There are two artists who created the autumn landscape. One is delicate and perfectionist, painting leaves with minimal brushstrokes; imitates the first gray hair of aging trees with strands of gold and copper; summons the wind to ruffle their hair: it caresses the stubborn green youth of some species as it drags the old leaves that crackle across the pavements. A little girl walks through the city and collects fragments of life and death, takes them home to keep in her favorite book. The other artist is wild: he falls in time and out of time, breaks the dance of wind and leaves, releases himself in immoderate showers, vertically, horizontally, diagonally, dissolves the colors of the leaves into mud. It speeds up the process of death. It darkens the already dark sky. He is the creator of this rainy and painful autumn of 2023.

I’m going home. Two friends sit at our table to share a bottle of wine with my husband: a Russian, an Israeli and an American in my kitchen. It’s not the beginning of Pepito’s joke, but of my life in Germany. A life that seems to take place in the pews of an opera where tragedies are lined up one after the other, a theater where the actors can no longer bear the horror and jump towards the bleachers with closed eyes, begging the audience to welcome them with open arms. The years I spent in Germany I shared with Syrians showing me the ruins of their homes, Venezuelans who lost everything but their grandmother’s recipe for hallacas; dancing with Israelis like at home (that passion, that community, family, warm and imperfect feeling that is so Latin), playing with Ukrainian children whose mothers have snatched them from their beds to bring them to a country where they don’t know the language or speak their customs .

Germany… is a country where a Russian, an Israeli, an American and an Ecuadorian can drink wine together…

A Russian, an Israeli and an American in my kitchen. Russian studies in Berlin: his parents, professors in Moscow, received at the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine a form in which they had to declare themselves (signature and address were not voluntary), on that day they decided that their son would stay in Germany. An Israeli is a man of faith and gratitude. He visited Poland where his family was exterminated by the Nazis. His view of today’s Germany is characterized by wonder and tenderness. Resentment, for fools. The enlightened believe in redemption. Germany will not be paradise, but it is a country where a Russian, an Israeli, an American and an Ecuadorian can drink wine together and feel gratitude, celebrate life and cry for their countries: for what they suffer and suffer.

By the end of October, this side of the world had already succumbed to the occupation of cold and darkness. It is almost a relief to confirm that this occupation is not a twisted power game, but simply the passage of time, the dance of the planets around the Sun, the natural cycle of being always in transition and transformation. But if the climate has also gone mad, cry apocalypticists whose dream catcher is entangled in the same nightmare every night: climate change. Either way, it’s the end of October and migrants in Germany are torn between the cold and gratitude. (OR)