Liminal

by Roland Schimmelpfennig

Genres: City Life; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A thrilling, filmic immersion into Berlin's legendary club scene - a skillfully told novel about the fragility of life.

Berlin, Görlitzer Park: The body of a young woman in a white wedding dress floats in the canal. Who is she, and where does she come from? Suspended drugs investigator Tommy trawls Berlin's clubs and criminal clans to uncover the woman's story.

On his odyssey through the city, he meets survivors and fighters, the lost and stranded from all over the world: from the Japanese tattoo master to the Indian fire-eater. Wide awake and dead tired, suspended between a dreamscape and reality, Tommy dives deeper and deeper into the Berlin underworld and into his own past.
A breathless noir novel that is as hard-hitting as it is emotional, exploring the fragility of life and our longing for community.

PRAISE FOR One Clear, Ice-cold Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century

"A highly original and often hypnotic work . . . exactly the type of book that readers in search of striking European voices should embrace" John Boyne (author of THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS), Irish Times

"A brilliantly kaleidoscopic morality tale"- Eileen Battersby, Financial Times

"A magnificent achievement, a novel of terrific originality" - Charlie Connelly, New European

"The exhilarating narrative is wonderfully concise, and the imagery is intensely cinematic" - Barry Forshaw, Guardian

Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

Release date: May 11, 2023

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 192

Sample

She floated in her white wedding dress on the green water of the canal; the young woman floated on her back and had roses in her hair. She gazed up at the sky.

It was a cold day in spring and yet the whole city was dancing.

May 1, Berlin, techno.

Two helicopters circled above Görlitzer Park, but they were flying far too close to one another; what if they touched, what if they plummeted from the sky into the dancing crowd?

But were there really two helicopters circling above us? Maybe it was just one; having been awake for more than twenty-four hours I might be seeing double.

Dancing next to me by the canal were a Colombian draughtswoman, a Croatian roofer, a Portuguese waitress, a Syrian IT guy, an Indian girl who could breathe fire, and a very tall, very thin, bearded Russian who described himself as a mystic. The Russian, Ivan, was the only one I knew.

All of them were wide awake yet deathly tired, and they all shared what they had on them: cocaine, MDMA, ketamine, speed, beer and vodka.

The sun was a silvery disc and I wondered how that was possible. It was as if the moon had strayed into the day.

I saw the young woman in the wedding dress floating on the water and I thought, everything’s right and everything’s wrong. A disco ball spun in a tree.

Once upon a time that was me up there, in the helicopter in the sky above the city, above the park, above the canal, and I know what you can see with the camera from up there: everything and nothing. You see nothing but a mass of bodies moving to electronic music by the canal in the middle of the day, but up in the helicopter you can’t hear the music as you circle the park; the engine noise is far too loud.

The young woman in the wedding dress floated down the canal on her back, gazing up at the sky.

Then a bird landed on her chest and pecked at her, but nobody apart from me seemed to notice the girl and the bird. All the ravers by the bank and on the narrow, packed bridge above the canal kept dancing as if everything was normal.

Berlin’s got more bridges than Venice, Csaba once said, and Gianni rolled his eyes.

– Infinity, what’s that supposed to be? the Croatian roofer said to the Russian mystic. Nothing’s infinite, as every child knows. A white powder was being passed around.

*

Hello helicopter.

Hello Venice.

– Everything has a beginning and an end, the Croat said.

– If everything has a beginning and an end, then there’s no infinity, the Syrian IT guy said. But infinity does exist. It’s a series of numbers.

– Infinity is a circle, the mystic said.

– Infinity is a line, the Portuguese waitress said.

– Can’t any of you see the bird? I said. What kind of bird, the Indian girl asked, what bird? Then the Colombian draughtswoman changed the subject, does anyone know the story of the bird and the snake? No, the Syrian said, but does anyone know the story of the bee and the whale? And all the while the bird kept sitting on the chest of the young woman in the wedding dress. The Indian girl with the blueish-black make-up around her eyes took my hands.

Will someone call the police? I was about to say, is nobody going to call the police? And then I thought, hang on, there are police everywhere here, I mean, I’m a policeman myself, but I wasn’t a policeman anymore.

I’d been a policeman for twenty-three years, but now I wasn’t a policeman anymore; I was waiting for my trial.

Is anyone here a lifeguard? I thought.

– Don’t jump, said the Indian fire-eater who I’d met only a few hours ago at daybreak, beneath the railway bridge at Holzmarkt; don’t jump, and she kept holding my hands.

I took off my clothes and jumped into the canal.

The water was icy.

The young woman gazed up at the sky, not blinking once as I pulled her out of the water.

She was dead.

Her wedding dress slipped and I saw a tattoo on her left shoulder, a cornflower.

The music hadn’t stopped, the disco ball in the tree was still spinning, everyone was dancing, the dead woman now lay on the grass beside the canal, the helicopter roared directly above us and an ambulance siren cut through the music, coming ever closer.

– Let’s go, said the Indian girl who’d been waiting on the bank with my clothes. I’ll take you home.

For a moment it crossed my mind that the Indian girl might not be an Indian girl, but an Indian boy or both at once.

– What’s your name? I asked.

I stumbled and began to shiver, my entire body was shivering, and then we kissed, an endless kiss somewhere on the road during the long walk from Kreuzberg to Wedding.

Rays of sunshine slanted through the large windows of the old workshop. I heard a train pass by outside. I couldn’t remember how I’d got home. The Indian girl wasn’t there.

I was alone.

I had nothing on.

I wasn’t alone.

At the foot of the bed I’d woken up in, a grey-haired man was sitting perfectly still, with whitish-grey stubble and deep wrinkles in his face.

The man looked at me with sad eyes.

In the corner of the room lay a snake in a patch of sunshine on the old wooden floorboards.

Another train passed by the windows, but this time it seemed to be travelling backwards. The man with the sad eyes at the foot of the bed disappeared, as did the sound of the train, and then he was back, staring at me in silence.

– How did you get in here? Who are you? I asked.

For a long while the man said nothing.

– The door was open, he finally said.

– Who are you? I asked again.

– Someone pulled a young woman out of a canal, the young woman was wearing a wedding dress.

Yet another train passed, this time going forwards and backwards simultaneously.

– And then the dead girl’s lying in the grass beside the canal, the pale sun shining coldly in the sky, people dancing everywhere, and not stopping dancing, even though a young woman is dead. Who can understand that? You can’t understand it.

The grey-haired man was wearing a dark three-piece suit. He stretched out his arms for a moment as if he were going to dance.

– Maybe people are thinking the woman’s asleep. Maybe they haven’t even seen her. The police arrive. An ambulance arrives. Nobody knows who the young woman is. Nobody’s looking for her. Not a soul. No-one knows what her name is. And if no-one finds out what her name is she’ll end up in an unmarked grave. And that would be the saddest thing imaginable. It would be the saddest thing there is, wouldn’t it?

I tried to cover myself but I couldn’t move. The snake still lay motionless in the patch of sunshine, but perhaps the snake was just my belt, and for a moment I thought the man at the foot of my bed was me, but he was twenty-five or thirty years older than me; he was about seventy. He looked like a businessman, maybe from the south-east, maybe Turkey, maybe Armenia, maybe Syria, maybe Iran or Iraq.

The man said nothing. Said nothing for ages.

– You pulled the girl from the water. The girl lost her name. I’d really like to give the girl her name back. I’d like her to have a name again. Everyone has a name, don’t they? Maybe you can help me, the sad man then said.

– I don’t know who she is. I didn’t know her, I said.

– Yes, the man said.

– I’m not with the police anymore. I’m looking at six to ten years in prison.

– Yes, the man said again. I know. I know. And you talk to ghosts.

– I don’t like ghosts.

– But you talk to them, and you walked from Kreuzberg back to Wedding barefoot and half naked.

The next time I woke it was getting dark outside.

The sad man at the foot of the bed was no longer there.

The Indian girl wasn’t there.

The snake on the wooden floor was my belt.

Beside my clothes lay a pistol. It was my own service weapon, a SIG Sauer P6, but they’d confiscated the pistol from me when I was arrested over a year ago; it couldn’t be here. I closed my eyes, then opened them again and the gun had gone.

I got up, drank two glasses of cold water and showered for more than twenty minutes in a tiled corner of the former carpenter’s workshop. I dried myself with a towel that had belonged to my father and put on some clothes. I switched on the radio and squeezed a lemon. I recognised the presenter’s voice. I liked the way she spoke. The presenter spoke as if we’d known each other for years. She spoke as if we weren’t strangers. She spoke as if we could be friends.

I stood alone in the old workshop, my hands shaking, and listened to the voice on the radio. I ought to have been hungry, as I hadn’t eaten for two or three days, but I wasn’t hungry.

I drank the glass of lemon juice down in one.

A little later my hands had stopped shaking. The trains passed on the railway line outside the tall windows of the workshop. Some were commuter trains, others long-distance.

The old workshop in Gerichtstrasse, where I lived, had once been my father’s. He’d inherited it from his father. Like my grandfather, my father was a carpenter. He died when I was nineteen, by which time my mother had been dead for many years. She died when I was a child. After my father’s death I inherited the workshop and moved in here, but I didn’t become a carpenter. I joined the police.

As I left the workshop my eyes fell on a narrow strip of paper on the heavy iron door, which a child had once stuck there, the daughter of the Vietnamese greengrocer across the road. Her name was Vinh. The strip of paper that Vinh had stuck to the door was one of those you find in Chinese fortune cookies.

“Unforgettable moments will enlighten your journey.”

This was what the strip of paper said, and beside it the girl had drawn a little rabbit. Only Vinh and I knew it was a rabbit. Thanks to a scholarship, Vinh was now studying maths at Harvard. She was highly talented.

When Vinh was still a child and used to stand behind th. . .