The Gift

The Potsdam square, always disfigured by city work (oh, those old postcards of it where everything is so spacious, with the droshki drivers looking so happy, and the trains of tight-belted ladies brushing the dust—but with the same fat flower-girls). The pseudo-Parisian character of Unter-den-Linden. The narrowness of the commercial streets beyond it. Bridge, barge, sea gulls. The dead eyes of old hotels of the second, third, hundredth class. A few more minutes of riding, and there was the station.

There were large flags and small flags, on short poles and on long ones, but none of this exhibitionism of civic excitement made the city any more attractive. On the Tauentzienstrasse

If one advanced even further—not to the left where the pinewood stretched endlessly, and not to the right where it was interrupted by a coppice of young birches, freshly and childishly smelling of Russia