pip 1

Well, let’s see where this is going to take me.

Prose in progress, part 1

Sitting in an empty flat in one of Berlin’s northern suburbs. Which is an unlikely place to exist, since Berlin is a conglomerate of suburbs forming the city itself – Berliners like to call that the “Kiez” – and can hardly afford to have suburbs surrounding suburbia proper. urbi et orbi, that line out of the blessing the pope gives every easter to the world and the city, meant for Rome and the rest of the catholic world, could have been intvented for Berlin only. Nevertheless, Glienicke-Nordbahn exists, with some 10.000 inhabitants made up of native Ossis, people born and bred in the former East and Wessis, mostly young families, who took advantage of the low pricing on land outwith city borders, cheap housing and some surrounding countryside to let the kids roam in.
Here schools need to be build, elsewhere in the former east they are closing down schools, even villages for lack of people.
The housing estate is called “sun garden”, rows of houses with 4 – 6 flats each, intermingled with roads of single houses featuring a tiny backyard and two parking lots each. This is Germany, the automobile nation. Vorsprung durch Technik. Although the cars are more often than not originated in Asia nowadays.
The flat she sits in is very barren. Customized, fitted kitchen, some prints on the walls, some of them already fallen off their hook. A massive aubergine-coloured settee with two matching chairs, ugly really, a square glass coffee table. Black shelf with the stereo fitted in, a way too big shelf covered in silver melamine, with a huge tv screen and video/dvd player on it. And matching dolby surround speakers everywhere. In the same room a round table with four chrome chairs, upholstered in a maroon shade. A complimentary glass case holding various glassware. A few plants, behind which a folded camping guest bed is neatly tucked away. The floor in this room, guess one would call it living room, is covered with fakewood flooring. Whereas the kitchen and bathroom are tiled in white, the hall, office and bedroom are fitted wih a cream carpet, worn and stained in some places but still ok. The hall is dominated by the nicest piece of furniture in the whole place: a rather biggish black chest of drawers topped by a huge oval mirror framed in matching black wood. Opening the top drawer, she finds a heap of tools. The other two drawers are empty apart from some grimy dustballs and other lint. In a recess next to the front door is a rack full of jackets underneath which a heap of worn shoes has been stacked. Next to this, a red plastic litter box is the cat’s toilet. A little black shelf with dusty odds an ends – shoe shine, brushes and the like – completes the hall’s furniture. The office, my oh my! Black shelfs and cupboards, a big desk, one bigbacked, black leather office chair plus another, smaller office chair on wheels. All of the room and the furniture, save from a little speck in front of the computer screen, is strewn with heaps of paper, stacks of magazines, cd’s, boxes, coins, bills, letters, dust, pens, bags, cases, some sporting trophies, you name it and it is going to be found in this mess. On the wall behind the computer three framed photographs have been hung, one showing an empty scottish landscape, the other the silhouette of a fisher against the backdrop of sparkling water, the third a black and white print of a young couple dancing. Judging by the clothing of the pair, it must have been taken in the early seventies. On the door leading to the office, another sepia toned black and white photograph has been taped. Showing the upper half of a young man, apparently sitting in a camping chair, maybe asleep. White T-shirt, dark jeans jacket. Hands folded in front of the flat belly. Long black hair, tucked away behind his ears. John Lennon style sunglasses hiding the eyes. Maybe he was getting badly sunburnt, since the nose appears very dark. Full lips, smooth skin. She wouldn’t call the young man attractive, but he was not ugly looking, either.
The bedroom features a wooden king size bed with a matching bedside table on either side, a wooden chest of drawers, a big brown basket, two chairs and one of those horrible dressers covering an entire wall. Five doors, three of which are mirrored, the rest is black set off with birch coloured frames. One plastic basket with some ironing in it, also the iron itself in a box. Stuck between wall and dresser an ironing table. A clotheshorse with mostly grayish washing drying on it stands in front of the dresser. Above the chest of drawers another tv set sits on a black fixture. Two prints of mystical landscapes on the walls, one framed black, the other in wood. The pictures look as if the prints the frames were sold in at Ikea have been left in them for lack of something better to be put up on the wall.
She was wondering about how much or how little one can tell about another human being by looking at their living quarters. Once more she wandered about in this flat, almost stumbling over a pull trolley in the hall, left next to a golfbag. Gosh, even this golf bag was a no name, god ugly, worn piece of junk. One wouldn’t even want to take a look at the clubs in it. She knew the contents as she has caddied for the owner a couple of times. She hated to pull a trolley – she preferred to carry golf clubs – but this bag wasn’t made for carrying. Dunlop Equation irons, badly worn, an unspeakable putter in T-form and an array of woodcovers bespeaking the clubs in it. Bleached with the sun, full of holes. One Trident 15° 3 wood, one Callaway Big Bertha Warbird 5 wood and a TaylorMade R360 driver, 10.5 loft. All of the clubs save from the putter graphite shafted. At least the driver was halfway decent, she thought. But then again, she knew full well she was being a snob when it came down to golfing equipment. After all, she works in the golfing industry since more than sixteen years now.
What would she say about this man by looking at his personal surroundings he called “home”? Obvious at first sight: there is no woman living in this place. She had no idea why this thought popped up first. Maybe a woman would not have left pictures that have fallen off their hooks on the floor. Maybe a woman would not tolerate an office used as junkyard and would at least have stacked the tons of papers in an orderly fashion. Maybe a woman would have hung curtains in front of the windows to make the place look cosier. Maybe a woman would have seen to it, that the eighties furniture was replaced by something more befitting the new century. Picked a new settee, for example, less volumptious and predominant, coloured brighter. And maybe she was just being full of crap and prejudice. She knew that this man was living by himself since a couple of years now. After 23 years of marriage he had attempted twice to live together with other women. It hadn’t worked out. So he gave up on cocooning, getting used to staying by himself, he even started to like it. Hours on end in front of the computer, playing cards. Bridge, poker, hearts, what not. Surfing the internet for music, the latest scientific report, the odd porn video to give himself a break. Free to do what and as he pleases, save for the regular chores his mother had in store for him. As he was lucky enough not to have to work for a living anymore, he looked after his mom’s affairs and had the rest of his time entirely to himself. So he dedicated himself to honorary work for his bridge club and other related associations. Apart from that, he kept pretty much to himself. Every fortnight, he would venture out to see a movie together with a bunch of male friends. As men tick, they formed a club to this purpose, discussing and choosing the films they were about to see and afterwards commenting on them on their internet movie rating site. She guesses they did this, because for one they all liked movies but also because they loved their customary visits to pubs or beergardens after the film, having a boys night out. By what she has gathered so far, the men were all roughly the same age, something between fifty an sixty, the one in question the only single man among them. The rest fairly settled, the kids grown up and out of the house, the marriage, or the second marriage, gone a little stale. Since the guys have been friends for a very long time, some of them since boyhood, she guesses this meetings were also about reminding each other of the fire that used to burn in each of them, long ago. The memories shared of trips they had taken together, when they first fell in love with their prospective spouses, when the kids were little. The golf outings in the later years, when the pressure was on and the men needed their breaks from career strains and family life. The comfort in knowing you could tell your wife you were out with the boys wereas in fact you were spending the night with your latest flame. The girl that charmed you last week. Maybe even the one you would leave your family for. And the boys would back you up on anything. When it did happen that one of them went to live with the new prey, the others would look after the woman who just has been left. For a while, anyways. Reporting back the things that she wouldn’t tell the villain to the face. But them. In the full knowledge, that whatever it was she said would reach the target somehow. Such was the quality of the friendship among this bunch of guys.
As she had moved country, she did not have such a circle of friends. She rather kept in touch with two, three very close friends via internet, telephone and regular visits spaced out biannually. None of them were childhood friends. Come to think of it, she didn’t have many childhood friends, as far as she could recall. She rememberd a neighbour girl she quite liked in her first four years of schooling. They used to walk the 45 minutes to school everyday. When she went on to a different school afterwards, they never met again. Her other friends from her junior years were all Jehova’s witnesses and betrayed the very meaning of the term “friendship” when she was chucked out of the church at age sixteen. Thus, all her friends, by order of the church, were forbidden to speak to her. Her best friend back then, Andrea, would change the side of the road whenever they happened to pass each other in the small town hell of her hometown. Another memory floated to the surface: A couple of years later, she had already moved to the county capital, Graz, the second biggest city in Austria, by then, her brother came to visit her one afternoon. Something that only happened twice during the six years she lived in this city, and she guessed it was more to the purpose to come to Graz rather than to see her, but anyways. He brought his best friend along, Markus. A boy she had spent all her childhood years with, and they used to be very close. Markus would not leave the car, he sat in there for the duration of the brief visit of an hour or so. When she walked her brother back to his car, she said “Hi Markus” to the guy who had grown to a young man by then, but he wouldn’t even greet her, turning his face so he didn’t have to look her in the eyes. Remembering this scene, she felt anger washing over her again. Arrogant bastard, she thought, where are you now? Also thrown out of the church for committing whatever sin unrepented. She wondered: would he speak to her now? And would she answer him? She was tempted to find out.