I echoed her grave, matter-of-fact expression with a nod and knitted eyebrows, since there was no question of disagreement. We only agreed on everything. I’ve never had conversations in which I’ve been in so much harmony with the person I’m talking to.
She smiled, coquettish, implying the joke was on me. ‘Schön,’ she said; disappeared.
This word I understood. The others I didn’t, but I could hear each one distinctly.
After she was done with the noisy bits, the vacuum cleaning, and was wiping the kitchen top – the one thing she undertook as a life-saving task, when I could hear her breathing – I said: ‘Do you have plans for the weekend?’
She paused for a second; looked up. ‘Das Waschpulver ist fast alle.’ She added with a radiant look: ‘Mach dir keine Sorgen, ich kaufe neues.’
I felt reassured: happy she was happy.
‘We have to do the registration!’ Jonas said. He was flustered.
‘Registration?’
It turned out I had to register with the police within two months of arrival. I was ignorant of the bureaucracy. The registration was Jonas’s lookout. So he was worked up, like a hen puffing up its feathers.
He seized me on my polite weekly trip to the office, and, on Tuesday, we took the U-Bahn from Dahlem-Dorf to Hohenzollernplatz. We walked through glass doors into a sturdy uninviting building, entering without impediment and going straight to the top. I felt out of sorts, as you do – even if you’re in perfect health – when you’re in a nursing home. Jonas was no-nonsense; he took my passport to make enquiries. A burly man glanced at me while Jonas addressed him.
The queues were puny. We could afford to be distracted. ‘See there,’ he pointed to the glass windows on the left. I looked at a shore-like expanse, except it was green, tree-and bush-infested, calm. Sometimes, birds rose like specks. ‘That’s the entire stretch of the Tiergarten,’ he said, eyes contracting behind the granny glasses. ‘Right to the edge of the East. You can see no further.’ Matter-of-fact, he said: ‘You sense what it felt like in 1989. That’ – he pointed his head slightly right – ‘was as far as you saw. The rest you had to guess at.’
At the end of the queue, I looked deep into the forest. This is what home was: this green darkness. We’d all belonged there. We’d never imagined there was an end to the forest, or that we’d reach the boundary. (The queue lost a person; I moved up.)
Jonas rushed off to lecture. I decided to walk. The stamped form was in my jacket’s inner pocket.
I was now in the world I’d seen from the top floor; the view had been a reminder of the way it had been portioned out six decades ago. I was forty-three years old – for me, those allotments had been time itself. Then the clock had stopped on reunification. Looking from the Bürgeramt Hohenzollerndamm’s top storey at the Tiergarten’s expanse, I’d remembered what time was.