1. The Overpass. West Berlin, near Nestorstrasse

“But whatever the truth may be, we shall never forget, you and I, we shall forever defend, on this or some other battleground, the bridges on which we spent hours waiting with our little son (aged anything from two to six) for a train to pass below. I have seen older and less happy children stop for a moment in order to lean over the railing and spit into the asthmatic stack of the engine that happened to pass under, but neither you nor I is ready to admit that the more normal of two children is the one who resolves pragmatically the aimless exaltation of an obscure trance. You did nothing to curtail or rationalize those hour-long stops on windy bridges when, with an optimism and a patience that knew no bounds, our child would hope for a semaphore to click and for a growing locomotive to take shape at a point where all the many tracks converged, in the distance, between the blank backs of houses.” Speak, Memory, XV, 2.

(Remarkably, the third person of the passage did recognize, half-a-century later, the particular bridge on this photograph. It is only a few blocks from Nestorstrasse, the Nabokovs' last and longest address in Berlin. The serious electric storm that can be seen gathering in the north broke out within a quarter of an hour, and I scuttled to a nearby pastry shop.)

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1: THE GRAVEYARDS | 2: PARIS | 3: CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
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