Break.up

by Joanna Walsh

  I go into the small spare bedroom with red walls, only slightly bigger than its sagging single bed, and sleep. All night the room rattles. The mattress, a network of springs. Outside my window a metal shutter beyond the glass excludes all light. Builders wake me at 6am. I sleep and sleep. I do not see Berlin.

  I dream that there is a party at my house. My parents are there (I never give parties, though they do). They have invited their friends and parts of my house have expanded to fit them. It is three, four in the morning and some children (who invited them to the party?) are still awake. In my dream I am still married. My husband is in bed upstairs. Things are getting out of hand. I am supposed to put the children to bed to placate my husband, who thinks they should not be awake, but my parents’ friends keep arriving. I answer the door and it is you. You are on crutches, dressed for winter in your coat and hat. You look terrible. We kiss. You didn’t know I was still married. I have to find you somewhere to sleep without disturbing the children, my husband, my parents. I put blankets over you on the sofa and lie down with you. There are various incidents, but by now it is nearly morning. Your parents arrive with your fiancée, whom you had not mentioned, and whom I find both ugly, and utterly unlike me, though I am determined to like her. She has on a red coat with square shoulders and gold buttons, a military coat. Her hair is short, blonde, businesslike. I am shocked you want to marry someone like that. But it explains everything. You leave with your family. I know it’s over, but I have the satisfaction of knowing that neither you nor my family have discovered each other’s presence.

  Is this the end of mourning? I have conjured the dead in dreams before, called them up to puppet goodbyes, forgiveness, to touch, to hear a voice again. Or perhaps I allowed their visits.

  16 May

  How long does it take to know a city? I don’t know, don’t care any more, don’t walk in Berlin, only down the main street in Kreuzberg, to the park, along the canal, and back, and round that grid bounded at all sides by main roads. I walk with a friend who points out copper circles in the pavement: the names of Jews deported from each block. I no longer notice, no longer want, no longer need to know such things. I have no more capacity for new things. I am exhausted.

  Well that’s what I travelled for, to fill myself up with new things until I was entirely empty, to travel so fast I disappeared, to see what was left. That’s why I took so long a route. And, finally, here I am.

  By the side of the canal the year rewinds. It was like this when I left England: the rain, the cold only just giving way to spring. On the banks of the canal, blossom begins again, easy as reversing a film. The last month may not have existed, or I might have fast forwarded through the next eleven months, compacted, telescoped. What do I have to show for it? My pockets are full of crumbs and pieces of paper: receipts, addresses, door codes: notes for oblivion. My phone is clogged with the names of WiFi networks from bars, hostels, cafés, libraries, stations. In my purse, still a couple of coins from that time I met you in another country. I throw them into the canal. They were never yours anyway: they were mine. In fairy tales things thrown into rivers come back as something else entirely. But that’s in running water. What about still?

  I have friends here in Berlin: J, who pointed out the copper disks, on our way to get Turkish pancakes, T, who runs a café, V who tells me she will read my tarot. I meet her in a café in the basement of the university where she works. It is empty. She spills her cards onto the formica table, asks for my birthday, asks if I know yours. I tell her.

  I used to consult my cards, interrogating them far beyond the rules of the game.

  Breton, Mad Love

  I choose six cards, blind, from the pack. She makes an H formation: three for you, and three for me, linked by one central card. She turns them over. On your side: Art, Power, The Prince of Cups (‘A muse, or an artist.’ ‘You, or me?’ I ask. V says, ‘I don’t know.’). On my side: the Three of Wands (virtue), The Ace of Swords (reason), The Ace of Disks (‘a beginning,’ V says, ‘from the physical, the material’).

  In the middle, linking us, The Lovers.

  ‘About love then?’ ‘Yes,’ says V, ‘but also other things: fantasy, projection, a union of opposites.’

  I am strictly rational: I believe in signs, symbols, magical portents.

  But why do you get all the good cards?

  I walk back through Prenzlauer Berg. Prenzlauer Berg was in East Berlin, right by the wall, the other side from Kreuzberg. It’s one of those places you can still see the Cold War bullet marks pocked on the stones like pollution. To the north is a park called the Mauer-park, which means just, Wall Park, where the wall was. It is not a smart park. In it is some kind of stadium, I don’t know what for. Here it is still winter. The grass shows bare in patches and the ground is uneven. Paths wind, although there are no bushes for them to wind around. Some of the paths look unofficial, beaten by feet, though they are not short cuts and are as twisty as the official paths. There is some statuary, all graffitied: a smaller-than-life polar bear, vulnerable because white, is covered with words, its eyes drawn over with blank bronze squares. I am frightened of the people in the park because something about the park is frightening, despite the fact they are often families with young children, despite the fact one woman casually exhibits an expensive camera. It is cold, not snowing, though it could, for all that it’s May. The sky is blank. The people here are trying to have fun.

  At the very end of the park are outdoor cafés serving glühwein and food, but it’s too cold, and I’m looking for somewhere inside. Then, on the steps beyond the park, where it meets a market, the usual people with towels spread out: old men and women with hopelessly curated small broken objects, a white rasta with a box of creased paperbacks, an art student selling earrings made from the legs of tiny plastic dolls, around fifteen people with a large green banner and petitions: SAVE THE ENGLISH THEATRE IN BERLIN…

  I daydream in May, in a café called November. Why name a café after such a month? Lovely lovely Berlin spring: a long low dusk that starts at four.

  I want you to walk in now unexpected, like in a movie or a stage play at the English Theatre. No, like in a romcom. You said I wanted to live in one, and, yes, no one else I know is capable of fulfilling so unlikely, so ridiculous a role as its hero. But have you been to Berlin? ‘No.’ Why wouldn’t you? ‘It might have been interesting in the ’nineties. It’s not the same now.’ But how would you know?

  Go to Berlin, since you were there once before, and you could in this way learn whether repetition was possible and what it meant. I had come to a standstill in my attempts to resolve this problem at home.

  Kierkegaard, Repetition

  How long does it take me to know a city? In any city there are streets I will never go down. That’s normal. I am tired of this. I don’t want to know cities any more. I am carrying something that drags. It is a not thing. It is you-not-being-there, and its heaviness has only begun to weigh on me again since you got back in touch. I will never see this city with you, cannot even trace your footsteps as you have never come here. There has never been a time we could have walked it together. I am impatient with Berlin. Whatever direction I walk, I will not find you, no, not even your memory.

  I remember you showed me your city once. You took me to look at plinths with famous men on horses. If they had only two hooves on the ground, you said, they had died in battle, if one hoof was raised, then they had died of wounds after. I said this was an urban myth, that there was no system. You seemed insulted, assured me there was. You gave me the facts, or things that sounded like facts – information, at any rate. I was surprised you thought they mattered. These were things I did not need to know. You asked if there was more you could tell me, more you could show, but I’d never wanted to see any of it. I’d come to see you and, when I was with you, I was not anywhere else, including there.

  Two people walking near each other constitute a single influencing body primed.

  Breton, ibid
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br />   You hurried me round historic streets, my arm in yours, but we went into malls, not museums, into chain cafés, not cathedrals. We stopped to sit on benches in new shopping precincts. You would take me to other places, you said: the art galleries where you’d seen good shows, the concert halls where they knew you, and would give you tickets for free, but somehow we never went. We walked close, touching, side to side. We leant into windows together, our faces almost meeting. Are we nearly there yet? Your talk about women redoubled. Any girl was beautiful: the waitress, the policewoman, the woman across the street. You were eager to show them to me: a girl you had seen working at a newspaper kiosk earlier that week. You insisted we make a detour: would she be there again? When we found the shop, she wasn’t, so we sat on the steps beside it, where I reached across and curled a strand of you hair round my finger. We sat there in silence for probably a minute after. It seemed like longer of course, but I can estimate these things quite ruthlessly.

  I always came to see you, never the other way round. You dismissed my city as nowhere anyone would want to see, but when I arrived in yours, you told me, ‘Don’t hold my hand, someone might see us.’ See what? ‘See that I’m with someone.’ I don’t think you expected that, the possibility of being seen.

  What a dickhead, feeding you that load of bollocks. How could you? Yes how could I, even as I knew you were, and at the same time also weren’t, because you were so much else besides. Well, we’re all human; we have only each other and, aggression having been a marker of men’s attention to me, sometimes it happens like that. I’m too tired to give a fuck. In the café, in Berlin, I am running out of power.

  I go back to the apartment and power down for real.

  So we finally went to bed (in my dreams) and in this dream I own a sweet shop. The counters are old-fashioned, worn oak with barley sugar supports between the niches. I look for sweets but there are none, in the corners of the recesses only dust.

  Behind the sweetshop is a bedroom, a damp lean-to with fibreboard walls, a worn pink chenille bedspread, a double bed, things strewn on nightstands, again wood, also dusty and ringed with the ghosts of glasses: a syringe I forgot, a used condom I forgot. Dust motes in the sunlight through the ugly long low modern window, the kind of window I know well enough to look for the damp, the moss at its corners. We go to bed. You look nothing like you. Someone from the shop keeps interrupting. You come too soon. And then you go.

  After I giggle and blush with the shop girls. They know what happened. They are happy for me. They are proud.

  Should I take this as a sign? Dreams are predictive, and those that do not come true within a short space, said Artemidorus, the second-century Greek who wrote the earliest extant book on the interpretation of dreams, may be considered allegorical, symbolic. Only the very virtuous dream the long-term future, and I already know I am not one of them. But I am not one to worry about the state of my soul. Sex dreams, Artemidorus said, are always about something else, though Freud said that dreams about almost anything else are usually about sex. Like a mirror, a dream is all opposite, yes, like a reflection, not a photograph. My dreams show you the wrong way round until I’ve become so used to seeing you like that, that when I see you in London, I may no longer recognise you any other way.

  The gods spoke directly to souls that are pure.

  Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol. 3

  I don’t know what I do all day. Maybe nothing. It’s evening already. German prepositions of time and space confuse me. As well as nach, which means both ‘up to’ and ‘after’, there is nur (‘only just’ but also ‘excluding’), and jetzt (‘not yet’ but also ‘already’ and ‘from now on’).

  A city is the way you cross it, but I’m too tired to engage. On the U-bahn, the seats are upholstered in pretty, kitsch red, white and blue. The cushions are shiny but the backrests are grey. Are they dirty? Are they more worn or less polished than the seats? I can’t be bothered to decipher. I am going to meet T at the café she runs in a cool street where cold Berlin saplings are just beginning to leaf. T says Berlin becomes Berlin at different times of day. As in London, she says, the city runs on different timezones. She used to go out with the other black girls in London to the hairdressers at midnight, exit at 2am, get to the clubs when the white kids were leaving. East Berlin used to be cool, she says, but now this area of Berlin is cool because it’s multicultural. Now the non-Germans in the city, ‘by which I mean the English, the Americans,’ she says, prefer to live nowhere else.

  After dinner with T, I walk back to the U-bahn, and, at this time of day, the street is so very Berlin, so very different from the afternoon city, which was so very Berlin too. Some of these people making this type of Berlin on the street right now surely couldn’t be the same people who appear here at other times of day or, if they are, they look different. Some people only exist at certain moments. Like me. I’m on two time tracks, living in the future at the same time as the past. I hardly exist at all.

  You said, You’re such a tourist.

  You said, The English abroad…

  You said, I didn’t think you’d be like them.

  I have no answer for that, none worth telling.

  Been here before, you said.

  I said, I am not anyone you have known before.

  Time spent with you was so hard and so bright that I asked myself afterwards why I didn’t do anything – anything! – to prolong it. But how do you extend a moment, and how can I compress the time here so I can cross it quicker to arrive at our meeting point? I am trying to get to the end of this time. If I sleep, my mind will take up the time for me. If I dream, I won’t stop being impatient, but I will feel it at one remove.

  It takes such a long time to cross the Berlin night back to where I’m staying, so I can sleep away this city, which is only one of the terrible places people have made for themselves to live in, as cold and strange as the twenty-four-hour neon signs on the street outside, promising all night on auto.

  I wake up to the rattling metal blind. I open it. Behind, it is not morning. I sit up, check my email (a reflex), write to you, Happy birthday. (It is your birthday?) V’s tarot made me replay the date. (If I write to you about everyday things, retexture the gap with invisible mending, something might be strengthened.) When we talked in the past, I’d wake up before you messaged me. Knowing you were online in another time zone, I’d become insomniac mirroring you. I wake again, several hours later. You’ve written back. I’m wrong. You tell me your birthday’s date. I could have sworn… Superstitious, I’m disappointed with myself. I have invalidated V’s reading? Worse, will I have altered our outcome by finding out I was wrong?

  What are you doing at the other end? I don’t even know whether you’re in day or night. What do you do when you get insomnia?

  17 May

  V rereads my tarot on a cramped table in a coffee shop. That last reading was wrong then? ‘No,’ says V, ‘no reading is wrong.’ But she will not reread the same formation. Instead she will read my immediate future, the next week. I pick seven cards, which she deals in an inverted V: Art, The Lovers (again!), The Star, The Hierophant, The Prince of Daggers, The Devil, The Tower.

  The situation: The Lovers. Art, a collaboration, a joint project.

  The Hierophant – the obstacle – an advisor, a received idea or direction, way of going.

  The present: The Prince of Daggers, practically planting seeds for the future.

  The Devil – the card in the position of the future – ‘Secrecy,’ says, V, ‘concealment, consequent social opprobrium’.

  The Tower (the centre card, a hinge): chaos, destruction, an end and a beginning.

  Outcome: The Star, moving between heaven and earth, dream and waking.

  This time the trumps are all mine.

  I go back to my room, put on perfume, lipstick. I want to look like a woman, to find a situation a woman might find herself in. I want to go out and drink and flirt – I don’t care who with. I want to fool around.
I think of you but not for long or seriously. Though the thought keeps coming back, the game’s not worth the candle.

  I meet a friend, an artist. He’s big, a continent. Canadian, but he’s been in Berlin since the ’nineties and before, starting in squats that are now chic apartment buildings. He’s 100 per cent Berliner, 100 per cent authentic. He asks, and I tell him my story because it is now so easy to tell, so easy it sounds like someone else’s. He laughs, and I’m not sure I like it. He opens wine. I balance on the kitchen sink to photograph the Berlin night through a tiny high window. We go to a supermarket and he buys two fish. He invites me to cook them and I wonder if he has noticed the perfume, the lipstick, but that he requires a further performance, some kind of test of femininity, or just that he is old, old-fashioned, that I owe him as he paid for the wine, the flesh. I cook the fish on the gas ring in his studio, and I cook them badly. They are both burnt and undercooked. I have not cooked for so long. He does not like the fish and, though he says they are OK, he can’t say it with conviction. When we are about half-way through eating them he lunges with no warning to kiss me on the lips and, seeing him come at me so slowly and also without conviction, I have time to move to one side though he keeps on coming in the same direction until he has passed right by me like in a cartoon.