When, with great, deliberate slowness, von Karajan finally lowered his arms, the silence in the hall lingered—as if everyone there was hushed and thunderstruck by that which they had just heard. Then, as if a signal had been given, the Philharmonie erupted into convulsive applause.
Thinking back on that concert now, it remains, quite simply, one of the great musical experiences of my life: a testament to the sheer volcanic and visceral power of live performance. After multiple ovations, von Karajan finally led his musicians off the platform. The entire audience then filed out quietly. After such a profound and transcendental experience, there was something humbling about returning to our individual lives. But perhaps this is the way I now choose to remember the night in question. You only begin to grasp the import of an event—and its larger implications vis-à-vis your life—long after it has entered into that realm marked “memory.”
I left the Philharmonie. Making my way to the S-Bahn station at Anhalter Bahnhof, I decided that, with all that Mahlerian complexity still swirling around in my head, it was far too early to return back to the Pension Weisse and my pristine room. So I headed south until I reached Moritzplatz—thinking I should find my way to the place where that woman I met on the plane came over to this side of the world.
But all I could see in front of me as I emerged into Kreuzberg for the first time was swirling snow, as a new storm had erupted while I was on the U-Bahn. It was now blowing so hard that visibility was a near impossibility. I glanced at my watch. It was just after ten p.m. and part of me wanted to execute an about-face and disappear again into the subterranean depths, catching the first U-Bahn back to Savignyplatz. But there was a bar up ahead—Die schwarze Ecke (the Black Corner)—and the U-Bahn ran until three in morning, so why should a minor blizzard keep me away from a dive with a pulp fiction name?
My head down against the blowing snow, I negotiated the street and entered Die schwarze Ecke. It lived up to its name. The interior was painted black. A long chrome bar ran the length of the joint. The only lighting provided was glowing blue tubes that served to illuminate the Day-Glo murals that covered the otherwise black surfaces. They were all pseudo-erotic in nature—depicting a bearded biker guy and some blond biker chick in assorted sexual positions. They were beyond bad taste. But judging from the tattoos on the biceps of the biker guy behind the bar (one of which showed a woman going down on an erect penis), they were an aesthetic theme beloved by its staff members. I ordered a Hefeweizen and a shot of vodka on the side, grabbed a bar stool, and began rolling a cigarette. There was heavy metal music playing on the sound system—the usual sonic air raid of crashing guitars and percussive pyrotechnics—but it was kept at a level where conversation was possible. Not that there were many candidates for chat on this snowy night in January. Just a young punky type at the bar and an equally young woman with a small black bobby pin fastened through a pierced corner of her left nostril. The guy had spiked black hair, a wispy beard, and a permanent scowl. He was smoking Lucky Strikes and doodling in a sketchbook. When he heard me order my beer and vodka chaser, he looked up at me with disdain and asked:
“American?”
“That’s right.”
“The fuck you doing here?” he asked in English.
“Having a drink.”
“And making me talk to you in your fucking language.”
“I’m not making
you
do anything.”
“Fucking imperialist.”
I immediately switched into German and said:
“I am
no
imperialist—and I hate being labeled certain things simply by nature of my nationality. But, hey, since you obviously like nationalistic clichés, maybe I should start calling you a Jew killer . . .”
I said all that without much in the way of premeditated thought. From the wide-eyed look of the artist guy and the biker behind the bar, I now wondered if I would get out of Die schwarze Ecke with my teeth and fingers intact. But then the punky girl with the bobby pin in her nose spoke:
“You’re an asshole, Helmut,” she hissed at the artist guy. “As always, your attempts to show off simply demonstrate how stupid and limited you are.”
The artist guy favored her with a scowl. But then the bartender said:
“Sabine is right. You are a clown. And you are now going to apologize to the American.”
The artist guy kept scribbling away in his sketchbook, saying nothing. I decided it best to look away. So I tossed back my vodka, then returned my focus to the cigarette I was forming between my fingers. A very long moment passed, during which I licked the rolled cigarette paper, placed the butt between my lips, and lit it up. At which point the artist guy was standing beside me with a glass. He set it down beside me and said:
“We tend to be a little too confrontational in Berlin. No hard feelings.”
He proffered his hand. I took it and said:
“Sure. No hard feelings.”
And raising the fresh shot of vodka, I said “
Prost”
and threw it back.
Were this a movie, the guy would have introduced himself to me; we would have become instant and firm friends. And my guide into the complexities of Berlin. And I would have met a bevy of funky artists and writers. And we would have gone on a very Wim Wenders motorcycle trip with his girlfriend and sister around the Bundesrepublik. And his sister—let’s call her Herta—would turn out to be a gifted jazz pianist and we would fall madly in love with each other. And there would be an afternoon in Munich when I would suggest we take a side trip to Dachau. And standing there in the empty camp grounds, regarding the crematoriums as a silent snow falls, there would be a moment of shared silent understanding about the horrors that the world can . . .
But life is never a movie. Having bought me the vodka and made the demanded apology, the artist guy scooped up his sketchbook. Raising his middle finger in the direction of the bartender, he turned and headed out into the cold. The bartender uttered a low laugh, then turned to Sabine and said:
“He’ll be back tomorrow—as always.”
“He’s such a shit.”
“You’re only saying that because you used to fuck him.”
“I used to fuck you, too—and I still drink here. But maybe that’s because I got wise and it only happened once.”
To his credit, the bartender smiled. Then Sabine shouted down to me:
“Buy me a drink and I’ll fuck you.”
“Now that’s the first time I’ve ever been offered that deal,” I said.
“It’s not a deal, American. You’re here. And I have only three deutsche marks left in my pocket and want to buy cigarettes with them. So I need you to buy me a drink. Just as I need you to fuck me tonight, as I don’t want to sleep alone. You have a problem with that?”
I worked hard at masking my bemusement.
“No,” I said, “no problem at all.”
“Then come over here and buy me a drink. In fact, you can buy me many drinks.”
Sabine drank rum and Coke—a treble shot of Bacardi splashed into the dark waters of the cola.
“I know it’s pretty fucking teenager to drink a
cuba libre,
” she said. “The thing is, I like what alcohol does. But I don’t like the taste.”
I discovered that Sabine was from Hannover, and that she made sculptures in papier-mâché, and that her father was a Lutheran pastor with whom she no longer spoke, and that her mother had run off with a man who sold agricultural supplies and whom she found to be
petit bourgeois
and insufferable. She asked few questions about me, asking me simply where I was from (“Yes, I’ve heard of Manhattan”) and what I did (“Every American in Berlin is a writer”). But from the disinterested tone of her voice, she was simply engaging in basic niceties. This didn’t bother me, as she seemed happy to talk about herself in a manner that veered between self-loathing and ironic detachment. She drank two triple shot
cuba libres
and smoked six cigarettes in the forty-five minutes during which we propped up the bar. Then when the bartender made noises about wanting to close up, I turned to Sabine and said:
“You know, if you’d rather not invite me back, that’s okay.”
“Is this your way of saying you don’t want to spend the night with me?”
“Not at all. I was just saying that I didn’t want you to feel obliged about . . .”
“Are Americans always so fucked up about sex?”
“Absolutely,” I said, flashing her a smile. “How far do you live from here?”
“Around two minutes.”
I threw some money down on the bar and we were out the door, holding each other up against the combined force of blowing snow and an excessive amount of alcohol. Her place was located in a shabby building dabbled with graffiti. It was a room on the fifth floor of a walk-up, a very large room with a mattress on the floor, a stereo, carelessly stacked records and books, a makeshift kitchen consisting of a hot plate and a small fridge, and clothes scattered everywhere. Tidiness was evidently not one of Sabine’s strong points. But I was less interested in her strewn garments and overflowing ashtrays than in her papier-mâché sculptures of mutilated animals hanging from the walls. Had I not been so drunk they would have unsettled me. Instead I took them all in with a bemused grin.
“George Orwell lives,” I said.
She laughed and produced a small pipe and a chunk of hashish. As the Scorpions blared on the stereo, we smoked several bowlfuls of hash—and then took each other’s clothes off and made very stoned love on the mattress. I remember little about the act itself—except that, courtesy of the hash, it went on for a very long time. It had the sort of intensity that, in other, more sober circumstances, could make you think that this was something more than two strangers losing themselves in the pleasure of each other’s bodies on a lonely night in a snowbound city locked deep within Eastern Europe. When we finished we both passed out, waking sometime after noon to the sounds of traffic and a domestic argument in Turkish emanating from an adjoining flat. Sabine raised herself up on one elbow, squinted at me with curiosity, then asked:
“What’s your name again?”
I told her. She glanced at her watch and said:
“Shit. I was due in work ten minutes ago.”
We were both dressed and out the door within five minutes. It was a bright, cold morning—the snow plowed up into huge drifts by the side of the pavement.
“Got to dash,” she said, giving me a quick peck on the lips.
“Can I see you again?” I asked.
She looked at me and smiled. Then said:
“No.”
And she disappeared around the corner and was gone.
Had it not been so cold and I not so hungry I might have stood on that street, reeling from the morning-after brush-off that had just been administered to me. Instead I decided that a late breakfast was needed. But when I spun around, looking for a café at the end of the street, I found myself facing The Wall. Catching sight of it this way was the visual equivalent of a slap in the face. Spinning around again, I spied the grubby buildings, the overflowing trash bins, the hunched Turkish women heading toward an open-air market, the dude in torn leather trousers with chains clanging off his right calf, the elderly German woman blinking madly into the sun while trying to negotiate the icy footpath with her cane, the two young toughs with shaved heads looking like they were en route to break into someone’s apartment . . . the whole strange Breughel-like street scene that was this corner of Kreuzberg.
Then spinning back again I stared right at the solemn triteness that was The Wall. And I thought:
yes, this is where the book will get written. Yes, this is where I belong
.
After a quick pilgrimage to the Heinrich Heine Checkpoint, I turned west again into the middle of Kreuzberg, determined to find a place here to call my own before nightfall.
THREE
N
EVER UNDERESTIMATE THE
way happenstance governs so much of human existence. Never underestimate how being in a certain place at a certain time changes the entire trajectory of things for you. Never underestimate the way we are all hostages to life’s random rhythms.
Just consider:
I leave the Philharmonie, thinking I will return to my hotel. Instead, I decide to seek out a bar in Kreuzberg. Upon emerging from the subway, I almost turn back due to blowing snow. But I cross the road into a bar. A nasty exchange with an artist leads me to talking with a woman with a bobby pin in her nose. We spend the night together. When we get up the next morning, she dumps me. I find myself on a street. I wander up to gaze at the local checkpoint. Then I turn into the first café I find. There is a notice on the wall in English as I walk in:
FLAT SHARE: Artist with Extra Bedroom in his Atelier seeks tenant. Rent reasonable. So too is the premises. Only louche souls need apply.
There was a name—Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross—on the announcement. There was also a telephone number. I copied both down.
Fitzsimons-Ross. Must be a Brit
.
And a pretentious one at that, given his “only louche souls” comment
. Then I drank several glasses of thick, coagulated Turkish coffee and ate a slice of baklava and asked to use the phone. The man behind the counter—hangdog eyes, a loopy moustache, stained teeth embedded around a cigarette—charged me twenty pfennigs for the privilege. I checked my watch. Twelve forty-nine p.m. I dialed the number. It rang fourteen times. I was about to hang up when a voice answered. From the sound of profound stupefaction that accompanied this voice, I immediately realized that, like me, the gentleman on the other end of the line had also had something of a late night.
“Do you
always
phone people so fucking early?”
The voice was tobacco-cured, posh. What I would have described as a BBC accent, except with a less clipped layering to it.
“It’s nearly one p.m.,” I said. “And is this Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross?”
“Who the fuck wants to know?”
“My name is Thomas Nesbitt.”
“And you’re a fucking American . . .”
“That’s most insightful of you . . .”
“And like the majority of fucking Americans, you’re up with your fucking cows every morning at five, so you have no fucking compunction about ringing someone this fucking early.”
“I happen to be from Manhattan, so I know nothing about cows. And having just gotten up at midday myself . . .”
“Is there a point to this call?”
“I was calling about the room. But since we don’t seem to be getting off to such a great start . . .”
“Hang on, hang on . . .”
A ferocious bout of coughing followed, the same cough I had whenever I had overdosed on cigarettes the night before.
“Bloody hell . . . ,” he finally said once the coughing subsided.
“You okay?”
“Nothing an organ transplant wouldn’t cure. You said you were interested in the room?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you have a name?”
“I told you it already.”
“So you did, so you did. But it’s so fucking early in the morning . . .”
“Maybe I should call you at another time.”
“Mariannenstrasse 5. Name’s on the bell. Third floor,
links
. Give me an hour.”
And the phone went dead.
I spent the next hour wandering around Kreuzberg. I liked what I saw. Nineteenth-century residential buildings in various states of scruffiness, but still imposing in their burgher solidity. Graffiti everywhere—much of it either related to Turkish government human rights abuses (I wrote down assorted dabbled slogans in my notebook and had them translated later on) or what I came to discover was the usual German anarchist stuff about eviscerating the capitalist, bourgeois state. There was absolutely nothing bourgeois about Kreuzberg. I could spy a couple of small coffee shops, but they all reminded me of German versions of the old beatnik joints that lined the Greenwich Village of my youth. The bars I noted were either the sort of heavy metal joints that I ventured into last night, or the occasional old-style local
bierstube,
or Turkish enclaves. These were lit by fluorescent tubes and peopled by hollow-eyed men in flat caps, smoking furiously, drinking shots of raki chased by coffee, and either talking conspiratorially or staring ahead blankly: that vacant look of the lonely, the exiled, the dispossessed. These men could be seen everywhere on the streets. So too could groups of Turkish women, wearing the Muslim headscarf (or, very occasionally, the full chador), pushing their children in strollers or baby carriages, and gabbing incessantly with each other. There were skinheads and Sabine-style punks everywhere—all shaved scalps or spiked hair, and tattoos adorning their cheekbones. There were the evident druggies—sallow, emaciated, with the toneless, sunken expression of the junkie awaiting his next fix. There were scores of falafel places and cheap pizzerias and the sort of boutiques that sold army greatcoats and biker jackets and shit-kicker boots. The chic, the well heeled, the
au courant
had no place in Kreuzberg. It was cheap. It was raffish. It was motley and profoundly heterogeneous. It was properly bohemian—not one of those alleged bohemian quarters where the moneyed professional classes had moved in and the only artists now in residence were the seriously rich ones. Rather, after this short inspection tour, it was clear that this was a neighborhood where outsiders had gathered, where it was possible to find some sort of foothold in an otherwise diffident and difficult world. During my long stroll through its spindly streets, I couldn’t help but think: this is one of those places that affords inexpensive shelter and
no questions asked
to all comers. You could land here and survive here for very little. You could leave ambition behind you and simply exist. It was an urban tabula rasa, upon which you could draw your own set of rules, your own
modus vivendi
for passing this time of your life.
Mariannenstrasse 5 was an intriguing building. It was twice the size of all the other apartment blocks on the street. And it appeared to have been condemned by the local planning board. The windows on the ground floor were boarded up. The front door looked as if someone had repeatedly tried to kick it in. The walls had been so oversprayed with graffiti that none of the slogans were legible. The building was next to a little grocery store—
ein Lebensmittelgeschäft—
that looked like it was gunning for a health code violation, as the fruit and vegetables on display had mold growing on them. There was a diminutive middle-aged Turkish man behind the counter (or, at least, I presumed he was Turkish) making a sandwich for a customer while simultaneously smoking a cigarette. Beyond this, at the end of the street, beyond a small park, loomed The Wall. From this distance I could see the tops of what looked like large Soviet-style apartment buildings only several hundred yards on the other side of this international barrier. That was the other thing about Kreuzberg. Its eastern frontiers completely abutted The Wall. It was everywhere you turned.
I pushed the bell marked Fitzsimons-Ross. No response. I pushed it again and waited thirty seconds. I pushed it a third time. Now, finally, a low buzz indicated that entrance through the front door was possible. I went inside. The entrance hall was cavernous and cold. As I stepped inside and the door closed behind me, I could see my breath fog up in front of me. The first thing that caught my attention was the walls. They were unpainted masonry, chipped and porous, and not exactly inspiring structural confidence. There was a cluster of battered postboxes next to a stairwell. The tiled floor beneath my feet followed the general theme of architectural detrition. The only illumination was a single fluorescent tube.
I headed up the stairs. On the first floor was a single door with a dollar sign crudely painted across its portals and a huge red x crisscrossing it all and the words
Kapitalismus ist Scheisse!
dabbed next to it. On the next floor the door was covered in barbed wire, with a small aperture made to access the lock and the door handle. Either the owner was sending a “Do Not Enter” signal to the outside world or he was a sadomasochist who liked to gamble with the possibility of torn flesh every time he entered his apartment. Either way I was relieved this wasn’t the portal to the Fitzsimons-Ross residence.
That was on the following floor. As I reached it I saw that its door was the same style of door as the others, only this one had been whitewashed in a way that allowed its old brown finish to underscore the artfully swabbed white paint. I could hear something loud and baroque—a
Brandenburg Concerto?—
emanating from within. I banged heavily on the door. It opened. I put my head inside and smelled the distinctive, medicinal aroma of paint. I was in a huge room. As with the front door the walls here were also whitewashed—the wide brushstrokes clearly visible everywhere. There were large industrial spotlights focused on all four walls. There were two oversized canvases: moody geometric studies of color—bright ultramarine blues shading into azure, cobalt, navy hues—adorning two walls. On the farthest wall, a good forty feet away, was a long table full of paints, splattered drop cloths and several canvases in varying states of development. But what struck me most forcibly about this vast atelier-style room—besides the evident talent of the painting on the wall—was its orderliness. Yes, it was a rough-hewn space—the floorboards bare and unsanded, the galley kitchen near the studio area this side of basic. The only furniture was a zinc café table, a couple of plain bentwood chairs, and a broken-down sofa over which had been thrown a white linen cloth. There was meager heat here—the space so large that it was, no doubt, prohibitively expensive to keep warm. Despite its austerity I took to it immediately. The artist in residence here was serious about his work and hadn’t given in to
La Bohème
squalor.
“So you let yourself in.”
The voice—that BBC intonation, raised to a loud bark over the blaring Bach—came from a staircase in a corner of the room. I turned around and found myself staring at a man around thirty-five, exceedingly tall, rail thin, with sallow skin, sunken cheekbones, terrible teeth, and electric blue eyes that matched the ultramarine in his paintings. He was dressed in a pair of faded jeans, a heavy black turtleneck sweater that did nothing to hide his evident emaciation, and a pair of expensive tan leather lace-up boots that were dappled with paint. But, again, it was his eyes that were so magnetic. They had the coldness of permafrost, offset by deep crescent moon rings. They hinted at a worldview both defiant and vulnerable, just as I sensed from the outset that his verbal haughtiness was also a veneer. Arrogance always masks doubt, after all.
“You let yourself in,” he shouted over the Bach.
“The door was open . . .”
“. . . so you simply decided to make yourself at home.”
“I’m not exactly brewing coffee in your kitchen.”
“Is that a hint? Your way of telling me you’d like a cup of something?”
“I wouldn’t say no. And if you wouldn’t mind turning down the music . . .”
“You object to Bach?”
“Hardly. But I find shouting over a
Brandenburg Concerto
. . .”
A slight curl of the lip from Alaistair Fitzsimons-Ross.
“A cultivated American. How surprising.”
“Not as surprising as an arrogant Brit,” I said.
He thought that one over for a moment, then went over to the record player in his studio area and lifted the tone arm off the record.
“I’m not a Brit. I’m Irish.”
“You don’t sound it.”
“There are a handful of us still left in the country who sound like this.”
“West Brits?”
“You are up on your Irish argot.”
“There are Americans who read and travel.”
“Do you all get together once a year in some restaurant and exchange stories?”
“Actually we meet in a diner. How about that coffee?”
“So rude of me. But I’m afraid all I drink is tea. Tea and vodka and red wine.”
“I’ll go with the tea.”
“But you do drink?”
“That I do.”
He moved toward the kitchen, picking up a rather battered and rusted kettle.
“That’s a relief. I had some of those strange compatriots of yours at my door the other day. They looked like smiling zombies in very ugly blue suits and had name badges on their lapels.”
“Mormons?”
“Precisely. I offered them a cup of tea and they looked at me as if I had asked to sleep with one of their sisters.”
“They have a thing against all things caffeinated. Tea, coffee, Coca-Cola. Cigarettes and booze are also a no-no.”
“So that explains why they went pale when I lit up. You don’t have a thing against fags?”
“By which you mean cigarettes?”