Tempelhofer

My third day in Berlin I went with my friend Emet to Tempelhofer, an enormous public park that is basically an overgrown, war-era airport. Runways bisect huge, flat stretches of greenery, and now serve as endless concrete racetracks for Brown kids on beat up bikes—bikes too small, so they have to crouch while riding, their wiry frames bent awkwardly, while their legs pump like cartoon pistons, moving so fast you think they might actually lift off their wheels off the ground at the end of the air strip and float off, above the horizon speckled with gray Soviet era radio towers and sleek modern buildings. But they didn’t fly, instead buzzing past: abandoned terminals, vines growing through windows, families barbecuing on big industrial-black smokers, young hipsters wearing cut-up jeans playing Kashmiri music on sitars and trumpets, couples curled in each other, whispering quietly in the erotic shade of trees with beer bottles strewn at their bases.

Emet and I biked around more leisurely, breathing in the unmistakable decolonized beauty of this place. Ditching our bikes in a patch of grass cozied up by the base of an enormous oak tree, we set off on foot. From this angle the dilapidated terminal was completely obscured by the tree-line—we might as well have been in a grassy meadow, far outside the city limits. Emet, less dazzled by the strangeness of this place, walked ahead and motioned for me to come around a turn to look at a sun-washed sign which described the history of Tempelhofer in English and German. I felt some color drain from my face as I read about how, at the end of the war, these very airport grounds doubled as a concentration camp.

It began to drizzle, the rain disintegrating the boundary between myself and the air. If that’s true, I breathed in the land itself, the erect trees and the soft, rust-colored slug climbing up the side of the historical placard. I turned back towards my bike, each step carrying me into my past and future simultaneously.