Ostkreuz
If the passengers were to speak with their tongues, who knew what kind of indecencies would emerge?
Occasionally in Berlin I pretended to be someone else, inhabited another name, history and language. I sometimes played the Dane, said my name was Tycho, sharpened my vowels and spoke slowly, throwing in some words I learned from the Danish redhead I used to visit before I went down into the u-bahn stations at night. I was 23 and broke and rode around almost every night because I didn’t know what else to do at that time and there were also fewer plainclothes ticket inspectors working at night, so I didn’t have to worry that much about getting caught and fined. The underground was where I could pretend to be someone else, or no one at all, take a nice window seat, repeat lines in my head from poems I was reading to learn the language—Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts. Die Niemandsrose— disappear into the true civil discourse, a language of glances, stares, glimpses between passengers, those sinister leers, eyes half hidden behind strands of hair or splayed fingers, a vast semiotics I planned on compiling into a lexicon.
If the passengers were to speak with their tongues, who knew what kind of indecencies would emerge? They might yell out, “Warum muss der verdamnte Sohn betten? Warum?” like the slouched guy in a trenchcoat who drags empty bottles in a sack up and down the car. Or they might scream like the skinheads on the platform with their dogs and studded denim vests and knife games. Or even resemble the woman’s voice over the train speakers each time the doors opened—Einsteigen bitte. All of our breath exhaling at once over the tracks, the steam of it swirling around the station clocks that stop at die Stunde null, past the stench of the goatmen, the ones who huddled on the far benches with their bellies flopping over their belts and piss stains on their paints, who never seemed to drink enough to fall asleep even with forest of bottles around them, the ones who stared at you like they were repossessing all the solace and delusion you’d accrued in a short life. Maybe some of them were finally lingering home, but most of them would eventually get dragged out by the polizei when the stations were locked up. That’s when they made their way to the bigger s-bahn stations above ground, the ones that were opened all night for the regional lines.
One of the goatmen sat next to me on a bench once and asked me what I was writing about. I told him it was a book about the stations. He looked at me like I was complaining that my feet hurt or telling him a dream I had. It was like what Borges said about the authentic gaucho poets, how they didn’t concern themselves with ornate descriptions of the pampas because the landscape was too familiar for them. The goatman had a story for me to include in my book. It was about the jeans he was wearing. Back in ’86, he said, he’d seen them on a guy at Ostkreuz and decided to follow him home and break into his apartment when he was gone and steal them. Back then, he said, they were one of the few pairs of jeans anyone could find in the East. Looking at them I wondered if he hadn’t taken them off in the twenty years since then: they were hardly even blue, more like a soupy faded brown with his long underwear exposed behind the shreds. The guy he stole them from must’ve also been a few sizes smaller because he could barely move his legs when he stood up to piss over the rails.
To him and most of the passengers the stations were places to be discarded. To descend was to erase any vestige of awareness, but the more the stations were ignored by others, the more I thought they could teach me. It’s like how the more we deny that something is true, the truer it becomes, or the more we point at the sun, yelling out, “Look! Look! There it is! Can you see it?” the brighter the moon shines behind us, or the more we call for peace, the hungrier we are for war, and the more we fear, the more we’re unwilling to confront our overwhelming desire—that’s why Orpheus had to turn back and look at Eurydice while she was still in the shadows, he was too scared to see her in the light because you run from nothing as fast as you run from the truth, and the most ingenious scientific achievements and systems of philosophy are little more than elaborate escapes from it. We rush through stations, those non-spaces, indifferent to their nuances, their traces, without knowing that soon they’ll become our homes, the last places where we could expect to survive.
While the incoming headlights shined along the tracks I reassured the stations with one breathless prayer, “Eberswalder or Kastanianalle or Hermannstraße, your tunnels may resound with only a flood of hurried steps now, but soon you shall inherit the earth! The goatman, the flower sellers and die antisozialistisch Alten shall no longer be alone to nurse their alienation,” each one its own floating continent, and the more expansive my lexicon got, the more I realized I wasn’t compiling a book but drawing a map of the entire Netz:
How the warm orange tiles of Rosenthalerplatz formed an illusory barrier against the cold, how the imbiß owner plays “Big Iron” from a portable radio while he sucks on slices of grapefruit, the wrecked and ravaged of Kotti limping around columns, sifting towards the escalator, a bandaged ear, a woman with track marks who squats by a trashcan, faces scratched, bruised, crutches tapping across the floor, scars, busted teeth, a girl with pink eye holding a piece of string and staring at magazines behind the kiosk window with images of tanned celebrities in bikinis standing on balconies draped in bougainvillea on some tropical island, how birds nest in the rafters of Warschauerstraße, beating their wings against the murky skylights and the drag queens prance before the kaleidoscopic pastels of Kurfürstenstraße, masquerading as Teutonic princesses with their bleached hair or shimmering black wigs, bedecked with shoulder pads and dainty purses and rings, led up the stairs by men in suits with clenched jaws and sunglasses, the accordion player of Heidelbergerplatz sitting on a nylon fold-up stool, her gloved fingers blurred over the keys, empty pill bottles scattered among the coins in her case, and the circle of flutists at Görli twirl under the ironclad lamps while a terrified dog seethes between them, the apocalyptic mural at Savignyplatz with its fallen airplanes and ashen steeples, hungry faces taking cover in the roots of trees, Werden wir gedacht gemacht wir chiseled into brick, and how one night I was sitting in Richard Wagner Platz and saw the infamous ghost train barreling through without stopping, a faceless conductor at the helm, the cars empty, some lights inside flickering, like the ship from The Flying Dutchman, a vessel in pursuit of some vengeful fantasy, eternally charting its course without docking at any harbor.
Aboveground on the Ringbahn (also maybe an oblique homage to Wagner since the line resembles more of a casket with its corners cut off than a ring) everything was different, all the stations turned into one unbroken gray platform running beneath courtyards of flashing windows, billboards, walls with overgrown vines and tunnel cables caked in dust. I rode it when I wanted to get out of the cold and because no matter what time it was, there were never any ticket inspectors sneaking in to catch us. Even though it traced the city’s periphery, the Ring wasn’t like its amniotic sac, but more the substance of its soul, the outside become center.
All stations belonged to the Ring whether they were on it or not, and if it weren’t for the Ring, the city would’ve collapsed into the void long ago. East, West, the swampy groves of Dahlem Dorf and Onkel Toms Hütte, the plattenbau of Lichtenberg, the auslanderbehörde up north in Westhafen where I got interrogated Stasi-style at a long table when trying to get a visa, the abandoned airport at Tempelhof, the abandoned spy station at Teufelsberg or the abandoned theme park near Plänterwald, the Ring was like what a theologian once wrote about God: an infinite circle whose center was everywhere and whose circumference was nowhere. Riding around with my feet on the seat, my head against glass, the monotony soothed me, like watching a clump of hair spinning down a drain, except I was the clump of hair, and the drain was spinning around me in a dim panorama slowly unspooling into blindness—these were the stations of the Ring, not of the Cross, Via Circulum, not Via Crucis, not a way of sorrows, but a way of flight, and instead of burial being the last stop, it would be transcendence.
Looking down the aisle I see a pregnant woman with her fingers locked across her belly, leaning to whisper in the ear of the man next to her, another woman without eyebrows standing by the doors with an unlit cigarette between her lips, gazing at the tip of it, her cheeks sucking in and out, the lighter weaving between her knuckles; the man in overalls streaked with paint who sleeps across from me with a wiry mustache and scabs on his arms, or the one with icy blue eyes, who taps his fingers on his knees and looks over at a woman more than half his age who pulls her skirt down over her legs, the nail bed exposed on her index finger; a girl in a shimmering hijab unties her brother’s shoelaces while he listens to headphones with his eyes closed; and the amateur conductor, who I’d seen more than once during my night rides, in his polyester suit, nervous, looking at his watch, pulling out timetables from his coat, not that he needs them, because he has them all memorized, the glorious Netz imprinted on his brain, all the endless combinations of rides, the ersatz lines, and the idiosyncrasies of each station could be recalled without hesitation.
Mostly ignored but sometimes met with laughter, he stands in the aisle, his hair sweaty, calling out to his small captive audience, “Next stop, Gesundrunnen. Remember, it’s been raining a lot these days, so the steps, they get slippery, so please, be careful. Just last week, eight people fell, one resulted in a fractured arm. If you’re transferring to S9 going to Bernau, you have ten minutes till the next train, but if you’re heading on the S1 for Oranienburg, you need to hurry, you only have…,” looking at his watch, “Oh, two minutes! Two minutes! But please watch your step at the top of the stairs,” then he yells out to the stationmaster on the platform who’s turning the switch key, “Hey Jörg, I’m glad to see you! You look spry as a fox, Jörg,” and when the doors close, he turns back towards us, says “Jörg had hip surgery last year, and Gesundbrunnen wasn’t the same without him, trains were backed up all the way to Wedding, it was like a carnival. He’s a good stationmaster, Jörg, one of the best. The trains have always been on time except for when his wife was sick—a captain must lose his heart before he can lead his brigade.”
The man with scabs on his arms sitting in front of me opens his eyes and looks over at the amateur conductor, then looks over at me, tucking his hands under his armpits and lifting his foot up onto the heater. In his eyes was the type of look that could be described on almost every page of my lexicon in one entry or another—the look of affected indifference—because you may despise or desire or speculate about a stranger sitting across from you, but never, never for a moment show them that you care about them.
Above all, reveal nothing of yourself while riding along the seamless platforms of the Via Circulum.
What was the lexicon really other than a way to learn more about this mask of affected indifference and the face behind it? What I wanted was to be one of those angels in Himmel Über Berlin, the ones who could pass between walls and glide over the city, listening to people’s thoughts, the stories they tell themselves, like the father in the beginning of the film who carries his child down the street and says to himself in voice-over: “The consolation of raising one’s head to the open sky and seeing its colors illuminated by the sun in each person’s eyes…” or the woman on the bicycle who says to herself, “At last mad, at last I’m redeemed. At last mad, at last I’ve found peace. At last, this guiding light.” Most people’s inner voices probably don’t sound like that—they were probably thinking about what tv show they were going to watch or what they were going to eat when they got home or scrutinizing their reflections in the window, but at least hearing those thoughts, whatever they were, would end my tiresome speculations about them based on a taxonomy of glances and gazes no matter its authoritative reach.
The film, for all its thrill of transcendence, gets it wrong about angels in the end. The main one wishes he could become mortal and fall in love (like an angel would ever want to wipe their ass or subscribe to the laws of gravity). Wanting to be what you’re not always seemed like a specifically human trait. By showing the angel’s mounting dissatisfaction with his winged-ness, it implied that having such intimate access to other’s thoughts would eventually become torturous. It couldn’t be any worse however than listening to my own thoughts or imagining what others thought based on a taxonomy of glances and gazes. At least one could always choose whose consciousness to listen to, like turning a radio dial or floating through some digital interface, and if all I wanted was silence, I only had to flap my wings, but as a wingless mortal, I could only guess what the guy with scabs on his arm was thinking as he looked at me, and later, when he walked up to the amateur conductor, who was telling us that the next stop was Prenzlauer Alle, and pushed him out of the way while he exited the train. And watching the amateur conductor, I could only speculate about his thoughts when he stepped off at Ostkreuz and pulled the wad of timetables out of his coat again, unfolding them and folding them back, comparing the frozen station clock to his wristwatch as more passengers rushed past him.
Sometimes I’d fall asleep on the S-bahn and wake up to her severe voice again, “Einsteigen bitte,” or when an empty bottle rolled into my foot. Once I woke up to a goatman with bushy eyebrows, holding a small umbrella, laughing in the seat in front of me. He looked like the same guy who was sitting next to me on the station bench at Ostkreuz the winter before, the one who told me about his stolen jeans. This time, though, he wasn’t wearing jeans but a pair of nylon track pants with clawmarks on them. He tapped his skinny finger on the glass, pointing outside to the summer holiday cabins, the allotments called ‘Freie Stunde,’ with their rows of meticulously pruned gardens and swinging trinkets under the early light, gnomes heralding earth gods with plastic staffs, flags risen high, some emblazoned with the black eagle. Jäger on his breath, he said something while he looked out the window and for once I was grateful I couldn’t understand.
Lee Tyler Williams has published a novel, Leechdom (New Plains, 2015), a novella, Let It Be Our Ruin (Arc Pair, 2020), and many stories in magazines, some of which were nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Wigleaf Top 50. A radio piece of his can also be found on NPR.
