Day two. You slept three hours and then did not sleep again.
By noon you are walking. Kreuzberg to the bookstore you found on a map that a man at the Späti pointed to when you said books. He drew a line on a napkin. Berlin jetzt, he said, half to you, half to the napkin. So ist es. Berlin now. That's how it is. You kept the napkin in your pocket.
A woman passes you on a bicycle with a child strapped behind her and a three-liter bottle of water in the front basket. She stops at a light and does not put her foot down because the light is not long enough to bother.
The street smells of the bakery on the corner, the exhaust of a truck that is not a new truck, and something that is either a flower or a detergent.
The bookstore is on a corner you would have walked past if the man at the Späti had not drawn the line on the napkin. One window. A table of books in the window. A woman in her forties shelving, with a hand on a book that stays on the book when she looks up.
The door is open because the day is warm. Inside is a smell of paper and cigarettes from before cigarettes were illegal inside of things.
Hallo, she says without stopping the shelving.
Hallo.
The shop is two rooms. In the front: new books, German, mostly. In the back: a long shelf of Eastern European — Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, side by side. Someone has moved the Russian one shelf down and the Ukrainian one shelf up since the war that started three years before.
The building above you goes six stories up for a reason. Your hand goes to the wall. The shelf-shift is the smaller reason.
The clerk's hand is not in the back room. You go to the back room.
You do not have a book in mind. You are not shopping. You are in a room.
On the lowest shelf of the Ukrainian section, in a row of hard covers, one soft cover. Slim. No jacket. You crouch.
The cover is blue the way paper goes blue when it has sat in a room with light for forty years. The title is a line of Ukrainian you know the shape of. The second line is a name you know the shape of.
You sit on your heels and hold the book without opening it.
I know this book. I do not know how I know this book.
Your grandmother sang three of the poems in this book when she was alive. You do not know whether the poems were hers or the book's. You do not know if you have ever seen a copy of this book before.
The third poem from the back is the one she sang when she was cooking for more than four people. The fifth poem is the one she sang in the car on the way back from anywhere that was not her kitchen.
When you stand up you are looking through the gap above the Russian shelf. On the other side, in the front room, a man is reading a book. He is standing. His shoulders are in the book. He does not turn the page while you watch.
He looks up. Not because he hears you. Because the shop is small enough that you register as a shape even to someone who is in a book.
His eyes are the kind of eyes people do not remember accurately afterward. You do not try to remember them. You look back at the Ukrainian shelf. A cold moves through your scalp for one second, then is gone, and you do not name it.
He is still standing when you look up again, four minutes later. The book he is reading is an English paperback. The spine has been broken in three places. He is rereading.
At the counter the woman has moved to a different book and is shelving that. The book you are holding is four euros fifty. You count out five and she gives you back fifty cents in coins. She does not look at the book's title.
Einpacken? she asks. Wrap it? You shake your head. Nein, danke. She asks something else, faster, the word Lesung in it, tomorrow night, you think, a reading at the shop. Ich bin nicht hier, you say. Your German has not advanced past that sentence and that one.
Alle gehen, she says to the coins in her hand, in German. Every week one more. She does not look at your face. She looks at the coins in her hand when she hands them to you.
Danke.
Tschüss.
Outside the bookstore the street is brighter than it was when you went in. You put the book in your bag. The bag has a paperback you brought from home and a notebook and now a book of Ukrainian poems that is on you.
You walk. Not toward the apartment.
At the next corner you pass a man reading a paperback with a broken spine. He is walking, now. He does not look at you. You do not look at him.
You know he is there. He knows you know.
You turn left.