by Hari Kunzru
It is not quite a year since I arrived in Berlin, and once again I’m lying awake in my bed. This time Rei is awake beside me. Two rectangles of light. It’s not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn’t my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life. In Anton’s world, hospitality is the greatest sin and the essence of human relations is either subjection or domination. A couple of days ago, I saw a teenager walking on our block wearing a hoodie with a picture of a snarling wolf. We Only Love Family, it said. I suppose it was intended to be defiant, an expression of solidarity, us against the world, but to me that “only” just seemed sad, beaten down, a retreat from some wider and more expansive kind of love. Homme seul est viande à loups, as the medieval French proverb has it. Alone, we are food for the wolves. That’s how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone. Rei rolls over in bed to face me. If it gets bad, she asks, where will we go? Together we say the names of cities. Together we talk, holding each other, imagining escape routes. Sometime during the night, Nina crawls into the bed and joins us. Outside the wide world is howling and scratching at the window. Tomorrow morning we will have no choice but to let it in.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to
Michael “Pankow” Boehlke, Dagmar Hovestädt and the press office of the Federal Commissioner for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic, Daniel Kehlmann, Deborah Landau and my colleagues at the Lilian Vernon Creative Writers House, Cathy Mullins, Anne Rubesame, Taryn Simon, John Tasioulas and above all Katie Kitamura, my first and best. This book would not have been written without the support of the American Academy in Berlin, an institution that shares a location with the Deuter Center, but otherwise bears no resemblance to it whatsoever.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HARI KUNZRU is the author of five previous novels: White Tears, The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions and Gods Without Men. His work has been translated into twenty-one languages, and his short stories and journalism have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The New Yorker. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library and the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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