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La-le-lu, nur der Mann im Mond schaut zu, wenn
die kleinen Babies schlafen, drum schlaf auch du.
Lo-lee-lu, only the man in the moon’s watching when
the little babies sleep, so you shall sleep, too.
(German lullaby by Hans Gaze)
y mother, who has freckles and lives under the
Milky Way: this is Aza. At night I whispered her
name without being able to call her mother, or
mum, or mummy, and the more I repeated it, the more I
believed I understood its meaning. Aza, she who has wings.
Aza, who must have thought I was a bird, and perhaps
hoped that one day I’d fly to that place to which she’d been
drawn. Aza, who was wrong but somehow proved right in
the end. I missed her even before I was separated from the
umbilical cord, before I could have imagined what awaited
me just four hours after I was born, in a single room of the
Red Cross clinic in Taxistrasse, West Munich.
Aza rose from the bed with a painful groan, slid her toes
into her flip-flops and lifted me out of the bassinet. It was
the first time she touched me. It was the first time she
looked at me. She hadn’t wanted to see me before that. She
hadn’t wanted to see anyone, closing her eyes as soon as
she heard footsteps approaching. She lay still when
someone put a hand on her arm or when something moved
behind her, even if it was only the harmless curtains
fluttering in the scent of a storm. When Nurse Marianne
M