Tomorrow Berlin (8 page)

Armand and Tobias meet up again. They dance side by side. They haven’t seen each other for about an hour. They are moving to an odd track, tribal voices, broken rhythms.

‘Armand, I’ve got to tell you. I’m HIV-positive.’

Armand stops dancing. Tobias takes his hand.

‘Come on, fuck it, let’s dance.’

There’s something strange about the idea of this evening going on forever. Outside it’s broad daylight. They can’t see it, they’re dancing in a little club that has no windows.

‘I saw you with a girl a while ago. I didn’t think she was your type.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t like that. She’s nice, kind of lost.’

‘Yeah, I’ve seen her before. She gets high on the juice too. What’s her name?’

‘I forget. She’s nice. Shall we go out for a fag?’

In the little garden, dozens of people are sitting in the armchairs. Sunglasses or troubled expressions. They’re smoking cigarettes and joints. You can hardly hear the music. You can talk here, and take a bit of a rest.

‘You still got the bottle I gave you?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You got much left?’

‘Half.’

‘Ten mil each. Plus the twenty I left outside. That’s good, we’ve got enough for the Berghain. You’ll see, there’s nothing better than the Pano on a Sunday. Everyone’ll be there for sure. I’ll introduce you. You’ll be a star.’

A few joints, several fixes of GHB. Tobias talks a lot, in the toilets, as he prepares the drugs. There are always other people sharing the cubicles with
them. The conversations are disjointed, often funny and meaningless.

They hang around for a while.

Outside, the daylight blinds them. It’s funny how calm it is, when you cross Holzmarktstrasse to get to the S-Bahn station.

‘Shit, I forgot to pick up the juice. Wait for me, I’ll be right back.’

Like everywhere in this city, the streets are huge. Waiting on the other side of the street, Armand feels good. He watches the regular flow of traffic. He’s smiling. He’s discovering the narcotic effect of GHB, of existing outside time.

‘It’s OK, I got it. One stop and we’re there. We’ll take the juice inside. You’ve got to look in shape for the bouncers. Just like before. Hide your bottle, syringe and speed in your pants. They search really thoroughly at the Pano. There are approved dealers, you see. And you mustn’t mention the juice too much. People don’t like that. A year or two ago they had a lot of problems. The ambulances were turning up every weekend because people didn’t know how to take it; they were boozing and everything. Don’t tell anyone that you’re taking G. It’s good though, isn’t it?’

‘Fuck yeah.’

Tobias recognises the guy who’s coming out of the S-Bahn at the same time as them. It’s Franz. He’s going to the Panorama too. They join up. They can go together, Armand, Franz and Tobias. Another regular Sunday at the Berghain.

Armand goes home from the Berghain alone. It must be thirty hours since he slept. He remembers Sigrid offering him her body in the toilets at the Panorama. He also remembers the brunette at the Golden Gate.

He doesn’t feel tired or hungry. He’s only going home because the evening has gone on long enough. He thinks of a line in a book by David Goodis, which he savours sometimes,
after a while it gets so bad that you want to stop the whole business
. The evening was starting to turn sour, Armand could feel it turning, that all he would end up with was a great, jaundiced feeling of melancholy and he had to go, go home to bed.

It’s dark outside. It could have been daylight and Armand wouldn’t have been surprised. He
hasn’t just stepped outside Habit, but also Time, though it’s hard to know whether Time is friend or foe. He’s humming that song:
Time won’t let us stop
.

He’s not in a hurry. The idea of taking the underground, of finding himself sitting opposite people he can’t escape causes him real anxiety. He prefers the streets, drifting along as a pedestrian; you pass others by and they can’t look at you for very long. They’re following their own route, going who knows where. There are none of those underground-carriage faces judging you.

Armand has always liked the anonymity of big cities. In Paris he thought he had lost it at one point because he hung around the same districts, frequented the same bars. Here there’s not much risk of running into someone he knows; it’s the freedom of being abroad.

He doesn’t really know which way to go. The tower in Alexanderplatz is a good landmark. Wherever you are in Berlin, you can pick it out on the skyline. He walks towards the tower, so straight and so real that for a moment he has no sense of never having trod these pavements before. The wind is blowing. It isn’t cold; it’s a mild autumn.

Occasionally he crosses streets bordered by
unlit waste ground. In the distance, he can see a petrol station, but he doesn’t come across any other pedestrians or cars. It feels like an industrial zone in the middle of the city. The discreet charm of industry.

Armand walks on towards the television tower. He can feel the little bottle of GHB in his pocket. He might be home within the hour.

Tobias and Franz are looking for people to keep partying with. When they emerged from the Berghain as it was closing, Armand had gone. They hung around, waiting for the last people to leave. Someone was bound to organise an after.

Why would they stop? They aren’t hungry or tired.

You find the world’s dodgiest characters at these afters in apartments, so they always leave you with the sort of bitter taste that prickles your tongue, or stings your cheeks. They are like the smoke from badly tamped pipes.

They wound up at the place of some guy they knew vaguely, talking about nothing much.

They left.

Now they’re hungry. They aren’t that far from Otto’s. He’ll have bacon. Off they go.

There were too many amphetamines still clogging his arteries, so Armand hasn’t slept well. Interrupted, troubled sleep, the sleep of pure exhaustion, which struggles with the narcotics that still intermittently trouble your guts.

When he got up, a cigarette in his mouth, he was touched to see Tobias and Franz sleeping like children on the living room sofa. Because they were still dressed, there couldn’t have been anything sexual in it.

Otto is up too. He shares some tea with Armand at the breakfast bar, a few metres from the sofa. They talk softly, indistinctly almost, so as not to wake them.

Armand mentions Sigrid. Otto smiles. Next time, maybe he’ll come along too.

Armand has found a watering hole he likes near the apartment. He goes there every day to work on his drawings, after sharing some bacon and scrambled eggs with his flatmates.

He likes the route he takes. Schönhauser Allee as far as Eberswalderstrasse, then Kastanienallee. The girls are prettier on Kastanienallee. Some streets are like that, as though you can almost smell their perfume. Armand likes to walk these streets, catch people’s eye, the hint of a smile in a flicker of an eyelid.

He’s used to his route. He already knows the shop windows. The hairdresser’s with the table football, the brown leather bike saddles made by Brooks, which make him drool but are much too expensive for him.

So first there are these shops, and then Kastanienallee and its blondes, the kebab shop on the corner, the clothes shop with dozens of T-shirts with Bolshevik designs hanging up outside.

Finally he reaches his bar. It’s a small room with green seats; it looks like a Russian living room. The light is beige, very different from the terrible white light from those economy lightbulbs that dazzle your eyes.

There’s a little marble table on the mezzanine, the only one where you can smoke. Armand sits there. The waitress recognises him. He gives his order in German the way Tobias has taught him.

‘
Hallo, ein Espresso, ein Aschenbecher und ein Chococroissant, bitte.
’

He’s proud of this sentence, of being able to utter it, and in German if you please. The waitress smiles at him. She thinks it’s cute, this French accent you could cut with a knife. She comes back shortly with a glass ashtray, a coffee and a chocolate croissant. She puts them on the table and slips in a simple ‘
et
voilà
’ in French, with that accent that German girls have, tender and sensual.

The waitress is pretty. Brunette, quite tall. She’s sweet, best of all. It would be good to rest his head in the small of her back or between her breasts, on that firm, delicate skin. She has a calm sensuality that Armand likes in women. He can almost feel the skin of her belly, her thighs, her back, a few beauty spots. Her whole body sums up what Armand misses, the privations of a single man; care and caresses. She seems to be inviting him, smiling at him. Something happens between them when she comes to his table, carrying the little metal tray. It’s not just Armand who feels it; it’s mutual.

She puts down the ashtray, coffee and chocolate croissant.

‘Et
voilà
…’

Armand feels himself melt. They look at each other for a moment, sadly, as though inevitably aware it is not to be. She goes back to her work. Armand is drawing at the little marble table.

An hour later, they say goodbye in the way that a customer says goodbye to a waitress. Armand goes home; he doesn’t look at the blonde girls on Kastanienallee.

Tobias and Franz are in the S-Bahn, the S41, which encircles the city like a little yellow-gold chain. It’s 2 p.m., morning rush hour for the out-of-sync people.

Tobias lost his phone the previous week. He and Franz are going to see that guy Stein; Tobias lent another phone to him a few months back.

The S-Bahn stops at the next station. A couple of guys in trainers and unfashionable anoraks are chatting on the platform. When the doors open, they split up and each of them boards through a different carriage door.

Berlin has plain-clothes ticket inspectors. Since there’s no turnstile to jump, they check tickets on the trains, working their way through the carriage from one end to the other. They don’t let you off, as they’re paid on commission. They’re often former fraudsters; it’s a rehabilitation scheme. You have to pay forty euros on the spot, in cash or with a bank card, otherwise you’re off to the police station and all that hassle.

Franz and Tobias are on the lookout; they don’t have a ticket and they can’t afford forty euros.

When they spotted the two guys on the platform at Landsberger Allee, they calmly got off. They’ll go on foot; it’s safer. Stein’s place isn’t far.

There’s an element of professionalism in their fraud. They are attentive; they couldn’t have missed those two wolves.

They’ve arrived outside Stein’s place. This is definitely it, Tobias remembers it. They don’t have the entry code for his building.

There’s no one they can call. Tobias doesn’t have a phone any more, and Franz sold his ages ago. In any case, they wouldn’t know what number to call. They wait outside the block for someone to go in or come out. Franz rolls a cigarette.

A guy goes in and they follow him. They knock
on Stein’s door. A Turkish woman opens it. Stein moved a month ago; she doesn’t know how to find him.

‘You’re not the first people to come looking for him. I don’t know who this Stein is, but he doesn’t seem right to me. He left the apartment in a terrible state.’

Tobias and Franz take the S-Bahn home, the S42, which loops the city in the opposite direction. They’ll get something to eat at Otto’s.

Armand bought a bike at the Gorlitzer Park flea market. It’s an old racer. The frame is grey; the handlebars, like rams horns, are wrapped in white tape. His hands grip them, and the tips of his shoes stick in the metal spikes on the pedals.

Armand has a feeling of security when he gets on his bike – he can’t slip off it, his slick tyres seem to float over the road surface, he’s following a clear route, making a necessary journey.

He rides his bike for several hours a day, going wherever his fancy takes him. He chooses streets he likes, follows them for a bit, then turns off. He
gets lost, rides among the cars, among men, going slowly or quickly. It’s a game. He loses his way and finds it again without ever asking for directions.

On his bike, he feels alone with the city; he talks to it, touches it. It’s an enormous pleasure when he’s lost and pedalling down streets where he doesn’t recognise anything, to find his way back, to realise exactly where he is thanks to a junction, a bar, an underground station or whatever. He knows at that moment that he’s beginning to master this city, that he has seduced it, that he holds all the cards and can penetrate the very depths of its being.

He’s won the battle. He hangs around for a bit on the streets or in a bar, snug in this tarmac cradle that belongs to him, this city where he’s no longer just a tourist.

As he rides, he practises pronouncing place-names. Schlesisches Tor, Schlesisches Tor. He stumbles over the language, tries again. He wants to know this city in the same way as knowing a girl. To feel her, taste her, and later remember the smell of her skin.

He hangs around on a café terrace on Oranienstrasse. He reads a bit, then goes back to his beer, rolls a cigarette and smokes it as he looks around.

He knows the way home. When he’s ready, he’ll go back. He’ll abandon the streets and the women passing by, return to his bed and wait for tomorrow.

When he wakes, his jaw hurts. He stretches out in his warm bed; the sheets are clammy. He glances at the window, or rather the sky, through the pane. It’s winter. It’s so cold outside.

The sky is mocking him. There
is
no sky. It’s like a big grey cloche over the city. You can’t see the sun or clouds, only this asphalt-coloured blanket, a sheet stretched between people and the heavens, a sheet that is holding back all hope. The dome of suffering.

Armand half-sits. He lights his first cigarette of the day. The cloud drifts upwards and disperses; he watches it rise to the ceiling like broken dreams. The grey smoke of a man alone, smoking and watching, slowly losing its form in the room. The smoke will coat the walls in the yellow of boredom, the colour of all the hours spent watching in vain for life to blossom.

It’s four months today since Armand arrived.

He gets up. A new day begins.