A Few Meters from the Platform

Nobody uses their real name there—either their parents are looking for them or the police are. Ingo Tuchel, fifteen years as a street worker in that neighborhood, says missing persons reports are rare in that world. The girl the Tagesspiegel calls Sina has brown hair with a center part, chapped lips, a short black jacket with a fur hood. She keeps her syringes in a chest pouch that looks like the kind your mother made you wear on school trips—the humiliating one that sat against your sternum and held your emergency cash. She’s small, pale, looks younger than the nineteen she claims. She speaks clearly and laughs when someone teases her for talking too much. She’d pass for just another too-thin teenager, except for the eyes: deep dark hollows, pinpoint pupils, a flat absence that you recognize even if you’ve never been close to it before.

Fifty euros a day to stay level. The money comes from begging and, as she puts it, pulling shit. A train to Paris departs Zoo station at 21:34. Sina doesn’t deal much in clocks. The only time that matters is internal—the one that tells her when the next hit has to come. Her wristwatch was the first thing she traded for heroin, four years ago.

The Tagesspiegel ran a long piece on Bahnhof Zoo as a permanent institution of Berlin misery—the long shadow of Christiane F., whose memoir about growing up addicted there in the seventies became one of Germany’s most notorious books and eventually a film. Decades later the geography is the same and so is the story, with different names. I change trains at Zoo most days. A few meters from the platform, this whole world persists. You learn to register it without registering it. You learn to keep walking, which is its own kind of answer.