A Sailor's Yarn Fourteen years of almost

Every Seemannsgarn ends the same way: The little bears cross their arms, shout that grandpa is lying, that none of it could possibly have happened – and then some impossible proof drops out of the sky. A feather. A scar. A photograph that shouldn’t exist. And the lie stands. Käpt’n Blaubär taught a whole generation of German kids something they didn’t know they were learning: a story doesn’t have to be true. It needs a witness, and a good enough ending.

I’ll give you both. What I can’t promise you is which parts are which.

So let me start the way a sailor’s yarn should – with two men on a hotel bed in Bangkok, somewhere past midnight, singing old emo songs into their phones like it’s 2006 and nothing has gone wrong yet. One of them lives in Switzerland. The other lives in Vietnam. They have known each other, and not-quite-had each other, for fourteen years – across three cities, two continents, and one entire separate life each. And the space between their two bodies on that mattress, maybe forty centimeters of cheap hotel duvet, is the least crossable distance in the whole story.

The one in Vietnam is me. The other I’ll call Julius aka Julle, which is not his name, because this is his story too and he never signed up to become a post on a blog with twenty years of history.

Go back to the beginning with me. Decide at the end how much to believe. I’m not sure I believe all of it myself – and that, I promise you, is the truest thing in here.

The bubble

Around 2014 – maybe earlier; dates are the first casualty of a story you’ve told yourself this many times – I found him on the queer German corner of Twitter. Back when that was a place and not a crime scene. A small, loud, gloriously incestuous bubble where everyone knew everyone, half of them somehow worked for Deutsche Bahn (this is a joke, and also it isn’t), and the whole economy ran on mutual likes, in-jokes nobody outside would ever decode, and 3 AM oversharing that felt, at the time, like intimacy and mostly was.

He caught me because he sounded like me. The same rhythm in the sentences. The same references pulled off the same obscure shelves. The same habit of picking a thought up, turning it over, and turning it over again until it showed you the strange wet underside nobody else had bothered to look at. Reading him was like hearing my own interior voice come back in a slightly different accent. I followed. He followed back. We faved, we replied, we quote-tweeted into the small hours, and then – the way it always went in that bubble – we slid into DMs one night and, functionally, never came back out.

The part I’m still a little embarrassed to put in writing: From the very first messages I was certain – not worried, certain – that he was out of my league. Too sharp. Too sexy. Too mysterious in that specific, infuriating way that makes you want to solve a person instead of simply liking them. Half Thai, half somewhere up in the Alps. A mind that moved like water finding the one crack in a wall. A face I’ll get to, because I have to work myself up to it. He read to me like a locked room at the end of a long corridor, light showing under the door, and I have never once in my life been able to walk past a locked room without pressing my ear to it.

I told myself I would admire him from a respectful distance.

I have never done anything from a respectful distance.

Frankfurt, the first yes

There were near-misses before the first real one. He’d pass through the city – he was always passing through, a guy who seemed to exist mostly in transit, materializing on platforms and dissolving back into timetables I never understood – and he would ask, light as anything, if I wanted to meet. And each time I manufactured some elaborate, plausible reason to be too nervous. Too busy. Too something. The truth was simpler and stupider: I did not think I could survive being in a room with him and keeping my face normal.

I lived in Frankfurt then. Young enough to still believe the right night could rearrange a life, old enough to be afraid it actually might.

Then one day I said yes and meant it, and he came.

We met in an Irish pub – the sticky-floored kind where the Guinness is pulled by someone who has never been closer to Ireland than the tap, where the light is the color of weak tea and the wood has gone dark from decades of other people’s evenings. He was already there when I walked in. He stood up to greet me. And every rehearsed, casual, effortless thing I had planned to say fell straight out of my head and onto that filthy floor.

Because in person he was worse. By which I mean better. By which I mean I was in serious, immediate, unrecoverable trouble.

Snaps and clips had not prepared me for how his face actually worked. Deep almond-shaped eyes, dark and a little heavy at the lids, that read you a full beat before you’d decided to be read – eyes that seemed quietly amused by whatever they found in you. A serious mouth that looked faintly disappointed in the entire room, right up until it cracked open into a grin and instantly undid every severe thing the rest of the face had just promised. And when I leaned in to say hello I caught the warmth coming off his skin – clean, a little spiced, something like sandalwood carried under whatever he was wearing – and I swear that one lungful rearranged something structural in me, moved a wall I hadn’t known was load-bearing.

We sat down. We started to talk. I lasted maybe ninety seconds before I stopped hearing whole sentences.

Because I was watching his lips. That was the humiliating animal truth of that first evening. I followed his lips instead of his words – the small, full shape of them opening and closing around consonants I had entirely stopped processing – and every single time they curved toward a smile I lost the thread completely and had to bluff my way back into the conversation from memory. He would say something clever. I’d laugh a half-second late, like a badly dubbed film. He noticed. Of course he noticed; those eyes noticed everything. He filed it away behind them and said nothing, which was somehow both worse and much, much better than being called out.

And under all of it ran one disbelieving refrain, looping, idiotic, ecstatic: this is real. This is actually happening. This impossibly handsome man got himself to my city, and he is here, in front of me, and he is looking at me like I am something worth the trip. My brain could not make it hold. It kept sliding off the fact like a palm off wet glass. Some part of me was already grieving the evening while it was still going on, because some part of me already knew exactly how these things tend to end.

Here is what I wanted, sitting at that sticky little table, and I’ll tell you plainly, because the whole point of a yarn is that the wanting is as true as the facts – sometimes truer. I wanted to reach across and take a fistful of his shirt. I wanted to talk him out of his train. I wanted to walk him back through the Frankfurt dark to my apartment, get him up the stairs, get the door shut behind us, and put him against it. I wanted to take that serious mouth apart with mine until it forgot how to look disappointed in anything. I wanted to peel him out of his clothes slowly enough to memorize it and fast enough that neither of us could think, to lay him down on my bed and learn the whole quiet geography of him by hand, to make love to him until the last train had long gone and the sky went pale over the Main and there was simply no version of the morning left in which he got up and left.

Maybe I even said some of that out loud. Maybe some of it happened; I honestly could not swear to you that it didn’t – the best nights fog over precisely here, at the seam where memory and wanting bleed into a single color and you stop being able to tell your life from your longing. What I can swear to is the ache. That was real. That has always been the realest thing in the entire story.

But he had a train to catch – of course he did – and I was not, that night, brave enough to be the man who asks someone to miss it. So he finished his pint and stood, and the warmth and the sandalwood stood up with him and walked toward the door. He hugged me goodbye. It lasted a second too long, or exactly long enough, or nowhere near long enough – all three at once, somehow. And then he was gone, folded back into the Deutsche Banh timetable, and I sat alone with a half-drunk Guinness and total, useless clarity: I had just fallen for someone I was going to spend years not-having.

People say love at first sight to make chaos sound like destiny. This was not that. This was recognition. The uncanny, floor-dropping sensation of meeting a total stranger and thinking: oh. There you are. I’ve been wondering where you got to. Sorry it took me so long to find the room.

The night that isn’t there

Years passed. Three of them, maybe four – see above, re: dates, re: the general reliability of your narrator. I moved to Munich. And he, it turned out, was living close enough that we could see each other on a whim, which felt less like coincidence and more like the universe flatly refusing to let a good bit die.

We met on a warm evening and walked the city until our feet filed complaints – the Englischer Garten gone violet at its edges, the Isar loud somewhere off to the left, beer-garden noise swelling and fading as we passed it. We talked about everything, then about everything else, then about the things you only say to another person at that one specific hour when the city has emptied out enough to feel like it belongs to the two of you alone. And then we washed up in a gin bar, because naturally we did.

I should explain something about Julle. He does not like things. He annexes them. He finds a subject, vanishes into it completely, and resurfaces a few weeks later fluent, credentialed, and insufferable in the most charming way a person can be – and gin, that season, was the occupied territory. He ordered one, then another, each selected like a chess move three turns deep, and at some point recruited the bartender into a genuinely solemn summit on juniper, on botanicals, on the precise correct temperature and the morally correct ice. His whole face lit up doing it. That was the thing I could never look away from – not the seriousness itself, but the specific way it broke open whenever something delighted him, the rather neutral mouth forgetting its own rules. It is a very dangerous thing, watching someone you want be that fully alive about something that small.

We drank far, far too much.

My apartment was a disaster that particular day – genuinely, catastrophically unfit for a guest – so instead of taking him there we crossed the entire city to a hotel, laughing, unsteady, leaning into each other. And – …

… here is where the yarn frays down to nothing at all. I don’t remember most of it. Neither does he. We woke up hungover and shy and late, carrying the very particular awkwardness of two people who both know that something happened and cannot assemble the same account of what. Skin remembers things the brain lets go of; mine had opinions that morning it could not properly source.

Years later, in Bangkok, he told me the truth of it from his side, and it undid me a little. He has no memory of that night. None. Not a single frame survived the morning. He did not know whether we had slept together. He only knew that he had hoped we did.

Sit with that a second, because I had to sit with it for years: A love scene with a hole punched clean through the middle. Somewhere in Munich there is a hotel room that knows something about the two of us that we will never, either one of us, get back.

The summer at his place

A year later he invited me to his home. Just like that. Come out, stay the day, I’ll cook. As if it were nothing at all. As if I did not read that message something like eleven times looking for the trapdoor in it.

I took the train (of course a train), and the day unfolded like the first act of a film I would happily have lived inside until the credits ran. He picked me up and we drove out into the countryside with the windows down, and it was one of those unfairly perfect summer days – the Bavarian sky scrubbed a hard clean blue, the light thickening to gold and honey through the afternoon, the whole world smelling of cut grass and warm tarmac and the deep green of fields doing their slow patient work. He drove with one hand. I spent a considerable amount of energy not staring at the other one resting on the gearstick, and failed at that the way I had failed at absolutely everything else where he was concerned.

We stopped and walked. A long walk, and a much longer conversation – the kind that only ever happens between two people who are a little in love and pretending, with enormous and obvious effort, that they are merely enjoying a nice chat. We solved philosophy. We settled the meaning of life provisionally and agreed to revisit the file later. The heat pressed down, whatever Bavaria keeps instead of cicadas sawed away in the hedgerows, and I remember thinking, with real clarity, that I would trade an embarrassing number of future years to simply freeze the afternoon right there and never have to find out what came next.

The heat that day was real. Outside, and in.

He was driving, so he stayed sober, and I – not driving, and a coward about my own heart – had been working steadily through some Ebbelwoi and had gone warm and soft at every edge. Which is maybe why the music got all the way inside. He was DJing the car, feeding me songs I didn’t know yet, watching my face sideways to catch the exact instant each one landed. Two of them never left me: Immer wenn ich high bin by Marsimoto, and Marta by il:lo. They are still on my playlist a decade later, and they still ambush me without warning – one bar of either and I am back in that passenger seat, in that gold light, in that heat, watching his hands on the wheel and wanting something I was still far too much of a coward to reach for. The music itself? Well, not quite my flavor – but the memories, oh these memories.

We already knew we shared the loud stuff – the melodic metal, the death metal, the screamo, the whole cathedral of beautiful noise we had both, separately, grown up hiding inside. This was different. This was him reaching past all of that to hand me the quiet songs. The ones you don’t play for just anyone. The ones you only ever play for someone you have already, secretly, decided to keep.

At his place he cooked, and his place told me things about him that all those messages never had. It smelled of incense – he burned it constantly, sweet and resinous and always going somewhere in a corner, a small daily devotion to the half of himself that came from somewhere far and warm, a thread whose weight I could feel without yet understanding it. He moved around his kitchen with the same total focus he’d given the gin, and he cooked real Thai food, food pitched at a level of heat my northern-European body was in no way engineered to survive, and served it alongside a gin so exquisite it arrived with a backstory and a short lecture I was delighted to receive.

I sweated through it. Visibly, helplessly, mortifyingly – red-faced and shining and shy about it – and he watched me suffer and laughed, and the laugh was not cruel. It was the laugh of someone who has quietly decided to be tender about you, who finds your discomfort adorable rather than pathetic. He refilled my water. He kept feeding me the spice anyway. Both of those things were, I understood even then, a form of flirting.

It got late. The alcohol did its patient work, for both of us. And the idea arrived at the table – unspoken first, humming in the warm air between us, then finally said aloud – that I could just stay. Stay the night. Not drive back.

I want you to understand how badly I wanted to. My whole body was one long uninterrupted yes. I could see the entire evening it would have become – the way the last of the distance would finally, finally have closed, the two of us finding out at last what all those years of almost had been quietly saving up for. I wanted it so much it genuinely frightened me.

Which is exactly why I ran.

I said I was unprepared. No change of clothes. No case for my contact lenses. No phone charger. All of it perfectly, boringly true – and all of it a coward’s scaffolding thrown up fast around the real reason, which was that I wanted him so completely I no longer trusted my own hands, and I was still, even now, even here, not brave enough to be the one who reached first. So I got into the train and rode home, alone, contacts drying to my eyeballs the entire way, one thought running on a loop the whole dark stretch of tracks: you idiot. You absolute, catastrophic fool. He offered you the door and you stood there inventing reasons not to walk through it.

I think we both went to bed unhappy that night, in two separate places, for one identical reason. I think if you could have laid our two ceilings side by side you would have found two grown men staring straight up at them, wide awake, furious at nobody on earth but themselves.

A confession, out of order

Something I only found out much later, and it belongs right here even though I did not know it yet, because that is precisely how memory works; out of sequence, ambushing you from rooms you were sure you’d already checked and left empty:

In the mid-2010s I was, let’s say, generous with photographs of myself on Twitter. Everyone in that bubble was; it was practically the local dialect. There was a whole nocturnal liturgy to it – the night timeline, that ten-PM-until-sunrise economy where people posted things daylight would never have permitted, most of it routed through Snapchat and half of it engineered to be gone by morning. I will leave the rest to your imagination and to the Wayback Machine’s patchy and unreliable mercy.

So when Julle told me, years later, lying next to me in a Bangkok hotel room with the whole city humming through the glass, that he had seen all of that long before he ever knew the shape of my mind – that it had been one of the very first things that pulled him toward me – I did the arithmetic and felt my entire face go up like a struck match. He had known my body before he knew me. He had been carrying that quietly the whole time we sat across tables from each other, pretending to be two friends who simply, genuinely enjoyed the conversation.

It was less awkward to live through then than it is to type now, which tells you something about either that era or about me. Both, I suspect. The bubble had its own physics. Things that felt completely weightless inside it develop a certain mass the moment you carry them out into the ordinary daylight world and try to explain them to someone who wasn’t there for any of it.

Bangkok, the emo night

Then I moved to Vietnam, and we lost each other for a few years.

No drama. No falling-out. Just distance and time and the slow entropy that quietly eats even the things you would have sworn on your life you’d keep forever. Life fills the space a person used to take up. You stop noticing they’re gone the way you stop noticing a sound that has been constant so long it has become a kind of silence. And then one day the sound comes back, and only then do you realize how much of you had spent the whole time listening for it.

What brought us back was, of all things, his roots. He had decided to go to Thailand – to get nearer to his mother’s side, to the warm far half of himself that the incense in his kitchen had always been quietly standing in for. He messaged me out of the years like no time at all had passed. I looked at a flight I could only half afford, and I bought it anyway, and I flew to Thailand for a few days for exactly one reason, and that reason had a face and a serious mouth and a name I am still not telling you.

Separate hotel rooms. We were adults now. We were also, as it turned out, precisely as doomed as we had been at that sticky little table in Frankfurt a whole lifetime earlier. Older, more scarred, considerably more honest, and no better at this. Not one bit better.

We spent the days walking. Bangkok in the wet heat, twenty kilometers of it, temples and markets and long unspooling stretches of just talking, sweat down both our backs, the city roaring and steaming and blaring around us. And in the evening, the thing we had been circling since the very first DM finally sat us both down on the edge of one bed.

It started innocently, the way these things always start. A hot shower each. Canned Japanese whisky – highballs from a tin, absurd and somehow perfect, cold and clean and gone far too fast. And then the oldest ritual we owned, the one that went all the way back to those first messages: we traded songs. One phone, then the other, back and forth across the duvet, each of us reaching a little further back in time, until we fell straight through the mid-2000s and simply stayed there. The Diary of Jane. I Miss You. Miss Murder. Comatose. The whole eyeliner-and-heartbreak hymnal of two kids who had each, separately, a continent apart, not even knowing the other one existed yet, survived their emo teenage years on precisely these songs.

And then he began to sing.

Quietly at first. Then not quietly at all. That serious mouth open and unselfconscious and giving the words absolutely everything, and I lay there beside him – beside this man I had been not-quite-loving since I was practically a different person wearing my name – on a bed in a city that belonged to neither of us, both of us wrecked from the walking and the whisky and the specific, marrow-deep exhaustion of having wanted one thing for ten straight/queer years. And I had a thought so clear it was almost frightening: I would not trade this. Not for the smooth version. Not for the one where we got it right that first night in Frankfurt and had a tidy little relationship and a tidy little breakup and precisely nothing to show for any of it now. I would not trade this strange, aching, gloriously unfinished thing for anything easier. I still wouldn’t.

We undressed. We reached for each other like the years had finally, formally posted a deadline. And there was heat then, real heat – his skin and mine and the whisky and ten years of held breath all cashing in at the exact same moment, his hands, that mouth I had been thinking about since a pub in Frankfurt at last on mine, the whole long-deferred gravity of it pulling us down into the sheets. For one moment the forty centimeters closed to nothing. For one moment there was no distance left anywhere in the entire world.

And then, right at the very edge of it, the universe delivered the punchline it had been so patiently constructing for a decade. We didn’t fit. All those years I had assumed, without ever once checking, that one of us was simply the answer to the other’s question – and it turned out that both of us had been asking the exact same one. Two tops – more or less. Two people who had each, all this time, quietly been waiting to be taken, and neither of us built to do the taking. And I – full honesty, the yarn demands it of me here – was unprepared, in every possible sense of that overloaded word, for the version of the night where we might have solved it anyway.

So we improvised. We found something smaller and stranger and gentler than the thing a whole decade of fantasy had been promising – a tenderness you laugh about softly in the dark afterward, foreheads pressed together, more relieved than disappointed – and then the whole enormous tiredness of it came down over us both like a warm tide going out.

He asked me to stay. To sleep there, tangled and warm, and wake up late and slow and together for once in our entire lives. My hotel was a five-minute walk away.

I walked the five minutes.

I have turned those five minutes over in my hands more times than I will ever admit in writing. There is a version of me – I can see him perfectly clearly – who stayed. Who took the offer, who woke with his face buried in the back of Julle’s neck, who let the whole story become something else entirely from that one morning forward. I am not that version. I have never quite managed to be him. Some cowardice runs so deep that it starts, after a while, to look a lot like fate, and I have honestly stopped being sure which of those two things I am actually describing when I tell this part.

The next morning we found a German bakery in the middle of Bangkok – because naturally two Germans-by-fate would locate Brötchen at the equator by pure homing instinct – and over strong black coffee and far too many pastries, we finally, at long, long last, said the thing.

That both of us had felt it from the very beginning. That he had been every bit as convinced that I was out of his league as I had been convinced that he was out of mine. That we had each spent an entire decade quietly, gallantly protecting the other one from a rejection that neither of us would ever, not once, not in any timeline, have actually delivered. Do you understand the sheer stupidity of it? The symmetry? Two people, one identical fear, aimed in perfect opposite directions, cancelling each other cleanly out to zero for ten years running. His long relationship had ended ages before; he had been single, searching, at one point wondering aloud whether the next chapter of him might even turn out to be with a woman. I had had my own procession in the meantime – men, women, people who live perfectly happily in neither column. We had run exactly parallel the whole entire time and never once, not for a single night, managed to merge lanes.

It should have been the saddest conversation of my life. It wasn’t. It was pastry and coffee and two grown men laughing until they nearly cried at how magnificently, how operatically they had fumbled ten years. And from that morning on we had a name for the thing. Not lovers. Not exes. Buddies for life – whatever that means. It means whatever the two of us need it to mean. We had to invent the category, because not one of the existing ones would hold us.

The three of us

Two years later. Bangkok again, because apparently Bangkok is simply where my life goes to hold its most important conversations. This time I brought my fiancé.

I want to move carefully here, because this is the part where people’s faces do a thing. I had told my fiancé everything – the crush, the years, the hotel rooms, the whole unabridged file – long before we ever boarded the plane. There was nothing hidden, and therefore nothing to disguise, no shameful little secret metabolizing away in the dark. The three of us spent a handful of days together, easy and warm, and yes, there was a night, and yes, all three of us ended up in one hotel room with a certain unmistakable charge humming in the air – and nobody moved on it. Not because anyone forbade anything. Because nobody needed to. The heat that had chased me across three cities and ten+ years had, at some point I could not even name, quietly turned into something else. Something you don’t have to act on in order to feel all the way down to the floor of yourself.

What we did instead was talk until the sky over the city went from black to bruised to grey. The real kind of talk. The three-in-the-morning kind, about the things that genuinely keep a person awake at night.

He told me about Switzerland – how he had moved back and finally, genuinely felt something like home there, all of it real except for the hole in the exact centre of it, the one that will not close, the one that keeps quietly turning him south and east toward Thailand, toward a family and a history and a whole self he is still, patiently, assembling out of incense and half-memories and a language his mouth somehow knows better than his own life does. Maybe he moves there one day. He isn’t sure who he is yet, and the remarkable thing, the thing that told me how far he’d travelled, was that he said it now completely without fear. Not knowing had stopped being a wound for him. It had become a kind of open door he was content to sit in.

And I told him about here. About a different country and a different, quieter, more finished version of me. About a partner I am going to marry. About a sexuality I stopped trying to sand down into one tidy little syllable somewhere around the same time I stopped trying to sand down anything else about myself. About a home – an actual one, chosen with both hands, in the single place on this whole earth where I have ever felt entirely and unapologetically myself – and about having no plan, none, not ever, to move back to Europe.

And that is the moment the real tragedy of the thing finally turned around and showed me its face. It is not the tragedy you are expecting. It was never that we didn’t get together – that’s the shallow reading, the one for people who like their sadness simple and their endings loud. The real one is quieter, and worse. We had become two mirrors that no longer reflect the same thing. For years we were uncanny, interchangeable, two instruments tuned to one single string. And then our lives forked. He is still looking for home. I have found mine. He is still assembling himself. I am, more or less, assembled. We love each other across that widening gap, and the gap is real, and it does not close, and it will not – and we hug anyway. All three of us, in the end, my fiancé pulled gently into the middle of it, the three of us holding on in the grey Bangkok dawn, warm and safe and shot straight through with a melancholy I would not trade away even if someone offered me the chance. Especially not then. Especially not there.

The proof

It is the middle of 2026 now. We still text. We are already half-planning the next one – Thailand again, probably, or he finally comes to Việt Nam and lets me show him my chosen country, or we split the difference and meet somewhere neither of us has any claim on and get to be nobody’s local together for a few days. It is unwritten. I have come, slowly, to love that it is unwritten. A story with no ending can’t disappoint you. It just stays open, like his door did.

I used to think this was the story of the one who got away. It isn’t, and it never was. He did not get away. He is right there – fourteen years deep, one message thread away, held in the exact and careful shape that let the two of us survive each other at all. Sometimes a thing cannot be allowed to happen, so that something bigger can come and take its place. I know precisely how that sentence looks written down, all fridge-magnet and scented candle, so let me say it in the least comfortable way I can find. We did not get the love story. We got the friendship the love story would have burned to the ground inside a single year. And I would make that trade again. I already have, over and over, five minutes at a time, walking back through the dark to my own hotel room while a door stood open behind me.

So. That’s the yarn.

Two men. One from Switzerland, one from Vietnam. Fourteen years of almost. Three cities, two continents, one forgotten hotel night that neither of us can vouch for, and a crush that flatly refused either to die or to resolve itself into anything as ordinary and survivable as a couple.

The little Käpt’n Blaubär bears are crossing their arms right now. I can hear them doing it. Too neat, they’re saying. Too symmetrical, too shapely, too much like something a person would write rather than something a person would live. Nobody misremembers an entire night. Nobody offers up the door and gets himself turned down twice, in two different cities, years apart. No one loves another person that long, that hard, and never once – not one single solitary time – manages to simply get it right.

And maybe the bears are correct. I warned you at the very start that I don’t believe all of it myself. The dates are soft. The geography drifts. The nights I remember most vividly are almost certainly the ones I have quietly rebuilt the most times, and the truest one of all is a blank – a hotel room in Munich holding the single piece of evidence that would settle every open question, and neither of us will ever, ever get it back.

So here is where I am supposed to produce the feather. The scar. The photograph that shouldn’t exist. The impossible proof that drops out of the sky and makes the whole unbelievable thing stand up straight and stand.

I don’t have it. That is the one real difference between my yarn and the Käpt’n’s. He always, always had his proof.

All I have is a song that still stops me dead one bar in, a warmth off someone’s skin I would know blind in a blackout, forty centimeters of hotel duvet I never once crossed, and a man in Switzerland who, if you tracked him down and asked him, might tell you a completely different version of all of this – or might just smile that serious-mouthed smile, and say nothing at all, and leave you to decide it for yourself.

Beyond belief: fact, or fiction?

Reine Wahrheit. Ehrensache.

I would swear to every single word. I just can’t prove you a single one.