Gaps and Ghosts

Walking home this afternoon through Ben Gurion Strasse, I was thinking that coming to Berlin as an Israeli is like discovering a secret crush: all this time you were living your life, your usual concerns and obsessions, and someone was watching you, thinking of you, caring for you from a distance. At Shlactensee on Saturday, (I did not got to nearby Wannessee, I only wanted to swim) I asked two brainy looking girls to watch my bag while I went swimming in the Lake. Sabine, with better English, explained how it's hard for Germans to be critical of Israeli policy; how she went to hear Amira Hass speak and bought her book; how when she visited Tel Aviv she was ashamed to speak German in the street.

I told my roommate how much better informed people here seem about Israel (than in the States); she said, well, of course, it's Germany! All the time when Germany was the black hole you didn't go to, I didn't think of all the Germans reading the weekend papers about Israeli weddings in Cyprus, watching Waltz with Bashir dubbed into German in the Park, and meeting Amira Hass. I know the romance metaphor for Germany will break down very quickly if you think about it too long, but I want to think about all our intimate Others, all our fun house mirror images. I want to triangulate: not only Israelis and Palestinians, but Israelis and Germans.

At a Shwarma place, my second day here, feeling out of place, I exclaimed to the Palestinian falafel maker, "Oh! We're brothers! Cousins!"
He said, "no, no, we're not."

When I left Tel Aviv for Berlin, in high heat and light, everyone from my hairdresser to academic advisor said, "Oh, Berlin, you're so lucky. " Maybe they already knew the pleasure of becoming a fetish object.

J. grew up on the East side of Berlin, tells me about the underground trains using the same pre-war tracks but going straight through the station, not stopping; the ghosted underground train stations of East Berlin are the places and stories that live inside me here, and I don't stop, I keep traveling through.