Tomorrow Berlin

by Oscar Coop-Phane

  Higher still, up some more metal staircases, is the Panorama Bar. This space is less impressive. The light is nice, the music more dancy. On the left under the mezzanine are the toilets. Unisex, no mirrors. You wait your turn for a cubicle. Alone, or with a girl, a boy, as many as eight people sometimes. You get high together, in these little metal cubicles, without any greater need to hide than that. Security don’t care if several people go in as long as the door is closed.

  The taps on the basins are all in a row. You splash water on your face, fill an old beer or Club Mate bottle with water.

  In the toilets the music is less loud. Languages mingle. It’s a big crowd that knows each other, the same people every Sunday. For nothing in the world would Tobias miss coming here on a Sunday afternoon and getting high.

  The room is orientated towards the DJ’s cabin. There are big reproductions on the walls. Coloured cubes decorate the ceiling. It’s captivating; festive and melancholy. The crowd moves in rhythm, but you can escape it, there’s space at the sides.

  Big windows behind closed blinds make up one whole wall of the room. No light from outside filters through. But sometimes at the right moment, as a surprise effect, the shutters open for a few seconds. It causes an enormous burst of pleasure as light surges in for a moment, like a special effect, when the music kicks in and time no longer exists.

  II

  Armand is dancing; he wouldn’t know what else to do. Who could he talk to? He looks around to see what other people are doing. He notes certain movements, adapts them to his style, the style he’s trying to give his own body. An arm movement, forward then back, quite simply, like in a race. He’s making his way through time like you clock up kilometres in an endurance test. The ecstasy tablets he bought surreptitiously help him keep going, of course, but sometimes he feels time itself sticking to his skin. Hours go by. It’s already Sunday morning. The time when people get up and think about eating. Go out and buy croissants for the girl they love.

  Armand is all alone. But so is everyone around him. And through their strength as a crowd, they lift the weight of loneliness from him. He’s alone, so he dances. The lights are coloured: sparkling reds, blues and yellows. It’s an adventure park for the senses. Armand looks at the lights as he dances, with his head up and a smile on his face. The girls are beautiful. He’d like to touch them but his hands are clammy.

  When he’s tired of dancing, he has a cigarette on one of the couches. Then, keen to fake a sense of composure, he pretends to write a message on his phone. To show all of them, all those eyes without faces, that he is not so lonely since he has someone to text.

  He dances some more. God, that red is beautiful; the lights shine. The people around him smile at him. Like all of them, he’s happy to be here. It’s noon.

  A few tracks later, Armand takes an empty bottle he found at his feet and fills it up with water. At the sinks in the toilets, a boy speaks to him in German. Armand doesn’t understand, and asks him to say it again in English. The boy is Tobias so he repeats it in French. Armand looks tired, he offers him some speed.

  Armand doesn’t know it yet, but this is normal here, shared drugs and pleasures, without a second thought. You look tired. I’ve got some speed; here, take some with me. Drogensolidarität.

  They lock themselves in a cubicle.

  ‘Are you gay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I am, but don’t worry, you’re not my type. You’re new, aren’t you? I’ve not seen you before. It’s a small world, you know, us druffis.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Druffis. It’s a term of endearment for druggies. Party animals, freaks, that lot.’

  ‘Yes, I got here this morning… well, yesterday now.’

  ‘Here, take this and let’s dance. I can introduce you to the blonde you’ve had your eye on. That’s Sigrid. She’s great. She was the one who asked me to come and speak to you. OK, have you had enough? Come on then, let’s dance.’

  The two of them make a strange pair in front of the DJ’s cabin.

  Armand offers half his last ecstasy tab to Tobias.

  ‘Where did you buy it? The E isn’t good just now. I’ll teach you. Call me Tata, OK? Tata Sarfatti.’

  Armand swallows the whole tablet. They both laugh.

  ‘OK, Tata.’

  They dance for a few more hours, lose sight of each other, meet up again. Armand kisses Sigrid. They drift apart and get separated. It’s hot, the lights seem sweaty, almost fluorescent. The jolting music guides the wayward souls of the Panorama Bar, it’s their only mistress, it dictates their movements, a jerky dance, a bodily convulsion. It’s an infinite pleasure, synthetic perhaps, but so real that you don’t care what caused it. There’s nothing as heady as the ecstasy of crowds, crowds of lonely individuals, the druffis that Tobias talked about. The girls are easy-going and beautiful; sometimes they’ll smile at you and give you a kiss. The bass pounds like your heart, you feel you’re living more intensely, with other people. Everyone enjoys it without shame or worry, naked with your pleasure. That pleasure is expressed through raised arms, mouths that sometimes call out. The ketamine heads experience it in slow motion, like in an aquarium; for others, on amphetamines, it’s speeded up. It doesn’t matter; it’s all about your pleasure. No one here begrudges you it.

  Armand and Tobias meet again in front of the basins in the toilets. They talk. There’s a room for rent in the flat Tobias shares, his WG as they call it here. When they leave here they can take a look. If he likes it, Armand could stay there.

  ‘Have you had any alcohol?’

  ‘Yeah, a few beers,’ Armand says.

  ‘No juice for you, then. Next time, I’ll give you some. You’ll see, it’s twenty times better than your shit in capsules.’

  Armand’s pleasure is wearing off; he’s cold, his whole body is shaking. He feels as though he is filled with a thick, scummy wave of exhaustion; the drugs are gradually leaving his system. Abandoned by the pleasure molecules, he looks for Tobias, so they can go and see the room, see it and go to sleep there, burrow under the quilt, sleep, naked, in a soft bed.

  He has to find Tobias. What’s the time? Eight p.m. already! Time beats down like a big rod.

  He has to find Tobias. The Berghain has closed, only the Panorama is still open. That makes the search easier.

  He must find Tobias. In the toilets, the freaks are blundering into each other. There’s a girl with tattoos who would be pretty if she weren’t snapping her jaw at the air. A guy is hitting his head against the wall. Weird convulsions. He is small, bald and blue. He keeps bashing the wall with his head. Beside him is a strange smiling creature, half-boy, half-girl, shaved head, orange eyebrows, mouth crudely extended with lipstick.

  He must find Tobias. Ah, there he is! He’s tired too. Time to go.

  III

  The apartment is on Schönhauser Allee in Prenzlauerberg. It’s quite a schlep from the Berghain, from the Ostbahnhof. They go on foot nonetheless. For Armand, it’s autumn in a new city. He has a sensation of space. Yes, it’s that: space and ease. He’s following a guy he doesn’t know to an apartment to check it out. He’s carrying his bag. He’s walking towards a new life; he has a heady feeling of disorientation; the wind that’s blowing is mild.

  Tobias talks incessantly. He hops around. That’s how he is when he’s on drugs, he has a sense that he’s living for what he is. Armand listens. It’s reassuring to know he speaks French. Otherwise he might not have gone with him; it’s an anchor point.

  Tobias is a lot shorter than Armand. It’s a bit like he’s trotting behind him, and yet he is leading the way. He’s talking about a friend who died a few days ago. Drugs, of course. What else would it be in Tobias’s circle? Being an addict is a full-time job.

  Armand still finds it romantic, how some people make their self-destruction a point of honour, applying themselves to their own decline. He doesn’t yet know if drugs will lead to his own disappearance or to living life more fully, but it’s a life
he wants to taste, life as a shadow.

  For now, the streets are broad, the road signs strange and notices impossible to figure out. German words have a particular appeal when you don’t understand them, something industrial about the way they are written; the sequences of consonants clustered together; a black language, as though still written in Gothic script. It’s a cold kind of sweetness, which envelops you and hits you. Yes, Armand wants to experience this life, these unfamiliar sensations.

  The apartment is huge; they all are round here, it’s a constant, like the stairways with lino on the floor. The windows go down to the ground. The previous tenant left a week ago, an American who’d stayed six months. His room’s available; the other two are Otto’s and Claudia’s. Tobias has been sleeping on the sofa. It’s a stop-gap; he’s been here three weeks. Claudia has gone away for a fortnight to see her family in Spain.

  A few years back, Otto lived in the apartment with his wife. She left him. Since then, he’s rented out rooms to foreigners who are passing through. He’s a tall fair-haired guy who comes from the north of Germany. He’s a student of history and biology, though he’s thirty-five.

  He’s making dinner. He didn’t know if Tobias would be back, but he made extra, just in case. Tobias introduces Armand as a good friend.

  Otto invites Armand to stay to dinner. If he likes, he can also stay the night; he looks tired. Tomorrow they can talk about renting the room.

  Dinner is fun. They speak English. Armand enjoys the realisation that he’s not the same person as when he speaks French. He doesn’t have the same character; he doesn’t make the same jokes. It’s nice to be able to change your identity temporarily.

  Armand takes a shower, then falls asleep between clean sheets.

  IV

  The next morning, as always, there are pancakes and café au lait. The Germans know how to live at home. Maybe because of the harshness of the winters. They have lots of accessories: to froth milk, to keep tea hot, to be comfortable at home without having to go out to the café.

  The breakfast is nice. They smoke roll-ups, eat bacon. Tobias and Armand tell Otto about their evening. The three of them are like a family, sitting at the bar in the kitchen.

  Otto feels it too. He likes Armand, this young Frenchman who has come here to paint, and why else? Hard to say. Perhaps it’s his restlessness that has brought him to this unknown city. He reckons they’ll be able to get along, that Armand, because of his youth and his character, will be an ally in the order of his existence. With friends, like in love, you can tell the ones who are going to be on your side.

  If Armand likes the room, it’s his. The rent is modest; it includes electricity and internet.

  Agreed! Armand will live here, put the few possessions he’s brought with him in the empty room – it’s more reassuring to know they’re there than in the Berghain cloakrooms.

  They celebrate with another round of pancakes. According to Tobias, Otto is cool. He gets high too. He was married to a really beautiful girl, an American; but she left because the two of them had got stuck in a rut. Since then, Otto has surrounded himself only with people who are passing through. He chooses foreign flatmates; he’s putting Tobias up for a few weeks.

  He’s a generous guy. Tobias, for example, knew from the time he had problems that he could count on Otto to lend him his sofa and feed him. Yes, he’s a truly special guy, Tobias says. I’m pleased the three of us are going to live together; it’ll be a good laugh.

  V

  A white room: tiled walls, tiled floor. A guy in a white coat comes in. Franz is sitting in a hospital chair with armrests.

  ‘O-positive. That’s good. Maybe more for us than for you. You’re fit, which is good. Just relax. We’ll take ten tubes. And afterwards, you can have a sandwich. It takes it out of you, you know…’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Franz replies.

  Franz knows the drill. Every month he comes here to sell his blood. He knows they’ll put a tourniquet on high above his elbow and it’ll be too tight, that the needle will slide into his vein easily and that the tubes will fill up, one by one, until there are none left.

  Then he’ll roll down his sleeve, someone will bring him a sandwich, attentively, as though he were ill. The guy on reception will give him a twenty-euro note in a brown envelope and off he’ll go with the money in his pocket.

  Yes, he knows the drill.

  VI

  It’s dark in the living room. Armand’s smoking in an armchair. He sniffs the edge of a yellowed book. These are the only movements permitted by his state of mildly depressive contemplation. He looks as though he’s resting after what he’s been through, now that he’s alone at last. But his features betray a little hint of eagerness, like the adventurer’s satisfaction in his new environment. He hasn’t yet found the treasure, but he senses it’s there, within reach, since he has travelled the whole path. He’s a young man at rest.

  At the same moment, in an over-the-top rococo basement, Tobias is going from one man to another. He takes and is taken.

  Then, for a moment’s peace, he locks himself in the toilets. He takes out his syringe and little glass bottle. The liquid rises in the plastic tube. 0.9, 1, 1.1, 1.2, right up to 1.6. A mouthful of Coke, then the contents of the syringe, then another mouthful. He sits on the toilet, his head in his hands. The music filters through, muffled by the toilet doors. He starts to cry. He waits for it to well up within him. He takes out a packet of cigarettes and looks at it for a moment. He breathes deeply, as though he had decided not to look more closely. He puts the bottle and the syringe back in a glasses case, then into his pocket, under his cigarette packet. Tears roll down his face. He strikes his head against the wall, three, four, five times; a little GHB convulsion. He is standing oddly, as though his disorientated body is unsure how to hold him up. His movements are jerky, the instinctive reflexes of muscles in motion. He opens the toilet door. He’s going back in. To take and be taken.

  In the living room, Armand has fallen asleep by his yellow book. Tobias comes in, looking distracted. He collapses on the sofa, then falls asleep, fully dressed, as though he’s wrecked.

  A few moments later, Otto comes out of his room; he sees his two transitory friends and covers them with a thick blanket.

  VII

  There are lights everywhere, words flashing, numbers jumping out at you with the promise of a new life.

  It’s one of those little casinos you get in Germany. A far cry from the Côte d’Azur; here there are lots of slot machines and the guy on the door doesn’t look at you. You play by pushing big buttons, like in English pubs or on ferries.

  A few guys dotted around the place are putting coins in the slots, pressing the illuminated buttons and staring at the screens on their bulky terminals.

  Franz is here to gamble the money he got for his blood, his last resources. He’s already bought a packet of tobacco so he has sixteen euros left. It’s too little to hope for a big win – enough, on the other hand, to increase: for the sixteen to become fifty, the fifty, one hundred and twenty.

  He picks his machine. The choice is never straightforward, maybe this one will give you a win, or maybe it’ll send you back on to the street, unable even to buy an underground ticket.

  Franz has gone with his initial hunch since the time a few months ago when he felt himself drawn, almost as soon as he entered the room, by the machine that went on to spit out the jackpot. Since then he’s vowed he’ll always trust his instinct.

  He sits down. The coins go into the slot as quickly as he earned them, as quickly as his blood filled the tubes. One by one, the tokens disappear, and are lost in the machine. Ten euros gone already. A huge amount when this is all the money you have in the world.

  The coins go in. Where do they disappear to? Maybe he should change machine. No, stick with this one. Yes, but what if he loses it all? No, stick with this one. His first instinct.

  Two more euros and he’s broke. Two euros! It’s come to this, wishing he had just on
e more coin, regretting buying a bit of tobacco.

  He’s playing more slowly now. There’s no rush to gamble your last coins. What will he do if he loses? Go home, to the empty apartment that he’s been lent. There’s nothing left to eat in the cupboards. His dole is due in a week. What will he do till then? At least he has some tobacco. He’ll go and borrow from a friend. He’ll make it through the week, but if only he could win, if only he could avoid the humiliation of going to ask his friends for money, again.

  It’s his second-last coin. To think that before he got caught, he hid bundles of notes in mattresses, in books. It’s inhuman, this downward spiral, Franz thinks.

  The coin slips into the slot. Franz holds his breath. He presses the plastic button. On the screen, the symbols flash by.

  Yes! He can’t believe it! He’s won!

  The joy of all those tumbling coins! And in a week, his dole!

  He’s got enough to make it. He’s happy. He leaves.

  VIII

  Armand has been for a walk in his new district. He’s even bought a bike. It’s 6 p.m. And he’s on his way back to the apartment. He’s happy, he’s beginning to take control of his life here.

  In the living room, Tobias is smoking a bubble pipe and tapping away on Otto’s computer.

  ‘Want some juice, Loulou?’

  Armand nods; he won’t refuse any experience; he’s in a state of discovery.