angel Bowie

Two hipsters compete in a Berlin bookshop, the day of David Bowie’s death

Hipster One: I know, I mean I was like twelve when I heard ‘Changes’ for the first time.

Hipster Two: I know, it’s like, I just… it’s like I had a personal connection. You know? Like I…

Hipster One, abruptly: Yeah, everybody seems to be saying that.

Hipster Two, hastily: I mean, not that I felt it, I mean like, this morning I was kind of like, Wow… But ~

Hipster One: But now ~

Hipster Two: I mean it hasn’t ruined my day or anything.

I am standing in the window alcove with a volume I saw from the street and have lifted out of the display. This conversation, with its switches from having to care most to having to care least, seems to me exhausting. I think about the beautiful and dignified Iman, Bowie’s wife, whose day the news presumably has ruined. Hipster One, who owns the bookshop, calls across the room.

Hipster One: Kann ich helfen?

Me: O nein – danke, ich kann es selber lesen.

Thank you, no… I can read it for myself. I smile at her lest she think I am being less playful than rude. I am reading a journal called Elsewhere, about place. It is a first volume, compiled by a bunch of homesick expatriates and published locally in English. To get here I walked past a stream of graffiti saying if you want to talk English, go to New York – Berlin hates you. Variations included Not for yuppies and the more melancholy anti-gentrification slogan Wir bleiben alle, written on a building which is about to be mass-evicted and made over for higher-paying expatriates. It occurs to me that Bowie himself was one of the pioneers of this gentrification.

My companion, who made the signage for this shop, comes in and the shop owner realises belatedly why I look half-familiar. She switches from the formal Sie to the friendly du and cozies up, saying: Habt ihr einen guten Rutsch gehabt?

And did you both have a good slip? a good slide? This is how Germans picture their entry into the New Year. After Christmas they start wishing each other einen guten Rutsch, as though all the nation held its breath ready to lurch down wildly careening into the new frontier, meatier, balder, bolder, breathlessly. We’ve arrived!

I buy the journal. We walk on. My companion guides me round a brownish squelch coiled on the stones. I look closer. “That – is just a big fat brown hair scrunchie.” He laughs. “And yet…”

I am pushing my bicycle, I don’t want to risk a bad slip, a bad slide. I tell him about the dog mess I found on my first visit to New York, wrapped in a flattened red singlet bag and shaped exactly like the drawing of a heart. I wrote about it online: I dog poo New York. On the river a circle of ice has formed round the perfect hole where someone threw a chair, a microwave, a bicycle, and the hole has frozen over. Bottles stand drunkenly frozen in place where they bobbed, and a few Christmas trees. Where the water has dissolved into liquid are a dozen ducks cosily chatting on the curving edge of remaining ice, which resembles a beach. It is so cold the tops of the buildings disappear but my breath makes shapes on the air. We are all smokers today. Or maybe, dragons. Breathing ice.