Pattern and Forecast (Vol. 4)

This is the fourth entry in a series in which writers give a report on the weather. Any meteorological statements made may range from the personal to the scientific, from observable weather to the felt. Read the first entry, by Andrew Durbin; the second entry, by Amina Cain; the third entry, by Madeleine Watts.

Evening in Berlin arrives by noon. For the five weeks in November and December that I lived there on an apartment swap, I found myself surrounded by sopping dark—a dark that clung to the mishmash of buildings, parks, snaking canals, bars, apartments, galleries, and Stolpersteine. Kafka wrote in his diaries: “All things possible do happen, only what happens is possible.” That’s weather, and it’s the weather in Berlin, where evening always ticks with promise. More beer, more dancing, more of everything. On brighter days, clouds were flecked with pink and orange light at their downy trim, the stuff of Renaissance backgrounds in scenes from the Crucifixion, but mostly morning and afternoon alternated between the humdrum colors of winter: pigeon’s feather—white spruced with mute blue—and wet cement. Night was starless: a Sachertorte of sky.

I drifted about town for the first few weeks, wrote to friends, read, ate in a cafeteria housed in a grocery chain at the end of my block where, once, I ran into Heji, a friend from New York, who seemed surprised to hear me say I enjoyed the boiled meats. Days often thinned to rain, and a faint mist hung across the whole of the central European plain for most of autumn, or at least the part occupied by Berlin, a city both schismatic and ever new. It huddles in the crater of its past, but signs of the post-war split between Marshall Plan capitalism and Soviet socialism are fewer and fewer; the 29^th anniversary of the wall’s fall occurred during my stay without much fanfare—and so, the last century continues to fade to black.

In my first days, I thought I might have made a mistake in committing to the swap for so long. I worried my writing days (I had come to work on a book) might be derailed by booze and boredom, nights at Würgeengel (that’s Exterminating Angel, pace Buñuel), Möbel Olfe, Bar Lugosi, Victoria Bar, and Café Einstein. I also spent too many hours thinking up ways to waste my day, whether by shopping or walking the parks, only to end up nowhere, or in the dark. I read diaries and novels and wrote in my notebook. I drafted emails to friends back home—some were sent, others not.

I wrote to Masha often from a gay bar on Mehringdamm....