The Comedy of M
The Sunday Extra Post
This is the monthly Sunday extra post.
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I don’t think the length of a relationship is a guide to its seriousness.
There are relationships I’ve had which lasted a very short time which still pop into my head even years later. Could ofs and should haves, a sense that my small initial errors gave a fatal first impression.
Perhaps I am deluding myself that they could have indeed have become something more enduring, but the fact that they never did leaves a temptation to speculate on them – more indeed than some relationships which got a chance to run their course.
So to the subject of today’s newsletter M, a woman I knew in my Berlin days.
I use her today as a symbol of romantic misadventure and while she is exemplary of that, I’ve also chosen this story because our acquaintance ended on a peculiarly satisfying note.
I lived in Berlin from 2005-13. Most of my time in the city was spent in the area of the city known as Kreuzberg, itself divided into two large parts; a grungier, younger district near the old Wall and a more bourgeois district further west known by a good friend of the time as ‘evil Kreuzberg’. This latter was the area I had generally lived in since I first arrived in Berlin in 2004, containing some of the city’s grandest surviving pre-war architecture.
By 2007, I wasn’t living there at all but further southwest in Neukölln, an area with a much sketchier reputation though again, this is by comparatively mild German standards. I was never convinced by the Germans I met who told me the city I was living in was like the Bronx. I felt there was a degree of vicarious pleasure being taken there at the thought that a bourgeois German city had slid into iniquity.
And of course it was tinged with racism as to what ‘die Türken’ were up to.
Anyway, I still used to go back to the old Kiez to drink, aided in that decision by it containing, next to Mehringdamm underground station, two of Berlin’s finest Imbisses, namely Curry 36 and Mustafa’s Gemüse Kebab.
Also the English Theatre Berlin – formerly known, in a reference to ‘Some Like It Hot’, as Friends of the Italian Opera – in Fidicinistrasse. It must have been there that night where I first met M. I can vaguely remember her milling about after the show, falling into conversation with other vaguely hip expats.
I remember her moving along the entrance corridor to retrieve her bike when we moved onto the next place. I can’t remember what play we had seen or when; there are emails in my inbox I could use to ascertain exact dates but frankly, I couldn’t bear to read the romantic emails of my youth even for you, dearest reader.
But I do remember speaking German with her – and that detail was salient because I was desperate to speak German with anybody at this stage. I was also insistent on pursuing this in the face of the typical German penchant to switch into monotone American English. (Reader: I persevered).
M spoke German in part because she was from the former East and hadn’t grown up learning English, and had instead learnt Russian, in school. She was still in fact sympathetic to aspects of that upbringing. I remember her telling me she’d quit an unpaid internship after a few days as ‘For me the idea of working for free was just too absurd!’
We talked and talked that first night and she was full of ideas I found interesting and peculiar. She wasn’t a believer that things had got better for one. She thought that the eighteenth century was particularly admirable, and I remember, drunk, telling her that we should go and live in the 18th-century.
Looking back I realize how lonely she was. That’s a frequent realization of mine when I look back at these old times.
I also remember her laughing at me when, having established we were both Brian Eno fans, I said how much I loved the album title ‘Another Green World’.
‘Another Green World,’ she repeated, laughing into her hand. Well, I still think it’s a beautiful title – but I suppose to her non-native ear it sounded a laughably naïve combination of words. Or maybe she was just doing that flirting thing were you choose a random thing the other person says to take exaggerated umbrage at.
We went to a small crowded bar on Bergmannstrasse; it had a large red Chinese lantern in the window. That I remember well. At some point in the small crowded bar a man, an American man – I must have seen him in the play that night, whatever that was – saw M pass and commented, ‘Man, that girl makes the best theatre.’
For that was M’s passion: Creating live theatrical events.