Tomorrow Berlin Read Online Free PDF Page A

themselves together. A painter, a craftsman, another who called himself a writer. Here’s where wanting to be an artist gets you, a so-called trendy café in the north of Paris, serving cappuccinos and Caesar salads. What didn’t change was the way they made up for it, at theend of their shift, with Picon beer and cocaine. Getting high was a constant.
    They would talk about football or the hot girl someone was screwing. They put powder up their noses, like on the boulevard Saint-Michel, and everywhere else probably. Humanity’s chains made of cheeseburgers and gin and tonics.
    They exploit you, they exhaust you with their brunches and birthday dinners, they make you run with pints in your hands and you become an idiot, a total zombie, in a trendy café in northern Paris: since they came here the painter had stopped painting and the writer had stopped writing, and Tobias was growing apart from Victor. On the other hand, there was still alcohol, and there were still drugs.
    Youth gets crushed one gratuity at a time; time is always out of joint when you get up at three in the afternoon to resume your life. So why wouldn’t they take drugs when life is so dull? It’s their choice, but can you blame them for running a mile from neon-lit offices and luncheon vouchers?
    The only consolation is, you don’t have to set the alarm clock, because at 6 p.m., the shift is back like a crack of the whip, and a day begins that will last until 4 o’clock in the morning. You rush around, you smile, you bring menus and basketsof bread. You work on autopilot, not thinking, and yet you would be almost happy to be there in a so-called hip café in northern Paris – because there are hot girls, because you can listen to deafening music at work, because the customers dress like you. And yet, you’re just a little piece of shit doing their bidding. A jug of water, and as fast as you can. There must be masters and slaves. Is there really a dialectic? The slave serves, the master orders, but then what?
     
    Tobias no longer went to meet Victor at his grey office on the avenue du Maine. He was either working or, when he had a day off – or rest day, if you prefer – he was so happy to be able to do nothing come 6 o’clock that he forgot about Victor and his PR career. It’s harder to be in love when you’re busy. They had to develop new habits as a couple, unlearn the language they’d spoken till then, as though reality, the trivialities of common people, were festering between them and gradually pulling them apart.
    While Tobias was at work, Victor waited for him at home alone. He got bored. At first, he was happy just waiting; he’d fall asleep, leaving space for him in the middle of the mattress. Then he got tired of falling asleep like that, pointlessly. So hewent back to his habits as a single man – talons out, in search of pleasure, in orgy bars.
    He only went to look. Naked, copulating bodies paraded in front of him. Victor masturbated for a while, and then went home, thinking of Tobias. But as the weeks went by, he spent longer in the bars, talking, glass in hand, surrounded by all those taut, muscled bodies.
    His desires banished the image of Tobias, as though his eyelids had made him disappear. He touched the men who danced in front of him, he took them with force, as he used to, slipping from one to another – the strange carnal merry-go-round that keeps spinning till you’re dizzy, until you feel sick.
     
    He caught the bad flu, among all those bodies he’d had. He sensed it. He knew instantly. He didn’t tell anyone, he wanted to omit that from his life.
    He didn’t think about the harm he could do; he continued living as though he’d really forgotten what he had in his blood.
     
    As Tobias and Victor drifted further apart, the months sped by increasingly quickly.
    They had some happy times, of course: a weekend in the country, evenings with friends.But there was no understanding between Tobias and Victor any more.