Not that I mean to compare the two, but the woman I’m with now never reaches out any farther than she has to. While carefully guarding her own territory, keeping it under control, she’s never curious enough to invade anyone else’s.

If I asked her to have coffee with me on Majakowskiring, she’d probably give me a “Why would you go all the way to Pankow just for coffee?” sort of look. Then, figuring that maybe I liked Mayakovsky’s poetry, she’d blurt out, “You go ahead and wait for me—I’ll come later if I finish my work in time.” But she wouldn’t finish.

Though as a student she saw the Berlin Wall from the western side every day, she was always facing toward the west. A typical West Berliner, she sometimes visited her parents, who lived in Munich, but always spent her summer vacations in Tuscany, or on Mallorca, or at La Palma, never even considering Krakow or Odessa.

I want to go east and north. Here in Pankow I’m already in the northeastern part of Berlin, but I want to go farther east, farther north. If I wasn’t always worrying about what she might think, I might be able to go farther.

Now I’ve been carried back to a fatal turning point and am shaking the dice in my sweaty hand. If I choose a separate path, my fate and hers will never cross. Then I’ll be able to go as far as I like, without waiting or worrying about how she’ll take it. I can leave Berlin. Or even the FRG, for that matter. Throwing off the repressive obi I’ve had wrapped around my body, I want to go far, far away, with nothing to hold me back.

But perhaps I would be unable to forget her even after my fate had changed, and find myself so haunted by memories that I’d end up storming into her house, saying, “You may think you don’t know me but you’re wrong—if only you’d turned the corner on that street one block up we would have met,” offering explanations she couldn’t understand.

Or what if the opposite happened? If one day the bell were to ring and I opened the door to find her standing there looking exhausted, just back from the future? Of course, she would be a stranger to me. “We were married for fifteen years,” she’d say, “but just now I was pulled back twenty years into the past and chose a different path from the one I’d been on. That’s why we’re strangers now. You probably don’t remember me, but I know you.” Though hearing her say that would definitely be upsetting, and no matter how long I stared at her I doubt I’d feel any love for her.

The city is full of people you might have met, who might have become close friends. Maybe that’s why, even when I’m with an old friend, someone I feel close to, I can’t help suspecting that there are plenty of other people around I would have enjoyed being with just as much, if only I’d had the chance to meet them. That’s why I make a point of referring to the person I’ve been with—sharing bed and bread—for twenty years as “her,” and why I make arrangements for us to have one more chance of meeting in the labyrinth of the city, hoping to discover her again for the very first time. I want to meet her in a coffee shop, where we’ll stir the sugar in our coffee with rapid movements, as if we only have time for one cup, savoring this time together, knowing we may never meet again, looking into each other’s faces again and again as we sip our coffee. And even if we always eat at home, I want to dress up and buy her a bouquet as if she’d invited me over.