Malte had never been here before. It had been raining when he arrived, but it was neither cold nor windy. In fact, it was a rather nice day for being outside, considering the time of year. Nevertheless, there was hardly anybody on the streets. Malte didn´t realize this now, but he would be overwhelmed by all the pedestrians when he returned to Prenzlauer Berg two hours later.
Turning west, a spacious square followed by a wide boulevard lay before him. In the distance, there was a man with a hoodie in the middle of a bench reading a newspaper, looking somehow displaced and self-assured at the same time. Malte himself was feeling insecure when he passed the man. Everything except himself seemed so strongly to belong here, that he couldn´t help but feel like an intruder. Which he was. Even though the houses reminded him of his childhood, he had never had that much money. Nor had he ever known anybody who had. Or at least he had never been friends with anybody this wealthy. Everything looked so dignified.
Or didn´t it? In summer, he wouldn´t have been able to make the houses out at all. They were all standing tall and solemn on little hills within wild but tamed gardens behind fences and hedges. Dark green rhododendrons were looming before the windows, dark wood themselves, green and brown, exuding nobility.
He expected distinguished old people to live here. Retired after a lifetime of decent and very well paid work. But the only people he met were young mothers with their infants, smiling widely at him as if he wasn´t an intruder at all. Welcoming. Happy smiles. Young adults without any worries, he thought. Or just nice people.
On the other side of the station he could hardly cross the street, so many cars were following each other, the true inhabitants of the neighborhood. Malte felt confirmed in his view of the world.
A famous singer-songwriter had pictured himself in a car on his last tour poster. Malte had been bewildered, admiring the songwriter for his leftish pacifistic lyrics. A car! In these times. When Malte read, that the singer-songwriter lived in Frohnau he accepted the car to be a sign for the famous singer to be normal, unpretentious.
And Malte longed for this normality to be normal again.
