These Dreams of You

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When she finds the page — or rather when it finds her mother — it’s exactly in the way that Molly never wanted to see it again, there affixed to the consequences of her mistake. It’s two years later, during which that page might reasonably be assumed decimated by time and elements, decomposed at the bottom of some heap, forgotten in any case by Molly and written off to blind and mindless panic, when she returns to her Schöneberg flat one afternoon and, as soon as she sees the police, she knows.

She cries, “Mum!” and dashes through the phalanx, none of the police able to muster the force necessary to stop her. The girl who’s now eighteen gets to the top of the stairs and sees through the doorway only her mother’s legs sprawled on the floor; only then, in contrast to the body of the beaten man in the Berlin street two years before, can she really claim she knows what lifeless is. She never sees the rest. A German officer swoops in to stop her and when he turns her in his arms, she accidentally kicks the crumpled paper at her feet on the top step and sees the wadded pencil portrait, dropped there not so much as a calling card but because to the six thugs who read it like a map, it was as useless to them as their target.