Batsceba Hardy - The-Apartment

e Apartment
I don’t know why I’m telling you this story. Someone, passing by my Café, may
recognize me.
My name is Maria. Maria as millions other Marias. In fact I do have a
second name, like almost all Marias – especially those born from a South
American mother – but since I took residence here in Berlin, I buried it
together with my old ID card, along the banks of the Nikolassee River on a
night of full moon …
Yes, why not? I buried it at the bottom of a drawer in my apartment, a
fourth floor walk-up on Danziger Straße, between Prenzlauer Allee and
Schönhauser Allee. Sunny side of one of those rare gray buildings, a residue
of the DDR, standing who knows for how long, enduring the pressure of the
renoviert and saniert where spiders have woven extremely long cobweb
highways along the external pipes, wide and narrow, horizontal and vertical.
I was born in Paris and spent my teenage years in Rome. My mother is
from Ecuador and my father from Boston. I always suspected he was part of
the CIA, and that is why I left home as soon as I could.
ereafter I took a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in London, it does not
matter in what. en I tried to settle in Copenaghen while chasing that
Yellow-eyed Girl. Eventually I ended up in East Berlin, in the heart of
Prenzlberg.
Don’t ask me why. Reasoning never led my life. What I call my “spy gene”
might have guided me, the one I inherited from my father, along with his
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