The Reader Berlin - Streets of Berlin

Ashamed to say I listened for footsteps for a moment – celebrity is a blessing & a curse – & then realising I was being foolish, I turned on my special Volksempfänger which they issue to some Radio people & which can pick up stations all across Europe instead of the limited range of the normal ones. It is tuned as ever to Fécamp Radio International (24 hours, beats Zeesen & Hamburg & I must say their jazz is better than mine). Some spidery harpsichord piece by Rameau wove delicate webs across the gloom & I took to the balcony to admire the skies, which is where you find me now.

The booze glows warm in my belly & I almost fancy I can hear someone knocking gently on the door. No, it must be Schmidt upstairs on his nocturnal perambulations. A voice muffled in the hallway. & I do not want to turn down the radio & now Rameau moves mystifyingly into Al Bowlly’s fine cut of “Blue Moon,” cutting thru the static & white noise of the hundreds of miles between the French transmitter & me here on my balcony in old Berlin. You saw me standing alone, without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.

Dear Al. Sweet fellow & a fine singer who I last saw in Watford, ’37. I hear he is back in London now, living on Duke Street. May he make it thru this business intact! He would laugh to see me shivering back with my little camp bed in my modest digs which Maria found once upon a time & from which she is long gone & with it the nice Danish double bed she took & hence the camp bed.

I wonder about Jenkins & if we are really here at all & momentarily I rather hope that we aren’t. I shall remain on the balcony anyhow & I wonder if this continual knocking is really here at all & if the early morning birds really are giggling in the bald plane trees. & I watch the blue clouds drifting slowly across Horst-Wessel-Stadt from Lichtenberg & the villages to the east instead. & I write to you, dear Snooper, amidst all of this beauty. Maybe something will happen next & maybe I am even done for. Or maybe like Jenkins I’m really just losing the old marbles & the brain is deteriorating into a parade of marvellous illusions.

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