Lydia’s Blog

As Joolz says, yes, this shit does always happen to me. This time, however, I had a witness.

A couple of days ago, I was ambling down Schoenhauser Allee after having a coffee with Rebecca, the designer friend whose constant employment in Barcelona justifies the occasional flown-in presence of yours truly.

As we were walking, I saw a woman lying on the street some ways ahead. “Check it out,” I said to Rebecca “a dead lady.”

She was skeptical, and so in typical classless American fashion, I bet her a bottle of decent wine (over EU 2 a bottle, that is) that the woman on the ground actually was dead.

To be honest, I was far from sure. My one clue was the two rubber-gloved policemen leaning casually on a tree next to the woman…ostensibly waiting for a van of some sort to carry the body away. I mean, they could have just been really lazy medics. They hadn’t made any effort to cover the woman in any way, however, and there wasn’t a crowd of people gathering (which is so awfully, appropriately German). All and all, it looked like any other early afternoon on a main street running through Berlin’s hipster district. Just with a prostrate, apparently deceased woman and two disinterested, sunglassed cops catching some rays.

As we approached the woman, it became clear that I had won the bet. The woman’s torso was flat against the ground, but her hips were torqued in a most unnatural way, legs following suit. Did she dive from a balcony above? Probably not. It would have had to have been a fourth- or fifth-floor balcony, and quite a strident jump (in order to land so far from the building). I couldn’t see any lacerations or bruises on the body. Sometimes old, sick drunks die on benches and stoops overnight, and are found in the morning. Despite her age, ragged dress and proximity to a bench, this was at nearly three in the afternoon, making this theory unlikely.

Whatever it was that did it, this woman was certainly dead. She wasn’t breathing, and her skin had already taken on that odd, waxy, grey-yellow tint.

As we passed by, me staring and Rebecca trying to drag me away, I overheard one cop saying something about the threat posed by the Czech teamin the upcoming World Cup to the other cop….while packing down a cigarette.

Walking away, I didn’t turn back. Now, I’m not a religious woman, but I found myself saying a little prayer for the dead lady, basically asking God to help those she left behind, those who loved her. Holy shit, I thought. Hopefully she even had people that loved her. Wow. I’m lucky. You’re lucky. Everyone who ends their lives someplace other than a sidewalk being gawked by hipsters and the essayists that hate them is lucky.

Feeling suddenly humbled and charitable as a result of the experience, I turned to Rebecca. “You know what, forget the bottle of wine”, I said.

She stopped walking, turned to me and stared.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 5th, 2006 at 4:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.