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near the radiator, which gurgled to itself from time to time.
    They talked about the city. To his amazement, she knew every single nightspot on the Kastanienallee, and on Bergmann Street and Simon-Dach Street. She preferred Lovelite, Maria am Ostbahnhof and a small place called Zosch. He had never been in any clubs. She liked Berlin because it was the kind of city where, whoever you were, there was somewhere for you or, as she put it, a place for you under the sky.
    He asked himself where his place might be. He felt most at home in his own small flat and with the other historians in the office where he worked as the assistant to one of the professors.
    He imagined Ana among the sweating bodies, a tank top exposing her bare arms and shoulders. She was speaking of freedom and decadence, he of his dissertation. He recalled how once, later, she had tapped him on the forehead with her finger and said: “Life happens outside, not in there.”
    How had she realised so quickly that the intense wish for what was “outside” was precisely what disturbed his inner balance? He needed someone to provoke him, odd as that might sound. He had felt like this back at school. Come on! Go for it! I dare you! Ana was the first woman who had grasped this from their first meeting. She was the woman he had always hoped for.
    Looking back over the ten months, he has come to see that she understood him better than he understood her. And he asks himself if he was too much of a coward. Should he have insisted on answers when her silence and her refusal to tell him more about herself made him feel insecure? He also wondered where it came from, thisfear of his that asking too many questions would ruin their love.
    There are no more lights out at sea now; the two points of lights from before must have passed out of sight long ago. The sky shows no trace of the advance of the morning.
    When he woke, she was lying beside him, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted, a few strands of hair sticking to her temples. He got up and started to look around her room. During their first few weeks together, he kept trying to decode everything about her. The books she read, the music she listened to, any little thing that might help him to be closer to her, any little thing that might reflect some part of her.
    The walls of the room were painted green, her desk was a wooden board on two trestles facing the window, and on that desk next to the computer, there were a pile of papers and a bunch of bright flowers stuck into a vase. He caught himself thinking that there might be someone else. Reality was different from what he had imagined, her rooms were cramped and seemed crowded with special places for objects and shelves full of little mementoes.
    The kitchen contained a table and two folding chairs, a fridge that reached up to the shelf on the wall where she kept a few items of crockery. Above the basin in the bathroom, she had lined up a couple of bottles of perfume and some make-up. A pink toothbrush protruded diagonally from a china mug. A mirror on the wall. A small round rug, white on a blue-tiled floor.
    That morning was also when he noticed the photograph for the first time. She had hung it on the wall above her desk. It was of a strongly built man with thick, black hair and a broad face. His eyes were her eyes. Thesmall folds on either side of his mouth were instantly recognisable. He was her father. And he had thought him such a warm-hearted father, stern now and then, perhaps prone to anger, but with eyes that spoke of nothing but kindness.
    She saw him looking around the room, noted that he stopped in front of her desk and carefully examined the volumes on her bookshelf. “Well?” she enquired and then added, “What have you found out about me?” She pulled the duvet back and patted the mattress gently. When he was lying next to her once more, she hugged him, put her face against his shoulder, and he told her, “I know everything.”
    He wondered,