These Dreams of You

~ ~ ~

Is it the arc of the imagination bending back to history, or just coincidence the night that she seals her mother’s fate? Molly enters a U-Bahn station near what used to be Checkpoint Charlie, not far from the Hansa recording studio, when she comes upon members of the Pale Flame beating a middle-aged man in the street. She darts into the shadows nearby, thanking the night for the color of her skin. Developed at sixteen years old and taught by her mother to keep herself covered and wary of male crowds, she’s terrified, and only when the skinheads finish with the man in the street and leave him lying crumpled there does she run to him.

She hasn’t seen a dead body before so she can’t be certain about this one, but if this isn’t dead then it ought to be what dead looks like. Kneeling by him, clutching all her papers and books, she barely can bring herself to whisper to him, afraid she’ll make a sound, when to her horror she hears the song that’s coming through her body grow louder, like someone has turned up her volume.

The body in the street stirs. She’s so startled that she jumps back and flees, dropping by his side the old battered paperback with the drawing of her mother.

A few years ago, the first time she picked up the book, it wasn’t her mother’s picture she noticed. Molly just had turned twelve and it was the autumn the Wall fell and she still remembers, coming through the window of the flat where they lived, the music in the distance so celebratory and defiant that it drowned out her own; she picked up the paperback and there cascaded from its pages a folded newspaper clipping from more than two decades before. The girl stood in the middle of the flat scrutinizing the face of the man in the grainy newsprint photo when an astounded Jasmine said, “Where did you get that?”

The way she said it, the daughter thought she had done something wrong. “It was in the book,” Molly said, frightened.

Jasmine had no idea how the clipping got there. She had looked for it everywhere before the book ever came into her vicinity or possession. Something strange happened in this moment that Molly discovered the clipping: When Jasmine reached for it, instinctively the twelve-year-old pulled it back. “Give it,” Jasmine said quietly.

Molly looked again at the man in the photo. “He’s very sad,” she said to her mother.

“Yes,” Jasmine said and turned toward the music coming through the window from the Wall. “He would have liked to be here now, to see this. . and to hear it,” and she smiled, “though he never knew much about music.”