NILS SCHREIBER

Girlfriend

ON MULACKSTRASSE IT LOOKED as if nobody had collected trash since the Wall fell. Empty lots like missing teeth, competing graffiti, foreigners out, Nazis out, on every exposed wall, and the faint traces of Yiddish over what had once been shop windows but were now as often as not boarded over. As midnight approached, a naked light bulb hung over a single open storefront. The storefront announced itself as an art gallery. In a spirit of bored curiosity, we entered. There were stairs and arrows leading to the basement. When we got down there, we had to walk over broken glass to get to the art, which was a dead rat suspended in the coal bin. Holly stifled what seemed like an unlikely scream. A girl with neon hair laconically held out a donation cup. I dropped a couple of marks in it. Holly wore flats with thin soles and was afraid she would cut her feet on the glass. The gallery was housed in the building her father had once owned, but her parents had never lived there and Holly showed little interest in this, her second claim. This was despite my suggestion that it might one day be worth a pile, that the old ghetto of the Scheunenviertel – centrally located, morbidly appealing, and left to rot during the GDR – was already showing signs of being Berlin’s next neighborhood of the future.