by Muna Nassir
Sitting on the sill, head slightly resting on the pane, The Dubliners in hand, I look out the window, much like the eponymous Eveline, at the start of this particular short story. The darkness, in this case, is ready to invade not an avenue with concrete pavement and rows of redbrick terraced houses in Dublin, but an empty playground with bright coloured slides, swings, seesaws, and a roundabout in South Manchester. My vantage point allows me an eye level view of the giant oak sitting at the closest corner of the park, across the street. Unlike the slanted view from the living room, here, I can almost see the tiniest ferns sprouting on its bark. The oak’s tip points towards the sky with its thick branches spread out like the arms of a dervish in a trance. Bearing the weight of the subject in mind, I sigh in, inhaling the evening breeze. My nostrils detect not the smell of dusty cretonne but rather the scent of fallen leaves imbued with the myriad hues of autumn. From green to lime, to orange, red, maroon, and brown. The tree sits on a sideway, a space that seems to have been added as an afterthought, giving the park an irregular shape. Basking in another worldly silence, the oak exudes a stillness befitting the day’s retirement for the night. Read more »
I moved to Berlin in 1984, but have rarely written about my experiences living in a foreign country; now that I think about it, it occurs to me that I lived here as though in exile those first few years, or rather as though I’d been banished, as though it hadn’t been my own free will to leave New York. It’s difficult to speak of the time before the Wall fell without falling into cliché—difficult to talk about the perception non-Germans had of the city, for decades, because in spite of the fascination Berlin inspired, it was steeped in the memory of industrialized murder and lingering fear and provoked a loathing that was, for some, quite visceral. Most of my earliest friends were foreigners, like myself; our fathers had served in World War II and were uncomfortable that their children had wound up in former enemy territory, but my Israeli and other Jewish friends had done the unthinkable: they’d moved to the land that had nearly extinguished them, learned to speak in the harsh consonants of the dreaded language, and betrayed their family and its unspeakable sufferings, or so their parents claimed. We were drawn to the stark reality of a walled-in, heavily guarded political enclave, long before the reunited German capital became an international magnet for start-ups and so-called creatives. We were the generation that had to justify itself for being here. It was hard not to be haunted by the city’s past, not to wonder how much of the human insanity that had taken place here was somehow imbedded in the soil—or if place is a thing entirely indifferent to us, the Earth entirely indifferent to the blood spilled on its battlegrounds. 
