‘No, you’re right, I shouldn’t have said anything.’

We stood watching each other, wondering if either of us would stand down. Neither of us did. Something passed between us – I don’t know whether it was hatred, or kindness. I took my hat, and once again I left Irmi’s apartment without saying goodbye.

Even without a strike, Berlin could be quiet. You saw that in the fishermen waiting for a catch by the Spree. You could hear the wind rattling the cages of postcards for the tourists on Unter den Linden. Only in rumblings could you hear the trains come and go from Friedrichstrasse. People said, Oh, Berlin! Full of noise and traffic and so dirty. We didn’t find it like that. The arcades and boulevards could lend the city an airy openness so that it had the feel of a stockyard at night. It wasn’t all Kurfürstendamm; there was also restraint, a city that knew an old Field Marshal was still president of the Republic.

It wasn’t like this in Kreuzberg, of course. Kreuzberg was shitty compared to the main quarter and rarely quiet. It had rats and mice and a smell coming off the canal. If you tipped Kreuzberg upside down there’d be tram wires and telegraph cables and washing lines to catch it all in a dirty great net.

I hopscotched through Kreuzberg alleys – places dear to my heart – and when I arrived at our apartment (the suspicious porter giving me his daily once-over) I went straight to our studio. Work would take my mind off things; it always did.

But Charlotte had left the typewriter on the desk. On the paper she’d typed a blueprint for a weave out of the letter P and various spaces – one, two, three spaces at a time – so that it made chevrons in the intended fabric. I smiled, remembering the notes she used to give me for lunch, all the Ps coloured red. She often made blueprints for weaves. This in itself didn’t mean she was necessarily at the Bauhaus.

One of the legs was still prone, the P depressed. Perhaps this was the moment she’d left, or maybe someone had come to collect her; perhaps even Jenö. I hated the idea of him in the apartment. I held the paper so as not to disturb the leg. These black letters; what were they but little hobnails of love? (But who for? Who for?)

Next to the typewriter there was an open book where she had stickered a Paul Klee painting called Castle and Sun. Even though it was a black-and-white reproduction I could conjure easily the North African oranges and yellows that had so obsessed Klee in Dessau.

Ah; perhaps the P stood for Paul Klee, not Paul Beckermann.