Every house or shop we pass makes me straighten up. Bookshops, florists, dirndl shops, but restaurants and cafés too. I am extraordinarily alert. I keep wanting to jump up and run inside to see if he might be there. He could be in the Frauenkirche just as easily as at one of the stalls on Marienplatz, n’est-ce pas?

I watch my reflection in a shop window and, through it, my sister and niece combing through a little shop full of hairpins, clips and brushes. He has been appearing around my niece quite often lately, though it is never possible to catch him completely. For a second, she has him in her laughter — the kind that suddenly bursts out of her. Sometimes he flickers in her voice, especially when she artfully lowers it. She even has him on her eyelashes now that she has started mascaraing them, but the place we encountered him most in Munich was a shop packed to the ceiling with girls her age. It is the kind of shop where every piece of clothing has sequinned wings on the back. And you need those. Just as you need four different makeup sponges, the ability to curl your hair around socks at lightning speed, or to drink an ube cloud, which even makes me wonder whether he might just turn out to be somewhere inside.

My niece, in fact, is his main bearer at the moment. Or perhaps I am simply better able to remember him through her, because by the time I was twelve, I too was paying fairly regular attention to him. It was around then that I began deliberately lying in wait for him and, for the first time, wanted to catch him, whereas as a child I had simply marvelled endlessly at the fact that he existed. And then screamed until I could barely breathe whenever he suddenly disappeared.

When we reach the Alte Pinakothek, he is there, of course. By then all three of us can feel him almost constantly, exchanging knowing glances in front of individual paintings from which he drifts into the room, sometimes more, sometimes less. He really does drift out of them; you can feel him pleasantly wafting over you as you stand there. The winner in this contest of intoxicating wafting is François Boucher’s portrait of Madame de Pompadour. She seems to have him in it, and so does every last fold of her magnificent dress, but also every letter in every book on the shelves behind her. The quill and the candlestick on the table have him too; even the roses fallen to the floor have him in every wilted petal.

I stare at the scene for quite a while and then, naturally, begin to doubt. There must be some trick to it. It cannot be possible to have so much of him, so opulently, right up to the brim, as if permanently, almost eternally. Where are we? The eighteenth century. Well, that explains it. Rococo was basically the Ludwig filter of Instagram, so it was almost impossible not to have him in it, especially with Boucher being such a master. Well, all right then.

That evening, satisfied and dissatisfied at once, I experience him in two different kebabs. Differently in each, but convincingly and unmistakably in both. Thank goodness my sister decided to test two different sources, she presumably has the most experience looking for him — and finding him. I conclude as much from how determined she was to take us to the Olympisches Dorf. That Sunday he sprawls through every little student house there, and he is most present at the memorial to the victims of the attack at the 1972 Summer Olympics. There, I very much wish that in some of his forms he existed a little less. Preferably not at all.

But then he wouldn’t be him.

When I get home, the amount of work sitting here untouched knocks me flat. There is so much of it that suddenly I do not even have the strength to unpack my bags. That night my sister texts to say that my niece had a crisis too. About something else, but that is merely one of his disguises. Sometimes I wish that after weekends like these he might be kind enough to spend the night in the hall. My sister and niece even have a front garden. Why can’t he, just once, quietly take himself out there and spread himself over the grass beneath the first fallen leaves?

But then he wouldn’t be him.