one day in Berlin | fiction

fiction and poetry weekly

one day in Berlin

Breaking glass woke Gabriel from a dream that belonged to his arrival in Berlin. Willow trees along an embankment that offered shade from summer heat. Tanned bodies side by side beneath a cooling sky, before retreating behind the curtain of tree branches. Hot bodies, moist and willing to go further as day inched towards night. Sweet tooth eateries selling crepes and pancakes from wooden shacks to passers-by, as swans, with their s-shaped necks and tangerine bills, arrowed the waters of Landwehr Canal in pairs. Until sunset arrived, turning a Kreuzberg skyline crimson before black.  

   Bohemian individuals, each dressed in unbranded clothes bought from a local flee market gathered on small bridges. Inked skinned limbs and moustached faces sat cross legged. Conversations in various accents, accessorised by bum bags and loose denim, patterned shirts and the muted tones of Berlin. Club-Mate and German beer, kebabs and vegan ice cream. The scent of meat cooked on a skewer among various skin tones, people who moved in new directions, towards night life reflective of a city that let almost anyone in.

   How Gabriel began his time in the city, who he was when he arrived, now belonged in a past with the innocence of newness. A once boundless spirit to experience otherness now only existed in dreams that woke him to a space of needless excess. A year since his arrival in Berlin, a city where people did what they want among buildings smeared in graffiti, a city history of loss seen in the copper plaques of remembrance engrained in the asphalt, often brought Gabriel to tears when in the streets.

*

Gabriel woke slowly, sat up from a stained mattress dazed and confused. Once aware he was alive, he attempted to swallow the remains of last night’s excess until ready to vomit.

   I have no idea what I am doing with my life, he thought.

   Nausea passed like a train on a platform you were unaware was not stopping. Standing from a mattress, he moved towards a square window that gave views of high-rise apartments. Sometimes he liked to count the plants that were placed on balconies, he didn’t know why. Lighting the remains of a smoke he found stubbed out in a teacup, he listened as two punk drunks below argued over a broken bottle, until one of them fell over.   

   ‘Arschloch!’ a drunk yelled as he fell.

   Oh, think twice, it's another day for you and me in paradise, he hummed.  

   Pressing the tip of his smoke into a teacup of ash, Gabriel closed the window and ran a hand through greased curly hair. A relentless Berlin summer heat was absent of breeze. This made his pale skin feel like it was peeling. His naked body glazed from sweat until blood rushed to feverish levels, swelling his skull. Falling onto the mattress, he wedged a pillow into his neck, rolled onto one side and then the other.

   Maybe I can find some curtains on the street, he thought, closing his eyes.

***

A phone began to ring, Etta James, I’d Rather Go Blind humming somewhere beneath a white sheet stained in ash and coffee and sweat. Gabriel’s temples throbbed as relentlessly as the baselines that had pounded his ears in Berghain the night before. MDMA and later ketamine, two men dressed in adidas having sex against a bathroom wall. Too loud music in an industrial setting bordering Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. A club that looked like an industrial compound, famous for refusing entry to most who spent hours queuing to get in. A place where time stopped on entry, and those lucky enough to be present wanted more from the night than they could handle. A DJ in a gimp mask blaring techno. And the dark rooms, where mobs of lost and found souls tore into one another’s flesh with an almost medieval vengeance.

   Everything is becoming too much, he thought.

   Gabriel found the phone, fell onto his back, answered.   

   ‘Do you still want me to come over or was last night too much?’ a female voice said.

   ‘How much became too much?’

   ‘Last night I met a guy at Kit-Kat Club who is dying to sleep with me. His name is Jean-Paul, he’s an artist from France. Jean-Paul has a Dali moustache and olive skin.’

   ‘We’ve all got problems, Joanna.’

   ‘Asshole.’

   ‘Isn’t Kit-Kat where we met?’

   ‘Don’t act like a fool, you know this is where we met.’  

   ‘A fool in love.’

   Her heavy sigh felt familiar. ‘Answer the question, pink salmon.’

   ‘People do as they wish in Berlin, we are all individuals here.’

   Another sigh followed a noticeable amount of silence. Ringing in the ears, a relentless desire to quench thirst. Itching skin.  

   ‘Your words sound more odd each week.’

   ‘Now she has a painter, the poet is no more.’

   ‘Jean-Paul likes to paint abstracts and nudes.’

   ‘He doesn’t know how to undress a woman and considers a blank canvas to have meaning. Robert Rauschenberg was a hack, and basic looking.’

   ‘I enjoy Robert Rauschenberg.’

   ‘That’s like saying you enjoy staring into the void.’

   ‘Please Gabriel, you exist in the void.’

   ‘That’s not always my choice.’

   ‘We live in Berlin, everything is a choice.’

   He stared at the ceiling, considered whether cracks were widening.  

   ‘Separate and withdraw,’ he said, ‘line, shape, colour.’

   Smoke hovered in the stillness of the room like mist over a lake.  

   ‘What are you saying Gabriel?’  Joanna said.

   ‘You enjoy the abstract artist,’ he said. ‘He’s probably Gen Z and has way too much anxiety to admire the complexities of Bosch or Picasso.’

   ‘How would you know?’

   ‘How would you?’    

   ‘I am studying art at Universität der Künste.’

   ‘Call me, mentor?’

   ‘Because you are old?’

   ‘Because I have vision.’

   ‘No thank you. Your brain is often a blank canvas.’

   ‘A canvas only you can colour.’

   She lit a smoke.

  ‘Tell me, after all the degeneracy you have enjoyed recently, can you still function as a man?’

   He smiled in admiration that she considered an erection to be a key element of being a man.  

   ‘Who even knows anymore.’

   ‘Jean-Paul said he can work for days without a break.’

   ‘Were you wearing those angel wings and knee length tights when you met him?’

   ‘Gabriel.’

   ‘All dressed in white, purity among willing sinners.’

   Sharp pulls from a smoke, the distant sound of laughter.

   ‘You are writing poetry for me now.’

   ‘Seeing you that way is poetry.’

   ‘Gabriel.’

   He looked at various objects scattered around the room: a bare lightbulb, piles of books, a stool, candles placed on a shelf he bought at Bauhaus. One succulent plant that required little water, its leaves rising like flames towards raying light that burst through a curtainless window. Empty brown bottles covered wooden flooring. On a wall, a print of Trumpet 84 by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Gabriel focused on the black crown that hovered like a halo above a jazz player’s head. Notebooks and pencils scattered across an apartment in Kreuzberg he found advertised on Woloho, at a price affordable for someone who has an allergy for work.  

   ‘Where did you go?’ Joanna said.

   A silent yawn.

   ‘Nowhere.’

   ‘Just tell me you can still function as a man.’

   ‘Last week you told me we have to dream bigger.’

   ‘I am in the process of adjusting my expectations.’

   ‘When we met you said I was different to other men.’

   ‘That bar was full of zombies and you looked thirsty.’ 

   ‘Why don’t you say what you really think.’

   ‘You’re a writer without ink, it’s a metaphor.’

   ‘Your words are sharp today.’

   ‘Uh-huh.’

***

Joanna came over with gin and a pack of Lucky Strikes. She looked restless as usual. Cheeks pinked from summer heat only added to her youthful glow. Gabriel answered the door and kissed both cheeks, dressed in black shirt and blue jeans, he stepped back as she entered, watchful of her hourglass frame that pressed into vest, against short tartan skirt. Using the heels of her feet to remove plimsols, barefooted she made her way toward an open window.  

   ‘Can you pour me a glass of water?’ she said.

   ‘Of course.’

   ‘Please run the tap until the water is cold, thank you.’

They stood by an open window in near silence, cigarettes held to pursed lips, sideway glances shared from close distance. She wore mascara. The green of her eyes when encased felt like a portal to another world.

   ‘You should think about furniture,’ she said, ‘a desk at least.’

   He looked around the room. ‘It’ll take more than a desk.’

   ‘To do what exactly?’

   He studied her strawberry shaped face. How round cheeks countered the cut of her shaven head, how the smoothness of her skin reminded him of untouched snow. How full pink lips stuck to the tip of her filter as she inhaled smoke, her eyes on his eyes as she waited for an answer, impatience growing like the unbridled flesh of youth.   

   ‘To write.’    

   ‘Are you even reading?’

   ‘Not really.’

   Taking off her vest she threw it on the floor. ‘This is because reading needs focus.’

   ‘Cool tattoo,’ he said, ‘where’d you get it?’

   She placed hands on hips, looked at him with a mixture of fury and disbelief. Then she lowered her hands and moved towards him as though he were being attacked.

   ‘Is it still functional?’

   He nodded.

   ‘Take off your clothes.’

end