30 May 2016. My colleague appears in the doorframe of my office at the university in Berlin. He seems somehow awkwardly fixed to his position in the doorframe and doesn’t enter my office. He tells me that our mutual friend Roman has passed away. Roman Arndt was a dance scholar and historian. He was Polish but had worked in Germany for several decades. I had just met him two years earlier and we had grown close despite our difference in age.
The notice of his death comes completely unexpected. I had just talked to him on the phone a few weeks earlier and in my email programme I had a drafted email, which I had meant to finish and send to him.