Here. Skidding on a patch of ice, grasping at a lamppost, clutching her bag of crumbs to her chest. Bitten with cold. The man on the corner looks her way and squints, like he’s seen her before and can’t remember where. Ursula composes herself and strikes off across the street, between weary bicycles and streetcars, hungry, exhausted, feminine Berlin. We are so sick of this war. We want our men back, our food back, our good times back. Our dignity, our trust in each other. What’s that? What about our Jews? Maybe not them. But everything else. A new coat for winter, one that actually keeps out the chill. Hot coffee made from genuine beans, not ersatz. Meat. Schnitzel, sauerbraten, schmaltz to spread on your bread in the morning. Remember that?

Ursula reaches the safety of the street corner and trudges on, without expression. She learned early in life that you kept your thoughts to yourself, your emotions to yourself, cradled carefully in your chest so that no one else could see them or touch them or hear them, and this, too, has served her well in her chosen field. An offhand glance over her shoulder reveals that the narrow-eyed woman has turned her attention elsewhere.

How different the Tiergarten looks. In the old days, even when times were bad, it was full of men and women walking their dogs and their children, lovers walking each other, picnics, roller skates, green grass, each flower and shrub in immaculate order, not a speck of gravel outside its allotted bed. Jews playing their violins for the spare change tossed in the open cases at their feet. Now it’s barren and unkempt. The lovers have parted, the men are at war, the women have no energy left for walking, the Jews are in the camps, the dogs have been discreetly boiled for soup, the January sky dyes the world gray. On a bench near the Brandenburg Gate, an old woman sits with her bag of crumbs, feeding a flock of skinny, ravenous pigeons. Ursula joins her.

It feels good to sit. Together they toss their crumbs and watch the bobbing and jerking of the pigeons, the frantic, nasty pecking. Like the sky, the birds are colored in shades of gray. Neither woman says a word. A policewoman passes by, eyes them carefully, moves on. After a few minutes, Ursula picks up the bag of crumbs and moves on too.

Except it’s not the bag she arrived with.