Dear Varsity,

“What could have possessed people to found a city in the middle of all this sand?” I think that’s Stendhal. When the first Berliners moved to this pestilent swamp tuck in the middle of a fog stretching flat out to the Urals, under an endless forest, beaded with lakes, and soaked through by the muddy clag of the Spree, they condemned themselves to a drifting, loose-ended narrative – one punctuated, admittedly, by points of high drama – but, ultimately, inconsequential... consider Heinrich von Kleist, the man who wrote German’s most beautiful four-page sentences, who rather gloomily and ironically shot himself and his girlfriend on the banks of the Wannsee, not far from here. The journalist in me would have had our protagonist end this last episode of 2010 dangling from a fraying rope off the edge of a cliff, but – aha, no cliffs on the central European plain. I could have him hanging by his fingertips from Abraham Lincoln’s nose, but I think we all know what’s wrong with that. “Alasdair MacKinnon”, raised on mediaeval architecture and Gormenghast, is far too good at climbing. And besides, while your eight-week in-and-out soon comes to a sudden and defined halt, here the drag-queens still play table-football, the deaf and dumb Wohngemeinschaft downstairs still plays charades, and I still cut eye-holes in newspapers and stare at people suspiciously on the U-Bahn.

I was just glancing through – through – the Berliner Zeitung on my way to Friedrichstraße, when I caught the eye of a boy on the other side of the compartment. I looked at him. He looked at me. We both looked away awkwardly and got off at different stops. Two days later we shot quizzical looks at each other across the lines at Hallesches Tor. Then, as I walked out one dark evening to get stale cakes three-for-a-Euro at the bakery, I saw him in the light of a streetlamp up ahead, looking back. I didn’t want another awkward staring situation on my hands, so I rolled myself a cigarette while I walked. Then, as I came quite near, licked, and looked up, I saw that, rather improbably, he had a gun. Cliffhanger.

Ali

(P.S. “Light?” he said, pulling the trigger.)