by Lauren Oyler
The ex-boyfriends think I need to delete my Twitter account and go to therapy. It has really helped them. One of them—my favorite, actually—would like to add that perhaps the attention I command on the platform has something to do with my Twitter profile photo, in which my hair completely covers my eyes and nose, representing me as a poutily sexy girl without a face. I point out that I don’t want to go to therapy in a foreign country and that nothing is stopping him from using a photo of a hot woman as his own avatar.
Not being much of a grocery-shopper even under ideal circumstances, I would eventually be driven outside by hunger, where I replaced the anxiety of the phone, which did not work where there was not Wi-Fi, with a tortured fixation on the question of what to eat. I walked around. Many people, when they experience a bad phase of life in a particular city, associate the bad phase with the city. I understood that this had little to do with Berlin and everything to do with me. Nevertheless, the setting was fitting. The light turned everything an eerie slate, no matter the time of day, like it had always just rained, or you had just cried. Once my sense of time and space returned to me, the atmosphere no longer produced a sense of pleasant absence but of being a small and insignificant part of an endless sorrow. Monuments commemorated dark events and challenged one’s sense of self. In New York if you walk down a street and no one’s on it you feel like you’re getting away with something; in Berlin you feel like you’re interrupting. I remembered the ponytailed daytime tour guide I’d had two years before, and the solemnity he’d assumed as he explained, sweat glistening at his temples, polo shirt square and unyielding to his form, that some people felt offended by the design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which allows visitors to walk through and in recent years take oblivious smiling photos for their online dating profiles. That had been in the summer, when the scene had been bright and forgiving. Now sadness seemed to drip from the buildings, despite the apparent contentment of the people I saw in the streets, walking their strollers and freakishly obedient dogs, usually off-leash.
I became hyperaware of situations that required small talk or brief exchanges. I tried to avoid them because they necessarily resulted in humiliation and anguish; though I had been an apologetic English-speaking tourist in several countries, including this one, I was now unable to rationalize the shame of not speaking the language as a worthy trade-off for the wonders of international travel. The German word for “excuse me” was cruelly syllabic. Most nights I went to English events where I didn’t know anyone, or to a collectively owned café a few blocks up from my apartment where they sold dry cakes and you could bring in peanut-sauced falafel sandwiches from the Sudanese place next door. There I overheard many conversations in English, though they seemed to pain the frowning staff; according to Frieda the cafés on Weserstrasse were quickly becoming more expensive and sleeker, like what I assumed cafés were like in Australia and Sweden, and the grungy politics of this one were under threat from developers. Before I left New York a colleague had sent me a ten-minute video rant conducted in accented English in which the speaker creakily denounces Neukölln’s gentrification, and one of the points he mentions, confusingly, is that the neighborhood’s “dirty dog shit” had, back when the video was posted, in 2010, been replaced by “nice baby buggies.” I did not necessarily find that to be true, nor believe that this point was selling his argument, but despite having neither dirty dog shit nor a nice baby buggy, I felt unease about being there. Later someone told me that the speaker in the video had opened one of the first “hipster bars” in the neighborhood and it had closed a couple of years before.
I had been to Neukölln with Felix, and I was familiar with Berlin’s happening energy, but now that I was living there its self-sufficiency seemed heightened, its communality idyllic but impenetrably baffling. You saw people running into each other and saying hi constantly. Nontourists lounged at cafés for all hours of the day, few with the intensely eyebrowed focus on their laptop screens that characterized the patrons at cramped New York equivalents. Many people seemed to have no schedule, or responsibility to anyone, even those who worked at bars or cafés or shops. This was, I guess, what Felix liked about living there: that you could come and go from life as you pleased, that you were not obligated to act a certain way or at all. He would say, approvingly, that it didn’t feel real. (I guess you could say that reality requires some amount of acting, and authenticity requires some acknowledgment of pervasive falseness, but I think those are obvious points made more than enough.) Wary of making assumptions about foreign cultures I’d always told Felix that I was sure Berlin felt “real” to Germans, and he would point out that the low cost of living and robust social safety net meant every burden was more of an option to them than to us in New York, and was not having options like that the definition of freedom? But the rents were rising, I said, somewhat helplessly, aware that I could not prove a fact that was as straightforward as this. You said so yourself. It was hard to find a room in Berlin and harder to find the money to pay for it, and when you lived there you felt your world shrinking, the possibilities squeezed. He would say yes, but it’s still not as hard. At this point our conversation would shift to other themes, the thing we were talking about being too nebulous to speak about cogently and extemporaneously; if we tried, we got into circuitous arguments in which it was as clear to both of us that we were talking past each other as it was difficult to say, “It seems like we’re talking past each other.” Anyway, it seemed I was now in the process of proving Felix right, that you could come and go as you pleased, though I tried to remind myself not to feel too bad about my privileged wandering; if the Germans wanted to abscond from reality they could move to various “new” Berlins perennially announced throughout Europe, Lisbon being a sunny option if the worsening political situations of Athens, Budapest, Belgrade, and Warsaw were not appealing. And there was also Mexico City and Southeast Asia. But all these places required a certain change of lifestyle, learning of language basics, and adjustment of perspective, particularly those where you couldn’t drink the tap water, that Berlin did not. If you wanted to have a cultural experience—read that as “cultural experience,” consisting of 70 percent sarcasm—in Berlin, the city would not force you; you’d have to seek it out.
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AFTER ABOUT TWO WEEKS I WOKE UP ONE MORNING AND DECIDED: I needed to meet people. I grabbed my phone, bypassed the usual apps, and searched instead for EVENTS and WHAT TO DO THIS WEEKEND. At first, I found only club nights and theater productions, but then I came upon a blog post from 2011 about a weekly dinner held at an English bookshop. This rang a bell: I remembered one of Felix’s Australian bar friends ranting about how this dinner was always full of dorks and the food sucked. At the time I had accepted this as the hard-won wisdom of experience but now that I thought about it, it was mean. I liked the idea of eating in a bookstore; though twee, it seemed like the kind of thing that would never happen in New York, both because too many people would want to come and because the bookstore would be fined for not having the appropriate licenses. Regardless, the bitchy carefree days of late 2015 had since given way to something much darker, and I thought the pure-heartedness of twee and the originality of dorks might be welcome.
The bookstore was on a side street in a bourgeois neighborhood, and when I arrived a group of people was outside smoking and talking about theater. A man was wearing fingerless gloves. Part of the building’s facade was covered in black and white tiles, and the window frame and door were the same cherry red as the bookshelves inside, which were chaotically assembled. The door was partially blocked by a couple of wire racks used to display paperbacks and by a cluster of metal chairs with mismatched cushions, all of which were occupied by men who seemed proprietorial, like they hung out there all the time. A man with a thick northern English accent and round watery eyes presided over a desk covered in papers and books. There was a metal cashbox and a computer that was the color of old newspaper and the shape of two cinderblock
s. He shouted as I opened the door, “There she is!” and a woman emerged from an open doorway in the back carrying a glass casserole dish with the same Ikea towels we had at my sublet; she didn’t acknowledge us as she carefully descended the steep stairs behind the desk. I stood dumbly in the door, which I had not closed all the way and was letting in cold air. The man behind the desk told me dinner was five your-ohs fifty, love, downstairs, and about to get started. One of the men in the chairs got up and shut the door behind me. If I liked anything to drink the beer was just there in the fridge, two your-ohs, and a bottle of wine was five. I include the prices, obviously, because they were remarkable.
Downstairs the crowd was evenly split between chummy regulars and tourists who’d heard about the bookstore from a recent article published on a travel blog. The room was large and asymmetrical, rimmed with bookshelves, and crowded with tables of varying sizes, including a long, intimidating one in the Last Supper style and a round one on a platform in the back. Food was arranged in the corner, steaming in slow cookers and casserole dishes with shabby oven mitts and dish towels still on the handles. Grocery-store cheeses were displayed on a wooden chopping block next to utensils, and although no one had yet made the first move a group of people seated at a small round table near the staircase was questioning the meat contents of everything on offer. I put my jacket at the circular table in the back, next to the science fiction section. The regulars seemed slightly predatory as they chatted with the tourists, several of whom were from Canada and so seemed pure and undeserving of the interrogation. I watched a man in a cabby hat pull out a pouch of tobacco and then take a small baggy of weed out of it before being admonished by the woman sitting next to him that they weren’t allowed to smoke down there anymore. She wore a long skirt and rugged boots with several buckles and many silver rings on her bony fingers; a few sections of her long curly hair had fallen out of the frizzy sculpture on her head; crossing her legs she flashed patterned tights featuring little cat heads. The man said something about the place having really changed and got up to fill his plate. Next to my table was a refrigerator filled with soda and Club-Mate, popular in Berlin for the way it, as Felix said, simultaneously sobered you up and made you feel more drunk. On the door a ripped, handwritten sign read, “Honor system!! Pay for yer drinks upstairs!!!”
As I was sitting awkwardly alone and wondering if I should approach the buffet the men came down the wooden staircase and, seeing that the only free seats were with me in the back, swarmed and sat down, effectively trapping me in the corner. I’d chosen my seat because it allowed me to observe the room, but combined with my unfamiliarity and apparent newness to Berlin it had turned me into a target. There were four of them, and they vacillated between issuing me a mocking level of intense attention, exaggerating their responses to every mundane thing I said, and talking among themselves about a book one of their friends had written about the GDR. They asked me my name and where I was from and how long I’d been in Berlin; when they heard my answers, a smiling knowingness washed over them, especially a bald one who I soon learned was from Scotland. That week Republicans in the House of Representatives had proposed a new healthcare bill to replace the tepidly more socialist version installed by Obama, and it represented a disingenuous faith in the free market—not socialist at all—and the men brought it up. After acknowledging in sad tones that, yes, the American healthcare system was reprehensibly terrible and, no, it didn’t make any sense that they believed the government shouldn’t provide healthcare services to its citizens, I became suddenly indignantly aware that these people were being rude. To be teased for being American seemed so 2004, not to mention that I might have had some chronic and financially crippling illness, that my family might be bankrupt from medical bills. Their glib attitude might have been triggering in me deep feelings of despair and thoughts of my impending death. The man from the desk smugly bobbed his head when he said something he thought was funny. “Why do you all—excuse me, y’all—why do y’all vote for these people?” he asked. He who had so recently called me “love.” “I had thought America was all right, with that Obama bloke,” he said, “but.” He had a soft, uneven voice that despite his antagonism was difficult to hear; he would emphasize certain syllables unexpectedly and then pause, as if his voice were tiptoeing across a hardwood floor in the night, interrupting its journey following an errant step on a creaking board to assess whether it had caused a stirring in the bedroom. To the question of why we all voted for these people my reply might have parroted the factors I’d seen cited by writers I thought were smart—the white working class’s feelings of alienation from society and unemployment, the failure of Hillary Clinton to campaign or connect, the fear of the other, few educational opportunities—though I also thought these talking points missed something that I wasn’t about to try and communicate for the first time then. Tidy structural explanations tended to make out the conservative voter as impulsive and stupid even as they sought to emphasize his/her explicable humanity. Would we all not be stupid if we were in these circumstances? they seemed to ask. That’s the thing about political people: they always have to have a narrative. Every effect must have a specific cause to be discovered so it can be manipulated. Even when they’re wrong—which they always are—the idea is that the cause is merely elusive, a code to be cracked, not so diffuse as to be nonexistent. I knew anything I said to the chuckling men at this point would be used to taunt me, that they would support each other’s claims in order to push me closer toward embarrassment, alternately patronizing me with exaggerated agreement and through more traditional teasing. But at the same time I hated them and wanted them to know. What would Ursula K. Le Guin do? I had to admit I’d never read her. The last time I’d read a science fiction book was probably in fifth grade, A Wrinkle in Time, but I didn’t know if that counted because I’d recently become aware of delicate distinctions between the “science fiction” and “fantasy” genres and I couldn’t remember the themes or motifs of A Wrinkle in Time at all. Making a reluctant nod of exception at the Scot I said the U.S. had probably done what we did for the same reasons you guys had voted for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. Head still bobbling, the man from the desk sat back in his chair and said he had been rid of those twats for twelve years. He stood up to get food and because he seemed to be the leader of the group the other men followed.
I took out my phone. There was no Wi-Fi in the bookstore, so I tapped around on it fruitlessly, scrolling through the stuff that had loaded on Twitter three hours ago, the last time I’d had the internet, and looking at my text messages as if a new one might be hiding there, some reminder of my life beyond jarring interactions with incompatible strangers. No one had texted. I got the occasional messages from my mom, Jane, and my favorite coworker, but besides them I hadn’t really been checked up on as much as I’d hoped. Though at first he’d been attentive in a daily and touching way, even Jeremy’s texts had evaporated over the last few weeks. Moving to a country where you don’t know anyone or speak the language sends a message of competence. I had wavered more on the question of getting bangs. Before I could allow myself to become depressed about both having made a mistake and having no one to console me about it, I decided I should find a more hospitable group to sit with, so I stood up and tried to maneuver out from the table, but hovering there between the fridge and the Scottish guy’s pulled-out chair with my jacket in one hand and my phone and purse in the other, looking, I imagined, pathetic and persnickety, disrupting the convivial atmosphere on behalf of some irrelevant offense or neuroticism, I saw there was nowhere else to sit. I considered leaving, but I thought it would give the men satisfaction to have scared me away. I know this is narcissism, that no one noticed me at all, and even if they did they wouldn’t care, yet this kind of self-centeredness can be fortifying, particularly when one is struggling to pin oneself down. Besides I’d already paid for the dinner and the prospect of doing what I’d done the three previous nights, eating Vietnamese fo
od alone, was so unappealing it seemed impossible. I put my things back down on my seat and got in line.
In front of me was a girl of luminous complexion who turned around and introduced herself as Nell from Los Angeles. About my age, very thin, and in Berlin for a three-month artist residency, she had arrived two weeks ago and was staying in an apartment a few blocks away that was, in addition to being on the sixth floor, “totally wild.” Before she arrived she hadn’t noticed the most important sentence in the email she received about the accommodation: There was no shower. Not even in the kitchen, as some of the really old Berlin apartments had. A tiny WC next to the front door was literal, containing only the toilet, but if you were taller than, say, five foot six, you had to hold the door shut and sort of spread your knees apart while you used it. She offered me all this without my having to ask, which I appreciated. Nell did not smell bad or have hair that was dirtier than any other hip young woman—as I’m sure you know by now, washing one’s hair too frequently strips it of vital natural oils, etc.—so I asked her how she was so clean. She told me she had had to get a gym membership so she could use the shower. Thankfully, everything here was so cheap, and anyway it forced her to go to the gym (almost) every day, so actually it was kind of good. Plus, the stairs worked out the butt, she said while doing a little shimmy. “Butts are in now!” she added, beaming as she spoke, as if on the verge of uproarious laughter. She managed to convey all this as well as a confident summary of her artistic concerns—refraction—before we reached the cheese, which she ignored in favor of lasagna-type dishes. Without saying goodbye or nice to meet me she bounced over to her table, where two elaborately dressed people were drinking wine and picking apart a shared slice of casserole with their hands. She seemed like one of those people for whom the world just made sense and would never cause insurmountable worry, though I couldn’t know; maybe she hid dark secrets, medical or familial-historical or romantic or criminal. Nevertheless, I suspected the comfort she and her friends felt eating a sloppy, multifaceted food with their hands reflected their comfort with the world as it was. She had never asked me about myself; I don’t remember telling her my name.
