These Dreams of You

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Disregarding her mother’s standing directive about answering doors to strange people and small boxes, the girl says, “Mum?” lifting the box’s contents in her two small hands: the small camera from Berlin that catches images and strands them mid-air on their way to film.

When they move back to Berlin, taking a flat in Schöneberg not far from the one where Jasmine lived before, the small girl clicks ghost pictures from Checkpoint Charlie to the Brandenburg Gate. Sometimes the pictures themselves are ghosts, disappearing into the electric ether; sometimes the pictures are of ghosts, people who aren’t there when she looks up from the camera. Sometimes the strangers in her pictures are ghosts of the past, sometimes they’re ghosts of a future the girl may or may not know. Everywhere she goes, she trails visual octaves looking for a home; for years the only thing she prizes more is a paperback that her mother stole, with a drawing of her inside.

Not far from Checkpoint Charlie, near what used to be a recording studio and, before that, an old movie studio, a southern part of the Wall unravels into a stone labyrinth between east and west, provoking confusion on both sides. Lovers meet there and children play, and when Molly’s mother takes her to it, the child hides in the maze of concrete, some of the passages sheltered by the debris of surrounding construction, others made blue tunnels by the sky above. Molly winds through the maze to the center and her mother always finds her, and only when Molly is older does she understand that Jasmine follows her music, left by the child like breadcrumbs.