Day 3. You slept late and have eaten nothing and the morning is gone and you are walking because the apartment felt like a room and not a place and you wanted a place that was not a room.
The U-Bahn at Görlitzer Bahnhof is the U1 and the U1 goes west if you want it to. You want it to. You get on at the platform with four other people all of whom are wearing lighter shoes than you are.
Tiergarten in late June is thick. The grass is the green of grass that has been drinking for three weeks. The paths are sand and pressed earth. A woman in running clothes passes you on the path near the Neuer See. A man in a suit with a briefcase is walking the way people walk in a suit with a briefcase at midday — as if the walk itself were the meeting he is late to.
You turn off the path and sit on a bench that is wood so old the grain has risen. The wood is warm through your jeans where the sun has been on it. An old dog comes over and looks at you and then goes back to the man who is reading a newspaper on the bench across the path. The dog does not need anything. The man does not either.
You have nowhere to be. This is the accurate sentence. You have nowhere to be.
The lake is small. The water has a sheen on it the way water does in heat. A duck moves across the sheen. Another duck moves in the opposite direction. They do not coordinate. They do not seem to notice each other. A plastic bottle is floating near the edge. Someone will eventually come and take it out. Someone always does, eventually, with these things.
You watch for a long time. The word watch is not right because you are not waiting for anything. There is no one watching-for. You are a person on a bench looking at a lake.
A boy of perhaps ten kicks a soccer ball along the path with a technique that is not quite practiced. The ball goes into the grass near your bench. He comes to get it. He looks at you once, uncomplicated, and says Entschuldigung in a voice that is practicing being a voice, and takes the ball back to the path.
His father is twenty meters behind, looking at a phone and walking slower than the boy. The boy kicks the ball again. The ball goes the wrong way. The boy laughs at himself, which is the thing you notice: he laughs, not at the ball, at the version of him who kicked it wrong. He is learning something he will not remember learning.
You watch them go down the path until the grass and trees take them.
By the time you are hungry it is half past three. You walk out of the Tiergarten at the Brandenburg Gate end. That is the direction your feet have taken. You did not argue with your feet.
You walk the length of Unter den Linden without going into anything. You pass a tour group listening to a woman with a microphone. You pass a man holding a balloon shaped like a fish for a child who is not looking at the balloon. You pass a couple taking a photograph of themselves in front of the Staatsoper with her arm extended.
At Friedrichstrasse you stop because you are hungry in the way where you will become irritable if you do not eat soon and you have not been in Berlin long enough to be casual about finding food.
You walk into the first place that has tables and a menu at the door. It is a restaurant that is not trying to be anything. The menu is printed on paper that has been photocopied from other paper. A currywurst plate. A schnitzel. A Greek salad because everywhere in Germany has a Greek salad. A bowl of soup of the day.
You sit at a table by the window. A man in an apron brings you a menu you already read and a glass of water you did not ask for. You order the schnitzel. You order it in German. He nods without comment.
The schnitzel comes on a plate with potatoes and a lemon-wedge you do not use. It is good in the way food is good when you are hungry enough. The breading is crisp. The potatoes are boiled the way Germans boil potatoes, which is to say done, simply. The salad on the side is mostly cucumber.
You eat with the slowness of someone who has time. You drink the water. You notice the restaurant is half empty and the other half is one table of three men in their fifties who are eating the same thing you are eating and talking about something that requires one of them to gesture with a fork every minute or so.
The waiter refills your water without asking. You thank him. He says gern.
You finish the schnitzel. You finish the potatoes. You do not finish the cucumber salad. You leave a tip in coins. The bill is twelve euros and change. You put fourteen on the table and leave.
It is not quite evening when you come out. The light in Berlin at this hour has a quality you have read about but not in fact seen — a slight blue in the shadows before the gold goes. You walk without a direction. You are not tired. The food has settled and you are the simplest version of yourself you have been this week.
You end up at a bar near Friedrichstrasse station at around seven. Not end-up as in drift into — a specific bar you noticed on the way to the restaurant and decided to come back to. It has one window and a door propped open by a brick and three people visible through the door and a blackboard menu of beers you do not know the names of.
You go in. You sit at the bar. You order a beer you point to on the board because the pronunciation is beyond you. The bartender is a woman of about thirty with dark hair cut to her chin and two rings on her right hand. She pours the beer slowly. She puts it in front of you on a paper coaster that says the brewery's name.
The man two stools down is sixty or sixty-five and has a face that has spent a lot of time outdoors and a beer in front of him that is half gone. He is reading a paperback with a cover the color of a wheat field. He is not drunk. He is not a regular — he does not have the set-in look.
You drink. The beer is cold. The bar is quiet. There is a speaker somewhere playing something instrumental.
After a minute the man glances up. He takes you in without lingering. You nod. He nods. He goes back to the paperback.
You are not looking for a conversation. He is not either. Neither of you starts one.
The bartender asks if you want another when you are nearly done. You say yes. She pours the second beer as carefully as she poured the first.
The man with the paperback turns a page. His reading is unhurried. You can see it is a novel; the sentences are the shape of sentences in a novel, not paragraphs of fact. You do not try to read over his shoulder.
After a while he closes the book and puts a ten on the bar. He says Tschüss to the bartender. She says Tschüss back. He does not say anything to you. He does not look at you. He picks up a small cloth bag that had been at his feet and walks out into Friedrichstrasse.
A possibility passes through you — you could have asked what he was reading. You do not. It leaves with him.
The bar is the bar. You finish the second beer. The bartender glances at you and you shake your head once — no third. She nods. You pay and she thanks you and you leave.
On the U-Bahn back to Kreuzberg you are between two tired women whose heads do not touch their shoulders the same way. One looks at her phone. One looks at nothing. The train goes. The train stops. The train goes.
At Görlitzer Bahnhof you get off and walk the five blocks to the apartment slow. The apartment is where you left it.
Inside, you pour water from the tap into a glass and you drink it. You take your shoes off. You lie on the bed without getting under the blanket. Your body has walked for six hours and eaten one meal and drunk two beers.
You sleep before you have decided to.
The schnitzel was good. The man at the bar read a book. You were a person in a city for a day.
You sleep.