I stayed on the major boulevard that bisected the park—the Strasse des 17 Juni, named for the East Berlin uprising. If I wanted to re-create my time in Berlin, I would have to follow the park’s rambles, past fountains and stone works of art. But I’d often been high when I’d wasted days in the park. The Soviet War Memorial was on the boulevard, and I had a far clearer memory of it, because that was where my father’s business partner, Klaus von Strohm, liked to meet. Your father wants me to check up on you, but I promise not to do that too much, he’d said just after I’d started at the university. What is the point of living in Berlin if not to be a bit decadent?

I wasn’t sure how Klaus defined decadent, but I went off the deep end. At boarding school, I’d smoked marijuana and taken mushrooms; in university, I’d quieted my nightmares and the voices in my head with ketamine and midazolam and opiates. It was a steep crash.

The Victory Column—with its golden idol to military might—loomed in the distance, gradually becoming more prominent as I walked west. Zoo Berlin lay just a little to the southwest of it. As a teenager, I’d felt bold, returning to the city where I’d almost died as a child. But I’d never set foot inside its grounds again. I told myself this would be the trip when I changed that.

But my priority was remembering my time in Berlin with Mirelle.

Just beyond the western edge of Tiergarten was my university, built around Ernst Reuter Platz. After the first couple of months, I’d spent little time in its classrooms. They barely registered in my memory.

I headed south, following Knesebeckstrasse to the boulevard of Kanstrasse, where signs pointed east to the zoo, a couple of blocks away. I didn’t know what I was thinking, choosing that area as my new home when I was eighteen. At that age, I’d firmly blocked out the past. Maybe I’d done it so successfully with drugs that the zoo didn’t register anymore.

My apartment had been somewhere south of the boulevard. I couldn’t remember the name of the street until I came upon the sign for Niebuhrstrasse, which was filled with elegant buildings. It didn’t take me long to find it after that.

I could still remember the day Mirelle had knocked at my door. Dark haired and pale, with rose-red lips, she looked like a fairy-tale princess come to life. Sorry to bother you, she’d said in French-accented English. I just moved here, and I lost my phone. Could I make a call?