Extracts from My Free Time,
translated by David Price



Every morning follows the same order: I half wake up, press the button on the telephone and look at the time shown on the screen. I stay in the bed a little longer and slowly, laboriously, I get up, or rather lift myself up to sitting, I hold onto the mattress and slide over the edge into the void until I'm standing up. I then open the door to the balcony and breath in the still charged air from outside. If it's rained and the balcony is wet I stay inside and content myself with looking at the plants, the trees, the fronts of the buildings and the pavements through the frame of the door. If not I survey them from outside, placing my hands on the stone ledge. I say that I look at these things, but it isn't quite true: I am facing them, and my pupils take in reflections, shapes and colours. At that time, at that moment, the distinction is of little importance. I see them, remember them and like me they fall back into place.



At around five o'clock this morning the telephone began to make a sound that it took a long while to identify: a kind of insistent and irregular “ooh-hooing” to indicate that the battery was almost dead. I returned the handset to its station and opened the balcony doors wide. Outside, everything was silent and peaceful except for the sound of swallows and a young couple in the square who seemed as if they had spent the whole night partying. They were speaking and laughing almost without moving, sitting side by side on a concrete cube. I thought it impossible that I could go back to sleep, so I slipped on a pair of trousers and a shirt and went outside to walk for a while. In the light that precedes the sunrise things seem more real to me, more alive. I don't feel the need to form any opinions about them. I looked in the front window of the recently opened French restaurant behind my building and, just across the road, into those of the art bookshop and the hairdressers: everything was immaculate, ready for the day to come. On the triangular lawn in front of the Volksbühne I saw three little shrubs in pots lined up nicely together and, in a neighbouring street, an uprooted hollyhock laid across the windscreen of a van. I then returned to the vicinity of my building and laid down in the humid grass of the square, a stone's throw from the couple who were still laughing and speaking. I lay down, but I didn't sleep, I didn't close my eyes. I listened attentively to see if there was anything within me that wished to make itself known. But no, there was nothing. I heard nothing but the laughs and cries of the couple in the square, the swallows, the morning's first traffic, and I set my sights on a point in the sky until everything around it disappeared in erasure.



One of the Spätis that I go to most often is in Wrangelstraße, near Schlesisches Tor. If I'm in the area and the weather is nice I go there to buy a beer and I sit outside on one of the benches placed either side of the door, with my back to the shop window. I avoid going there either too early or too late: better to go at the moment the day is finishing, when one can make a kind of mental recapitulation, an evaluation of things, even if almost nothing's happened since the morning. I open my beer and watch people passing by, look at the cars, trees, animals and people in the buildings on the other side. The Späti in question is owned by a couple who could have been taken straight out of a Carson McCullers book. They're both very fat, impenetrable, and seem to go about their tasks without paying much attention to what they're doing, as if suspended in a parallel universe – as if the zone in which their Späti is located didn't quite belong to this earth. They have their own folding chairs outside in the middle of the pavement and take it in turns to come outside to sit, without purpose, just like me. One could think them anaesthetised, or that they'd already seen and heard everything that could have been seen or heard. But they turn to look at the slightest sign of a disturbance. Their interest is piqued by the most minute occurrences: they want to know who is laughing or crying at the corner of the street, why a certain woman drags her feet whilst walking, exactly where an ambulance is going, if a passing cloud is the sign of rain or if it's simply a lonely cloud in the evening sky. A few metres away there's a baker who also has a chair out on the pavement. He sits on it for the duration of a cigarette, leaning forward slightly in the direction of passersby that he knows. If a customer presents themselves then he goes to get some bread for them. But, strictly speaking, it isn't a bakery shop as such: they make bread, and sell it to those who know to buy it, that's all. There are no signs, no prices, no window. It's enough to approach the open door, make a signal to one of the employees inside and then, in exchange for a single coin, one finds oneself with a orange plastic bag containing a large round bread, warm and soft, and covered in sesame seeds. From time to time a little van stops outside the entrance and thirty seconds later someone comes out to load it with piles of crates. The van then leaves again to make deliveries to some or other restaurants. On the other side of the road there's a Turkish barber who orbits around his clients under the glare of at least forty neon tubes. On the left there's an Indian restaurant called 'New Friends'. The name flashes on an electronic panel just above the door: New Friends, New Friends... There's almost no-one inside. Occasionally the owner ventures outside to make a telephone call and raises a hand to greet the baker or the couple from the Späti. I feel no need to check the time as I can always tell how long I've spent there, noting these things and others whilst sipping my beer, as if allowing my thoughts to wander in turn allows me to measure the time with clockwork precision. Sometimes someone, or a couple, sits down next to me, people from the neighbourhood. They talk, drink a beer or some fruit juice, eat something sweet and then go on their way. There are people in more of a hurry who come to buy a pack of beers, some wine or milk and then dash off rattling enormous bunches of keys. When it's the husband's turn to oversee the counter his wife appears on the doorstep and stays there for a moment, as if uncertain about proceeding, and then slowly and inevitably relinquishes her hold over the Späti. She glides towards her chair and slumps down on it, releasing a sigh as she does so. Her head turns to the left then the right, absorbing the light and shapes around her, the sounds and the movements. I raise my own eyes, but I don't see. I listen but don't hear anything. Once my beer is finished I lean back against the window and wait peacefully until something tells me it's the moment to depart – and so I obey this something, that muted voice, and I get up and go home.