These Dreams of You

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Now in the novel that Zan writes about the writer dying in the streets of Berlin, the black teenage witness to the beating kneels clutching her belongings, hears the music coming out of herself and, as she bends to touch the man’s body, is so startled when he stirs that she jumps back.

Dropping by the man’s side her old battered paperback, she flees into the mouth of the U-Bahn and only when the train arrives that will safely take her away from what’s just happened does she realize the book is missing. Because it’s a book that she’s had since she was a child, she seriously considers going back; but of course she can’t go back. The skinheads might return, the police might come, or the dying man in the street might rouse himself to consciousness and strike out at her in a rush of adrenaline.