The East Girl
Frantically checking coat pockets, trouser pockets, the stupid inner compartment of my wallet where coins go to disappear. Two-fifty. That’s all I need for a döner from my usual place, herb sauce and garlic sauce, and I genuinely don’t care about the consequences because nobody has to smell me today. Not even the blonde woman walking toward me on the pavement.
I make eye contact with strangers as they pass. My colleague Kathi was an eye person—she’d practically swoon over a good pair—but that’s not what drives me. I want the reaction. Does the other person look away? Down? Hold? The blonde drops her eyes at the last possible moment, and I catch her nose instead. My brain, without being asked, fires a single word: Ostmädchen.
This has become one of my main activities in Berlin. When you’re a straight guy here you spend a lot of time looking at women—the interesting ones studied closely, everyone else receiving royal indifference or simply not registering. But the noses. East German women, in my completely unscientific observation, tend to have small, slightly upturned button noses—wider pores, sometimes freckles, something unaffected about them. West German noses run differently: longer, parallel to the ground, nostrils with an edge to them. Sometimes tilted slightly skyward, as if to clarify provenance.
Can a recent transplant even call this? Is it just tidy prejudice dressed as urban anthropology? Ana had an even more pronounced version of what my brain files as the eastern nose, and she was from Kazakhstan, which somewhat demolishes the geography of the whole thing. I was briefly convinced I had something worth developing—imagined pitching it as a proper theory, diagrams and everything—but then my brain groaned and redirected my hand to the secret inner pocket of my wallet.
Two euros fifty. Perfect. "One to go, please."
The woman waiting next to me stares at the döner man with this magnificent, unprovoked contempt, chin lifted, like she’s tolerating something beneath her dignity. My brain doesn’t hesitate: Westmädchen.