A New Friend

berliners

While the band was setting up, I waited in front of the bar with a beer in my hand. I rolled a few in my customary style: too full of tobacco, threatening to rip at its center. I eavesdropped on the crowd ‘round me, trying to distract myself from my thoughts. I felt a whir in my stomach, another stupid line begging to be born— “a good alcoholic should be like a mathematician, inventing problems that lay just slightly beyond his abilities to solve.” I wrote it down on my phone. Self-satisfied, I giggle and go out the door to smoke outside.

As I lit up the cigarette and took a few puffs, a woman came walking by with an expectant expression: she looked up and down and ‘round and about; she had large, hexagonal sunglasses made of black tortoiseshell as if she’d walked out of a monochrome screen. She look at me, glanced at my beer and smiled, and she approached me.

“Are you here to see the music?” she said. Her hair was white, with a few pins, and her face was rich with features like a landscape. I nodded in agreement, and smiled; she stood a bit closer and stuck out her hand in a gesture of friendliness that startled me. “I’m Elke,” she said with a worn voice. She asked if the music would be the ordinary jazz or the more avant-garde sort. She was a bit disappointed when I told her it was of the ordinary sort: “a clarinet, bass, a few chords.” She laughed and explained that she used to be “so hip to it all, but not much anymore.” Burrowed little noises blended into something personal. She coughed into her hands, then shot an apologetic look. “Want a cigarette?” I asked with a smile. She nodded no, and said it would be a shame if I was to tarnish my handsome face with smoking.

I ask Elke to join me at the bar where I buy her a shabby, non-alcoholic attempt at a cocktail. A wooden umbrella hangs between chunks of ice, in a cracked glass set onto dusty pine. I saw her body creak a little bit as she pulled herself onto the bar stool, but I wouldn’t dare to condescend by helping her. She covered her mouth with a bar napkin as she coughed. I complimented her on her sweater— regal, patterned in black-and-white. She smiles, takes a sip of her drink, her lips a tad shaky: “It’s part of an old collection. When I was a teenager, I wanted to look like a Hollywood star. The old Hollywood before my time. You know what I’m talking about?” I nodded, trying to imagine Elke as a bright-eyed teenager. “I was in love with this houndstooth suit Bacall wore in the Big Sleep. It was already old-fashioned but I didn’t care and I begged my poor mother to buy me one. And she shouted, in German; ‘Elke! Kleine Mädchen aus Rostock kleiden sich nicht wie Hollywood Schauspielerinnen!’ Little girls from Rostock don’t dress like Hollywood stars. And I was so upset at this obvious truth that I locked myself in my room for a whole day.” I laugh, and offered a rejoinder: “well, every girl is entitled to want better for herself. Every girl wants to win.” Elke straightened herself in a gesture of pride. “Yes. While I was in my room, I made the promise to myself to always want better, to always want more. I think that’s why my life is the mess it is. I won a lot.”

I took a sip from my beer, and I looked around. The walls were covered in ancient dust, and the lights are yellow’d as if covered with the soot off that old wall. The air lies thick with smothered hopes and cigarette-smoked clothing. Through the speakers, a faint voice crackles through. I figured we were surrounded by the old guard; they’d been herded in from the tenements, from the squats, from cheap pensions with crappy heating. I hear the ambient talk drift like leaves in water: gallery gossip, Marxist theory cold in the middle, and always & ever how Berlin used to be before you people got here. I give life to every single of them: this one was a filmmaker, now he babbles the night away drunk on cheep beer— reciting lines from Hölderlin in a private mass. Another shiny bald dome scribbles his confessions in a book; endlessly rehearsing his old ‘conquests.’ A woman with bright red lipstick and a Polish lilt to her pleading laughed intermittently at nothing at all, staring at the ghost of her lover that stood in the corner beside the drum kit.

“The graffiti in the bathroom says ‘Berlin is where art comes to die,’” I say to Elke. Elke laughs. “The sad truth about Berlin is that it’s pretty much just like every other city. It’s just that here people take it particularly harsh when their fantasies don’t translate to reality,” she sez. I take a sip from my beer, trying to subdue the burning in my throat. “Did you take it particularly harsh?” Elke smiles. “My fantasies did translate into reality. And that was not a great thing.” I giggled, a bit impressed by her subtle swagger so deftly existing beside sudden vulnerability. As the musicians took the stage, Elke touched my arm again: “Thank you for speaking to me. Very few men your age are interested in talking to me.”

I returned to the bar the next week, as my friends would be playing this time. After I took a seat on the leather couch and listened to the rancor of a clarinet swimming across keys, I saw Elke quietly find a place between two stacks of coats set on decaying wooden chairs. After the first set, I marched up to Elke and demanded that she take my spot on the leather couch; to the chagrin of my friend who found it distasteful that a woman would dare to age. After the second set, Elke expressed appreciation and squeezed my hand, but she did not stay to chat and left me to the drunken boredom of my friends.

Eager to see Elke again, I returned to the bar the next week. I felt a strange guilt; there would be no jazz tonight, my intentions were clear. Am I making a mistake? Am I lesser for ‘wasting my time?’ Am I a freak or a creep for seeking a connection with someone I shouldn’t? I lie to myself by telling myself other people don’t share my neuroticisms, even though I know they do. I put it out of my mind. Elke comes through the door, this time wearing a red beret and an olive blazer; Baader–Meinhof chic. She dressed up for me. I buy her another cocktail, pineapple this time, and we talk a bit about films— La Chinoise in particular was on my mind. “Oh, that woman hater. Give me Bergman instead, please. Substance over fashion.” I found that rather ironic. She adjusted her glasses. “I mean, if you like him, that’s not a bad thing.” I stuck out my tongue, playing up offense at her mock pity. “Let’s go for a walk, a slow walk. The air in this bar really bothers me.”

After our drinks, we walked down steadily towards Schillerpark. Under the dire, crumbling bark, a few boys dressed in tracksuits chased each other with beer, trying to make bursts of foam by attacking the rim with forceful taps of the bottle. Down in the grass, children ran through the bushes, faces blushing and fat. Elke and I discussed our mundane troubles for a while; she told me she was once a struggling writer herself, a terrible habit she’d picked up when she realized her imagination offered more comfort than the war-torn Berlin she’d been born into.

“Once I started writing, I had the most vivid dreams.” She said when we sat down on the stairs behind the statue of Schiller. I threw a few French fries to a gaggle of pigeons gathering above the statue. “You see I grew up without a father. I think because of that, my mother had always told me I was special and rare. She had no man to attach herself onto, so she attached herself onto me. And she never told me what happened to my father, so I started having strange fantasies. I imagined my father being eaten up by my mother, in some kind of strange ritual of marriage. And I imagined myself rising up as a gigantic crystal tower, blinding everyone with an explosion of light when the sun came up behind me.” Our eyes met, and I admired the fearlessness of her candor; a strength far beyond the fragility of bone.

Before we parted, Elke reached into her leather bag and handed me a book. The cover was dull in a comforting way, a typical German veneer. At the top, it read “die Dritte Geliebte;” at the bottom, “Elke Mucha.” She smiled, showing her brilliantly-sculpted teeth. “It’s about a love triangle between two men and a woman. It grows more and more violently ‘till the two men conspire to kill the woman. Sex and violence and love; such German things.” Elke touched my arm, and added: “sorry to spoil it, but I don’t think you’d read it otherwise.”

On the train, I read a few passages of Elke’s prose. The words were brisk, angular; each new line seemed to be a violent intervention on its predecessor. But compared to her contemporaries, Elke’s characters were richly drawn with constant private confessions to the narrator. Each lover was a portrait of shame & disgrace; ill-equipped to reckon with their past, incapable of imagining a future. Snakes devouring themselves by their own tails, sinking in quick sand, distracting themselves by any means, constantly betraying themselves through grand follies— the aesthetic was punk literature, but the drama was pure Old Hollywood, a grainy bootleg of Casablanca. And it was just so funny; “frisch durchgefickt, kam Henriette ein Gedanke über politische Ökonomie.”

On the back of the book, there stood a picture of Elke; her hair was still black, and her face was smooth like a piece of jagged marble. She wore a boyish little button-up; the same delicate smile with honest teeth. The dark roughly-hewn strands were combed to the side, falling beside her neck, down towards her waist. I felt a strange sort of shame in finding Elke beautiful, as if it were immodest, inappropriate. I imagined her as a breathing specter sitting on the seats before me, appearing as she would in the Sixties— her eyes alit with barely-concealed rage, absent-minded, carelessly muttering ‘tween cigarette drags, intoxicated by the obliteration which Berlin had once promised the world. “Can you relate to me without wanting to sleep with me?” she asked with a Pomeranian melody in her words. I laughed. “What is it that you want from me, Elke?” She rose up from her seat and sat next to me. She smelled of jasmine perfume and wet wood. “I want you to see me. I want you to see that my circles still run.” A sudden pang of remorse robbed me of my smile, I could never deliver on such a request. “How did she say it? ‘Death. The opposite is desire.’” Elke’s face softened up, and she rested her head on my shoulder. The ebb of night went by in silence.

The next week, Elke and I stood outside our little Kneipe while a boring, trite band etched away at some noodling. I drank a few sips of my bottle, and Elke drew a cubist rendition of me slow-dancing with a beer as tall as I am. “A bit boring today,” I spat. Elke looked up from her notebook; “my place is only a little bit from here, let’s go.” I laughed. “I think we should just be friends,” I said, trying not to wince too much. Elke’s face turned on its side with a raised eyebrow: “I’m sorry, I like older men,” she answered. “The closer to the grave, the better.”

We walked up Osloer, towards the graveyard. Elke held onto my arm, resting her hand on the nook where my skin and the leather of my jacket meet. She pointed to a wall covered in graffiti, lamenting how it had turned into a ‘respectable enterprise.’ “It was really another world back then,” I answered carelessly. Elke broke her contact from me, her expression suddenly serious: “don’t say that, I’m not a fossil!” I felt bad. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m sorry, I’m careless with words sometimes.” Elke folded her arms, stood for a few moments, then returned her hand to my arm: “a bad quality for someone aspiring to be a writer.” I took the jab in stride.

Her apartment building was a red-brick’d affair falling between a few neglected trees, with a handful of neon-yellow trash cans stalking ‘round the corner beside rusting bikes, abandoned shoes, rotting literature. Up the cobblestones, you saw satellite dishes looming over neglected plants and ceramic flower pots. Elke tells me that just a few world orders ago, you could get a döner and a Bierchen for a single Bettina. Go across the street to Kotti and you could get yourself a little bit of crystal for another Bettina, just enough to keep you writing through the night. “People wore less black then,” she said as she pointed to a kebab shop that used to sell used discounted leather popular among the Lederbären crowd, back when an outlaw could be a petty crook and still afford a motorcycle license. “Even with Joy Division, you know Ian Curtis would wear pink and baby blue. The darkness wasn’t something you wore, it was something within you, something dangerous you can’t let out.” And if you walk a little further down, past the little kiosk that sold thimbles of coffee, you can find an empty little shopfront that used to host readings and plays and whatever else a mies Berliner could get her hands on. “Before Berlin was part of the world, it was its own world. Now it’s just a very dirty little scab on the Earth’s surface.” Elke’s weathered face seemed more distant now, as if it were transmitted to me from somewhere far away.

“Come on,” I said. “I’m tired of walking.” Elke took out her keys and led me into the rotting insides of the apartment building. Rusting mailboxes and rotting windowsills brought me the stench of war fatigue and the steps creaked under us as we walked up. One of the windows was covered in dust such that I could not look out, ‘cept through a few patches, rays of light full with dancing particles, from lamps that fill every crack of shadow on the street.

Elke’s apartment surprised me. It was a mess, a coherent and meticulous mess. From every corner hung an article of clothing. Entire art pieces were etched into the wall. Several stacks of periodicals stood high like towers beneath paintings and wall etchings. Every flat surface was covered in books, or magazines, or a vinyl record, or a cassette tape; it was a museum dedicated to teh chambers of Elke’s mind, thoughts ambered, artifact’d, a history of curiosity and touches. The unending search. And what was this trek in search of, but a few images, to open the heart wide ag’in as it once did? “Cool stuff,” I said. “Sorry, it’s such a mess” Elke responded. “I’m still figuring out what to do with all of this. Throwing it away seems like a shame.” We went over to her kitchen, where she fixed me a coffee using an antique little moka pot. Above the stove hung a little calendar presenting a new Grecian statue every month. The calendar read “1997,” and the image was of three marble woman in a singular embrace. She poured a little bit of coffee and I sat before her on a small wooden table, into which were carved a gallery of initials, doodles, shapes— and the dust left behind by the people who leave your life just as abruptly as they enter it.

“Show me something cool,” I said as I slowly sipped. “I think you’ve had an interesting life.” Elke scoffs: “had!” I put down my coffee. “That’s not what I meant.” Elke’s face softened up into a smile. “I’m teasing you.” Elke went up to the living room and came back with a photo album; the aches started to set in and her posture became stiff and strained. She set the photo album before me— a gallery of ghosts, full of blurry fragments of some greater moment lying just beyond the frame; boxy cars, smiles, body parts, unhappy loves and degraded friendships. “Does it fascinate you?” she asked. I told that a writer is parasitic on the sentiments of others. “Not parasitic,” she responded. “Symbiotic,” she added. “Memories are just memories. Nothing more. They’re dreams I’ve once had, dreams I can no longer trust. Writing them down transforms them; they’re given new life again.” She runs her fingers over through a few of the pictures, turning the pages; instant photos, flashy haircuts dyed in orange, goth ‘n roll. “It’s a way of dealing with the grief.” She takes out one of the photos: a man with a mohawk is embracing Elke, a cigarette between his teeth, both of their middle fingers up. “It’s comical to me; none of them ever say to the camera ‘please remember something of me,’ even though the photo might be the only thing left of them. We tell time to fuck itself, knowing we’re powerless in getting fucked.”

Elke turned the pages of the photo album a few more times. She stopped at a page which featured a blown-up picture; herself on the bottom with short black hair, and above her to the left a man, and a woman to the right. She smiled. “You look like him,” Elke said. “Blue eyes and a soft face. Kind.” I looked at the woman to the right; blonde-brown hair, elven features, and a mischievous smile. Her hand is on Elke’s shoulder; the man embraces the woman from the side. “She’s beautiful,” I said, I thot with an intent to poke and pry. “Jutta,” Elke answered. “She was my best friend.” The edges of Elke’s smile were strained, the name was bittersweet on her tongue. “And the guy?” Elke’s smile bled away. “I was going out with him,” a diplomatic, understated choice of words. “He and Jutta were very close, but I never thought they were in love. I thought I was actually jealous of their friendship at first,” she laughed. I looked at the photo, and it started to burn. I thought about how Elke would have been as a lover— I imagined embracing her as she wept, the precision with which she’d sink her claws and teeth into me when we fought, the softness in her voice as she slowly fell asleep in my arms. The images in my head were somewhere between dream and memory; the limbs of experiences and fantasies becoming one in union, caught in a flash.

“And what happened?” I blurted out thoughtlessly. “I mean… if you want to tell me,” I added. Elke’s smile made a return; she got up and drank from a glass of water. “Me and him related physically— but with Jutta, he had a spiritual, artistic, maybe even mystical bond. They could speak without speaking, sitting beside each other in silence; ignoring my long, boring rambling.” She took the photo out from the album, and read the writing on the back. “Ah, yes. This was taken before I broke up with him, before they broke off contact with each other. I made a lot of accusations; not about sex, about something… something I thought was much worse.” She laughed to herself, then sat back down. “She said her friendship with me was more important, and that she found his presence unwelcome and irritating, and his affection unbearable.” Her eyes looked to me. “But she never said ‘no’ to him, and she tried too hard to act as if he meant nothing to her; as if she didn’t seek his comfort, his approval, his love.” Elke’s face turned red, and she apologized. I put my hand on her hand, I squeezed, I stroked the fine wrinkles of her skin. Elke smiled at me, her eyes burning with gratitude. Her lips moved to say something, but she said nothing, and her eyes fell back onto the page. I didn’t answer, and a chill of embarrassment made me shiver.

Elke turned the page to another picture. More pictures of him, of Jutta. Throughout the pictures, Elke’s expression soured, her face thinner. A happy love between the three of them became an unhappy love; resentments and unexpressed needs will smother you in time. In one of the pictures, he’s standing with a guitar in his hand and a cigarette between pursing lips. Jutta looks up at him; she’s not smiling, no. I know that face, the terror it could inspire in you. Her expression is blank and contemplative, her eyes intently focused, staring into something. It was the last picture in the photobook of them all together, before they buried everything they could not express with distance and silence; I wonder if they knew the finality of that moment they’d shared together. “Jutta died alone,” she said quietly. “From cancer. And he resented the role I’d played in keeping them apart.” Elke looked at me with sad eyes, expecting something that I knew I could not give her; I looked the part, but I could not play the role. “I’m boring you,” she said softly. “No,” I answered before I stood up. “No, I…” and Elke started to wheeze and cough violently and I handed her a tea towel and watched her fill it with phlegm. The emptiness of the kitchen made me feel uneasy, as if the entire world had shrunk to the four walls surrounding us. I cleared my throat. “It’s easy to imagine things going differently, going better,” I said. “But there’s no guarantee that if it had gone differently, it would have been better. For anyone.” I resented myself for suddenly sounding like a bad self-help video. I touched her shoulder, but not for too long. “Please, don’t;” her voice was strained. I left without saying a word; I paced through the living room, searching for the door. I looked behind me at the empty room, stuffed with boxes full of her possessions.

I returned to the bar the next week, unsure of what I’d sought. I’d thought of things to say to Elke; I felt that I’d failed her somehow with my words. I looked around at the bar; there were two men, drinking and smoking without much clamor. I looked in the back, behind a damp curtain, where a few flowers were covered in dust beneath smoke-damaged paintings and a peeling veneer. I went back in the bar. She wasn’t there. I waited for a bit longer. I waited all night and Elke never came.