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separate waiting rooms, including one used exclusively by the Hohenzollerns. They stepped out of the station and into a crazy intersection of five converging boulevards (“Potsdamer Platz,” said Julius). The sheer volume of pedestrians, trolleys, horse-drawn carts, bicycles, pushcarts, motorcars, and carriages was exhilarating. There were newsboys and flower sellers. Tram bells and horses’ hooves and car horns. There were men in elaborate uniforms escorting elegant women. It was a jolt: the noise, the smells, the buying and selling and rushing and strolling and conversing and meeting and parting amid all the enormous buildings housing offices, stores and shops, cafés, theaters, and packed restaurants, spilling people into the streets. It was the thrill of being in the congested center of such a metropolitan city, populated by shopgirls, workmen, noblemen with their formal manners and air of entitlement; students, local and foreign. Scientists, artists, musicians. Poets. Factory owners, department store owners, bankers, and purveyors of fine goods. People passing through, people without the means to move on.
    On this unseasonably warm spring day, Cymbeline knew happiness. And when Julius took her arm, she thought, Yes, this is where I was always meant to be.
    “I thought we would wander and see what we find,” said Julius, as they threaded through the throng, passing a rather garish and massive establishment claiming an entire street corner, its name emblazoned across the facade.
    “Piccadilly?” asked Cymbeline, coming to a stop.
    Julius tried to pull her away.
    “Let’s go to the Tiergarten,” he said. The Tiergarten was Berlin’s wildly lush city park.
    But she wouldn’t budge, watching patrons come and go from the Piccadilly. “It isn’t as if we have to be somewhere,” she said.
    “You won’t like it.”
    “How do you know?”
    “It isn’t what you expect.”
    “Now you’ve just convinced me.”
    “Well, then, if you insist,” said Julius, reluctantly escorting her toward the door. He stopped her from entering by placing his hands on her shoulders. “Yes,” he said as they stood face-to-face, “you really should see all that Berlin has to offer.”
    “You think I’ll be shocked.”
    “What’s the American expression? ‘It’s your death.’ Yes?”
    “ Funeral. ‘It’s your funeral.’ ”
    In truth, there was a line for Cymbeline, despite her practice of free love and her unorthodox upbringing, so called for the collision of her father’s progressive and traditional beliefs, and, to a certain extent, the bohemian life she was choosing. When sex was too raw, too divorced from feeling, it displaced her. However, her knee-jerk response to someone predicting her preferences, combined with her persistent natural desire for experience, pulled her through the oversize doors.
    Her eyes had to adjust from the simple sunlight of the day to being in a theatrically lit, multistory space that rivaled the train station in scale and seemed almost as populated and diverse as the platz outside. There was a grand common space, ringed with myriad rooms, whose entrances were gathered velvet drapes, or swaths of see-through silk, or strings of colored-glass beads. There were privacy booths and standing floor screens. Swan boats floated on a lake in a lobby large enough to prevent the boats from colliding.
    It wasn’t just the chaos and cut-crystal chandeliers, the painted murals and ceiling of copper stars, or the four gracefully turned staircases carved with mermaids and sea monsters; it was the clash of costumes, decor, and music in many languages. All of which fractured Cymbeline’s focus into a dozen directions, everything in competition with everything else. “What is this place?” she whispered, though Julius could not hear her.
    “Welcome to the poor man’s European tour.”

    “Ah, this is clearly the Bavarian Room, and located, as it should be, next to the Viennese Room through the