The Girl Who Loved Books: Under the Berlin Rain with the Brothers Grimm
I have been thinking a lot about childhood friends lately. How we convince ourselves we cannot breathe without them, only to discover how effortlessly life continues after they leave.
I think of those friends, but even more, I think of our childhood fairy tales. And how growing up meant leaving the ones I loved most behind without ever looking back.
Andersen and Aesop dissolved into the past. But my heart kept a permanent sanctuary for the Brothers Grimm. They were different. They belonged to me. Dark, melancholic, politically incorrect as they were—those old stories felt written for my eyes alone.
I remember lazy afternoons with my childhood friend, A. We would lie side-by-side on the small red rug in my bedroom, staring at the ceiling and reading Little Red Riding Hood.
Without knowing the words for it, we sensed the story was an allegory for awakening. It was about us. We were growing up, secretly fascinated by the wolves waiting under our grandmothers’ blankets.
We no longer wanted innocence. We wanted to shed our red cloaks and stand bare.
While the sky outside turned a pastel blue and evening stars surfaced one by one, we would whisper about escaping home to join a circus. A. would rest her head on my chest. I loved that. We swore we would never part until death.
The circus was our quietest secret—a silent wish never spoken aloud. A wish she would likely forget in a few years, but one I could never cast off.
Out of all the wild dreams I carried back then, only one survived into adulthood: to become a writer.
We grew up, and the circus receded into the distance.
I had spent my youth believing I would become an explorer roaming the earth. Instead, I grew attached to a writing desk, bound to a room of my own making. My books became my circus. The colorful, fantastical worlds I created were my stage.
Writing for children was no coincidence; it was birthed in those strange, quiet afternoons with the Brothers Grimm.
I chased the idea of home, forgetting my longing to wander the world. Eventually, I realized the circus was meant for others—for those who could leave. My fate was to stay behind with my books, paying the writer’s tax: living forever in my home country, confined inside my own mind.
A. became everything I had once dreamed of being.
She traveled the globe, surrounding herself with brilliant, radiant people. In her eyes, I grew dull by comparison. She slowly stopped calling, unaware of the worlds I was building in my solitude. She settled in Berlin, a city made for artists, and gradually let me fade from her memory.
Years later, we reconnected at the graves of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in Berlin.
Two small, black headstones surrounded by blood-red roses. A. mentioned that the local cafe sold honey gathered from the graveyard’s bees. Then she confessed how much she had missed me, and those quiet afternoons on my red rug.
I told her the house of my childhood had been demolished for urban renewal. A. went silent. Then, under the first drops of a cold drizzle, she looked at me with her dark eyes and whispered:
“I’m writing a novel.”
I leaned down and buried my favorite pen among the roses on Jacob Grimm’s grave.
We walked away together, huddled beneath her massive gothic umbrella as Berlin stretched out beneath elephant-gray clouds. I knew this was our final farewell.
“What is your novel about?” I asked.
She smiled, wrinkling her nose the exact way she did as a child.
“About a child who runs away from home to join the circus.”
For a fraction of a second, we were girls again on a red rug. Then the vision dissolved like smoke.
At the train station, I asked her one last question: “What happens to the child at the end?”
“They fall in love,” she replied, looking at me as if no other answer were possible.
She handed me her umbrella. “Keep it,” she added casually. “Your road is longer than mine.”
She leaned in, kissed my cheek, and walked away with her hands in her pockets.
I think about my childhood friends a lot these days. How we survive losing the people we once couldn’t live without.
I think of the stories we leave behind.
But the Brothers Grimm… they remained faithful to me until the very end.