By John Holten.
The week after the exhibition opening Moderat are always being played in the apartment: plangent techno that speaks of loss. Sybille puts ‘Rusty Nails’ on repeat and finds herself getting a lump in her throat but doesn’t know exactly why, as if a loss is approaching which she has yet to fully comprehend and which in turn only makes it all the more plaintive. A growing sense of abandonment, vague and amorphous but there all the same. She speaks with William less and less and spends less time inside the flat. She visits Samantha but only when she knows it will be just Sam and Holly the dog. She likes the dog the most, she has often joked, and could easily spend an hour mindlessly playing with her. While Samantha is bathing Holly on the Monday, Sybille stands by the door looking on and feels the faint intimations of wanting to be a mother, and the thought leads her to her own mother and she sees more clearly why they argued sometimes, why her mother finds it so hard to accept William and why she finds it hard to understand Sybille taking time off study, deferring a whole academic year to come to Berlin and do nothing in particular. Her mother is sensible and calm in the face of the known world whereas Sybille is always excited, or wants to be excited, by the unknown and strange. She has no answers to her mother’s questions because she doesn’t want to hear the questions in the first place. Being in Berlin is question enough.
During the first months in the city she found herself texting her old friend Camilla back in Oslo, but increasingly her reports from home seemed so terribly vapid they made Sybille feel trapped — as though Camilla’s uninteresting life acted as an obstacle to Sybille returning to Oslo even as her escapist plans in Berlin feel somehow blocked. The result is that these Facebook Messenger chats seem to take place in an awful, claustrophobic non-place. Even now she can’t imagine returning there, to the boring bars and crushing routine, the faces she always has to pretend not to recognise, the forced estrangement from other bodies in space. And yet at the same time she knows she will eventually, inevitably, one day return.
On the Tuesday she goes to The Melbourne Canteen on Pannierstrasse, ordering a cappuccino she doesn’t really want, with the intention of formulating these thoughts and feelings and writing in the expensive Moleskine notebook she bought that morning in Karstadt. After sitting staring at the street and playing with the word ‘lonely’ in her mind, writing nothing, she switches cafés and goes to Five Elephants on Reichenberger Strasse, where she stares at the Congo river on the huge map of Africa that hangs on one of the walls. She finds herself trying to flirt with the cute barista, unsuccessfully. Faces she recognises come and go and she has two short chats about parties, recent nights out and friends in common, first with Dora an Icelandic artist and then soon after with a Greek woman whose name she can never remember. These brief conversations make her feel calm and help her to pick up her pen and write, little bursts of words about the people around her, about friends like Samantha and Purcell, Aude, the Frenchwoman from the yoga class she goes to once a week in Neukölln. But then she stops, unable to write beyond these faint, quick lines of character portraits.
She can’t drink any more coffee so goes for a walk along the Landwehrkanal, wondering why it is that she feels lonely. She has a friend network, a boyfriend, and yet the register of her world seems wholly flat and unappealing. Back at the apartment, she lies on the bed and reads. William is out working or doing whatever he does — she simply doesn’t know sometimes what he is doing with his time these days and has no inclination to ask him. After a while, she gets up and sits on the sofa in the living room of Reuterstrasse 14 and reads. She started To Warmann the day before as a way to inspire her own efforts at writing, and she recalls Milos and the strange aura of resignation and mystery around the guy. She realises now that for all her proximity to these people, having partied and spent the better part of a weekend in each other’s company, she has no idea what this book is really about, what stories it contains or who it is that is telling them. It’s like a mystery, the tunnel of ignorance you want to rush through as a reader the quicker to find out the truth in the bright light of day. She reads and time slows down further still and she furrows her brow more and more in concentration: she reads frowning and twirling her hair somnolently, incessantly.
She starts to read the book a second time after she finishes it, and then a third. By Friday she is in Samantha and Purcell’s with the evangelical mission of recommending the book she’s just finished and wishes everyone to read.
— Have you read this book To Warmann?
— No.
— What do you know about the wars in Yugoslavia?
— Very little I suppose, says Purcell.
— The country collapsed, hazards Samantha, nationalism flared up, the Serbs fought the Bosnians, the Croats fought the Serbs … There was a siege in Sarajevo. NATO conducted a bombing campaign. Then Kosovo?
— That was something else, Purcell adds fallaciously.
Sybille just shakes her head ever so slightly and frowns once again: this is not the conversation she intended.
Do you want to have a child?
Are you ever scared of the future?
Could you ever imagine separating?
Does art really talk backwards to the past?
Later that night, trying to fall asleep, she crosses the page and walks in on the narrator Djordje Bojic and his lover Warmann. She wants to say to them: you love each other but don’t know what to do with the boredom of love. You must see that art is the result of your love, the art of being together, you say it yourselves: the art of the humdrum everyday brings you together. I want to have a baby because that is the past talking to the future, the only way I have to get out of the present. And because like you say: the world is going to end soon.
The above is an extract from The Trains of Europe, Chapter 2.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Holten is a novelist. His two novels The Readymades (2011) and Oslo, Norway (2015) were published by Broken Dimanche Press, which he co-founded in Berlin in 2009. In 2024 he published his third novel The Trains of Europe. His writing has been published in LitHub, frieze, gorse, The Stinging Fly, and Electric Literature, among other places. Over the years he has collaborated with many visual artists with literary and text additions to their work, as well as exhibiting and performing his own visual, text and codex works in gallery settings.
