Compared to what she had been used to in Manhattan, rush hour in Berlin wasn’t even that bad. On the occasions that she set out too early or came home too late, she still almost always got a seat on the subway. During the past ten days, as she’d been switching tracks in stations scattered all over the city, from U-Bahn to S-Bahn, she had quickly established certain preferences: the right side of the car not the left, the back, four seats to herself if possible. On long stretches above ground, she put up her feet. Every morning she planned out a different route before she left the house. She did not choose her destinations for the areas around the subway stations but rather for the stations’ names. Weissensee to Spandau, Frohnau to Lichterfelde to Wannsee. Sometimes she picked a series of stops that rhymed, or began with the same letter, or sounded funny, like Blankenberg, or nice, like Paradestrasse. Sometimes she got off at the end and looked around, but mostly she just rode. She liked to think of the city out the window as a person,clocking its schedule by the ebb and flow of students getting out of school, the older women with their midmorning groceries, strollers at the elevator stations in the afternoon, the general flow of citizens from east to west, north to south.
