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thinking of me.
    Alcohol wasn’t thinking of me either. You cannot one-up someone who has dumped you, but my former love, white wine, was showing that to be not always the case. I left white wine, yet when I stood there on the Ku’damm, with the sky blue behind me and the east ahead of me end-of-summer dark, it was white wine that was over me already and in the arms of someone else.

 
    TWO
    The conquest of the earth was not a pretty thing. The splendor and misery were gone. Symbolic, unchaste Berlin was still the barracks town of Frederick the Great, but the once-teeming capital had also become a small town with a big past. You could crawl into the disfigured city as into a shell. You could treat it as either inhabited ruin or blank space. You could write your own ticket, regard the city as backdrop, a theatrical setting, and appropriate the citizens as extras for your daily dramas, your tremendous inner opera buffa.
    The wintry light cast a spell. You were going to walk out the door and reinvent yourself. You were going to turn a corner and there in the neon haze would be the agent of your conversion. Or you could go around in a nervous silence for days, as if the city had been depopulated, leaving only an architecture of signs, layer upon layer, and a dialogue between vanished buildings and their replacements. A preserved fragment of the bombed-out-then-mostly-demolished Anhalter train station shot up from the hard earth to scream at a white block from the 1970s that was like the architectural equivalent of a bimbo.
    “Paradise is locked and bolted. We have to make the journey around the world to see if it is open at the back,” Kleist said. Berlin hid its historical face until you slipped over there, into East Berlin, into the immensity of Unter den Linden, Apollonian Baroque and the ineptitude of Karl-Marx-Platz. I didn’t try to stop myself from liking the dereliction, the forgotten pockets of buildings still so scarred by bullets that I would not have been surprised had Marlene Dietrich emerged from a doorway to sing “Black Market.” Overdressed, laden with the Communist state’s unconvincing currency, I found the usual racial situation reversed. These white people who spoke low like inhabitants of a ghost town were the primitives, the needy tribesmen I couldn’t take back with me. The sky was a glittering frontier of fumes, creeping mists, and the Berlin Wall itself the white surf.
    Back in louder, wandering West Berlin, I turned around and faced the Wall, an exhibition of found art, an explosion of graffiti, like a high school yearbook. I was told that a man was sometimes lowered in a cage from the featureless earth of No Man’s Land to wash away the many-colored scrawls of slogans and hearts. I didn’t believe it, though none of the graffiti went back very far, certainly not as far back as the crosses behind the Reichstag in memory of those killed trying to escape that August of 1961, when the Wall went up overnight.
    The Wall made the lucky part of Berlin artificial, held its grumbling, caustic population in the jealous embrace of privilege. It was a poor city, West Berlin. The conquered city had become the subsidized city. Old Germans willing to live in encircled West Berlin received tax breaks and the young were exempt from national service. The real estate was worth nothing and there was no heavy industry to speak of, just the hundreds clocking in at Schuzburg Tools and other family companies like it. The city services were not massive. Workers of the world—clock out and spend four weeks in a spa. The only big business, it seemed, was culture. The students, filmmakers, artists, musicians, actors, writers, and professors were the aristocracy, and a foreigner, an intruder, never had to make sense.
    *   *   *
    I longed, as did Cello’s nanny, for those times when the family was out. She and I gravitated to the balconies, in spite of the wet and cold. We went out onto separate balconies. It was