Oval

by Elvia Wilk

  “While I was tripping over the weekend I had the stupidest idea,” said Anja. She hadn’t been planning to say anything, but it seemed so silly now, what was the harm? “I was convinced I had the solution.”

  “To what?”

  “To you guys leaving.”

  Laura wrapped her arms around her long, tan legs. She hadn’t shaved any part of her body in a long time and the black hairs were healthy, thriving. Actually, Laura as a whole looked healthy, alive and well. Anja felt the warmth of her friend’s body through the blanket and gazed at her with love. Love, and comparison. She wondered if she would ever simply admire another woman’s body, or whether she’d always be compelled to compare herself, centimeter by centimeter.

  “I had this idea,” Anja said, laughing hoarsely, “that I would try to buy your building off Finster. I even called their real estate subsidiary while I was high, apparently. Thank god I didn’t get through to anyone.”

  “Damn,” said Laura after a pause. “But would you—I mean, is there any way that’s possible?”

  “Of course not. It makes no sense. Finster wants to monopolize this whole block. Why would they sell off the final piece to some random person?”

  “I guess. Could you afford it, though? How much does a whole building cost?”

  “No idea. Howard laughed in my face when I asked,” Anja lied. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t asked him, she told herself. It was impossible.

  Laura leaned her head back against the wall and then lifted it, knocked it back again, lifted it, knocked it back. Gently banging the back of her head against the paper-thin interior wall, plastered with Raufasertapete, the disgusting wood-chip wallpaper that had been plastered over so many interiors at some point before the end of the Wall, supposedly for insulation. The same era when they’d chopped up all the Altbau buildings, like this one, converting them from grand homes into single-family apartments—creating long, narrow hallways, tunnel-like kitchens, and closet-like bathrooms. The room they were in now might have once been a third of a large drawing room, with a maid’s quarters on the floor above. Now it was a strangely shaped extra-large kitchen-living area. After living in Berlin long enough, everyone got accustomed, even attached, to the hacked configurations. It was liberating when things weren’t the way they were designed to be; it made you feel you could do whatever you wanted with them. For a time. Now it seemed claustrophobic.

  “It’s a lost cause,” said Anja, picturing the glassy loft that would become of this space.

  “How rich are you, really?” asked Laura suddenly. “Could you afford a building?”

  Anja crossed her arms. “I don’t know.” She didn’t know how much buildings cost, but she did know she had as much in her investment account as Eva, and Eva had skated by without working a day in thirty-five years. “Probably,” she admitted. Her heart was beating uncomfortably fast. This was the first time she and Laura had ever had an explicit conversation about money. The risk of sounding like a poor little rich girl had always been too high.

  Laura cocked her head and asked, “What would it take for you to spend some of it? Don’t you ever want to buy something big?”

  Anja didn’t know what to say. Once or twice she and Louis had fantasized about using the money to build their own little village somewhere, a thousand times better than the Berg, where all their friends could come live. A real commune, a real community. They could take over one of those crumbling brick sanatoria on the Polish border, or hire an architect and start from scratch on a mountain in Switzerland. But they both knew she’d never take the leap. The first time she’d ever found herself truly tempted—compelled, unafraid—to go all in was when she’d been spiraling on O.

  “I could never decide what the most important cause would be.”

  Laura shrugged. “Causes are Louis’s thing. Look how that’s turning out.”

  “But I can’t justify spending it on myself either.”

  Laura examined her fingernails, then looked at Anja. She put an arm around one of Anja’s knees, which was bent up toward her chest. “You’ll figure it out,” she said. “When the time is right.”

  Anja nodded, grateful but unsure whether this was true. She knew she’d moved to Berlin partially so she’d never have to stare down this question, but here it was. The city would soon be too expensive for her to squirrel away her savings forever. Maybe it was time for her to jump ship too. Unlike Eva, who’d replicated their parents’ schedule of constant displacement, Anja had dedicated herself to pinning down a steady, stable homestead to counteract all those years of being ripped out at the root. Most international school kids ended up flighty like their parents, but not her. Maybe Berlin had been the wrong choice, but she’d chosen it. It was hers.

  19

  OLD/NEW LOUIS DIDN’T ANSWER HER MESSAGE. SHE HAD MADE a pact with herself not to send him anything and then promptly broken it. The message she ended up sending, she hoped, sounded casual. It said that she was sorry and hoped they could talk soon.

  The real messages, the ones she knew she shouldn’t send, she composed in her sleep. She woke up unsure if she’d sent them. She often dreamed that he had written back. But nothing came from him. Twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours, forty-two . . . He hasn’t seen it, she told herself—it doesn’t have the double check marks saying he’s opened it. But his phone had alerts, just like hers, where the preview of the message showed up whether you opened it or not. But maybe his phone was off. But maybe his phone was on . . .

  Her phone offered no other clues. Sara’s feed had gone dark, and Louis hadn’t popped up on anyone else’s. He didn’t have his own profile: either a brave or elitist choice, depending on how you looked at it. She refreshed Sara’s profile once again.

  You were supposed to go for a walk when you felt stagnated. She wrapped Dam’s kimono around herself and left the house, thinking she would head toward the canal and get an ice cream. That was how Sundays used to be, in the early Berlin days, when time stretched before her like a boundless airfield. Ice cream, drugs, new people, improvisation—and then all those things anew, with Louis. Last Sunday at this time she’d been with Louis in the corner of his studio, neurons misfiring. How could she have done what she’d done?

  Her phone dinged from her pocket and her stomach flipped, but it was just Dam, back from Barcelona. FFRYING 1 EGG ON ME FORHED RN BRRLIN IS N INFERNO SCAPE WILE U CAN. A mass text, not even geared toward her. She searched for a podcast on her phone that would override her thoughts.

  Dam was right: the sun was harsh. Her armpits moistened and she felt sweat bead up into a mustache of droplets on her upper lip. She pictured the skin cells on the ridges of her cheeks quickly turning precancerous, like an animation from a sunscreen commercial. Sunblock—another thing you were supposed to do. The dirt path by the canal was almost deserted, only a few couples sweating on the strip of grass between the path and the water. The smell of weed drifted from an unknown source. A line of filthy swans trailed through the water near the steep edge of the canal, beady eyes trained on the surface in search of sandwich morsels. One dived down and came up with an empty bag of paprika chips.

  The voice in her ears explained how the ozone hole had briefly appeared to be shrinking—but after a second check the meteorologists had apologized: nope, still thinning up there. She glanced up toward the sky. Spreading, spreading, like a cervix dilating.

  Someone sidled alarmingly close to her on the path. She pocketed her phone, which she had somehow unconsciously pulled out to check yet again, and veered slightly away from him, monitoring him in her peripheral vision. It was threatening to be approached when both of you were ambulatory, active and directional, two vectors in motion. One party had to be stationary for a nonthreatening transaction: either you’re sitting on a bench or at a table and someone comes up to you, or you pass someone kneeling on the street and drop some change into their cup. Not both of you moving in toward each other with the possibility of confrontation.

  He was clut
ching something in his fist. She stepped down onto the grass to avoid him. He revolved on his heel to follow her along the path. She was now approaching another pair of people sitting on the ledge of the canal bank, hunched over what looked like little cartons of takeout sushi. One was stirring wasabi into soy sauce, the other arranging ginger atop a California roll. The man who’d been following her was hiking down the short slope toward them now, chopsticks held high in anticipation. She shook her head at her own assumptions, paranoia.

  The city was changing its clothes, or at least wearing a new scarf. Good to be walking along, seeing it happen. The canal was the right place to test the city’s social temperature: ground zero for public life.

  The summer she met Dam and Laura had been full of canal days. They played bocce for entire weekends at the canalside court between teams of old men who never seemed to finish a game, so busy were they haggling over points. The three of them walked up and down the long stretch by the water, always finding a new perch to dangle their legs over or someone they knew to stand around and chat with. Groups of friends gathered around them and dissipated, but the three of them stuck it out, forming a solid core. Laura always had a bag with a blanket, water, cigarettes. Afternoons, Dam went to pick up pizza, smearing it with chili oil before bringing it back with a slice already missing. Laura liked tuna on her pizza, which was awful, but Anja gave in, willing to let her tastes soften to make these people hers.

  Interning four days a week then, Anja was the only person who seemed to have a place to be during the week. The feeling of letdown at the end of a long weekend was new and surprising to her: she wanted these beer-soaked, sun-slurred days to last without end. She wanted to smoke on the grass and let her hair bleach, let the conversation spill over from afternoon to night, then bleach her brain at a club until the next morning and do it all again. She wanted it more than she wanted to be in the lab, for the first time since she’d stepped into one. That had been the last true summer of persistent heat before the weather went haywire and scattered the year into discrete days instead of seasons.

  “Hey!” Someone called to her from the other side of the water. She squinted. It was a couple she knew from around, friends of Prinz, maybe. The two guys had been together so long that they looked like each other—or maybe they had always looked like each other, and that was the reason they got together in the first place. The one on the left waved and called her name. She skidded down the slope toward the bank.

  “What’s up?” she called. They were surrounded by cartons of beer.

  “We’re emptying some bottles!”

  “Why?”

  “Gonna give them away!” He appeared to gesture toward the sushi eaters. His partner handed him a bottle, which he cracked open with a lighter and tipped slowly into the murky water. The canal was probably 60 percent beer anyway, she thought. Behind them, the black cat that they brought everywhere was straining at its tether, tied to a tree.

  “You’re emptying them . . . to give them to those guys?” She jerked her thumb to the right.

  “We were collecting empties for a few hours, but it got a little intense. It’s nasty in the trash bins.”

  “Then we realized we could just buy a few six-packs and give the bottles away.”

  The first one was struggling to pry the top off another bottle with his lighter. Anja wasn’t sure what to say. “They wouldn’t rather have the cash?” she tried.

  “Charity is demeaning,” said one, lifting the cat and stroking it between the ears.

  “Teach a man to fish!” shouted the one opening bottles.

  The other nodded. “You have to nurture the ecosystem of the city so it stays alive.”

  Remora fish clean sharks. Oxpecker birds eat the flies off cows. He was, it seemed, referring to bottle collecting as part of a kind of urban symbiotic system. She started backing up the bank toward the path.

  “You could just give them the full bottles,” she said, less loudly.

  “We’re not about to give them a case of beer,” the one with the cat said, laughing.

  Back on the path, she bumped into a tall girl teetering on clunky platforms, chatting into her phone with one hand and clutching the end of a leash with the other. The leash was attached to the collar of a Weimaraner who was finishing taking a huge, unself-conscious shit in the dust. He stood up, pawed a bit in the dirt to signal his satisfaction, and the two of them walked on, leaving the pile of crap in the middle of the path.

  Anja watched them amble on, wondering why you’d want to have a dog in the city. She’d always vetoed the idea, but Louis loved dogs so much, all of them. He had a kind of radar that brought anything under knee height immediately into his awareness. He would grab her arm on the subway and she’d know to look down. Dogs: the great leveler. The lowest common denominator of human compassion. The perversity of pampering your dog while the planet is dying. Sloths are nearly extinct, and here we are breeding bulldogs whose rib cages are too small for their lungs. A slave race of our own making. Louis would say all this, bending down happily to pet a collie.

  Nothing looked out of the ordinary at the base of the Berg. It wasn’t cordoned off, but the paths leading up the western side where Anja and Michel stood were deserted. None of the usual bottle collectors or birdwatchers or furtive couples sneaking around the trees at the bottom.

  They circled around to the southeastern trail, the lesser-used one that led up to the back of the clearing where her house stood, and climbed a few meters into the brush, which had grown surprisingly quickly to meet itself in the middle of the path.

  A giant stepped out from nowhere in front of them.

  “Nope,” he said. He was huge, with arms swollen in a way that didn’t look as if he were always at the gym but rather that his body fat was distributed in a way that happened to conform to the shape of muscles. He was wearing a pinstriped shirt that could have been a Karstadt uniform. The shirt bunched at his armpits, straining to contain his chest.

  “Private property,” he grunted. “Residents only.”

  “I’m a resident,” said Anja, feeling Michel shift nervously beside her.

  The giant shook his head, gearing up for the certain pleasure he would experience in contradicting her. “All residents are accounted for.” He crossed his arms and stared off behind them.

  “And yet here we stand,” said Michel.

  “All residents are accounted for. I have the list.”

  “Looks like reality and bureaucracy may not be in alignment on this day of all days,” said Michel, digging his toe into the mud. “Maybe Mercury in retrograde.”

  Anja reached into her bag to find her phone with the requisite residence permit codes on it, and the man’s hand instantly went to his hip.

  “Whoa,” said Michel, stepping forward. “We’re harmless.”

  “I’m just trying to show you my residence permit,” said Anja. “I have it on my phone.”

  “No residents are currently in residence here.”

  “I just need to pick something up.” Anja smiled sweetly up at him. “Maybe you know Howard?” she tried.

  She watched carefully for his reaction, to gauge whether he was high enough on the ladder to understand how and when to succumb to this type of coercion—or whether he was immune to name-dropping because he believed power worked in straightforward ways according to protocol. In other words, how German was he? Whatever Laura said, she thought, Germany will never entirely collapse into the next century. Cultural capital, even real capital, will always yield to the rules here.

  The giant remained impassive, and she sighed, running through possible tactics. Name-dropping: no. Flirting, no. Indignation, entitlement, rage . . .

  He moved his hand away from his waist, and she glanced at it. The hand had faded barbed wire entwined around the fingers. She checked his other hand. A spider extended its legs down the wrist.

  She couldn’t believe it had taken her so long. “You know me, actually,” she said. “Wednesdays and Satu
rdays are your nights at the Baron.” He glared at her. “You always let me in. I’m usually with Prinz and Louis.”

  The way he scrutinized her was entirely familiar. There was the necessary delay of a few painful seconds, before he would reach out his hand to shove the swinging door open and a warm, wet, smoke-filled puff of air would hit her in the face as she pushed through into the club. The precipice of rejection. The power was petty, but it was entirely his.

  Without Louis she knew there was no guarantee she’d get into the Baron, much less the Berg. Alone and not a recognizable regular, she would be easy to dismiss. The social anxiety of possible rejection should have been surging inside of her, but she decided to bluff.

  “I was at the Baron last night, actually,” she lied. “A little hungover today.” The bouncer grunted. She rolled her eyes impatiently.

  He looked slowly from right to left, arms still crossed solidly in front of his chest, and took a few steps to the side. She watched him, waiting for the fateful nod. When it came, she tapped Michel and started up the path. As they passed, she nodded back at the bouncer, careful not to seem overly grateful. You wouldn’t get in the door next time if you acted relieved when you got in the first time, that’s what Sara had once told her. Or would you? The whole thing was a crapshoot. People were constantly trying to come up with repeatable strategies for getting into the club, but the whole process wouldn’t work unless it retained some element of randomness. There could be no truly systematic process: every dictator knew that.

  “The fuck?” said Michel when he assumed they were out of earshot. “Is that really the bouncer from the Baron?”

  “I can’t believe I didn’t realize sooner.”

  They veered slightly west in order to stay shielded by foliage until they came up behind the cluster of houses. The trees hadn’t had a chance to lose their leaves, but the air was intensely cold, and the ground was brittle, nearly frozen in places. STAY CHILL*YALL had been the message of the morning. The confused peat moss that was grafted on the stones—which were grafted on the soil grafted on the mountain grafted on the airport grafted on the city—had shriveled up into brown pubic-hair masses in the cold, and much of the shrubbery looked like it had passed on to the next life. Too many temperature changes to keep up with.