Cold War

Clarissa sat down at her computer and began writing. As she typed away at the computer she could hear the bombs falling in the distance. Not too many, just a few, every minuet or two the loud burst of sound echoed in the apartment. She just sat there, in her bedroom and continued writing. By nine in the evening, only a half an hour had elapsed, she opened her door, and shouted into the living room: Will you shut that crap off? I am trying to work!

The young man in the living room argued a bit, but then turned the television on mute. She stared at him for a few seconds. “It isn’t even new bombs, it is the same one over and over. . . did it even hit what it was supposed to? After watching this for an hour, you couldn’t even tell!”

And so the war had begun.

When I decided to write this story, Clarissa had been living in America for over twenty years. She was born in a small town outside of Berlin or part of Berlin, depending on when you asked her. She claimed the small town heritage of the little German commuter town, although she moved to California when she was two. Strangely her pride remained with her home town. She held a strange balance and mix between the two levels of nationhood, always preferring to be German in America and American in Germany. The memories of her childhood, which I only know from the stories that she told me, remind me of my own past. "In the beginning," she would always state, "my memories are always shrouded in graininess. I can never remember if they are real or if they are dreams."

She says that her first memory, was in the late summer when Berlin was unusually hot. She climbed up on the back fence, separating her garden from all the other neatly tended gardens in the complex. Barefoot she gripped the chain link fence with her feet, and hoisted herself up peering over the edge.