Eva is the most trusting person I have met so far. Well, I didn’t actually meet her. but that’s what makes her so trusting. Eva is away on holiday, you see, miles away on the Baltic, but it doesn’t stop her renting out her spare room. She has left her details with the exberliner flat renting agency and the keys with the neighbour.

It’s €125 per week, still cheaper than a private room in a nearby hostel, and she has one bedroom/office, with a small living room, and a kitchen, with a sizeable south-facing roof terrace/balcony. The neighbour, who has hurt her thumb and is off work, shows me in.

Eva is happy for me to move in if I like it even though she will not there be there for nigh on two weeks. “It’s OK, I trust you,” she says.

The words still jar. She has not even met me, yet … She … Trusts…. Me. It sticks in the craw. Why should she? Dumkopft, is she mad? Nein.

No one in Berlin seems mad, just trusting, accommodating, nice, friendly. Mad then? Probably not.

Her neighbour – let’s call her Frau Schmidt – must be mad, too. She just leaves me the keys after showing me a cursory glance of the living space, Despite my best attempts to tell her I am seeing more apartments, she leaves, putting the keys in my hand. A middle-aged east Berliner, she has had little or no schooling in English, though she probably speaks perfect Russian.

I have to ring the agency to explain to her. “Katja, the Germans are being nice again, help!”

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