It must be the air. The language. The unmistakable acoustics of Berlin. That timeless echo of voices reverberating along the buildings. Lena appears to have strayed into a crowd of protesters. People moving at a steady pace, calling out their slogans, with drums beating. They want change. There is no time to waste – it’s our future.
Like a swimmer, she throws herself into the crowd and becomes a temporary participant in the demonstration, taken upstream in the strong current. She ends up on the far bank, some distance down from the starting point. Leaving the human river behind, she comes into a quiet street and enters an interior space.
It’s a café bar. There is music playing. A man’s voice singing about seven days to live your life and seven ways to die. Lena is swept up into an embrace by another woman. The woman’s name is Julia. Julia Fernreich, the owner of an art gallery in Berlin.
They sit down, they order coffee.
Julia wants to know how things are in New York – tell me everything. They list off the names of people they both know in the art world. Julia is preparing for a new exhibition at her gallery. The room Lena will be taking up at Julia’s apartment nearby is all ready for her, but the living room, she warns, is still full of stuff right now, mostly packaging.
By the sound of it, Julia is a big woman, in her late forties. Her voice is husky and confident. She has a large laugh. Her choice of words is full of fight and irony, giving advice, pointing out all the places where she has gone wrong in her own life. She goes right to the heart of the matter and begins to talk about happiness. Wrong goal, she says. I’ve never heard so much shit being talked about happiness, she says, and the world is out of control with anxiety. We are humming with optimism in a time of doom, she says with a broad laugh. Living in the moment, they might as well go back to religion. Have you ever known so many people talking things up, using positive words like great, fantastic, amazing, awesome, epic?
Beautiful. Tremendous. Terrific. All liar words. It’s a triumph of lies. They’re running out of superlatives.
In the middle of this, Julia asks Lena if she’s hungry – would you like to eat something?
No thanks, Lena says, I’m good.
Happiness does not make people happy.
Look at me, Julia says. Not very lucky in love. My latest partner has just moved out. It’s my default situation, getting left behind. Crazy bitch. I still love her. You see her going around on a motorbike.
I have a son from a previous relationship, Julia says. Matt – you’ll meet him later. He’s a lucky boy. He’s got two mothers. He’s not entirely without a father either, you know, a male father. I try to make sure we go on holidays as a family once a year, all four of us. Matt has got himself into some bad company, a bit of trouble with drugs. Might have to send him up to his other mother in Hamburg.
I hope he’ll be OK, Lena says.
I’m sorry, Julia says. You didn’t come to Berlin to hear me complaining.
Then it’s Lena’s turn to talk about her life. She speaks with a younger voice. The words come up in a wave of enthusiasm. Her body leans forward as she tells Julia that she’s hoping to do something new. My work, she says. I hope that being here in Berlin will take it in a new direction. I’m gathering material, let’s put it that way.
Go for it, Julia says.
Lena is slow to say this about herself, but her Misfortune collection has won her quite a bit of acclaim. Julia already knows about that exhibition at a small East Side gallery in Manhattan and wants her gallery to do Lena’s next show. She gives Lena a bit of straight advice. As a curator, she has seen a lot of artists come and go into oblivion. It’s not about fame and success. It’s about being outrageous. Aggressive. Ruthless. You have all that, Lena. Trust yourself. Tear up the clichés. Allow yourself to do something completely crazy.
Thanks, Lena says.
Take a shit, Julia says, right in the middle of the floor, for yourself.
Lena laughs.
On the back of her success, Lena has managed to get a research grant to help tide her over while she’s in Berlin. All she needs is a small studio space.
Let me nose around, Julia says. Maybe we can find someplace. I’ll put out the feelers.
The music in the café seems to have become louder. Now it’s the screaming voice of a man asking a woman where she slept last night and she replies that she slept among the pine trees, where the sun never shines, and she shivered the whole night through. The singer’s voice seems infected with great sorrow.
Julia says – I love Cobain. I mourn him every day. He took a shot of heroin, he masturbated to a picture of his wife, then he shot himself, in that order.
A shout rises above the roar of the singer. It’s the voice of a customer inside the café, sitting at the bar, turning to say – ladies, mind your handbags. A piece of delayed wisdom drifting across the room, which might have been confused initially with the voice of the singer belting it out from the back of his raw throat. The man at the bar repeats his warning – handbag – but it takes time for the word to reach the table where Julia and Lena are sitting.
Julia stands up. The chair howls.
Hey, she shouts. Is that your bag, Lena?
Oh my God.
The bag in which I have been happily recalling my early years in this city is now being hoisted onto the shoulder of a thief making his way out of the café. How come it doesn’t surprise me? This used to be the capital of book thieves and disappearing bags. The city of opportunists. Where people were constantly offered the chance to buy back their own possessions at a knock-down price.
I was content inside that bag. Dreaming about my newly printed days, when I was first published. I was well received, if not exactly celebrated outright, a newcomer on the literary scene. I was overshadowed by a bigger, weightier book, with many more pages than mine, a masterpiece about a sanatorium that came out in the same year. It’s a book I envied very much. I sometimes wished my author had thought of it. But then, I have to say, I’ve always been happy with the brevity of my own story about a man who gave up one of his legs in defence of his country and is then betrayed by his own people, forced in the end to rebel against them all.
There is no time for that kind of reflection. I am being rushed out the door onto the street.
My first night home and I get stolen.
You were meant to keep me safe, Lena. I’m supposed to be your little brother, right?
I become conscious of sudden acceleration. I feel myself running along the street. I hear Julia’s sharp voice coming after me, as if the shivering singer on the sound system in the café has been brought back to life and has run outside with his burned-out throat roaring along the doorways. A shout like a piece of vocal graffiti. The person carrying the bag is fast, a young man, light on his feet in soundless shoes. Julia cannot keep up with him. By the sound of it, she hurls a beer glass, swiped off the bar counter at the last minute, with extraordinary accuracy, striking my assailant, my wrongful inheritor, somewhere in the back of the head with a solid knock before it crashes in shards on the ground.
Glass in the street. Not something I can forget.
My thief is cursing. He checks for blood. He holds on to his plunder and continues his escape. Julia’s shouts fade away and I want to call back like they do in movies – I will find you – but I am taken out of earshot into a nearby park. In darkness, next to an overfilled rubbish bin, my thief calmly turns the bag out. He takes what is valuable to him – passport, phone, money. He throws the bag on top of the bin. He leaves me rejected on the ground. I lie abandoned in the city of my birth, a witness to my own robbery, next to the remains of a Vietnamese takeaway. It begins to rain. A warm, late-summer rain that is nonetheless cold and has the potential to chill me to the core. I feel the dampness under my skin. My pages are beginning to warp.