These Dreams of You

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Raised among Turks and Muslims, every now and then the girl goes to the local mosque where the constant humming from her is frowned upon. At the age of twelve she’s there at the Wall’s fall, taking pictures of people dancing along the edge, wine bottles in hand, her own small tune filling the pauses of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Like everyone who’s grown up in Berlin, she feels the sense of liberation, as a line down the center of the century is erased and replaced by a hole. The fallen wall is the city’s ghost limb, history an amputee that feels an appendage no longer there; but with the fall, something dark is unleashed along with the dream. Even the girl feels the shift in sentiment. When the army of skinheads that calls itself the Pale Flame marches down the Unter den Linden and screams at the mother watching from the sidewalk with her young teenage daughter — who already has the body of a woman — Molly is old enough to understand what foreboding is.