“You can’t just let anyone stay anywhere!” he said. “I came home and I couldn’t even sleep in my own fucking bed.”
“Oh please, your Schulfreund Klaus was here for two weeks and I didn’t say anything.”
“That’s because I didn’t put him in your bed.”
“Wait, where did you sleep, anyway?” Leonie asked, eyebrow arched.
“Ich hab’ bei Rebecca geschlafen,” he answered with a shrug, which technically means “I slept with Rebecca,” but uses the dative preposition bei, which means “with” as in at someone’s house. When you sleep bei someone, that usually means you’re crashing on the couch or the floor. What he didn’t say was what had actually happened: Ich habe mit Rebecca geschlafen, which means exactly what you think it means, and which would have been indelicate to say outright, even for a culture that so cherishes its bluntness.
Our relationship eventually became unambiguous, a development that three out of the four other Loftschlossers found insignificant (it is possible that Detlef and Rolf never even realized it, given that they were never home). I can’t really blame Leonie, though—she and Johannes were best friends, and my swift ascendance as his girlfriend, which resulted in us being cleaved together for days at a time, provoked seething jealousy in me anytime the two of them wanted to hang out alone, or disagreed with me about anything, or—an altercation of which I am not particularly proud—decided to prepare a meal of fried fish together even though Johannes was supposed to be my co-vegetarian. Most of the time, though, Johannes acted as a giant-haired human shield, sheltering me from the more-inane instances of Leonie-related pedantry while still including me in the everyday household activities, which involved Run Lola Run–levels of improbability, minus the petty crime and time travel—so, primarily a lot of questionable hairstyles and techno music.
I wouldn’t say, however, that this was a period of assimilation into the late-nineties Berlin milieu. This is because assimilation is not a strong enough word. It was a time of full-scale metamorphosis into monstrous Eurotrash. I started dressing differently, trading my black garments for clashing bright separates—which I accessorized, at all times, with one or more scarves, no matter the weather, as per Eurotrash bylaw. At Johannes’s request, and because it clashed with my clothes, I neglected my extensive, expensive, and lovingly curated makeup collection in favor of four days’ worth of facial oil. (It probably goes without saying that, in accordance with the local mores, I lessened my showers to twice or thrice weekly.)
I started acting differently, turning up to study-abroad functions with at least one Loftschlosser in tow, or blowing them off to hang out at home, which—having been furnished with a functioning stage (including microphone and amps), three dismembered mannequins, and a rope swing hanging from the ceiling, was now officially cooler than most local establishments. I started eating differently, finally learning how to butter my bread correctly—methodically and in a perfect even layer, out to the exact edge of every piece—and correspondingly embraced the tradition of the ninety-minute Berlin breakfast, undertaken with alarming propriety even by squatters who lived in rubble. (I also started putting Bailey’s in my morning coffee instead of cream, though this was an entirely individual affectation.) I started speaking differently—in, at long last, fluent German, albeit a slang-heavy and grammatically suspect dialect of my own devising that was my earnest adoption of Johannes’s single rule about second-language acquisition: Just don’t give a shit.
But even after all this, I wasn’t truly considered a Loftschlosser until I developed the ability to stop being shocked when my roommates did something so bizarre that, until they did it, I never would have even considered in the repertoire of human action. One afternoon, for example, Paul came home with a used television, a thirteen-inch model that had most definitely broadcast the fall of the Wall live. He and Johannes immediately set about sawing a rectangular hole through the living room wall, creating the world’s first flat-screen by shoving the set into that hole so that its backside hung directly over the toilet in the bathroom on the other side.
Another morning—by which I mean noon—I awoke to the urgent demand from Leonie and Paul that I come downstairs to participate in the Gay Pride Parade immediately.
“Los, Rebecca!” Leonie said. “Heute ist Christopher Street Day!”
“But I’m wearing my Schlafanzug!” I said, pointing to my green-and-black oversized flannel pajamas from the Gap.
“I know!” she said. “You’re dressed perfectly.”
I ended up going out dressed like that to a fairly snobby restaurant for lunch.
It was my official rule never to turn down an invitation by a Loftschlosser, because each one took me to a weirder place than the last, deeper into the Berlin that my Time Out guidebook had never seen. One night, it was a tire-fire party in the backyard of a squat, whose residents performed their toilette in a full-sized bathtub placed on top of two adjacent stoves. At some point I told some of them that I could play “Wonderwall,” so, in between excoriating my country’s imperialist foreign policy and correcting my grammar, the “occupiers” (the literal German for squat is besetztes Haus, or “occupied house”) thrust an out-of-tune acoustic guitar into my hands.
“Oasis spielen!” they cried. “Oasis! Oasis! Oasis!” They pronounced it Oh-AH-sis.
The next week, it was onto the handlebars of Johannes’s bicycle with me, as he careened through the deserted streets of Mitte at four in the morning, en route to a bar called Dienstagsbar because it wasn’t a bar so much as a random gathering of people with cool hair in a gravel-covered vacant lot, and it only happened on Tuesdays. As we rode, we screamed the lyrics to a Jürgen von der Lippe song, whose comedic nuances I did not understand but whose spirit nevertheless seemed right:
Feet in the fire, nose in the wind
Men will be men, men will be men
The next week, it was a pop-up art show by one of Leonie’s friends, comprised entirely of stuffed-panty-hose sculptures, that took place inside a filthy abandoned bunker. Sometimes I felt like my roommates just woke up, combined a bunch of random nouns and verbs, and then decided to go do whatever that was.
In the late spring, we threw what was supposed to be a rent party, but on which, I am fairly certain, we lost money. At a series of increasingly heated planning meetings, Leonie and Paul almost came to fisticuffs over whether or not we should serve homemade fries, which she insisted could be prepared in bulk on our fifth-hand stove and the rest of us viewed as a mild-to-moderate grease-fire hazard that paired especially unsavorily with the fact that technically our building was always locked from the outside. The party was almost called off entirely due to these creative differences, until Johannes came through the door one day wielding a contraption from the mid-1970s that looked like a Barbie Dream West German Nuclear Fallout Shelter.
“Ach du Scheiße!” said Leonie. “Where did you find that?”
“Zweite Hand,” said Johannes. “The party snacks are solved!”
Everyone let out a cheer except for me, who had no idea what the fuck the thing was.
“What’s wrong, Rebecca?” asked Leonie. “Haven’t you ever seen a sandwich maker before?”
“Not one like that,” I said, believing, rube that I was, that a sandwich maker was a pair of hands and a knife.
It was essential that this party be perfect for me, because I’d invited all of my study-abroad classmates and it was imperative they see firsthand exactly how cool my life was. And I think that when the magical day arrived—sturdy milk-crates full of Hefeweizen procured, peculiar elder-flower punch mixed, sandwich menu curated (Nutella DM 2,50; Cheese DM 3)—they had a good time. But it was hard for me to tell, because for most of the party I was stuck on “key duty,” which meant I was responsible for using my giant Disney Schlüssel to let some partygoers in and others out, at random and somewhat indeterminate intervals made ever more complicated by the fact that nobody had a mobile phone yet.
Our guests stayed so late into the wee hours—dancing; swinging from the ceiling; staring at each other wordlessly and then pairing off into life partners; eating sandwiches—that Paul had to blow his saxophone directly into their drunken ears to get them to stumble out into the Hinterhof. When I finally trod into my corner of the living room at eleven the next morning, I found a strange guy sleeping in my bed.
“Hallo,” I said. “I live here.”
“Huh,” he said, and puffed languidly on the cigarette whose ashes were falling onto my sheets. “Is this yours?” He held up a haunting-looking children’s book, The Three Golden Keys, by Peter Sís. “It’s wonderful. Just wonderful. I can’t believe these illustrations.”
I’d never seen the book before and didn’t know how it got into my room, but it looked like the guy needed some more time alone with it, so I slunk back into the kitchen and grabbed one of the few remaining bottles of beer. I popped off the cap using one of the four cigarette lighters that lived permanently on the kitchen table, then used the same lighter to ignite a Lucky Strike from one of Johannes’s half-open packs.
As I took a slug, Paul shuffled in with his hair sticking straight up and his shirt on backward. He nodded, grabbed a bottle for himself, and handed it to me to open, since I already had a lighter in my hand.
After about fifteen minutes of sipping and staring out the window through a smoke cloud, he said: “You’re up early.”
I nodded.
After about five more minutes, he said: “It might be cold today.”
I looked vaguely in the direction of the living room, ashed my cigarette, yawned. We were, after all, there to drink, not to talk.
7.
Liebeskummer
n. heartbreak, from love and grief.
