A nun in Berlin

I arrived in Berlin just in time for the cottonwoods. Their seeds drifted through the air in such numbers that it looked as though God had taken a giant dandelion, blown on it, and forgotten where the fluff landed.

The fluff collected along curbs and in doorways. Little tumbleweeds of summer. A breeze would gather them up and send them skittering down the street again.

Every city has something it would rather not talk about, but Berlin seems incapable of changing the subject. Walk past any building older than sixty and you can’t help wondering what it witnessed. A wedding? A bombing? Something worse?

One Saturday evening, just as the sky was beginning to trade its blue for orange, I was wandering toward a pizza place that Google Maps assured me was only six minutes away. Google Maps had been assuring me of that for nearly fifteen.

I looked up from my phone and saw a nun standing ahead of me in a brilliant starched white habit. She was small and delicate, probably in her seventies. She stopped walking and tilted her head upward.

Naturally, I looked up too. Nothing. No miracle. No descending angel. No rogue weather balloon.

Then I heard them. Birds.Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Hidden in the trees above us, carrying on as if they had all been handed tiny microphones and told to sing for their supper.

The nun smiled. Not a broad smile. Just enough to suggest she was listening to something more than birds.

As I passed her, I found myself doing the math. If she was seventy-five, she would have been a little girl when Berlin fell. A child sheltering in basements while this city shook itself apart. A child learning the difference between incoming and outgoing fire before she learned algebra.

Maybe I was inventing her biography. Travelers do that. We turn strangers into novels because we’ll never see them again.

Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

There she stood beneath a peaceful sky, listening to a chorus loud enough to drown out every other sound. The birds sang. Cottonwood drifted through the evening light. And for a moment it seemed possible that a city, like a person, could spend a lifetime recovering from its childhood.