There was a fusty smell as soon as the door was opened, and the light was dim. It was the opening of the curtains that exposed the secret of what Walter had been up to. There were bags of salt, broken chairs, vegetables and meat; a salami, even a phonograph. Here was his heartbreak, his Herzschmerz: Walter had been stockpiling.

He grinned. ‘My empire!’

‘What is all of this?’

‘I have turned into a merchant.’

My gaze went immediately to the pencil drawings propped on one shelf: both recognizable as Kandinsky’s. There were a couple of others too: boggy abstractions, which I didn’t much like. I picked up the smaller of the Kandinskys. ‘How did you get this?’

Every morning, Walter explained, after a shift at Mr Steiner’s, he’d go straight to the baker’s. From there, he’d trade the loaf for a book of matches, matches for carrots, carrots for pencils, pencils for a tin of luncheon meat, and finally he’d find one of the Masters’ wives and trade in the tin for a sketch. ‘My uncle,’ he said, ‘the art dealer in London. He’s going to get me valuta for one of these! British sterling. Can you imagine! Corned beef into a Kandinsky, then maybe into a house!’

‘You’ll never give them away,’ I said, my eye following the loveliness of Kandinsky’s line. ‘You’d rather die.’

‘Last week I read about a man in Berlin. He withdrew all his life savings – a hundred thousand marks – to buy a subway ticket. He saw the sights, went to the zoo, the palace, the Tiergarten, then locked himself in his rooms and starved himself to death. It’s a dangerous time to be alive.’

‘Not if you’re Walter König.’

On the side table there was a photograph of Walter with his mother and father, looking how he had when he’d arrived in September: bony and aristocratic. It made me realise how plump he’d grown. Maybe he was eating the stock as he went. Walter hardly ever talked about his parents, but then maybe none of us did. They were the ones we were running from.

He brought out some coffee. He’d changed out of his painter’s smock into a collarless shirt. I saw how he carried this new weight awkwardly; he still moved like a thinner man. Seated on the sofa he was framed by tins and cured meats.

‘Won’t it go off?’

‘Even rotting food is better than money.’

‘When did you do all this?’

‘The past month. I had to keep my mind on something else.’

There it was, the tacit mention of the happy couple. I let it go, not knowing what to do with it. We hadn’t yet talked about them. ‘You’ve paid off Mr Sommer then?’