A man in a puffy tan jacket stops in front of the memorial commemorating the night the wall fell. It is difficult to determine his age under his white knit hat, but bits of gray hair and a roughness to his cold-chapped skin mark him as old enough to remember the night the barricades had opened and people had streamed across the bridge.

He takes a rag from his pocket and carefully wipes the last day’s accumulation of snow from the plaque. The old parking lot nearby, and even the parts of the sidewalk that haven’t been shoveled are covered in inches of snow. But the memorial has barely any, even before he begins his work. He has been here every day, making sure these words can be read, though he knows that no one else will read them today. Everyone passes with their shoulders tense against the cold and their eyes scanning the sidewalk for treacherous bits of ice. That doesn’t matter to him.

When he goes, the flakes immediately begin re-whitening the brass surface. An hour later the letters have vanished; but he will be back tomorrow.

A red station wagon screeches to a halt in the middle of the intersection. A young man leans out the driver’s window, shouting furious English-language obscenities at the top of his lungs. “You goddamn bitch, you fucking piece of fucking.… I should fucking…aaaaAAAHHHHHH…”

He pulls his head back inside, throwing the car into reverse. A minute later the car lurches forward, and the brakes squeal a second time. Again the young man leans out the window and shouts until tangling himself in his own cursing. The little audience gathered outside the coffee house laughs and claps appreciatively, and the actor turns to give them a sly smile.

Inside, the regular is delighted. “I used to see this in New Zealand. Two cars race up to a stoplight right next to each other, like this, you know?” His hands mime the cars’ sudden stop. “Guy gets out of one and the other driver, the idiot, rolls down his window. First one punches him right in the face, and then gets back in his car and drives off.”

Laughs all around. “That was a movie?” somebody asks.

“No, no, that was real.”

A shoemaker’s shop. Custom-made, fashionable leather orthopedic shoes are displayed in a row behind the glass window. The shoemaker and his partner, a young man and woman, stand relaxed in the doorway. He wears a shirt with white-and-blue horizontal stripes, giving him the look of a French sailor, or a waiter on San Francisco’s Belden Place. Her arms are folded, and she leans casually against the doorjamb, listening. They are talking to a third man, who holds a bicycle with one hand and a small notebook in the other, in which he has written the shop’s address. He gestures with the book, and then lifts one foot, nods toward his sneaker’s rubber sole. My feet are unusual, he is saying. There have never been such feet as this, such difficulties, such geological formations. Steppes, I have, crags and badlands, regrettably placed mountains. Footquakes.

It is no problem, says the shoemaker. He is barefoot, himself.