Twenty Blocks
A puzzle in stories
There’s a pigeon in a nest outside my window. Every morning this week I’ve filmed it through the smudged glass. I can’t get any closer, which is probably for the best.
I live on a street named after a man who introduced the telephone to Germany and had very strong opinions about how mail got delivered. I like knowing this because I’ve spent most of my life on streets named after people I knew nothing about.
Before Berlin, I lived in eleven cities and seven states – Florida, Colorado, Virginia, Illinois, North Carolina, California and New York.
When I landed here on one of the last summer days, I was twenty-seven and too nervous to take the U-Bahn, so I wheeled a suitcase over crooked sidewalks and Stolpersteine, golden squares engraved with names of people murdered in the war.
It was 2018 and Berlin was already over. A few months into a sublet, Nike opened an office right outside my window. I could see the swish from my mattress on the floor.
I closed my eyes on Wühlischstraße and got pushed around in a grocery cart, block after block, through a heat wave in the dark.
On a dead-end street in Pankow, I feared I’d lock myself out or burn down the building, so I taped up a sign that said Mach den Herd aus! with doodles of flames.
I locked myself out, and my German neighbor picked the lock with a French brand of water, bottled in plastic from China.
I learned enough German to confuse Waffe and Waffel, to fight with the pharmacist and write one-star reviews: leider war die Apothekerin unhöflich und uninformiert
Farther away, on a gravel road behind the planetarium, two strangers put a crown of Queen Anne’s Lace on my head.
On a street that didn’t feel like mine, I met a puzzle. Twenty wooden blocks painted with fairy tale scenes. I turned them in my hands but gave up trying to solve anything.
No matter what block I was on, things kept arriving. A bald bird in a hoodie, an email written by a robot, a cardboard box marked zu verschenken, to give away.
On my last day in an office with barf-green walls, I found a book with a note written in a stranger’s handwriting. I took the book home but didn’t open it for months.
I spent weeks in the bathtub. Then one day the water ran gray and I had to move.
I had already stopped reading. Now I stopped pretending to read.
When I had no job, no class, no words, no plan, I threw a tennis ball in the park for my dog until my hands were covered in dirt.
One night, I met a woman who told me she was half-bird.
Two blocks away is a park named after a man whose name means castle. The park is built on ruins cleared away by Trümmerfrauen, women who rebuilt the city after the war. There’s a memorial, but everyone runs past, up and down the rubble mountain.
The door of my building never closes all the way. A sign says: Bitte die Tür fest ins Schloss drücken! Please press the door firmly into the castle.
At dawn, I turn on the camera, and the pigeon is still sitting on the egg.
Twenty Blocks is a series about birds, books, boxes and other objects that arrive uninvited with a piece of the puzzle.
