These Dreams of You

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The German gentleman offers his hand to pull him up. Repeating something, he looks at the woman, tips his hat to the man on the ground and passes on. It’s not until the writer is on his feet that he registers the book he’s held all night.

He stumbles into the morning light, and the fog of pain gives way to clarity. Disoriented, he tries to think where he was last night before the attack, but as he gazes around, nothing of the cityscape is familiar even as something about the terrain is. He realizes he should be looking at the topographical scar that is Potsdamer Platz, occupying where the Wall was a few years before; but now not even an echo of the Wall can be glimpsed, there among all the antique cars that fill the road and the passersby who dress quaintly. Not until he resorts to the tradition of the unwittingly time-traveled and picks up a discarded newspaper does he realize that, somehow, he’s found himself in March 1919, four months after Germany’s defeat in what’s still called the Great War and will be known as World War I only once history trespasses the vicinity of another, greater war.