“It’s not just the loss of blood that’s keeping me here. It’s my little ‘problem’ as well. They have me on the ‘substitute.’ The quack in charge of me has said that he won’t sign off on my release until he is certain I have been weaned off smack.”
“How’s it going with the methadone?”
“Considering that I have been in a fucking coma, no problems. But now I can already tell that the withdrawal, even with the methadone, is going to be monstrous. I have several close junkie friends who went down the substitute route. They all reported back the same thing: absolute hell.”
“Well, at least you will get off it now.”
“Stop sounding like I’ve been spending my entire adult life waiting for the moment when I could be near-fatally stabbed by a fourth-tier artiste in some sordid fuck bar so I could finally free myself of the dreaded drug which had so crippled my life. The fact is, I love smack.”
“But since they won’t let you out of here until they’re sure you’re off of it . . .”
“Mind you, I could try to check myself out of here once I have enough blood coursing back in my veins. As the quack and the investigating cop explained to me, the fact that I am
Ein Ausländer
—a bloody foreigner—presents all sorts of complications, in that it’s clear they have physiological proof I am a junkie. Which means they could legally throw me out of the country. But the Germans aren’t as rigid as the Brits or the French on such matters, though. Thank fuck, they didn’t search the apartment.”
“Who told you that?”
“I just surmised that, as it was a case of attempted murder—”
“You’re a junkie. They tore the place apart.”
“And did they find—?”
“No, I got it out the window and into the trash the next morning.”
“You threw it away?”
“What the hell was I supposed to do? Keep it warm until you came back? Say the cops had done a sweep and found your shit?”
“That was seven hundred deutsche marks of ‘shit.’”
“A small price for not getting busted and evicted from the Bundesrepublik.”
“We don’t live in the Bundesrepublik. We live in Berlin.”
“They’d still deport you. Now you can wean yourself off your addiction at their expense.”
“Stop sounding so fucking
pragmatic
. When are you next seeing Mehmet?”
“Eight a.m. tomorrow, when we sand your floor.”
“Will you ask him to visit me?”
“I’ll ask, but you know he can’t be seen with you.”
“He told you that?”
“Yes, he told me that.”
“Then can you come back tomorrow night and give me an update?”
“On what?”
“On everything outside this fucking lonely hospital.”
“Tomorrow night’s impossible.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I am otherwise engaged.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’ll tell you if it amounts to anything.”
“It will amount to something.”
“How can you be so damn sure?”
“Because you know it will.”
“The day after tomorrow then?”
“Of course.”
“And tell Mehmet he’s missed.”
I did pass on that message to Mehmet the next morning. The walls were all repainted, and we spent the four hours he had set aside to work here dealing with the messy business of sanding the floor of the studio. The wood dust was torrential, Mehmet pointing out that the parquet flooring was of the cheap variety and seriously brittle when attacked with a sander. Of course, when he arrived that morning I immediately informed him that Alaistair had pulled through—and, judging from the acerbity of his repartee last night at the hospital, had not been too mentally scathed by this attack. Mehmet took this information in with a modest nod of the head, then fell silent until he started telling me what we needed to do to get the floor stripped of blood. Halfway through this dusty job, we took a break for coffee—during which he suddenly asked me:
“You are telling me the truth about his condition? He really will live, yes?”
“It does look that way. And he did ask about you many times. Why don’t you just go to the Krankenhaus and visit him? I mean, it’s not like we live on the other side of The Wall and have every move we make monitored. Anyway, even on the wild chance that you did run into someone you knew there, big deal. You’re visiting a friend, nothing more.”
Mehmet simply shook his head and said, “It’s not as simple as that.”
We carried on working in silence until noon. Mehmet helped me sweep up all the sawdust, then washed his hands, straightened his tie, and said, “Tomorrow at eight.”
Once he was gone I glanced at my watch. Realizing that I still had the afternoon to kill before making my way to meet Petra at that Turkish café near her apartment, I decided to do something that had been anathema to me since my last year in college: I was going to go for a run.
A true confession: at one time in my life I actually saw myself as a marathon man. Or, at least, a marathon man in training. I ran cross-country in school. My specialty was the 10K and I actually came in third once in an intercollegiate track meet. I also spent two years on my college’s running team until my love affair with cigarettes put an end to all that.
Jogging out onto Berlin’s hard, arduous concrete, I was struck immediately by how quickly the old training kicked in again. Setting off I heard again the voice of the taskmaster track coach at school in New York, an ex-Marine name Mr. Toole who always exhorted me:
“Four paces run, then four exhalations, then four paces, then four exhalations. And you never,
never
deviate from that rhythm. You forget the four-four rhythm, your breathing will go all over the place, and you will lose pace, velocity, staying power. You start doing something goofy like even occasionally holding your breath . . . and I’ve seen even experienced long-distance runners inadvertently make that mistake, because they simply forget the four-four pattern . . . and you will find yourself winded, flagging, lost. In running breathing is energy—and I am going to come down so damn hard on you, Nesbitt, if you forget that.”
But I never forgot that, and jogging through Kreuzberg I kept repeating the same mantra:
Four paces, four exhalations. Breathe back slowly through your nose. Four paces, four exhalations. And never, never, hold a breath longer than needed.
Youth is such a great gift and one which we never really see until years later, when we become aware of the body’s increasing lack of forgiveness for our excesses. As I hit the first kilometer mark, all I could think was:
So I can smoke and run at the same time
.
A city changes when you run through it. Distances that always seemed lengthy when walked are now surprisingly close, the jaunt from my front door to the U-Bahn station at Heinrich Heine Strasse no longer its usual ten-minute stroll. Then there’s the simple fact that you are rushing past everyone—and, as such, are dodging pedestrians and cars and, in this case, heading northward, using The Wall as a directional marker. But even though my route zigged in toward this barricade and then away down nearby streets, the fact was: The Wall now appeared to be an endless impediment. I could turn left, but simply could not jog to the right. When I followed its northward trajectory, it eventually dumped me out in front of the Brandenburg Tor and the ruin that still was the Reichstag. A left-hand turn and I was now running through the Tiergarten—that big public park through which Hitler’s mob marched when they torched the parliament, and which, prior to that infamous night, was best known during the exalted decadence of the Weimar Republic as a favored place in which to encounter prostitutes of both sexes. Now it was shadowed by the ghosts of an imperial and fascistic past, and by the biggest line of ideological demarcation constructed during this most terrible of centuries.
But these thoughts came later. For the moment the Tiergarten was simply a patch of green to be traversed at a reasonable clip . . . that is, before my stamina began to wane and I started to feel a heaviness in my legs. My throat was arid and my chest heaving. I slowed down to a panting halt, my head bowed, my hands on my knees, my throat now raw, smoky phlegm filling my mouth. But I also did remind myself that after a five-year hiatus, I had just run for forty minutes without let-up. Glancing at my watch, I put my hand out and grabbed a taxi home.
A few hours later—freshly showered and shaved and wearing black jeans, a black leather jacket, and a black turtleneck—I walked the twenty minutes down to the Café Ankara. Petra was right: compared with my own grubby but energetic corner of Kreuzberg, hers was thoroughly down-at-heel and lacking streetwise vitality. This was an area noteworthy for its faceless blocks of low-income housing, a few extant left-behinds from the late nineteenth century, and a smattering of sad-looking shops: a grocer’s, a laundry, a place that sold elderly-looking housewares, a clothing shop aimed at Turkish women who (judging from the strange mannequins in the window) didn’t seem to mind wearing the chador.
At the end of this street, the equally ugly tower blocks of East Berlin peered down at me. Though the closest ones were less than one hundred meters from The Wall, they appeared to be near-neighbors to this corner of Kreuzberg. Again I found myself wondering what it must be like to live in such a Stalinist aerie, with a clear panoramic view of the Forbidden City from all western-facing balconies. Did you have to be a senior Party apparatchik to get such a privileged view? Or did the authorities deliberately house political misfits there as a way of sticking in the proverbial knife and reminding them that though they were geographically close to the longed-for Other Side, they were also so damn far from it.
The Café Ankara was the Café Istanbul gone even more downmarket (and that took some work). Even shabbier floral linoleum. Even darker tobacco-cured floral wallpaper. The same Formica tables. The same fluorescent lighting. The same intermingling aroma of bad cigarettes, overcooked Turkish coffee, and grease. And no customers when I walked in.
I slid into a booth, checked my watch, and saw that I was about five minutes early. I felt so damn jumpy, so eager for this to all go so right, so concerned about making a good impression, so desperate to appear calm and not over-eager, that I quickly pulled out my pouch of tobacco and papers and rolled a cigarette. The guy behind the counter shouted over, “What you want?” I ordered a Turkish coffee “medium” (i.e., with a half teaspoon of sugar, rather than the three teaspoons the Café Istanbul usually put into their “sweet” version of this highly caffeinated and thoroughly addictive liquid). Then I pulled out my notebook and started writing down some thoughts about jogging alongside The Wall. The coffee arrived. I lit up my cigarette. I continued to write—trying to let the accumulation of words quell my anxiety. My pen flew along the narrow pages of my pocket-sized book. The combination of caffeine and nicotine kept the nervousness in check. In the middle of an extended sentence about running out of physical steam while in the Tiergarten, I heard her voice:
“So viele Wörter.”
So many words
.
I looked up. There she was. Petra. Wearing a dark gray tweed overcoat with a brown turtleneck, a short green corduroy skirt, and black tights with—as before—a small tear around the left knee. I forced myself to appear casual as I said:
“Ja, so viele Wörter. Aber vielleicht sind die ganzen Wörter Abfall.”
Yes, so many words. But perhaps all the words are crap
.
She laughed and sat down opposite me. I saw that she was also carrying a black vinyl shoulder bag, out of which she pulled a packet of HB cigarettes. I reached for my tobacco pouch and papers.
“I never knew Americans smoked roll-ups,” she said, tapping out a cigarette and reaching for the lighter I had left on the table. “That is, outside of novels by John Steinbeck.”
“It’s a habit I got into in college. Especially as it was cheaper than real cigarettes.”
“But not as nice. Then again, having grown up with the things that passed for cigarettes over there . . .”
“Like f6s?”
“Ah yes, I forgot you mentioned this brand in your essay. I liked the ‘industrial strength’ image. Very apt.”
“And the rest of the essay?”
Again she smiled at me.
“We’ll get to that later. First, I need a beer.”
“I could use one, too. I just attempted to run for the first time in more than five years.”
“Run from what precisely?”
“Run from the fact that I smoke far too many cigarettes a day, and I used to be able to run 10K in less than an hour.”
“You actually did that?”
“For a very brief time in my adolescence.”
“Personally, I could not imagine life without smoking.”
“That’s a serious statement.”
“I’m a serious smoker.”