Tomorrow Berlin (3 page)

Tobias walked on for a short time, dazed by what he’d just experienced. Day was breaking. He needed somewhere to sleep. Going to his sister’s was out of the question – imagine Stéphane’s face if he showed up there! That left Victor. He could ask him that much, after all.

Tobias was cold; he kept walking. He needed to find a phone box, and hope Victor was at home and would pick up. The boulevard Saint-Germain was deserted, a few workers, like well-dressed tramps emerging from a hard night, and Tobias, alone again, searching for a telephone, searching for a bed.

He went into a café. He was struck by the noise of the coffee machine, beans being ground, milk heated. At the counter there were just men on their own, lost amid the mechanical noise, like workers who have left machines running while they come to. No conversation, no music, just the incessant noise of the coffee machine for all these lonely men up at this hour.

On one side, the owner was reading a newspaper and across the counter, the men, regularly spaced, stood staring into their own private void, the void of their early morning existence. From time to time, one of them put a coin down on the counter, breaking the silence: ‘Have a good day.’ Heads would look up, and the man would leave, as though he’d never been. Men came and went – and always the incessant noise, the metallic noise of the coffee machine.

The owner got up from his paper – he looked at Tobias as though he hadn’t expected anything from him.

‘Have you got a phone?’

The owner glanced at the other side of the bar. ‘Over there.’ Tobias saw the phone.

He took some coins from his pocket and unfolded the scrap of paper with Victor’s number on it. The men at the bar were watching. The owner was reading his paper again.

‘Victor? It’s me… I hoped you’d pick up. I was scared you wouldn’t… I need you, Victor. Where do you live? Great, I’m on my way.’

In the metro from the gare du Nord, Tobias tried to think about Jérôme, but he couldn’t; all that mattered was finding a bed, finally lying down and sleeping, and never waking up.

Victor didn’t ask questions. He and Tobias fell asleep, nestled together.

Tobias lived with Victor on the rue de Dunkerque. They shared a bed and everything else: showers, casseroles, clothes.

Victor worked in PR. The apartment was comfortable. Tobias was too scared to go back to the café on the boulevard Saint-Michel. The thought of the rue des Écoles, the whole of the Left Bank, messed with his head a bit. He couldn’t go near it. The Left Bank meant the police and prison, communal showers and beatings.

But before long he had to make up his mind to go and look for what he rather childishly referred to as his ‘jackpot’. That would keep him afloat for a while, but only if he went back, up the staircase on the rue des Écoles, past Mrs Gérard’s door.

He went at night; even cops had to sleep. Everything was normal, the entry code hadn’t changed, the stairwell still smelled of fried food and the cellar. The packet was there too, where he’d left it, wrapped up and hidden in the gas pipes. Tobias slipped it into his jacket and ran off as though escaping that whole part of his life.

Yet he often thought about his garret, about Paulo, Maurice and Gégé on the boulevard, and especially about Jérôme and the morning he got picked up; the poor guy, he’ll never be with Luisa, but he’ll keep writing to her, dreaming of Montevideo from behind bars in a small, filthy cell.

It should have been him: Tobias was the one who should have got caught; he didn’t have a Luisa.

Oh, but he did now, things had changed, he had Victor and all those days spent waiting for him. He was befuddled by his love, unable to think of anything else. Evenings brought relief; he would go and meet Victor outside his grey office, they’d
have hot chocolate and hold each other tight in a male embrace, separate from other people, as though nothing could happen to them. Now he was with Victor, Tobias was saved, the end of his wandering made sense.

Of course in time there were arguments, violent ones more often than not, men’s fights; they’d both get high, too, before or after fucking, as if their unity as a couple needed this little additional thrill. They lived attached to one another, one inside the other.

The jackpot was almost used up. Tobias got a job in a local bar; it was the only work he knew, after all. But it was a far cry from the café on the boulevard Saint-Michel. In this place there was no uniform, no black waistcoat or white shirt; it had what the boss called ‘a relaxed feel’. No professional baristas; the people he worked with had had quite strange careers – they were mostly young, rather lost, trying to get themselves together. A painter, a craftsman, another who called himself a writer. Here’s where wanting to be an artist gets you, a so-called trendy café in the north of Paris, serving cappuccinos and Caesar salads. What didn’t change was the way they made up for it, at the
end of their shift, with Picon beer and cocaine. Getting high was a constant.

They would talk about football or the hot girl someone was screwing. They put powder up their noses, like on the boulevard Saint-Michel, and everywhere else probably. Humanity’s chains made of cheeseburgers and gin and tonics.

They exploit you, they exhaust you with their brunches and birthday dinners, they make you run with pints in your hands and you become an idiot, a total zombie, in a trendy café in northern Paris: since they came here the painter had stopped painting and the writer had stopped writing, and Tobias was growing apart from Victor. On the other hand, there was still alcohol, and there were still drugs.

Youth gets crushed one gratuity at a time; time is always out of joint when you get up at three in the afternoon to resume your life. So why wouldn’t they take drugs when life is so dull? It’s their choice, but can you blame them for running a mile from neon-lit offices and luncheon vouchers?

The only consolation is, you don’t have to set the alarm clock, because at 6 p.m., the shift is back like a crack of the whip, and a day begins that will last until 4 o’clock in the morning. You rush around, you smile, you bring menus and baskets
of bread. You work on autopilot, not thinking, and yet you would be almost happy to be there in a so-called hip café in northern Paris – because there are hot girls, because you can listen to deafening music at work, because the customers dress like you. And yet, you’re just a little piece of shit doing their bidding. A jug of water, and as fast as you can. There must be masters and slaves. Is there really a dialectic? The slave serves, the master orders, but then what?

Tobias no longer went to meet Victor at his grey office on the avenue du Maine. He was either working or, when he had a day off – or rest day, if you prefer – he was so happy to be able to do nothing come 6 o’clock that he forgot about Victor and his PR career. It’s harder to be in love when you’re busy. They had to develop new habits as a couple, unlearn the language they’d spoken till then, as though reality, the trivialities of common people, were festering between them and gradually pulling them apart.

While Tobias was at work, Victor waited for him at home alone. He got bored. At first, he was happy just waiting; he’d fall asleep, leaving space for him in the middle of the mattress. Then he got tired of falling asleep like that, pointlessly. So he
went back to his habits as a single man – talons out, in search of pleasure, in orgy bars.

He only went to look. Naked, copulating bodies paraded in front of him. Victor masturbated for a while, and then went home, thinking of Tobias. But as the weeks went by, he spent longer in the bars, talking, glass in hand, surrounded by all those taut, muscled bodies.

His desires banished the image of Tobias, as though his eyelids had made him disappear. He touched the men who danced in front of him, he took them with force, as he used to, slipping from one to another – the strange carnal merry-go-round that keeps spinning till you’re dizzy, until you feel sick.

He caught the bad flu, among all those bodies he’d had. He sensed it. He knew instantly. He didn’t tell anyone, he wanted to omit that from his life.

He didn’t think about the harm he could do; he continued living as though he’d really forgotten what he had in his blood.

As Tobias and Victor drifted further apart, the months sped by increasingly quickly.

They had some happy times, of course: a weekend in the country, evenings with friends.
But there was no understanding between Tobias and Victor any more. An argument that was no more serious than all the rest decided their separation.

As a final twist of the knife, Victor told Tobias what he had inside him, what he’d given him; that he’d marked him with a branding iron. He’d done for him.

Armand and Emma often took the metro together. In the morning she’d come and collect him from outside his mother’s on the way to school. They’d kiss on the flip-up seats, cut off from the daylight, among the other passengers. It was their thing, in the tunnels, in the corridors or carriages, as though they were divorced from the rest of the world, lit by the neon lights of the tunnels.

They drank coffee, too, at Le Rouquet on the boulevard Saint-Germain. They smoked together, they kissed, and felt contempt for other people. They were better than them. They’d found each other; they would never part.

In ten years, if they were no longer together, they would meet, on 6 June at 8.15 in the
evening in front of the church on the boulevard Saint-Germain.

She had a white coat. Armand wore ties and ripped jeans. They were falling in love. He was sixteen and she was seventeen.

Armand no longer wanted to be apart from Emma; he left his mother’s without saying goodbye to live in the little apartment in La Muette. He had passed the first part of his bac and she’d got the second, the real one, which launches you into adult life.

They stayed in bed, in the little two-room in La Muette, happily fucking and smoking, under the quilt. Sometimes they sat on the tiny zinc balcony.

Armand would go out for a few hours to cadge smokes from strangers, then he’d come back with his pockets stuffed with loose cigarettes. They ate pasta or rice. They didn’t need money, since they were in love, in the little two-room apartment in La Muette on the floor above Emma’s grandmother.

That summer they went to a luxury hotel in Deauville for five days. Emma’s father had received an invitation and gave his daughter four nights in the hotel as a gift. Emma and Armand felt proud arriving at the hotel reception. They laid waste to the minibar and room service.

In the afternoons they went walking on the beach, like the old couples they despised.

Sometimes Armand went down to the hotel bar alone for a gin and tonic while Emma was asleep. He liked the thought of how he looked. When he wasn’t with her, he observed himself living, and he liked his image. He was in love, he was handsome, he was young, too young to live the way he was. He cultivated his contradictions, like the ties with ripped jeans. That’s also what he loved about Emma, she wasn’t predictable. She was one of those people you can’t work out immediately. She epitomised in his eyes the out-of-place middle-class girl, the modern version of corrupt aristocracy. He liked not being able to fathom her, with her little-rich-girl habits and semi-bohemian lifestyle. He liked those paradoxes, talking about anarchy in the bar of a luxury hotel in Deauville; the idea that you can feel comfortable with ordinary people because of your ideas and the upper classes because of your manners; a permanent disjunction that means you don’t belong anywhere. You are unfathomable, ‘never explain, never complain’, but have an innate ease. They lived like no one else.

Armand enjoyed seeing this paradox deepen. His school friends couldn’t understand how he
could live with a girl, adults were baffled too, seeing them living like them. He felt as though he wasn’t part of society even as he walked around in it. This feeling made him joyful beyond measure. He was observing his own existence.

When they got back from Deauville, they had to leave the little apartment in La Muette. Armand found an attic in rue du Quatre Septembre. They stayed there two years, joined at the hip, covering the meagre rent thanks to their fathers. Armand bought a scooter, a Honda Scoopy SH50, with red plastic trim. At last he was free; he had a room, a scooter and a girl to love.

At school he seemed to be living in another world. It looked easy, but he was short of money. He gave some private lessons, but that wasn’t enough. He had to find a way of getting by so as not to lose face with Emma. He learned to steal, not expensive things, just food and shampoo, beer and Mentos from the local mini-market.

He learned to ask for things too.

Near school there was a café where all the students had lunch. Serge ran the place. He was a good guy. Every day he gave Armand his lunch and pretended to get him to pay without other people noticing.

Emma worked at her preparatory classes for university. Armand rode around on his scooter, stealing books or food, then returned to their attic, happy to find her waiting for him.

Armand passed his bac, as Emma had done a year earlier, and began his first year of prep for university. They worked on their lessons, they slept together. But something was missing, something of the enthusiasm they had had in sharing their normal life.

Franz was eighteen when he arrived in Berlin. He had his bag in his hand, the wedding suit and his diploma from the Hannover Institute. Sir had recommended him to a few businesses in the city – in the west, where the streets are cleaner, the people busy, like in Munich, and the economy thriving. The men walk quickly, holding sandwiches, as though they couldn’t possibly waste time on lunch. The women – both young and old – clack their heels energetically. They look proud and powerful. You wonder how they pick up men. Maybe they go for men more powerful
than them; or less, and dominate them with a few little slaps.

Franz liked all this activity. Between their offices and the luxury shops, these people were in a hurry, preoccupied, and how happy they must be, since they had no time to idly nurture their little neuroses.

After attending a few interviews wearing his tie, Franz entered this world. He was to be executive assistant at Günther and Co. After all, being an assistant is not so bad if ‘executive’ is part of your title, he thought. You start as a secretary and you climb the ladder, a lifelong career at Günther and Co.

He started work. It was dull. And his company’s offices were gloomy, too. But that’s how it goes, you get a boring job at Günther and Co, slog your guts out, then one day you marry a Katherine, with a hollow face and no spark, but soft skin and gleaming hair. You make love and a little Martin comes along. You go on holiday in your car. Before long, Martin will graduate and you can relax.

Meanwhile, Franz lived in a two-room apartment in Nollendorfplatz. He was eighteen. He did the filing. In the evening, he closed the door and read second-hand books.