He found a small sign that said “Please Do Not Disturb” in several languages, including Arabic, hung it on the outside door handle, and went back downstairs, feeling he had earned the right to go off and see Berlin on his own, especially as she already knew the city and he didn’t. For a moment he considered eating her breakfast, which was going to waste in the dining room, yet how would it look if he did? And so he stepped outside and into a nearby café, where he ordered a second breakfast of coffee and a small frankfurter to help brace himself against the cold. Their main meal, he assumed, would again be in the evening, when she would have her strength and appetite back. The question of the Talwin, however, still bothered him: he would have to find the drugstore and count the number of pills in a box to know how many she had taken.
Outside the day was in full swing and on the steamy sidewalks the shopkeepers were busily sweeping away the snow and polishing the brass handles of their doors. The entire area seemed to be undergoing renovation, for beside slummy old grocery and junk stores there were other, quite fashionable shops, all kinds of boutiques and art galleries. He soon reached the drugstore, but the funny old man with the cravat wasn’t there. In his place stood two slender, stern-looking pharmacists defending their locked cabinets of drugs, the open straw hampers, apparently a private promotional device of the night shift, having vanished too, so that, after a brief debate with himself, Molkho decided to forgo the Talwin and walk on, treading adventurously on the snow past the high wall of the old fortress, though perhaps it had been a factory or school. The street ran downhill now, curving left, then right, and soon grew quieter and less crowded. The snow beneath his feet was thicker too. Passing an apparently abandoned building and stopping by a concrete wall between two houses, he noticed a rusty skein of barbed wire protruding from the snow. Dimly he had a sense of déjà vu: there was no way of passing the barrier or seeing what lay beyond it, and so he tried to outflank it to his left, only to encounter it again, slightly taller than a man and scribbled over with graffiti. Only now did he realize that it was the Berlin Wall itself, which he had never imagined being so low and so gray. He stepped back, looking for a vantage point from which to see the other side. A few deserted houses were visible there, and something that looked like a frozen pond. Suddenly, with a surge of pleasure, he knew what he was reminded of: it was of that other divided city, the Jerusalem of his youth. At first, half-afraid of some Communist body snatcher, he walked parallel to the wall at a distance. But the cold grew harsher, snowflakes swirled around him, and afraid of slipping, he followed it more closely, making his way slowly alongside it. Once in all his childhood it had snowed in Jerusalem; his mother had been so afraid of his catching pneumonia that she refused to let him out of the house and—it still made him laugh to think of it—sent his father up to the roof with a wash basin to bring him down some snow to play with. If only she could see him now!
Nevertheless, not wanting to take any chances with the storm, which was getting fiercer, he turned and walked back to the hotel, deciding when he reached it, however, not to go inside just yet. Let her sleep a while longer, he thought. In fact, it was beginning to seem likely that she might sleep for another day or two and force him to extend his stay. It was lucky his children were grown and could get along without him, he told himself, passing the hotel entrance and disappearing down some more side streets, which soon emptied into a large square. Yes, it was an oversight not to have asked his mother-in-law for the name of her old street, which he pictured being like one of these. Why, right here might be where his wife had played as a child, unless it was further on, in what was now a no-man’s-land between East and West. He could hardly believe that just four months after her death he was touring the city she had refused to come back to. But the storm was still gathering strength, and he resolved to return to the hotel for his fur cap, which he had had the good sense to pack.
In the lobby he wondered why the old lady at the reception desk had changed clothes; then, coming closer, he saw that a different and even older old lady, who smiled at him blankly, had replaced her. “Sechs,” he said in what he felt sure was a much-improved accent while raising six fingers, and she gave him the key at once, responding in German to an English remark about the snow, so that they stood talking for several minutes in perfect agreement until he nodded one last time and went up to his room, where he found a swarthy young chambermaid changing the soap in the bathroom. Excusing himself, he rummaged through his suitcase until he found the hat. The windows of the room were frosted over. For a minute he debated going upstairs to lock the legal adviser’s door against the chambermaid, but in the end he thought better of it. His fur hat on his head, he descended the stairs again, nodded to the old woman, returned the key, and strode gaily out into the snowstorm, whose soft, giant flakes now whirled round and round in the viridescent light of a sun reflected back from the battered old sidewalk.
A church bell rang in the white fog, which seemed to issue from some vast darkness and through which, brushing by him as bulky as bears, pedestrians made their way. He paused by the window of a small, empty barbershop in which an old, white-smocked barber sat reading a newspaper in a big, multilevered leather chair, the tools of his trade set out gleaming before him—razors, scissors, old clippers, a stack of spotlessly laundered white towels—as though in a cozy little operating room. A fireplace was burning in one corner, beside which stood a potted plant. On the walls hung pictures of clean-cut, smooth-shaven men, and there was something so confidence-inspiring about the whole place that Molkho nearly stepped inside for a haircut. In the end, however, he continued on his way, once again regretting the lack of his mother-in-law’s old address, since tracking down his wife’s childhood could have given this aimless morning a profound purpose of its own. Should he step into a post office and call her long distance? But he knew that by the time she understood him and remembered how to spell the German name, the call would have cost him a fortune, and so, rejecting the idea, he entered a large department store full of shoppers seeking shelter from the storm.