Though I lived three floors up, I could always hear Mrs Kramer screaming at me with ease. ‘Beckermann! You have a visitor!’ I heard Charlotte’s voice from the vestibule; famously, my landlady liked her and no one else. As she walked up the flights I thought how today we’d inexorably come together. My skin tingled. How pleasant it is: anticipation.

Nothing, however, could have prepared me for her appearance as I opened the door. Charlotte’s hair had been shaved off. Her head was nothing but scalp, and her flat eyes looked stranger still. ‘I’ve just been at Jenö’s,’ she said, her breath quick from the climb up. ‘Now’s the time to take the fast further.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All this hair,’ she said, pulling at one of my curls. ‘It’s just confection!’ She came into my room, looking around, as if expecting to see someone else here. ‘Oh,’ she said, looking at the hanging lantern with a frown. ‘I hadn’t realised you’d kept that.’

I touched her bald head. ‘Is this because of Master Itten?’

‘Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him?’

She registered my confusion.

‘Corinthians. You should read your Bible.’

‘I didn’t know you were such a zealot.’

‘My childhood,’ she said, ‘was full of wonders. What you don’t know, Paul, is that I am one of life’s obsessives.’

‘I did know that, actually. Who did yours?’

‘Jenö.’

‘This morning?’

‘Yes. I told you already. Keep up, Pauli!’ She looked excited. Charlotte carried all that in her mouth.

I checked my watch: it was almost noon. I could have sworn it was only nine or so. I lit a fire to take away the smell of mouse; at the mirror she brought out scissors and a razor. Charlotte laid out newspaper by the sink. She snapped the towel like a matador. ‘Ready for your appointment, Mr Beckermann?’

I realised I hadn’t quite consented before she began cutting at my hair. The curls – which my mother had always adored and called ‘my glory’ – fell to the newspaper below. Charlotte worked methodically, snapping away with the scissors. ‘Did you know that nuns were able to stop menstruating just by controlling their breathing? They were the true masters of the fast. Much better than the monks, who anyway drank stout to offset their hunger. No, it was the nuns who ate nothing during Lent, and it was then there appeared the most visitations of Jesus and the Virgin. The two,’ she said, ‘cannot be separate phenomena, can they?’

‘Has either visited you yet?’

‘No. But Jesus once appeared to me in a dream.’

‘What did he say?’