Night of day five. You are walking with him.
He lives east of where you are staying, in a part of Friedrichshain that is the end of the line of the U-Bahn if you take it past the last station that has a sign. He knows a club that is not on the maps. He says this. He says it the way people say things that they have said to other people before.
The street is mostly quiet. A bar on the corner is open with four people in it. A kebab shop is closing. Two men are counting money at the counter. They are counting in Turkish. A woman's voice on the radio above the counter sings a Turkish song from the decade these men were your age, in another country.
You have not asked him what he does. You have noticed that he does not ask you what you are doing in Berlin.
The air is Berlin-summer air — warm in the part of the night that was just day, cooling at the edges where morning begins before morning.
The club is a door in a wall with no sign. The bouncer is a woman. She looks at his face and then at your face and then nods once and says zwanzig. Twenty euros. You put a twenty in her hand. She does not make change because there is nothing to change. Kein Geld wie früher, she says, folding the bill into her apron. No money like before. She says it to the wall.
Inside, a hallway. The hallway is long and has a coat check at the end that is not staffed. He hangs your jacket on a hook that already has other jackets on it. You keep your bag.
Inside is a room larger than the hallway suggested. Dark. Concrete. A bar along one wall. A DJ at the far end at a small table with a laptop and two turntables and a person.
The music is the kind that is not made for songs. It is made for a room.
You are on the floor. He is next to you. You put your hand on his arm to say something into his ear and what you say is lost because the music has taken the space that words go into, but your hand stays on his arm for a second longer than saying something required. Then his hand on your back, briefly, to move you out of the way of a woman who is moving backward toward you without looking.
His hand leaves. Your hand has already left.
You dance. You are a body in a room.
The floor surges once. The crowd moves as one body and you are pushed toward the center with it. A hand on your arm, not his, steadies you by accident — it belongs to a man you do not know, older, who is not looking at you. You find the edge of the crowd. He finds you again at the edge. The music changes.
You walk to the bar for water. A man beside you asks, in English, if he can buy you a drink. No, thanks, you say. Where are you from, he asks. Leipzig, you say, which is a city you have never been to. He shrugs and does not ask again.
A man with grey at the temples is watching the room from the column nearest the bar. You do not look again. The music shifts. The room shifts with it.
Later — you do not know how later — he says something you can hear because the music has changed to something with words. I'm going to stay for another hour. Want to wait?
You do not want to wait. You say so. He nods. He touches your jacket on the hook as you take it down. The touch is small. The touch is the kind of touch that says next time.
The hallway out of the club is longer than the hallway in was. The woman bouncer is not at the door anymore. A man who was not the bouncer is at the door. He looks at you and does not ask you anything because he knows you are leaving.
Outside the club the air is colder than it was when you went in.
The S-Bahn at 4 a.m. smells of sleep and cleaner and the last of someone's kebab. You sit.
The train moves on rails that once stopped at walls that are no longer walls. The line was broken for a generation and the rails were never quite re-aligned when they were welded back. You feel the slight cant when the train leans into a turn.
The back of your neck has not let go of the pressure from before the music shifted. You do not turn around. A woman is across from you in the car. Fifty. A plastic bag with a uniform folded in it. Her hands are on the bag in a way that has not let go of the bag for the length of the commute, which is some number of stops, and will not let go of the bag until she gets to wherever she is going to put the uniform on.
You look at her hands. Your hands are not like her hands. Her hands have done a thing they do. Your hands are still deciding.
I am a person on a train at four in the morning in a city that is not mine.
The woman gets off at Ostkreuz. She does not look at you as she gets off. You do not look at her either, except the one time you had already looked at her hands.
At the next stop a different woman gets on. Mid-forties. Raincoat too warm for Berlin summer. She sits across from you and turns a silver ring on her finger, a quarter turn, again, again. She says, to no one, to the ring: Etwas ist faul. She does not look at you. She gets off two stops later, still turning the ring.
Kreuzberg at 4:40 is quieter than Kreuzberg at midnight was when you walked to the club with him four hours ago. You take the stairs. You do not count them. You know there are fourteen.
The apartment is yours. The postcard on the mantel is where you left it. The book of Ukrainian poems is on the table where you put it when you got back yesterday.
You do not turn on the light. You take off your boots. You lie down in your jeans. You close your eyes.
Your feet are sore. Your ears are still in the music. The music will be in your ears until tomorrow afternoon when a truck downstairs sounds like a bass-line.
You sleep.