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holding the doll. There she sits on that sunny summer afternoon, on that vanished European beach, thinking how it is so peaceful and familiar, until she looks down and realizes that what she is holding isn’t a doll, but a baby, its arms and legs as stiff as plastic, its eyes squeezed shut, its mouth frozen open in a soundless cry.
    On Sunday afternoon, her ex-boyfriend drove her to the airport in his father’s car. He pulled the sunroof back and drove in silence past the stately rows of government buildings, the dome of the Capitol shining on the hill, the long scar of the Vietnam War Memorial cut into the Constitution Gardens grass.
    I’ve decided to move back to the States, he finally said.
    Susan turned to look at him. With the kid?
    He shook his head, his eyes fixed on the road, his lips pressed together in a line, as they’d been the night before. Susan wanted to reach across the gearshift to take his hand, but there was something about the pain in his eyes, the set of his mouth, that made her stop.
    It was only later, as her plane lifted and banked over the shimmering Potomac, that Susan let herself think back to that moment in Central Park, that question hanging unanswered between them in the cooling air.
    When Susan finally went to Berlin, a couple of years later, her ex-boyfriend had long since moved away. She walked along the Kurfürstendamm her first night there, through the neon lights and jostling crowds. She passed a woman walking with a little girl with fair curly hair and a familiar tilt to her eyes, and she turned back for another look even though this child was much younger than her ex-boyfriend’s daughter would have been by now. She sat for a while at the edge of the fountain and looked up at Kaiser Wilhelm’s ruined church, its hollow tower floodlit from below, like a stage set, and then went back to her hotel.
    The wall itself was long gone, of course, and the Potsdamer Platz had turned from a mine-filled no-man’s-land into the largest construction site in the world. Of the city her grandparents had known, there was hardly a trace. Cranes and scaffolding stretched across the sky. She walked all the way around the square, feeling the way she always did when she traveled alone: invisible and weightless and free.
    Before she left, she bought a postcard at a kiosk. She sat in a café and addressed it to her ex-boyfriend. She thought about writing,
Thinking of you
. She thought about writing,
Auf wiedersehen
. In the end, she put it in her purse and didn’t write anything at all.

I look everywhere for grandmothers and find none
.
    ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
LILA’S STORY
Israel 1997
    In my memory, my grandmother is framed by flowers. Head-high stalks of gladioli, a backdrop of hibiscus, anemones at her feet. My grandmother is smiling, cheek to bloom. Here are the flowers still: tricolor lantana bordering the sidewalk, vermilion bougainvillea overhanging the second-story stairs. Here are photographs, a pile of black-and-white snapshots taken in the 1940s, not long after my grandparents arrived in Palestine. I flip through them like tarot cards, lay them face up on my hotel room bed. Here is my grandmother in a full skirt and blouse and walking shoes, kneeling in the Carmel woods called Little Switzerland. Here she is, arms linked with her two sons, posing on the beach. She is beautiful, or almost, cat-eyed and slim, with an aquiline nose and prematurely white hair. Here she is leaning against a railing by the sea. Her hair is blowing across her face and she is squinting just a bit. The sea behind her is flecked with white. The camera has caught that fleeting moment that precedes the self-consciousness of a smile, and that,with that slight squint and windblown hair, makes her look contemplative and a little reckless, both vulnerable and brave. I sweep the photographs back into a pile, leaving this one on the top.
Palestine 1939
    Lila knows it isn’t true the world