Techno Queen of Berlin

Oontz-oontz-oontz-oontz went the driving beat as Gilda hopped, writhed, wiggled, stomped—showering beads of sweat on the warehouse floor. Her short, curly hair was now a wet mop on her head, tendrils plastered to her forehead and dripping leave-in-conditioner into her eyes. If she were home in St. Paul right now, she would be rushing to the restroom to wipe down her face, reapply her lipstick, and straighten her pantyhose. But she wasn’t—she was in Berlin, a club-kid paradise where no one knew her, and where there were literally people boning on the dance floor to the techno beat. Not that she was watching, but if she were, she’d have to admit that their rhythm was impressive. 

Being a hot, sweaty mess made her as much at one with this crowd as it would have made her at odds with her friends back home, where dancing meant choreographed steps to top 500 pop music with friends she had made in her University’s Hillel chapter. 

How long had she been dancing? She’d adjusted her watch forward seven hours on the plane but it didn’t have a light up screen, so she hadn’t been able to read it’s face from the moment she’d entered the warehouse—Her grandfather’s fur warehouse, at Hagenstrasse 88/87, Pankow District, East Berlin. Would he be rolling in his grave to see her here now, dodging mildewy couches full of the lusty grandchildren of his gentile clientele on her way to the bar? He was probably lucky he hadn’t lived to see the 90s. The only fur visible here now was the unkempt facial hair of so many post-soviet German youths, walking around like they had merkins on their faces. 

You know that saying, if you can’t beat them, join them? She had wandered around the room for thirty minutes asking who had turned her grandfather’s department store into a techno sex den, her broken German hard to hear over the music, when a cute, scruffy man in fragrant flannel pulled her onto the dance floor and twirled her into his pheromone-laden armpit. She had long since lost sight of him—three, four hours ago?—along with her structured grey blazer and her one piece of rolling luggage. Her blouse was as wet as her hair and she had folded up her pencil skirt nearly to her underwear to give herself more freedom to stomp. She had expected squatters, or maybe even a German business to have moved in on the property now that the soviets were out, and so she’d arrived looking like a lawyer. She had not expected Klaus, the naked DJ who could seemingly run the soundboard with his shmeckel. 

She elbowed her way to the front of the bar and then pulled herself over the edge of it, the splintered wood digging into her gut. At a whopping five-feet, one-inch tall, she had to work hard for her lager. “Ein Bier!” She shouted at the bartender, a man who danced with his lips pursed and moved like he was spinning invisible records on his own private DJ table. She looked to her left and right as she waited, sort of scoping out someone who looked like they might be in charge, sort of because she was on the prowl. She had just caught someone’s eye when the bartender nearly dumped her beer into her hands, a solid thirty percent of it now coating her skin. 

“Danke!” She said, trying to pronounce the German word as sarcastically as she could, which was incredibly difficult. Did sarcasm even work in German? It worked fine in her dirty home-schooled Yiddish. She dropped a few Marks into a glass jar full of bills, her principles making her unable to eschew their informal payment system even for terrible service. 

“Hallo,” said a baritone voice in her ear. She turned and saw the man she’d been making eyes at, his face a beautiful, furless canvas for her to project her sexual desires onto and then her emotional fantasies—she'd move to Berlin, of course, become very well-versed in the techno-scene, of course of course, and probably start a new fur dynasty right here in this very building, nameless Mr. Sexyface at her side. Was that still a thing—a department store dedicated entirely to fur? It sounded gross and probably unethical. She’d work out those details later.

“Hi,” she said, extending her hand in a most American way. He took the offered hand and kissed it, in a most ambiguously European way. She was hooked. She was planning their wedding and hiring Klaus to DJ. 

“Sprechen Sie English?” She said hopefully, not willing to expose a prospective husband or dance-floor lay to her Pidgin, foul-mouthed granny Yiddish that only vaguely resembled German in the 1920s. 

“I do,” he said. She blushed. She hadn’t expected to hear those words quite so fast.

“I’m Dmitri.” He bent to say this by her ear, his breath making the hair stand up on her neck. He was good-looking even very close up, which was a tall order—most people looked kind of bug eyed or weird when they were inches from your face.

She put a hand on his shoulder to keep him down at her level.

“I’m Gilda.” 

Dmitri led her away from the bar and towards the front steps of the building, where a dozen or so people were rolling their own cigarettes and dancing to the scraps of beat that they could hear through the wall. Under a dilapidated awning above their heads, Gilda could make out a faded sign that read “Wolffs Pelze.” Her grandfather, Benjamin Wolff, had probably walked past that sign a thousand times as a boy. She shivered then, and remembered a saying her grandmother had—that a chill passes over you when you catch the attention of the dead. 

“So ver are you from?” He asked. She thought about lying, saying she was from New York or somewhere cool. She imagined where the get-to-know-you conversation would go and she wasn’t ready for it. Instead she said, “Let's not talk. Let's get back in there and dance.” 

She’d let the penetrating vibration from the speakers become one with her bones, the sweet tobacco stank of him and the deeper notes of his complex musk a heady drug for her senses. Hours later, when they were still dancing together, when their bodies had established a convergent rhythm again and again, Dmitri caught her lips in a slow, sultry kiss. She breathed him in and her knees felt weak—or maybe that was the beer? She sank to the floor and he went down with her, trying to keep a lock on her lips. The other dancers made a polite ring of space for them to screw in. Her shirt had basically disintegrated with sweat, or maybe she had flung it off in a trance. His was tied around his waist, exposing the lithe musculature of a person who danced all night and forgot when to eat. Through the tall, ancient block windows Gilda could see the slate-grey sky of a cloudy morning, a sky that always reminded her that parties end and she would die someday. The sight of it briefly sobered her, made her wonder in a panic where her luggage was and how she was going to get all of these people the hell out of her warehouse. But then Dmitri tilted her face towards his, making her look into his pale mint-green eyes with their starkly contrasting black lashes and—was that eyeliner?—She decided that reality could wait. 

“Can I show you something?” He said, propping himself up on one knee like Prince Charming, offering her a hand to help her up. He led her to a hallway behind the large, open warehouse floor—presumably to find a more private, less dangerous place to be horizontal. She liked that, even if he thought he needed the pretense of showing her something special to get her there. He led her into a dark, musty room that smelled like a taxidermy shop, or so she imagined—like decomposing animal carcasses and chemical solvents. Her hackles rose.

Dmitri left her in the too-dark, where she was unable to see anything except for a sliver of the room faintly illuminated through the glass of the door. She heard the rustling of a match striking a match-box, and then saw him illuminated by the fire, briefly sinister. She thought about her exit strategy—back to the warehouse floor, back into the throng of people still dancing, where she would try to get lost long enough to locate her luggage. Dmitri was lighting candles on an ugly folding table that someone must have brought in from the street. The more candles he lit, the more she could see.

“I like to come in here sometimes to be alone,” he said. He probably thought that sounded pretty deep. She hadn’t realized until now how young he was—maybe twenty-five, but a young twenty-five. He wandered over to the back of the room, to the source of the animal-chemical stink; there was a pile of pelts, some threadbare, others still lush and soft looking. She was briefly transported to the 1930s, standing in her grandmother’s shiny black school shoes, running her hand along the fur and pretending it was only a pile of sleeping rabbits. 

“This building used to belong to a fur trader,” Dmitri said. “I just think its so cool—how long this building sat empty, everything still inside. Like a museum. Or a tomb.” 

“You think its cool?” Gilda said. Dmitri looked up, catching the edge in her voice.

“Is something wrong?” He asked, moving towards her. There was an assumed intimacy to his gesture as he reached for her. She pulled away, volleying biting words at him—

“You think its cool that a Jewish family was forced to abandon their home so they could go be poor in France, and then poor in America, losing half of their relatives and friends to Nazi death camps? So that you could someday have a super cool dance party. Shit. I wonder who your grandparents were.”

She backed out of the room. She hadn’t expected herself to react like that… to feel so much, about something that happened so long ago to people she barely knew. She didn’t want to cry, so instead she charged back onto the dance floor and let herself interpretive-dance her feelings away, thump-thump-thumping her feet against the hard floor that her grandfather had built his life on. Dmitri stayed away, though she was vaguely aware of him in her periphery, dancing, talking to the DJ, chatting with the bartender. 

The crowd gradually thinned until Gilda was one of only a few still dancing. Most of the people had gone, the rest having fallen asleep on the sunken couches or in piles on the floor. According to her watch, it was two in the afternoon. 

“My grandparents were from Russia,” Dmitri said, startling her out of a sleepy daze. “They came here after the war.” 

Dmitri was rolling a large, black garbage bin behind him, collecting beer bottles and debris from the dance floor. Gilda scooped up a few bottles and deposited them into his bin.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to imply that your grandparents were… you know. Nazis.” 

“Yes you did. but that’s okay,” He said. “None of us have perfectly clean hands here, so to speak.” 

"I literally don't," Gilda said, cringing as she showed him a red-smeared hand she had accidentally dipped in a saucy food wrapper.

He laughed, seemingly accepting the unspoken truce buried in her self-deprecating humor. 

"So what was it that you were saying about the fur trader? He was Jewish...?" Dmitri asked, bravely or foolishly returning to volatile territory.

"Yeah, about that--" but before she could finish, the once-naked DJ approached Dmitri and clapped him on the back. 

"Dmitri mate, you did it again!" Klaus said in Queens-English. Dmitri looked down humbly and smiled. 

"Is this your girl?" Klaus said, gesturing towards Gilda. "This guy is the man. Seriously. He fills this space every night and he's been doing it for a month."

Gilda looked warily at Dmitri, who looked warily back at her.

"You organize these parties?" She said. Klaus sensed the buzz of rising tension and quickly excused himself. Gilda continued to dump the remnants of the evening into the bin--torn clothing, trampled cigarettes, shards of glass--while she gathered her thoughts.

"Dmitri... this building is technically mine," Gilda said. "I'm Gilda Wolff. My grandfather was imprisoned and forced to sell this place to the Nazis, which of course isn't considered legal anymore. I'm here to reclaim it." 

Dmitri gave her a long, awestruck look, as if she had just told him she was the princess of Atlantis. 

"So... what. I have to pay you rent?" He said. 

"No, that's... no. I mean you can't be here. I'm reclaiming my family's legacy. I'm going to make something of this place."

Dmitri looked thoughtful as he plucked the discarded heel of a boot out of a pool of mystery liquid. 

"There were over 500 people here tonight. Dancing, celebrating. Living. The Berlin Wall fell only last year,” he said.

"...and?" 

"And... this place already is something. It’s freedom. Joy. Berlin reborn. Berlin doesn't need more luxury furs or department stores or whatever this place would be. Berlin has become a place for artists and misfits and everyone that Germany discarded. It needs a place for people to finally express themselves. It needs techno."

Gilda snorted. She was getting ready to tell him how unbelievably cheesy that sounded, but then she stopped herself. She looked at his earnest expression. She thought about the way she had felt last night—like she’d been let out of a cage she didn’t even know she was in. Like she could be her most raw, unrestrained self. Sure, she had rejected that freedom, chalked it up to some kind of “what happens in Berlin, stays in Berlin” temporary madness…

Gilda found a mop and a bucket that someone had wheeled onto the floor. Her mind wandered as she ran the mop back and forth across the smooth ground, getting into a rhythm not unlike a dance. By the time the water had gone black with dirt, she had made up her mind.

“I will let you use my warehouse,” Gilda said. “On one condition.” 

“Anything, of course! Name it,” Dmitri said. 

“I want to be the Techno Queen of Berlin.”