divided cities

i.

Right now, I’m living decades ago, which is to say the spiced cookie I eat this afternoon
returns me to West Berlin when I was fifteen. In a gold and marble konditorei, my father
ordered cups of coffee. I drank black tea. The lebkuchen tasted so sweet, it was easy to
forget we were sitting in a divided city.

ii.

A friend emails me from the Middle East to ask if we were ever forced to leave a post
overseas. I write to tell her, Yes, from Zaire, when I was three. All I remember is nothing
of that departure from Lubumbashi. The evacuation was so sudden that, years later in
Brussels, I would have to relearn the French I once knew as a little girl, language like
crumbs brushed clean from a porcelain plate.

iii.

In the high-ceilinged rooms of the past, a waltz keeps playing. Onetwothree onetwothree
onetwothree. I am eating or drinking somewhere far away.

iv.

A friend calls me from New York. It’s midnight, and neither of us can sleep again. We
can’t decide which country will be first to shatter. On the other end of the line, I can hear
her reheating her coffee, the small ping of warning from the microwave.

iv.

Tikkun olam, I say to her or she says to me. For Jews, it means repairing the broken world.
We are always talking like this. And I’m telling her about the Poland of my childhood, the
paper bags of plums, their skins the purple of a bruise, the baskets of raspberries bleeding
juice, how I used to wander through Warsaw, touching the gray exteriors of buildings,
feeling for the absence made by bullets, their ricochet.