Chapter Text
Leni Schumann walked the frozen streets of an especially grey East Berlin. Her chin was tucked deep into the coarse wool collar of a coat that fell past her knees and her body hunched against the cold; her faded, scuffed boots struck a slow, rhythmic beat against the pavement. The sound of her footsteps was hollow, weighed down by the heaviness inside her and by the weary snow that had finally stopped falling the day before.
Look at you, Leni thought, her gaze fixed on the ground. You were wrong to fall here. You should have kept your purity, guarded it. Instead, you let yourself be poisoned the moment you touched this soil.
But then another thought followed: hadn't they all – every soul in this place – allowed themselves to be poisoned?
The pulse of her thoughts dictated her aimless pace, while her soles sank into a slush of snow, mud, and coal dust. In the side streets of Prenzlauer Berg, this viscous grime clung to her boots, as if trying to anchor her steps and drag down any desire of escape.
From time to time, she lifted her eyes to the sky, desperate for a flush of red or any sliver of colour that might break the thousand shades of grey ruling her world. But the inhabitants of the GDR were not granted such mercies – twilight did not descend over their heads: it collapsed.
It came down hard, just as the bombs had decades earlier – and the dying sunlight, incapable of warmth even when the clouds drifted elsewhere, suddenly gave way to a thick shroud of ash: the Night.
The Night settled over façades still pitted by bullets from the Second World War – those marks were wounds that had never truly closed, never fully healed.
In any case, Leni no longer dreamed of escape: the sun-drenched Italian coasts her father once described felt like a fading ghost story, told by a man who carried a foreign surname and yet had never seen Italy himself.
Her grandparents had reached Leipzig in the early post-war years – her grandfather, Vincenzo, was a stonemason that moved to Germany hoping to take part in the great construction, only to end up carving headstones for the Südfriedhof monumental cemetery.
Her grandmother, Milla, found work in the textile mills – the one that under socialism would become the VEB Buntgarnwerke – and there, amid the clatter of looms and the smell of raw wool, she gave birth to their son, Domenico.
Domenico grew up suspended in a permanent limbo of identity: not Italian enough for Italy, nor German enough for Germany. His German was almost flawless, though betrayed at times by vowels a bit too open, but at home he spoke a crooked Italian, frozen in the language of the 1920s and in his parents' voices – a language that filled him with shame. He felt like an impostor, without a country to belong to.
After surviving Nazism and its horrors, he found his place at VEB Takraf: a vast industrial plant where his colligues called him il Moro – the Moor – with a familiarity that hovered between affection and suspicion. It was there that he met Helga: a blonde and pragmatic girl who worked in accounting. She was the daughter of a loyal Party official.
Their love was simple, forged in the shadow of smokestacks and during long walks along the Elster canal. Helga loved the warmth of that man who, despite the exhausting shifts, never seemed to fade away completely – that was perhaps the one thing the Party could never tear out of him, even after it had bent him and turned him grey. This warmth was his flame, his fuel.
Then, soon after their marriage, came Leni: a little boundle of energy, curiosity and enthusiasm – but tragedy struck before her parents could grow old together: a foulty bolt, a crane that snapped in the winter cold, and her father's life was taken in a few minutes.
But his death occurred in a department officially not meant to be operating that day, and so it was silenced by the State, as if it were Domenico's fault.
After that accident, Helga made the choice that would shape Leni's life: when she turned fourteen and applied for her first Personalausweis, Helga insisted she take her maiden name: Schumann.
"With a name like this you'll walk tall, Leni," Helga would tell her as she hid Domenico’s photographs in a tin box. "Schumann raises no questions. It doesn't draw the Stasi's eyes. It's a wall you can hide behind."
And so, Leni officialy became a Schumann. Yet every time she faced her reflection in a mirror, she saw a truth no document could erase: her hair was a dark, rebellious mass – thick curls that refused discipline and fell across her eyes and her back like a wild veil. Her skin was olive, a heritage that made her feel foreign among the pale, washed-out faces of the GDR, and her gaze was as deep as the night itself, searching for cracks in walls and lingering there.
She had hoped that moving from Leipzig to Berlin would make her feel less out of place – more anonymous, more dissolvable. She did not expect belonging, a feeling she never had, but a quieter sense of non-belonging as she felt like a stateless person in the land of her own birth.
But this was not the only reason she had left Leipzig: there was also the need, the necessity, to escape her mother.
This thought tightened in her stomach like a knot of frost, climbing slowly toward her throat and scratching it, but she could no longer breathe in that house, swollen with her father's absence – Helga had scrubbed away every visible trace of Domenico, as if he had never existed, and Leni could not simply move on, she could not live beside a woman who had turned into Mist.
She had watched her mother vanish piece by piece, until she became a stranger with whom she shared only potato soup and silences sharp as razors. To remain there meant becoming Mist herself – a stranger in the one place that should have felt like home. And that was unbearable.
Unbearable like her mother's gaze, in which Leni saw her own future reflected more clearly each day – she did not want to dissolve into chimney smoke and coal-black air
And so, she had left for Berlin.
Her mother had understood, she had not tried to stop her. At first, Leni took this as another sign of indifference, but with time she recognize the quiet kindness and love in the act of letting her go.
And now she had to think about her own life.
She tightened her fists around the leather straps of her Praktica; its weight, the steady thump against her ribs, was reassuring. The camera, an extension of her soul, was the only organ that allowed her to look at reality without being devoured by it.
That day she had gone out to capture something: a bridge between herself and the mute lens of rebellion against the Party, so she ventured into the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, a refuge for East Berlin’s underground scene, where buildings leaned against one another like drunks in a collapsing pub.
She turned a corner where peeling plaster exposed red brick like raw flesh and stopped before a heavy wooden door left ajar; she pushed it open, heedless of caution, and stepped into a labyrinthine Hinterhof that seemed to swallow the light.
It was wide and suffocating at once, its ceiling a milky sky that looked as though it might collapse at any moment.
From the centre of the courtyard came a rhythmic thud and the metallic bite of a saw. It was not the cold, industrial roar of her father's factory – it was rougher, it was Human.
Leni raised her Praktica, with fingers pale and clumsy with cold as she adjusted the focus. She narrowed the world to her viewfinder, framing a pile of willow branches and rusted tools scattered across a gnarled table.
Then she saw him: there was a man, perhaps only a few years older than her.
He sat on a low stool; his back was hunched wirh his legs planted like roots. He wore a leather vest over a dark shirt, his sleeves were rolled up despite the biting frost and his forearms were mapped with scratches.
His massive hands were moving with surgical precision as they wove some dark and supple branches into a basket.
Leni held her breath.
His profile looked carved from granite, his skin damp with sweat despite the cold – he did not belong to the city of coal and concrete, Leni instinctively linked him to the earth, to the deep woods.
He looked up just as she pressed the shutter.
Click.
The sound cracked through the courtyard like a gunshot. Leni froze with the camera still pressed to her face, her heart thundering. Through the lens, she met his eyes: a glassy blue, filled with a melancholy as old as the world; they pierced the glass – and Leni herself.
He did not move, he did not look angry: he simply stared back at the small black circle spying on him.
"It's a wasted frame," he said. His voice was a low rumble, a vibration she felt in her own chest. "There's nothing beautiful to see here."
Leni slowly lowered the camera. Her cheeks burned – she did not know whether from shame or from the weight of his gaze, which she now struggled to meet without the shield of the Praktica.
"Beauty has nothing to do with it," she said, her voice thin and strange to her own ears. "I was looking for something Real."
He looked surprised by her answer but did not reply. He lowered his head and returned to the intricate weave taking shape beneath his hands, retreating into the steady rhythm of the work.
Leni remained where she was, suspended between the urge to flee and the need to stay.
There was something magnetic about him: it was something dense, layered, at times almost dark that anchored her to the gravel beneath her feet and to the dry creak of willow bending under his fingers. And yet she felt foolish for having crossed into a private space, for taking photographs without asking, for speaking of truth to a man who was likely just trying to finish his work.
"The Real has sharp teeth around here," he said at last, after a silence that stretched until it began to ache. "It bites, if you look too closely. In any case, you won’t find it here: we're all actors, we all play a character. It’s the only way to keep the Stasi from breaking your back."
Leni stepped closer, cautiously, gathering what little courage she had.
"But we're here now, talking about it," she said. "Isn't that already a way of going against the Party? Of seeking the Real and reclaiming it?"
For a brief instant, something like curiosity flickered across his face, only to settle back into neutrality.
"Maybe," he replied. "But I'd watch my mouth. Even these walls, even the very wood I’m bending, have ears. For all you know, I could be an informer." He lifted his gaze to hers, but this time his eyes no longer tried to pierce her, helding instead a lazy and testing interest.
"Or I could be an informer," Leni shot back, forcing a casual tone as she struggled to hold his gaze. "Trying to catch you out."
A ghost of a smile touched his lips.
He stood up and Leni instinctively stepped back: he was tall, broad-shouldered, solid and imposing, almost menacing in his physical presence; he towered over her. Though she was not small, beside him she felt suddenly diminished – and yet his closeness did not suffocate her as the buildings of Berlin did.
A laugh broke the tension – light, but deep.
"I hate to disappoint you," he said, "but you're the furthest thing from an informer. You look like one of those students who come sniffing through these courtyards in search of inspiration… except your gaze is too heavy for someone only playing at rebellion."
He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead and took a step away, perhaps aware of the weight of his own body.
"You're not from Berlin. I can hear it in the way you speak. Leipzig?" he asked.
Leni nodded, struck by his accuracy.
"Yes. Leipzig."
"I thought so," he murmured, looking away. "You all have that look – the melancholy of people who've read too many black-market books."
"Oh, listen to you," Leni snapped, her eyebrow arching with that sharp Italian reflex Helga used to attribute to Domenico. The sting she felt came not only from his words, but from the familiar feeling of being exposed once again as a foreign body.
"You're not from Berlin either. But you wear that same melancholy like it was stitched into your skin," she said, noticing he didn't have the local accent.
"That's true," he admitted. "I was born in Leipzig myself. That city leaves a mark, even if you grow up further north."
He paused, surprised by how much he had just revealed to a stranger.
"Anyway," he went on, "photographer from Leipzig, my name is Till. And if you're planning to freeze to death here, you might as well make yourself useful and pass me those wire cutters," he said, nodding toward the table. "It's the least you can do after stealing my face with that metal box of yours."