Wednesday night in Berlin

Dorothee calls and says she fancies a drink. I convince her to come out to where I live in Neukölln. We meet at Hermann Platz and walk down Friedelstrasse. It’s been cold for weeks now and temperatures haven't climbed above freezing since New Year’s Eve over a month ago. The pavements are a mix of ice and grit and the old snow has been swept to the edge of the road, forming small hillocks, dirty grey, that you hae to clamber over to cross the street.

We go to Heroes, a cafe near me owned by a young French couple. A haze of cigarette smoke greets us at the door. The rest of Europe may be on an anti smoking drive but in Berlin everyone smokes everywhere. At Heroes, anytime of the day or night French artists and designers prop up the bar; usually drinking unfeasibly strong coffee or small glasses of house red and puffing hard and fast at cheap cigarettes. The place is named after the Bowie tune and they’ve painted orange, purple and gold stripes from the ceiling across the white wall in a swooping diagonal curve to the floor. Dorothee and I sit at high tables in the front room and drink Kir. She smokes, adding to the fug, and we exchange Christmas presents though it’s already February.

After a few drinks we decide to go for a slice of pizza around the corner. The place is run by Napolese Italians (it’s hard to find Germans around here, this part of Berlin still belongs firmly to immigrants) and the pizza is sold by the slice, cheap, simple and tasty. I choose anchovies and olives; Dorothee has pepperoni. A small Spanish guy propping up the front counter buys us each a glass of house red and we chat to him in a mix of Spanish, German and English, the stilted conversation of the linguistically in-adept then take our pizza through to the back room. Tables and chairs, a mix of styles and heights, sit all over the place, disorganised. It must be the German in me that wants them in rows or some kind of order.

We’re mid conversation when a diffident young woman wanders in with a large glass of tea and a small backpack. She’s the kind of person that’s easy to ignore: mouse brown hair in an indistinct cut hangs long on her back, she’s wearing walking shoes, a pale blue v-neck sweater that’s a bit too big and Levi’s cut to be unflattering. She pulls up a chair to the piano that I’ve never noticed before and sets down the glass on the floor. I’m only half watching her, my mind on Dorothee’s story. Then she starts to play and everyone in the restaurant stops for a second, disbelieving.

The notes flow from her fingers: complex sounds fill the room, too loud for a small space, too beautiful for a run down pizza joint. No one moves, talks or eats for a second or two, then business of dinner, the conversations, resume. She plays for 10, 15, 20 minutes. No sheet music, all from memory. No pause. From one to the next, long, intricate classical pieces, concert quality. Then, with the same lack of ado with which she started playing, she stops.

And, without any prompt, everyone in the room turns and applauds. Long. Loud. The little Spanish guy leading the chorus, ‘more, more, more, encore’ he cries. Even Dorothee pauses in the story she’s telling and claps. The girl looks startled, as if she’s only just realised there was an audience at all. She’s half standing, half sitting, gives a little bow and a little smile, gathers up her glass and her backpack and leaves.

Dorothee has Deutschschule tomorrow and hausaufgaben to complete so we leave too. We walk out of the door and into a snow storm - thick wet flakes blow fast and furious into our faces, drop damply down our necks. ‘Bloody hell,’ I curse the never ending winter, pulling my hat down low, the furry hood of my jacket up over it. We walk to the corner and see that the square is empty; the crossroads hidden under a soft white coat of snow.

In the five minutes it takes to walk to the U-bahn we’re completely covered in snow, white tendrils form over our heads, arms, shoulders, boots. We kiss goodbye, make plans to meet for lunch on Sunday and I turn for the short walk home. With the wind at my back the storm feels less ferocious and the streets are suddenly silent and still. All I can hear are my footsteps squeaking in the freshly fallen snow.