The warm wind caressed the short strands of her hair. She’d cut her long braids a few days ago, without asking for anyone’s opinion or permission and was delighted to see a young woman, not a girl anymore, staring at her in awe from the other side of the mirror. The exams were approaching. She would ace them; she knew she would. And later, with her wartime experience, it would be utterly moronic of them not to accept her to the coveted medical faculty. Gerlinde Neumann, a surgeon! Last April, some stranger walked around bearing her name. It was never her and she saw that clearly now. An imposter only and Gerlinde couldn’t be happier to be rid of her at long last.
“You think it’s changed?”
The wind almost carried Tadek’s words away. Gerlinde carefully turned her body sideways to hear him better. “What? The Tiergarten?”
“Yes. Last time we were there, it was…”
“Last summer.”
“Yes. Almost a year ago.”
“I imagine they cleaned it up a bit. I don’t care for the sights, though. I’m hoping for that book I mentioned.”
“Yes, yes, the illustrated, anatomical… something.”
Gerlinde’s laughter even sounded different from last April’s Gerlinde’s. Careless, free.
“Why don’t you try and enter the Uni together with us? Wouldn’t it be grand, to study together just like we are now?”
“Erich will get jealous.”
Gerlinde tried to play-swat him and nearly lost her balance. Laughing, Tadek moved his head out of her hand’s path and almost rode into a patch of freshly turned ground. Someone was following Frau Hanke’s example here as well.
“I’m serious, Tadek.”
“Medical profession wouldn’t suit me.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve seen too many corpses and far too many sick people. Can’t bring myself to see any more of them willingly,” he admitted with honesty.
Gerlinde understood and nodded and turned to face the street again. The Tiergarten was coming into view and along with it, the carcass of the Reichstag.
“I’m surprised they let it stand,” she noted, more to herself. “One would think the Ivans would want to demolish it.”
“It’s much too easy.”
“How come?”
“Much too easy to erase the memory of something altogether instead of facing it, coming to terms with it, and reforming it into something contrary to what it had once represented. Now it is something that would make the entire next generation – or generations even – remember the past the way it ought to be remembered.”
Gerlinde stared straight ahead, at the pockmarked steps and chipped-off columns, at the soot-covered walls and the broken windows, and silently agreed with him. They came to a halt before a makeshift market – still there, still very much functioning – and Gerlinde thought to ask Tadek about the camp, whether he thought it was a shame for the SS to demolish the physical evidence the way they did but bit her tongue at the last moment and silently called herself a chicken. An elderly woman with a black kerchief around her head was already pushing a tiny dress into Gerlinde’s hands and the subject was hopelessly lost.
“No, no, I don’t need it.”
“For your child!”
“I don’t have any children—”
“For your little sister?”
“I don’t have any. I’m sorry. It’s just me.”
Gerlinde tore herself out of the misty-eyed woman’s grip. No one sold new children’s clothes for profit unless the children were dead and that was something Gerlinde couldn’t bring herself to deal with that day. The sun was too warm on her cheeks. Her coat was open and her backpack was full of her father’s books. If she were lucky, she’d trade some of the first editions that collected dust in her vast library for not only the anatomical atlas but the medical kit itself, if someone was selling one that day. She couldn’t bear looking at this woman in her black kerchief now. Gerlinde bandaged far too many injured children during that bombed-out spring to listen about the ones who had died after the surrender had been signed and the hunger replaced the artillery fire.
“That man over there, I think he has books.” Tadek was pointing at the respectable-looking gentleman in a gray coat. The brim of his hat lowered over his face; he was pacing, two steps forward, two steps back, in front of several boxes lined up neatly in front of the curb, looking pained and out of place yet just as gaunt and hungry as the rest of them all.
However, it wasn’t him who Gerlinde was staring at, wide-eyed and breathless. Hands clasped behind his back, head tilted slightly to one side, mild half-a-smile and an American felt Fedora – there couldn’t be a mistake. Still, her mind went in circles, why here? Out of all places, why at the market? Perhaps, not him after all… a Doppelgänger, deceiving and alien against the sun.
“You go ask him,” she told Tadek in a voice that suddenly sounded hollow and unrecognizable, “and I’ll go ask that gentleman over there. He looks like he knows where to get these things.”
Tadek’s back to her, at last. Tadek’s hands on the bars of the bicycle. Tadek deep in conversation with the Gray Coat, animated and unexpectedly amicable. They were both digging in the boxes now and Gerlinde was walking briskly away. Away and toward the man in the felt hat, who had purchased the flowers and was hurrying along the sidewalk, across the street, toward the bus stop.
Gerlinde was running now. More than anything she wanted to scream after the man, shout for him to stop but only charged faster across the street, started when a staff car with several severe-looking Russians nearly ran her over and gasped in horror when the man clambered inside a bus that was ready
