When the news broke of protestors dancing on the wall, I knew immediately that I would have to return to Berlin. It wasn't the wall that drew me, though, or at least it was not that wall, and so I waited almost a year before I bought my ticket. I waited until I heard that the station had reopened.

Between the airplane and taxis and my slow pace on foot, it is some time before I come to stand before the yellowing brick, beneath the sign. It is just I had remembered it. Unter den Linden, it reads, its sharp-edged letters the color of dried blood.

In the space between one breath and another, forty-five years blow away.

Dr Heinz—he always insisted we use his first name, a compromise after his failed campaign to force us to call him Papa—had decided that his charges needed an outing. Marta, Avram, Rivka and I, his four miracles, his wonders, his supermen; never mind that we were two little girls and two little boys, and all but one Jews. We were to be the saviors of the thousand-year Reich, we would make him more famous than Einstein, we would set the course of history. Two little girls and two little boys. The arrogance of it all.

He had decided on an outing in Berlin. Even we knew that Berlin was in the process of being bombed to sand; Dr Heinz could not be bothered with such mundane concerns. Should the worst happen, his children would protect him, he assured his secretaries.

It took days and days for him to secure a car to take us from the camp to the city. Fuel was scarce, working vehicles were scarce, and not everyone shared Dr Heinz's feeling that chauffeuring four children to a day out in the city was a useful application of Germany's fatally fading martial resources. Still, in the end, a car was acquired and we were bundled into it.

Dr Heinz sat across from us. Owing to my weight, I sat in the middle. Marta slid translucently between me and the blacked-out window. On the other side, the twins, Avram and Rivka, wove their latest conspiracies with fingers entwined and heads bent together.

I slept for most of the drive. The car had picked us up very early, before dawn, so that we might have as much of the day as possible in the city. We arrived in Berlin in the early morning hours of February third, 1945.

The bombs arrived soon after.

I remember little of the time before the first explosion. We must have heard the engines. Perhaps there were sirens as well. But in my memory, there is a blank silence, and then the blast.

Marta, standing beside me, was killed instantly, despite the bomb falling at the far end of the street. The mere sound of it shattered her delicate skin, and the wind stole away with her vaporous essence.

(I should say, I assume she is dead—in truth I don't know enough of her nature to say whether or not she might still exist in some way, in some form, unconfined.)

Dr Heinz shuffled to where she had been. He picked up a sliver of glass from the street. It melted in his hand. He turned and slapped me across the face. "You could have saved her!" He screamed. "Why did you not get between her and the blast! You fool!" He slapped me again, then grabbed his hand. I touched my face and my finger came away red. He had torn his skin on mine.

"Another comes," Rivka said. Avram mouthed a silent count. "One minute, four seconds. Right here."

Dr Heinz's eyes grew wide. His gaze whipped back and forth, then fixed on a line of people jostling on the stairs into the station. He grabbed my arm and tried to drag me there, but I had set my feet in stone. He turned to the twins. Their necks bent back as they watched the dark crosses of the bombers float by overhead.

"If you try to take us," Avram said. "You will also die," Rivka finished. They smiled. Dr Heinz looked from them, to me, to the station. He let go of me and ran. He pushed through to the front of the line and disappeared down the stairs.

Moments later the world went white and silent, and then a roaring wind of dust and bricks and parts of soft bodies rushed back in towards me. The twins vanished. Dead. I presume.

I freed my feet from the stone and plodded to the station and down the stairs. A pile of rubble blocked the entrance. I passed through it.

Inside, it was black. All I could see was the warmth from the bodies packed together. The air was heavy, dank, stagnant. Full of whimpers and cries. I could not move through all of that flesh, so I slipped into the wall.

I crept along inside until I spotted him. Dr Heinz sat beneath the station sign, holding his head in his hands and weeping. I stepped out of the wall behind him.

"Dr Heinz," I said.

He turned. So quickly. I could never move so fast. "Binyamin. Thank God, thank God. All is not lost."

I reached for him. So slowly. He could have run away if he wanted to. Easily. But he mistook me. He stood, stepped forward into my hug.

Holding him, I backed into the wall, and then I left him there, mixed enough with the stone that I thought he might live a while.

I brush a hand through the bricks beneath the sign, but in the wrong place. I had forgotten how tall he was. I swipe higher, move the stone aside, and find his eyes. They twitch as the light hits them, but do not focus. I whisper his name, but even then, there is no recognition.

I push the bricks back into place. That is all. Again, I leave him, and soon after, I leave Berlin.

Now I am back at my desk at the university. I have a great deal of work to do. I write so slowly. Clumsy as ever. The students every year complain that they cannot read my writing, that the grades are late. That I ask too much, push too hard. But I push no one harder than I push myself.

Berlin was a distraction. I must focus on the work. I don't think I will be going back.

(Revised 6/28)