There is no wind. It’s like a funeral morning. The mist in the streets of Berlin seems to bring the city to a standstill, even while everything is moving. The people Joseph Roth described a century ago are back in their starting positions. Same lives down the road in history. The little girl pouring sand on a balcony. An old man reading a book in his room. The young man in a parallel room putting on some music, sending out a fragment of sound into the city.
A fragment of a fragment, he called it.
Inside Armin’s bag feels like being in the back of an ambulance. You follow the imagined street map in your head. Another five hundred metres straight ahead, then left. We have now reached the market stalls on Hermannplatz. Where the shopping centre once stood like a giant anniversary cake with two towers, before the bombing took it away and it was replaced by, what, a shopping centre with no towers and no swimming pool on top.
All around, the flow of people passing by like a library in motion. Books gathered in clusters around fruit and vegetable stalls. A melodic book shouting special offers on avocados. A steady stream of books going down the escalator, joining the books already waiting on the platform. Books getting off and books getting on. A last-minute book, rushing to jump in before the doors close.
That musical gift for hearing what cannot be seen – it was something the organ grinder had. The ability to distinguish the tiniest sounds. His ears became sighted. He knew the difference between the hoofs of a carriage horse and those of a dray horse. Between the old and the young. Between the weak and the strong.
My fellow travellers this time – a notepad, a measuring tape and a laser distance meter. Armin’s livelihood involves measuring empty spaces. As part of a research project, he has been tasked with surveying sites around the city such as gas stations and parking facilities which have been given over to private motorized transport. In his notebook, he has recorded the details of a single-storey corner site, once a beer store, then a Starbucks outlet, now an Italian restaurant. The aim of the project is to calculate the available vertical space, how many housing units could be provided once the capital has been turned into a green zone.
I have now become a measurer’s assistant.
Only one thing troubles me. I am carrying a cargo of cash. Inserted between two pages right in the middle, there is a bundle of banknotes. This calculable world of money gives me a bloated sensation. Have I now been turned into a wallet? I want to renounce this wealth. I want to be a book that carries only its own literary content, a vehicle of storytelling, not for transporting money.
On a street of twenty languages, Armin steps into a barber shop. He sits on the waiting bench. In front of him there are two men draped in black sheets, buried up to the neck, it seems. On a TV screen a woman is seen walking along a beach, singing with the sunset behind her.
The men in the barber chairs show implausible levels of masculinity. The man on the left is getting a buzz cut, leaving a full black beard untouched. His eyes are fierce and self-hostile – that’s how I imagine it, ready for a fight with his own reflection. The other man has a pointed beard and a tattoo of what looks like a chainsaw on his neck. He’s getting a skin fade, but again, the beard stays. The space underneath their barber robes is spring-loaded with musculature, as though they are both armed.
Are men always going to war or returning from war? Either defeated or going off to fight in a conflict that is already lost? Are these men getting ready for some unknown enemy? Maybe a big fight with nature. A battle with water. Without water. With fires spreading.
This sacred cutting room where men face themselves in the mirror with great intensity while the barber works on their external appearance. It’s a day of reckoning. A place to reflect and fess up and collect the latest news. Joseph Roth wrote a newspaper piece a hundred years ago about a man who walked into a barber shop and started talking without any introduction, giving a stream of political developments to the silent men in their chairs.
A large fly has entered the room, taunting the men, making their strength appear ludicrously overstated. One of the barbers tries to chase it out from behind bottles of spray with the use of the hairdryer. The fly is blown away in a hurricane, lifted vertically like a helicopter.
The overwhelming masculinity of the two bearded men, along with the barber’s deep voice and the scent of aftershave, makes Armin feel androgynous. He will tell this story about himself later. A memory of childhood in which he was once turned into a girl at school. For a minor misdemeanour, he was dragged out from his desk. The master decided to bring him over to the girls’ section of the school, where he was dressed up with a veil over his head and made to sit at the back of a classroom full of girls. They kept turning around to giggle at him as if there were something funny about being female. He sat there wearing his veil for a full day, inside the life of a young girl, waiting to escape back into his own body as a young boy. He tries to forget that memory of the time when being a woman was a form of punishment.
The barber picks up a magazine with a woman in a swimsuit on the cover. He slaps it down on the counter with lightning speed. The big fly is dead. Twice dead. Once in life and once in the mirror. His black corpse is carried over to a bin, where it becomes part of a vast collection of cut hair. The fur of a dozen men has become his grave.
A new customer enters the barber shop and sits down on the waiting bench beside Armin. He is in his forties. His leather jacket makes a squeaking noise as he grabs me out of Armin’s hands and begins leafing through the pages. He takes the money I’ve been storing and counts it, then he puts it away in the inside pocket of his jacket.
What’s a Muslim doing reading a book in German?
I’m not Muslim, Armin replies.
You were born Muslim, the man says. Chechnya, right? You can’t just take it off like a coat. You can’t just leave it behind on the bus and say it’s not mine. You’re a Muslim until you die, my friend.
I grew up here, Armin says.
It’s in your shit.
The man is clearly not a reader himself. He doesn’t even want to know what the story is about. The life of a barrel organ player is hardly going to interest him. He uses me to scratch his thigh.
Tell your sister, he says, she’s a beautiful woman. I love her. I don’t even see what she’s missing. In all honesty, it’s not something that ever bothered me. A lot of other men wouldn’t want that.
Armin makes no reply.
Tell Madina from me, I’m the only man who loves her for who she is.
Armin refuses to be drawn.
It was me who set her up, the man says. Without me she would never have become a singer. I got her off the ground. Don’t let her forget that. Without me she is nothing.
He stands up and reaches over to borrow a razor from the counter.
Excuse me, he says to the barber. Just for one second.
He begins neatly cutting out one of the pages from the middle of the story. The pain is something else. Now I know what it was like for Effi Briest. It happens to be the page where the barrel organ player gets in trouble on the tram. Where the businessman refuses to make room for him and he’s forced to fight his way on board, only to be called a faker. Where he’s called a Jew and immediately seen as the aggressor. A peace-loving man cast out of the community. For allowing his anger to show on the streetcar, for raising his crutch in retaliation, he will be charged with public disorder and forfeit his right to happiness.
This page contains my author’s entire worldview on social injustice.
The man folds the page he has just cut out and places it alongside the money in his pocket. A part of myself has been amputated now, like a severed limb. Any sales description would need to include my true condition. Slight water damage. A spot of thief’s blood. A trace of rat’s urine containing Weil’s disease. A hand-drawn map, as well as a wide selection of thumbprints, dead and alive. Not to mention that faint smoke inhalation from the night of burning books.
And now, this vital page missing.
Before he hands me back to Armin, a flyer falls out from in between my pages and he picks it up from the floor. He takes his time to examine it before he puts it back inside again.
Gallery Fernreich is pleased to invite you to the opening of an exhibition of new work by Christiane Wartenberg. The collection is being launched by Tagesspiegel critic Ronald Kolterman. Auguststrasse 89. Mitte. Drinks – 5.30 p.m.
He stands up and raps his knuckles on the wall behind Armin’s head. Armin sits in a dream, watching him stepping out into the street and going out of sight. One of the barber seats becomes vacant. The barber slaps the chair to let Armin know it’s his turn now to be a man.