Amazingly, alone at last and also all of a sudden, Dieter and I found we actually sort of liked each other in the particular bewitchment of Berlin at dawn. We spent a long time standing in front of an old synagogue that’s now a gallery of Judaica, and I made him read to me over and over the historical signage in German with all its bone-chilling verbs as punchline, and then he started trying to coach me through it — Diese synagogue ist 100 Jahre alt und wurde am 9. November1938 (and yes saying the year was too difficult) IN DER KRISTALLNACHT von den Nazis in Brand gesteckt — and then to teach me to count in German, but I kept getting to nine and forgetting the word for ten, and he suggested some associative conditioning and began hitting and shoving me, shouting zehn! zehn! and it was very, very sexy, an excellent fulfillment of whatever has been incubating since the tender age when I was made to watch all those movies of fearsome square-jawed Prussians. Anyway, at the end of it all, I’m thinking Sieben is an excellent name for a child.
