You arrive in Berlin in the fall.  The flat you rent is small and underkept, but the landlady is an expatriated Londoner like you. She doesn’t care about why you’re here, only that you pay the rent and don’t ask about the men that wander from her bedroom.

You eat lunch at the small shop near your flat. It has a worn placard in the front that proclaims it a cafe in German and the woman that serves your food in a brittle stone bowl is fat and pleasant and seems to like you. She serves you beef stew and crusty thick bread that steams in the cold Berlin air.

It is November. The wind around you bites at your skin as you sit on the patio translating the newspaper in front of you to English. The Reich is successful everywhere, it says. Everyone in Germany is happy, it says. Everything is propaganda, you suppose, from the words on the newspaper to the red flags streaming down the important buildings down the street. You fold the paper and place it down on the weathered wooden table. Nothing in this part of the city is varnished; nothing shines but the thin film of fat on top of your stew.

You think about the shine in Hans’ eyes. This is why you came to Berlin, of course. The boys here. Where there are rumors of places to meet boys in London, in Berlin they are everywhere. Little holes under buildings with shiny floors and lights run over with red waxed paper. And boys. Their muscles seem amplified in the darkness of those places; their eyes seem to burn in the room that fills up with the smell of smoke and sex. Boys from all over come here and you find yourself moving from table to table, their eyes clinging to you and wanting you. The boys in London don’t want you like the boys in Berlin do.

This was where you met Hans. He was sipping on a lager at the bar, leaning his forearms against the brushed chrome surface and watching you like a marksman watches a target. The crowd seemed to move you towards him. The people against the mahogany-paneled walls seemed to shift until you were there, next to him, your breath mingled with his, your trousers pressing against his.

In Berlin, no one seems to care who tourists take home. This morning he was gone, but you still have the taste of his drink on your tongue and the sensation of the pillow against your cheek from the night before.

You roll a cigarette. The stew cools in the bowl and you tear a piece of the bread off, drop it into the liquid. It soaks up the fat, soaks up the juices, bloats with the flavor of a foreign city.

A clack-clack behind you makes you turn. A little girl in dark shoes with wooden soles is crossing the cobbled street with her mother towards the café. Where you sit, in your pressed suit smoking your expensive tobacco, you must look like the very definition of excess to them. The Londoner with money from home, traveling somewhere exotic before the war begins.

The girl makes you think about the war. Your mother writes you letters here and tells you that it’s only a matter of time. There’s only so much that our government will take before you all go to fight, she says. It’s so strange to you, with a mind full of boys and cigarettes, reading how afraid she is. It’s the bombs she’s afraid of. It’s the bombs she writes about every day. Not German bombs; British. Falling on German cities. British bombs killing German children.

Like this German child. Her shoes clack-clack, and her skirt brushes her knees. It is too small for her, and it is in dire need of repair. Her coat fits better, if only just, but the tattered yellow star tells you that she shan’t be finding somewhere to purchase a new one any time soon.

Her mother waddles to the door of the café. She reminds you of your bread, bloated in the soup bowl. She is so desperate to hold everything together, to keep from spilling out all over the street in front of her daughter, that she is swelling with desperation.

They do not make it to the door. The woman who brought you your lunch points to the sign, the one that proclaims that no Jews are allowed. Funny, how easily you looked over the sign, brightly colored despite the drabness of the rest of the café. The mother holds her tongue, but her desperation begins to spill over her cheeks. The fat and happy woman’s face is hard, her eyes are disgusted. She hates the two newcomers in the way that a chef hates a rat in the kitchen. The air, once crisp and biting, suddenly feels thick with suffocating disdain.

You had asked Hans what it is that makes Jews the enemy in Germany. It was not something you could fathom, the enemy being an entire race of people. And while he held you the night before, still sweat-soaked from your exertions, you let down your guard and asked.

“They are different from us,” he had said in his broken English.

You’d told him that the both of you are different than most of the people in Berlin. You will never be part of any sort of Master Race since you have no intention of making love to a woman ever. Anyone within that club can’t be the norm.

“I will marry one day,” he told you. “Perhaps I shall name my son after you.”

Would he not want to stay with you instead, you had asked. A romantic notion, yes. And you had been with many boys since your arrival in Berlin but Hans—Hans was different. You told him this.

He had gotten quiet, then. Your flat suddenly felt too small, like there wasn’t enough room in there for you and Hans and his silence.

As the mother and her daughter leave the café, you find yourself wondering if you’ll see Hans again at the club tonight, and decide that it may not be worth it to approach him again if you do. You don’t want to see his future wife gleaming in his eyes as he holds you.

There is a peal of laughter, and a few of the rowdy HJ’s—Hitler’s Jugen, Hitler’s youth—throw things at the two Jews from the other side of the street. They follow the two Jews as they scurry away.

Clack clack. Laughter. Clack clack.

There is no marker proclaiming you different here. No yellow star on the lapel of your freshly pressed suit; but you are. You are different. A blot of oil in a pan of water, you do not fit in. What would those HJs throw at you if they knew?

Clack clack. Laughter. Clack clack.

They round the corner and the sounds fade with them. The café is quiet again, apart from the bustling of the fat lady in the kitchen. She steps back out and looks at you with that warm, kind face that you know would harden if she knew where you had been the night before.

“Are you finished, sir?” she asks, her English only barely passable.

Your stew has gone cold, and your cigarette is nearly gone. The bread sits in the stew, pathetically falling apart from where you dropped it.

You look at it, then back up at the woman. Her husband is putting up a sign that proclaims the café does not accept homosexuals underneath the sign that warns away the Jews. The woman is still smiling. Words do not come. Everything feels suddenly very suffocating again. The street seems very small.

There is not enough room in this city for you and your own silence.