by Lauren Oyler
Instead of sex, I’m ashamed to say, I imagined our relationship: He would be initially very sweet and progressively less so. He would always leave our mornings-after at a reasonable hour. Eventually I would have to tell him I’d lied about my biography, and he would be upset, but it would be because he was allowed to be, not because it truly hurt him. We would keep small things from each other because neither of us really understood ourselves and we would not want the other person to uncover such intimate knowledge first. I would constantly ask if I should stay in Berlin or go back to the United States, and if it was worth the trouble to learn German, and he would never offer anything but a sincere effort at logic: If I left, x; if I stayed, y. He, Z, would never be a factor, because a man should not affect a woman’s right to choose what she does with her life. Similarly, his tenderness would be calculated, never shifting into vulnerability; I, in turn, would demand from him some sign of emotional seriousness, though not because I really wanted it, not because I had ever felt in love with him, but because I would want to know he had felt in love with me.
Or maybe it would have been completely different and I was succumbing to my emotional turmoil. Maybe he would have broken the spell. He said, “I am going to get up and go to the toilet, and when I come back I am going to ask if you would like to come home with me.” He stood up, maneuvering around the crowd of low tables, and turned the corner. The bathroom had a single toilet, no urinal, and was located at the end of a short hallway across from another loud room; he would have to wait. We had shared a carafe of wine, almost certainly more than one liter, we had noted, and combined with the cigarettes and the noise and the low light, I was drunk. The nerves proliferated and I no longer liked them. I picked up my jacket and left.
*
WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM LITERATURE? SOMETIMES THINGS may feel like they’ve been going on forever, but really it’s only been about forty pages.
*
THE EX-BOYFRIENDS MEAN THIS IN THE MOST LOVING WAY, BUT they’re feeling like they really dodged a bullet here.
NELL’S WRITING GROUP CONSISTED OF HER AND ME SITTING IN her salon-like bedroom on Karl-Marx-Strasse and discussing issues of plot and structure, her being “not really into style.” When I blinked at this, she added that she appreciated it in other writers, but it just wasn’t really for her. Since I was mysterious and unproductive and never brought any work to shop, I didn’t feel I had the right to object.
After three sessions I decided I would ask her if she would come with me to the Ausländerbehörde to help me apply for a visa. Since I’d contributed no writing to our writing group, in a way she owed me. In another way I owed her, as I had not given her any material to later mock in her own semiautobiographical novel, but I wanted to hold on to this transactional understanding of our relationship. I gave her feedback (three specific compliments, followed by a constructive piece of criticism that was substantive but never as big as the biggest compliment); she could give me early-morning translation skills. Before our first meeting, she sent me a three thousand–word story about a woman who had a compulsive acupuncture habit, written from the perspective of someone who seemed to have never heard of acupuncture or women, and I told her the moments conveying the appeal of wellness trends were apt and she should worry less about depicting the peculiarity of the trends through the unnatural voice. When she herself expressed a hair-twirling guilt about her own penchant for burning certain incenses to effect specific changes in her life, which she said helped her feel less “neurotic” though she knew it seemed “woozy,” I said, “If you have an imaginary problem, an imaginary solution usually works,” which Felix used to tell me whenever I made fun of myself for doing yoga. (Well, I would point out, arguing against myself more than him, yoga is actually exercise.) I touched her forearm confidentially and said I had a huge jar of turmeric powder, an alleged guard against inflammation, on my counter. “Turmeric!” she exclaimed, gesturing toward her own kitchen. It was only after I left the apartment and was passing the closed discount shoe stores and chain bakeries that I realized telling someone who was basically an acquaintance that her problems were “imaginary” was pretty rude. My problems were certainly imaginary, but I did not know what hers were. If you want to become a nondescript yet consistent presence in people’s lives, able to take advantage of their companionship without investing emotionally, offending them is not the best way to go about it. The next time we met, she said she would have loved to help me with my visa interview but couldn’t because she was going to Venice for the Biennale that week.
People I had no reason to trust assured me the visa case I had constructed for myself was solid: registration with the police; a bank account with more than ten thousand euros in it (thanks to the previously mentioned rich friend, who smugly agreed to smugly transfer me a huge sum so that I might print out an inflated balance before transferring the money back to him); fictional letters from three fictional freelance employers testifying they would employ me for x hours per week at rates of y for copyediting work, copywriting work, and article-writing work; a falsified letter from my mother, translated into German by Google translate and corrected by Frieda, testifying she would give me one thousand euros per month should I encounter financial trouble; my résumé; a photo of my university diploma; a printed portfolio of several of my articles; a financial plan (I would have no expenses); and a passport photo I took in a booth in the Hermannplatz U-Bahn station, the greenish light casting a murderous mauve look to my visage. I assembled all these in a large binder, having been told by several blog posts and one acquaintance that Germans love binders. A woman I met at a very bad poetry reading told me she had gone in with a letter from an employer whose address was listed as “Mary-Jane-Strasse 69”—they had been joking around in the office that day and forgotten to change it—and she was granted her work permit within a month. A musician from New Zealand told me he received his visa the same day he applied. A man from New Jersey said, “It was always easy for Americans, but it’s even more so now,” raising his eyebrows and gesturing, I kid you not, at the falafel he was eating. When friends back in New York asked why I wanted to stay in Berlin I took to mimicking the responses of other people, like these: It was just “so different” here, so “chill,” the clubs were “amazing,” nobody worked, and now that the weather was getting warmer you could drink outside! The socioeconomic benefits of legal outdoor drinking should not be waved aside as mere frivolous recreation! The New Yorkers could not argue—everyone was leaving town these days—but as I said these things I sounded much dumber than I had when I lived there, as if I’d been overtaken by some exploitative self-help program, so I hoped they suspected something was wrong.
The only problem was that the TK form was very confusing and confusingly translated, containing requests for health insurance card numbers and exemptions and cancelation confirmations. One section was titled “Recruit New Members and Win,” but it seemed to be more of a hypothetical opportunity, acknowledging that I myself might have been recruited and that someone else might win, but also to remind me that in the future I could put myself in the shoes of a winning recruiter. When I tried to visit the company’s office in Friedrichshain to discuss the form with an agent—assuming a phone call, without the aid of body language, would be impossible—I could find no office where an office had been promised, just an eerie car dealership and a discount grocery store. I walked around the block and stood in the grocery store’s parking lot with my neck bent over my phone to look at the map I’d loaded in advance, trying to find some hidden alley, a fork in the road, a cul-de-sac that would make clear where I’d gone wrong. I finally gave up and, though I’d spent the entire morning looping the babies around the disused airfield that had been converted into a public park, watching early-morning rollerbladers speed up and down the tarmac, and feeling sympathetic for the remaining twin who had not yet said his first word, I decided to walk around after my failure. I knew I was just east of Felix’s old apartment; with the hope t
hat I might run into an ex and confirm he looked worse than when we were together, I started off in that direction and decided to let my navigational intuition guide me. I could have looked at the map on my phone, yes, but I told myself I would not.
I’d spent weeks in this neighborhood but didn’t know it well. From east to west, it transitioned from industrial, to quiet and neutral, to aggressively familial, to Felix’s Kiez, which was touristy and insufferable at night. Scattered throughout were the dirty and mad holdouts of legendary squats and DIY venues that had once ruled the area, whose heyday we were sad to have missed; their offspring today were either unobtrusive or flying combative banners in response to attempted evictions. I’d been to a show at Rigaer 94, somewhere around here, which had been raided and reoccupied since, its doors cut out at least once; Frieda had told me about a new squat a bit farther north, in an old carpet factory that belonged to the owner of a fast fashion company. On the other side of Warschauer Strasse was the major draw for bright-eyed money-spending tourists and self-righteous expats, Berghain, the former power plant that now housed the best club in the world, bounced by a notoriously scrupulous and face-tattooed doorman whom the tourists inevitably came to resent and the expats pretended not to revere; the club had so far resisted succumbing to badness by seeming to ignore the conversation about it, remaining popular enough that it could continue to reject the sort of people who would make it unpopular. When the subdued apartment blocks gave way to obvious renovations and facades decorated with kid-friendly murals advertising peace and acceptance—“mom graffiti” as Felix had it—I knew I was close. The neighborhood was at maximum capacity in terms of places to buy customized T-shirts. A pirate-themed ice cream shop was just opening, though it was after noon. A Vietnamese place I may have been to. A tram rambling down the middle of the street. The Platz that hosted a popular flea market I’d never been to. It felt a little like I was stealing Berlin from Felix, like I shouldn’t be there, even though he never liked living there and had, for all intents and purposes, failed at it, based on any typical metric of life success for an upper-middle-class white man with bohemian inclinations: friendships formed, local language learned, sustainable income procured, artwork made. Yet he was constantly mentioning the two years he spent there—I’m pretty sure it was two years, there was some documentation—and whenever he appended an anecdote with some version of “I lived in Berlin so,” or “In Berlin they do it differently,” I would respond, “Oh, you lived in Berlin?” as if that were the first I’d heard of it. I would never do it like he did it. The health insurance forms were surmountable and I was going to surmount them, at which point I would act as if it had been no big deal.
When I reached Simon-Dach-Strasse, I knew I should turn left, pass the bar where we’d had our first “date,” and then turn right to end up in front of the door to Felix’s building. It was ridiculous of me to suggest that I might not be able to find it again; I knew exactly where it was. I could probably get someone to let me in if I wanted, but there would be no point in that. His roommates might still be living there—the apartment was very cheap, rented through an old contract, and it would have been foolish to abandon it—and if I ran into them they might recognize me and ask me questions. I would just walk past the building, have some kind of emotional experience, and then continue on across the Oberbaumbrücke, where I would look at the TV tower and the Spree before walking back into Kreuzberg, cutting a straight line through Görlitzer Park, across the canal, and into Neukölln.
When I turned left and saw that the bar we went to wasn’t there anymore, I almost cried, which was pathetic. I hate crying, especially about facts of life. Bars closed all the time, for all sorts of reasons, and most of them had been settings for first dates that didn’t lead to everlasting love. What was that bar to me? What was any bar to me? I’d been there a handful of times, all of which were now tinged with betrayal. Yet I was desperate to find some great significance in its closure. I think it had been there for years, but not that many years, and regardless, I hadn’t been going to it for years. It was so cheap, and the bartenders were rude. Briefly I tried to blame gentrification, the shrieking children all around me and their huffy parents waiting to pick them up from Kita, but I had no claim to that complaint and no basis for the assumption even if I could have made it. I turned right onto Felix’s street and no longer cared to see his apartment, but it was there, fine. I was already having my emotional experience.
Waiting at the corner across from the sausage stand I noticed graffiti that read “UGLY BOYS” on the side of an apartment building, but I was too sad to take a picture. On the easy ascent to Oberbaumbrücke a couple waited for their strip of souvenir photos at the Photoautomats there. In New York photo booths were popular at parties and weddings and in bars, but the photos they produced usually appeared new, in color, too detailed. Sometimes the booth came with “props” to help subjects convey kookiness—comically large sunglasses in neon colors, false mustaches attached to little wooden sticks. But in Berlin the booths looked antique, and the photos were a grainy black and white, though the booths had only been installed throughout the city in 2004, as part of a project, as if Berlin needed more opportunities for nostalgia. The woman waiting had a spiky ponytail that suggested she straightened her hair with a flat iron; the man wore a zipped-up sweatshirt and boat shoes. I’d never asked Felix to get our photos taken together when I visited, and he never suggested it, and I knew why, because it would have been cheesy, because everyone did it, but still I wished I had one, if not to reject an opportunity to be sentimental about it then to have a set of flattering photos of myself appearing to have a good time. The photos were always flattering—high contrast, dramatic shadows, blurring imperfections—and the people in them always seemed to have stumbled into the booth in a moment of playful joy, never caught uninspired for a pose, probably because they were usually drunk or high. There were a few photos of Felix and me, our faces always mockingly serious, never smiling, always taken by one of us awkwardly holding a cell phone in front of our faces and so to a certain extent provisional. I had some saved on my phone that I’d avoided looking at; when I finally did go through them, the first thing I noticed was how uncomfortable I looked to be photographed. My face was thinner than I imagined it, my hair was not as boring as I was always complaining, but I felt ashamed to be next to Felix, who managed to look both aloof and comic.
· · ·
MRS. DALLOWAY SAID SHE WOULD FILL OUT THE HEALTH INSURANCE forms herself. Blistered and home I lay on the floor in my bedroom and tried to work up the necessary courage, saying to myself in my head several times that I would get up after ten more seconds. The floor was a cool, ugly laminate, inconsistently installed and hilly, with a few peeling edges here and there, and because dirt just sat on top of it, I could feel little rocks and bits incorporating themselves into the backs of my arms and embellishing my T-shirt. There was a vacuum in the hallway next to the front door that I’d recently tried to use but couldn’t figure out how to turn on, and because I’d been living in the apartment for two months I didn’t feel I could ask Frieda how it worked without making it clear I had never vacuumed my bedroom, or any other part of the apartment. I could have used a broom, but I did not. She knocked on the door.
“Come in,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “You are on the floor?”
I agreed with her. I said I was trying to gather the strength to fill out my health insurance forms, which didn’t make any sense. I recited some lines, which I had apparently memorized.
“Do you have them in German?”
Since they were German health insurance forms, they were available online in German. I had not even considered this as something that could be helpful to me. I got off the floor and sat in front of the computer.
In fact, the form I’d been attempting to fill out was not the correct form at all. Frieda stood over me like a parent helping a child with her homework and navigated me to the page I needed. As she sca
nned the health insurance application for foreign nationals not required to enroll in the German pension scheme, her mouth moving silently over the long German words, she interrupted herself. “By the way, I am here to ask if you can borrow me a tampon?”
This opportunity to be reciprocal cheered me up immediately. Could I ever! My tampons were unusually stylish. The nature of occasionally writing women’s interest stories meant I had at some point been signed up as a subscription member for an organic tampon company, which every month for about a year had sent two boxes of tampons—one regular and one super, both in tastefully patterned packaging—to my apartment in New York, as well as a newsletter full of mantras like “We are worthy of the ability to be the sovereigns of our own bodies.” It would be a medical emergency if a person needed all the tampons they sent, and I always donated half. I brought the rest to Berlin because they were nice—I had not realized there existed such variability in tampon quality until I used them—and because I’m cheap. It also seemed like a good way to avoid a translation problem at the drugstore. I rolled my chair over to the end of my bed, pulled out my bag of tampons, and handed one to Frieda.