Like a little eggshell in the sky. I have moved into my final Berlin sublet, just 3 weeks, and barely dare breathe. Everything is white down to the phone, painted roughly with house paint but still black on the inside when you pick up the receiver. In the little white bathroom a toilet with no lid and no seat. A tiny wooden vegetable brush perches primly across the back of the… mouth of the sewer. I said to my landlady, who is off to India for three weeks to translate Arabic manuscripts, “No toilet seat?” “Oh, did you notice that? Does it bother you?” “Well…”

She said, “I guess it’s a bit cold, and kind of uncomfortable, but it broke and I just realized, I don’t really need this.” I foresee that within a few years she will be living cross-legged on the head of a pin. The place is quiet and curtainless and resembles a tiny Buddhist monastery. Floorboards painted white. White rugs which, she showed me, she cleans with a little brush. She pulled out a rush cushion from under the low white bed to show me: “This makes a great table, for eating.” Then she set off in the November rain through streets full of sticky wet leaves to fly south, with one little blue bag, wearing a pair of socks inside white sandals. Mysteriously there is no mat at the front door, yet everything within is pristine. My landlady had also painted her little computer white, including all the keys, but then had to scrub most of them back to the original black so that she could see what they were. Her patchy keyboard in the chalky white room was startling, a giant crossword. We exchanged money and keys this morning and she showed me around. “I have these two spoons.” Four plates, two bowls, and a couple cups, no pepper, oils, pans, forks, knives. “Poor little flower,” said the friend who helped me carry my suitcases. “You get the feeling that a gust of wind would blow her away.” I on the other hand will not be having that problem. In just 18 months my pile of cases and boxes has swollen like paper in water to twice their original dimensions. I think of the old cartoon of a bag lady pleading not guilty on a charge of shoplifting “by reason of static cling.” To get home I will have to divest myself of a rowboat full of leaves, intricately rusted bottlecaps, brochures and books that I picked up and brought home because they seemed beautiful or interesting. This might be the perfect place to do it. In between, I will loll in the tub and read, an egg in an eggcup in a large eggshell in the grey, minimalist skies over Germany.