The Berlin Diaries (Part II)

I enjoyed riding the S-Bahn as it chained its way across the city.  I liked it when the trains ran parallel with the traffic on the road and you felt, momentarily, at one with the drivers behind the wheel – it felt like equality – and then when everything dropped away, thwump, into darkness as you entered a tunnel, and then again when you emerged looking for the sky.  I liked this.  The feeling of movement, of going somewhere.

I was 30 years old, turning 31 in less than 14 days.  I was emotionally sick and wasn’t doing well physically.  I smoked too much and my lungs burned if I exerted myself.  I hadn’t eaten properly for months and the weight had dropped from me until what was left was a gaunt, bone of a man.

I was crashing at Liana’s place in Neukölln, two minutes walk from both the S and U-Bahn. She lived with five others in a flat like a commune I once saw in New Zealand, where the residents shared everything from sex to drugs.  The rooms were large and bright, quite wonderful, and the corridor that linked them seemed to bend around like a two-headed snake. The doorbell didn’t have a button.  It was two open wires you had to put together to make a sound.  Although not entirely clean, the apartment was well organised, reflecting Liana’s presence.  I felt, somehow, this flat was the hub for all the creative spinning of Berlin.

But I would discover more than this.

Many years ago I was heading out of Las Vegas in a white camper van.  The fluorescent lights of Vegas were fading behind me and the beat of that sinful town was making way for calm desert and cacti.  By the road, covered in dust, was a tramp with a dirty beard and a satchel slung over his shoulder.  He had his thumb stuck out into the road.  I remember thinking this man had probably arrived a millionaire.  Cities can do that to a person.

Berlin is a regular city.  It has its casinos, bars, nightclubs, strip-joints, whorehouses, but it’s also pregnant with the unknown, something that impels a person to search for adventure.  Every possible thing opens into everything else.  There are no boundaries.  You can do what you like.  A foreigner living in Berlin needs something of a safety word to keep them self grounded.  It’s dangerous otherwise.  You can lose yourself.  Get arrested.  Catch an STD.  Overdose.

We all have our safety words, I expect, and I don’t mean an actual word.  It could be a thing, a teddy bear, a coin, a book, even a friend, although friends are not always reliable structures.  We’re fallible.  That’s why neediness is such a red blooded killer.

Truth

My Auntie died recently.  It was a long drawn-out battle with cancer.  In the space of three years she had numerous operations, the surgeons taking things out of her, replacing organs with bags and cutting out tumours that were becoming ever more prominent and aggressive.  The cancer was untreatable with chemo or radiotherapy, so she must have known early on this was the end.  When she died it was as much a shock as it wasn’t.  My family, especially my mother, were grief-stricken.  The funeral was a low-key affair, organised by her two surviving children.  It was not in a church but at the funeral home, and we shuffled inside the cramped hall, taking our seats and trying our best not to focus on the coffin in the corner, so beautifully laid out with flowers and shoes.  She had loved shoes.  There were eulogies, first from my mother and then from my two cousins.  Each speech was loaded with emotion, voices breaking, composed pauses, tears, and even laughter.  The lighter moments came in the shape of humorous reminiscing.  She was not a conventional woman and, I think, she would have approved of her funeral.

As I walked out, I made a detour to the coffin, placed a hand at the foot and said goodbye.

I did not get to know my Auntie as well as I should have until the illness was diagnosed.  In her later months, when I could, I would go round to see her for a cup of tea.  The conversation would, inevitably, turn to death and funerals.  It was a tiring and dark affair, and I realised how utterly alone she must have felt, knowing what we all knew was the truth.  The spectre of death hovered over her, filtered out and touched those around her.  But amongst it all, overpowering the inevitable, was her strength and courage, and we drank from this, fed on it so we too could rise above the horror of it.

A particularly acidic woman, she had a cutting sense of humour, a fierce intelligence and insight.  She brought her children up with strong morals, and a strong work-ethic.  They have turned out well and I know she was proud of them both.  The love she held for her grandson, who was only a year old when she died, was both powerful and unconditional.  He gave her great pleasure during those last days.

I forget that my Auntie is gone, but every now and then I remember.  Trying to comprehend her non-existence is like hitting a brick wall.  She is gone.  Dead.  No more.  Where there was thought, feeling, humour and speech, now there is nothing.  I read somewhere that death cancels everything but truth.  I am forced to confront my own truth, as are we all.  I desire now to rid myself of the neurotic.  Who am I exactly?  What do I want?  Where am I headed?  These questions, for so long a mystery, are no longer malleable, but stone, exact.  I now know the answers.  So, if for nothing else, I thank her for that.

Seeing everyone react to my Auntie’s passing made me reevaluate my position in the family.  It changed the way I viewed them.  My mother was filled with regret for not having had the chance to say goodbye properly, the way she had wanted to, the way, I guess, she had envisioned.  This regret, I could see, was eating away at her.  And suddenly I could see my mother, I could see her not as my mother but a woman, a young girl grown-up, filled with a lifetime of thought and experience, memories of love and pain and joy and sadness.  At the funeral, as she spoke of her love for her sister, one question turned over and over in my head.  What has my mother achieved?  The answer; everything I am.

Frontiers

I remember that second day in Bristol, and how it was nearly over.  The boiler was broken and the house was like a block of ice.  After relocating from Cambridge I was sleeping in my friends’ lounge and living from my bag.  I was lying in a makeshift bed, wearing several layers, two pairs of socks, a scarf and a trapper’s hat.  I was weighed down by what blankets I could scavenge from other rooms.  Above me, everyone in the house was asleep, curled up in bed, hugging themselves, hugging each other, fighting the cold.  The snow had come heavy that day, a blizzard sweeping through the streets, relentless and overpowering.  I had bought a £20 heater and gave it to my friends as a house present.  I placed it beside me, whacked it on full power, but still I could not stop shaking.

My friends were relaxed about my staying.  They did not accept social boundaries, which made them incredibly refreshing.  But I was worried about the other tenants, the one’s who were paying.  I worried I was taking up space, stinking the place out with my dirty washing and my well-trodden feet.  Having moved around from city to city my clothes and hygiene had taken a hit.  I fantasied about having my own space, perhaps living with a woman who shared my sensibilities.  We would eat biscuits in front of the TV, and talk about saving the world.  Holier-than-thou progressives.

On the train to Bristol I read a book on Marx.  ”Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die.”  Later in the book I read a passage from the author that read, “it is tempting in this terrible century to abandon any attempt to change the world.  Mostly we take refuge in personal relationships or, in the case of those with the talents and the economic opportunities, personal achievement.”  Those words, printed so fine on the page, were swirling through my head.

Bumming from city to city as I was, I found myself drawn to a simpler life away from the metropolitan world.  Perhaps such self-interest was precisely the problem?  I was searching for a frontier, although I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant.  If there were any frontiers left in this world they had long been knocked down or scattered like cards on a table.  But at that time I was determined to settle in Bristol, a stepping stone of sorts, an incremental move towards an end goal, whatever that might be.  At first it was exciting and adventurous, engaging with old friends and hoping for the best.  But that night, lying under the blankets in the cold boilerless house, the reality had started to set it.  It wouldn’t be easy.  Find a job.  Find a room.  Find something to keep me occupied for a year, and then maybe, just maybe, things would slot into place.

I applied for nine jobs in two days – cleaning work, coffee baristas, the kind of jobs designed for my generation.  Searching for jobs in a jobless market was no fun at all.  I was more like a passenger.  The captains didn’t have a compass.  It was like swimming for hours only to find you were still in the middle of the ocean.

I took my CV for a walk.  It didn’t want to go, so I leashed it and forced it and dragged it out of the house.  CV’s are the first to get shot when battle commences.  It’s often bloody.  You pull yourself back from the streets, wounded and dehumanised, clambering through the front door.  You don’t want to go back out there.

That afternoon, as the snow fell, I strolled along Gloucester Road, admiring the independent shops promoting their wares and supporting each other like a community should.  Glozzy Road, as it’s affectionately known, is the longest independent street in the UK, or so I am told, and they don’t take kindly to big business setting up shop on their turf, although it does and has happened.  And still, when I thought about it over coffee, Glozzy Road was no different to the high street – people staring into empty windows like fucking morons, hypnotised by the aesthetic.

At this stage in my life I was distrustful of people.  I’d been let down in the past and had grown wary of establishing new relationships, be them social or professional.  I saw very little to like in people, but I came to realise it was rarely their fault.  Really I was frustrated because, like me, they were clutching for answers – a light, a rock, something to hold onto, something to fix the gears.  The world was like a great clock, fragmented and consuming, corrupted and corrupting.  It was, as Habermas said, colonizing the lifeworld.  And perhaps, I came to realise, those frontiers I was searching for were the pockets that resist this colonization.

So there I was, torn and displayed, newly arrived in Bristol and attempting to tap back into the very thing I was against.  And perhaps, further still, there were no options, no originality, no frontiers.  I was reminded of a quote by Georg Simmel.  ”What we regard as freedom is often in fact only a change of obligation.”

Jane Cooney Baker

I first met Hank in The Glenview.  The Glenview was where I spent most nights fending off the advances of deadbeats and drunks.  Hank was different.  He sat at the end of the bar, solemn and thoughtful, nursing a drink and watching me with feigned disinterest.

I have never been a bad-looking woman. I have my father’s face and my mother’s eyes, but not their manners.  I left those on the road between Roswell and LA.  I’m far from ugly, but far from the prettiest.  I have a full-figure and long legs, and in a bar like The Glenview, I’m a light for moths.

After some time, Hank coolly stepped from his stool and approached.  I watched him walk over.  He had strong powerful legs.  His head was large and bulbous, sitting uncomfortably on his shoulders, and the cave-like overhang of his brows lifted up and down as he spoke.  He said he liked my dress and the black beads around my neck.  He bought me a drink.  There was jazz on the radio, a sense of culture in this otherwise backwater bar.  The barman, with his one queer eye twitching like an eight ball, poured us drinks until we ran out of money.

Hank and I laughed at the world, laughed at its hopelessness.  When he spoke, voice unbothered by doubt, it was hushed and comical, a contradiction to his large bulk and pock-scarred cheeks.  I was riveted.  He said unusual things.

‘We’re all just waiting,’ he told me.  ’Doing little things, and waiting to die.’

We fantasised about getting away.  We could get on the boxcar, get the hell outta here.  It could clock and clack us someplace new, a place where the booze was free and the people weren’t slime.

When the bar kicked us out, we ended up at Hank’s.  He lived in a rooming house in the black quarter.  After sex we lay in bed, smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap wine.  Hank rolled that giant head of his and looked at me with a frown.

‘Say, I don’t know your name.  What’s your name?’

I tapped away a plug of ash.  ‘What the hell difference does that make?’

Hank and I moved in together on South Union Drive, not far from MacArthur Park.  We lied to the landlady, posing as a respectable married couple.  What a cop!  The word “respectable” vanished with the drinking and the arguments.  The landlady thought I was pregnant.  Sure, pregnant with beer.  It wasn’t long before she asked us to leave.

We went from place to place, leaving a trail of broken glass.  We had some great times, some furious rows.  He loved me in that dress and we fucked every day.  The first few times he was really nervous, an amateur, a real kid.  But I taught him a few things and he got better.  We laughed and we drank and we fucked.

Hank couldn’t stand me flirting with other men.  He would get jealous and fly into a rage, get arrested, wake up in the drink tank.  I would disappear for days, hitting the bars, sleeping with other men.  I know he loved me more than I could ever love him.  He was my best friend and my drinking buddy, but I had no mind to commit.

When I was gone he would invite the drunks and bums to our place to keep him company.  He was a heavy drinker and it took its toll.  He got ill, vomited blood.  At the hospital they told him one more drink could kill him.  He came to me and I helped him as best I could.  To take his mind from the booze we went to the racetrack and won or lost money.  It became a regular thing, but it wasn’t long before Hank started drinking again, slowly at first, mixing milk with his shots.

After a while my promiscuity pulled us apart.  Hank met some broad with no neck and disappeared to Texas for several years, while I continued cruising the bars and the beds of those stupid enough to buy me drinks.

I often wonder what Craig would think of me now.  Craig was my first husband.  Like me, he was a heavy drinker.  That’s what killed him.  It was a car crash, but the booze was driving.  I should have helped him, could have listened.  I could have saved him.  I’m not the only widow to blame herself.  We had two children together, Jo and Mary.  I don’t know where they are.  I think of them often.

Some years later, I bumped into Hank in the street.

‘I saw you with that bitch a while back,’ I said.  ‘She’s not your kind of woman.’

He smiled.  ‘None of them are.’

Hank and his Texas girl had broken up and he was back in town.  It had been years since we’d seen each other.  During that time I’d managed to find work here and there, drifting aimlessly through life.  It was now 1962 and I was working at The Phillips hotel.  They gave me a room and money for drink.  I invited Hank back and we sat on the bed, reminiscing about old times, sitting there amongst the empty bottles and cans.  Soon we were making love.

I put on my best dress and my high heels.  I didn’t look as I once had.  I caught sight of my reflection.  My figure was melting with the years.  Sex had lost any meaning.  I knew Hank was disgusted by me, and he tried to hide it.  As I walked from the bed to the bathroom, my ass hanging low, I caught the look on his face and felt hurt clutch at my chest.

One morning after the Christmas holidays, he arrived to find me drinking heavily, sitting in the chair and staring out the window.  I was wondering where my life had gone, where my two children were.  I wondered how they were doing.  I wanted to know so much, but the answers had vanished in fifty-one years of life.

I’d been given booze, gifts from the tenants, and the bottles and crates filled every corner of the room.  Hank tried to stop me from drinking it all, tried to take some of it away.  With my gaze out the window, I told him to leave, and he did so, reluctantly and without conflict.

I woke in hospital.  I was so very tired.  My eyes barely opened, but the great hulk of a figure, a dark silhouette, blurred into view.

‘I knew it would be you,’ I said, and Hank smiled.  He dabbed my brow, and I fell back to sleep.

for Jane: with all the love I had, which was not enough: -

I pick up the skirt,

I pick up the sparkling beads

in black,

this thing that moved once

around flesh,

and I call God a liar,

I say anything that moved

like that

or knew

my name

could never die

in the common verity of dying,

and I pick

up her lovely

dress,

all her loveliness gone,

and I speak

to all the gods,

Jewish gods, Christ-gods,

chips of blinking things,

idols, pills, bread,

fathoms, risks,

knowledgeable surrender,

rats in the gravy of 2 gone quite mad

without a chance

hummingbird knowledge, hummingbird chance,

I lean upon this,

I lean on all of this

and I know:

her dress upon my arm:

but

they will not

give her back to me.

           - Charles Bukowski

(note: this is a fictional account of Jane Cooney Baker, derived from Howard Sounes’ biography of Charles Bukowski, Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life)

Joe didn’t have a Christmas tree…

Joe didn’t have a Christmas tree.  Instead he put a mannequin in the corner, wrapped tinsel around it and threw presents at its feet.  He covered one half of his TV screen with black masking tape because, as he claimed, it made Woody Allen films more interesting.

At his London apartment he held regular parties.  Weekends were crazy.  There were a lot of drugs. People fucked in the corner and others would write on the walls.  Joe was intelligent, a scrapper and a dodger, but the desperate took advantage of him, picking his bones clean of love and money.  He knew this - it was self-inflicted.  He could argue anyone into a corner but it pained him to do so.  He preferred a fistfight.

‘You know where you are in a fistfight.’

He drank a lot.  He liked wine.  He was scared of touching superglue tubes.  At night, usually around 2am, he worked at his desk on something he called Numberless Worlds – but was very secretive of its content so no one ever found out what it was about.  Joe was mysterious, an idiot savant, outlawed by his own behaviour.  No one could deny he had some form of psychosis.  He qualified the speculation with odd statements.

‘We all die in places that don’t matter,’ he once told me, high on speed.  We were passing a joint back and forth.  ‘All we have are circles, fucking circles, overlapping.’  He fixed his gaze on me.  ’It gets so you can’t breathe,’ he said.  ’We don’t serve anything but the circles.’

One day he got thrown in hospital and I went to see him.  I found him in a corner, skeletal and false, sitting in a chair with that death-look in his eyes while others around him danced with life.  Whatever system Joe belonged to had been wiped clean by the hospital, and I wondered if he was too far-gone to ever reshape himself.

Some months later, I heard that Joe cut his wrist with broken glass and had died right alone in that place, in that corner of that hospital when no one else was there.

The next night…

The next night, after several bottles of wine, Gregory went back to the parlour and again picked Lucy from the line-up.  Her skin was a pale gold.  She was very erotic.  Gregory was the only customer and except for the girls the parlour was empty.

Unlike the night before, this time he entered Lucy.  She sat herself reverse cowgirl and reared up and down until he climaxed.  She was sweet with him, yet firm and commanding, sensual and erotic.  He was very drunk, very damaged.

‘There you go honey,’ she said, smiling.  She was pulling up her lingerie.  ‘Did you enjoy that?’

Lucy was older than Gregory by five years, with tattoos on her arms and curly blonde hair.  She smelled of ivory soap.

‘Yes, thank you,’ he said.

The room they were in was decorated with purple and gold fabrics.  It was an attic and above them stretched wooden rafters.  There was a large double bed with netting.  Beside it was a red panic button.  The shower was in an adjoining room.  Gregory wondered how many men had been in here.

‘What do you do during the day,’ he asked.

‘I do this,’ said Lucy.  She lit a cigarette and shook the match out.  ‘But I go to people’s houses.  It pays more.’

He sighed.  ‘It’s been a long time since I was with a woman.’

‘It’s okay, sweetie.’

Gregory was very drunk and feeling sick.  There was dull ache like a strip of pain across his lower back.  He rubbed at it, kneading his fingers into his kidneys.  ‘Where do you live?’ he asked.

‘In the city.  I have my own place.’

‘You live alone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

She looked at the floor.  ‘No.’

‘But you’re very nice,’ he told her.  ‘Very nice.  You should get someone.’

She was biting her lip and nodding.  Outside the sounds of Christchurch drifted up through a window.  The room grew hot and stuffy and Gregory, pulling at his collar, began to feel uneasy.  As if sensing this, Lucy stood from the bed and put her cigarette out in the ashtray on the side.

They were both frightened.

Later that week at a different parlour, Gregory was drunk and depressed, sitting on the bed with another girl beside him.  They were naked.  The room was warm and smelled of lavender.  Helen was very thin, young, a brunette with large brown eyes.  She was quite beautiful.  ‘I’ve never done that before,’ Gregory told her, slurring his words.

‘Were you a virgin?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he said.  ‘Was I any good?’

‘You made me come,’ she lied.

Gregory chuckled.  ‘I think you’re very pretty.  The prettiest girl in Christchurch.’

Helen blushed.  She tucked a stray hair behind an ear.  Around them the air was tight and hot on their skin.  The sound of the air-conditioner buzzed and clicked by the far wall.

Gregory swayed.  ’Am I pretty?’

‘You have nice skin,’ she said.  She stroked his arm with her fingers.  ‘Usually we get old men in here and their skin is horrible and they smell funny.  I got excited when you walked in.’  She paused, glanced reluctantly at the door.  ‘You’ll have to go now.’

‘I have a brain tumour,’ he told her.  ‘I have six months.’

She gasped and put a hand over her mouth.  ‘Oh my.  Is that true?  I’m so sorry.’  She was close to tears.  Her arms trembled.  ‘You poor thing.’

‘I have nothing to live for,’ he said.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said again.  She seemed about to get up, but remained seated next to him, looking unsure and awkward.  Scared.

Gregory was drowsy, his head spinning.  ‘What did you do before you worked here?’ he asked.

Helen glanced away.  All of a sudden she appeared very lost, childlike.  Still in shock, and with her voice breaking, she said, ‘I was at school before I came here.’

It hit Gregory like a shot.  ‘Shit.’  He began to focus.  ‘This is your first job?’

She opened her mouth to speak but said nothing.  Instead she closed her eyes and nodded.

Gregory stood.  He left her sitting naked on the bed.  He had sobered up.  Guilt and confusion ate away at him.  On the way out he thanked the madam, then made his way down the stairs and into the night of Christchurch, searching for the nearest bar.

Another Road (Part V)

The rain came that night.  It hit the roof of the cottage hard and loud and pattered against the windows.  Myers opened the back door and looked out.  The village was gone in the rain.  He came back inside and decided to work the vigilant stove.  He had plenty of kindling now, and with firelighters and the driest of wood, Myers got it burning.  He shut the damper, closed the doors.  The wood spat and cracked.  He sat back feeling satisfied. Man and fire.

As he watched the flames rear and flicker, he saw himself as a child sitting in his father’s car with his father at the wheel and wearing the same white shirt and tie he had always worn.  Outside, the countryside rolled up and receded.  Myers put a hand on the glass to block the sun, which as it disappeared was bleeding beautiful reds and yellows into the earth.  Myers, a boy of ten, closed one eye and imagined himself balancing on the horizon, bathed in beauty.

His father was halfway through another lecture, his voice loud and gruff.

‘The city is where the money is, boy,’ he was saying.  ‘Not the countryside.  In the city, people are mad enough to fork over more money than they own.  Take the Bible for example,’ he said.  ’People believe the bible was written by the infallible hand of God.  And yet the Bible was penned by the fallible hand of man.  And even if God did communicate with man, there’s no way there wouldn’t be errors in the translation.  I would imagine God’s language is pretty complicated.’  He clipped Myers around the ear.  ‘Are you listening to me, boy?  I’m teaching you a valuable lesson.’

Myers nodded.  ‘Yes, sir.’

‘You see, boy, my position is one of trust.  If a customer trusts what you tell them is true, they’ll buy from you without prejudice.  And if you’re really trustworthy they’ll devote themselves to you.’  He wagged a finger in the air and said, ‘Don’t underestimate the power of lies, Henry.’

Looking back now, Myers felt sick to his stomach.  His father had been a deceitful man, and he wondered how his mother, a woman he barely remembered, could have been so entwined with him.  He remembered his mother like remembering a dream.  The only memory he had of her was one of her sitting in sunshine with her head back to catch the rays.  She had been a beautiful and sad woman.  In the same memory, she stood and turned, as though facing an audience, and reaching out she spun a wind-turn with her finger.  It clicked and blurred, and as it spun darkness fell on her face and she glanced up at the sky.  Then she was gone.

Myers stared at the flames in the stove.  His hands had a tremble, his breathing was laboured.  He glanced about the cottage.  Pushing back his chair he stood and went to the backdoor and opened it.  Rain spat in his face.  With what light there was, he was able to make out a metal bracket in the brick by the door, a bracket that once held something in place.  A wind-turn.

My father moved us to London.  Why?  When my mother died?

Back inside, he opened the doors of the stove and poked about with an iron poker.  The flames were dying.  He cursed.  The kindling had burnt but the logs had only blackened and not caught.  He grabbed more firelighters, broke off large chunks and threw them in, the smell of chemicals burning his nostrils.  He covered the firelighter with more kindling and struck a match.  The flames reared up, fierce red and bold.  Maybe now, he thought.  But once again, after ten minutes, the fire died.  He went through this process all night until he’d exhausted the firelighters and the kindling was all but gone.  He could get it lit but not keep it going.  The logs were not catching.  He needed anthracite.  If it carried on like this, he’d never get the cottage warm.  The floors and the walls were ice cold  He couldn’t relax.  He could see his breath in front of his face.  Damn it!  A failure at fire!  His father would have enjoyed this.  Myers imagined him watching from some ghostly realm.  Laughing.  Warmth.  None of it.

The Berlin Diaries (Part IV)

When Thatcher destroyed the working class institutions I was only a child, but I paid for it through my parents and I’m still paying.  I can remember at night my mother and father arguing, vehemently, over money.  We were pretty poor, and only my father’s ties with the local church had kept him in part time work. My father drank a bottle of whiskey most nights and I wondered if he was hurt because sometimes I would hear him sobbing.  The sound of my father crying tied me deeply to life.  I wanted to ignore it, to sleep, so I wrapped up in my sheets and pretended I was dead.  I had this huge imagination.  My bed would become a tree, or a ship in the ocean, or a bubble floating in space.  Sometimes I would pretend I was dying in that bubble, dying in the vast black void.  It was like I would float forever.

With my mind racing back to those early years, I found myself hanging from a window, smoking a Lucky down to the butt and listening to the traffic on the road.  I’d been in Berlin 14 days in the company of Liana, probably the most beautiful woman I’d ever known.  Behind me on the laptop, Górecki’s Symphony No.3 was playing.  Earlier that evening Liana and I had been to the ballet, which had been performed, rather badly, to this very music.  I’d sat in the audience, trying to keep still beside a giggling Liana, my stomach in knots and panic in my lungs.

It was my 31st birthday.

On our way back from the ballet, feeling released from an awful pressure, we took a diversion to Raphael’s and bought some weed.  We turned up in our evening dress, like two professionals on our way to a fundraiser.  Raphael’s apartment was simple, minimalist, slightly grubby.  On the side he had a tank of exotic fish, and on the walls pictures of jellyfish.

‘I love jellyfish,’ he told us.  He was leaning over his coffee table and building a joint.  ‘It’s the alien of the sea.  The stalked-jellyfish is my favourite.  It moves with grace.’

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Liana.

Nothing moves with grace, I thought as we walked home.  Recently I’d been reading up on cybernetics and had come to the conclusion that life might be a series of movements preordained by some spectacular system.

I’d always been assaulted by the big question of existence; and it had become such an obsession that I thought I hadn’t been born for any other reason than to find the answer.  It was a pattern of irony I couldn’t escape and it caused me great distress.  For as long as I could remember I’d suffered from drops in mood, followed by extreme highs, sometimes feeling elated and depressed at the same time.

With Górecki playing behind me I began to feel more inclined to accept the state of things.  I finished my smoke and flicked it away out the window.  With her back against the wall, Liana sat in bed under the covers, her face boyish and beautiful in the light.

As she smoked a J, she launched into a rant about her current boyfriend, waving the joint about like a pointer.  ‘We’re in an open relationship,’ she was saying.  ‘We see each other, but we fuck other people.  Sometimes I worry that he hasn’t understood that an open relationship isn’t about falling for other people.  It’s just fucking.  I’m not sure he gets that.’

There was something spectacular, even exciting, about her honesty.  She attacked form like a person shunned by it.

‘What side of the dial are you on?’ I asked her.

‘The right side,’ she said.  ’And do you think we can change the music?  It’s depressing me.’

I scrolled through iTunes, found Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and hit play.  A beautiful choir filled the room.  Liana groaned and buried her head beneath a pillow.  ’Are you kidding?’

I figured it was time to say goodnight, so I switched off the music and went for a walk.  It was past midnight and I’d been 31 years old for precisely 24 hours.  With the moon scythed in half above me, I walked the roads of Neukölln, making my way slowly up Karl Marx Street.

Berlin, at night, is a beautiful, clunky city.  I imagine from the air when dusk sets, the city lights spread open like a vine, dark buildings turning a multitude of colours.  I think of Berlin as a dazzling industrial grid, a hymnbook of history, and of love and life and blood.  And dotted throughout are the established citizens who know something of sadness.

When you stroll through Berlin, occasionally by a building entrance, you’ll come across small bronze plaques in the pavement.  On them read the names of those who were taken from that building, the year in which they were taken, the concentration camp they were sent to, and the year in which they died.  These are not imposing memorials, and being underfoot they are easily missed.  The idea is to stumble upon them.  They bring you into sharp focus and take you from the trivial daydream and into the reality of past horrors.  Sometimes, when finding one at my feet, it felt as though at that exact moment, there was nowhere else I was meant to be but gazing at those names etched in bronze.

I found this experience unlike the Jewish Memorial, with its stone blocks arranged methodically into grids.  The Jewish Memorial is all around you.  And the deeper you go into it, the further from society you are.  Stone surrounds you and the city quietens to a hum, to a silence.  The ambience here is constructed.  Your world is constructed.  It is peaceful as it is painful.

I floated far up Karl Marx Street until I came to a beautiful church, radiant in floodlight.  I sat on the curb and stared up at it in awe.  It stood on an island amongst the traffic with its sun-stained bricks and its spires touching the stars.  I am not a religious man, but I do appreciate the beauty of Christian architecture. It was one of the few things my father had taught me to admire.

As I sat pondering, a homeless man asked me for a cigarette.  I was smoking American Spirit, and I rolled him one and together we sat and smoked like old chums.

‘Are you British?’ he asked, in his tough German accent.

‘Yup.’

The answer seemed to satisfy him, and we were quiet for a time.  The man beside me was filthy.  He had a sketchy brown beard and longing eyes, and what looked like shoe polish in his hair.  I could smell the booze coming from his clothes and his lungs.  There was a whole world on his face, a world far from mine.  And yet there was something familiar about him, and when at last he spoke, it was as though he knew something so empowering that for the briefest of moments I found I envied him.

‘I met someone who had power over my life,’ he said, looking up at the church.  ‘This person, they used this power against me.  I could be a dog,’ he said, ‘because that’s how everyone treats me.’  He scratched his nose with a filthy nail and squinted his eyes shut.  Ash from his cigarette fell into his beard but he made no attempt to remove it.  He wobbled slightly, and then pulled himself upright.

With the cigarette clutched between his teeth, he said, ‘Let me tell you, friend.  Let me tell you because I think you should know this; knowing and understanding are two different things.  People can know things about you, but that doesn’t mean they understand those things.  You are who you are.  If they don’t accept that, then they’re not worth anything in this life.  And believe me…’ he closed one eye and said, ‘all things in life should have value.’

This man, whose breath smelled of weeks-old whiskey, left me speechless.  He groaned as he stood, and once up, he glanced about as if he were discovering for the first time where he was.

He decided on a route, but as he entered the light of a streetlamp, he began to laugh like a man possessed.  He turned, tapped a finger against the side of his head, and shouted, ‘There are no old songs in here.  In here, it tells you everything is and should be reborn.  Through the sadness, it says, there is always hope.’

With that, he was gone, and I made my way back to Liana’s, feeling numb and stupid.

That night I dreamt of a fire and a machine that ate people, and my father and Liana were both there, and Berlin was made of glass, and the whole world was wrong somehow.  Then came a blinding light and suddenly I was on a beach and the world was suddenly put to rights.  When I woke up, for a brief moment in that early morning glare, I thought I saw my father standing in the doorway.