Bebelplatz

The old man was back. She knew he drank black coffee with shaking hands, and often let loose a cough that sounded like his very bones were rattling. Twice now he’d brought a paperback with a withered cover and laughed out loud at the words within, his jangling bones seeming to play a merry tune. She liked imagining what he was reading; not Chekhov, unlikely to be Celine. No, she decided, maybe it was Kafka making his eyes crinkle.

He rarely looked at the constant stream of tourists ambling across Bebelplatz; he just read, occasionally scratched words in a palm sized notebook, or gazed around the square with an expression she couldn’t quite interpret. Several times this week though, she’d looked up to find him staring straight at her.

That child has more words than she knows what to do with, the old man shook his head. He’d seen her a few times now, claiming the easterly bench with her red winter coat and assortment of moleskin diaries. He liked imagining what she was writing – the tiny diary was probably for ideas, the spiral one for earnest poetry, judging from her intense expression when she scribbled in it. Probably angst-filled soul searching or paeans to the beauty of moonlight, he chuckled as he sipped his black coffee.

And why does she need so many pens? He’d watched her furrowed brow as she tried to select a colour, pale hand hovering over the different inks. Did she reserve blue ink for tales of melancholy, red for stories of seduction, green for impishness? He tipped the cup to his lips and sucked back the thick dregs at the bottom. As if that’d pull the words from her pen any differently. But he tilted his head around a passing tourist to check which colour had called to her today.

He looked about seventy. She had the purple pen resting between her teeth; tales of scorn were tapping at the lid. He was too young to have witnessed the night of the book burnings here, where the flames would have illuminated the rabid faces of the Nazis and the Sturmabteilung as they tossed the words onto the fire. Maybe his parents had told him stories of the smell of burning paper carried across the square to Unter Den Linden, of the ominous clouds of smoke that rose high into the Berlin night.

But he had his own stories, she knew that. She could tell by the tilt of his head, by the secret smile tugging at his whiskers as he sipped his coffee. Maybe tomorrow she’d sit on his southern bench, casually glance over, and say something. She hoped his German wasn’t too fast; she’d only been in Berlin for two months but her language classes were flowing, and the words pouring out of her fingertips made her forget to eat in her eagerness to pin them down in ink. Maybe she could write about him?

The flash of red almost made him spill his coffee as her coat unfurled a few feet from him. Why was she on his bench today? If those relentless words started coming out of her mouth instead of her pen he’d have to find another seat for his musings. He’d seen them like her before, these passionate young ‘writers’ with literary Germany in their hearts and the next big novel loitering in their pen, lured to Berlin to sit in Bebelplatz and inhale the words still left floating on the traces of smoke they tried to imagine. Probably had a Literature degree in the Classics or worse still, Linguistics! He could feel a cough building in the depths of his chest. There was no point analysing Pushkin if you’d never laughed at Vonnegut; why do they never know this?

He quite liked this one though. She drank her coffee black and fed the birds from shredded cakes of gingerbread she kept in her coat pockets. He angled his eyes to the spine of her book and read “Die Gebrüder Grimm: Rotkäppchen” with a smile. Ah, so she was learning German….the Grimm Brothers’ “Little Red Riding Hood” was a good place to start, he decided. She could stay on his bench; for now, at least.

“Would you like some bread to feed them?” She’d practised it in her head twice, the verbs sounded right.

The old man smiled softly and spoke slowly as he reached out to the burnished flakes in the waxy paper bag.

“You have a lot of words.” The pigeons tumbled over each other as his hand moved towards them.

She sat up straight, sun catching on the thick folds of her coat and the curls falling down it, and closed the Brothers between gloved hands with a thud. “I love to write here! I feel so inspired…...the words just fall out.”

He gazed at her fondly and switched to English, trying to make his message kinder. “Just because you can, child…..doesn’t mean you should.”

No sound came from her parted lips but her brow had delicate furrows of consternation.

“Ink is like blood, girl….it leaves stains. We should think about the stains we want to leave this world, and leave only those that truly speak our voice.”

She sat back heavily against the bench, and stared around Bebelplatz with an expression he couldn’t quite interpret. She tried to picture the flames in the darkness of that night, the stench of burnt paper, the poison that took decades to wash clean from this city. She thought of the stains that generations of writers had tried to leave, and the malevolence that had tried furiously to scrub them from the page of the world, here, in this square.

Her words would always come; she knew this. But maybe they needed to brew a while before spilling, before being stamped into fonts and flung into the world. Some words could be kept for her alone to nourish instead of editors, to curl into being without the constant need to show and shine; words for nobody’s eyes but her own.

She turned to the old man again. She could see he was concerned he’d offended her, and she gave him a gentle smile. “I can see that, yes…..But sir, I may not have to send them out, but I do have to get them out.”

She dipped her hand into the gingerbread bag and closed her fingers. “Do you understand?”

She heard his bones play their song as he laughed, and said in German for her, “I do, child. I do.”

And when she sat cross legged at home that afternoon to write him out of her, she closed her eyes as she reached into her rainbow of pens. It didn’t seem to matter which colour her words were painted in this time. Sometimes, the ink could choose itself.

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Tags:

bebelplatz, bellmusker, berlin, celine, chekhov, grimm, kafka, rotkäppchen, stain, voice, vonnegut and writing