The news of the fall of the Berlin wall coincides with the news of my mother’s brain tumor.

Both are preceded by outward signs of pressure—restrained, candle-lit protest marches in the GDR, headaches and migraines in my mother’s darkened bedroom in West Germany. The moment their actuality is confirmed on television and on the radiography, their reality becomes inconceivably linked.

Once my mother has undergone surgery, I cannot watch the German people pounding the wall with their hammers without thinking of the doctors drilling, cracking her skull open. Risen from ruins and facing the future, her country’s anthem says, ringing off-key for the both of them. My mother is not simply German. She’s a citizen of the GDR living in West Germany, an unassimilated immigrant in her own country.

“I’m from the GDR,” she tells everyone she meets. When she speaks of here and there, of these women here, it’s always clear what she means—just as it’s clear what every German on either side of the wall means by the word drüben—over there.

Our family is a collective and the collective matters more than the individual, she teaches us. She does not believe in the West’s mollycoddling.

“When I was a teenager and I had my tonsils removed, I had to hold the bowl for the blood during surgery,” she tells us, cupping her hands underneath her chin.

Physical weakness is a political issue, a debate that the West loses with every sneeze.

The few times my brother and I are sick, she shakes her head in disappointment.

“Have you stopped taking cold showers?” she asks.

While people in the GDR dream of the West, it is still the scattered backbone of our home. Our bedclothes, dishes, pots, records, towels, doilies, dolls, underwear, Christmas tree ornaments all have the VEB stamp that stands for Volkseigener Betrieb, meaning people-owned enterprise.

While the European children at school eat Mars bars during recess and the Africans eat paprika-flavored potato chips, I eat rusk that was baked by a VEB.

“I can’t believe it!” my mother says, watching the wall crumble like rusk. She was fifteen when it went up, I’m thirteen when it comes down.

One wall between two generations. Now everybody wants a piece of VEB concrete rusk.

Unlike my mother, I have never known a world without the wall. It’s as natural as the tree in front of our house. It did not occur to me to ask, will the tree ever crumble like rusk? I accepted that the sun rose every morning and that we crossed the death strip several times a year to stay with Omi and Opi.

The death strip. Now that it’s gone, my mother will finally cross over into death. There must be a connection, I think. Everything is connected, same as on the World Clock on Alexanderplatz where one person’s sunrise brings another one’s sunset.

The world is not a collective, neither is our family. It’s a ball caught within steel rings and spheres that rotate between war and peace, light and dark. If it hadn’t been for the Cold War, my father wouldn’t have received a scholarship for the university in East-Berlin where the creator of the Alexanderplatz World Clock taught.

My parents would never have met in East Berlin or anywhere else in the world. I wouldn’t be here to watch the wall that brought them together fall.

In comedy, timing is everything. The joke of history is on us.

My parents don’t come home from their shopping and my father calls late. They are at the hospital because of a headache. Don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay, my father says while I mute the grainy black-and-white picture of Walter Ulbricht on television.

“No one has the intention of building a wall,” says Ulbricht at a press conference in June 1961, two months before construction works for the wall begin.

Even muted, I hear Ulbricht’s high-pitched voice while I watch him move with the exaggerated gestures of a string puppet, his hand rising to his chin, his head jerking left and right as if the faces around him were mirrors magnifying his mannerisms.

With his bald patch and chin beard he looks like a prim schoolmaster, a latecomer to fatherhood, sitting at the dinner table with children he is unable to connect with. Why won’t they grow into the fine names he gave them?

The footage is shown again and again. When all the footage of the present has been used, the channels switch to Walter Ulbricht.

The lie is inexhaustible. It keeps on giving like the wishing table, the gold ass, and the cudgel in the sack in the eponymous fairy tale. 

The GDR had no bananas, but for every non-existent banana it handed out a cluster of lies. “All governments lie to their people,” my mother told me.

Don’t worry, everything’s going to be okay!

Even my father lied.

“I can’t believe it, Mutti,” my mother tells her mother on the phone as they watch the wall between them come down.

In the great disorder of things, the wall runs through our family with the same painful symmetry that my mother applies to parting my hair for my pigtails, pulling the comb’s row of teeth across my scalp until my tight tails tug at the sides of my face like the two horses on the Levi Strauss label.

The axis of the wall not only separates here from there, them from us, but now from then.

The East is the past. Walls and facades are still riddled by bullets from WWII and trucks from the 50s chug down the street. Children run around in leather sandals, playing with mechanical toys in a country that is full of creaking cogs and levers going left and right, up and down, anywhere but forward.

In East Berlin, my mother does not need to tell strangers that she’s a citizen of the GDR. She hugs people she has known since childhood. People shorten her name into a little girl’s.

Nobody is a stranger. Everybody is Aunt and Uncle.

This is where, my mother’s sentences begin, her accent sounding more like East Berlin every day. My mother’s words kick off their Western shoes and run barefoot in her mouth.

Das becomes det, sagst becomes sachste, pipi becomes puller.

The past is a country—and my mother, brother, and I were born in that country. We all have a GDR passport so that the past will let us in whenever we come knocking. Every time we reach the border, my mother shares her fears that the past will refuse to take us back.

The symmetry of the wall separated my grandmother from her brother, my mother from her brother, and should, by that logic, separate me from my brother someday.

On my mother’s side, all the women had a boy and a girl for three generations. There’s a pattern here. And now that the wall is gone, my brother and I will have to find a different separation.  

We find it quickly.

The wall comes down and the men in my family stop talking. They want to watch this. They want to read that. They want to go to bed early. They want their door closed. They want to go out. They want some peace and quiet. They want to eat now.

They want to do anything but talk. 

No one wants to talk about the tumor, everybody wants to talk about the wall.

Mein Gott, ein Wunder! God, it’s a miracle! 

“You have to be a good girl,” my grandmother tells me on the phone. “Your mother needs you now.” She remembers the GDR’s official motto for telecommunication, Keep it short, and hangs up. She does not ask me how I am. It’s good enough for her that I am. You’re either free or you aren’t. You’re either alive or you aren’t. You’re a good girl or a bad girl.

Sometimes I go to the botanical gardens with a girl from school. We sit left and right of a man-made cascade that splashes the slabs leading across a little artificial stream. The seemingly innocuous slabs are slippery. People flail, get hurt. It happens all the time, men and women thinking this is nothing, miscalculating, misjudging, mistaking. It’s these people I want to see slip and fall, not the few who approach the little stream with a tense foreboding, their small steps apprehending, their hands turning into fists. These are the people who make eye contact, yet these are the people I don’t need to warn.

Sometimes it’s mere bruises, sometimes the skin is shaved right off the defensive arm and raw pink skin shows under a healthy tan. 

This unhappy girl and I sit together, contemplating our need to see other people get hurt, through no fault of our own.

We are good girls. We didn’t build the walls of this world. 

Sometimes I want to warn old people, but they are so wrapped up in themselves. If one of them would look me in the eyes and smile, I would tell them. If one of them would pay me an obol in the form of a tale from their past, I would be their Charon and guide them across the stream.

I do love a story.

I’d slip off my rock for a story. The world is a dangerous place. Anything can happen, I would tell them. Miracles and misadventure!

I make myself look when they fall. It’s punishment and reward at the same time.

Their pain becomes mine until the moment they hobble off. That’s when I give it back to them like a stranger on the subway picking up another stranger’s hat. Hey, Mister! 

I feel a lightness as I stretch my arms and legs. We are good, patient girls, miscalculating, misjudging, mistaking our motives.

We are Misses, not girls.

When I have my first period, I feel betrayed by my body. I feel betrayed by men. How can their genitals dangle out there in the air,their feelings trapped so deep? How can my genitals be so hidden and my feelings so exposed?

My body is turning into a stranger. I have cramps and bleed once a month. I think of the joke my English teacher has told us about a woman whose first language isn’t English.

One morning I woke up next to my husband, she says in English, and I suddenly realized that I’d been married to a foreigner for the past twenty years!

The joke is so funny that it hurts my stomach. Of course, she meant to say stranger, the teacher explained to those who weren’t laughing. The teacher got more laughs when she said that the French needed to be careful when pronouncing the word beach.

One morning I woke up and suddenly realized that my body had turned into a foreign land.

This foreign land is so confusing that my soul decides to build a wall between itself and its country. Whenever I cross the border, I cross a line of innocence. In my big sweaters the topography of my body turns into a shapeless secret, unlike the well-defined spots of blood that seep into the fabric of my pants, thanks to my mother’s sanitary napkins made by a VEB.

Nature is a carnival barker.

Step right up, step right up! 

Watch an innocent girl turn into a foreigner!

See her now! See her now!

One day, I come home and find my father lying on the couch, his face contorted, pressing a tissue to his face. “I have a nose bleed!” he shouts. He’s not good with blood. He wants help. He wants something from me that I cannot give him.

Be a good father, I want to tell him. Keep it short. Your daughter needs you now.

“Do something!” he shouts. I bring him toilet paper and watch his blood soak the flowery texture. The color of his blood unwraps like the tight red ribbons my mother used to twist around my pigtails in the morning. They came loose in the course of the day, her grasp on me slackening as the hours went by.

He pushes the bloody, crumpled paper back into my hand, grabs the fresh one the way he grabs his cigarettes, the way he grabs his blunt words, like someone who has to wring raw, unripe materials off some taught, resisting stem.

When he strokes us, he grabs our heads right behind our foreheads and pulls his hand down the back of our heads, his pressure flattening our hair.

“Why does he stroke me like an animal?” I’d  ask my mother.

“It’s a different culture,” my mother would say.

Why are men always translated by women? 

The war did this to him.

He can’t help it. It’s his culture

He didn’t mean it like that.

Do women get a special instruction manual?

Before operating the unit, please read thoroughly. 

“Why does he stroke us like we’re animals?” I ask my brother, but my brother closes his door.

My father does not understand these questions and I don’t understand my father because I have not been given the instruction manual yet. I have only been given a few passages. You have everything means I had nothing. Meaning I have no excuse, meaning my father does not have to say please do this, please do that because he lost the sensitiveness in his fingertips as he climbed over the wall of poverty. He earned the right to speak in imperatives.

Do this! Do that!

Grabbing his words, my father speaks of sacrifice. Everything he ever did, he did for his children. If we fail, he fails. We are his works of art. Before we are ourselves, we are his creations. When we do wrong we insult him, when we shine we affirm him.

He’s not our friend. One cannot be friends with one’s maker. 

Once the nose-bleed has stopped, he lights a cigarette.

When he smokes, we smoke.

I wonder why my mother, who has never smoked a cigarette in her life, has a tumor growing inside her like some freakish third child made by three parents: one-third by my father, one-third by my mother, one third by second-hand nicotine.

Not nice clean halves like my brother and I. Easy on your brain.

Divide by two and you get half.

Divide by three and you get a headache. No, a brain tumor.

I wonder if he gave it to her in all those years that she sat next to him, inhaling his chain-smoking presence. I wonder whether he wonders when he grabs at his thoughts in his half-full, half-empty bed, his lung flapping like a flag in the wind.

Does she wonder in her hospital bed? She has plenty of time to wonder now.

No one had the intention of building a tumor. No one says it out loud.

I cannot ask her. She is not herself anymore. She is life and death reunited. She is Germany without a wall. She is now. No one knows about Germany’s future. Germany is now.

The doctors crack her head open and extract the tumor. It’s benign, they say—like the benign rulers in my history textbooks.

The tumor has been smothering my mother with its gentleness, kindness, and harmlessness.

“Put your shoes on!” my father says after I come back from hanging up the washing in the basement, wondering why men have holes in their briefs. Why can’t they be bothered to pull their underpants down, when my new bra wraps around my ribcage like an uncomfortable hug from a stranger.

“We’re going to the hospital!”

I tell him then. I repeat her words with the exactness of a magic formula, constitutional law, the ingredients of a family recipe.

If it’s too much, you don’t have to come to the hospital after the surgery. I’ll understand.

This wasn’t the same woman who had held the cup for her own blood under her chin, the woman who kept saying, There’s no way around this when she left me on my first day of French school with only one French word in the pocket of my VEB dress.

“What nonsense!” my father says. “Of course, you’re coming!”

“But it’s what she said!”

Truth isn’t consensus. My mother’s truth is my father’s nonsense.

I’ll understand. In the darkness of my room I have repeated these words before going to sleep, when my left hand suddenly grabs my right hand and pats it and I understand that this will be my life if my mother doesn’t come back from the hospital. My left hand, this affectionate awkward stranger, patting my right hand. I’m grateful to my left hand. I’m moved by myself. It’s a comforting gesture. Maybe tomorrow the right hand will be kind enough to return it.

If my mother dies, my father will take me to his country where they celebrate toomuchness every day. It’s their language, their touch, their spices, their clothes, their sun. In the dusty streets of flea-markets, boys dragging their heels in flip-flops splash the dusty earth with water because even they, who have never left their own city, can feel the toomuchness rise in the heat of the day.

Their toomuchness makes them  repeat their words over and over again once they’ve understood that you don’t understand them.

They think of toomuchness as a gift. 

It’s rude not to accept gifts, Fräuleinchen.

Nein, nein. This can’t happen.

What a selfish person I am to think of myself when my mother is dying. The right hand will not pat the left one back. Not even in the dark.

If my mother dies, the person I am now will die with her. I will be reinvented at the hands of toomuchness.

You’re not half-dead, they will say. You’re 100  percent toomuchness now.

I, a thirteen-year-old girl, will be surrounded by benign rulers.

“Why don’t you leave her be?” says my brother, putting on his shoes, looking strangely comfortable in his post-pubescent body.

He is tall and handsome. The girls in the neighborhood blush when they pass him. When I was small, I’d whisper his name in the night, waiting for an answer, his bed floating in the darkness of the room we shared for a year.

He’d mumble and I’d swim through the darkness to his bed. I was a good swimmer already. The dark was like water, was like my bicycle—carrying my body without questions. I was unquestionably myself there.

My brother smelled like the fresh hay we’d stuff into our pet rabbit’s cage. Years later, when his body has turned into a foreign land, he does not build a wall between himself and his body, but between his body and us. He doesn’t want to be touched anymore. He shakes off hands, sits on the other end of the sofa, tolerates hugs only on his birthday.

The day I get my hands on the operation manual, I’ll look up the chapter on brothers.

“We’re a family!” my father shouts, meaning you are my family. Where I go, you go. 

I’m my father’s shadow now. I undulate across facades and floors, I turn my head when he looks at me and stretch him into a caricature.

I repeat my mother’s words like a charm. If I am my father’s shadow, I can be my mother’s spirit.

I’ll understand.

He shakes his head and chews his tongue. He looks disgusted. Most people I know have vague expressions depending on the shades of their joys, the angles of their anger, but his face shows either happiness, astonishment, or disgust. He easily slips from one expression into the next, developments cradling, rocking, capsizing his face.

He’s disgusted now. He questions everything. All his choices have led to this child—how could such a disgusting soup of a person have come from his sperm? His cupped hands hang like giant ladles at his sides.

“It was all a big mistake,” he says, lighting a cigarette, speaking half to his pride.

Nobody asks him what he means. We all know. We’re a family, a collective memory. Nobody ever asks him where he goes when he leaves the apartment.

With parents, it doesn’t matter where they go, but where they come from. With children, it matters where they go.

“I can’t go!”

My father tells me to get my shoes. He does not know what to do with my fear. It’s like a piece of unnecessary cutlery to him. He ignores it, pushes it away from his plate. He’s got a lot on his plate and he doesn’t need this, whatever this is, now.

There was a time when the love between us had a different grip. He was a tree I would sit in, my chin resting on the crown of his head, my legs wrapped around his limbs, my hands folded under the rough rind of his chin. It was the tree that smelled of tobacco, not the man. 

Nothing was created, everything just was.

My father was a tree who tickled me before he shook me down. 

He stopped being a tree and became Walter Ulbricht.

My fear turns into the black-and-white papercuts from my brother’s old room back in Casablanca—everything is faceless and well-defined around the edges—the black shapes of two children holding each other by the hand as they stand before a peaked house. A girl with a basket facing a wolf with perked ears in the woods. The leaves of the trees are sharp blades or sinuous tendrils, but their black sap is pure menace.

Lying in my brother’s old bed, on holiday in the country of toomuchness, I’d watch them for hours—these black spots where there should have been faces. A world cut to life by sharp little teeth.

This is my fear: the papercut of a woman lying in bed, a cloth tied around the split blob of her faceless head, at the bedside, a saw as serrated as the firs in the papercut woods.

I’m thirteen, too old for fairy-tales, but nowhere else have I encountered death, the motherless children, the tortured body as a matter of course. 

Once upon a time, I read these stories, not knowing that the blood that coursed through them was as red as the blood from my period, my father’s nose, my mother’s brain.

“Don’t you want your mother to get well?” The sting of my father’s tongue is as sharp as fairy-tale spindles.

“Of course!” The grown-up in me is fighting with the child. It’s children who hold on to their parents’ promises. Grown-ups know better.

I’ll understand.

“Put on your shoes now!” My father coughs, puts a fist in front of his mouth. His lungs rumble. Whenever he laughs, whenever he shouts, there’s a mudslide in his chest.

This is what his own toomuchness looks like. A fight with the ones he feeds and clothes. The ones he made. 

He expects nothing from his collective body but to function and finds he’s dragging his legs. 

I can’t see my shoes. I am crying on my shoes.

“She can come along next time,” my brother says. I can’t see his face through the wetness. I can’t swim over to him. Is the irritation in his voice aimed at me, my father, or the both of us? These days, he smells of aftershave instead of fresh hay. He’s covering his tracks.

I don’t want to see my mother like this, I want to tell both men, but they speak a different language. They’re wearing their jackets. They’re impatient. They have nowhere to look now that the TV has been switched off, so they look at the door. They have that in common. 

I can’t bear it, I want to tell them. 

I think of their underpants hanging on the clothesline. The practical flaps, the lack of frills.

Asking me a question would be a frill.

How are you doing, Nadia?

How I wish men had frills.

“Quit your childish nonsense and put on your shoes! Your mother needs you to be there for her!”

The toomuchness becomes sour. I have swallowed something whole and its ugly tail is still sticking out of my mouth. It’s my tongue. I imagine how ugly the rest of this animal, burrowed deep into my stomach, must be if its tail is as ugly as my pink, wet tongue. 

I’ll understand.

Men have no frills.

I put on my shoes and dry my eyes.

In the car, something in my stomach picks and turns like an animal building a nest. The men sit in the front. It’s what they do. My knees push into the back of my brother’s seat. It’s rolled all the way back, like my father’s. They need so much space. They need flaps on their underpants, plates stuffed with red, greasy food. They need women to hang up their practical underpants. 

My father has picked the model of our car, my mother the color. 

My father would drive, my mother would talk. She does not drive. She runs after the streetcar, after the bus, after the train. She runs and rides with the collective. When she takes me into town in the summer, we smell the collective’s powerful sweat. Below our skirts, our pink calves get stuck to the green fake leather seats of the streetcar. In winter, we smell the collective’s wooly condensation and study its reflections in the fogged-up windows.

“Sit here,” my mother says, tapping a seat, showing me my place. From there I watch the collective’s hairy necks, painted toes, smooth skin and broad buttocks.

The collective is a strange creature. The more I watch its wondrous body, the more I listen to its clicking tongues, the more I realize that I’m not part of its circulation.

I’m not the little blonde girl banging her knees into the seat.

I’m not the old man clutching his newspaper, his nails square and the color of Harzer cheese.

I’m not the middle-aged woman with the pear-shaped buttocks.

I’m not the boy who tells his mother what he wants for his birthday.

I’m a different animal, I realize, reading the obscenities that one of the collective’s many claws has scratched into the backrest of the seat in front of me.

The collective likes to draw male private parts.

Men’s parts are fiery rockets delving into space. No one draws women’s genitalia, only breasts—circles with a dot like a bird’s eye view of a man standing on an empty island. Maybe women’s private parts are space. A small leap for a man, a great leap for a woman.

When old people step on the full tram, my mother tells me to stand up. Sometimes they pass the offer and even resent it and I sit down again, feeling foolish until, at the next stop, we repeat the act until I’m so ill at ease that I grow red in the face the moment the doors open.

The sight of old or disabled people begins to make me insecure.

“There’s something wrong with your circulation,” my mother says and the collective turns its many heads to watch my face grow redder.

“Get up, Nadia. Offer your seat to the lady.”

I feel the same resentment when my mother wakes me in the morning. “Get up,” she twitters like a bird. Aufstehen, Nadia! In winter, when it’s dark, I sometimes wonder if I fell asleep on the tram.

Get up, Nadia. Offer your bed to the lady.

For the rest of the ride, I wonder what it’s like to say, This is mine in the collective’s game of musical chairs, without the music, without the jostling. When someone bumps into me in the street, Entschuldigung pops out of my mouth. Before my mind can catch up, my body knows that I must have occupied the collective’s space. My body always knows first.

I pull up my knees. I’m already taller than my mother, taller than all the other girls in my class, but I seem to be missing parts, little filaments, tendons, and sinews that can be pulled back like a slingshot.

A slingshot of toughness.

“Hey, what’re you staring at? Want my picture?” the tough girls ask, chewing their bubblegum.

At the hospital, I stay in the back. I let the men graze the bruised and shapeless dough of my mother’s hands.

Her bandaged head is pinned inside a metal contraption made of rods and screws that look like the strips and bolts from the incomplete Meccano set my brother left me. It’s impossible to see where her head ends and the metal begins. The contraption rests on her shoulders, caging her head as if to keep it from taking flight and crashing against the closed hospital window like some foolish bird. 

My mother looks like a mad scientist’s experiment in a black-and-white movie.

It’s 1989.

I thought the future was here. I thought the collective had given up its fake leather seat so the future could sit in it.

I thought I’d heard the future whisper, This is mine.

“At the public library, they scan the barcodes of my books,” I’d told a girl in East Berlin. Watching her eyes widen was like being able to tickle myself.

I come from the future, I thought, twitching and laughing inside.

In what seat do we find the future sitting if not in a hospital where they cut people’s heads open?

Where’s the future now?

How do you imagine yourself in the year 2000? asked a school essay in 1987.

I could not imagine myself in 1987. How was I supposed to imagine myself in the year 2000?

I lied.

I will be happy, I wrote between the lines on the French ruled paper, while Ronald Reagan stood in Berlin, saying, Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Je serai heureuse en l’an 2000.

Eleven years to become myself, to turn this moment into someone else’s memory.

Please, have my seat.

The pressure in my chest has the hardness of a swallowed sweet. There’s nothing I can do except to keep breathing while I wait for it to melt. The relief of seeing my mother, rather than imagining her.

My body contracts, stiffens.

How are you? How was the night?

These questions come easily to the men now. They are like tourists who have learned the basic phrases in a different language:

Check, please!

When do you close?

How much?

Maybe this is what being an adult is all about—learning basic phrases for every country you could possibly visit: sickness, love, death, anger, sex, happiness. It’s the task of a lifetime because countries are subject to change.

One of my classmates was a citizen from Haute Volta, but after the summer holidays she suddenly found herself a citizen of Burkina Faso.

My mother moves her lips slowly. She’s okay, she says, her mouth and words dry.

The sound of her voice is like a page turned, its paper so thin you can see the writing on the other side.

“Nadia’s here too,” my father says, looking over his shoulder, into my corner.

I touch a small spot on my mother’s hand where there are no bruises from the IV. There’s a hand on my shoulder—my father’s. It’s meant to support me, but I feel its pressure.

How are you? 

Are you in a lot of pain?

When are you coming back?

I think of you.

I’m sorry this is happening to you.

You look much better.

I miss you.

I hope you’ll get better soon.

These are the simple phrases written in the guide to my mother’s country: Useful and Basic Phrases to Know Before Visiting Death’s Shadow.

Overwhelmed by the sights and exotic smells of this new country, I cannot read these phrases out loud.

My mother’s country is falling apart. My mother is my country.

I smile and say, “hello.”

“Nice to see you,” she says as if we had just bumped into one another on the number 12 tram, grabbing the handrails as the tram takes that sharp turn right before the central station, but her hand grabs mine.

I make myself look into her eyes, pretending she’s an old lady who wants my seat, so I offer it to her. She glides into the seat, eyes first, rubbing her thumb over the soft spot between my index and thumb.

My daughter, the thumb says and the soft spot between my index and thumb, shaped like a useless slingshot, responds by growing softer because it’s what daughters do.

I am my mother’s frills.

She’s alive, but there’s no entry in Useful and Basic Phrases to Know Before Visiting Death’s Shadow for the change in her eyes.

My mother and her country are gone. Everything will change. She will forever be the person I offer my place to, every stop of my life in this new country. The GDR citizen with the cracked skull, who the West’s doctors and the West’s men put together again.

This is where the wall used to be.

Our GDR passports, with the embossed emblems of hammer and compass, are curios now, official proof that everything has a before and after.

People simply call the GDR’s end, die Wende—The turn, The change, like a country’s first period.

Please, have my seat, East Germany says to West Germany as the tram chugs toward the future, soon exchanging the fake leather seats for plastic ones.

My father takes us home. He’s as elated as the rest of the country.

Wir sind das Volk! We are the people!

No one will die in this revolution. Life will go on for the collective.

We switch on the TV set, balancing my father’s red greasy food on our knees. This is how we eat now.

We watch the wall come down one more time.

No one has the intention of building a wall, Ulbricht says to his children at the table again.

He does not know that he is caught in a loop.

We eat, watching people in old black-and-white footage jump from the windows of the houses on Bernauer Street. The houses are in East Berlin, but their sidewalks are in West Berlin.

All my life, I have seen the old woman climb out the window of her apartment. She steps on the ledge, then dangles, held by the hands of an East German policeman who refuses to let her land on the jumping sheet held by the West German firemen below.

The East can’t spare this old woman.

Another man steps on the sill of the window below and starts pulling the old woman down towards the West. In a tug-of-Cold-War, the woman is pulled up and down.

Her white hair is done and her black dress is neat. Something tells me this woman has never been grabbed this way in her life. The man in the window below takes off her left shoe to get a better hold of her leg.

Finally, the East German policeman lets go. The precious citizen falls to the West.

We watch the wall go up, cinder blocks amassing as men with cigarettes dangling from their lips slop on the mortar as if they were building another post-war house, another post-peace garden wall.

We watch a young East German policeman jump over the barbed wire again, dropping his weapon as he leaps into the West before the wall is all the way up.

We watch these scenes over and over again while my mother’s head sits in its metal birdcage. She cannot move. We move for her, the way we move around these loops of images, these familiar strangers leaping into our unwalled dreams.

I’m okay, my mother says once I enter her field of vision.

I tell her that everybody wants a piece of the wall now.

A splash of color on gray concrete.