I found out that, although her internship wasn’t finished, Irene had never gone back to the Museum of Arts and Crafts after the morning we spent together. I also discovered that in addition to the rented flat she’d shared with Schwind, she had another apartment, one she owned, that her friends knew nothing about – a hiding place. The neighbours couldn’t remember the last time they had seen her, only that it had been a long time.

I was hurt, sad, furious. I yearned for her and, when I picked up my mail, I sometimes wondered if I would find a letter from her, a postcard. But she never wrote.

Once, two years later, I thought I saw her. Close to our office in Westend, a building had been squatted by students and emptied by the police. The demonstration afterwards, in which thousands of people marched, went by our office, and I stood at the window and looked down. I was surprised at how jubilant the demonstrators were though a supposed injustice had driven them into the streets, how happily they raised their fists, how proudly they shouted slogans, and laughed as they linked arms and fell into a trot. They weren’t bad faces: fathers with children on their shoulders, mothers holding their children’s hands, many young people, schoolkids and university students, a couple of workers in coveralls, a soldier in uniform, a man in a suit and tie. Then I saw her, or thought I saw her, and ran out of the office and down the stairs and onto the street and alongside the protesters, trying to catch her. A couple of times I thought I saw her. But it wasn’t her, and then I found a face similar to hers and thought I’d been tricked by that face, and wanted to give up. But I didn’t give up, and looked more, until a group of demonstrators broke into an empty house, and the police came, and the situation escalated.

At some point, wounds scar over. But I never liked to look back on what happened with Irene Gundlach. Especially after I understood what a fool I’d made of myself. How could I not have seen that what had started with a lie could not end well; that I did not belong behind the wheel of a stolen car; that women who ran and climbed away from husbands and lovers were not for me; that I had let myself be used? Anyone with an ounce of sense could have seen that.

I found the ridiculousness of my behaviour most painful when it came back to me how I’d waited at the wall to see if Irene would come or not, want me or not, with my sunglasses, my chills, my fear, and how I had embraced her, and had been happy, and thought she was happy too. I shuddered at the memory.