It was one of those interminably grey December days—the sort that feel like someone placed a giant saucepan lid over the entire city and walked off. From where I stood, below the S-Bahn tracks on Alexanderplatz, the sky looked featureless and forlorn, an extension of the square’s own vast, monotone bleakness. As well as being depressingly grey, it was freezing: arschkalt as the Germans, with their penchant for arse-related phrases, tend to say.
I reluctantly inhaled the familiar scent of stale piss and sausages and watched the local pigeons strut around in a kind of lethargic daze. The way they stumbled around, ignoring the grease-spattered KFC boxes on the floor and adjacent puddles of dried vomit made me wonder if they’d inadvertently snacked on some discarded crumbs of smack or MDMA. The faces of the people passing by looked as grey and stony as everything else. Hunkered down into thickly padded winter jackets, hands stuffed firmly into pockets and hats pulled down over pinkened ears, their expressions were pinched from the cold—although to be fair, Berliners often looked this way in summer too. I had the fleeting sensation that this was how life must have felt in former East Berlin; so many of the photos I had looked at for research seemed similarly monochrome and oppressive.
It was 12:50. They would be here soon. I rummaged in my leather shoulder bag for a final check: iPad, yep; photography books, yep; warm flask of sugary British tea, yep; emergency bretzel—everything was in place, just as it had been when I’d checked ten minutes earlier. And ten minutes before that. My nervousness, exacerbated by the grim scenery, was doubtless due to this being one of my newer tours—and knowing that I was relying just a little too much on the group not being very au fait with the square’s history.
“Paul?” A man, tall and good-looking, was standing in front of me, regarding me quizzically with beady brown eyes. The collar of his thigh-length black coat was turned up against the cold. He wore beige slacks, dark blue sneakers and a canary-yellow beanie that only partly covered his long hair which, like his dark stubble, was flecked with grey. I placed him in his early-to-mid forties.
“Guten Tag!” I replied in my faux-jolly tour guide voice. “And you must be…Fabian?”
“Yes…one of them,” he said with the faintest trace of a German accent. “I’m the one that booked the tour. The others should be along in just a moment.”
“No problem at all,” I purred, automatically looking at my watch again. “In fact you’re a few minutes ear—”
The air exploded with a loud burst of saxophone. A busker had apparently managed to set up right behind me while I was waiting and had started to play, with a great deal more enthusiasm than skill, the solo of George Michael’s Careless Whisper. I rolled my eyes at Fabian, who smirked back, and we instinctively moved away from the S-Bahn bridge and towards the main entrance of the station. When the busker was out of earshot, I asked him as casually as possible if he already knew much about Alexanderplatz. “As a matter of fact—” he began, but stopped and raised a gloved hand to a group of men walking towards us.
There were four of them, a curious ensemble of varied shapes, ages and gaits, all dressed identically to Fabian: thigh-length black coats turned up at the collar, beige trousers, dark blue sneakers, canary-yellow beanies. I was too bemused to comment and felt it would have been anyway imprudent; these were paying clients, after all, and it was surely some kind of company uniform or an in-joke that would eventually be revealed.
I smiled good-naturedly as the quartet greeted Fabian with a barrage of handshakes, hugs and high-fives. When done, they looked at me expectantly. “Everyone, this is Paul, our tour guide,” said Fabian, taking the initiative. Four bright yellow beanies nodded curtly. “And these,” continued Fabian, gesturing vaguely towards his colleagues, “are the other Fabians. Let’s say I’m Fabian One, then we have, from left to right, Fabian Two, Fabian Three, Fabian Four, and Fabian Five. Obviously you’ll get the numbers mixed up but there can be no excuses on the names!”
Fabian One smiled at me and the others smirked, some of them a little sardonically.
“Well that’s…interesting!” I managed. “Five Fabians in one group! That’s definitely a first. Like a kind of mini Fabian Society!” I grinned, proud of my spontaneous little joke. The five faces looked at me blankly.
“Well, I suppose that’s more of a British thing anyway,” I mumbled. “I’m from the United Kingdom by the way! You may have heard of it? A small and increasingly irrelevant island just off mainland Europe run by a bunch of psychopaths? Ha-ha! I believe you Germans refer to us as Inselaffen…? No? Okay! Apparently not. But okay well it’s really nice to meet you all and thank you for booking the tour. Since it’s a little, mh, arschkalt