by DBC Pierre
“But if it’s old Prenzlauer Berg you’re looking for,” says the comrade, “you’re a few years too late. You really had to be here in the nineties. Are you American? Your German is quite good.”
Ah, my secret Miguel. I suppose a foreign sphinx in a greatcoat is as unusual here as a sausage, it’s just another weekend raver with forty euros in his pocket and two new friends called Andreas.
“I’m English,” I say, “and I was here in the nineties.” I also wonder how soon into the decade Berliners started saying this, or if before that they said eighties.
“Really?” says the comrade. “But then as a baby.”
“My father started a club here in the nineties. I think on Brunnenstrasse.”
“Oh? The Kim Bar?”
“Nein.” Craggy slaps him on the cuff. He chews the inside of his cheek for a moment, rolls his eyes up, thinking—and finally shakes his head: “Kim Bar hat nach den Neunzigern geöffnet. Wenn du die Neunziger meinst, zumindest an diesem Ende der Brunnenstraße—dann muss das der Pego Klub gewesen sein.”
His Eastern brogue hits me jumbled, only assembling after a short delay.
Then I reel back in the chair.
The men recoil, thinking language has confounded me. After a moment the speaker waves an apology, and says in English:
“If you mean nineties, at this end of Brunnenstrasse—it had to be the Pego Club.”
13
The alternating Klaxon of a Notarzt van bounces off winds in the distance. It’s a sound in black and white, an ambulance from a newsreel, resounding through bygone streets.
For me its souring blasts describe a passage from dread into hope. I let the quiet unfold, the ambulance waft away, till the men lift their sagging faces into the night. Then I lean in, peeling strips from my beer label, rolling cones in my hand:
“And—what happened to the club?”
“Well.” Craggy turns to his friend: “Wasn’t it the tall one, from Leipzig—?”
“There used to be two, remember. One of them was Bernd—Bernd Specht.”
“Gerd Specht?” I prompt.
“Ja, that’s it,” says the comrade. “Gerd Specht.” Both stare up a little higher, blowing smoke into the lamplight.
“So—what happened?”
“The place closed,” says Craggy. “I think he went to Kreuzberg after that.”
“Ja, to Tempelhof.” His friend turns to me: “Did you ever see Tempelhof Airport? Biggest single building in the world. One of Hitler’s projects from the thirties.”
“Nein.” Craggy shakes his head. “The second biggest structure in the world after the Pentagon. Or the third. Top three, anyway.”
“Ja, well—you should see it. A masterpiece of architecture from the Third Reich. Fantastic monument, over a kilometer long. Three and a half million square meters in the middle of Berlin. Almost empty now. The airport occupies a small part of it, but I think that’s closing soon. The city wondered if to put apartments, or a hotel. But they could put twenty hotels and still have space.”
“And Specht moved there?” I nearly whimper. “With the club?”
“Ja, his business must be there, and who knows what else? Nobody really knows what’s inside. I think there’s a dance school there somewhere, and also a bowling alley put by the American forces. There may be parts not even touched since the war.”
“There’s even a fish farm, I think.” Craggy nods. “Sounds like a joke but it’s typical Berlin, we just don’t know what to do with these places. A good move by Specht, though, going there early. Can you imagine having such a building as your premises?”
As the men speak I feel the warmth leave my fingertips.
“The walls are like five meters thick,” says the comrade. “Solid stone and concrete. You could stand next to it and not hear a club.”
“Nein, three meters thick,” Craggy corrects. “The beauty billionaire, Lauder, from New York, wanted to buy it and make an avant-garde clinic, where jets fly to the door. But you see, typical Berlin government, they only saw the symbol of the super-rich using their monument. They didn’t see all the jobs it could make. And Berlin needs jobs, we still never recovered from reunification.”
“Now you talk like a capitalist,” tuts his friend. “Berlin doesn’t want to be a playground for the super-rich.”
“Well, look at Hitler’s big dreams,” says the comrade. “He wanted visitors’ mouths to fall open when they landed in Berlin, that was the idea. They get off the plane and their mouths fall open. From the air it has the shape of an eagle, and the airside even has a roof, so planes park underneath like in a giant garage.”
A serene smile grows on my face. The breeze no longer bodes ill, now it smacks of beginnings.
“Gosh.” I drift back to the moment: “And have you seen
Specht there?”
“Oh, ja.” The comrade nods. “Last year I met the Brussels flight, which is the last international service into Tempelhof. Specht was in front taking a delivery of drinks.”
I sit absorbing this till exploding vistas make the conversation sputter and fade. One vista in particular becomes a goal: a sphinxlike figure alone at the head of a banquet table, in the middle of a monumental salon—elegantly deceased.
Yes: the furniture of my death is here assembling. You might think such an uplift of hope works against the interests of suicide. No. I can tell you from here that it has the opposite effect—pressure to get on with it. All my ties are cut, I’m a wraith in waiting. Because, though it may have escaped you in these musings so far, with all my talk of this disconnection or that—the fact is that only one thing underlies a death.
And that is an absence of love.
An absence which I have in abundance.
After some last words between the men, we bid each other goodbye and disperse into the night. Turning back the way I came, I note that Grand Sneer is now Grand Seer, Swine World is Wine Mounts. When a taxi rounds the bend at Zionskirchplatz, I fight an urge to hail it to Tempelhof and sit watching the building till dawn. Because the possibility now exists that Specht has a venue unlike any in the world, unlike any in history. A kilometer-long monument where planes fly to the door.
I shiver imagining it.
In light of this breakthrough—because possibility lifting its skirt can still be called a breakthrough, even more so when it serves a desperate hope—I snort no lines and drink no drinks. I carefully walk to the phone, looking both ways for the tram.
But in Tokyo there’s a problem. Smuts doesn’t come on the line. The duty sergeant has a lot to say, but I don’t know what it is. When I repeat Smuts’s name he answers more insistently, and when I try to read out the Kastanienhof’s number he just gives the same answer louder.
In the end, with both of us grunting, he hangs up.
I don’t know what to think. Perhaps it’s already too late—though Smuts did say that weeks can pass before charges are laid in Japan, and I suppose charges are the next possible hammer blow. When I try the interpreter’s number it goes to voice mail, so that in the end, for peace of mind, I have to decide that Smuts simply used up his morning’s phone privilege. I should get some sleep, set off early to Tempelhof, and call from there with more concrete news. It’ll be the same day in Japan. And perhaps in the meantime the sergeant will report that I called.
Just look at my lively schemes. Watch the human mind weave perfect sense from chaos and failure, turning mysteries into contraptions where one thing leads fruitfully to another, till a problem has been tunneled clean through. Such is the fantasy of control. For one thing, it’s a lie from children’s literature, perpetuated by weary parents, that sleep must bring refreshment. Because it doesn’t. In my situation a child would better have a nice wine and a cigarette, and play cards with his parent, than sleep.
Obviously that
would be a hippie parent.
For me the short night passes like an itch, till I’m forced to crispen a nimbus with substances. While it’s still dark outside I sup a full poet’s breakfast of seven cigarettes, three lines, and half a bottle of Marius. As it’s such a big day I also shampoo my rusty mop, letting the shower jet pummel my spine. I blow-dry my head, and sprinkle myself with Jicky. Then I sprinkle myself again to widen the aura into a net, against the pitiless mesh of which the arch-profligate Specht will fall helpless.
While birds make good their callous agenda, I wrap a bottle of Symphony in a laundry bag and head for the mystical airport, struggling to expel an image of Smuts hanging from the ceiling by his belt. In the end I’m unsuccessful at this. Other notions unsettle me, swarms of them, and as the U-Bahn train nears Tempelhof, I’m forced off a stop early, afraid that the doors might open onto Specht’s office.*
I stumble back to the earth’s surface and find myself in Kreuzberg, at the foot of a long avenue. This seems a realistic part of town. A working part, still with its sights, its curiosities and bars, but also with older people, with more Turks and fewer babies. Its stately buildings are less recently refurbished than Prenzlauer Berg’s, its shops less inhabited by concepts and whims, given more to the everyday.
While I finish a cigarette at the intersection of two broad avenues, Yorckstrasse and Mehringdamm, the Enthusiasms toss me a choice. On one side of Yorck sits a Burger King; and on this side of Mehringdamm, a couple of doors up, is a secondhand clothes shop. Both have implications.
It’s the way of the Enthusiasms to work like this.
Burger King might ballast me for the crucial day ahead. But after a moment’s consideration I feel the charity shop must be the right choice, and as I move to the window the reason unfolds in this question: which of these clothes would Specht wear? What type of decadent is he? A garrulous Peter Pan? A brooding Dr. No? I enter the shop, which is the largest charity shop I’ve ever seen, and look across rack after rack of old fashions, including uniforms, fancy dress, leather and latex. Because whatever Specht’s nature, it must be true that any mogul would be unimpressed with an ex-weasel in a military greatcoat. It’s a serious matter, and an interesting thing happens that leaves me frozen under the spell of a revelation: in wondering what to wear, I realize I’m asking who I am. Who is this sphinx in his limbo? How does a phantom dress for his business? Because in the midst of all this laundry my clothes are suddenly wrong. They belong on a person I no longer am. In a time and place I no longer haunt.
Like waves, revelations break in sets, and the next one knocks my thoughts back to center: while I can reflect on who I might be, and take the risks I must in being him, I should focus most on appealing to Specht. If he’s a contemporary of my father, for instance, and was friends enough to open a club with him, he must also have been a beardie with bad taste. But then: decadence comes from overabundance. And a club on the scale of the largest building in the world, or even the second or third largest, speaks of flamboyance and self-love, of acumen and admiration of risk.
All my powers of judgment are tested. I stand scowling between racks till my only resort is a simple process of elimination:
First and easiest to disqualify—clubbing clothes. Because just as a good drug dealer won’t be a user, a club owner won’t be a clubber, and may even despise his clients. I consider evoking Specht’s East German roots, which means bland and ill-fitting clothes. Completely wrong, because his ascent to magnate suggests he won’t recall his roots very fondly. Everyday business wear—no, because that’s what his suppliers will wear. Black mogul-wear—possible, though such a man will have either an ego or a compensating mechanism for low self-esteem, in either of which cases he might despise his look-alike. Gangster wear holds some promise, though I must remember I’m a returning child already known to him, so any attempt at menace is crippled from the start.
I’m exhausted by it.
The morning marches on till I’ve eliminated all options but one—a wild card which I can’t even find arguments for, let alone against.
I finally leave the shop as Die Sphinx.
Die Sphinx wears a Bavarian Miesbacher coat—short, gray, with staghorn buttons—over a shirt embroidered with edelweiss flowers and alps. A whoosh for Specht. A risqué counterpoint to his laser-light world, a Volks-comment, a gesture, an irony, sailing close to the breeze without invading the absurd, the border of which, in this instance, I judge to be lederhosen.
I manage to avoid the traditional Miesbacher hat with its feather ornament until the shopkeeper explains that in Bavaria the hat is the sign of a free man. As a truly free man I must buy the hat, though it stays in the laundry bag with my old clothes—because mine is an occult freedom.
Ah, the protocols of limbo. These locomotions propel me light-headed and sweating to a bar up Mehringdamm, where a beer rebuilds strength. Strangely a line isn’t called for. After this my walk to Tempelhof is up an incline, not steep but long, which becomes a kind of ascent to Castle Dracula. It seems impossible that an airport will be here in the middle of town, much less one of the world’s greatest structures; but as the avenue steepens, a curious limbo develops in the space of a block, where clouds swirl lower and grayer, buildings cower back from the road, and businesses catering to any sort of comfort melt away, forming a cappuccinoless no-man’s-land between Kreuzberg and Tempelhof where no charming persons gather, nor baby carriages, nor birds.
I half expect circling bats.
A block farther up there’s still no sign of a monument, and I feel mounting pressure to call Smuts. The morning has come and gone. Avoidance is seeping into the calling routine, despite my best intentions. It’s because the calls have fallen victim to reality-creep. The brainatelle has fallen victim to it, and the delicacy of Smuts’s situation means I’m not using the force I should in harmonizing it with grim fact. For instance, I’d be overjoyed to call with news about any kind of club at all; whereas Smuts would feel I’m already late with a contract. Our different backgrounds partly account for this—he’s a man of international networks which he swings across like a monkey, networks of alleys behind kitchens where the bidding of genius is done. He assumes I’ll spark opportunities as he does, pluck him from one alley to another across the world.
Whereas I never had networks, or bidding. Or genius.
Well: I once had an alley.
We’ve also become separated on a graph—look at it: he’s forced to live high above chaos in a stratosphere of hopes and dreams, while I’m here on the floor, grinding away at small, hard-won victories. Between us we form a chart of all existence. Every day of limbo is suddenly a working model of life.
Pausing to straighten my staghorns, I realize we’ve even come to illustrate the Master Limbo’s engine: see how its milking action uses daydreams to lure our grasping up from horror. And now I must follow its example. I must milk the wanton Specht. Instead of harmonizing Smuts with the facts, I must lift reality to meet his needs. One explosive performance is all it might take to equalize fact with the brainatelle.
Pulling myself together, I sweep up the last few meters of the incline and finally reach the crest, where I stop dead.
My breathing slows, and deepens.
The hulk of the old airport slams into view across a small memorial garden. It doesn’t fully unfurl its scale, but rather teases above trees. No vast grounds attend it, no acreage of parking; it stands beside the sidewalk like a sudden mountain range. With growing wonder I walk a block in each direction, struggling to gain a sense of its mass. Hitler’s monolith hugs an airfield within semicircular wings which are a rhythmic arc of towering sandstone slabs and cascading glass ribbons that stretches out of sight in both directions, ending who knows where, probably Poland. Clean, resolved, symmetrical; a deco behemoth, a beautiful, untouchable thing, surely impossible to erase from the landscape. And jutting from the bottom of h
er arc toward me, at the junction of Tempelhofer Damm and Columbiadamm, stand two quadrangles of sandy buildings, as big as hospitals each, that make up her raptor’s talons; tiny within the scheme of the whole, but forming between them a parking lot and entrance square where the legend “Zentral Flughafen” perches above main doors.
Last night’s locals were wrong; she could fit a thousand clubs.
From here I see no movement around the buildings, as if their gravitational force repelled anything smaller than a church. Then, setting out across the small parking lot, I eventually spy two men loitering by the entrance. Their clothes recall old freighters and tugboats, and billow tersely, no doubt from gravity. They watch along with stone eagles that scowl off the walls as I mount a few steps and pass inside. The glass doors rattle to equalize pressure behind me. Then stillness. A narrow stone lobby stretches left and right of me, empty of souls. Two Terrorist Wanted flyers are taped to a wall. And ahead a chamber unfolds to the size of a cathedral, a titanic expanse set down some more steps, with sailplanes hung from its ceiling. Down the left of it sit empty glass locales, and along the right a neat row of check-in desks, seeming like miniatures from here, and all empty but one, where a girl slumps onto an elbow. If it weren’t for glass plunging between elegant ribs, and light flooding through recesses high above, the concourse would make a tomb for someone Cleopatra would have served on her knees.
After a moment there comes a soft click-click-click: an old woman appears up the steps with a little dog on a leash, as if on her Sunday promenade. The dog wears a red coat, and trots clicking along beside her.
“Tag,” she says in passing.
I nod. “Guten Tag.”
At the distant end of the concourse a globular gentleman is sweeping, and when he sneezes—kaff, kaff—the sounds flap lazily through the air toward me. I stand frozen by the place; and this is but one room in a structure that curves for more than a kilometer left and right of me. A terrace of cathedrals in a single construction so empty and still that you can hear a terrier’s claws on the floor.
