It was before the first snow that winter that I caught Walter heading to the Georgium Park. I watched him from my balcony, wondering if I should follow. The looseness of his stride gave him a sorrowful air. Our improbable twinness made me sensitive to his moods: Walter, after his weekend trips to Weimar to work for Ernst Steiner, could be tender and snappish, and I often questioned whether I wanted to be dragged into the remembrance of what we had lost. Weimar was a long time ago, and I had worked hard to forget it. Below the balconies his thick chestnut hair was blown about by the wind. After a while I put out my cigarette and went after him; I knew he wouldn’t begrudge the company, even if he did protest.

The Georgium Park, just next to the Bauhaus, was full of neo-classical follies, dreamt up by whoever had committed the park so irreversibly to the nineteenth century. There was a garden house that went unused, and a ducal summerhouse, flanked by two mossy maids. Presumably the statuary was to give the park an air of wealth; instead it amplified its menace. Blank-eyed sphinxes guarded the mausoleum; a one-armed goddess stared forlorn from her plinth. As you walked through the whips tangled with snowberry, these open-mouthed statues sprang from nowhere. Empty nests darkened the light-fall to the path. The snow always took longer to melt here, and when it did the River Elbe turned rich and smoky and dark. The Georgium was not at all like the Ilm.

An inlet of reeds and grasses was where the river had broken its banks, and this was where I found Walter: his shoulders slack, his mouth a line, his eyes on the water, reading into its surface some manner of trouble. Maybe he would wade into the river with rocks in his pockets and put a stop to things. Over the years he had once or twice mentioned suicide. But really I knew Walter’s life-force to be resilient: it was just sometimes he got caught in these big nets of mood and found it difficult to go on. Whereas my love for Charlotte had become an acceptable fact of everyday life, as natural but as ignorable as breathing, one felt there hadn’t been much in the way of love’s diminishment – not for Walter.

‘Oh, Paul,’ he said, looking up at me, startled.

‘Aren’t your shoes getting soggy?’