Tomorrow Berlin Read Online Free Page B

to. No conversation, no music, just the incessant noise of the coffee machine for all these lonely men up at this hour.
    On one side, the owner was reading a newspaper and across the counter, the men, regularly spaced, stood staring into their own private void, the void of their early morning existence. From time to time, one of them put a coin down on the counter, breaking the silence: ‘Have a good day.’ Heads would look up, and the man would leave, as though he’d never been. Men came and went – and always the incessant noise, the metallic noise of the coffee machine.
    The owner got up from his paper – he looked at Tobias as though he hadn’t expected anything from him.
    ‘Have you got a phone?’
    The owner glanced at the other side of the bar. ‘Over there.’ Tobias saw the phone.
    He took some coins from his pocket and unfolded the scrap of paper with Victor’s number on it. The men at the bar were watching. The owner was reading his paper again.
    ‘Victor? It’s me… I hoped you’d pick up. I was scared you wouldn’t… I need you, Victor. Where do you live? Great, I’m on my way.’
    In the metro from the gare du Nord, Tobias tried to think about Jérôme, but he couldn’t; all that mattered was finding a bed, finally lying down and sleeping, and never waking up.
    Victor didn’t ask questions. He and Tobias fell asleep, nestled together.
     
    Tobias lived with Victor on the rue de Dunkerque. They shared a bed and everything else: showers, casseroles, clothes.
    Victor worked in PR. The apartment was comfortable. Tobias was too scared to go back to the café on the boulevard Saint-Michel. The thought of the rue des Écoles, the whole of the Left Bank, messed with his head a bit. He couldn’t go near it. The Left Bank meant the police and prison, communal showers and beatings.
    But before long he had to make up his mind to go and look for what he rather childishly referred to as his ‘jackpot’. That would keep him afloat for a while, but only if he went back, up the staircase on the rue des Écoles, past Mrs Gérard’s door.
     
    He went at night; even cops had to sleep. Everything was normal, the entry code hadn’t changed, the stairwell still smelled of fried food and the cellar. The packet was there too, where he’d left it, wrapped up and hidden in the gas pipes. Tobias slipped it into his jacket and ran off as though escaping that whole part of his life.
    Yet he often thought about his garret, about Paulo, Maurice and Gégé on the boulevard, and especially about Jérôme and the morning he got picked up; the poor guy, he’ll never be with Luisa, but he’ll keep writing to her, dreaming of Montevideo from behind bars in a small, filthy cell.
    It should have been him: Tobias was the one who should have got caught; he didn’t have a Luisa.
    Oh, but he did now, things had changed, he had Victor and all those days spent waiting for him. He was befuddled by his love, unable to think of anything else. Evenings brought relief; he would go and meet Victor outside his grey office, they’dhave hot chocolate and hold each other tight in a male embrace, separate from other people, as though nothing could happen to them. Now he was with Victor, Tobias was saved, the end of his wandering made sense.
     
    Of course in time there were arguments, violent ones more often than not, men’s fights; they’d both get high, too, before or after fucking, as if their unity as a couple needed this little additional thrill. They lived attached to one another, one inside the other.
     
    The jackpot was almost used up. Tobias got a job in a local bar; it was the only work he knew, after all. But it was a far cry from the café on the boulevard Saint-Michel. In this place there was no uniform, no black waistcoat or white shirt; it had what the boss called ‘a relaxed feel’. No professional baristas; the people he worked with had had quite strange careers – they were mostly young, rather lost, trying to get