When I came to myself, I was standing on the verge of the forest. I turned around to see that the Majakowskiring was still close by. I could easily go back there if I wanted to. The street separating the city from the forest rose before me like a sinister band of light. I’d been so attached to the city, I thought I’d never be able to leave it. But I’d easily stepped outside the Ring. For no particular reason, I had assumed that outside the city all would be desolation and loneliness, but I seem to have been mistaken. The smell of dry grass, steaming in the hot sun, and the buzzing of bees like tiny stitches, sewing everything up. The earth is sweet, and every time the breeze goes by its fingers play in my hair and gently stroke my cheeks. What season is caressing my skin? It feels good. Who would have known that parting could be this pleasant, as fine as spring?

PUSCHKINALLEE

When I got off the Ringbahn at Treptower Park Station, the heat and humidity suddenly disappeared—I was washed in fresh air. There was a kiosk outside the train station where men were drinking beer. People were streaming into a big store selling trees and shrubs to plant in gardens. Alone under the elevated tracks, I noticed something alarming: my body had shrunk to the size of a child’s. Being so small I was afraid I’d be attacked from behind before I got through this passage under the tracks; besides, once I was outside I didn’t know how I’d manage with no one to take me by the hand. But I was not a child anymore, and even when I’d been one there was no war on, I told myself, which calmed me down a bit. There were no houses, or post offices, or road signs here, only plane trees lining the avenue on both sides as far as I could see. They were so tall I only seemed smaller. I was not Alice in Wonderland.

The trunks of the plane trees were pale and looked so smooth I wanted to touch them, but something standoffish about them kept me from reaching my hand out. They were mottled, with lighter and darker gray patches that fitted together like a puzzle. I remembered seeing military uniforms with a similar pattern at a souvenir shop.

The leaves were completely outside my line of vision, but when I tilted my chin straight up I saw them covering the sky overhead, so green I wanted to squeeze the juice out of them. They swayed in the breeze, close enough to the sun to absorb its light and deliver it straight down the trunks. The leaves were large and floppy, overlapping, though each one was thin enough to see through.

Obeying the law of perspective, the plane trees headed toward the vanishing point, growing smaller and smaller as they got farther and farther away. I’d grown so dependent on such scenes, with the size of things adjusted to fit me, that perhaps I’d been living under the delusion that I was the biggest thing around. But I wasn’t big at all—it just looked that way because I was nearest. Near, of course, meant near from my point of view, which was only natural since I was the one looking, but this being the case, the only way to figure out where I actually was would be to start from the vanishing point and watch the trees get gradually taller and taller until they reached full size: that would be the only way—and not a very dependable one, either—to define my position.