Free This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger

years, but in Berlin it was on all the time.
    “What about Dave?”
    Dave had come home after she was already asleep and left the house before she got up.
    “He’s busy, Mom. I don’t see him much these days, and since I rarely speak to anyone else, the sound of my own voice is becoming unfamiliar.”
    “After what you’ve been through anyone would be distracted.”
    “Or maybe I’m going crazy.”
    Her mother’s preternaturally positive personality did not allow for a lot of soul-searching. She preferred solution-oriented conversations, which is why Hope had been avoiding her until now.
    “Nonsense. You just need to make some friends there. Actually, you really only need one friend, in my experience. This is what you do: Tomorrow go to the busiest place you can think of—I mean a nice, busy place, not the train station—take a seat and look around. When you see an attractive woman who looks friendly, introduce yourself.”
    “What if she doesn’t speak English?”
    “Everyone speaks English. A nice girlfriend in the neighborhood will do you a world of good.”
    So it was that Hope found herself holding a cup of coffee with both hands and looking around at Balzac for a friend. The median age of the patrons was about twenty-two, presumably due to the university across the street, and she tried to count how many of them were smoking. Too many, so she counted how many were not smoking instead: four, including herself. Germans smoked like they thought it was good for them, she thought. “Uptown Girl” played over the loudspeakers and she watched the students at a table to her left. They were unbelievably young and yet old-fashioned: inexpensive clothes and obvious makeup, big hair, acne. In New York, it had seemed to her that college students were much more sophisticated nowadays. They owned companies already, wore designer clothes, had perfect skin. The students at Balzac reminded her instead of her own college friends years ago, hanging around in lazy groups of four or five, fixing each other’s makeup. Occasionally, one or the other would burst out into laughter so hysterical that she had to double over completely to recover. Hope drank her coffee and turned to face the tall, curved window stretching around the entire front of the café, like a movie screen, capturing the street corner in action. People blew by in both directions clutching newspapers, briefcases, handbags and groceries, illuminated as if deliberately by pale northern light. A man carrying his small daughter on his shoulders caught her attention. The girl was bundled up in a pink jacket and a hat and asked to be taken down. When she hit the ground running and tripped on the sidewalk, Hope’s entire body jerked forward as if to pick her up, spilling hot coffee on her thighs.
    She winced in pain, but it was the girl’s father who reached for her outside, who dusted off her knees and used the inside of his coat cuff to wipe her tears. Hope forced herself to close her eyes until they were gone.
    She wiped up the spilled coffee with a napkin and tried to concentrate on the task at hand. She didn’t see a friendly-looking woman to pick up anywhere and befriend. But if not here, then where? There were fifteen other students in her German class, but on the first day, when they went around in a circle to give their names and their countries of origin, it had not been lost on her that both past and current enemies of the United States were well represented: Vietnam, Russland, der Irak. To her right had been two men from Saudi Arabien, to her left another from Marokko. She was the only woman in the class with the exception of a very young one from Kuba, married to a German pensioner three times her age. When the introduction circle had arrived at Hope’s place, she had cleared her throat.
    “Ich komme aus New York.”
    The announcement had been followed by a pause in conversation. The teacher nodded sympathetically and the other students looked away,