Day 13. The line under the shirt is two days old. It itches in the way fresh ink itches when the body has decided to be a body again after a decision. You wear a loose shirt so the cloth does not press.
You leave the Kreuzberg apartment at two in the afternoon. You do not know where you are going until you are at the U-Bahn station at Görlitzer Bahnhof and the U1 is pulling in going the wrong direction for any errand you have. You get on.
You do not decide this. You also decide it. Both are true.
The U1 to Warschauer Strasse. The change to the S-Bahn at Ostkreuz. The S41 ring-line to Prenzlauer Allee. You have not been to Prenzlauer Berg this week. He mentioned once, in passing, that his translator-friend — the one who has been helping him with the Russian — can be found most afternoons at a café on Knaackstrasse. He did not tell you this because he wanted you to know. He told you because it was a thing he had said and did not think twice about saying.
You have thought twice about it.
The café is on the south side of Knaackstrasse near the corner with Belforter Strasse. You see him before you are close enough that he could see you. He is at a table outside in the shade of the awning, across from a man older than him by perhaps fifteen years. The older man wears a grey linen jacket that is right for the weather. A book is open between them. A second book is closed beside the first. There are two coffee cups and one glass of water.
You stop at the bakery across the street. You pretend to look at the window. Your face is reflected faintly in the glass of the bakery and behind your face the café is reflected, and at the bottom edge of your reflection is the edge of Martin's shoulder where he sits in the shade.
You cannot hear what they are saying. You do not want to hear. You want to have seen.
The older man gestures with one hand the way translators gesture. A small movement in the air to indicate a word he does not want to say aloud yet. Martin writes something in a notebook. The older man laughs. Martin does not laugh but his mouth shifts in the way a mouth shifts when something has landed. You have seen that shift of mouth before. You have seen it once, at his table, when he said you should about the Russian novel he was translating, and you did not ask why.
The older man sets his palm flat on the table between them. Not a commanding gesture. A weighing one. Like he is resting a thing down.
You have been holding your breath. The breath goes out.
Maybe he will look up and see you.
He won't. The awning, the street noise, you across a street in a city of four million. He won't look up.
Maybe he will look up and see you and raise his hand and you will go over and he will introduce you to the translator and you will sit down and the translator will like you and Martin will think you fit.
He won't. He would not. You do not want him to. You want him to and you do not want him to. Both are true.
The woman in the bakery behind the glass watches you watch. You realize this before you realize it. The woman has seen you for three minutes and done nothing; she is a shopkeeper at Friday mid-afternoon, there are pastries in the case, you have not come in. She taps the glass with one knuckle, not unkindly. A question. You turn. You push the door open and go in.
The bakery is small. The woman is around fifty. Her hair is grey at one temple and brown at the other, cut short. Her left hand has a wedding ring worn to a thin band. You order a Franzbrötchen you do not want and a black coffee you also do not want. She pours the coffee from a pot that has been on for longer than it should have been and gives you the Franzbrötchen in a paper bag. She says something to you in German you do not catch and you say danke the way you say danke in every Berlin shop. She does not say bitte. She says viel Glück — good luck — and you do not know why she says this.
Your face is still in her window. She has seen what she has seen.
You take the coffee outside.
Martin and the older man are gone. The table has been cleared. The street is a street again.
You are standing with a coffee and a Franzbrötchen you did not want on Knaackstrasse and the afternoon is moving and you do not know where he went.
You walk east. You eat the Franzbrötchen. The bread is too sweet. You drink the coffee. The coffee is not good.
You see him again at the corner of Rykestrasse. Not by accident. Not by intention either. The neighborhood is compact and the walking in it has a logic and you are walking the logic a fraction of a minute behind him.
He is alone. The older man has gone a different way. Martin is walking at the pace a person walks when they are going somewhere they have been before and will be again. He does not look behind him. Why would he.
You know him by his walk before your eyes tell you. His shoulders are set the way his shoulders set when he is not being looked at. His stride is shorter than his height would suggest — he walks like a man who reads. Something about the weight of the left shoulder. You have not noticed this from close up. From across a quiet street at his back you know him.
You follow half a block behind. You stay on the opposite side of the street because a following person on the opposite side is not a following person, a following person is a person who happens to be going the same direction.
He turns into a bookshop on Kollwitzstrasse. Russian letters in the window among the German. You do not know if the bookshop is new to him or an old haunt. He holds the door for a woman coming out carrying a child and the woman thanks him and he says something back she laughs at. A scene you do not have the sound for.
He goes in.
You do not go in.
You stand on the far corner across from the shop and drink the bad coffee. You count to sixty in German in your head. Eins, zwei, drei. You are slower at the twenties than you are at the teens. You miss neunundzwanzig and have to backtrack. When you get to sixty he has not come out.
You count to sixty again. He has not come out.
You wait.
He comes out at the eighth sixty with a brown-paper-wrapped package the shape of a book. He does not look toward your corner. He turns left and walks back the way you came.
You do not follow him back. You stay at the corner and let him go.
You have seen what you came to see.
What did you come to see.
The question arrives in your own voice and your voice does not answer. You do not know what you came to see. A man you have slept with in a life you have not told your mother about, meeting a translator, drinking a coffee, buying a book, walking back to his apartment through an afternoon of the city he chose to live in.
He has a life that goes on when you are not in a room with him.
You ride the tram back west. The M10 to the S-Bahn at Warschauer Strasse, the ring back to Ostkreuz, a change you do not need to make but you make it because you want to sit down in a different seat. You are tired in the way following a person tires you, which is a tiredness you have not had before. Your body has been walking and stopping and walking and the stopping was the work.
The line under your shirt sits there. You press it lightly through the cloth with two fingers. The line is itchy. The line is real. You are the one who put it there. The man you followed does not know yet that you put it there. Maybe he will never know. Maybe he will.
At Friedrichshain you get off the S-Bahn instead of changing. You do not decide this until you are on the platform.
You walk to his building. You do not go up. You stand across the street at the corner with the bakery that was closed last time you were here. The bakery is open now. A woman inside sweeps the floor with a broom that is missing half its bristles.
Martin's window is the third from the left on the fourth floor. A light is on. A window is open. You cannot see him.
You stand for a moment. Then you walk to the U-Bahn and you go home to Kreuzberg and by the time you are at your own door the sun is going.
You do not tell him. Not this evening when he texts at nine to ask if you want to come over. Not the next evening, the last one before the airport. You will not tell him. Not because it is a secret. Because there is nothing to tell.
You sleep. Your right hand goes to the line under your shirt without your telling it to. The line is yours. The following was yours.
Day 13 closes. Day 14 is the airport.