I went to Berlin at the end of the summer at the beginning of which the Ukrainian girl had dumped me citing "artistic differences". She was right, and a very competent painter and latterly conservator. I've long been in thrall to the Slavic face. It was a disastrous mini break. Her mother had arranged her a modest hotel accommodation as a birthday present but, not wanting to give me the wrong impression, of love or lust or anything resembling it, I supposed, she refused to let me stay in her room, instead had me fork out for a hostel in Mitte in which I left a small grey holdall of underpants, shirts and - tellingly - sheaths, that would return through customs resolutely untarnished by anything like use, and drank somberly in the smallest hours of night on the roof terrace. She would bring me continental breakfast items wrapped in napkins from the hotel buffet. I could then still recall vividly the feel of her cunt like a garment around me. As we walked about the city I tried in vain to make a case for a simple coupling, liberated from the norms, emotions and expectations of the messy relationship we had left back home, but she was unconvinced, my argument from purported indifference quite undermined by my persistence and my uncontrollable teariness.
I'd spent much of the academic year preceding it considering the broader cultural and philosophical context of Wenders' Wings of Desire, and was moved to great silence at the foot of the Victory Column, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, finally to despair at the conglomerates chrome redevelopments of the Potsdamer Platz, altogether more hopeless than the immense devastation that was in Homer's stark odyssey to a single armchair through the war-levelled topography of memory.
We shared a small bottle of brandy in her hotel room one evening, before I returned in the darkness to the hostel, and lay resting on her bed, my head gradually angled until in her lap, where I carefully inhaled to smell the cunt through her trousers, felt the scarred skin of her arms, so close, I had thought, to us being at it that when moments later I was once more in the street I felt afraid, as though just awoken, and harshly.
When we first got together I'd been another person. We watched Tarkovsky in Russian on VHS tapes with cardboard slipcases which she translated with a slight delay, until such time as the beauty of the images overcame her and we listened only to them.
She talked like a lover about the city of Odessa, the dewy clit of the greater Slavic snatch. The sandy beaches, temperate waters, the heat, the women, all tight stonewashed denim and large t-shirts, watermelons from street vendors piled five feet high in red genital grins. Leaves me elbow deep in her memories until they become my own, until our break up some half a year later takes away both my love and also my memories that always were in fact hers. I participated in a performance piece by one of her Slavic friends, playing a spinning top.
I used to attend these huge barbeque events her parents would have at their palatial dwelling in Milton Keynes, attended exclusively by Russian speaking geniuses lugging great buckets full of chicken wings around slathered in marinade, bowls full of layered salad white with mayonnaise, the stench of boiled egg and beets on the air. The last one I attended, this a year after the split, I slept through, from 2pm until the next morning, in a heap of denim in the guest room, and then left without goodbyes with a salami sandwich on black bread that had been left in the fridge in plastic wrap. In the midst of exams I’d driven to Edinburgh via Newcastle two nights earlier in a Citroen Berlingo, hadn’t slept, sniffing coke all the way, then got wild drunk at a homecoming party before making it to Marylebone for a nauseating Easybus trip, sweating profusely and ruined of stomach. It was the most of horrendous of all the horrendous trips I had to their house, lusting over the Slavic face of my girlfriends mother and looking at her knickers in a laundry pile in the utility room.
I'd spent much of the academic year preceding it considering the broader cultural and philosophical context of Wenders' Wings of Desire, and was moved to great silence at the foot of the Victory Column, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, finally to despair at the conglomerates chrome redevelopments of the Potsdamer Platz, altogether more hopeless than the immense devastation that was in Homer's stark odyssey to a single armchair through the war-levelled topography of memory.
We shared a small bottle of brandy in her hotel room one evening, before I returned in the darkness to the hostel, and lay resting on her bed, my head gradually angled until in her lap, where I carefully inhaled to smell the cunt through her trousers, felt the scarred skin of her arms, so close, I had thought, to us being at it that when moments later I was once more in the street I felt afraid, as though just awoken, and harshly.
When we first got together I'd been another person. We watched Tarkovsky in Russian on VHS tapes with cardboard slipcases which she translated with a slight delay, until such time as the beauty of the images overcame her and we listened only to them.
She talked like a lover about the city of Odessa, the dewy clit of the greater Slavic snatch. The sandy beaches, temperate waters, the heat, the women, all tight stonewashed denim and large t-shirts, watermelons from street vendors piled five feet high in red genital grins. Leaves me elbow deep in her memories until they become my own, until our break up some half a year later takes away both my love and also my memories that always were in fact hers. I participated in a performance piece by one of her Slavic friends, playing a spinning top.
I used to attend these huge barbeque events her parents would have at their palatial dwelling in Milton Keynes, attended exclusively by Russian speaking geniuses lugging great buckets full of chicken wings around slathered in marinade, bowls full of layered salad white with mayonnaise, the stench of boiled egg and beets on the air. The last one I attended, this a year after the split, I slept through, from 2pm until the next morning, in a heap of denim in the guest room, and then left without goodbyes with a salami sandwich on black bread that had been left in the fridge in plastic wrap. In the midst of exams I’d driven to Edinburgh via Newcastle two nights earlier in a Citroen Berlingo, hadn’t slept, sniffing coke all the way, then got wild drunk at a homecoming party before making it to Marylebone for a nauseating Easybus trip, sweating profusely and ruined of stomach. It was the most of horrendous of all the horrendous trips I had to their house, lusting over the Slavic face of my girlfriends mother and looking at her knickers in a laundry pile in the utility room.
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