Aileen Bassis
Winter Begins in Berlin
And when the cock crowed, My eyes opened; It was cold and dark, And the ravens croaked from the rooftops. Wilhelm Muller lyrics to Die Winterreise
I’ve been coughing ever since I came to Berlin, where the smell of burning sausage is on every corner and cigarette smoke blurs crowds outside bars. Standing, eating currywurst, thick red sauce drips on my shoe. U-Bahn cars screech above pollarded trees reaching for a dimming sky, where afternoon grows colder until night pulls a tight grey stocking over layers: gilded palaces cathedrals museums; an old world panoply of insouciant parlors, vacant cellars, stairs hiss hallways bend under whispers. A wrinkled world spews a scribbled palimpsest onto emptying streets where a green light blinks, Apotheke & a honeyed tenor voice drips Schubert’s Die Winterreise from an iPod player on a counter beside a clerk. She glints eyes brown as copper pfennigs above smudged mascara wings. Her face is snowy with powder dusting lines as secret as a labyrinth & she hands me a bottle that reeks of ivy leaf & pine mold with a label that I can’t read & all through that cold long Berlin night, I’m coughing, sipping syrup from a tiny stolen spoon.
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