We live with ghosts. We live with thugs, dodgers, punkers, needle ladies, pork knuckle. We live where there’s no place else to go. We live with birds—a pair of magpies in the old hospital turrets, a fat yellow-beaked grebe in the thick sticks of the plane trees. A man named Sebastien has moved into the Kiez from France. My mother’s got an eye on him.
“You’ve had enough trouble, Jana,” Omi warns her.
Mutti shakes her head, mutters under her breath. Calls her own mother Ilse, like they are sisters, or friends. Like two decades and a war don’t divide them. Like sleeping, dreaming, waking, breathing so close has quieted one to the other.
We live in a forest of box gardens and a city of tile. We live with brick and bullet holes. We live where Marlene Dietrich lived, and the Kaiser and the Reich. We live here, and here is where I have learned what I know, all that I can tell you, including: You can scrub the smell of graffiti out of the air with vanilla, cinnamon, nutmeg, lavender, sometimes oil of roses. But you can never scrub the paint off the wall.
“Be careful, Ada.”
Of course I’m careful. I’m in love.