living in the garden

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 11 years ago

Last night I slept under my own roof for the first time in four months. So to speak. It’s a beautiful sublet in a groovier part of town, bristling with bars, but very quiet behind the city wall of our foremost apartment building. I’m in the back, windows facing the trees, in a place with high ceilings and old DDR coal stoves clad in green and corn-coloured ceramic tiles. Downstairs is a baby with lusty lungs. A black and white cat sleeps in the courtyard. The owner of the flat spends her summers living ‘in the garden’ just outside town, which sounds idyllic, and has rented me her keys, her crockery, her weird hot water system, her dreamy curtains. Turning off the reading light I felt momentarily assailed by ghosts and spirits, a movement in the darkness, a sense of swarming: all the people who have lived in this old building in the past; and it occurred to me this was my first night sleeping out, beyond the palings, in the saddening wilderness of old-time East Berlin.