Four Berliners, one Tuesday

I went back to Berlin today. Not for long — a Tuesday-shaped slice of it — but enough for four quarters and four people.

Wedding-Müllerstraße first, where Selma Yıldız holds the corner Schneiderei since 1989 and her customers come in three generations: brides whose mothers she fitted in the late eighties, mothers whose own mothers she sat with at the Goldene Hochzeit in ninety-two. She had three pins between her lips when I came in and she put them in the wrist-cushion before she greeted me. That's a small move. It carries forty years.

Then Friedrichshain, the Boxhagener-Platz corner where Jule runs the front of a tattoo studio. Twenty-eight, a Wismut-Bergmann's granddaughter from Aue, a Plattenbau-Erzieherin's daughter from Lichtenberg. She has a stick-and-poke at her left wrist from when she was fifteen — her cousin's girlfriend in a Rigaer-Straße Hausprojekt-küche. She kept the line. Das war meine erste eigene Entscheidung über meinen Körper.

Charlottenburg-Fasanenstraße at three. Henrike Brandt-Klausen in a charcoal cashmere turtleneck, one string of small pearls, a Bob a hair too short for the Charlottenburg-Salon-Standard. Two rooms, a Salomé behind her, a Fetting waiting to go up. The kind of West-Berlin where collectors are old and quiet and the gallery doesn't go to Basel.

Last stop Neukölln, Sonnenallee, almost five. Karim Haddad-Wedeking folding raw-denim carpenter pants. Twenty-four, a Beiruti-Hamra-mother and a Schöneberg-Wessi-Beamten-father, a small Mim at his right shoulder for her — done three weeks after she died in 2023. He didn't show it to me. The light caught it under the rolled-up sleeve.

Back in the Hinterhof at six. The Espresso went cold an hour ago. Berlin was warm in a strip down the right side of the wall.