By Oranienburger Straße, East Berlin

Our first night in Berlin for some much needed alone time as a couple after 90 days in the UK with our kids — needed it so bad, we considered Iceland — after a couple drinks in a burger bar reliving our days with mint juleps on the front porch recalling what we can, we stop at a Berliner Mexican cantina with candles in the windows and Bienvenidos signs, Aztec gods with fat tongues in headdress, think we can toggle from bourbon to tequila (look at us!) but choose beer and tap water instead, greeted in English and shown to a table in the dark, order in a mish-mash of German and English to our dark-skinned waiter we assume is Mexican but realize by his accent he’s Indian, they all are, the young men in black T-shirts and ponytails hovering in that formal Indian way nodding and smiling, hands behind their backs clasped — and it seems ridiculous, how they serve our plate of nachos with such panache, the jarred jalapeños, the clotted cheese — and behind Dawn, there’s a woman sitting alone listening and watching me talk about Catch-22, how they were fighting the Nazis in the air but the Nazi bit is downplayed and that’s probably deliberate because it could be any time or place like Vietnam, or now, some pushy man comes into power and prides himself on anti-intellectualism — and when I ask for the toilet I misunderstand the waiter and he has to repeat himself, ‘downstairs,’ and down I go into the dark of the Mexican music, the strings and horns and the marching troubadours, but there’s another figure coming right at me from the opposite direction and I collapse at the bottom of the stairs frightened by my own reflection in a wall-sized mirror, dropped at the foot of a door that says Herren, the center of a ceremony with Aztec gods glaring down at me cross-armed and frowning — and inside the loo, a series of infinity mirrors that fan out forever and dice my head in symmetrical blades make me think I’m not the man I used to be, who thinks he can mix beer and liquor and foreign languages and get away with it, who can get back up and do it again.

Back at the hotel Rezeption I’ve stopped caring how good my German is and blurt out <<Kann ich etwas eis für ein bottle Sekt in unsere Zimmer haben>>, which is fraught with all kinds of problems but I make hand gestures to pantomime a bottle of wine going inside a bucket of ice that looks like I’m stroking myself and he gets the picture, phones the restaurant next door — and because we’re in Berlin they have Wi-Fi so we spend some time in bed checking our respective feeds, realize after a time we’ve started disappearing from one another and shut down the devices, and it’s just been too long since the two of us have had uninterrupted time to talk and be together, which is really my favorite thing, and when the Sekt is ready we pop it, Dawn says she’s sorry for falling asleep and shudders when she dreams she’s tripped over the dog, and I say it’s OK and write, and finish most of it, go to the window looking for the last of the moon but it’s hard to see with the lights and the buildings in the city, and say goodnight, and get back up to do it again.

Categories: musings, travel

Tags: anti-intellectuals, Berlin, Catch-22, creative nonfiction, humor, travel, valentines day