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understood. Our needs. I smoked. She ate hidden chocolates. Neither of us had had anywhere to go on New Year’s Eve. We said when we met in the kitchen that we were exhausted from the noisy family Christmas and didn’t want to go anywhere anyway. She was paid extra to watch the children that night and Cello approved of my staying quiet.
    Valentine’s Day went unmentioned in the kitchen, but not the Ides of March. The nanny said she didn’t give a fig about Shakespeare. All her life she’d been disgusted with the Bard. On her nights off, she’d taken to coming in giggly from a bar frequented by British soldiers. She was getting drunken phone calls after ten o’clock. I knew that Cello would have Dram speak to her before too long. I was not sorry to see her go. She’d been good with the children, which many mothers resent in a nanny after a while. But she wanted to trade confidences with me about Cello, as though she were my equal, or rather as if I were down there with her.
    She broke down the day of her departure. Cello took the children to their grandparents on Wannsee the night before. Dram informed the paid-off girl that the children would not be coming back that night, that it was best a parting scene not be imposed on them. He assured her that Cello was at that moment explaining to them that their au pair was going home because her own family missed her and that they should be happy for her.
    Dram wasn’t there the morning she left. I’m the one who watched the tears erupt when she pulled her bags into the entrance hall. Her curling iron was in its box in a plastic bag. I made her sit down. I got her a tissue. She’d been a fool to agree not to tell the children anything until the last minute. I listened to her sob about how unfair it was to expect a young person not to have a social life; how unreasonable it was to keep the oldest out of school just to prevent him from saying goodbye to her; how unfair it was that their mother couldn’t see they’d become attached to her. She didn’t trust a reference from Cello not to be a stab in the back. I called her a taxi. I helped her take her bags downstairs. I hugged her. Humiliated, she was on her way back to her previous job in the gift-wrapping department at Marks and Spencer.
    She told me to beware. She’d heard Cello and Dram having an intense discussion about me. Obviously she didn’t know what they said, because in her ten months in Berlin she’d learned not a word of German. But they’d repeated my name often, she said, and not in a nice way, she didn’t think.
    *   *   *
    N. I. Rosen-Montag had proposed the reclamation of an industrial wasteland on a bend in the River Spree, near the housing estates of the Hansa Quarter, as a focal point of the International Building Exhibition, or IBA, a series of meetings of architects, designers, and planners that was taking place in West Berlin over a period of years.
    Much outrage followed the announcement that Rosen-Montag, a paper architect, had been given such pride of place, not to mention the huge commission, the chance finally to build. That was some time before I quit drinking and taking drugs. By the time I joined the project, hip Berlin columnists were gleefully relaying rumors that Rosen-Montag’s small-dwelling idea, his back-to-the-eighteenth-century-scale crusade, was seriously behind schedule and likely to be wildly over budget.
    What made his peers quiver was the fact that he was a part of both the New Building and the Old Building sections of IBA, the sole architect to be so engaged. He could construct anew, fill in grassy gaps, and he could remake and revive old buildings, be an exponent of what the IBA director called “critical reconstruction.”
    The Lessing Project, Lessingsdorf, was always going to have a hard time asserting itself against the modernist parks of the Hansa Quarter, overgrown strips between broad streets by railroad tracks. The Hansa Quarter was sacred ground for