I went to the kiosk just down from my apartment in Berlin to buy coffee. The owners – a Turkish family – know me since I’ve been coming in sporadically for six years. They know me only by sight since I don’t speak Turkish and my German is negligible.
Today, the glamorous matriarch was behind the counter – kind eyes, and what I imagine to be an acerbic wit. In her late 50s now, she was doubtless beautiful back in the day.
‘Tschuss’, she said, as I walked out
‘Tschuss’, I replied.
A human interaction, albeit of the smallest kind.
Berlin has always seemed to me a mysterious city, especially in the late afternoon, when the light starts to fade and – across Kottbusser Tor and Friedrichshain – the neons flame up. Bars, kebab shops, casinos, shisha lounges, and of course – in non-pandemic times – clubs, which pound for days and nights at a time with heavy techno music. So many intersecting lives. All those individual drives and agendas melding together in a strange twilight world of hedonism, glamour and excess.
It seems mysterious, but perhaps that’s just because I don’t speak the language – and perhaps that’s how I like it. There are advantages, after all, in being a stranger in a strange land. You become – necessarily – an observer, in the thick of it but never fully part of things. It’s a role I’ve always cherished, since I’ve often preferred to think of myself as a chronicler rather than a participant (although the truth is that I’ve participated with enthusiasm more times than I can recall).
I walked out of the kiosk into the bright morning, the sun rising behind the busy main street that intersects with mine. The summer warmth in the air was tempered by that slight coolness you feel in the early part of a day that promises to be hot – and you welcome it since it merely heightens your anticipation for the balmy noon to come. Green leaves on the trees, the smell of fresh bread from the backerei, people hurrying to work, kids on their way to school – human life happening around me, and along with it the reminder that yes, despite everything I am still here, and despite my railing against much of what the world is, there is still breath in my body, and I can still enjoy the simple sensual experience of being alive – the cool air, the breeze, the sunshine, the sounds of a city waking up, the street signs, buildings, graffiti, the moan of the traffic and an awareness that – however pointless all this may ultimately be – I remain and I live, for today at least.
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