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In the morning, a light rain fell from the sky, the kind that coats cities in a grey mist. Yusuf stuffed a few Euros into his pocket, packed a satchel with snacks from Leyla’s kitchen and slipped out into the park before anyone noticed. A flock of birds swooped overhead in a great heaving mass, turning one way then the other. He longed to be that free. He’d start over, but it took too much energy. Before long, the grass had muddied his trainers. Wet strands of his hair curled around his ears. He pulled up his hoodie and began the walk to Plänterwald S-Bahn, past a portrait of Marlene Dietrich graffitied on a wall, Isaiah’s playlist still blaring in his ears.
On days like this, Berlin was not merely a city; she became a life force all of her own. She had many faces. Perhaps time had made her the most accomplished city of them all. She could soothe with her green spaces or be a city for lovers, a musician’s bolthole or a creative opioid. But in the same breath, she could also be a window to dark days of human history, with bullet holes carved into her, a seat of power, and sometimes, a nihilist’s dream.
Today was such a day.
Isaiah and Yusuf veered into the crowds. Hardcore electro music pumped out of an underground nightclub a few metres away, drawing drunken revellers towards it. Yusuf ignored the swell of sound. They hadn’t come for beer or music.
“It’s disgusting, really,” said Isaiah, shaking his head. “Music should be about freedom, not about control. The coppers sponsor all these street parties, the concert stages, the food stalls. It’s all to dampen the protest itself, to keep trouble-makers from rioting. It even gives them a reason to say we can’t demonstrate on certain routes.”
They made straight for Kreuzberg, an inner city neighbourhood, which encompassed both Little Istanbul and remnants of the Berlin Wall, stretching over a kilometre to Friedrichshain. The ensemble of murals stood as a monument to fall of the Wall and a reminder of the Berlin’s complex past. It featured the work of more than a hundred national and international artists, including the kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker, which Old Sayid always tried to recreate in art class.
“I love this part of town,” said Isaiah, pointing to the side of a building covered entirely in a black and red rose motif. “Amateur street art sits alongside well-known artists such as Victor Ash, Blu and El Bocho here. The art is like a life cycle. It’s constantly scrubbed out, painted over, embellished and altered. The face of Kreuzberg is always changing.”
They rounded the corner, and met a wall of people.
Yusuf sucked in his breath.
The demonstration stretched for kilometres ahead of them, despite the drizzle. A sea of placards and obscured faces swam before them. Many wore hoodies, like Yusuf, and some wore ski masks. He hadn’t known what to expect, but inside him, a seed of destruction had taken root, and he hoped for a chance to express it.
“This is awesome. Can you feel the buzz in the air?” said Isaiah.
“I can feel it, man,” said Yusuf, exhilarated.
A wave of euphoria blanketed the crowd, as if they’d been made giddy by the prospect of change, by the semi-illicit nature of this type of civic participation. Taking control of the streets could be more powerful than merely wishing for change or marking a cross in a box at the polling booth. The signs held aloft bore no hint of compromise. Stark letters turned heads and invited discussions. Strangers smiled at one another and bumped fists.
Capitalism Kills
We are Many
We are One
“It’s time,” said Isaiah, zipping up his bomber jacket and digging into his pocket.
“For what?” said Yusuf.
“For these.” He handed over a piece of cloth, and unravelled one of his own before pulling it down around his neck then up over his nose and mouth. “They’re from my spraying kit. Just in case we need to hide our identity.”
Just in case we need to hide our identity.
A mask turned a man into a stranger, and sometimes into a monster. The same could be said for a uniform.
Isaiah leaned closer, his eyes sparking, his sonorous voice muffled by the mask. “Ten years ago, the May Day riots spiralled out of control. The demonstrators weren’t satisfied with the usual fare. My auntie told me they went wild. Just picture it plastered all over the front pages, bro–a policeman running, his riot gear in flames. It’s urban legend. Usually, it’s the black man running.” He pointed at the mask. “So, you going to wear that or what?”
Yusuf nodded and pulled the mask on. It felt alien on his face. On any other day, a man such as he would be more likely to be attacked if he appeared to have something to hide. Just like a black man in the USA feared a bulge in his pockets could be construed as an illegal weapon, reading the wrong book or growing a beard could attract trouble for Yusuf. Isaiah had assured him he had nothing to fear. Today, donning a mask meant he’d be one of the crowd. A part of the whole.
They marched alongside seasoned and sanguine protesters holding recycled banners against a silver sky. They marched next to timid first-timers and bored kids from the provinces. They marched with the weary unemployed and angry students. They marched with gays, punks and feminists inspired by Red Rosa. They marched with Erasmus students high on their first taste of a demonstration, and with bemused tourists, untied to any philosophy, eager only to amass photographs and recount their stories at home. They marched side by side with brash young men, nudging those in front of them, elbows out, impatient for trouble. They marched in sight of the Wall, where families had been separated and lives taken.
Yusuf marched, and he waited for the promised violence to ignite. Inside, he stilled the voice of his mother–never forget who we are– and heard only the drumbeat of anger.
When the change came, it swept through the crowd like a virus. First, the pace of the demonstration became stilted, as if an unpractised hand lay on the throttle of an engine. The crowd grew agitated with the sudden stops and swells. Demonstrators set fire to wheelie bins; they flared and fizzled like litmus paper, and smoke bellowed into the air. Respectful chanting gave way to cat calls and anti-state venom. The police fanned out across Kottbusser Tor as the remaining crowd grew more and more unruly.
“Down with the pigs!”
“Capitalist scum!”
Isaiah adjusted his mask. The earring high up on the cartilage of his ear glinted in the light. “It’s about to kick off.”
A megaphone called for calm in the background. Some marchers responded, sensing trouble. Families, especially, moved away in alarm. A hard core group of a hundred men and women with fire in their bellies and in their eyes took the megaphone announcement as an invitation.
They leapt over the specially erected barricades. “Stupid bulls!”
“Stay back!” said the policemen, batons raised.
A police dog bared its teeth and barked at a group of drunken, jeering men, who taunted its beer-bellied owner. A lone tourist held his selfie-stick up high to get a better shot.
Yusuf absorbed the scene around him, narrowly avoiding injury when a bottle whizzed past his ear. It exploded feet away, near a fire hydrant. Blood pounded in his ears, and he was transported back to falling bombs and children covered in rubble. He clung to the present, his feet planted wide apart, the veins in his neck straining against his skin. Next to him, Isaiah’s eyes had widened, the whites of his eyes in stark contrast to his black mask.
After a brief pause, like the pendulum before a clock strikes midnight, mayhem erupted all around them, within the ranks of the protesters and the state apparatus, as if they had crossed an invisible line.
Masked youths barged towards a bank, throwing rocks and beer bottles that cracked panes. Sirens blared. People zigzagged across the street, searching for pockets of safety or property to destroy. Yards away, a man crouched on the floor to let off a firework and the side of his face took the blunt force of a police baton. A group of men ran riot, flipping over bins, targeting cars and looting shops so that the streets became strewn with filth and fragments of glass. The police numbers exploded, and soon the streets had become a battlefield of pepper spray and batons, improvised projectiles and ferocious strangers. From balconies nearby, phone cameras flashed.
The scenes intoxicated Yusuf. This wasn’t war like in Syria. There was a barely there civility, still, to this deteriorating demonstration. He felt alive. Uncaged.
He grabbed Isaiah’s arm and together they ran into the stream of troublemakers, shoving their way through. Some fool had parked a sleek black Mercedes on the roadside. A man next to him drop-kicked the wing mirror, cracking it. Then he and Isaiah joined others rocking the car, heaving with all their might until it rolled onto its roof like a beetle on its back.
Yusuf thought back to all the times he or Selim had fought with their father, and how every angry word left a welt on the soft flesh of his heart. Better to strike the enemy, to land blows before someone else did, to protect yourself by being the attacker, the bully, by taking what should be yours.
He thought of Simeon and Dawud, Silberling and Karl. Most of all, he thought of his mother and his dead brother.
His anger helped him soar.
Power surged through him as if he was in the eye of the storm.
A policeman swung his baton in their direction and Yusuf elbowed the man in the windpipe. The policeman’s knees buckled, and he fell to the ground, winded.
Yusuf paused, suspended in time, while around him men threw punches and shouted themselves hoarse, hurled broken bottles, and stumbled through the white whirling vapours of noxious gas. He turned a lens on himself and saw an alien, someone he didn’t recognise, as if he’d splintered into shards of his former self.
Could a person fragment and still make their way through the world? How had his identities become so layered? What had once been fluid and seamless had become a complex negotiation, skins chosen or attributed to him in different times and places: a small, loved Syrian child; a brown man; a refugee; an alien; a terrorist; a lost man; a thug. He’d tired of the nimble feet required to stay upright on his path.
Next to him, Isaiah helped a woman to her feet. They swarmed forward together, finding release in their delinquency, in the disregard for law and property. He didn’t have anything anyway–not really–so why should he care about others and their things?
Selim had envisaged a world that could never exist.
The real world wasn’t soft and round, but made of jutting glass and force.
Lines blurred, and the hairs on his arm stood on end. Perhaps he and Karl weren’t so different after all.
