Londons Künstler ziehen scharenweise nach Berlin. 2006 kommt auch Ben. Mit Anfang dreißig bastelt er noch immer an seiner Karriere; Deutsch spricht er nicht. Er hofft, dass das letztlich egal ist und recht bald verliebt er sich in den Künstler Markus. Sein Handeln und sein Blick auf die Welt sind vor allem von seinem Sinn für Ästhetik geleitet, dennoch landet er als Quotenmann in einer linken Frauen-WG. Spannungen zwischen seinen Mitbewohnerinnen und Druck vom Vermieter zwingen die WG die Wohnung zu räumen und so zieht er unversehens mit Markus in ein Atelier, in einen weit weniger multikulturell geprägten Kiez. Während der Vorbereitungen zur Fußball Weltmeisterschaft versinkt die Stadt langsam in Deutschlandfahnen und Nationalismen, was selbst Ben nicht länger ignorieren kann. Seine alten Freunde aus London, zu Besuch in Berlin, befeuern einige Spannungen in seinem Leben und es wird mehr und mehr klar, dass Ben London nicht nur verlassen hat, weil er ein billigeres Atelier suchte. (Deutsch von Antje Vorwerk)

Last night’s jeans, his red pair, stank as though they’d been used to mop the floor of a bar. Ben fished the scrumpled card out of them, along with several tissue lumps, papier maché; casts of the inside of his trouser pockets – tiny, intimate sculptures. When had he last not been snuffly? He scanned the card for information, ignoring the art work reproduced on it. The opening began at 19.00, it said. This was in half an hour, and now he needed breakfast.
He opened the kitchen door to a wall of heat, a smell of hot metal and burning wood. The Ofen was lit. ‘Good morning, Ben,’ Manu said. ‘Would you like a beer? We have Radeberger, or piss, sorry Astra.’ Heike thumped her and Manu laughed. Heike was sitting on Manu’s lap, her feet resting on the Ofen.
Ben chose to start the day with coffee, not beer. He had never once not had to remove the previous person’s grounds from the espresso pot; a privilege reserved for people who made coffee after him.

‘I hope you didn’t hear us arguing,’ Manu said. ‘She drives me crazy. Such a princess! I knew it was her who broke that plate. She tried to pretend it was Julia, but Julia was at Uni the whole time. And Julia would have told me; she has respect. When I finally got it out of Heike I was furious.’
Ben nodded. He had indeed been woken by the shouting, his bladder about to burst, his forehead hurting like hell. He had no clue what they had been saying – or rather screaming – but the rage in their voices had cut right through to his room, through a thick duvet, two blankets and a sleeping bag. Some pots and pans issue again, favourite plates and hated cups, broken, lost, or not washed up; broken hearts, broken promises, soiled expectations, mountains of unscrubbed frustration, misplaced affection.

Markus grabbed a beer mat and started scribbling his Handy number on it, so Ben did the same. …
Over the weekend Ben fingered the beer mat often, sometimes with the phone in his other hand, but didn’t ring. Best wait a while. Judicious spacing was needed, like Poussin placing a column or Mondrian marking out a black line. Late Monday or some time on Tuesday would be about right.
In the meantime they’d all been invited to see Heike on stage at her college, just in case, as Manu muttered, there was any chance she hadn’t had enough of their attention already.

The sun had deigned to put in an appearance and he finally felt like there might be some joy in walking around before it sank again. A lot of the pavement gunge had melted and he stood against a wall in the sun for a while. He could actually feel warmth, and soaked it up like a lizard. Moments from the night came back. Ben and Markus were both people who cared about their clothes. Without them they were in scary territory; the language and forms were unknown, but beautiful, the communication creative, the forms original. Ben was now bound to this man’s body. Sex changes everything. And the changes were arguably for the better; someone had demonstrated that they wanted him. The experience had erased Ben’s frustrations – at least for now; but he would need it again or the effect would wear off. The smell of thawing dog poo was suddenly too much and he decided to take action. He’d been stupid to get all jealous of an artist whose work he really liked! The thing to do was engage with the situation. They had similar proclivities; they might get on.

Lucky he had made an effort; the lights were bright and the crowd dressy – for Berlin – with a high faggot quotient. But there were obviously students and younger artists like Ben there. Markus had referred to the place as ‘Mathilda’s’ and yet it was officially known as the Matthias Hillmann Galerie. Any confusion about this discrepancy was cleared up at first glance. The gallerist was much in evidence, a big old whoopsie with screaming specs. Markus was nowhere to be seen, but the three graces, Chloe, Roger and Astrid were there. They were focussed entirely on each other, but Ben dodged behind a sculpture to save them the trouble of ignoring him. The work consisted of slender plywood screens, abutted at right-angles, full of apertures jigsawed out at heights which related to Le Corbusier’s anthropometric concept of the modulor and the Indian system of Chakras. At any rate it was good for avoiding people who were avoiding you whilst still keeping an eye on them.

Ben knew he would have enjoyed being an artist back then, buddies with Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Carl Andre, knocking out sculptures with simple, repeating forms, wholly clean, pared down and free of sentiment but in a recognisable style. He stood for ages looking at Andre’s copper quadrants, laid out on the floor, butted up next to each other in sheer enjoyment of the squared grid they formed together. ... The whole thing was so sublime he wanted to lie down next to it and make himself as square as he could. What made it so beautiful was the exclusion of everything which didn’t fit, pure order, no messy edges and complicated misfitting awkwardness. Which made it all the more of a shame that this Fick geezer hadn’t spent more of his ill gotten gains on a thorough refit of the space; it still had a post-industrial, rough-and-ready look to it. To enjoy minimalism properly you needed a polar background, all extraneous details and colours wiped out and washed white, all surfaces smooth and free of clutter.

Markus’ homing instinct found them the nearest run-down local, where they could drink several beers for the price of one from the gallery bar. Does he see me in terms of quality or quantity? Ben wondered. Am I just one more copper square? Soon he would have to nail him on that. But best not rush. Just as Donald Judd knew how much space to leave between his rectangles and whether to stop after five, six, seven or eight, all would become clear. They would have to meet up again soon anyway because Markus now owed Ben; while Markus had said going the pub would save ‘us’ money, it was Ben paying. Markus was waiting for a dole check or something, announced that the drinks would be on him when it came. The first beer anaesthetised Ben’s insecurity; by the second they were doing what they clearly both loved: analysing the interior of the pub and the other guests and slagging off people who weren’t there. In return for the Beuys anecdotes Markus suddenly wanted stories from London.

He borrowed Heike’s CD player and dug out his Stereolab collection; the task called for driving neo-krautrock.
Ben was not one of those lightweights who needed masking tape to paint a straight edge without straying across the line. He’d learned how to colour in without going over the edges before anyone else in his infant school. And much fun was to be had by beginning with broad, gestural sweeps before homing in on the edges in a pincer manoeuvre, like a map of the final stages of WWII. He closed in on one colour with the next, narrowing the white area like a combine harvester eliminating corn – metaphors for painting colourfields abounded – till yellow met Burgundy and blue met yellow and white was shut out. He stood back against the white wall and drank in the colour, the cadences, collisions and dissonances. The shapes did indeed both loom forward and retreat back, pushed and pulled, rhymed and alliterated. It had been worth it.

Next day they returned from their rare night at Markus’ place to find a ‘situation’ in Ben’s kitchen again. No-one was around but someone, presumably Heike, had taped a lifesize trompe l’œil picture of the nineteenth-century cupboard her friend Martin was to create over the current one. Printed in colour, its twirly knobs, pilasters and dark oak panels enlarged across twenty or thirty A-4 sheets, the two-dimensional vision of what was to come completely hid the coffee browns of the East German piece. ‘It’s like an image from Baudrillard’s Simulations,’ Markus said, ‘some kind of post-modern nightmare.’ Ben put the kettle on, fished two teabags from his secret stash of ‘proper tea’ and watched as Markus appraised the A4 sheets. They had been aligned with malign precision.

They nestled on Ben’s bed and Markus went through each page of his dog-eared book, explaining his sketches. Good ideas, Ben reckoned, although they would be pricy to realise: installations involving huge sheets of glass and mirrors, spaced divided and veiled, video projections and monitors obscuring more than they revealed; all recognisable forms were blurred, erased, hidden behind reflective surfaces, distanced and mediated, or looped repetitively – a blank mass of deferral – but such images as could be perceived, were all of Markus himself. It was all about perception, the body, space, identity. Markus certainly gave the impression he had something important to say. Had Ben read much Lacan? No, but some of his best friends had. ‘I can see you need space to develop all that,’ Ben said.

There were many cheap internet-and-phone places in the neighbourhood, which was known amongst other things for this. One was on the way to Carnations. They were given adjacent pens. Ben winced at the keyboard; a brown tidemark rounding off the corners of each key, highlighting the letter with filth. You could compare these places to laundrettes, but laundrettes were clean. The computers were grubby and used – in the sense a toilet is used. If the flimsy partitions and worn carpet weren’t seedy enough you just had to think of the all the verbal outpourings that were flushed through these machines each day. It was like a busy bus-station lavatory.

It was no longer so cold you scurried from one hostelry to the next, so they bypassed Carnations, walked down to the canal and sat on a quiet bridge smoking. The canal was scarily wide, nothing like the narrow British canals you felt you could almost leap over. But it was peaceful, lined with overhanging trees, planes and weeping willows. There was still no sign of a leaf on any of them, a mesh of bare blank branches shot through with sodium light. A posse of swans were sleeping on the water under the bridge, necks tucked under wings. How such regal creatures deigned to live in this city escaped Ben. How did they remain clean, when every other white thing here – snow, his t-shirts – became smutty? But at least the swans looked happy. ‘I’m worried about Heike and Manu,’ Ben said.

‘Hello, I was wondering if you’d seen Manu.’ The women looked amused, as if a puppy had wandered into their kitchen. One of them gestured out of the window. ‘All the way down there, behind the yellow van and you’ll see her.’ As he approached the corner of the site, he heard banging hammers and revving power tools. An extension cable led him to Manu and a colleague, who were constructing a tiny, two- storey hut using old doors and sleepers. They were working on the steps which led up to the first floor. He couldn’t see what it was for; there could be only space to read or meditate up there. And it wasn’t clear what went on in the room below, which seemed just to be a cupboard. Then Ben realised this was ‘the smallest room’, as his grandmother had put it. He no longer wanted to think about what was in the lower half.

Ben had envisaged being able to ignore the World Cup entirely, not granting it the dignity of his attention. This was not to be. ... Nylon flags, footballs, cigarette lighters, baseball caps, scarves, condoms – all decorated with the black, red and yellow of the German flag. And Ben was, of course, alive to this chromatic reduction. A colour scheme was an event. Clusters and swathes of black, red and yellow, in stripes and hard-edged colourfields, on surfaces hard and soft, firm and flexible, manmade and natural, all united with the three colours. ... These were the colours of aggression. Yellow, red and black; bombs, blazes, blindness; ferocity, fire, fear; danger, defiance, death. Philistines like his father, who failed to appreciate the art of minimal decisions, did not grasp that there was a syntax to the juxtaposition of three or four colours. They became a sentence, the colours predicating each other. A wasp sting hurts. A candle left alight leads to a fire. An incendiary bomb kills.

Once their plane had finally landed he took his position among the taxi drivers and tour guides holding signs, the waiting grandparents and fidgeting partners, and unfurled a flag, rolled round a length of dowelling. He had stitched it together from fabric in colours seldom chosen for flags, pink, purple, lavender, mauve and fluorescent green, rather than the nationalist primaries seen on the flags hanging in the airport to welcome football fans from around the world. Its design was a pattern of diagonal stripes and semi-circles. Ben waved it to and fro, keeping a straight face, as if anyone wondering what on earth it symbolised needed to get out more.

‘Welcome to Berlin madam,’ he said as Sophie rounded the corner in thigh-length boots, her hair tied up in a flourish above her head and a wheeled suitcase in train. Mikey, Oliver and Elias brought up the rear as if attached to it, with Soph pulling them on a lead. ‘What time do you call this?’ Ben said to them. ‘I was wrenched from my bed for nothing.’ ‘No doubt sleeping with the enemy,’ Ollie said, ‘bunking up with the Boche, having it with the Hun. Where is Gerry anyway?’ ‘His name isn’t Gerry,’ Ben said. ‘You’ll meet him shortly.’ ‘I’m sure he’s very nice,’ Sophie said. ‘He’d better be after what they did,’ Ollie said. ‘Have you not seen Hiroshima mon Amor?’ Ellie said. ‘We might shave your head, strip you and banish you to a cellar.’ ‘Phwar,’ said Mikey. ‘Can I get some of that?’ ‘According to the guidebook it can easily be arranged,’ Ollie said.

The Information Centre was closed. It was always closed on Mondays. ‘We knew nothing; it was a Monday.’ Ollie said.
Mikey climbed up onto one of the blocks and Ben began photographing him. He stepped from one block to the next, looking down at them; Ben shot him framed by vertiginous charcoal expanses, the sky bright behind. A guard came over and ordered Mikey down, pointing them to a sign at the edge of the memorial about appropriate behaviour. Many things were banned: loud music, jumping from one ‘Stele’ to another (it was unclear if stepping across them was permitted), dogs or other pets, smoking or consumption of alcoholic beverages, bringing or parking bicycles or similar equipment into the monument.
‘So in fact we’re the criminals. Now I get it.’ Ollie said. ‘It’s us who’s guilty.’

Soon after he left the bar, he heard a huge roar, which this time didn’t die down again; it grew louder, was joined by whistles, car horns and every other possible kind of noise- making. The tense calm of the last hour had erupted in a storm of euphoria. The ‘right’ side had obviously won, presumably Germany. There was now no safety, anywhere, from the deluge of exuberance. The streets were filled with ecstatic faces, making as much racket as they could. How could this banal either/or outcome make these people so effing happy? And was there any need for them to make such a fuss about it? Ben kept his head down and stomped on, avoiding the intrusive smiles of the revellers. Now he really was miserable. He got as far as the river, from where he had a great view of all the fireworks going off all over the city – how nice! He didn’t really have the energy to walk any further. He was now tired, drunk and hungry and wanted to go home and sleep.