I sacked off work. Instead I went in and out of the Klee book on the sofa, occasionally closing my eyes to imagine the saffron warmth of the Tunis scenes, finding I had dropped off, then coming back to the grey picture of Kreuzberg at the window. Through the foundry’s grime I watched men working on the scaffolding opposite, a boy-messenger come and go from an office’s reception, a woman working at some books. At some point there was the machine noise of a low-flying aeroplane. I thought of Charlotte, Anni and Otti flying over Klee’s house. Where was Klee now? France? Switzerland? And who lived in the Masters’ houses: how many Nazis occupied those white cubes? And here was Berlin, going to the dogs, and Charlotte was somewhere in it, and I didn’t know where. No matter how much Irmi might reassure me, that fact was going to drive me crazy.

Charlotte had always walked the city. When we had first arrived we walked it together, top to tail. After Weimar and Dessau, the metropolis was a gift. In the night-times we’d go to a club, and I’d be so worn out that, listening to the music, drinking wine, often I’d be overcome by a profound awareness of my own happiness. Under the table Charlotte would pull my hand into her trousers then push it away, smiling with her lovely dull teeth, and I’d go crazy with her smell on my fingers; telling her we had to go home now. She would say, all right, after this song, knowing the wait would twist my longing even tighter.

Surprising: how hungry she was.

We wouldn’t wait for home. Instead I’d push myself into her against the brickwork of the club’s alley where so many other couples had been before, or else she’d take me in her mouth, shielded from the road by hanging laundry. The colour would rise on her cheeks, and I’d feel for her breasts, and her eyelids fluttered as the sounds of the city surrounded us: people laughing, footsteps close, an omnibus brake released.

As we rode home the tenements outside the window were proofs that all this was real and undreamt.

Our passion was a little rank. We were always a hair’s breadth from being caught down alleys, behind a fairground ride, in the cinema. That first winter we were always fucking and never changing the bedsheets. At home everything had our rime on it: our hands, the kitchen counters, the bath-tub. Kaspar would call round to the apartment and even he – the man with multiple girlfriends – would scrunch his nose with faint disgust. I did wonder if she had been like that with Jenö. I liked to think, frail man that I was, that he couldn’t fulfil her like I could. That, I know, is ego speaking, but there we are.