Earlier that summer I had been living in a student house in Portrush on the north coast of Northern Ireland. I was the only boy in a house with eight girls. As a bit of a science geek I didn't really notice the girls much beyond the mess and general lack of bathroom facilities.
Having completed my first degree I was contemplating taking time out before embarking on a masters. I recall the landlord, James, an archetypal Northern Irish protestant Christian; all hard work and money but a decent sort, popping in to ask me if I'd show a German girl around who was thinking about taking a room over the summer. Ever the obliger I agreed though I was thinking that another girl was hardly what the house needed.
Jenny the German as she became known was old beyond her years and had a melancholic air about her that I instantly liked. I'd frequently find her brooding in the living room, she often found the other girls to be foolish and generally avoided them. She was amazed at how little they knew about life and I was amazed at how much she knew.
The daughter of a high ranking German army officer, her mother a Russian dancer Jenny had come to Ireland because she wanted to be somewhere as cold and as grey as she felt inside. She'd picked well. Her parents had separated, unusual at that time, at least where I came from, and her mother had recently introduced Jenny to her new boyfriend Peter. It was too much for Jenny and she fled to Ireland, to Portrush, to my house.
I think the immaturity of the girls in the house drove her to strike up an awkward friendship with me and free from lectures and lab classes I found myself spending more and more time with the enigmatic German. I'd love to tell you that I swept her off her feet all debonaire, suave and charming but nothing could be further from the truth. Ours was a slow cooker love affair driven by circumstance, longing, boredom, loneliness and need. I was lost between the anticlimax of finishing my degree and not knowing what to do next and Jenny, well she was just lost. Even when she was laughing she retained an air of sadness. I loved her for it, I longed to understand and ease her pain and she loved me for trying.
By the end of that summer we'd found an uneasy comfort in each other. There were lots of long silences, walks on the beach, staring at the cold north sea. Nights spent in Jenny's room, Simple Minds; Belfast Child seemed to be on constant loop and Jenny smelling like orange blossom.
September came and summer ended and along with it Jenny ended her time in Ireland. We could feel it coming, in those last days, like the poison of a snake bite, ending us. We spoke in solemn hushed tones. "I'll come to you in Berlin" "yes do, you should"
And that is how I came to be in a flat on Summerstrasse two months later in November 89. Sadly those two months might as well have been two decades, we had changed, everything had changed and the world around us was changing. The claustrophobic isolation of the north coast that Jenny had felt so strongly was gone and so was her need to run away. Her mothers relationship with boyfriend Peter had become the norm, Jenny liked him, so did I. I learnt also that there had been another relationship that Jenny had ran away from.
Frank, she told me, was the opposite of everything I was. He was no good for her, but she loved him, what could she do. I was oddly relieved; to be released from the weight of Jenny's sadness was some small consolation. She went to work, I walked in the parks, we dined with her mother, with Peter, alone. Alone in the flat we talked about the girls from the student house, the beach, James the landlord, the relentless cold but we would never listen to Belfast Child again. We wandered the city and I fell in love, this time with Berlin. Jenny seemed happy. In the days that followed we created something new, in her flat at night when it was her and I. We tore down our sad old world and built a new one, full of laughter, full of trust, full of love. "Will you hold me?" "Always" I said and I meant it. Jenny and I had found our rightful place in the world; friendship.
Outside the city was erupting, our normally quiet street was a constant blare of car horns. People were shouting, yelling, dancing. Jenny's mother was on the phone, "The wall is broken, the wall is broken" Jenny cried. I asked her "Do you want to go; to the wall, to see what's happening?" "Tomorrow, we can see it all tomorrow. Tonight is your last night here and I don't want to spoil it, let's go to bed." I have no regrets, sleeping as I did on the edge of history. Jenny and I were rarely together again after that but even after all these years every time I hear Belfast Child or smell the soft orange scent of calendula oil I think of Jenny the German and the broken wall.
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