The streetcar rattled into the city center as the lamps were coming on. Along a row of bakeries, middle-aged men were hauling up their awnings and getting out their bicycles. The streetcar passed four-story homes flanked with ancient chestnut trees, and luxury hotels with names done up in electric lights—the Adlon, the Bristol, Horcher’s. Lunchrooms and beer and sausage emporiums. Bars for draymen and coal- and potato-dealers. It stopped opposite the Komische Oper, which featured a twin bill of Damnation: 1,000 Women! and Berlin Without a Blouse.

They disembarked on the Leipzigerstrasse near Thälmannplatz, neither of them speaking. Wilhelm noted the location as if he’d be following a trail of bread crumbs home.

In an antiquities shop, they saw a display of prehistoric bones of the sort dug up in Asiatic deserts, then they walked slowly down a long, dim arcade, reading posters in the half-light.

For dinner, Hans debated with himself: Austro-Hungarian, Czech, or Russian. He chose a Russian café that was a favorite of his mother’s, and there they stuffed themselves to the brim with cold eggplant slices in oil, miniature Siberian dumplings in broth, a pink lamb shashlik and, for dessert, kisel, an opaque fruit jell.

After dinner, Wilhelm’s host announced that they were going to the All-City Revue You’ve Gotta See It! After paying the check, he led Wilhelm on a winding ramble which terminated at a huge dirty cellar that Wilhelm’s father, Herr Plumpe, would have called a Low Place.

The crowd was bumptious and jovial. The first skit turned out to be a celebration of the new elevated trolley. Then some Hohenzollern statues somewhere were ridiculed in a kind of comic dumb-show. Then a female personification of the city sang “I have the foibles of my youth, I’m still a young metropolis!” And then a woman dressed as a cross between a sailor and a Catholic Cardinal—“Claire Waldoff!” Hans exclaimed as she emerged from behind the curtain to cheers—sang “Anyone Who’s Reflected on These Times Will See: Everything Our Dads Respected Seems to Us Stupidity.” The whole thing was tatty and absurd. The crowd sang along and offered alternative lyrics. Wilhelm was exhilarated. Everyone around him seemed to be the ultimate Berliner. His host told him afterwards that they were probably all from Gelsenkirchen.

Outside, Hans announced that he was hungry again, and pulled Wilhelm inside another café by the jacket and introduced him to bouletten, minced meatballs, which he said was a Berlin specialty. Pyramids of them trembled on heavy china plates on the counters. They were eaten at room temperature, slippery with onion and fat, along with sour cucumber pickles and hard rolls.