I had been awarded a year's fellowship at the Villa Massimo and Ralf asked if he and his new girlfriend could spend two nights with us. I agreed, although in Berlin we hadn't seen much of each other except when he happened to drop by.

His visit at the end of June — when he showed up all alone — proved a blessing at first. A few days previously, I had torn an Achilles tendon, and surgery had left me with a cast on my right leg, so that I could walk only on crutches. On his first day with us, Ralf managed to locate a wheelchair and pushed me wherever I wanted to go. He quickly made friends with the kids, including those of other fellows at the Villa. They adored him, even though he did little to court their favour. But Ralf could yodel and draw and do headstands, and he knew magic tricks. He could snatch his self-rolled cigarettes apparently out of thin air, sometimes already lit, and make them disappear just as suddenly, so that the kids assumed he was capable of any miracle. He was also more relaxed around them. With us he thought he had to talk about books or art, which proved fairly strenuous. Since Natalia didn't like to drive in Italy, ten days later Ralf was our chauffeur for a jaunt to the shore. It turned out to be a beautiful day. Where the actual beach began, he grabbed me around the hips, I threw an arm over his shoulder and made my way across the sand. At first it didn't bother me to talk about the women standing along a stretch of the road right before it entered a pine forest. Almost all were women of colour, who wore short gaudy dresses or snug-fitting pants and kept their backs turned to the road. Ralf interpreted this as modesty, I guessed it came from a different tradition — the courtesans of antiquity are said to have also enticed their clients with buttocks rather than breasts. But they were all Ralf could talk about the day after as well. Did I know where these women came from, where and how they lived, if they had documentation, how much they charged, how much their pimps deducted, if they could wash themselves somewhere, and did they ever actually get to see the sea, and plenty more along that line.

"How would I know?" I finally groused. That afternoon, Ralf asked me for the car. He didn't return until early the next morning, slept till noon, clowned around with the girls, wolfed down a couple of jam sandwiches and borrowed the car again early that evening. This went on for several days. I found his behaviour embarrassing and puerile and rude — if only because of the girls. Natalia, however, suggested that the women found Ralf more pleasant than the sort of guys we had spotted moving in packs along the shoulder of the road. "Main thing is, nothing happens to him."

"I find him disgusting," I said, putting words to what had only become clear to me at that moment. Just seeing his toothbrush next to mine revolted me and I suddenly had to force myself to use the same toilet he did. Ralf must have sensed this. One morning, there he was sitting on his suitcase. He said goodbye to the girls, expressed his thanks to us, and departed. The car was standing in the parking lot, tanked full and sparkling clean, inside and out.

When I heard from him four months later, in November last year, he sounded embarrassed by his escapades, at least he apologised on the phone, without saying what for. By then I had admitted to myself how cranky and unfair I had been during my crutches-and-wheelchair phase, and didn't want to refuse him a second visit. It was sort of a mutual making of amends.

When Ralf arrived in Rome on 6 December, the girls were thrilled. He granted us the first two evenings of his company. One of Ralf's new trademarks was an inordinate consumption of oranges. I was suspicious at first. He had read Seume's Stroll to Syracuse, and I remarked I found it comforting that Seume could at least eat his fill of oranges for a few weeks. But Ralf's appetite showed no sign of abating. He would schlep several kilos of oranges from the market every day, doling some out like advertising freebies and stuffing himself with the rest. You ran across orange peels almost any time and anywhere, and he always peeled them in a spiral, leaving shapes you could balance on your fingertip or on top of a bottle, something I hadn't seen since childhood, when oranges were still a rarity. We called it "making monkeys". Ralf was constantly photographing orange trees, both on the Villa grounds and in the neighbourhood, for example on the way to Trattoria La Pergola, to which we made regular pilgrimages. Ralf made himself as useful as he knew how, worked on my website, showed Natalia how to edit and cut computer films, and downloaded a lot of children's cartoons. Our orange man never said a word about his summer excursions.