Zoo Station

Sina’s not her real name. The kids down here don’t use real names, especially the ones trying not to be found. Parents looking. Police looking. Both, maybe.

There’s a street worker named Ingo Tuchel who’s been here fifteen years. He says missing person reports from Zoo Station are rare. Sina has brown hair parted down the middle, lips cracked and bleeding, a black jacket with a fur collar. She’s small and fragile and pale, speaks clearly and politely, even laughs when Jan teases her for talking too much. You’d think she was just a too-thin kid if it weren’t for her eyes—that thing everyone says about junkies that sounds like a cliche until you’re looking at them: deep dark hollows, a blank glazed stare, pupils like pinheads. She says she’s nineteen. She looks younger.

She goes through fifty euros a day. Panhandling, stealing, whatever pays. Someone’s seen her regularly on the Kurfürstendamm, where the girls work the street. There’s a train to Paris leaving Zoo Station at 21:34 every night, but Sina doesn’t keep track of time like that. Just the clock in her body, the one telling her when the next dose is coming. She sold her watch for heroin four years ago.

I’m at the Zoo most days. The dark side of Berlin is just meters from the tourists and the Aquarium and the people walking through with somewhere to be. Christiane F. was here in the seventies, and the machinery is still running. Just different faces now. That’s all that changes.