Day ten. You walk to his apartment at seven in the evening. He has told you how to find him and he has not told you what to expect.
His building is in a part of Friedrichshain that was the GDR before it was not the GDR and is now itself. Six floors. A courtyard. A staircase that smells of wood and something else — linseed oil, maybe, or a polish from before people used polish.
The building is concrete from an era when the concrete was poured to last a forever that did not last. The staircase is original wood — cheaper than replacement then, still here now. Your hand on the railing is on stairs built for a country that is gone. The building does not know the country is gone.
The days you cannot account for climb the stairs with you. Day 2 slept past noon. Day 4 a bus to Tempelhof, window seat, and you do not remember why. Day 6 a pastry on a bench; a woman in a red coat passed three times. Day 8 the podcast in your ears was German you could not follow and you listened for an hour. Day 9 is gone. Day 12 a coffee at Oranienstraße you could not taste because the cup was warmed the wrong way. The body has taken photographs the mind has not yet looked at.
His door is on the fourth floor, at the end of a hallway with one window at the far end and three doors on one side. His door is the one in the middle. He opens it before you knock.
His apartment is one room large and one room small and a kitchen that opens onto the large one. The large room has a desk at the window. The desk has a laptop and stacks of paper with red marks on them. A book on the desk is open to a page with a yellow sticky note. The top page of red marks has a Russian word in the margin. The letters are his hand — not a classroom's.
On the wall above the desk, a map. Not a map of Berlin. A map of a place you do not recognize. Old paper. Small print.
On a shelf near the map, a photograph of a woman in her eighties holding a cat. He has not mentioned her.
In the kitchen, an open envelope on the counter among other things. The envelope has a name on it. Martin, and a surname you do not read because you look away.
He cooks. Pasta. A sauce from a jar, garlic and black pepper and a tomato from the Turkish market on his corner added to it.
You eat at his table. The table is also the desk, cleared of papers. There is one candle because the light is bad. The candle is about light, not atmosphere.
He has been translating a book for six months, he says. A Russian novel from the late seventies. A book that has been translated before, not well. He is retranslating.
You have not read it. He says you should. He does not push. He says it the way people say things they believe and do not need you to agree with.
He asks why you chose Berlin. Cheap, you say. He asks why you are leaving. It's time, you say. Neither answer is fully true. Neither of you says so. The candle has burned closer to halfway than it was.
You have eaten. He has eaten. The candle is burning to the halfway. His hand is on the table near your hand. Your hand is near his hand.
You do not plan the thing that happens next. You have planned for the option of it for four days. The planning is not the same as doing. The doing is when your hand crosses the four inches between your hand and his hand.
He looks at your hand. He does not move yet. He waits.
You move. You stand up and walk around the table to his side. He stays sitting. You put your hand on the side of his face. He turns his face into your hand.
You kiss him.
The bedroom is the small room. The bed is a mattress on the floor. You stand beside it and take your shirt off. He takes his off.
His chest has a scar an inch under the collarbone on the left side. It is an old scar. It has the shape a childhood scar has after twenty years of not being thought about.
You put your hand on the scar. You do not ask what it is.
He puts his hand on your ribs. Не я is under his hand. He has not seen the tattoo before. He does not say anything about it.
The mattress is low. You go down onto it.
His body is weight you have not had over you before. It is a weight that knows how to be weight without pressing. You breathe under it. You shift. You do the things your body has learned to do since you were seventeen.
He is quiet. He does not say things into your ear. He listens to the things you do not say.
When he is inside you, you are awake. You do not close your eyes. You see the candle from the other room burning in the door's crack.
You say wait once and he waits. You say now and he does not need to be told what now means.
You are both there. That is the thing that matters. Both of you are there.
Afterward he does not speak for a minute. Neither do you. He moves off you. He lies on his side, facing you. His hand is flat on the mattress between you, palm up.
Your heartbeat has not come down. Your lower back carries something new that was not there an hour ago. The sweat at your temple is cooling.
You put your hand in his.
He asks if you want water. You want water. He goes to the kitchen in his jeans that are back on. You hear the tap.
You lie on the mattress looking at the ceiling of his bedroom. The ceiling has a crack the shape of a river. The crack has been there a long time.
He comes back with two glasses of water. He gives you one. He drinks from his. He sits on the edge of the mattress not touching you.
You drink the water.
You decide to stay until three. You do not tell him you have decided this. You close your eyes. He does not ask.
At three you get up and dress. Your boots are by the door.
At the door he is in the doorway with a robe on he has put on since you started dressing. He does not try to stop you leaving. He says the next time you come, bring the book.
Ok, you say.
You walk down four flights of stairs and then out into Friedrichshain at three-fifteen in the morning.