I climbed slowly up the grassy slope. I had no one to mourn or commemorate. I had come to meet someone who wasn’t dead yet, a little girl; she probably wasn’t a little girl anymore, but surely she was still alive.

On top of the mound was a small shrine with a round dome like the kamakura snow huts children make in Japan; I peeked inside to see a group of people who might have come straight out of a religious painting. Two tough-looking men in military uniforms were draping a cloth with the word slava on it over something. The cloth shone brightly, as did the Cyrillic letters. Slava was Russian for “word” wasn’t it? But the spelling was wrong. The first vowel should be an o instead of an a. Since the letters were so shiny, perhaps they said “luminous moss.” Or “glory,” maybe, or “power.” But what kind? Was it the name of a battleship? Was it somehow related to the girl I was going to meet? These people couldn’t have draped the cloth over her, treating her as if she were dead, could they? “Excuse me,” I called out to them, but they didn’t seem to hear. And as the lattice door was locked, I couldn’t get inside.

I gave up. I stopped staring through the lattice door like one possessed and took a few steps backward to look up at the huge soldier. He was holding a little girl, hugging her close. She must have been left alone in the ruins. I felt his strength and purity as he protected this child. But what if she had been older, say, seventeen or so? Her body was small enough so that her bottom rested firmly in the soldier’s hand, but her face, surrounded by curls as heavy as Bach’s wig, looked older. Her bottom was simply too small. Or perhaps her head was too big for the rest of her. “Hey,” I called out to her, “it looks like your head grew up but your body stayed small—is that it?” Startled, she looked down at me. It would take courage to jump down from that height. And if she did jump there were still pieces of a broken swastika scattered on the ground which might hurt her feet. But if she stayed where she was, the soldier would have to be a soldier forever, and she would be stuck in the body of a child with the face of a grown woman. They couldn’t go on this way.

The girl braced herself and jumped. I drew my head back and closed my eyes. I was holding my breath, waiting for a crash, but when I heard a refreshingly clean thud right next to me I opened my eyes to see that, having made a splendid landing, she was already running across the lawn. I hurried after her. The girl’s bouncing curls changed from gray stone to brown hair, growing lighter and lighter until she was a blonde whose chubby arms and legs were firming up and putting on muscle by the time we left the park and were running down the tree-lined avenue, past cars, past that Mercedes-Benz, her legs developing voluptuous curves as we raced by the station where the men drinking beer at the kiosk looked up to ogle her, but by the time we crossed the street, ignoring the red light, her blonde hair was white, yet even so she kept on running, heading for the present, finally reaching the end of Pushkin Allee, easily crossing that bridge you couldn’t have crossed without getting shot during the Cold War, and even with blue veins starting to stand out on her calves and with the skin on her heels about worn through, she didn’t slow down, no, with the sweat pouring down her now-wrinkled forehead she laughed, and gasped, now a seventy-five-year-old woman racing into Kreuzberg.