by Lauren Oyler
The baby squirmed, angling its body toward the ground. I put it on the floor and sat next to it, shaking a rattle in front of its face and attempting to look casually mesmerized by the miracle of developing life. I told her that yes, I’d published kind of a lot of stuff online but nothing I was particularly proud of, just stuff, you know, quote-unquote articles, really I was here to work on a novel, but I could send her something if she’d like. She said that would be great. “Or on Monday you can read the several examples I have printed out in my VISA BINDER,” I added, to which she replied, oh, good, Germans love binders. I said I’d heard, spun the baby in her direction, said, “Go see mama!” and left. I planned to forget to send her the links until after Monday, and in the meantime to assume that as a newish mother of twins she would be too busy or forgetful to look up her competent and reliable babywalker’s suspiciously extensive online publication history.
That night I canceled a date with a Greek musician and went to see a boring movie at an art house cinema on Potsdamer Platz. Though the city has several movie theaters offering original-language films or those with English subtitles, there had always been something preventing me from going, like I didn’t belong there and so shouldn’t partake of civic enjoyments. The weather had improved since that morning, and I was in bed scrolling through the dating app, finding problems with everyone, when suddenly I felt like seeing a movie and it was as if I had woken up. I biked down Oranienstrasse through Kreuzberg much faster than necessary, maneuvering around flashing double-parked cars and running a couple of yellow lights behind an older man on a technological-looking bike in a high-visibility vest, though the sun would not set for another two hours.
I was biking past the still-crowded Checkpoint Charlie when I heard a loud clattering behind me, a rev, and a bright green Trabant shifted to overtake me, smelling of gasoline. A sign on its side advertised trabi-safari.de; it was being driven by a man in what looked like an era-appropriate hat. Within half a block I was in front of an apparent competitor called Trabi World, housed in a bright-yellow building with two Trabis on the roof, one stretch and bright orange, the other painted like a giraffe. An “I <3 Berlin” Trabi out front was flanked by other paint jobs on either side. T-shirts in faded East Berlin sorts of colors hung in the windows. In front of me I approached two girls on bikes taking up the right side of the road, their knees splayed as they pedaled leisurely side by side. I rang my bell. As they veered out of my way I heard one of them, Australian accent, say, “They’re made of plastic! Yes, I’m serious!” A long stretch of Berlin Wall was to my left, dividing the street, which was renamed after the communist resistance fighter Käthe Niederkirchner, from the former Nazi headquarters that is now a history museum. The concrete was crumbling, the remaining graffiti was blurry and old but often ebullient and occasionally funny—“Rob—call me!”—and pieces of rusted metal frame were visible in places, warped, and there were holes wide enough for people to fit through. Across the street were tacky signs attempting to explain, in paragraphs and paragraphs recounting when it was built, how many people died trying to cross it, how it went up overnight, Brezhnev, Reagan, but they didn’t really make any sense.
When I reached the end of the physical Wall, I continued to follow the double row of memorial cobblestones that charted its past course down the street. I turned right and approached the tall shining buildings looming in geometric harmony. The glass and windows gridded to the sky were a disappointing familiarity, the realization that Europe wasn’t all my idea of Europe but also sometimes an idea of America, or of the future. At Potsdamer Platz I heard David Bowie warbling in my head “Had to get the train / From Potsdamer Platz,” as I always did when I came upon some mention of Potsdamer Platz. More groups of the pleasantly confused and foreign teetered on the edge of the sidewalks as they waited for the signal to cross. People bobbed in and out of my lane, shocked when my bell warned them they were about to be hit by a bicyclist on their vacation. A couple of multicolored hunks of Wall remained on the square, disintegrating historically next to their informative panels. The S-Bahn sign announced the area in sans serif and I remembered the first time I came here, alone, in the rain, the day after the day after I met Felix, intending to visit the Neue Nationalgalerie, which had a collection of degenerate art. Though I would eventually find the museum closed for a years-long renovation project, before I made it there I got turned around and ended up in the gift shop for the Museum of Film and Television, looking at postcards of Marilyn Monroe and Charlie Chaplin until I could muster the nerve to ask an employee where I could find Wi-Fi to see if Felix had continued our email flirtation. The cinema was next door and the movie was boring, but a few days before, the city had entered the mild and euphoric two-month period when it is never technically night, so when I came out of the theater it was still light out.
· · ·
I WAS ON THE PLATFORM TO CATCH THE FIRST S-BAHN AT 4 A.M. on Monday, accompanied by a quiet man drinking and a couple making out. Once Felix and I came home from a bar at 7 a.m. on a Wednesday and the scene was the same. These memories had begun to appear to me neutrally, as mere factual associations, something about which to say, “Huh,” without pausing for a swell of emotion. The little hut selling pastries and bad coffee at the station was closed and I knew I would regret my snacklessness.
The part of Moabit where the Ausländerbehörde is located is stubbornly bleak, with a smokestack visible in the distance as you disembark from the train station and see the signs for the immigration office. You turn right at the gas station and follow the river. Across the water a block of perverse apartment buildings painted in lime green, carnation pink, popsicle purple, and terrible yellow is visible above the trees, the website for the rental agency responsible emblazoned in bright red across the facade. You’ll know you’ve arrived when a mural depicting parents and children of several races standing in front of the silhouetted landmarks of Berlin welcomes you in French, German, Turkish, English, and Spanish.
I had expected there to be more of a line, but after checking the long list of nationalities posted on the information building I took my place outside the entrance for Egypt, Ethiopia, Algeria, Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Equatorial Guinea, Argentina, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chile, Costa Rica, Cote d’Ivoire, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Djibouti, Ecuador, El Salvador, Eritrea, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Grenada, Guatemala, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Cameroon—this is in alphabetical order in German—Canada, Cape Verde, Kenya, Columbia, the Comoros, the Republic of the Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cuba, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Morocco, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mexico, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Niger, Nigeria, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Rwanda, Zambia, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Somalia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, South Africa, Sudan, South Sudan, Suriname, Swaziland, the United Republic of Tanzania, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Chad, Tunisia, Uganda, Uruguay, Venezuela, the United States, and the Central African Republic behind about ten other people. Other buildings had longer lines, but nothing as bad as the photos I’d seen online had led me to believe; maybe the blogs were out of date, or their authors had arrived later. It was 4:40. A woman in front of me holding a Nigerian passport yawned and said to the man with her that it was so much better since the students were moved to that new building in Charlottenburg. He said yeah, well, students are disorganized and don’t think to make appointments ahead of time. She said accusingly that he’d said he wasn’t mad and he didn’t have to be like that. He said he wanted coffee. She said nothing would be open, especially here, gesturing wearily around. After about five minutes a man holding a stack of maroon passports got in line behind me and began shuffling them like playing cards.
I’d gone over my application the night before and decided I didn’t need to worry about smoothing over the details for Genevieve. I wou
ldn’t have been able to disclose to the German government that I worked as an accountant even if I did work as an accountant, because it would suggest that I either wanted authorization to work as an accountant in Germany, which I surely would not get, or planned to bill clients under the table in Germany. The picture that my binder painted, of a young writer looking to strike out as a freelancer in a new land (with support from her stable upper-middle-class background), was not inconsistent with what I’d suggested to Genevieve I’d suggest about myself. My résumé was vague enough about the nature of my writing work for the website, and if she asked me about it I could say I’d left it vague in order to seem more legitimate as a freelancer to the German government, though I’d done it to seem less legitimate as a writer to her. Besides that I hadn’t lied to her about anything else. My inflated bank statements would resemble those of an unambitious freelance accountant, I thought. Rationalization is a sign of weakness, Felix had said once, but I’d thought it was just a sarcastic joke about Donald Trump.
The line was quiet. My anxiety at being found out was overlaid with sleepy apathy. At around 6 a.m. employees began to arrive, walking briskly and uncaringly past us to their various posts, and we all watched them like dogs under the dinner table. I thought it would be funny to cheer or ask for an autograph. I tried to read but mostly just stood there. Genevieve showed up at six forty-five with two coffees and croissants. “The boys have been up probably about as long as you have!” she said, surveying the now somewhat daunting line behind me. “We’ll definitely get a spot today, good for you.”
When the doors opened everyone engaged in futile crowding and Genevieve and I looked at each other in mock exasperation. A woman yelled, “No, you do not! I am here first!” and a few people laughed. After about fifteen minutes we reached a booth where a rigid man asked to look through my binder, nodded at it, gave me a number, 013, and told us to wait on the second floor. Genevieve asked in German how long he thought it would be and he said, she translated for me, “No idea. Maybe one hour, maybe two hours.” The entire complex was hospital-esque, each floor consisting of an alternating pattern of waiting rooms and hallways lined with offices. Many signs printed from Microsoft Word warned of common mistakes and misunderstandings. In our waiting room a digital television screen displayed two columns of numbers, the assigned case numbers on the left and the room they were to report to on the right. As in all number-based line systems these did not appear in chronological order, or any other sort of order. Also on the digital television screen was an image of an analog clock that was about thirty seconds ahead of the identical, actual analog clock hung next to the screen, above a closed door bearing another print-out sign that read, in English, “Do not cross the barrier until you are permitted.” When a number on the screen changed, a two-tone electronic jingle sounded; because we were in one of a series of waiting rooms in a long hallway in a building full of long hallways, the ding-donging was almost symphonic as it issued randomly up and down the floor, causing me to look up in precious hopefulness very often. The only people who looked nervous were a young couple a few seats down from me. An hour passed. Employees would periodically emerge from their offices seeming dubiously friendly to welcome their next appointment. Realizing that, in addition to lying to her, I had conscripted a new mother of twins to spend an uncertain amount of time sitting in a waiting room miles away from her children and their needs, I apologized and thanked Genevieve a few times. She said it was fine, she didn’t care about her children. More time passed. Genevieve asked if she could look through my binder and I had no credible way to object. I could see she’d gotten to my bank statements when she asked, “Why did you want to work for me?”
By this time I’d abandoned my fantasies of tearful confession met with confused but sensitive acceptance, so I told her that I’d just wanted something to do—I’d moved to Berlin without much of a plan, I said, and it was a little depressing to know so few people and have so little to do. I added that I liked children and thought they would be soothing in a time of political upheaval. It occurred to me that I might seem like I was taking a job from someone who needed the money more than I did, or indeed that I might have actually been taking a job from someone who needed the money more than I did, though it wasn’t as if I didn’t actually need money. I found myself explaining further: I learned basic tax code after college because I wanted to work on writing without having to worry about getting a full-time job, and my grandpa was a real accountant, a CPA, and I had all these fond childhood memories of watching him with his spreadsheets and his pencils behind his ears. Sometimes, I was told, he would look over at me and make a comment about itemized deductions or the earned income credit that I couldn’t possibly understand, and I would respond very cutely in my baby voice. I wasn’t a CPA now, no—for most people’s needs you don’t need to be certified. There are lots of freelancers in New York, and most of them never think to ask if you’re certified, especially when you’re cheaper than H&R Block. I couldn’t do audits, but why would I want to? Seriously though, I wanted to stop doing taxes, which was part of the reason I came to Berlin. I hated math, I was just good at it, and though I’d initially been sympathetic about the panic inspired by government bureaucracy, now it took every ounce of patience I had not to lecture all the people who put off doing their taxes until the last minute and expected me to comb through their receipts in forty-eight hours. I could charge extra for that, yeah, but it was still infuriating, and what was more infuriating was that it was part of my job to remain calm and reassuring even as my clients treated me like a computer. Most of these people had no excuse—they were totally capable of paying, just lazy. No, yeah, the plan is to switch to writing, which I’d studied in college—I nodded at the binder she was still holding to indicate there was proof of my degree within it—and then maybe start doing free or, like, sliding-scale tax services for low-income people once I had things figured out. To do karmic penance for this lie, I was going to have to actually learn the tax code and start offering sliding-scale tax services for low-income people, if that was even something anyone could just wake up one day at 3:15 a.m. and decide to do. People major in accounting in college. Genevieve nodded and said she was glad she’d found someone who was so good with the boys, so she hoped I didn’t start hating them, too! Ha ha. No, they’re too cute.
When the demonic jingle announced 013 it was dreamlike, surreal, ten forty-five. I jumped up and said, “It’s me!” and elicited chuckles from the elderly couple who had just sat down nearby. Genevieve and I walked purposefully to the smiling woman standing outside room 155. She had maroon hair styled like a porcupine and said, “Ute. English?” I said yes but uh and looked at Genevieve. Before she could reply for me, Ute shook her head and waved her hand and said Genevieve couldn’t come. “I speak English, fine, OK.” OK. The blogs had not prepared me for this at all. I passed an apology to Genevieve as I was whisked into the office and the door was shut behind me. There was, as a blog said there might be, a small cat calendar on Ute’s desk.
“Zo,” she said. “My English is not . . . great, but this doesn’t matter.” I said all Germans said that, even though their English was great. She said, “What?” I said never mind. She asked what I was applying for; I had printed out a cover page for my binder with the German name of the visa on it, which I pointed to. She took the binder and asked what my job was. I said I was a writer. She said ah, a writer. She said, “Do you have health insurance?” I said yes and stood up from my chair unnecessarily to flip to the printed-out evidence of my health insurance, which I had finally managed to procure with Frieda’s guidance; it was ultimately very straightforward. She looked at it and then flipped through the rest. She said, “Do you have your passport?” I said yes and gave her my passport. She said, “OK. You go outside. I will call you back when I’m finished.” I did this and apologized to Genevieve again.
Five minutes later Ute came out of 155 and beckoned me to return to her office. She said my application loo
ked good, but it would have to be approved by some sort of official body, the name of which I didn’t catch, which could take up to three months. I said, “Three months?” and she said yes but it wouldn’t be a problem, probably. When it was ready I would receive an email with a date, time, case number, and waiting room number to return. She put a sticker in my passport that said, according to her, I could stay in the country but was not authorized to leave and come back. I didn’t have to pay until the visa was ready. I said, “That’s it?” That I might just decide one day to move to a foreign country for no real reason and be able to do it with relative ease felt like a con. She said, “Yes, welcome to Germany,” and she picked up a little flag on her desk and waved it without changing the expression on her face at all.
CLIMAX
ACROSS THE COUNTRY GERMAN PARENTS STILL IN POSSESSION OF television sets watched the weather reports with concern and quickly relayed the forecast via text message or email to their progeny in the capital. Do you have to go to work on Thursday? Remember to close the windows. The progeny frowned—it was only Monday, and their parents were annoying—but they nevertheless tapped over to the appropriate app, not feeling confident in TV news reports or their parents’ ability to relay them. Three days in advance the weather app was mostly useless, but next to Donnerstag and Freitag it did display a cloud icon with a little lightning bolt under it. Further investigation suggested a storm was coming. The Germans began to discuss the impending weather with their friends and roommates and colleagues, who confirmed the projections, adding to the exciting and portentous atmosphere. Among the friends and roommates and colleagues were expats, who warned their friends, mainly other expats, understanding the helplessness of weather to be compounded by the helplessness of never reading local news. I heard about it from Frieda, who was in the kitchen cheerfully grating an apple over muesli while I removed my clothes from the washing machine. Wet pieces of flesh were flying across the countertop; one soared dangerously close to my clean sheets. “What time do you see the babies on Thursday?” she asked, juice glistening on her fingers. I told her I got there at eight and finished at eleven. “Good. It is going to rain really hard,” she said. “My mother said, on the news? They are saying one of the worst rains in one hundred years.” Since we lived on neither the ground nor the top floor and as renters did not take responsibility for water damage to our home anyway, the gravity of the situation was lost on us. I could buy some groceries to avoid having to eat whatever I had in my cabinet on Thursday, lentils, old garlic, toast, oatmeal. If I didn’t it would be totally fine. “Luckily it is not supposed to start until later in the day, I think.”