Tea with Mouayed al-Rawi in a Turkish café in Berlin after the Wall came down *** Our cigarette packs close to hand (that secret fuel) . . . The babble of immigrants slapping dominoes on marbletops: a noise familiar once, out of which a word may flare up amid the smoke -- born there, refusing to die here. If we don't say it, who will? And who are we if we don't? *** Not about what came to pass; how it came, and passed! But about this spoon buried in sugar, and this finjan. Not that Wall whose remains are sold as souvenirs at check-point Charlie where only yesterday they exchanged spies and traded secrets of the East and West, but this wall painting facing us now, with a harem from the days of the Sublime Porte who recline dreamily in pleasure boats, on a river guzzled down, in one gulp, by history. *** Let's say we have seen a lot of walls, how they rise and fall, how the dust particles dance under the hooves of the Mongol's horse, how "victory" laughs its idiot's laugh in the mirror of loss, before it breaks and its shards fill the world where we walk, and meet, every time. ________________ Translated by the author