But she hears judgment in my voice. “Marina does with her body what Marina pleases, got it?” she says. “Your Allah or Jesus or whoever the fuck doesn’t get a vote.” She’s quiet for a moment, deciding whether I’m worth the trouble. Then she looks out the window. “Here we are,” she says.
We transfer to a trolley that runs down the center of a wide boulevard. The streetlamps catch the buildings in gray light, showing off their crumbling, communist-era glory. “They don’t look much better even in the daylight,” Marina says, reading my mind. “Gnily zubie.” Rotting teeth.
A few blocks of the same rumble past the window before Marina tugs my sleeve to get off. I follow her through the massive concrete buildings and realize the only way to tell them apart is by the unique face of each one’s decay. Sagging ears here, a listing awning-nose there. Hers is the one with the spray-painted RAUS AUSL?NDER—Get out, foreigners—next to the entrance.
There’s no lock on the building’s door. You just have to know the trick to turning the lever: push and lift, then turn. The elevator’s broken, Marina says, and has been forever. I follow her up the stairs to where she lives on the sixth floor. There’s a TV on loud in one of her neighbors’ apartments, and the toxic reek of crack or meth or death hangs in the hallway.
She locks the door behind us, then gives me the grand tour. The tiny kitchen, the tiny bathroom, then the living room where there’s a plaid couch, sagging low in the middle, and an old swiveling recliner. Beyond this is a small bedroom with two single beds, one on either side of a window. The one on the right is sloppily made and has a Hello Kitty throw pillow on it. “That’s Marina’s,” she says. The one on the left is drawn tight and has an Orthodox crucifix hanging over its head. “Lyuba’s,” she says. “My roommate—she’s a cam girl.”
“A cam girl?”
Marina nods. “Also a piano teacher.”
*
I crash down hard on the couch, exhausted beyond exhaustion, and although I need a shower, and although I need to brush my teeth—Jesus, has it really been since Paris?—I simply can’t move, not even enough to take off my jacket. I close my eyes, but all I see is a kaleidoscope of colors and shapes and faces and things. I try to shut off my ears, too, try to ignore the noise from the city outside, but Berlin refuses to shut up. It’s just like New York in this way, always there, starved for attention even when you’re trying to sleep, making itself known with distant sirens and rumbling trucks and buzzing sodium lamps.
And just when it’s disappearing. Just when the world’s going silent. The click of a lighter and the rolling fug of marijuana smoke. I open my eyes and see Marina, dressed now in a tattered T-shirt. She’s curled up in a chair, bare legs folded up against her chest, brown ceramic weed pipe held lazily in one hand. She’s looking at me, watching me, like I’m an animal in a zoo.
Probably a minute passes, the two of us just looking at each other. Finally, she lights the pipe again and inhales. “As a rule, I don’t ask,” she says with clenched throat, then exhales. “But you’re not the usual kind of runaway.”
I’m too tired to understand, and as Marina laughs at the confusion on my face, she gestures to the room, but really, to all Berlin.
“How is it you end up on Marina’s couch?” she says. “Daddy hit you? Boyfriend get you pregnant and want to marry? I can help you with that.”
“No,” I say. “I’m just—looking for someone.”
She shrugs. “Lots of someones here.”
“And you?” I say. “How did you end up here?”
Marina taps the pipe over a plastic ashtray. “Marina doesn’t ‘end up’ anywhere, novichka. Marina chooses. Father runs away, mother marries a bus driver who likes little girls, so, pffft.” She flicks her fingers, sending her old life skittering across the floor. “Off I go, nach Berlin. Four years, this July.”
“Congratulations,” I say, the word coming out as a question.
She refills the pipe, carefully pressing the fresh weed into the bowl with the butt of her lighter. “Anyway, Marina needs only Marina. Just as Sofia needs only Sofia.” She thrusts the pipe at me. “Want?”
“No thanks,” I say.
“Suit yourself,” she says, putting the pipe to her mouth. “How old are you anyway?”
I try to remember the age on the Sofia passport. “Twenty-two.”
She laughs, coughing a geyser of smoke at the ceiling. “Twenty-two my ass.”
“How old are you?” I ask.
She wipes spittle from her mouth on her T-shirt. “Seventeen,” she says.
*
I close my eyes until Marina thinks I’m asleep and wanders off to bed. For a while, I try to imagine Marina’s life, what it’s like to fuck for money as if that were no big thing, to have no family and not give a shit, as if that were no big thing, either. Life as an endless war of all against all, and ein wenig Gras is what you get if you win.
But as I wonder what it’s like to be Marina, I wonder if maybe she isn’t right. If it’s true that Sofia needs only Sofia, then why am I here at all? Silly to continue an epic, pointless quest to find a father who’s not even my biological father. A father who lies to his not-even-biological daughter for her entire life. A father who killed my mother with a wrong turn because he refused to be an accountant or mailman like all the others.
This connection to him is just imagined. A child’s fantasy. And, like Marina and Sofia, Gwendolyn is too old for fantasy. Grow up, Gwendolyn. Let him go. Children bury their parents. It’s the way things work. You already did it once.
Morning is starting in Berlin. The light—soft blue and yellow fighting it out—finds its way to my eyelids. I turn over, bury my face in the couch cushion, but trucks snort angrily past on the boulevard. Morning deliveries of strudel or whatever Berlin trucks deliver. And somewhere, in some other room, a clock is ticking.
*
When I wake, Marina is gone, replaced by someone I assume to be Lyuba. She’s a wispy blond, curled up in the same chair Marina had sat in, smoking a cigarette and reading a Bible. She is doing so languidly, beautifully, leg draped just so over an arm of the chair, hand with cigarette just so, draped over the other arm.
I check my phone: three in the afternoon.
“Where’s Marina?” I say.
“Don’t know,” she says.
“I’m Sofia,” I say.
“Did I ask?” she says.
“Mind if I take a shower?” I say.
“Do. I can smell you from here,” she says.
In the bathroom, I have to duck under improvised clotheslines crisscrossing the room, heavy with drying panties and bras hanging by paper clips. But the sink and shower are surprisingly and spectacularly clean. I steal a little toothpaste and brush with my finger. Then I take a shower, letting the water scour the terror and exhaustion and fear down the drain in tan swirls.