Tomorrow Berlin Read Online Free PDF

An argument that was no more serious than all the rest decided their separation.
    As a final twist of the knife, Victor told Tobias what he had inside him, what he’d given him; that he’d marked him with a branding iron. He’d done for him.

V
    Armand and Emma often took the metro together. In the morning she’d come and collect him from outside his mother’s on the way to school. They’d kiss on the flip-up seats, cut off from the daylight, among the other passengers. It was their thing, in the tunnels, in the corridors or carriages, as though they were divorced from the rest of the world, lit by the neon lights of the tunnels.
    They drank coffee, too, at Le Rouquet on the boulevard Saint-Germain. They smoked together, they kissed, and felt contempt for other people. They were better than them. They’d found each other; they would never part.
    In ten years, if they were no longer together, they would meet, on 6 June at 8.15 in theevening in front of the church on the boulevard Saint-Germain.
    She had a white coat. Armand wore ties and ripped jeans. They were falling in love. He was sixteen and she was seventeen.
     
    Armand no longer wanted to be apart from Emma; he left his mother’s without saying goodbye to live in the little apartment in La Muette. He had passed the first part of his bac and she’d got the second, the real one, which launches you into adult life.
    They stayed in bed, in the little two-room in La Muette, happily fucking and smoking, under the quilt. Sometimes they sat on the tiny zinc balcony.
    Armand would go out for a few hours to cadge smokes from strangers, then he’d come back with his pockets stuffed with loose cigarettes. They ate pasta or rice. They didn’t need money, since they were in love, in the little two-room apartment in La Muette on the floor above Emma’s grandmother.
    That summer they went to a luxury hotel in Deauville for five days. Emma’s father had received an invitation and gave his daughter four nights in the hotel as a gift. Emma and Armand felt proud arriving at the hotel reception. They laid waste to the minibar and room service.
    In the afternoons they went walking on the beach, like the old couples they despised.
    Sometimes Armand went down to the hotel bar alone for a gin and tonic while Emma was asleep. He liked the thought of how he looked. When he wasn’t with her, he observed himself living, and he liked his image. He was in love, he was handsome, he was young, too young to live the way he was. He cultivated his contradictions, like the ties with ripped jeans. That’s also what he loved about Emma, she wasn’t predictable. She was one of those people you can’t work out immediately. She epitomised in his eyes the out-of-place middle-class girl, the modern version of corrupt aristocracy. He liked not being able to fathom her, with her little-rich-girl habits and semi-bohemian lifestyle. He liked those paradoxes, talking about anarchy in the bar of a luxury hotel in Deauville; the idea that you can feel comfortable with ordinary people because of your ideas and the upper classes because of your manners; a permanent disjunction that means you don’t belong anywhere. You are unfathomable, ‘never explain, never complain’, but have an innate ease. They lived like no one else.
    Armand enjoyed seeing this paradox deepen. His school friends couldn’t understand how hecould live with a girl, adults were baffled too, seeing them living like them. He felt as though he wasn’t part of society even as he walked around in it. This feeling made him joyful beyond measure. He was observing his own existence.
     
    When they got back from Deauville, they had to leave the little apartment in La Muette. Armand found an attic in rue du Quatre Septembre. They stayed there two years, joined at the hip, covering the meagre rent thanks to their fathers. Armand bought a scooter, a Honda Scoopy SH50, with red plastic trim. At last he was free; he had a room, a scooter and a