Behind the bar
was my favourite, winter fox barmaid, who still had a warm hat on. I munched on
little salty snack, in loads, shovelling them into my mouth, turning pages as
the head of my beer sunk lower in the
glass, the cigarette burnt down, and wondered where the hell I would live when
my German friend returned. I read the
narrator’s description of the eponymous hero’s room, in Hermann Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf.
‘A few volumes of Dostoyevsky bristled with
pencilled slips. On the big table among the books and papers there was often a
vase of flowers. There, too, a paint box, generally full of dust, reposed among
flakes of cigar ash and (to leave nothing out) sundry bottles of wine. There
was a straw-covered bottle, usually containing Italian red wine, which he
procured from a little shop in the neighbourhood; often, too, a bottle of
burgundy as well as Malaga; and a squat bottle of Cherry brandy was, as I saw,
nearly emptied in a very brief space – after which it disappeared in a corner
of the room, there to collect dust without further diminution of its contents … all these signs of a life
full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the
same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust.’
I imagine a life in that book,
with my bottle of Burgundy as well as Malaga and scattered about my beautiful
sun-drenched flat there would be signs of a life full of intellectual
curiosity. A few evenings before I had gone to visit the flat in Marzahn, and
found none of this there. On my way over I had thought about what I might find
there. ‘This is flat is too big for me’, she had said in her advert. How big
was it? And how long had she been rattling around inside it alone? Had there
been other people living there with her before? And if so, were they now? I
imagined her to be a mature student working hard in Berlin, indifferent to life
inside The Ring. She would study something like science or maths, or if a
humanity, she would do so as if it were science or maths. Comer by comer, neat
steps of her argument ping-ponging their way down the page. She would never
take a sip of Guinness with Joyce, and would think that Shakespeare on stage
was a distraction from what was on page. She dreamed of being a lexicographeror
or a teacher in a quiet school. She wouldn’t care about where she lived so long
as it was affordable and functional. The neighbours wouldn’t bother her because
she was quiet, and she wouldn’t think on them at all. It was a riddle she rarely
dwelt upon, as why it happened to be that they were there, and she was there too,
so close. But a riddle nonetheless, and when she occasionally did dwell upon
it, she found it a preposterousness that they shared the same view, the same
bricks, perhaps even some of the same thoughts. She was confounded, and thanked
God for walls.
When
I found the building a man came out of with a small terrier. He looked at me
blankly and walked on a few steps then stopping and rummaging through his
pockets turned to me and asked, ‘hast du
Feur?’ I didn’t understand him but the unlit cigarette hanging from his
course lips were enough of a clue. He lit his cigarette, returned the lighter and
thanked me. I thanked him and feeling cheered rang the buzzer.
‘Hi, come up!’
she sounded shrill and excitable. I clambered to the fifth floor and still
hadn’t reached her but looking up I saw a face and shoulders bending over the
banister above. She was younger than I
had expected, probably about my age, bespectacled with crimson hair. When I
reached her she smiled a little awkwardly and ushered me through the door. As I
clambered past what I imagined were bin bags, heaps of clothes and tilting
pieces of furniture, she called from behind me,
‘I am sorry there is smoke but my Canadian friend is here.’ I tumbled
over something in the darkness and hit my knee on the floor. She cried out and
putting a tentative hand on my back, apologised as I got up and guided me
through a door into a light and smoky sitting room. To my right was an open
arched doorway and to my left an L-shaped leather sofa with a blonde boy
cross-legged upon it who smiled up at me with the same uncertainty that she had.
There was stuff everywhere.
The boy shook my
hand and introduced himself. I wasn’t quite sure, what he had said, where he
was from, and if this was the Canadian who I was to blame for all the smoke. As
I sat down on the sofa he got up and left through the door we had just
entered from and the girl took his place, and curling her legs under herself dragged
a laptop onto her lap.
‘We are looking
at the election results,’ she told me. ‘All the Nazis are in this area here. Fucking
fascists. Oh! You want a beer?’
She
got up to grab me one from the small kitchen which the arched doorway lead to. I
took off my glasses and looked around the sitting room. Through the smoke, the
place smelt of some kind of animal. There were bottles and papers, and piles of
clothes on the floor, on every surface, and dripping from two large bookshelves.
The boy came back into the sitting room, and the girl returned with my beer and
they joined me on the sofa, leaning together over the laptop, their foreheads
almost touching. They spoke in German again in front of the screen, and then
she turned to me again:
‘Do you smoke?’
she asked. I assented and they gave a little cheer and a gleeful glance at each
other, and she took out a cigarette. And I took out my tobacco. The girl now
began speaking very fast, both in German to him and in English to me, but I
couldn’t make out much of what she was saying in either language.
‘I am sorry my
English is very bad now. It has been so long. Not since Henri has been speaking German …’ And as if to prove
the point he began sparking away in German to her and they occasionally broke
into peals of laughter.
She
fell sober looking at the screen again. ‘Yeah this is a very Nazi area …’
‘Really?’
‘O
we must have a tour!’
I
stood up with her and turning around I saw a cage and in it a big white rabbit.
‘You
have a rabbit!’
‘Three
actually!’ and she took me to the balcony and showed me a large cage. ‘Inside
is Mila,’ she said, introducing me to the white one. ‘And the junges are Calimero and their son
Bumblebee. We keep them separate because she always attacks Bumblebee.’ From
the depths of the great hutch two rabbits hopped forward, one jet black with
pointed ears who looked wild and impressive next to the chubbier brown one,
that lolloped towards us, his ears drooping. I bent down to Mila and poked my finger
through the cage. The girl smiled at my
excitement, and said. ‘That is so cool! You are the first person who has come
here and liked that there are rabbits!’
The tour
continued to the two bedrooms that were off the corridor and I had entered in
on, a bathroom next to them and then a spare room situated in the opposite
corner of the living room to the kitchen. Each room was as cluttered as the
living room, especially the spare room which looked like a dumping ground for all
laundry and rabbit paraphernalia. I couldn’t initially make out the toilet and
sink in the bathroom, for books and towels and boxes of toilet roll tubes.
The girl had
kept up a heavy flow of chatter as she took me around the flat and didn’t stop
as we joined Henri on the sofa. In a momentary pause he asked me if I wanted
another beer, and jumped up to get me one. They offered me a wrinkled
clementine from a bowl on the coffee table in front of them. As I ate the sour
fruit, the peel sticky from spilt alcohol, she said she wanted to show me the
television shows from which the cartoons Mila and Calimero were named after. Bumblebee
was from Transformers. The Canadian looked at her with an amused expression,
and occasionally at me, cautiously. Not once did either of them ask me any questions.
When I had left she said to me again at the
door, ‘I am sorry I speak so much I get so nervous when people come here and we
have had some really weird people coming here. And most people don’t turn up at
all so I am really glad that you came. No one like Mila and so it is so great
that you love rabbits so much. Henri didn’t like them at first either but now
he is always liking them and feeding them peanuts and even Calimero comes up
and sits with him on the sofa.’ And then
she had said, ’I think it would be nice if you lived here. I think it would be cool if you moved in.’
That night I
dreamed off living with her in Marzahn. The white rabbit in the corner sprung,
and we drank and kept drinking, and the ash flew about us, and Mila, and Calimero,
and Bumblebee came about us, and not just them, but their namesakes as well;
the little Anime volleyball player with big, astonished, mindless eyes. She
screeched in her squeaky continuous English, and he now screeched with her, as
we danced with stuff everywhere, about us. I took off my shirt, and my glasses
were stepped upon . None of it mattered as with this rent I could buy new ones,
and the rabbits leapt, and we kept drinking, and the Nazis outside waved their
flags, and the old man next door with his terrier, began playing the piano as his dog barked along in tune.
The next day I
was to meet Ollie, the French teacher who had also got back to me about the
room in his flat. On my way to meet him I suddenly realised that I couldn’t
remember if Ollie actually was his name, or whether the one I was meeting was Pete.
Was it perhaps the same person? Or were there two, both language teachers? Hovering
about the statue he had designated we meet at I felt a presence behind me and
turning saw a pale looking man, young with limp blond hair, and glasses. He had
a scarf wrapped tightly round his neck, and looked harassed, and a little
miserable.
‘Bertie?
Shall we?’
‘Yes!’
I said, and headed towards the stairs which lead down to a smart looking café.
‘No,
actually, I don’t have much time. I thought we could speak here.’ And he
indicated towards two hard chairs that sat in the corner of the lobby.
‘Of
course,’ I said, and he sat opposite me, letting out a sigh. He had weary,
faint, blue eyes that were slightly opaque like thin clouds, and a pimpled damp
forehead. This furrowed an unfurrowed, into and out of a resigned, pitiful
frown. He was French, but spoke English perfectly, and lacked any of the
excitement or colourings one would presume of a typical Frenchman. He questioned
me on my history and on my motives to moving to Berlin, which I don’t think I told
very well. He was unable to understand the concept of the Pub Crawl. I tried to
explain it to him clearly, returning to the beginning without stopping when his
expression refused to clear, using different words, and coming at it from different
angles. After my third attempt he said, looking pain-stricken, ‘Excuse me, one
more time please …’
He
told me about the various stipulations that he was compelled to put upon any
new tenant, and a little about the house. He told me of the horror he had had
to go through with his last flatmate – ‘An Australian’
– and mentioned Pablo his current
flatmate, saying his name flat like it was just a sound, a label of something
that he had no inclination to speak more of. He didn’t smile but once I managed
to coax out of him a dry chuckle and a resurgent sparkle fired up through the
fog in his eyes. I didn’t think he was convinced with me, but at the end of our
meeting invited me to come see the house the next day.
It
was a wet walk to his house from my friends. It was in Neukölln, though not
nearly as far out as Marzahn. It was a depressing, empty area. As I walked
further towards the teacher’s house and I realised that I hadn’t expected it to
be any different. ‘No cafes or bars nearby, I’m afraid,’ he had said to me the
day before. ‘But there is a Lidl.’ It was residential and reminded me of Neighbours but here no-one was good
friends. No-one even new each other. As the ugly street stretched out ahead of
me I envisaged the damp, depressing life I might lead here.
I would leave
the house each morning with an umbrella. Ollie would be awake when I woke, and
so would Pete, and both would be in the kitchen and would greet me with a ‘good
morning’ and return to their own little occupations: Ollie to the most boring
pages of the Berlin newspapers, Pete to wiping the counter, collecting the moist
crumbs in to his palm. They were silent and gave each other no more attention
than they granted me. But they were united in their silence. Their silence
against me and the world that they, ploughed through and resented. I asked if I
could have the half grapefruit that was in the fridge. They nodded, after a
pause, and watched me as I put it on a plate and began to eat it, the surface
crusty, and flesh dry.
And
where was Pablo? Where was the third flatmate? Pete raised his eyes, and Ollie
did the same on the table. And they asked me to sit down and they told that
Pablo was out late again last night and had come crashing home in the early
hours of the morning. Something has to be done, they said. It was decided.
But could they
put themselves through the stress of finding another flatmate?
Each
shuddered with the idea of it. Pete said something to Ollie in another language
and his hairy eyebrows hopped in accent. They looked at me as if I were one of
their students who bored them by incorporating the unwavering proof that there
really wasn’t anything in the world getting excited about. At least the world
of grammar and sums could provide a little meaning, provide them with a little
satisfaction, and give the days at least the semblance of meaning …
My
feet were wet when I arrived at the house. He looked even more exhausted when
he greeted me at the door, and even older. Through our second interview, at a
clear kitchen table he kept sighing even more, rubbing his forehead and looking
hopelessly at me. ‘I am sorry, I have been interviewing people all morning.
Remind me again, what is it you do in Berlin?’
‘Well
you see Ollie- shit, Pete? sorry, it’s the emails they’ve got me …’
He
waved his hand as if he had expected nothing else. ‘It’s Bertie isn’t it? I am
saying it right? It is a strange name. Not common in England?’
‘More
common in Germany,’ I said. ‘Or at least it used to be. ‘
‘Maybe,’
he said. ‘Bertie Bertie Bertie Bertie.’
And that was it.
I thought, I would never know Pete from Ollie. And he would accept it in a resigned,
unsurprised sigh. And he would rub his brow again, and despair stoically,
still.
And
that afternoon I went to the third flat in Wedding, to meet two sociology
students from Bayern. Wedding reminded me of Shepherd’s Bush. I saw few bars
and cafés here, but there was undoubtedly life going on which hadn’t been the
case at the last two places. Reaching the right building I walked through an
arched doorway into a quant Hinterhoff
and up pretty stairs into a white and floral flat. The two girls looked at me
slightly warily as they stood in the door frame, as if they were children, home
alone and opening the door to their new babysitter. They welcome me to a table
where flowers stood, as well as biscuits a pot of tea, a jug of cool water and
a pot of coffee. They showed me to what would be my room, which was a beautiful
white box, with flowers on the walls, clean as a pin, empty, and tidy. They
looked at it proudly, and at me, expectantly. It was fresh, and unspoilt, and I
imagined my dad’s army bag sullying it, slouched in the corner with its contents
hanging out.
Back at the
table they offered me some homemade lemonade which was sickeningly sweet. The bespectacled
one who seemed to speak for both of them drank a clear tea, and a lot of it,
while the other one, her figure short and thick like her hair, sat in the
corner, cracking nuts in her hands. We spoke for a bit about vegan markets, and
reading, and relaxed Sundays. They told me all the financial details and about
the kitty for vegan daily food and toilet rolls. And that was it. There was
nothing. Nothing at all. It was as bare, and as pretty, as frozen as the empty
room.
I wasn’t to
receive any more offers.
Bertie Digby Alexander
Berlin 2014
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