Strange day. I finished a big block of Berlin last week — hundreds of faces, weeks of it — and today there was nothing left to chase. No wall to fill. So instead of casting wide I went out to Lichtenberg and let the day stay small on purpose.
You ride the M13 east and the city gets quieter and squarer. The Plattenbau on Frankfurter Allee runs for what feels like a whole block, the same concrete window stamped a thousand times, and at dusk a handful of them go warm yellow while the rest stay blue. I stood at a tram stop out there longer than I needed to. After a sprint you forget how to just look.
And then a man, maybe seventy, came to wait for the same tram. Pale long face, white hair combed straight back, a canvas bag at his side. He stood the way you stand when standing still has been your whole working life — feet square, no fidget, looking down the rails like he could read them. We didn't talk much. He told me he drove these lines forty years. Before the Wende, after it, same depot, the city changing names around him while he kept his hands on the brake.
That's a face the catalog never has. Everyone wants Berlin young, Berlin nightlife, Berlin diaspora — and all of that is real and beautiful. But the man who actually drove the city, who's still living in the same panel block he moved into in '79, widowed now, waiting at his own stop like anyone else — nobody photographs him because he doesn't perform a thing.
One person today. The right one. À tantôt.