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hannahssimblr · 3 months

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Chapter Ten (Part 2)

I have never known cold in my life like the cold of the early morning in Berlin. It’s the kind of morning that feels like the sun will never rise. The cars still have their headlights on as Claire and I haul our bags up the stairs of the U Bahn station and out onto the street for the first time. It is seven in the morning, and it is not beautiful here.

We huddle together beneath a massive BAHNHOF NEUKOLLN sign and peer through the grey in search for a familiar face. The metal barriers all around us are lined with chained up bicycles overlapping each other, and there is careless graffiti on the shutters of the electronics shop across the road from us. It isn’t open yet. Nothing is open yet, including our hostel, so we stand with our backs against the frigid metal of a cigarette machine and wait.

He’s like an otherworldly spirit when he emerges from the fog, bundled in a big black coat, breaths turning to clouds that absorb into the thick mist around him. He raises a hand in a wave, and his smile is the brightest thing for miles.

“Good morning.” Jude says. “I’m sorry I’m a bit late.” He bends down to hug me and I immediately feel my lack of sleep. I could almost sleep right here on the cushiony softness of his puffer coat with his cheek somehow still warm despite the weather.

“So this is your home.” Claire says as he gives her a hug, and he shrugs nonchalantly. “Looks like shit this morning, to be honest. It literally couldn’t be uglier, but welcome to Berlin.” He offers to carry some of our bags, and we let him. We head down an identically bleak street that’s lined with Doner Kebab takeaways, phone shops and tiny supermarkets, all closed. Jude gently tugs on the back of my collar when I try to cross the road.

“You have to wait for the green man.” He says near my ear.

I stare at him incredulously. “I know, but there’s no cars coming.”

“I don’t make the rules here.” We stand then, stupidly, waiting for the lights to change as not a single car passes us by. Then finally, it does, and we can cross.

“That was ridiculous.” I say. “What’s going to happen if I just walk? They’ll throw me in jail?”

“No, worse.” He says. “An old German woman will materialise and start scolding you from her kitchen window. Happens literally every time.”

“Hm. So they’re pretty rule bound here.”

“You’re telling me.”

Jude lives a twenty minute walk from the station in a large brutalist block of flats that is identical to all of the other brutalist blocks of flats that flank it on all four sides. I wonder how he can ever remember which is his, or how many times in his first few weeks he found himself wandering around trying to recall which block he walked out of that same morning, because I can certainly imagine that for myself.

“Oh, cats!” Claire comments as a pair of tabbys appear from the vegetation around the base of the building, one of whom starts winding her slinky body in between Jude’s ankles and mewing rather impatiently at him while the other sits watch from a short distance away. He leans down to scratch her head. “Nothing for you right now.” He says to her. “I’ll come back later on.”

“You feed these cats.” I say. Not a question, a fact.

“I’m the crazy cat man of the neighbourhood.” He admits. “But they just love me, they must know that I have a kind soul.”

“It’s because you feed them.” The tabby gives up on him and approaches me next, mouth open in a startling maw, her meow the cat equivalent of a screech. “Jesus.” I whisper.

“It’s just how she sounds.” He explains. “She’s actually a well tempered cat.”

“What’s her name?”

“I call her Main Street, because that’s where she mostly hangs out, and that one.” He points his thumb toward her noticeably more timid pair, hovering by the wheels of a parked car. “That’s Ten Feet Behind.”

“Because she’s always-”

“Yeah, ten feet behind the other cat.” He grins with chattering teeth. “Let’s go inside, it’s so damn cold.” With stiff fingers he punches in the code for the apartment and leads us into a hallway stuffed to the gills with more bikes. There is no lift, which means we have to carry our things up the stairway, winding around and around, hoping that each landing will be our last, but we keep going up until the seventh floor, where finally, mercifully, Jude lays our bags on the floor and fumbles in his pocket for his keys.

“Jonas is probably still asleep.” He warns us. “So let’s try and keep it down until he surfaces.” He gingerly opens the door to his apartment and lets us inside, and the heating is on, and my body is flooded with the kind of warmth and comfort that makes me want to curl up on that inviting green couch in the living area and fall asleep for hours.

“You two can sit down wherever.” Jude says, so we peel our coats off and leave them hanging in a closet by the door. “I’ll make something for us to eat.”

“Oh? Food?” Claire says, as she and I sink into the soft cushions of his couch. “You don’t have to make anything.”

“I’m hungry, I’m sure you’re hungry, we can eat.”

“Okay.” She says, immediately convinced, and I wind my arm with hers and rest my head on her shoulder as my eyes flutter shut with contentment. The apartment is so nice. It smells good. There is nice art on the walls that looks as though it was picked out by someone with a good eye, rather than the usual landlord special back in Dublin, which consists usually of some ancient picture of a hideous, jowled dog that was likely dug out of the bottom of a bargain pile at a car boot sale.

I can’t believe that this morning I was in Dublin, and now I’m in a different country. I’m really in Berlin. I’m in Jude’s house. He’s cooking breakfast. It feels like something that would only happen in my head, but I keep opening my eyes to make sure that it’s real, and finding out that it is. After a while I peer over the back of the couch, and he has his back to me, whisking eggs in a bowl, and I read the spines of the cookbooks stacked neatly by the hob. Ottolenghi. Samin Nosrat. Grace Young. There are no books with unsophisticated titles like One Pot Wonders or Meals in Minutes! His are specific cuisines. Middle eastern food, Japanese food, North African, Italian, Chinese, French. I prop my chin on my hand and regard him with fresh interest. “I didn’t know you cooked.”

He glances over his shoulder at me. “Of course.”

“I mean that I didn’t know that you cooked cooked, as in, more than just improvised tomato pasta and shepherd’s pie from a container.”

He chuckles. “I seem like I enjoy food from containers, do I?”

“Not particularly, I just never thought about it.”

He takes a serrated knife to a hunk of soft bread and cuts off several thick slices. “I’ve always liked to cook. I had to do it a lot when my parents were too busy to make dinner for my sister, it all kind of fell on me, and I grew to like it a bit, I suppose. Luckily. There’s not much that beats the taste of something you made yourself. When it’s good, I mean.”

He casually drunks a slice of bread into the beaten eggs with one hand and fires up the gas stove with the other. “Weird that you never knew that about me, honestly.”

“I suppose it never came up.”

“Hm. Well, surprise.”

The door from an adjoining room suddenly opens, and I glance around to see a very broad, bare chested man emerge from the darkness of his bedroom. “Hello” He says groggily. “What smells good?”

Claire, who had drifted into a shallow sleep before, regards him suddenly with wide, shocked eyes. He’s wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, looking like a viking, with blonde hair the length of his shoulders and messed up on one side to suggest that he sleeps on his right.

“Oh.” He says when he notices us on the couch. “Hello ladies.” He steps in front of us so that we’re just about eye level with his crotch and extends a hand for Claire to shake, then me. “I don’t need introductions. I know that you’re Claire, and you’re Evie.” He points his thumb at himself. “I’m Jonas.”

Jude peers at him from the kitchen. “Yeah, they’re pleased to meet you, Jonas, can you put trousers on please.”

He shrugs nonchalantly. “Okay! If you want.” and goes back into his room.

“Oh my god.” Claire says under her breath. I can’t tell whether she’s appalled or impressed, but she’s wide awake now.

Jude starts dealing out plates at the counter, and we get up to take our seats as he carefully places a slice of perfectly golden French toast in front of us. He takes a bowl of fresh berries out of the fridge, along with some sort of mascarpone cheese cream, and slides a jar of maple syrup across the counter into my waiting hand. “Enjoy.” He says, and stands on the other side of the counter to eat his the way that Italians drink espresso, al banca. He stabs his fork into the centre of the toast and swipes the knife across it. He’ll have it all eaten in ten seconds, but Claire and I will savour every delicious mouthful.

“Sorry about the berries.” Jude says eventually. “They’re off-season.”

“Oh God, no, we don’t mind that.” Says Claire. “It’s actually so good, this is unreal.”

“Absolutely.” I agree. “This is like something you’d get in a restaurant.”

“Calm down, lads, it’s just French toast.” Says Jude, but the tips of his ears have gone red.

When Jonas reemerges, dressed, he takes a plate from the cupboard and starts unceremoniously shovelling food onto it, and then stands barefoot in the middle of the kitchen eating it like a wild animal. I side eye Claire to gauge her reaction to this, and just like I expected she’s horrified.

“What is everyone going to do today?” He says, mouth jammed with bread.

“No big plans.” I tell him. “Maybe see the sights a bit, wander around. Look at the shops.”

“Oh, have you got costumes for Saturday night?”

“Sort of. Halfway, maybe. We were hoping to find something here.” I glance at Claire and she nods. I have the shoes I want to wear, but nothing else. She hasn’t got a single item, so some serious shopping is in order.

“There are so many places for thrift shopping.” He says with a wave of his fork. “You will find something great.” He prods Jude’s shoulder with his fork. “Are you going too?”

“Nah we’ve agreed to meet up in the evening, I have to go to the studio today, unfortunately.”

“Work work work.” Jonas says with an eye roll. “I hope you get a good job after all of this is finished, or it will all be for nothing.”

“Agreed.” Jude says flatly. “Who are going as, by the way? I mean, costume wise” he says to Claire and I then, eyes flitting back and forth between us, and I smirk at him. “We’re not telling you.” We don’t know. “We’re going to surprise you on the night.”

“Fine, then I’ll surprise you too.”

“Well I’m expecting to be impressed.”

His smile falters. “Don’t hold your breath.”

“You mean you’re not overly prepared?”

“It was a difficult theme.”

“It’s not difficult.” Jonas informs him. “It would be difficult if it was, I don’t know, 1930s soviet politicians, but it’s 60’s celebrities. It really couldn’t be easier.”

“Okay.” He shrugs. “Just mostly men were just wearing variations of the same suit.”

“Not true. You could have been a beatle, or a rolling stone, any of those groovy woodstock men, you didn’t think outside the box.” Jonas turns and winks at us. “My costume is good. Wait and see.”

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