Free This Must Be the Place by Anna Winger Page A

as if she had admitted to a terrible handicap that made them feel disgusted, helpless and guilty all at once. In the days since, they had all settled into regular seats and stayed as far away from her as possible. Since the majority were men from the Middle East and northern Africa, they took the front and shared a single Arabic- German dictionary, the Russians formed a group in the middle row and the two men from Vietnam—brothers, apparently— sat together. She had taken a place at the back with the Cuban teenage bride who dropped out after the first two weeks. These days, she sat alone.
    She pulled her textbook out of her bag and opened it up to the Christmas calendar that was her homework. Much to her parents’ dismay she had not actually celebrated Christmas since she met Dave, but even as a child it had never been her favorite holiday (uncomfortable dress, turkey and stuffing the second time in a month, boring television). She had always preferred Halloween and Easter (trick-or-treating, egg hunts, active holidays with things to do) but the textbook made German Christmas seem interesting. Pictures were laid out along the month of December. There were many more days to celebrate here than she remembered in the United States. One picture showed a pine wreath laid flat and decorated with four large candles. The book said that Christmas trees were only decorated on the evening of the 24th and then with real candles, not electric lights; it said that Sankt Nikolaus came on the 6th to bring children candy, and the Weihnachtsmann came with presents the 24th, although the difference between these two characters was unclear. Both were old men with beards, red hats, big bellies. Her favorite picture was of a girl kneeling down before a shoe filled with candy. The American version of the same picture would have shown one of her own third-grade students, she thought, his or her brightly colored sneaker stuffed with candy bars, the Velcro closures hanging open. Somehow the simple laces of the brown leather German shoe suggested that an idyllic childhood was still possible here, if no longer in New York. She hoped so, because like the rounded edges of phone booths in Paris, or the pink of the Italian newspaper, the German Christmas rituals outlined in her textbook satisfied her expectations of Europe. She was comforted to have found something charming here.
    On her way to class she carefully followed the street signs leading south, marking off the corners she recognized in an effort not to get lost. She had been in Berlin for a month and it had been overcast every day so far, dry and cold. The sky was gray and the buildings were gray. There were so few people on the street, and so few stores, that the streets were similar one to the next and she often got turned around, mistaking north for south or east for west. She was used to Manhattan’s grid. Here, when she got lost, she could not just flag down a yellow cab, because there were no yellow cabs in Berlin, only the occasional curbside group of cream-colored Mercedes waiting for phone calls. So she walked slowly and paid attention. Dave had mentioned that most of the streets in their neighborhood were named after famous educators (he was appealing to her vanity, she thought, but as she had never heard of Mommsen, or Leibniz, or Pestalozzi, the names didn’t stick). She clung to the few she remembered, like Kant, searching out memorable landmarks. At the corner of Kant and Leibniz was a sex shop, its exterior covered with life-size photographs of women in black leather bikinis, carrying whips. The photographs were lit from behind like ads in an airport, so that even in the dark, Hope could see this corner glowing from a few blocks away. Now, as she came around it, a man in a black coat approached her. His hair was cropped short and he wore a small black leather cap.
    “Excuse me,” he started in English, enunciating his words, “do you know where I could