Ich bin Fremd hier #16

In my flat in Marzahn I slept on a sofa-bed which I had believed to be just a sofa for the first few months of my time there. The new blind that Red had found for me and proudly presented on my first evening there, fell down in a tired heap the first week and stubbornly resisted going back up. The moon – perhaps shinning off the Platenbauten – flooded through the window at night and at weekends I would wake up to my room drenched in sunlight. The window was always open, both to help my clothes dry on the apparatus that took up almost the entire floor space of my room, and to combat the smoke that hung in clouds in the living room. Little noise came through the window, as the area was so quiet, but Milla the rabbit made up for this by crashing about her cage in the night when she had been let out to roam the flat in the evening. I would lie fuming, trying to fall asleep before springing naked from bed and storming out of the room to confront her. By the time I got to her cage she would be sitting in the corner she always sat at, not making a move or a sound, turning to look up at me with a reproachful expression as if I was the one suddenly disturbing her sleep. We got on better in the mornings when I emerged from my room and she hopped to the front corner of her cage and tried to push her funny little twitching nose out between the bars. Red said she liked me because I was a man, and as with her past male flatmates, she wouldn’t poo on the floor if they were around. This wasn’t quite as true as I would have wished, but I certainly got on better with the rabbit than Smokie. Milla took an instant dislike to my French flatmate and would habitually creep up to her and pee at her feet if she was in one place for long enough.

I was fast approaching Day 50 in Berlin and it was much on my mind. It hadn’t been that long before that I didn’t think I would make Day 30. Nothing to get too excited about I told myself – that would come at Day 100 – but a landmark nonetheless. I was looking forward to Christmas more than anything else. Red was often raging about all the festive songs she had heard that day and the little chocolate Santas she had seen. She hated Christmas creeping in autumn, like a lot of us, but was irregular in that she would say this while seasoning a great vat of Glühwein, which she told us was the only permitted exception. She would force mugs of the sweet stuff – without cinnamon she insisted, that was only for Christmas – upon Smokie and I and we settled down together to watch an episode of Buffy die Vampire Jagerin while Red rolled up another joint.

I was very happy with the two girls and thought I had been lucky to end up in a flat with them. The fact that both Smokie and I had moved in at the same time, and so the three of us were all equally getting to know each other, made the process easier than it would have been I they had both been there and been close when I arrived. Red was certainly the Mutti, but in the early weeks I saw much less of her than Smokie. They were both usually asleep before I left for my language course in the week, but when I came back early from the Pub Crawl or on an evening off Smokie was usually up. Red would most often be in her room, sick, sleeping or having sex, smoking a spliff whatever undoubtedly. 

I spoke with Smokie in a mixture of all three languages, from German to French to English, and tried to piece together some form of understanding. Usually I would start in German, filling in the gaps of my vocabulary with French words. However both my German sentence structure and my French accent were so poor, that her face remained in a crumpled quizzical expression, until I shamefacedly resorted to the English. She would then go through the process again, speaking good German and even better French, both largely incomprehensible to me, and then also resort to English, which was as bad as most French people’s English, but much better than either my German or French. Somehow we managed to get by and in time, the disdained English began to crop up less and less in our conversations.  

We would sit together long evenings drinking wine together and planning a cheese day and a trip to Potsdam, neither of which ended up happening. Red would stumble in from her room now and then through a cloud of marijuana, spluttering out a cough and wearing only her knickers and a light t-shirt, fumbling in the kitchen to make some tea and up turning the vegetable shelf in the fridge for Milla to feast on.  

I remember laughing a lot with Smokie but, as is common, can’t remember what we were laughing at. Our level of understanding was so patchy I can’t imagine many of the jokes we laughed at being that sophisticated, or at least, if they were, they were likely different jokes, and though laughing at the same time we were really amused by our own fancies and images that the other was utterly unaware of. I do remember on one occasion I was attempting to speak French, and I mistakenly used  ‘chou fleur’ as a term of affection in French. This caused an unforgettable reaction in Smokie who, like a little party cracker had gone off in her chest, seemed to bounce up from the sofa with all of her features exagerated. She had been placing a cigarette to her lips the moment I had said ‘chou fleur’ and therefore as she bounced up from the sofa the cigarette seemed to leap on its accord, as if in a desperate dash for freedom, out of her mouth and towards the table. Her eyebrows seemed have a similar idea, rising so high up her face that they were like those erratic cartoon eyebrows that hang suspended over an individual’s head, with apparently nothing attaching them to the brow at all. Indeed, this image of Smokie was so amusing, if lasting only for a moment, that I was soon in as great hysterics as she was. Though I don’t know if I had made such a funny portrait. Eventually she settled into snort and snuffles and lit another cigarette. Speaking in such a mess of misunderstanding was actually completely alright, not done enough perhaps, and much safer than understanding, and wherever that might pose to take you.

I had been so focused upon the end of summer and the approaching Siberian winter that I had completely forgotten autumn and was therefore surprised when Berlin suddenly bloomed into ruby and gold. The trees on my walk to and from Mehrower Allee passed the green box school was now canopied with trees bearing leaves crisped into gold and were one by one beginning to fall at my feet. Schlesisches Tor was particularly spectacular, especially from the view of the U1 trundling over the Spree from Warschauer Straße. Looking down upon the bunched trees it looked like a scene from the fall in New England, and each time I would crane my neck to try and spot the statue of the man with his dog in the middle like a merry early morning walker.

These leaves, reminded me and more of home. I had realised that I wouldn’t be able to fly back home in December for Christmas. Erik was giving me less and less shifts at the Irish Pub and for some reason I seemed to be getting less money in tips as well. Buying the much needed new winter jacket and snow boots looked like it would be tricky enough. So thoughts of home were never far from my mind, and they were spurred on by the autumn trees. I remembered frantically collecting conquers through the fallen leaves, kicking clumps of brown leaves around the playground at school, and watching our terrier frolic in them on walks in the countryside. One particular memory that was stirred up was one of getting separated from my mother and sisters when walking in the arboretum in Gloucestershire. I can’t actually remember being apart from them, but I do recall my sisters discussing what would have happened if I had never been found, on the journey home.

‘Well we would have got all his presents’, one said.

‘No,’ the other objected. ‘They would have been stored in his room.  Or he would have simply stopped getting them.’

I wonder what will happen to my presents this year, I thought mournfully after another long shift at the Irish Pub. Later finding myself once again reading damp spy literature in Schwarzes Café, these words from Joseph Kanon’s novel The Good German took on a certain significance:

‘Jake hadn’t seen football in years, and now, unexpectedly, the sound on the field took him back to sunny afternoon when nothing mattered except the next ten yards and who you might be seeing after the game … it was the homesickness of an exile – what you missed was your own youth, not a place … He shifted in his seat, embarrassed by his own nostalgia … yet there it was, the unexpected longing, triggered by a football game. Who he was, as inescapable and permanent as a birthmark.’[1]

But most of the time the beauty of Berlin in autumn was enough to ward off yearnings for home. One of the most beautiful corners of the city that I stumbled upon was one morning was the canal at Kottbusser Brücke in Kreuzberg. I found myself here one morning before the language school, in smarter trousers, shoes and shirt than I had worn since coming to Berlin. A couple of weeks before I had received a response to an internship application I had sent off in the second hostel, a tip off from Mo. A cast-off of his actually, as he would habitually remind me in the future when asking how it was going. The whole thing looked a little too techy for me and the pay wasn’t great. However, with only two shifts a week at the Irish Pub, the pay was better, and, I thought it would be short-sighted and unadventurous not to go along to the interview.

Despite the good memories of the second hostel, I hadn’t warmed to Kottbusser Tor which I found particularly ugly and dirty – even for Berlin standards – and held none of the charm that could be found round the corner at Oranienstraße or even down the tracks at Görlitzer Bahnhof. Yet just a tree minute walk down Kottbusser Damm you come to the bridge over the canal. I hadn’t been down this road since handing out CVs during my first week in the city. Arriving 30 minutes early for my interview I bought a coffee and wandered East along the Uffer, on the Kotti side of the canal. The company I was interviewing for was located in one of the big buildings looking over the water. Having spotted its sign and the words ‘Hof 1, Etage 2’, I assured myself that I wouldn’t have any problems finding it, and carried on wandering.   

There were a couple of willow trees hanging over the water by the bridge, caricatures of themselves, and reminding me of the ones that stand at Schlesisches Tor on the banks of the Spree. On the water there was about fifteen swans, placidly making their way up and down the canal, looking about them with that slight aura of arrogance, that of a smug but slightly defect toff, that I believe is innate to swans. The bushes I walked passed rustled and tweeted as little worker sparrows scrambled up about inside them scavenging for crumbs and grubs.

Discarding my empty coffee cup I returned to the building the office was in, and told myself to get serious, which I really wasn’t feeling. To the right of me as I walked into the Hof was a little café called ‘Concierge Coffee.’ The name I assume is derived from the little hole in the wall which looks into the café by the till and coffee machine, where a tall and spindly barista stands, flat brown hair swept over to one side of his face and a great bushy moustache. He didn’t smile as I passed by, but I peered through the hole nonetheless and saw the small interior of a café, brick walls and one little wooden bench. Small and functional it was classic a Berlin café.  I was to later to find out that ‘Concierge Coffee’ is regarded as one of the best ‘third wave’ café’s in Berlin and the unsmiling moustached gent a big name in the coffee circles of Berlin. 

Into the first Hinterhof I turned right and saw the plaque of the company once again next to an open doorway into one of the buildings. Outside of which stood a light blue vesper and next to it an Oldtimer. All very European I thought to myself, smiling. There was a rickety old metal cage lift next to the staircase that looked like it belonged in a warehouse or on an oil rig. It was cold and bare and dark on the stare well, and it didn’t feel like I had gone ‘inside’ at all. It looked to me like it was all deserted. Up to the second floor I pushed the doorbell and a tingling sound came out and with a buzz I entered the office that was flooded all the light that the stairwell was deprived of.  I was greeted by a young girl behind a little reception directly opposite the door. A glass conference room was to my right, and in front, beyond reception spread out on the polished wooden floorboards and within the while walls, were about 100 desks, hosting computer and worker. Apart from the tapping of keyboards, the office was almost silent, which made a contrast with the bright light and appearance of action about me.

I was led by the friendly receptionist into a small side room. No one turned our way as we passed which I found odd. She then left to grab me a coffee. The room I was in was bare, no doodles, no scratches no papers, not even pictures – it was clean, and cool – functional lack of clutter, it was a mac of a room, an iRoom, good-looking enough to lick – beautiful and expensive and self-consciously cool, and yet would never feel the butt of a cigarettes, the touch of spilt liquor or hear sounds other than those of work. The receptionist returned with my coffee and to my surprise began interviewing me herself. I floundered from the offset, realising with a jolt that I actually didn’t have a clue what the company did, and seeing that the only card I had to play was ‘ignorant but keen’  which I did, gushingly.

I left the interview almost certain that I hadn’t secured the position, but oddly satisfied with the experience nonetheless. It had been quite cool to see inside one of these buildings that appear to be nothing on the outside, but within hold the heart of the Berlin start-up tech scene, fast, ambitious, growing. And the internship had brought me to this part of town. I had a while before I had to go and join Maya, Marco and Martial at the language school and so deigned to take a wander about.

Following Kottbusser Damm down, away from Kottbusser Tor, I wandered. This street is peppered on either side with kebab joints, Späties, Turkish tailors and costume shops with mannequins of children, dressed up like prince and princesses, shining hair and made-up purple eyes. It is bustling for Berlin, but not like that of London. People aren’t rushing to get anywhere, people are just out an about. Women in burkas pushing prams, others with their bikes; old and fat men sitting outside the kebab, Späties and cafés drinking tea and smoking.

On Tuesdays and Fridays, I was to discover, there is a market that stretches along the canal to the left if walking away from Kotti, on the other side of the canal from the building I had been interviewed in. Cheap vegetables and fruit can be bought here (the further in you venture, the cheaper they are) and also stalls selling vegetarian wraps, falafel, baklava and gozlemes.  At the end of the market it becomes less Turkish and more hipster. Here you can find ice cream, fresh fruit juice and coffee. Here there is also a little platform like pontoon but attached to the bank and hanging over the river. When the weather is nice people gather to smoke and drink and eat their snacks and there is a busker who plays.

Following this road down you can turn right into the little streets of Kreuzberg which all look the same to me, and I frequently get lost along. There was building works going on, so I walked back to Kottbusser Damm and walked down to Schönleinstraße U-Bahn station. Crossing the road here and turning right of Kottbusser Damm I came across quitter streets such as Graefestraße which looked as fantastic as Schlesisches in autumn. Here are gourmet pubs and cafes that sell cocktails and play retro electro and in between the buildings and streets are little tarmac sport courts with high fences were Turkish men and boys are often playing football. The noise from Kottbusser Damm can barely be heard here.

From this point, if I chose, I could walk further into West Kreuzberg towards Gneisenaustraße where the quirky bookshop Another Country is, further on to Mehringdamm, and Platz der Luftrbrücker and the English Theatre Berlin, and just up from the Tempelhofer Feld. Alternatively I could walk south towards Neukölln, the junction of the two districts in my mind meets at Hermannplatz. While many most love Kotti and scorn Hermannplatz I am the opposite. Banks and gyms and bowling alleys ring the square (whereas bars hostels and kebab joints ring Kotti) but the place is more open. The two dancing golden figures – they look like elves, or pixies of some sort - rising from the top like a juvenile nelson’s column, always look towards hope and joy and life. Walking straight through Hermannplatz and onto Hermannstraße we would venture deeper in Neukölln, noticeable when graveyards begin to stretch out on either side of you. Towards the end of this you would come to Emser Straße where Mario and my friend lived.

            I had no idea of this then though. As I wandered back through ‘Kreuzkölln’ to catch my train to the Alexanderplatz and the language course a swarm of the little sparrows swept up in front of me, across the road in a fluttering blanket, and then up into the sky, over the other side of the bridge and across the water. I thought: would be a great place to live and it would be fine to work around here. Perhaps in summer I will find a place to live around here.

             But I had to enjoy autumn first, while it was lasted. The city was changing again. Soon I would reach Day 100, and as more tables began to be brought inside and big coats aired once more, in more houses than mine Glühwein would be bubbling in vats across the city.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

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[1] The Good German, Joseph Kanon, p147

Ich bin Fremd hier #15

When I visited the flat in Marzahn that first time, Henri the Canadian had told me that he didn’t have job in Berlin but went to a language school. He took the course for free, as by payment he would put up posters for the school around the city. He had showed me one of them that evening – a colourful sheet of A4 with a picture of two studious ladies looking at each other aghast upon a sofa - and said casually that the school would be searching for someone new when he left. What with rabbits and anime cartoons the conversation quickly moved on and I forgot about it. However Red brought the subject up again when I had moved in and told me that before Henri had left he had mentioned to the people at the school that I might pop by. Suddenly the idea of starting a German course gripped me. I had never considered going to language school before, planning to simply boycott lessons and grammar and just learn German by immersing myself in the country. But in a city where everyone speaks English even for the most diligent the likelihood of the success of by osmosis is slim. In fact, my German seemed to have stalled since I had arrived. I thought that if I could take on Henri’s old position and receive the language lessons for free, I could take the classes in the morning, put up posters for them in the afternoon and then work on the Pub Crawl or at the Irish Pub in the evening.

Henri had already been gone a week when Red mentioned it to me again so I rushed to Alexanderplatz fearing that they might have already found someone to replace him. The school was on one floor of a large building just off Alexanderplatz.  I was directed in the right direction by a skeletal and frosty receptionist and followed arrows to the office up a couple of flights of stairs and down a long corridor. As I approached a black tangle of fur came running out of one of the rooms and raced towards me barking. It leapt up at me and when I bent down to greet it bathed my face in little wet licks. Looking in to its face – if you could really cool it that – I could just make out two shimmering eyes beneath the curls, and then the little pink tongue that it presently put to work again. A call of ‘Maya!’ came from down the corridor and the two of us trotted down the rest of the corridor to the doorway from which the voice had sounded.

This was the school’s office I saw and here I found two women sitting behind desks heavily laden with packages and papers and coffee mugs. The office was small and full of files and books and in front of the two desks to my right was a little sofa and to my left a table where stood a great vat of coffee. One of the women in front of me was tall and thin with blonde hair down to her shoulder and looked like a younger version of Glenn Close. The other was short and plump with rosy cheeks and eyes as bright as the little dog. Both looked up at me however with tired and slightly weary faces.  Maya rushed under their desks to a little basket in the back of the room where she sat, looking at me between the two women, her little tail still wagging.

I told them that I was Bertie and instantly their faces moulded like shifting theatre masks and they let out a collective shriek that roused Maya from a basket once more to join their chorus with her own shrill barks. I smiled a little awkwardly until they presently told me that they had been avidly expecting me since Henri had spoken to them and had been growing concerned that I wouldn’t turn up.  ‘We didn’t think we’d find anyone again,’ the cubby one said in her thick German accent, coming to standing next to me. ‘But here you are!’ they let out a cheer and a round of applause again and, feeling a little awkward just standing there I joined their celebrations, but this felt even more ridiculous so I presently stopped.  

At this point a third woman entered the office behind me and I was spun around and introduced as ‘the new Henri!’ and the jumping and clapping was given increased energy by the new addition to the little party.  In a flurry of excitement and textbooks and yapping over the next three minutes all the particulars of this new partnership were laid out. I was to start the course the next week at the beginning of October. I could take a quick test to assess my level and then they would deal with the rest.  I would work for them roughly 15 hours a week, putting up their posters on traffic lights and street lights around the city in certain key area. They confirmed that this would be my payment. I was soon as enthusiastic as they were and left the school feeling elated. It was only when passing the skeletal receptionist again that I realised that the only name of theirs I had learnt was that of the little dog Maya.  

I shortly new their names, and over the next few months studying at and working for the language school I came to see myself more and more as ‘the new Henri.’ It was a funny feeling, as I was not only doing his old job but also living in his old flat. He was gay, like myself, and had arrived in Berlin almost exactly a year before me. Around the city I went replacing the tattered posters he had undoubtedly placed a few months before, and looking up at the walls during lessons, I would spot pieces of his work proudly hanging there.  Red would constantly tell me fantastic anecdotes from the time that she and Henri lived together and, secretly, I came a little obsessed with the blonde Canadian that I had only meet so briefly that one evening, and yet whose marks and echoes of Berlin surrounded me, both at home and in the city.  How did he live his life here in Berlin? How was it different to mine? In what ways was it better? And how would my life pan out after, I too left Berlin, and who would then follow in my footsteps …?

The language school began well. I was in a class of about ten people, all of us in our twenties, and a pretty broad mix of nationalities. Our teacher was a proud lion of a man called Martell. I would guess that he was in his mid-thirties, with a silvering neat beard, strong jaw and big brown eyes. He was tall and muscled, and if he hadn’t taken such obvious pride and in his work, teaching would have seen like a mismatched career for him. Yet he took a lot of pride, and did his job so well that you left each lesson mourning the fact that all the teachers of our childhood weren’t off his calibre and how better we would have grown up to be if they had been. Martell drew grammar tables on the white boards (of which about six were hanging on the various walls) in a small neat hand, as fine and précised as the flashcards and he handed out to us with the dative prepositions on. He delivered his jokes with the poise of a Shakespearean actor, and only the slight twitch at the corners of his mouth hinted that he was aware of his own humour. He only ever spoke German to us in slow, deliberate base tone. When marking at grammatical point for which he needed an English example, he would utter the world with disdain, as if saying the word ‘choo choo’ or ‘choki’ for the benefit of a child. Indeed, whenever he did speak English, he appeared smaller and younger than he did otherwise, so we soon too came to disdain the language when in the classroom.  

I enjoyed the lessons very much and became friendly with a fantastically rude Frenchman called Martian, who worked in a bank in Budapest and a glorious Australian homeopath. Whenever Martian was making furious phone calls to his estate agent back home, or the Australian wasn’t rolling on the floor with Maya, the three of us would sit and drink coffee in the Pause looking at the maps of Germany and share stories.

One day on the way to language course, I suddenly felt that I belonged in Berlin. Not in terms of a lifetime or as an Echter Berliner, but in terms of, I have a class to go to, therefore I am in Berlin, and need to get off at this stop. It was a small but fantastical little feeling, a recognition of doing and being in a city, rather than simply wafting through. And it was funny that that feeling was provoked not by the flat or the Irish Pub, but by that funny little language school. Berlin seemed to be working for me, and reading the following words in David Downing’s Zoo Station, I felt, whether justifiably or not, that I could relate to them:

‘Home? No. I like it here. Lots of girls – they can’t do enough for you. And I’ve got my own property. What have I got in London? Five quid and a thank you very much? There’s nothing in London. You’ve got all the opportunity in the world right here.’

Even the Irish Pub I was beginning to enjoy. Over the next couple of weeks I was lucky enough to avoid working with Johnny again. Instead I was partnered with an assortment of others working there: the gloomy Merle; a beautiful boy from Afghanistan whose name I could never remember and my mumblings he could never understand; there was a hairy lad from Liverpool who had followed his girlfriend to Berlin, a ‘refugee of love’; and a thin, bespectacled young man from Serbia. I found a while after having first worked with this last one, that he was actually a supervisor at the Pub.  This evidently didn’t deter him from turning at up work baked and singing to himself. He would make cocktails at a leisurely pace, expertly and with a camp nonchalance, then subsequently forget who they for and so set them behind the bar for us to enjoy.

New employees were regularly flooding into the pub, which is sure fire way to make any slightly less new person feel established and not quite so green. To my surprise, one evening I saw the depressed Lucie from the Pub Crawl turn up. She seemed a lot more cheerful now, actually smiling and telling me to send her best to Garth.  There was a Swedish girl called Kaijer, with coffee-coloured skin and bouncing black curls, who began working the same time as Lucie. She was vivacious and chatty and had so much confidence that I thought she had been there a lot longer than me the first time when I first saw her. Whereas every little mistake and challenge that I had come across on my first shifts had sent me into a panic she would  brush of the drinks she spilled and orders she got wrong by lifting her eyebrows and a letting out a sharp laugh.   

One evening Kaijer and I were sent home early together and I took her to Schwarzes Café. Out on the little balcony we sat and smoked and shivered with two gruff old men. They were both Berliners, and in time, began to relate to us their memories of the fall of the wall, during which one of them began to cry. Somehow, the conversations soon moved on to Kaijer. They loved her and she pandered to them, while they ignored me, and she kept squeezing my leg. The men kept remarking how good her German was which I was sure was not particularly better than my own. There was a little awkward moment when she was going to get me my next drink, not wanting another for herself. The however offered to buy it, thinking it was for her. When the wine arrived and she promptly gave it to me, I was very aware of the scowls that she was oblivious to.

We left Schwarzes a little drunk and outside she offered for me to stay at hers, rather than taking the train across the city back to Marzahn. I declined and then after a deep breath she said: ‘Look, I’m really horny tonight and want some sex. Do you want to come back to mine to fuck?’ She was a little shocked when I said no, and then a little embarrassed when I told her why. I tried to ease her awkwardness and we managed to find a common love for cheese and wine and Harry Potter. We made plans to arrange a Harry Potter cheese night and parted a little stiffly at Zoo Station.

More than Kaiser’s proposition, it was the people on the balcony who stuck with me that night, for they were just a couple of the odd and eccentric characters I was to bump into out on that balcony. It was tiny, big enough for only two chairs, and from inside you could never see if someone was there or not. This meant that each time you went for a smoke you would be taking a risk regarding who you were to be squeezed up against. 

One young couple I met out on the balcony stick in my mind. The boy had a large fringe that stood up straight like a wave from his forehead. He didn’t speak at all when I was there, and looked a more than a little irritated by the chattiness of his companion, and sneered sceptically at anything I said. She was a beautiful black girl, with long hair and big earrings. She spoke perfect English with a stilted American accent. She told me she was half German and half American and though she had been to the States a lot had always lived in Berlin. She told me that Charlottenburg was the place to be. I had never heard this before, and though I loved some little bits of it that I had found, didn’t believe her. She cackled with a laughter when I told her that I would like to live in Neukölln, and her companions scorn grew into a grimace, though at this point I wasn’t sure if it was directed at me or her.

‘But what about all the Turkish?’ she demanded of me. ‘There is nothing worth doing in N Neukölln.’ I didn’t think it was worth objecting. She has a ragged, frantic look in her eyes, which was unnerving, and I never knew from one moment to the next whether she would screech with laughter again and smile at me or attack.

When I had finished my second cigarette with them out on the balcony I was glad to get away. She offered for me to sit on her lap with her but I declined. They stayed out in the cold for a long time and eventually left an hour or so later. ‘Have fun in Neukölln’ she drawled as the passed my table. A fat woman took their place. When I went for my next cigarette I found that she was German and looked like she really ought to be home cooking or sewing, not hanging out at Schwarzes. I imagine she was about fifty or so, with charcoal damp hair over a glowing face. She had bulbous rosy cheeks and little black pebble eyes that twinkled. I spoke to her in a faulty German and when I lived she smiled broadly and wished me the best of luck in Berlin.

I was working on the Pub Crawl about two nights a week at this point. The whole thing had got a little drastic and there were many nights when I was the only promoter. Each day Garth relayed new schemes that the Irish boss had concocted, and told me in no uncertain terms why each of them was doomed to fail. Along with the promoters, the beautiful Hanns, Garth’s number two, had also quit. Now when Garth took days off Irish Dave would lead the Crawl. To my surprise, he was strict, and I ended up dreading making the calls to him to say that I had got no one, more than I had those to the disbelieving Garth or the quietly disappointed Hanns. Irish Dave would draw up a list of other hostels across the city I could try. ‘You might as well,’ he would say. ‘What do you have to lose?’

Desperately I would approach anyone I could. One group of about twelve German guys that I approached snapped viciously back at me, ‘Is this urgent? We are actually having a private conversation.’ Of course they were completely right. And I felt like the biggest fool. The less success I found, the less money I was earning, the more dispirited I got with this part of my Berlin life. This led me to frequent the bar in Prenzlauer Berg around the corner from one of the hostels, where the man had given me the inspiring speech about writing. Write. Just dare, and write ..!

Eventually even Irish Dave left the Pub Crawl. At first, I admit, I secretly hoped that he had been kicked out of his flat and had to leave Berlin and return to Ireland, which had looked likely at times. But this wasn’t the case. He had found work in a bar somewhere in the city and a few months later I found out to my surprise that he had been promoted to a manager there. Regarding the Pub Crawl, it now turned out that I was Garth’s number two and so it would fall to me to lead the Crawl whenever Garth was away or was otherwise occupied.  The first time this happened we met at the opening bar so he could take me through everything before the punters arrived. He came with his big black satchel and showed me the purse and the ping pong balls and the flyers and took me meticulously through the rules of each drinking game.

But no-one arrived. Instead a tall, dark American appeared who I had seen before, and I knew worked on promotion for the wider Berlin Tours company that our Pub Crawl was only one branch of. The first time I had met this dark and sallow American I had felt a instinctual physical dislike of him, which came back all the stronger this second time. His laughed was painful to listen and his gaze rattling to be under. He was the type of person you would fear in the playground, whoever you were, and the type of person who without doing anything explicitly mean or untoward, made it possible once more to believe, that human beings really could be as brutal and horrific to each other as you see in films and read in books.

I don’t know why he had come to us that night, whether he was evaluating Garth’s work or was simply at a loose end and wanted some freeze booze and easy poon. But he was there for whatever reason, and stood outside the bar with Garth and I, making crude jokes with the tubby Australian and, like the men on the balcony, completely ignoring me. I noticed Garth dart wary glances at our new companion for the first few minutes, and his banter and chuckle came stalled, but he soon warmed up and his easy Australian nature rose once more and he and the American were soon laughing and joking together, Garth’s chortle the bass tone to the American’s harsh guttering snicker. The American told Garth tales of his Berlin debauchery and the Australian supplied some of his own exploits, looking cheekily up at the much taller American. The only sign that he wasn’t completely at his ease was the way he would shift the weight of his satchel from wide side of his heavy buttocks to the other and twist the Pub Crawl a flyer slowly into shreds in his chubby hands. They seemed to fall into a double act, the tall American leading with his hollow cheeks, harsh beard and sunken eyes, throwing up quips and expletives which the round Garth would pass back with encouragement and grins, and his own easy banter, his flowing locks of golden curls swaying about his furry cheeks.

As the minutes drew on, it became apparent that no-one was going to turn up that night and both of them fell silent.  I hoped that a chance for me to leave was about to open up.  

         

          ‘This is how it always is it?’ the American asked Garth, and Garth let out an odd little titter, perhaps hearing more of the menace in the voice than the disdain I heard.

          

           Garth suggested that they make use of the night by going along to the second bar and speaking to the manager their, who had on a previous occasion indicated that he was open to extending his offers to the Pub Crawl. He turned to me and said that I should come along and meet him to as I would be running the Crawl that weekend.  The bar was busy and hot and smelt sickly sweet. Plumes of shisha smoked hovered out of the smoking room and over the bar, and I felt faint, as I used to in Mass with the Catholic incense. The American and I stood just behind Garth at the bar while he spoke to one of the young girls working there. She looked bored and a little uncomfortable as Garth leaned over the bar and shouted in her face over the techno. The American soon barged his way in next to the Australian, and they stood there shouting and grinning at the girl while I leaned up against the wall and waited. Eventually she disappeared through a curtained doorway behind the bar and then returned with a tall bearded and greasy man who I assumed was the manager. It was the manager. He and the American shook hands and he fixed me with a disdainful stare for a few seconds when Garth indicated back over his shoulder. The Australian turned to me and told me they would be back shortly and the three of them disappeared through the curtained doorway. I could see them through the lining of the swaying material, three figures in the shadows, standing in a circle with the heads together. Occasionally they would pull back suddenly to fling their chins in the air and roar with muted laughter before simultaneously bring their brows together once more .

The blonde girl at the till looked at me curiously as she played with her hair and sipped on a drink of a bright azure. To break her gaze, more than anything, I ordered a beer, and took outside to have a smoke. I was on my third when Garth and the American re-emerged.  They trotted out of the bar and were almost over the pavement when Garth turned and saw me and came back pulling me up by the arm and telling me that the Boss had rung and there would be a party of 80 that I would have to lead that weekend.

‘We have cracked a deal with Ahmed’, he said. ‘Half price on any cocktail and three for one for the ladies.’

This was ridiculous. Not one of the bars we went to would comfortably fit more than 40, and I said this.

‘They will this weekend,’ the American said as we walked away from the shisha bar. ‘If not – find some that do.’

Garth nodded encouragingly at this. ‘You think you can do it?’

‘Maybe we should call Irish Dave,’ the American said.

Screw Irish Dave. I said I would do it.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Ich bin Fremd hier #14

One day before my shift at the Irish Pub I headed into Tiergarten where I hadn’t been since the summer, when had I ventured into the outskirts of the park with two friends from Liverpool for a photo opportunity. Tiergarten is Berlin’s second largest park, after Tempelhofer Feld, the old airfield which is now left for the free ranger of joggers and cyclists and loungers and rollerbladers. I settled down by one of the glistening lakes that are spotted throughout the underbrush and spotted three people rowing slowly in a boat on the water. If I look in their direction I could see very clearly little else apart from the green and brown of the trees, the water reflecting the same jungle hews, and of course, the boat and its cargo. I thought of the Jews escaping from Nazi Germany, or Ossies crossing the Spree to reach the West. Alas, they are far too languid and relaxed for any of these fantasies to be long sustained. I’m not sure they are even rowing but just sitting still in the water.

Rousing myself and walking on a little further I took a turning off one of the principle arteries that cuts up the park and wandered over a little stone bridge and down to the water once more where I saw the rowing boat again. I passed some girls taking pictures of themselves against the trees in a patch of evening sunlight that lights up the leaves. The light was beautiful and the leaves had come alive in it. The girls pout and bend and laugh at each other. I wondered if this was how Calan’s photoshoot had been. Of course not. I think of Calan and wonder what she is up to now. How is she living in Berlin?

As I walk on I come across more photographers and models; this time it is a women taking a picture of her child sat on a man’s shoulders. They are all wrapped up and quietly content and I fear – as I often do these days – that I appear something of a vagrant, even if a colourful one that doesn’t smell. I am wearing my white shoes that are too small to be called boots (and would make inefficient snow boots too, due to the holes) but are still too big for my feet. I look a little clownish in them. I am also wearing my dark blue trousers which were once smart like a sailor’s but are now tattered and faded and there are holes in the front two pockets. Baggy t-shirt and baggy maroon jumper; bright yellow headphones, granddad glasses … I had lost my big brown winter jacket from Chicago when I left the first hostel. I would come to miss that sorely. Then I have my trusty brown rucksack and I carry a bottle of Hofferader. Not as cheap as Sternberg (at 50c in a shop around the corner from Frankfurter Tor) but the cheapest the lovely lady in Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof had. In Chalottenburg one quickly misses the Spätkaufies that are peppered throughout Neukölln and Kreuzberg. I also feel a bit ashamed to drink Sternberg. It is known as the cheapest beer going. Drinking Sternberg once with once with some of Red’s friends they had told me that it was a drink for baby-eaters I hadn’t really known how to respond to that. 

I walked down to the water again. For ten minutes I stood there and no one passed behind me on the track or in front of me at the water. Only later does something dark leap out of the greenery to my right. At first I thought it was an excited fox that hadn’t noticed me or perhaps something wilder! Alas, it I was only a dog. Two ladies follow it along the path. They called ‘Alfie! Alfie!’ and whistled and clapped. Then they too get out a camera and commence taking photos. The dog acted nonchalant, feigning interest in a shrub hidden amongst the undergrowth until they desisted with their cooing. The three of them left me walking toward the edges of the park and I turned back to the water and think how glorious it is. But what to do with this! the same gnawing question returns. Take a picture? I turn to a tree trunk and settled down and bring out my Buch für Berlin and begin to write. But I soon get distracted, as a painter never could, as a musician cannot not, and begin scribbling something about the bells in The Sound of Music. I completely neglect the oily marble water that astounds me, because apart from that – oily marble water that astounds me ­– I don’t know what else to say. Maybe something else about Nazis and Ossies …  

I rise again and walk deeper into Tiergarten wishing that I could be living a life where I could just walk and drink and look forever, and that the start of the shift would never arrive. You can easily get lost in Tiergarten despite the frequent maps placed at the points where the twisting and diagonal paths meet. It was originally a park constructed for hunting – hence the name, Animal Garden. There are a lot of statues about the place. There is one of Goethe at one edge, standing erect and proud and regal and around him half-naked fat boys and women tending to them. White statue of Mozart, Beethoven and Hadyn can also be found. These I all find a little dull and ugly. The ones I love are the freeze frames of hunting parties: men in big caps holding muskets on horses with fierce hounds snapping and leaping on their quarry. Now, the place is inhabited by rabbits which, when you stand still, will soon emerge from the underbrush and venture onto the open grass to nibble at the lawn and gamble about each other. I would stand and wait for them and then slowly crouch down to get a better view. I wondered how Milla, Kalimero and Bumblebee, Red’s rabbits in the flat would fare if we took them down to Tiergarten one day and set them free.

Walking through the path, away from Charlottenburg and towards Mitte and Brandenburger Tor, I came across a little fenced off cottage. It looked that the ginger bread house that Hansel and Gretel stumble upon. I don’t know who lives there now but I imagine it was originally the abode of the gamekeeper. The rabbits graze at their own pleasure here, whether I move or not, and at the corner of the little garden amongst piles of damp leaves and compost lie to large statues of what I think are mule. They look placidly over the lawn at the rabbits and appear rather splendid despite the bird shit that is littered across their smooth rumps. Further along the path I walked and eventually came to the North East corner of the park where there is a statue of a ferocious looking lion. Turning right, or South, I arrived at an open area where there are five points laid out in a circle of either a selection of rocks or one large one. These are ‘The Rocks of the World’, one clump for each continent and each are designated – or are innately supposed to express - an emotion: love, awakening, hope, peace and forgiveness. It was the life work of the artist Wolfgang Kraker von Schwarzenfeld who brought the rocks to Berlin as a gift to the city. They are so placed that at one point each year they reflect the sun’s light into one single beam into the sky. They are beautiful and grand, and all the more so for the children that were scrambling over them leaping off the edges and running from the father, or the couples leaning against another smoking and kissing and laughing.  

Just on from here you can come to a black box, the size of a small garden shed, which is a memorial to the homosexuals persecuted by the Nazis. Peering through a window you can watch a short film on a loop, showing clips of gay couples making out: in one a mother yanks away her young son who is gazing in wonder at two women kissing; in another, two women fondle each other on a train and smile guiltily when a middle aged woman enters their train compartment, and then continue when she gives a knowing glance in return. In a third, two bearded men in a crowd ignore the scowls men behind them as they hold hands and lock lips.  

Just on from this, outside the boundaries of the park is the Holocaust memorial. 2, 711 concrete columns are laid out over an area of 204, 4000 square feet. There is no text, and no images. The idea is: what could anyone possibly say that would adequately express the horror and the shame of what happened? Too much said? Not enough? Even as it is has received criticism for being both too simple, and also for being too aesthetically designed.

As you reach the memorial it appears like just a platz of black stone, but as you enter in, the ground begins to sharply decline and suddenly what you thought were blocks at the height of a park bench, suddenly rise to become columns and you are in of what, to me, stacked coffins on their head.

It is remarkably disorientating. As Chloe Aridjis writes in her novel Book of Clouds:

‘The sloping ground made it hard to secure a foothold and very few meters I found myself grabbing onto the slabs to steady myself, although I had the feeling that at any moment they might treacherously tilt away. It was the topography of the place that threw me off balance, not the tequila from the bar, and before long everything was undulating and vertiginous and the only steady presence was the moon, whose beams washed the stones, skimmed the tops and dissolved.’

Indeed it is easy to be thrown of balance here, the place being like a maze. When I was first there, there was a large group of Spanish school children who were making use of it as just that, running and shouting, and shrieking when they turned a corner and found me silently facing them. I tried not to be annoyed at them and their insensitivity, telling myself that it wasn’t really insensitivity. Just because people aren’t quite at a memorial doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t be saddened and horrified when forced to look the subject of the memorial in the face. Or that some of them wouldn’t be heroes in resisting such a thing happening, or will be heroes in resisting something like it in the future. And there is nothing to say that those who sit quiet and think about it get it more than the rest of us, or think about it more, or care more. Or indeed, that they aren’t capable of perpetrating such atrocities themselves, and may well do so in the future. And anyway, how can any of us, even the most informed and the most thoughtful, really comprehend what happened, and why it happened, and how the people there then felt? And so we return to the idea behind the decision not to have images or text.

The architect Peter Eisenman apparently said that he would be happy for people to graffiti on the memorial, perhaps the idea of the East Side Gallery now, where next to the political art berating walls, and exposing a shared humanity, are the scrawled messages such as ‘I love Justin Bieber.’ What matters that we are here, in Berlin, together, having a good time. What matters that we can run and scream and play, and, express our love for Justin Bieber.

Alas, the beginning of my shift was fast approaching, and so I made my way back to Charlottenburg and Zoo Station. I was thankful to see that I wouldn’t be working with Johnny that evening. Instead I was to work with an Australian called Merle. He seemed to lack any sense of humour and was of inexact age. To me he could have been anything between 25 and 40. In any case he looked too morose to be and Ozzie exploring Europe and paying his way by working in pubs. This was in fact the second Irish Pub he had worked in Berlin, the first being the one in Hackascher Martkt which was owned by the same people who owned ours. He told me that he had been fired from that pub for taking time of work to see his father who had come to visit.

‘Bastard. Horrible man,’ he kept saying, referring to the manager there. ‘I told him I was going to take the time off. I told him months in advance. And then when I returned from dropping my father of at Tegel Airport he told me I was four weeks late for my shift and no longer had a job. Just horrible. He hated me from the start. Just horrible.’

If nothing else, Merle was a good worker. He threw himself into the work joylessly but with an expertise that I envied. I found that evening that no matter how much time we spent pouring over the till trying to find the right button for a ‘Shamrock’, I made considerably less mistakes with him next to me and found myself enjoying myself more there than I had yet. My pints came out calmer, I calculated the change quicker, and all in all had to ask less questions. In short, I remembered that I actually quite enjoyed working behind the bar.

I worked until one that evening but as it is a weekend the trains are running all night so I head straight to Zoo Station. Despite the long distance I had to travel the S7 would take me all the way back to Mehrower Allee. However that evening the S7 wasn’t on the board when I arrived at the platform so I jumped on the first S75 which should have at least taken me to Springfuhl, a few stops before Mehrower Allee. 

Like a lot of people I think, I liked train stations. I always found the underground system of a foreign city exciting to use, comparing the colours, and the sounds, and the speeds. The names are always quite exciting, and they were nonetheless so in Berlin where I found half of them impossible to pronounce. At this stage into my time in Berlin, the U and S-Bahn hadn’t yet lost their wonder. Almost as fun visiting to new stations, was getting to know old ones better. I think that however long I stay in Berlin, and wherever I end up living, a part of me will always think of Görlitzer Bahnhof as my home station, purely because it was the station outside my first hostel. Though Görli is pretty grotty as stations go, I will always prefer it to Kotti. Görlitzer has some daredevil charm in its shabbiness and the queer types that gather under its haunches. Kotti is merely grotty and seedy and like Zoo Stations packed with gaudy fast food joints and building works. Schlesisches Tor, in my mind, comes with the other two, and is certainly the most beautiful. Dirty, of course, as everything seems to be in Berlin, but the stone is ornate, and infused with the shadows of grander times. The station looks as if it was built in a time when train stations were still commonly something to get excited about. From the outside, if you couldn’t see the tracks that stuck out from it above street level, you might think it was an old parish town hall. Hollow on the inside of course, like the tracks were the trajectory of a bullet that had blown its brains out.

Space is everywhere in Berlin. Along from Schlesisches Tor, over the Spree and out of Kreuzberg into Friedrichshain you come to Warschauer Straße where U1 meets the S-Bahn. As well as there being a busy hub for commuters in the morning, it is also bustling at night. But there is space here still, despite the crowds. The tracks that spread towards Alexanderplatz on one side and the out East on the other are like a second river. On the far side of the bank are what could be seen to be the old boat houses, Suicide Circus and Urban Spree, forlorn and derelict but similarly coming alive at night as electro clubs and smoky bars. They is a large half-pipe for skaters in one of the buildings but most of them are bars. Down steps from the appropriately named Reveler Straße as if entering a separate plain, here you can pee and pick up weed there any time of the day, and no one will grant you a second look. There is a lot of space there too day and night, though at weekends there is a flea market and I imagine at other times in the year it is put to good use. Tramlines are still imbedded in the ground though I don’t know how long ago it was that they were last in use. The bridge made up of scaffolding that totters in the air and takes you down to the S-Bahn platforms hosts a couple of huts of its own, which look like the boxes that builders put up on a construction site as a make-shift office. The whole place looks like a building site frozen in its tracks, and strolling over the walkway, high above the steel river, I wonder how much space will be left when the construction is finally over.

The stations I hate are those of Sudkreuz and Ostkreuz. They are metallic and soulless, and I imagine the replacement of stations that once stood there with a charm like those in Kreuzberg, before being blown up. The two unnerve me in their eerie likeness to one another. They look like they are shiny metal things that a child has found and placed on a muddy sprawl upon which he is constructing a city. They are like space ships from the future, landing amongst, the dirty, the scruffy, the chaotic, barbarian past. There is little human about these stations.

Ostkreuz is deserted when I arrive there that evening after the Irish Pub, and all the more disconcerting for it. Even the human surroundings have been torn up at here. Piles of sand and cement and bricks. On the platforms heading East or West there is no shelter and no comfort. The screens don’t tell you when the next train will come. Hell where time isn’t offered and cannot be counted, and the sings stubbornly say only Eiche and Warschauer Straße. I look at the empty coffee stands, black screens, and signs saying ‘Wannsee Wansee Wannsee. As if a stone had just fallen into my stomach I realise that there are no more trains heading out to Marzahn and that I am stranded. I stand alone in this half built station to nowhere. It is the edges of the world where you do not stop, and it is not made to care.

With no other choice I take the train back to Ostbahnhof, thinking that at least there I would be inside. When I arrive the signs are no more optimistic. The numbers of minutes I had to wait were so large quick they look off: 19 minutes, 29 minutes ... I go to other platforms, knowing that most of them are for national trains and are no help to me. But it is cold and I want to keep moving. Escalators startle from their sleep and take me slowly upwards to nothing … even colder here, no blackness; an emptying out of letters and numbers, of thinking technology and life. Empty, bright , blue screens offer nothing. Nichts. There are no trains to take me home. Nothing tells me why there are no trains, and there is no one to ask. Although, I think, I probably wouldn’t be able to understand the answer even if there was someone. Over this side of the tracks it is eerie, and I scuttle back and down and up the other side, knowing there is no hope and little comfort. Stopping and starting, pulling and pushing the sluggish trains make their way about the square circle, leaving a cold, trail for the next to track, carrying more individuals sheltering all but me from the city at night.

I end up getting on to a train back to Alexandeplatz, in the direction I previously came from. I   hope to find a tram but there are no going in my direction until 7 in the morning. I decide I will go and ride the Ring and write. I go up to Schonhauser Allee. And take the train. It is almost empty. On the Ring I find that I have no pen. I fall back on the seat and sleep next to my bag. I wake up somewhere around Halensee with a man sitting on the seat opposite me, smiling guilty. I straighten myself, grab my bag and he gets up and retreats to the other end of the carriage. I rode the Ring twice then got a train from Schonhauser Allee back down to Alex.

It was dawn when I arrived there. There are others there already making their way to work, and other from dancing still drinking. Then there are vagrants, people with suitcases leaving, people with suitcases arriving. A mist had descended over the city and on Alexanderplatz looking up I could see only one third of the great tower, the rest disappearing into the fog. It appeared all the more grander, and all the more foreboding with only its stub visible. I tried to imagine that I had just arrived that morning in the city and knew nothing of Alexanderplatz and the Fernseturm and would up at the tower disappearing into the clouds and wonder how high it rose, and what else was lurking, hidden in the mist about me. What other ghosts were lying unseen in the gaps of the city?

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Ich bin Fremd hier #13

I chose to move into the flat in Marzahn and was largely pleased about the way things had panned out. It wasn’t the celebratory acquisition of an address that I had imagined. The phrase ‘I have a flat’, that I had thought would fall so euphoric when uttered truthfully from my lips the first time, felt a little muted and plagued by limitations. Marzahn really was very far out. But, it meant no more hostels, and it was a significant foot forward in the right direction. I came to find in Berlin that the progression towards dreams comes in such small steps that often you barely notice yourself nearing them. But you are nearing them nonetheless and power comes in recognising your progress, and in loving it, and giving it the appreciation it deserves. We owe that to our past selves and our past dreams, if nothing else.

I took half of my small collection of possessions over to Marzahn a few days before I was to move in properly. Having dumped them in my room, I chatted a little to my German flatmate with the Boudicea-red hair. She was hovering up rabbit droppings in the sitting room, some of which were as freshly laid as it was possible to be, the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner sweeping dangerously close to the little Milla who, being deaf, was utterly unaware of its nearing approach. The buzzer for the main door downstairs sounded and a few minutes later emerged a French girl, sweating and grinning and wearing a hiking backpack. This girl was to be my other flatmate. She was moving in that day and had only arrived in Berlin that week. In her desperation to find a place to live she hadn’t even visited the flat or yet met the fiery haired Hauptmieter (main tenant). She was student and spoke better German than English, though her English was better than both my German or French. Je suis Bertie, I said proudly and shook her hand at the door. How wonderful this was to be! I thought, being able to practise both languages in this flat! I descended the stairs with her as she went to pick up her second suitcase and left her at the bottom to rush over to Charlottenburg without offering to help her take her load up the five flights of stairs, which I later felt bad about.

A few days later I had said my goodbyes to Mario and was back in Marzahn with the remainder of my kit. When I arrived the flat was even messier than it had been before. In the sitting room Red with the fiery hair sat alongside the French girl and a tall German boy. They were sitting about the low coffee table laden with a breakfast of rolls, cold meats, cheese, Nuttella and three steaming mugs of coffee. They invited me to join them. I told them I would soon speak only German but couldn’t possibly do it right this moment, tired and excited as I was. I squeezed my few paltry groceries into the fridge overladen with moulding food and sat down with them. Red only ate half a roll with some jam spread over it and then sat back on the sofa and commenced rolling a joint. The German boy put down his salami and cheese muttering some words to her and took over the rolling. The French girl rolled herself a cigarette to and soon I was in a cloud of smoke enjoying the breakfast alone. I became entranced watching Smokie the Frenchie who would lazily drag her cigarette, the trail of smoke slipping out of her mouth and rising up to and curling around her tangled brown hair. She had big brown eyes and full lips, and smiled at us all placidly when she wasn’t laughing hoarsely or speaking German in her thick French drawl.

After the breakfast I walked over to the little shopping centre towards Mehrower Allee S-Bahn station. It wasn’t really a mall but a large building with a collection of shops which had a wide thoroughfare cutting through it which was kept open all hours. Apart from the regular banks, supermarkets and pharmacy there was also a plastic looking Italian restaurant at the far end and on the side nearest my flat there was an Asian takeaway and kebab shop, and occasionally a van parked up selling hot sugary treats.

I bought some bread, cheese, salad and yoghurt from the supermarket Rewe and noticing the grocers opposite was overcome with a strong desire to eat fruit. I bought a box of raspberries and a box of blueberries and a large apple. It was a warm day and so I sat out on a bench on the side of the walkway that stretched from the tram stop just outside my house, through the shopping centre and on to Mehrower Allee S-Bahn station. The yoghurt actually turned out to be some kind of creamy vanilla syrup, which I cracked open nonetheless and dipped the berries into. Halfway through the berries I attacked the apple. I couldn’t remember the last time I had enjoyed an apple so much. In fact I couldn’t remember the last time I had enjoyed an apple at all. I had always felt it to be the most boring of fruit. This one was the size of a softball and as shinny as the fake ones found in bowls at Christmas. With relish I crunched great white mouthfuls out of it. There was an old man sitting on the bench next to me looking vapidly out at the people passing by. I thought it wouldn’t be long before I was back sitting on a bench much like this one with my old companions of cheap beer, cigarettes and a falafel kebab. At that point though there was nothing I would have swapped my apple for.

The joy bubbling away inside of me did not appear to be reflected out on the streets. It was a quietly depressing little scene, full of the ugly normalness of Philip Larkin. The normalness that makes a mockery of living. It was just people walking by, bits of families mainly, doing their shopping, making noise, going about their business, filling the hours. Still new, I was very aware of the Plattenbauten that rose about me, as in the preceding three weeks I had always felt the presence of the Fernsehturm over my shoulder even when it was out of sight. It didn’t feel repressive sitting there, surrounded by people and their houses, but it did feel packed. Later I was to find the peace in Marzahn and realise how quiet it is and how quickly one could locate a spot of solitude. But at that point, gorging on my fruit, I felt like I had been thrown in to a community, a mass of people, that weren’t my people, and it would only be a matter of time before they realised that I wasn’t supposed to be there at all.

They were ugly as well, I thought. Fat and decrepit, struggling in the simple human functions of walking and breathing. A lot of them seemed be losing their hair, what was left of which hung limply down their neck and over their ears. Apart from the children, who were as energetic as children anywhere, everyone appeared to be living under a shadow; every face looked tired and no one appeared particularly happy. They were all just going on. Everyone was smoking. The smell of stale, dried smoke would later become firmly associated in my mind with the people of Marzahn.

Anything can be forgotten and any worry or concern – legitimate or otherwise – can be easily squashed when there is the next mouthful, the next swig or the next drag to consider, and so I didn’t really think of them much, or how it would be to live with them, but just kept on eating my fruit.

Walking back to the flat I had to cross what I always described as a meadow. The path I walked along was lined by trees and on one side there were bushes before a line of shops – a bakery and odd little café and a funny  bar that looked like the lobby of a care home – and then beyond them, of course, were more tower blocks. To the other side of me stretched grass, a path winding through it leading to a giant bright green block looking like something out of The Tweenies. It was in fact a school and in later weeks I would see children each morning bundled up against the cold making their way towards it, dithering and stalling. Just off the path that went perpendicular to this one, that which I was now trundling along, stood a Vietnamese man who would be there most of the times that I was to pass over the next few months. He stood looking cold and bored and next to him, lined up like little toy soldiers, were a four or five packets of different brands of cigarettes. These so called Handelsplätzen, I was to later learn, were all that was left of the Marzahn Vietnamese mafia. In the 1990s there had a string of murders had plagued the district and the next door (and much grimmer and greyer) district of Hellersdorf (‘Light Village’). Somehow the war eventually came to a close. The demand for illegal cigarettes began to drop heavily and the vacuum left by the dissolution of the two gangs was filled by a multitude of much smaller ones. Today you are more likely to come across Vietnamese selling flowers or hairdressing services than cigarettes. Despite this, whispers of the Marzahn Vietnamese mafia are still rife within the Ring and towards the West. And even I would often wonder when I passed the little man along that path each day: What was actually going on? What had he seen? What had his parents seen? What am I not seeing?

Back at the flat I attempted to squeeze my small pile of groceries into the packed fridge shelf that had been designated by Red as mine. There was something dripping down to the shelf at the bottom of the fridge and when I closed the door a sour-cheese smell was wafted into my face. I then set about tidying up the flat but soon realised that this was to be a losing battle. It really was the filthiest place I had ever lived in. Red had lived there for almost four years so had collected piles of defunct and half broken objects that rose up in piles in the kitchen or spilled out of cupboards in the hallway. The multitude of flatmates that had come before Smokie and I had also contributed to the mass of stuff that the flat was filled with. One of the prior tenants, Red told us, had simply disappeared one morning, leaving the entirety of his possessions where they were. Red heard from the man’s aunt that he was still alive, but that was it. Running from debts and a baby, he never heard of him again. I was to later replenish my wardrobe from what remained of him in the flat.

As I tidied up, Smokie was in the sitting-room and perhaps felt a little guilty and so put out her cigarette and her sheets of German and came to help me. Mill was charging against the cage doors so we let her out but soon regretted it as she hopped around the room shitting everywhere, and leaving puddle of piss at Smokie’s feet. I wiped a few of the counters in the kitchen and started to wash up but no cold water came out of the tap and so the sink was full of water too hot to put your hands in. I could feel squashed rabbit droppings squishing under my feet and eventually gave up and fell onto the couch. Smokie was quick to follow my lead.

At this point I was working about three days a week at the Irish Pub and then twice a week I would join Garth on the steps opposite Frankfurter Tor for the Pub Crawl. He had a couple of newbie promoters that he had picked up somewhere but none of them stayed long. The dearth of backpackers keen for free shots and Beer-Pong in Friedrichshain meant that I was spending more than I was earning during these nights. I began taking literature along to read at the hostels so the evenings wouldn’t be wholly wasted. It was growing cold and despite the new schemes cooked up by the mysterious Irish manager and the newly designed flyer that Garth proudly showed me I had little hope that things would pick up.  

Regarding the Irish Pub, Erik had told me I needed to buy myself a pair of black trousers and some shoes for my second shift. Not knowing where would be best to find these I wandered over to Hackescher Markt in Mitte. I have been told that this place has lost much of the charm that it once had. What was once a treasure chest of little independent shops and homely little cafes is now dominated by global chains such as H&M and Zara. The independent shops other shops have been pushed down into side alley or out of the area completely, due to the low footfall meaning they were quickly unable to pay the skyrocketing rent. The area is equally as quiet now the big brands are there. This is no skin of their nose of course, and many believe that they only set up in the quiet Hackescher Martke to be able to say they were part of the Berlin scene. It all makes for a rather odd place. It is still beautiful in a polished touristy sense, but only comes alive on warm afternoons or evenings where battalions of waiters emerge from overpriced cafés and restaurants to lay out lines and lines of tables and chairs. The area doesn’t feel very Berlin to me at all and I think this is common to those who live and work and play principally in the triumvirate of Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Friedrichshain.

In Charlotenberg, where the Irish Pub was, it felt similarly ‘un-Berlin.’ Whereas Hackesher Markt appears to be ashamed of the gaudy tourist restaurants and shops that now plague its streets and has the modesty to bow its head in shame at the globalisation that has consumed it, Charlottenburg sparkles and seems to revel in its distinctiveness from the rest of Berlin. Charlottenburg was the shining heart of the little island of capitalism that West Berlin once was in the sprawl of the Soviet Union.  KaDeWe, the Kaufhaus des Westens, is the biggest department store in Europe after Harrods and has lit up Kurfürstendamm (‘the Ku'damm’) since it first opened in 1907, standing as a spectacular beacon of consumerism throughout the Cold War.

There are icons of the bygone glory to be found in Charlottenburg. The cinema Zoo Palast is one of them, a similarly sparkling venue and has been restored to its former glory this year. It was built in 1950, constructed out of the ashes of a silent cinema which, like KaDeWe, was heavily bombed in during the Second World War. Shimmering through the 50s and 60s, it gradually fell out of fashion and into disrepair. Now, after €5.5 million spent has been towards its renovation, Zoo Palast is once more to offer Berliners what it calls, 'premium cinema'.

Café Kranzler is another architectural celebrity in the district, and like the other two, has also gone under extensive redevelopment. While KaDeWe appears today very much of the time, and Zoo Palast, a classy throwback, Café Kranzler is crass and tacky and sticks out on the Ku'damm with its red and white, stripped tombola hat. The original Café Kranzler was opened in 1834 on Unter Den Linden on the corner of Friedrichstraße. With a sun terraced, ice-cream parlour and smokers’ room it came to be seen as one of the finest and most fashionable spots in the city. A second branch was opened in 1932 where the current one can now be found. This was where the equally famous Café des Westens had once sat, running from 1898 to 1915. This café was known colloquially as Café Größenwahn, meaning ‘the delusions of grandeur café’ and became a meeting point for many of the greatest artists living in the city at the time.  Nothing is left of the original Café Kranzler, and where the current one today sits not a speck of the finery and jazz of its parent institutions can be found. Instead you have sour faced waitresses dressed up in the café’s red and white stripped colours, serving over priced coffee and damp, tasteless and greying food.

Just off the Ku’damm, only a five minute walk from Café Kranzler is Zoo Station and the Europa Centre where the Irish Pub was. Zoo Station (Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof), once the hot spot for prostitution, drugs, the black-market and the scene of many a thrilling Cold War spy novel, now resembles a sad drunk crouching in the corner of a shopping mall. Building work is going on there and hopefully they will bring the place up on its feet again. It smells of fast food, has too many cheap neon lights and tawdry statues. It is one of the worse places within the Ring in my opinion, and is perhaps a cautionary tale for living too hard and too fast. The only bit around Zoo Station I do like is when you leave the station from the back entrance along Jebensstraße where the Museum für Fotografie is. It is mostly stone here, and only calm, pastel colours. There is usually a down-and-out or two sitting in one of the inlets here. It is quiet, and feels very European, more like Italy or France than Germany, or Berlin, or certainly Zoo Station.

            

For my second shift at the Irish Pub I was working with Johnny again, which he seemed as disappointed about as I was.  I started the shift nervy and spent the ensuing six hours that way, the only moments of  relative calm found sucking on a cigarette in the a back room and looking ahead desperately to the Feierabend (end of shift) pint. The smirking Vernon was working as a waiter that evening. Smart, shining and confident he swooped between the crowds of punters, cooing his beautiful German and watching me flap about behind the bar preparing his drinks. I had found out that Johnny and Ellie, the girl from Yorkshire who had lived her way around Europe by working at Irish Pubs, had paid for my drinks when I had left Schwarzes Café early by mistake. I apologized and told them I would pay them back. ‘Ye, you cheeky bastard!’ Johnny had said grinning before the shift began. Ellie wrinkled her nose and told me it didn’t matter and that I could just buy her a drink next time they went out. Vernon however was not so easily placated. He stared at me, grinning as I spoke to the girl and would for the next couple of weeks call out things like, ‘Bought Ellie some drinks have you yet Bertie?’ or ‘Watch out for Bertie, he might not come back when he goes to the toilet!’

    

        That second shift went worse than the first, primarily because I no longer had the excuse that it was my first day or that I hadn’t pulled a pint in years. The Kilkenny would froth like the Cornish coast however gently I pulled the tap, or however much I fiddled with the pressure nozzle. I would pour the froth into spare glasses, waiting for it to settle so I could it use it later. I soon had a line of these pints full of head standing under the taps.

One of the things I was getting used to was the customers tipping as they paid. For example, if a drink was 4.70€ they would say ‘five’ indicating that the 30 cense was my tip. This was opposed to their being a tip jar on the bar, or them ‘buying me a drink.’ Often when paying they wouldn’t say anything at all, but when I returned their change they would shake their head and back away, seemingly offended that I would assume them stingy enough not to tip 30 cense. Despite the awkwardness of this, it felt very unnatural to me, to simply pocket their change without them having explicitly indicated that I should do so. I was extremely unlucky in that when I did for the first time do just that, assume the tip and casually drop the 30 cense change into our little jar, the indignant customer loudly demanded where his change was. Of course at this point Johnny was nearby and swooped in to get the man the right change. Both were scowling and when the man had turned away Johnny rounded on me saying,

‘I don’t want to break your balls Bertie, but you’re not gonna last long here if you keeping making mistakes like this!’

          

  Erik wasn’t managing that day but the second manager, an old German called Olaf. Olaf was much friendlier than Erik. He smiled for instance, and in general seemed to take a much more relaxed approach to managing a bar. He was wizened and bald and looked like a crookled warlock out of Game of Thrones.  Erik had told me that it was essentially down to Olaf whether I would stay working at the Pub or not. He didn’t seem to watch my work at all so I figured that unless Johnny spoke up I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Whether that was something to be pleased about I was yet unsure.  

At 2am I was pouring myself a pint of Guinness. I drank it in about five minutes while having a cigarette in the narrow corridors when the band stored their bags and cases and used as a thoroughfare to their van that waited for them in the underground car park just outside. It was hot there and overflowing ashtrays and a couple of pint glasses and mugs with solidified dregs. Camp Olaf was very relaxed and at the end of the shift when we were all closing down the bar with our Feierabend drink,  spinning about clutching a Desperado and saying in a high voice, ‘My gay beer! My gay beer!’

I was pretty unenthused by the work. Panama told me that she had only wanted to work at the Irish Pub for a month, and she had at that point been there for a year. There was little chance of that happening to me, I thought smugly as I wiped down the bar, then sobered hearing Johnny’s words again. What I was concerned about more than anything when working at the Irish Pub, was that it wasn’t really Berlin. I was thinking this in Marzahn really, and what it boiled down to that I wasn’t living in the Berlin I had heard about, in the Berlin that I had read about. In this Irish Pub, I could have been anywhere. That was what bothered me, and that was why I reeled when Ellie told me that she was making her way slowly around Europe by working in Irish pubs.

Schwarzes Café did seem like Berlin to me however so I was happy to return there when my second shift ended early. I had missed the last train and was had no confidence at being able to navigate the trams and buses. I tried to remember the short distance that Vernon had taken us after my first shift, but predictably got lost. I found it eventually and settled down upstairs. Free from my colleagues, I appreciated the place even more this second time. Here it seemed to me, at any hour, every queer fish of Charlottenburg will come to find sanctuary from the city. The café, I later found out, was originally created by West Berlin anarchists. It is open 24 hours a day (save for a few hours on a Tuesday afternoon), welcoming students, workers, clubbers, vagrants and all other creatures of the dark. With the candles at night the place becomes a little gothic, graveyard of lost decadence; an atmosphere which the cheery service can’t quite break through.  Upstairs has the look of a plush sitting room after a generation of disrepair and crumble, imbuing the café with the ambience of Dracula’s lost dining room, or an Edwardian set for the Rocky Horror Show. With each creak of the stairs one expects the ragged Steppenwolf to emerge from the shadows. There were candles on each table and I would collect on my table so I had enough light to read. My eyes were tired and every half an hour or so they drooped and I felt myself falling asleep. I decided I needed some food.  I had more money in cash from tips than I had since I had arrived in Berlin I decided to splash out. I bought another red wine which came in a glass the size of a small bowling ball, and a club sandwich. The later came in a tower to me on a plate and collapsed in a pile of crispy bread, mayo soaked chicken and sauce on my plate when I tried to raise just a quarter of it to my mouth.

The trains were running again at 4am and it was passed 5 when I finally got back to Marzahn. I passed a few old individuals with rat-sized dogs on leads as I made my way back to Max Hermann Straße. Into the empty flat I walked and before going to bed I slipped out on to the balcony. It was to be a beautiful day, and wasn’t begrudged by how much of it I would now miss sleeping. I gazed into the beautiful view that lay before me under the balcony. To my left was a grass field, for want of better word, peppered with clusters of trees. Over the tops of these trees I saw what looked like a small hill, invisible from the centre of the city. Over this the sun broke, and cast screens of sun on the pastel coloured Plattenbauten, the base of the U-shaped housing block I lived in. They stood at broken angles so they resembled the construction of a child playing with big lego bricks. Gazing upon the architecture I didn’t think ‘Communism!’ but thought that they would one day be seen in a better light by the rest of Berlin, and embraced by that which lies within the Ring.

I was for a moment secretly happy that Marzahn wasn’t caught up in the folds of Berlin; happy that it was apart, and that I was there too. It is not what I had come for, but it was what I had found. Below me the Spielplatz lay empty. Day was rising over Marzahn, and I couldn’t be happy to be there to witness it.

There of all places.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014