Blacklines

Blacklines – Bar Mama, Berlin

 

In an old and youthful city, a bar sits on a corner, a bar that hopeful drinkers do not see on their way to brighter haunts, in a part of town that had rejected hipster usurpers, but now finds its tenements refurbished one by one. Once the establishment was a shambles neighbour to squatters, now legitimate and tolerated but unchanged. The bar is stocked with ales, gin, and Riesling wines that speak of river valleys the patrons of that establishment would never visit. Some hold glasses with their names on, written in the stain of fingerprints. Felix stands behind the bar, a record player on a shelf behind him turns vintage tracks every night and the patrons know each scratch. He places the stylus on treasured circles of polished vinyl to grunts of recognition. If there is a word for his role in that cave of addictions it could be barman or landlord, but he likes owner because the title shows it is he who possesses the bar and not the other way around.

One night as June began her progress the regular cohort circled and settled upon their perches. Sticky rings of lost beer and downward breath pooled beneath glasses of lager, mixer to the distilled sweat of that close evening. They were three and Felix when a woman entered. She smiled at them, black painted eyes and a worn leather jacket. Confident and precise she spoke the word needed to order a glass of Riesling, which she downed in a single draught. The men exchanged glances as she turned from the bar in a fluid movement, and strode into the front saloon.

Even in daylight lamps were lit against the gloom. Hardly a shadow of the lowering sun penetrated the filthy windows. Tobacco tar within, city carbon without, the glass hung streaked, keeping the summer in the street. Above the woman’s head, nicotine thread veins haemorrhaged dirty saffron droplets through the plaster, which long ago reached saturation, in a slow toxic rain. She circled the ripped leatherette chairs and peeling veneer tables and gazed around till she settled on one wall opposite the window. The space before her was blank but for the unique pattern that coated every surface, painted there by generations of self-poisoning artists. Eyes flickering she tilted her head as if regarding an intricate work of art. She sighed, pulled a marker pen from her jacket pocket and with a balletic gesture ran its tip in a swift deliberate line up the wall. Black ink shone on the dun paintwork. As soon as this was done, she turned and left the bar.

“Ay, Felix,” called Jan, who witnessed the act of vandalism. “Look at this.” 

The landlord shuffled in and frowned at the wall. 

“What’s she done that for?” Felix said, “Weird thing to do.” but as he reached to scrub the mark away he noticed a detail in the unbroken line. Caressing the edge of the sweep of ink hovered a  tiny bumblebee. Felix scrutinised the insect.

“Ah, what’s the harm,” he said, shaking out his cloth. “I got to decorate some time anyway.” 

“Why?” said Karl. “It don’t need it. Anyone who comes here comes because the place never changes.”

Felix muttered under the lyrics of an Einstürzende Neubauten song, which spoke of mountains and sanctuary.

The next evening was Wednesday. A thunderstorm splattered road dust up the steps, and in the broken rays between clouds scaffolders shed new filth from the rooftops into the street. City crust blew through the doorway into the loose crevices of nylon armchairs. Felix shoved a broom at the front step, blinking away dusty tears, and turned, squinting from the falling sunlight.

The woman came up shortly after, wearing a damp cotton dress, her black hair tied in a knot on her crown. Wangling the marker pen between short fingers she ordered a glass of Riesling and again drained the glass in a single swig before going to her line on the wall. Vinyl grooves sang in the speakers, the woman stood visible as a swaying silhouette. In the saloon she gave a little hum, just audible over Iggy Pop rasping from the from under glass, watching the city slip away. There was a skip in her step as she emerged and saluted the four men. Without pausing she bounced in time to the music out of the door and away down the steps.

Felix wandered into the front room. There he found a second black mark running parallel to the first, curving to trace a path up, finishing to form an intersection - two rivers meeting. Felix squinted, searching along the new line. Near the point where a triangle formed, he found it, the shape of an old key growing sideways from the thick black ink.

“She’s taking a liberty.” This from Oscar and the others rumbled their agreement.

“It’s no worse than what’s underneath, and maybe better.” said Felix “I’ll leave it. Got to paint soon anyway. It’s overdue.”

Sunset on Thursday she came again.

“You need not think you’ll get free booze for your graffiti here, Miss,” Oscar said, as she knocked back her wine.

“I do not speak this language,” she said in another. But Felix held up his hand.

“Shut up, Oscar,” he said and poured her a second measure.

The woman gave a bow, shook her head, and spoke the word, pronounced like a ripe apple hitting the ground, they all knew as meaning ‘one’.

Her saloon, lamp-lit in the afternoon, was empty. The men turned, waited, Karl dared to follow her, hands occupied with beer and pocket change jangling in time with the scratches in the record. After a moment she left, pen tucked behind her ear, serving them all a wink from one bright circle eye. A weak chorus of farewells reached out but fell silent at the door. The men waited for a heartbeat, then crowded in to see the latest amendment.

A bold C shape had appeared above the other marks. None of them could see anything strange about the new line, and none could make out what the image was supposed to be. Karl thought she was goading them, Oscar suspected performance art was to blame. She was unfathomable in any case.

Later, in the smallest hour between locked door and stale pillow, Felix grappled with tidying the saloon. Lights on to flush out fallen cigarette butts, he hauled a stool from under a table, turned it upside-down, then paused, tilting his head to follow the fresh ink up and around. There it was, an easily missed addition. Hooked on the curve as if an earring, hung a tiny rune. The symbol sent a shiver up the twist of his DNA, and a great grandfather leaned over his shoulder to whisper ‘Gesund’.

She came each day as June bloomed. Graffitied in the rancid paintwork, her masterpiece grew. Felix and his patrons found a jumble of symbols hiding in the lattice of black lines. Hummingbird and hieroglyph, leaf and flower, wheel and crossed blades. Somewhere they found a smiley face, elsewhere a light bulb.

On the day of the latest sunset the ‘foreign woman’, as Oscar called her, with lifted hem of her white silk dress, mounted the steps and saluted them all with her marker pen.

They waved back, knowing she was not able to speak German, and respectfully made space for her to take a ready glass of Mossel wine. She grinned and lifted the drink in a gesture to each man. but this time took the glass and went into the room where her artwork hovered in its human-sized space. They followed and watched, no longer hiding their fascination. 

“Is it finished?” said Felix.

“Must be. She looks happy with it,” said Karl.

Above them blazed a human stripped nude to what lies beneath the skin. The paths of a nervous system, of every touch we could ever know, perfect and faithful; a map of sensation decorated with the sigils of our cultures. And the bumblebee shivered with the taking of its breath.

“Wait!” said Felix. The woman raised an eyebrow and paused as Felix ran back to the bar and came through with a tray of clear schnapps shots. “We should join the toast.”

She nodded with reverence to the clink of five glasses. The ritual made her smile. Threads linked them now, each man, the woman, and the traced figure, in that soiled pit, on the eve of the highest day of summer. Pen behind her ear the woman called a toast in her foreign speech that woke the room like a woodpecker alarm. She raised her glass and the men honoured her salute. But then she turned and flung her wine against the windowpane. Felix starred as she rubbed the accumulated filth away with her hem of silk.

“Don’t do that!” he said. “Don’t dirty yourself, Miss.”

Taking the shot glass from Felix saying the words they all knew as meaning ‘come’ she skipped out and into the street. They followed her, glasses suspended mid-toast. Outside she dowsed the same window, rubbing away the city’s smog and tire dust so that a perfect square of sunlight fell on the black wall figure. It glimmered, white as chalk. Baffled in the light the men watched her dance away, singing like a carousel, and turn the corner onto Lenaustrasse.

“Prost,” whispered Oscar, and the others echoed.

Felix’s hands trembled as he poured himself a schnapps to mark the end of the smallest hour. The cambered stairs to his flat above the bar squeaked beneath his feet. Pulling back the bedclothes Felix lay down and let darkness pass over him. Forgetfulness is the drunkard's curse, one of many. Felix would often forget to lock the door, or empty the spill trays, or turn off the amp. In his tiny bathroom that night the cold tap ran forgotten into the half-blocked sink. 

The sun had risen at 4:43 on the earliest morning of the year. When, many hours later, Felix woke in the familiar wreckage of a hangover, he cursed and frothed and made himself small on discovering the nocturnal flood. Across the floor and down the wall the waters had washed deep into wood and plaster, and into the pigment of the black figure.

At 18.47 a narrow parallelogram of sunlight set its bright foot down on the sticky saloon floor. A brilliant shape that widened with the angle of the sun, with the passage of our spinning planet, rising to fall upon the nervous system in a perfect square. And in the accidental soil, a reaction took place. Nourished by that watered loam of filth, there came a quickening, a germination.

When the men gathered that evening, work behind them and ahead like shackles at their necks, Felix confessed his forgetfulness. They shook their heads as one and in procession filed into the saloon to see what damage had been done. But each man stumbled as they entered and gasped at what they saw there alive in the brown plaster.

“What...What was in the pen?” said Karl.

“Seeds?” said Jan.

Oscar gave a hoot and gawped at the figure.

 “Seeds?” he said, taking a step toward the miracle on the wall. “But the lines weren’t bumpy.”

Felix, steady hand held out before him, moved toward the figure, until his fingers brushed the white petal tips of daisies. 

Each nerve, each inkblot node, each symbol hidden in the tracery had sprouted a flourishing plant, all reaching in perfect horizontal sprouts toward the sunlight. At the heart spread a beech sapling. At the gathering of nerves, at armpit and crotch grasses radiated with carrot tops, and sweet pea tendrils and fern spirals. Even as they dared each other to step closer the frosty purple of a cornflower unfolded in the verdant face, a bright circle in the stretching meadow that bloomed in celebration of the sun.