Tomorrow Berlin (2 page)

The days flew by, in the orgy bars, at the café on the boulevard, in his attic. He grabbed cocks, he carried his tray, he made up little bags of cocaine. He liked being alone with his digital scales. A decent heap on his left, a knife and pieces of plastic. You make a gram, always a little bit less – business is business. You seal the plastic with your lighter. And that little ball instantly represents money. You do the calculations, you’re safe.
You have lots of little balls sealed in plastic, you’ll put them in your pocket and sell them. That’s the raw material.

It felt really good being able to pay the rent without worrying, drink whatever he wanted, buy cigarettes without counting his change.

Soon he only worked weekends in the café on the boulevard. Fridays and Saturdays were when there were most customers for the little balls in plastic bags. At the end of his shift, he’d tour the rue d’Assas with Maurice, Paulo and Gégé. He did a line or two with them and there were more clients there, so that was extra money rolling in – like Molloy with his pebbles, he stuck the notes in his left pocket and took out a ball sealed in plastic from his right – an endless cycle. He also felt he was giving them pleasure; he was selling a bit of happiness. Didn’t he also take some of that happiness himself whenever he wanted? He had that in common with them, the little artificial excitement, the awakening of the soul. Oh, how he would have loved to be like that all the time, without having to stick a straw up his nose.

One Monday night, he met Victor in one of the orgy bars. They fucked like crazy. The difference was, with Victor he felt satisfied. He didn’t feel
the need to go and look for other arses, to be penetrated by other cocks. He felt full of Victor. That was enough for him. Their bodies completed each other as though they could talk to each other, as if this ease went beyond them.

Victor was thirty-five, about ten years older than Tobias. They exchanged names. Tobias didn’t have a phone; he jotted down Victor’s number.

They kissed shyly as they parted outside the bar where they met, as though they wanted to recreate the embarrassment of a less brutal encounter, as though they had not already fucked in that filthy bar, rammed with bodies.

‘Will you call me?’

‘Yes. You’ll need to wait a bit.’

Day was breaking. It was cold, but in a nice way. Tobias smoked as he walked slowly along – he was enraptured. If you’d looked closely at his face as he walked home after that strange night, you’d have seen a little smile on his lips. Not the smile of a drunk, but something suggesting happiness was within reach. You can sense it, it’s there; you could almost touch it, the happiness of enchantment.

He could sense the little nostalgic smile crease his cheeks; he felt like he was observing himself
walking in the streets, a figure alone, but already as though he was missing Victor.

It was almost seven when Tobias reached the rue des Écoles. All the way there, his little smile had remained. It disappeared instantly when he saw Jérôme outside the building being led to a police van in handcuffs.

Their eyes met. Jérôme motioned to him to get away. There was no sense in him getting picked up too. They’d both go down, and what good was that?

Tobias obeyed. He passed the building one last time and kept walking. He just kept going.

Armand’s a nice guy. Whether people like him or not, that’s generally what they think; a nice loser, with tangled hair and jeans that are too short. He mooches round the bars hoping to catch the eye of some hot girl. Armand says he wants to be a painter; he works at it a bit every morning. On the street he looks for pieces of wood and road signs. He likes having paint splashes on his hands, arms or legs as proof of what he’s doing. He also likes
the idea that he’s working with something physical, one foot in reality, the other in creativity. It’s the physical sense of the moment when he’s painting that he likes; otherwise, maybe he’d have wanted to write.

He plays the drum machine. He doesn’t eat much. He smokes plenty, though. It’s unusual to run into Armand without a cigarette end dangling from his lips. It doesn’t go with his look, the extinguished butt he chews at the corner of his mouth. Armand’s young and quite good-looking. He has four scooters; one day, he’s going to buy a motorbike. And then he’ll finally be free; he’ll ride around in the desert, a law unto himself, the stars and stripes tattooed on his shoulder.

At sixteen he left his mother’s house to live with a girl he loved more than life itself, as he put it. He truly believed that.

She’d sent him emails without him knowing who she was. He saw a girl in the high school yard and hoped it was her.

The emails were funny; every evening he had to reply, find something new to say. God, this girl wasn’t like the rest; she was definitely right for him. He was afraid. There was also the tall blonde he looked at outside the school smoking her morning Dunhill.

If only the email girl and the Dunhill blonde could be the same. But surely she couldn’t be, that would be too beautiful, and life’s not beautiful; in this life you stumble and fall, land on your arse.

In their emails, they talked about meeting. He knew she went to his school and that she was a year older than him, but there were so many girls in the final year.

Then it was arranged; they’d meet at the crappy party organised by the student committee in a nightclub on the place de la Madeleine. Armand would be DJing and playing his drum machine. She’d come and speak to him; at least she knew who he was.

Armand was a bit drunk when he arrived at the party. The tall blonde was there, on her phone outside. But it couldn’t be her – there were dozens of girls in their final year. Well, time would tell.

Armand went into the nightclub. He felt proud of his big bag of records. He focused on this prop to forget his fear of meeting the girl who’d been writing to him.

He said hello to good friends, then went up to the cabin where they played the records. There was a small spiral staircase up to the little cabin with two turntables and a view of the dance floor. He could see the tops of all his friends’ heads;
he’d set the drum machine going and get them dancing.

He played his favourite records. It seemed to be going well; from up in his little cabin, he could see heads and arms moving mechanically. Two girls came up the spiral staircase; they slipped him a note without him seeing their faces.

My first rhymes with ‘you’. My second I drink each morning. My third is a dog. The whole thing is attached to the bottom of my face.

He felt a pang holding this little scrap of paper. At last, he could see her writing, her real writing, letters shaped by her hand, not the impersonal characters on the computer. He didn’t understand the riddle at first; what could she have stuck to the bottom of her face?

But of course – a beauty spot! Bew – Tea – Spot!

Did the blonde have a beauty spot on her chin? He didn’t know, he’d only seen her from a distance. He had to stop thinking about the Dunhill blonde. If letter-girl was someone else, he’d take her anyway, he needed a chick.

When he’d finished playing his records, he went down on to the dance floor. People spoke to him; he even got some compliments. He didn’t hear them; he was smoking and looking for the beauty spot.

Finally she came up to him, the pretty blonde. They shook hands. They agreed on a café for the following day. Then she left without looking back.

That evening Armand felt happy as he fell asleep. It was her, and tomorrow they’d have coffee.

In the café they talked about Matthew Barney and anarchy. Armand managed to pronounce the word ‘anthropomorphism’. He was proud of that. Later, Emma told him that had impressed her.

They smoked a lot, Cravens for him, Dunhills for her; they had three coffees each. They were a bit awkward, but kept the conversation going; there was a sort of urgency to express what they wanted to say.

For a month they met like this in the café, without getting closer in any other way, the way of love. It was understood though that it would happen, that it was inevitable they’d kiss.

Armand was afraid. Emma reckoned it wasn’t up to her to make the first move. What would happen after, when they were ready to make love? The whole deal of being a couple scared Armand, yet it was what he wanted most.

One day, like many times before, they parted in the metro, in the corridors of Montparnasse
station; she went towards line 9 and the little apartment in La Muette (a half-forgiven mistake: ‘Do I really look like I live in La Muette?’) where she lived alone on the floor above her grandmother – and he towards line 12, to his mother’s three-room apartment on the rue de la Convention. Again without kissing, they each went their separate ways, towards that dull life in which they were no longer together.

Armand was hungry. He wanted to buy some sweets from the vending machine on the platform of line 12. He accidentally pressed the wrong button and some madeleines came out. Armand didn’t want to admit defeat. He took out another coin; he got the right button. While he was doing this, the train went by. He’d catch the next one; he wanted sweets.

He leaned against one of those high seats designed to stop tramps sleeping on them. He was eating his sweets and waiting for the next train. Emma appeared on the platform right in front of him looking flustered. Without giving him time to take this in, she kissed him. A first kiss that tasted of jellies.

Franz has the same name as his father. Franz Riepler. Exactly the same. This is not a very good omen. The father died young, newly wed, in a hunting accident. A stray bullet. One minute he was standing there, the next he was down. The child his wife was carrying still unborn. Guts ruptured, aware he was dying, on his knees on a carpet of brown leaves in the beautiful Bavarian forest. Our son will live, but you won’t be there to see him, but they’ll give him your name so that he knows you would have treasured him, if the bullet had struck elsewhere.

The mother is sad. She brings Franz up as all she has left. See how like his father he is. His smile, the look in his eye. He’s not called Franz Riepler for nothing. He has the same way of frowning.

That’s how little Franz grew up, like a photograph that keeps changing, the piece of photographic paper his mother treasured; sadly, the living image of what fate had snatched from her.

He and his mother left Bavaria, since there was nothing for them to do there, since there was no more father working at the sawmill. Mother and child, on their own, making a life for themselves. Dinah, the mother, found a job as a chambermaid
in the home of an industrialist in Lübeck. Franz, the child, went too. He was four. A long journey, then arriving on a cold, grey day in the big middle-class house of the Kienzel family, manufacturers of wine-bottle corks.

It was quite something, the big house built of brick, the park that extended as far as the eye could see, a pond, outbuildings. This would be a good place for Franz to grow up. They were an influential family, a fine family. The children ran around in the garden. Soon, Franz would join in their play, pulling Katherine’s hair, fighting with Georg like they were brothers, since they were growing up together. The mother performed thankless tasks, humiliating chores, the sort where you wipe away other people’s filth. Ironing Sir’s shirts, brushing Madam’s wigs, scrubbing Sir’s shit off the toilet, throwing away Madam’s tampons. Rebuffing the caretaker’s advances, doing the shopping. Anyhow, Franz grew up with them, he learned their manners, he pulled little Katherine’s hair, he fought with Georg, like they were brothers.

Soon Franz turned fifteen. He fell in love with Katherine. She had such soft skin, such long hair.

They had to hide it: brother and sister can’t fall in love; nor can you love the maid’s son.

It was bliss. At night Franz would get into Katherine’s bed. They made love simply, as two young people do. They felt they were experiencing something unique, something that other people could never know. The touching belief of young lovers, cut off from the rest of the world since they live for what others – so they think – could never feel.

Franz would go to Katherine at midnight. He’d sleep in her bed, and at around 5 a.m., before the household awoke, he’d creep back upstairs alone to wait for morning.

During the day, he stayed in his room, so as not to see Katherine, to avoid his feelings for her bursting out in front of everyone and betraying their love.

He had to keep busy. He took books from Sir’s library. Finally, among those yellowed pages and austere bindings, he could be himself.

Franz’s asceticism pleased Sir. The maid’s son might make something of himself after all; he wanted to be progressive enough to think so.

Dinah fell ill. Bronchitis, with serious complications, mucus in the lungs. Trussed up in bed, the ceiling of her little room looked like her destination in the sky.

Dinah died. No more mother and child. Just
Franz, and the Kienzel family, who had no idea what to do with him.

Sir and Madam discussed it. Katherine prayed about her anxieties. Franz had to stay; he had to sleep in her arms again. He could replace the caretaker. He could live in the little shed; she could be with him at night, as before.

She spoke to her father. No, we have Jules, I can’t sack him. But you know very well that Jules is useless. Yes, my dear, I know. And Franz is crafty, I know that too. That boy spends his days reading. Maybe he’ll be a poet, who knows? His mother was a good woman, I must do all I can for her son. I shall send him to school. I’ll pay. The boy will make something of himself, we’ll give him all the help we can. Why are you crying, my dear? I thought you liked the boy, you grew up together. I want to give him the best. Why are you crying?

In Hannover there is a boarding school they call the Institute. There boys – boys from good families – are taught philosophy, literature, geography, mathematics and history. Six hours of lessons a day, sport, and a uniform in the British style. Franz liked it there. He sent long letters to Katherine, the kind of letters you keep, which pile up
in a nice metal tin. Later, though we may not read them any more, we take them with us when we move house, we can’t throw them away because they are evidence of what we once were.

When the weekend came, the other boys went home to their families. Franz stayed behind because he no longer had any family. He remained in his little cell. He studied, and wrote too, some touching, well-wrought verses about the seasons, nature, and also death. Love he reserved for Katherine. Her skin was so soft, her hair so long.

He made friends. Jojo the Legend, Günther and Barnabé. They smoked in secret behind the observatory. It didn’t go very far, just some short-lived, cautious silliness. In a few months, they would get their diplomas, so best not get caught. Anyway, what would Sir think if he discovered that thanks to his money Franz was smoking with Jojo the Legend behind the observatory?

Franz studied hard. He also learned nice manners. He was a fervent admirer of Aristotle. A little bust of the philosopher with a full beard was positioned above his bed. Maybe Franz’s essays were confused and disorganised, but so inspired, so sincere that his results turned out to be entirely acceptable. He was a bit of a dabbler, true, but it was enlightened
dilettantism, to the delight of his teachers, who saw in him – they saw this so rarely – a student who was passionate about their subject.

The results arrived. Franz was second in his class. He was seventeen now. No more Institute, but the life of men, on his own, with his diploma in his pocket.

He hitched back to Lübeck along desolate industrial roads lined with factories and power stations. All those buildings, all this activity spurred him on. He too would be such a man: he would build things. For heaven’s sake, he’d come second in his class at the Institute in Hannover!

He knocked on the Kienzels’ door, unexpectedly, without warning them he was coming, since it was his childhood home, since Katherine was there. She was beautiful, she was gentle, he loved her. Of course, over time, they hadn’t written to each other so much, but throughout those two years, Franz had not stopped thinking about her. Their love could be out in the open now; there was no shame any more. Franz was no longer the maid’s son, he had his diploma, he’d come second at the Institute in Hannover; he was wearing his uniform like a blazon over his heart.

A grey, unsmiling woman opened the door.

‘How may I help, sir?’

‘I’m Franz.’

‘Franz? We’re not expecting any Franz. What do you want? Are you here for the wedding?’

‘What wedding? No, I’ve come to see the Kienzels.’

‘Come in for a moment, please. I’ll call Madam.’

Madam appeared.

‘Franz! How handsome you are. And that uniform! You’re a man now.’

‘You’re very elegant too, madam.’

‘You’ve come for Katherine’s wedding. That’s lovely. I’ll have a room made up for you. We’ll get you a suit too. Tomorrow will be a day of celebration. Come along with me. My husband will be so pleased to see you. Ah, who would have thought that you’d turn out so handsome! It’s wonderful, Franz, you’re a man!’

With Sir, he talked about the Institute, his diploma, Aristotle, plans for a career. But where could Katherine be? Was she really getting married? Yes, she was. How could she no longer love him?

The conversation with Sir dragged on. He had contacts, in Munich, Berlin, Hannover. Franz could take his pick. They would find him a job.
But where was Katherine? That was all Franz could think about.

He found himself alone in a room that wasn’t his. He still hadn’t seen Katherine. He tried on the suit that he would wear in honour of her love, in honour of her love for someone else. Hadn’t she read his letters? God, he loved her, he’d told her so. All those nights they’d spent together! It wasn’t possible that she loved someone else. He felt something in his gut; a growing sense of injustice within him, crushing his entrails, then his ribcage. It welled up in his gorge. He threw up all the tears in his body. But the bad feeling was still there. The melancholy bile seemed to keep on coming endlessly. Throwing up or yelling would do no good. This bad feeling would always be there. He wanted to write about it, but he couldn’t. Soon it would be time for dinner; he would see Katherine.

The groom was as expected. Short, rather dim. No light in his eyes; no refinement in his features. So that’s the sort of man she likes, Franz thought. Rather empty, kind, with a job, comfortably off. He, a maid’s son, could not compete on that terrain, even if he did come second at the Institute.

Then Katherine appeared. Something in her eyes had changed. She looked nice, her hair shone as before, but she had lost her distinctive beauty. Katherine loved a little fool; she was no longer what she had been, there was no nobility in her features. She had found her place, in the bed of the petty bourgeoisie. And now Franz wanted nothing to do with that place for anything in the world; he was alone.

At dinner they talked about the financial crisis and safeguarding interests. The changing world, all that stuff, property prices and petrochemicals. The industrialists’ equivalent of peasants discussing the weather.

Katherine tried to catch Franz’s eye as if to seek forgiveness. But she couldn’t, he’d already moved on.