A strange place.

-- Why don't you try to sleep?

-- I can't sleep in strange places.

-- This is your bed.

-- You're the strange place. I wish we'd had a chance to get to know each other.

-- Isn't that what we've been doing?

-- I mean having a real conversation.

-- Touch is also a means of communication.

-- Not always.

-- Then tell me something. Tell me something so that I'll know you better.

-- You can't do that. You can't just tell--He shrugged.

What could I do but make something up?

-- Fine. Fine then--: Once...

I. Thea: A river to jump into

The day after falling for a man at a party is strange--I have made a kind of decision, or a decision has been made about me. I have moved on to a new space, but nothing has happened yet. I go on a walk. I live a few blocks from the Spree, and I like to walk along the river promenade between Friedrichstrasse and Monbijou Park. Here is everything I could possibly need, I thought the day I took the apartment, the clubs and cafes, the museums, the streetcar, the subway, and a river to jump into if it comes to that. Berlin drifts apart on the dark water. A coal barge passes under the Weidendammer Bridge. A bird--a seagull? too slow, too strong, cruciform--a swan overtakes me. Have I ever seen a swan in the air before? It disappears around the sooty corner of the Bode Museum, following the river, the only street it knows. A moment later a red train shoots out between the museums, across a bridge and into the gray thicket of Monbijou Park. And when it's gone the city seems becalmed, only the Museum Island comes forw ard like a barge.

The Pergamon Museum. The processional entrance to Babylon: blue tile walls, lions and asters. Lions and oxen and scaly snake-beasts marching on the Ishtar Gate. These dragons have no doubt that they exist. They plant their claws firmly: I am. The scale model of the Marduk Temple dwarfs visitors. Why are ruins mysterious? Because buildings are. What haunted them when people lived there? What futures? Buildings are statues of non-existent places.

He asked me what I was going to do that weekend. I said I thought I'd go to the Pergamon Museum. He said you could meet interesting people in the Pergamon Museum. I said I didn't notice people, I only noticed buildings. He said people were more important, and buildings were made for people, not the other way around. I don't know if that's true, I said.

In the first hail of the museum, on the Pergamon Frieze, the gods and giants lunge and sprawl. Below them living people stand and walk stiff as pegs, their legs together, their arms at their sides.

Back along the Spree. An imaginary conversation.

-- What's wrong? he says. Does it bother you when I do that?

-- I don't know. I don't know how you mean it. I'm always afraid of overreacting. How do you mean it?

-- A friendly gesture, that's all. I like you. I like women. Why not?

-- What do you mean, you like women? Is that like liking cats or dogs? Is it friendly to pet a stray cat if you aren't going to take it home with you?

It would be unwise to say these things. To say anything. To say to myself that this or that might happen. Say nothing will happen. At every moment shouldn't you be able to look back at your life as a finished thing and turn away the imaginary life which has built up before you?

I can't sleep, though right now that is all I want, to sleep and be alone. The man seems to lie above, below, and on both sides of me. He is an obstruction. He's like the closet I hid in when I was playing hide-and-seek with my friends; instead of throwing open the door they turned the key and went away. I was locked in the closet and the closet was in my room, but I was not in my room; I was locked out. I could see out through the cracks and see all around me the things I had been playing with before my friends came, but it was another world. I want to escape into this world. I go out. I go to the bakery. I go to the drugstore for valerian tea and see him buying toothpaste. "What are you doing here?" I say.

"I live here," he says, "Friedrichstrasse. Are you having trouble sleeping?"

I say: "I can never sleep in the winter."

"That's not normal," he says. "It's normal to spend all winter in bed, like a bear." And he grins sleepily, like a bear. "But I don't have the time. Go home and sleep for me."

So the drugstore, the bakery, the clubs and cafes and the subway are his too. Only he doesn't seem to use the river. After work I take the subway to Kreuzberg and go to a cafe there, but it's as if-sitting in the train and sitting in the cafe--I have failed to move at all. I am still sitting and he is sitting beside me.

I walk west along Invalidenstrasse. I walk so fast that instead of resistance I feel a pull as if I am heading downhill. I come to a break in the city, a wilderness: railroad yards, a canal, the river. On one side of the gray water the yellow brick buildings of the medical school, the Charite hospital, across the water the curve of the elevated with its bricked-up arches like an aqueduct through the wilderness, the bare trees of the Tiergarten. The Reichstag stands by itself like a castle in the woods. The tallest things in the whole city are the orange cranes that bend over the Reichstag, putting it together. Here was the border. Like the bones of a child's skull, the city's parts do not meet. They will never meet.

I feel small. My inside has become very small. I want to be in the outside again, to step outside of my skin which has grown so small, become caught. I want to be in Berlin, to see it not as if through my window, as if from my bed with the heavy bedclothes grabbing my legs, but as if I were outside and could enter the strange space of tracks and trees and water between me and the Reichstag. But he is always in front of me, like my shadow which falls on everything, and follows when I turn, grinning and holding my ankles. I am walking without moving, moving like a peg from place to place, unable to wrestle like the statues, fall like the statues.

I stand outside the coal cellar looking up the steps to the courtyard. A shrub leans over the top of the steps and moves in the wind. This place, which is like a rock crevice, is the only place I had found where I do not think about him. He is outside, he is up there, like rain. But I am sheltered. Jam not touched. He is like something I only hear, something which strikes lightly above, which makes the air move uneasily about me, but from which a patient, shivering animal can find shelter.

Above, the city is too conscious, too human. It thinks, many different things, but one thought leads to another and brings me back to him, because everything is connected in the city; when you look at the map you see how to get from a to b to x, all the possible ways are there. But afield, I think early one night, a stream, a forest is alone and outside and knows of nothing but itself and the space around, the sky into which everything leans. Nothing reminds, and nothing remembers. I dress, count the money in my wallet and go out; it is four thirty in the afternoon, dark as morning, but not too late. Friedrichstrasse Station is just across the river. I could take a train to the edge of the city.

The Weidendammer Bridge. The lampposts with gilded suns, the cast iron railing with its black flowers and eagles with feathers like knives. The man at the middle of the bridge playing the accordion, very fast, as if to hurry the end of the night which has just begun, to chase the crowds into the Variete and home again, scatter the traffic, make the stars turn faster. I change my mind. It would make me uncomfortable to walk past him and not give him money. I stop by the railing at the foot of the bridge. The station, long and with huge windows, bends like a train about to take the curve across the river. The Spree flows on toward the Reichstag, hidden by the bulk of the station, the outside platforms and the railway bridge; I imagine the river opening out into the sea, the city, like Memphis, built on a delta, like Venice wading into the sea. And yes, the Spree, like all rivers, is that big. Water is a different kind of space; when a river is close by there is no need to take a trip to the country. I go a sho rt way along the embankment until I find a flight of steps. I step over the chain and go down the steps to a platform by the water. Here under the bridge it is like the coal cellar. He is left behind above. But this time instead of a wall before me there is the river, smooth and quiet and touched with light like an underground lake in a phosphorescent cavern. As I swim I pull away from myself with each stroke, fail back, pull away, fall back, pull away.

II. Christa: Cafe Mandelstam

To convince myself that I am a city person I spend my evenings in a loud smoky cafe. I need convincing four or five nights a week. As soon as it gets too dark to see out the window, I put my "work" into my backpack and go down the street to Cafe Mandelstam. I don't get any work done. I am the student who will never graduate. I read three sentences, or one sentence three times, and then I see someone I know. Or someone I don't know, not trying to pick me up, because Cafe Mandelstam, with its pretensions of being a salon, is one of the few places where you can still go by yourself in the evening ... someone begins to talk to me. I met Johanna that way. She said, "Have you ever read a book written in the second person?" She was shy about telling me her last name. She was a well-known writer, but I had never heard of her. I said The Confessions of Saint Augustine was written in the second person. She seemed disappointed--at the word "confession," or because it had been done before, or because she had wanted to sa y something which she could only have said if I hadn't thought of anything. She changed the subject. Later she told me that she was planning to write a novel in the second person. I thought she was a pseudo-intellectual, a hip cynic, a Westerner. But it turned out that she came from Magdeburg, which made us countrywomen. She had lost her dialect, unlike me. She had gone to the University of Jena, where she had been active in the underground scene before she was discovered and joined the semi-dissident boheme, publishing slim, lovingly-designed volumes of stories and poems that were snatched up before they hit the shelves and made her a reputation in the West. Last year she had written her first novel. Now, supposedly, she was one of the few eastwriters whom democracy had not stunned into silence, and she had a reputation.

She was unsure of herself. She was aloof, persistent, and somewhat tactless, like an unknown trying to make an impression. Once I knew her better I saw that she loathed herself in the necessary and intimate way you loathe a rival. I liked her for that. Also, she was a good listener. She always asked me to tell her legends and gruesome incidents from the Middle Ages. It made me feel that my studies were not entirely a waste of time, my way of escaping from reality. The stories had begun to seem empty to me, like ruins, fields of stones. They had stopped giving me pleasure, but telling them did.

Johanna liked anecdotes. It was the way she had chosen to take in the world. She quickly lost interest in people who had no anecdotes to tell, or who told other things. She liked those glimpses of other lives whose sense is their incompleteness, she liked to have fragments of other people, for her they had the enigmatic charm of artifacts. She liked talking to taxi drivers, people in her train compartment, the chimneysweep, the American who played the harmonica in the underpass at Alexanderplatz. Years later she could remember what they had told her. As long as it was a story without psychological explanations. She hated people who made confessions unless they could confine themselves to the thing itself which they had done and pass over their reasons for it, or their feelings after the fact. That was why she liked my stories; they were all from times when people had no selves the way we do.

Sometimes she tried to draw me out. The Harz was the enchanted forest of her childhood, she told me. On a clear day you could see the Harz from Magdeburg, dark hills on the horizon, and you thought of firs and creeks and crags. What had it been like to live there, in the restricted zone, so close to the Green Border? Did I have any good Wall stories? I had no stories she would have appreciated. I told her, instead, that the Harz had always been a kind of borderland; in the Dark Ages it lay between the Germanic and the Slavic tribes. For the Cistercian monks venturing further east the Harz towns were the last outposts of civilization. Johanna liked that. This is Slavic land, she said. This was always the East. She was going to write a book about the Eastness of Germany.

When she talked about writing I felt pleasantly detached, and I could always tell the very moment the wine took effect in me--it was like slipping under the surface of a warm bath. But then she would change the subject. Why did she have to keep talking about men, as casually and reflexively as she smoked? She didn't worry, she didn't savor, she only consumed. At some point a man would show up, kiss her face, bring back two beers from the bar, smile at me and turn her toward him like a book. Now talking to her was like reading upside-down. These men always made me sober up quickly, maybe it was the cold air on their coats. I would feel myself rise to the surface--the body doesn't stay down naturally, the lungs hold you up until you take the first breath of water--and I would want to leave. It was almost always a different man. She was always on her way to a party, where she made her contacts--for the small press she was starting, and for the five or six hours she spent in bed every night. All this activity--t he press, the parties, the men--struck me as a pretense. Was she afraid of being alone? Afraid of sleep?

Sometimes her dates at Cafe Mandelstam were chaste, friendly dismissals. I could usually tell, or she told me, and I knew when it was all understood and no one minded, and I knew when the man didn't know and would have to be asked not to mind. Sometimes I felt she left them there for me. I didn't take them. I always went away feeling as if I had witnessed something tragic. But really these gestures of parting had no meaning, they were like steps in a dance. Only a drunk watches dancers and starts to bawl when they change partners. When you're drunk you don't know what's important and what isn't.

When she realized how this bothered me, she quoted a Schubert song with an odd, shamefaced laugh, as if she were revealing a streak of sentimentality. Love loves to wander.

"That's not love, that's tourism," I said.

"There are tourists and tourists," she said, but she never said which kind she was.

One evening I thought she looked different--remote, quiet. It was as if she had found herself on a train with nothing to read and no one to talk to, and had been forced to look out the window for hours. But right away, as if this calm did not sit well, she grimaced and said she had had strange dreams. "I had told someone about Istanbul," she said. "I had told him what a beautiful city it was and if he took only one trip in his life that was where he should go. Then we were there together. At first he hadn't wanted to go, but then I had convinced him and now he couldn't wait to see what it would be like. And it was nothing, it was just a drab little town. All Krushchev-style housing blocks, and it was cold and raining. We got on a bus, and when I asked the driver where the Hagia Sofia was he said, 'Isn't that in Rome?"'

What are you supposed to say when people tell you their dreams? "Does Istanbul mean anything to you?" I said.

"It doesn't mean anything to me. But the man I was with that night, his boyfriend is Turkish."

I felt I should ask her if she ever thought about AIDS. But the question seemed naive and inappropriate. It would have been like asking a soldier whether he thought about death. "Were there any more strange dreams?" I asked.

"A few days ago," she said. "I dreamed I was in a room. I was writing something."

"Your novel in the second person?"

"No, it wasn't important, what I was writing down. It was a shopping list, or a list of things that had to be done in the apartment."

"And why is that a strange dream?"

"It wasn't my dream."

"Whose dream was it, then?"

"It must have been the dream of the man I was with."

"Don't dreams always seem to come from someone else?"

"Yes, of course," she said impatiently. "Like messages from beyond. But they're still addressed to you. It's not like opening someone else's mail."

"Isn't that the kind of thing writers do?"

"My curiosity is very limited. There are things I want to find out, but I know exactly what they are. I would read someone else's mail to confirm a suspicion. I would break into a locked room to look for something, but not just because it was locked. I don't want to be surprised. I don't want to be shown anything."

"What if you start having their nightmares? What if you dream about throttling women and dismembering them in the bathtub? Wouldn't you think twice about seeing the man again?" I said to annoy her.

"You see. That's what people always think of. 'What if he's a serial killer?' 'Maybe there's a body in the coal-cellar.' That's their idea of a mystery. I don't believe in nightmares anyway. I've never had one. I've had dreams other people would call nightmares, but I can't say that I was really frightened. It's other kinds of dreams that bother me."

A man came up behind her, rested his hands on her shoulders and smiled at me. I knew him from somewhere. Flirting came to him like natural courtesy: he looked at me now as if to say that he could fit me in somewhere if I liked, maybe Thursday. It seemed to me that unlike some of the creative men Johanna took home, he had self-mastery, kind indifference, and an utter lack of curiosity, and that she would be safe with him. I could not imagine him dreaming, for example. She looked up at him, appeared satisfied, and asked him to bring her another glass of rioja. I let him bring me a vermouth. I wanted to go, but first I wanted to hear some normal, pointless conversation to distract me from the thought of Johanna having the dreams that bothered her. We talked a little about the architectural renewal of Friedrichstrasse, and he gave me his card on the excuse that he would find it interesting to talk to someone who has a more historical view of things. His name was Hans, and he was an architect himself. Now I rememb ered that I had seen him with Johanna once before, and before he had shown up she had told me some improbable-sounding stories about him, that he had been a double-agent--or triple-agent?--while running an underground radio station and smuggling people across the border. Johanna hardly noticed when he gave me his card. I had expected at least an amused look. But she seemed absorbed, relieved that he was there, she drew close to him and found reassurance in his impenetrability. He asked me if he could bring me another vermouth, but I said no, I had to go, I was expecting a call. I stood outside the door buttoning my coat. I read the dark and bright windows and the headlines outside the newspaper shop (The Best New Year's Parties! Who Is the Spree Corpse?) and the streetcar tracks. And then a yellow streetcar came down Rosenthaler Strasse and I walked that way because of it, because of its dwindling window where someone stood with a kind of defensive hardness in her face, as if looking out from the stern of a boat.

I saw her two nights later and she said, "I know what a story in the second person is."

"What?"

"The second person is a dream dictated to you."

She hadn't been safe with him. Strange as it seemed, even he had harbored the fatal germs; he had exposed her unwittingly to this secret malaise. "What was it?" I asked. "What did you dream?"

"Not me," was all she said. We were there until two, when the cafe closed, and no one came to pick her up. She walked me home, it was on her way. "Sleep well," I said, and she gave me that peculiar smile, as if she were ashamed--of needing to sleep?

III. To Hans: A story in the second person

You have just gotten back from a trip. It's dark, and you're walking home from the train station. You are in high spirits. You think: the city seems different somehow when you've been away and comeback. You cross to the other side of the Weidendammer Bridge to see if you will see her swimming, sporting in the river. The Museum Island juts forward, a chalk cliff, pillars, shadows, cypresses, like Bocklin's Island of the Dead, like a city in the Mediterranean, and you are standing on the road that comes from the city. Stairs lead down the embankment. The river is not there, there is only a dry bed, like a river of chalky rocks tumbling along the sides of the island and converging before it. After a moment--pleased with yourself for having such sharp eyes--you spot her picking her way across the rocks in the distance. You feel the intense pity you feel only for animals. What will she do now that the water is gone? She scrambles back and forth across the rocks.

IV. Christa: A proposition

I came to his office on some excuse. He didn't look surprised to see me, and said he'd be with me in a minute. I looked at the blueprints on the walls, and out the window across the back yards. "That building on the right used to be the West German embassy," he said from the computer.

"I know," I said.

"This was all border zone."

"I know."

"Go up to the top of the stairs."

"What stairs?"

"The stairs you just came up. Go up to the top and tell me what you see." He smiled at me. The computer screen shone onto his face like something that would take twenty years off his life.

I went up to the next, top landing and saw a steel trapdoor in the ceiling, heavily bolted. As I came back down someone else was going down the stairs below me. Our footsteps almost matched, and I thought that if you took a cross-section of the house you would see us, one directly above the other, each on the same step of a different flight of stairs. The door to his office was ajar. Had I closed it?

"A steel trapdoor," I said.

"Right. In all these buildings the doors to the roofs were sealed. The police used to come and search the place every few hours."

Why the history lesson? Did he take me for a Westerner? I said, "Yes, life was much more interesting back then."

He laughed. "As long as there are men and women life will always be interesting," he said. I wasn't listening. I was looking out the window. The view pained me--the playground, the medical school, the monolith of the Charite Hospital--as if it were still the end of the world. The bare trees were filled with sparrows. Somewhere in these yards years ago Thomas and I had sought and found a secret Berlin landmark: the mulberry tree the Hugenots had planted. It stood on great loving crutches and the sidewalk beneath it was inkstained. That was the abandoned life.

"Well?" he said. "Business or pleasure?"

"Not business," I said, though I felt as if it were. I wondered if I had any desire for him at all, and looked, and all of me rose at the sight of him as if he were the only person who could help me. As if he were powerful.

He laughed--then the phone rang. He talked with someone for five minutes about a shipment, I tried to guess what of. Bricks? Concrete? I realized I was sitting with my hands clasped tightly in my lap as if I were hiding something pitifully precious--a modest heirloom with which I was going to pay my way. And he would say curtly: Nonsense. Keep your ring. You don't owe me anything.

When he hung up he swiveled in his chair, took my hands in his hands and my knees between his knees and made me a proposition. I listened without interrupting. It was like a wedding or a funeral, where you know what they're going to say even if you've never been to one. He leaned toward me and looked me in the eye as if he wanted to make very sure, as if it mattered very much to him. He wanted to seduce me and at the same time to alarm me, to warn me that it was all he promised and more, but I might not be up to it, and he would feel sorry about that.

I was relieved when the telephone rang and he abandoned his mock-serious face, became impassive, human, business-like for a moment. Then he laughed, and I could see him select another face with discreet, weary enjoyment. "Well?... Well, that's no good--you should try to get some sleep... Of course Pd like to see you again, sure...Tomorrow I'm driving up to Brandenburg to look at a building site...No, I don't think so. I'll probably be staying the night...A friend from the army. Not what you think. But any time after that... Go ahead, bring it along, if you suddenly feel like playing at three in the morning I won't stop you. Well, I'd better go now, I've got a visitor...Go to bed now, rest up. Don't fail asleep in the subway again, someone might steal your violin."

He followed the receiver down with nods and smiles and then looked up and gave me a different smile. Was it the one a man gives a woman at the door after helping the other woman escape out the window, or the one the man gives the woman hiding under the bed when he gets down on all fours to tell her the coast is clear? And which woman is the other woman? "Sorry about that," he said. "Well, that's how it is. It's good for everyone to know where they stand."

You're always in danger of overestimating your own importance. It's good to go to the doctor, the dentist, the welfare office, where they treat you as if you were no different from other people. They know about you what they need to know.

I tried to think of something to say that no one would have said before, but nothing occurred to me, which seemed to be just what he had expected, for he nodded as if we had reached an understanding, closed his files, switched off the computer and tidied up his desk. "Well, I'm going to close shop now," he said. "What were your plans for taking nourishment this evening?"

"What?"

"When were you planning to eat?" "When I'm hungry."

"You can help me make dinner if you're hungry now."

"I'm always hungry." He laughed as if that had been an innuendo and showed that I was learning how to play. He turned out the lights in the office and gave my elbow a reassuring squeeze as we bumped into each other in the doorway; he released it as soon as we started up the stairs. I still felt as if I were about to convert all my savings into a currency in which they would be worth next to nothing.

V. Christa: Over there

I'm naked. I always thought I could only be really naked outside, in a clearing in the middle of the forest on the hard ground in the warm sun. I always felt foolish, being naked, I always felt sad, as if I were trying to play a game I had played as a child. Half of me wanted to leave, half of me wanted to stay and see what I once thought would happen if I stayed long enough. It's easier to wait when you're a child and you think that if things happen at all they happen to you.

All I can think of is how other people have been here too. The rice paper lamp is like the sun, how many people have gotten their bearings by it? I look for Johanna' s shadow on the wall, and the woman with the violin, but the walls are white. I asked you why you don't have any pictures on your walls and why your bedclothes are black and you said that your life was complicated and you liked to keep your living quarters simple. There's nothing to look at but cracks in the paint. And you. I look back to see where I've been, and you expect it, that cursory surveying look.

It feels as if you're carrying me. I could safely fall asleep; you know where we're going. Everything in this strange-looking night is familiar to you. Do you ever wonder what's inside the packages you carry? But everyone looks the same in your arms; there is one position for being carried. And though everyone has a story, it's all the same to the ferryman or the checker of passports: they come and they go. Or am I wrong? Do other women take you where they want to go? Do they wander off in the dark, do they start to sing and dance in the middle of nowhere? Do you remember certain conversations, agreements on things that had barely crossed your mind before, arguments in which you almost had to call your beliefs into question, the way when traveling you sometimes meet foreigners as penetrating as spies, eager to try out their German?

Why should it bother me that there are other women? Is it that there are other women at all? I don't mind when I can see them, when they're in the same room with me, when I'm talking with them and they seem like me. It's the things I hear about indirectly, when people aren't there, only spoken of, when they're on the other side of a wall, that they seem the most real to me, that is, the most strange, the stronger, the further away, the less they have to do with me the more distinct they are, like animals I watch from my hiding place, unaffected by my presence, so free from me and so inscrutable. It unsettles me that men exist, when women talk about them. I can't avoid hearing about other countries, other civilizations, other ways of life. Why do I live here, why am I this?

I've lost so much time. I was at sea--my life, all the burdens and limits I thought were permanent and overarching broke off, and my life seemed like a finished thing. So what was I after that? Sometimes my clothes seemed unfamiliar, as if I had been rescued from drowning and given someone's strange dry clothes to wear. There wasn't really anything I wanted to do but look around and eat and drink and listen to other people talk.

Was it a long time ago the Wall came down? Probably longer for me than for you. You don't live in the past. For you everything is an opportunity. Whatever you were before, instead of holding you back it carried you forward, as if you had had your career all planned out to be picked up by the great wave of freedom.

Maybe you wonder why I'm here with you. (But you don't wonder.) I want to take part again, even in those things that have lost their meaning. Who am I to say this isn't "making love" just because it was different with Thomas? We were seventeen and so alike that we were lonely together. We invented our own language, it was completely new, I never even told him about my childhood language. No one had any idea we were more than friends; our friends couldn't imagine why anyone would keep something like that a secret. They confessed eagerly--and we agreed that it sounded nothing like what we did. But when we talked about it, it sounded just the same. So we didn't. It was our secret weapon. And you can't believe that everyone has the same secret weapon; that would mean everyone could master the world. There was one world, and it was ours. Now there are a million, and none of them is mine.

I took him to my favorite places in the forest. The border ran through the same forest ten miles away. I never gave it much thought; what I was looking for was the wall of a ruined city. I was sure there had to be one, that without knowing it we lived like peasants outside an ancient citadel. When you walked in the forest you always felt you were about to come to the edge of it; from the top of the hill you would see a patchwork of fields and the walls and towers of the city, your destination.

We went to Berlin together to see the Pergamon Museum and the Humboldt University, where we wanted to study archaeology and Old German Literature; his military service would begin in a few months, after that we hoped we would be able to study together. Berlin was the strangest city in the world. Our Berlin had trains going in all directions, and it had outskirts, sleepy satellites where people went on the weekend to walk in the woods or swim in the ponds. And then there was their Berlin, a walled city. A city with a wall is a unity, an elaboration of the castle, there seems to be a single will behind it. That used to be the glory of a city. I thought of it that way, even though it was really our wall and not theirs. We had a normal modern city, and they had an island fortress, a phantasm.

We spent the first few days exploring. We walked past this very building the night we saw Baal at the Berliner Ensemble, I remember because there was a restaurant next door and we stood there arguing about whether he was going to pay for me. He had already paid for the theater tickets without asking me, and I didn't want us to be like a typical couple. But the argument was typical too. After the play we walked along the river and I didn't mind anymore that he had paid. It was a beautiful night, and I wanted to go on walking along the Spree for miles past museums and wharves and factories and parks, to the very edge. I saw Berlin as an enormous unexplained artifact of civilization waiting for us to decipher it, including of course the great missing piece.

A few days after that we had another argument. I didn't understand why--all of a sudden he was sick of sightseeing, and I went to Potsdam by myself. When the palace gardens closed I went to a movie--there weren't many other ways to spend the evening in Potsdam--walked around some more, and came back on the last train. But he wasn't there. The next day one of his Berlin friends came looking for me and told me not to call the police, because he had crossed the border. I had never even gotten used to the idea that he had other friends, and here was this person I had never seen before, telling me that the escape had been planned for months, and it had gone off smoothly. The friend seemed angry with me for making things more difficult.

I went home. There was no one I had to tell. I couldn't have told the truth anyway, I didn't understand it. I still don't know why he went over to the West. It was as if he had jumped out of a window. I asked why? why? automatically, but that's not the same as trying to understand; what you're really doing is picturing the trajectory of a blow over and over and asking, why did I have to get hurt? Later you come back to the cold trail and ask why? again, this time really wanting to know, but usually too late.

It's clear: there's a wall, you want to climb over it. It's the kind of thing you see in your dreams, a wall you keep coming to and wondering what's on the other side. But what makes some people and not others think they belong on the other side of the wall, even when they're not dreaming? I had thought we were so alike, and maybe we were, except for that one thing. All I thought I understood was that he was dead. Any hold over him stronger than mine could only have been fatal. I was sure that I was the only surviving speaker of my language. A few months later I got a message from his friend saying that he was safe, but there was no message for me.

At first I was afraid I would be questioned, but no one seemed to know or care about me. There was no one I could go to when I wanted to betray him and tell everything I knew. Comrade, he has a secret weapon, we are lost if it falls into enemy hands. I don't know how else to describe that feeling once I knew he was alive over there: someone had taken something that was mine, that was me, to use against me. I had taken him deep into the jungle to uncover the ruins of a city thought legendary, we reconstructed the language from the inscriptions on the walls of roofless rooms, and we found an amulet of great power; one night he disappeared, taking the amulet with him. That was the beginning of a pulp novel about two comrades who became archenemies. That was how I dreamed about it. Someone was using my own words against me--or my own child--someone was hiding in the forest where I used to hide, waiting for me. Someone was wearing my amulet between her breasts, someone was speaking my language. My enemy destroyed me by existing.

You're asleep in your black bed. You're like a closed building, an office building, a museum at night. You're like an ancient temple ruin known for so many generations that there's nothing left to find there. The last relics of sacred rites were gleaned long ago. There are only the walls, the grassy floors. Did people really go into ecstasies here? I did, but I doubt it was really me. Lying here all alone in the night I became possessed by the spirit of someone who was here long before. I don't celebrate my own mysteries anymore, only others'.

Now you're like a heap of smooth gray rocks, not a human structure at all, a place where no one has been.

V. Christa: Strange violin

He said he would call me or I should call him. And I thought: if he calls me, I'll come back. It would be like a summons: come back for further instructions, to be told whether you are still in our power, still in our debt, still in need of treatment. I wouldn't call him. Who knew what business I might interrupt. You don't initiate contact with shadowy organizations like that. They may call you; they may leave you alone. For weeks, for years. Maybe you're just a number to them, maybe they know everything about you. Afterwards you rack your brain and wonder whether you said too much. But you don't know, maybe they don't take any notice, it's just the usual things people babble in white rooms. Or do they remember?

When I was a child I would have said: I'd just speak my secret language, and they wouldn't understand me.

Sometimes I felt lonely now. It was the price I had to pay for taking part again. How good, I thought as I lay awake, that I am this lonely, not someone who couldn't bear it. And the throe of loneliness was like a gesture of protection or comfort toward someone unknown who was agitated and beside herself and at the very edge of her life.

A week or two went by. I saw Johanna several times in Cafe Mandelstam. I often thought that she might bring Hans again. But when she did come, alone, and we sat there together, I never thought of him at all.

Nothing happened, until one night I decided to see a movie. However I looked at it, the only subway to take was the one that stopped across the street from his building. Dangerous territory, this former border zone, but it was being normalized. Friedriclistrasse was going to be a great boulevard again. Now most of it was under construction. This particular block was not being torn up, but it was as good as a dead end, and there was never much traffic. No cars were coming now, but I waited for the light; the streetcar might come around the corner. If he looked out the window and saw me, I thought, he would think I was standing there trying to gather the nerve to come up. All I could see was the ceiling and the rice paper lamp--and I could hear music. The street was that quiet. He was occupied; I was relieved. He would not look out the window. The light changed, and I would have crossed the street and gone down into the subway then, but I had been puzzling over the music, and just then I knew what it was. It w as hard to hear, it was only a violin, but I was sure that it was playing Bach. An andante, I think, a halting tune in which the violin shadows itself.

Most music I am indifferent to, but then a few pieces have a meaning for me that I can't explain. They seem quite clearly meant for me, but they make no sense, like a letter addressed to me containing nothing, or a phone call I answered, and got no reply, only faint, nervous breathing and the sounds of a home in the background, and I felt I should know who it was.

Whenever I heard this andante I saw, as if an apparatus were registering the music in some way that the ear does not and showing it on a screen: a vertical line, fluctuating in width, then two lines dancing close together, a line splitting apart and fusing. The strict rhythm keeps tugging the two lines together before they have a chance to move too far apart. At certain moments both lines become stronger and more plaintive, straining to come apart. I think they will succeed. Any moment this music will make another player appear out of thin air. The illusion has become so powerful that reality will have to give in and make it a body. But in the end the illusion is not sustained, there is only one voice after all, and the violinist is alone.

I went into his house and climbed the stairs slowly, listening. The sound of the violin was gone now; there was nothing to hear but voices and footsteps and televisions inside the apartments. I was the only person on the stairs, and I made no noise. I passed his office without hearing anything. At the top of the stairs, under the steel trapdoor, I stopped and listened again. No voices. I was petrified, but I wanted to see. I rang the doorbell.

The violin went on playing. After a minute I heard footsteps. He opened the door barefoot in sweatpants. "Well," he said.

"Is this a bad time?" I asked, suddenly only contrite, as if I had dragged him out of bed.

"No, no. You could never come at a bad time. Come in."

He brought a pot of tea into the living room. The violin went on playing in the other room. The living room had an angled wall of glass. I could see the trees right under the window, and the Charite in the distance, and blue dark clouds. The setting sun shone through in one place and made a cloud look like the Hradshin or the Acropolis, the floodlit crown of a city on its outcropping. I looked out the window. He watched me without feigning any kind of understanding, only mildly curious, wary, but not impatient. The music casts a spell, I thought. And I wanted to see.

"Who's the violinist?"

He looked startled; it was a far-fetched attempt at small talk. "I don't know," he said. "Is it important?"

"No, I guess not."

"Well, now I'm curious," he said, getting up. Even barefoot he walked loudly. I followed him into the other room. There was no one there, nothing but the bed and a new stereo set up on the floor. "It's the radio," he said. "I don't know what it is, I just got the stereo." In its tangle of wires the stereo looked like a hostage tied up in the corner of the bare room. "Do you think the speakers sound all right?" I was about to say they did when he held up his hand. "Ssh!" It was the announcer's voice. Bach's Sonata No. 2 in A Minor for Unaccompanied Violin, BWV 1003, played by Jascha Heifetz. "There you go," he said. "Jascha Heifetz. Have you heard of him?"

"I've heard of him," I said.

"Then you know more than I do. Jascha Heifetz. Well, I've learned something new today." He smiled, genuinely pleased to have learned something new, and then his smile changed to take into account the fact that I was standing next to the bed. I was sorry that the awkward conversation was over; I was uncomfortable and disappointed in the empty room. I had been tricked back. But why had I thought once would be enough? I would have to come here again and again before I met another person. The room seemed huge now, it stretched out on all sides and he was very near. I put out my hand to see how near.

-- Well, don't go drowning yourself over me.

-- It's just a story.

Isabel Cole's literary translations have appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Archipelago. A translation of Two Prague Stories by Rainer Maria Rilke is forthcoming from Vitalis Verlag (Prague), and two short translations will soon appear in the Chicago Review. She lives and works in Berlin as a freelance translator.