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Zeiger unlocked the front door, peered up the stairwell. The windows in the stairwell had not been replaced since sector times. Their frames were porous and leaky and wind passed through them with bitter, grief-stricken moans. Hohenschönhausen, report Schreibmüller at the bureau, cheese toast and milk coffee at the café, see Lara—even though there was no reason to believe she would be there today, as she hadn't been there in weeks, ever since she put a hand on his shoulder, which gave him the courage to go to her apartment, speak to her there. Then Ketwurst at the cafeteria, an airless press conference in the evening, the end of his day, another to follow, nothing had changed, alles in Ordnung.
He grabbed his briefcase and stepped outside. Fresh, wet air and a sky made of glass. As he descended the two short steps onto the sidewalk, something hit his temple. A cracking sound, hollow and profound, and a lacerating pain. He touched his fingertips to the side of his head. A biscuit, perfectly oval, lay at his feet like a hoax hand grenade.
"I'll rip off your head and take a shit in your neck, you asshole," someone said.
There was a man on the sidewalk to Zeiger's right who had the build of a bullfrog. He wore a parka with a tear along one shoulder and clenched a biscuit in each fist. His face was purple with anger, hot and comical. He was looking not at Zeiger, but slightly beyond him, at the baker, who stood in mirroring warfare fashion off to Zeiger's left. Blood from the baker's marred lip speckled the pristine whiteness of his shirt and apron. With a detonation of deep, primal sounds, he hurled himself past Zeiger and at the man with the biscuits. Zeiger shielded his head with his briefcase as the men dropped to the ground in amateur entanglement, their faces so close they appeared to be going in for a kiss. A few paces off, a young man struggled in a choke hold, his teeth sunk deep into the bones of another man's wrist. Biscuits were everywhere. A mother was gathering her wailing child. Another woman sat on the curb, gaping through her fingers at a group of men shoving one another like boys on a playground. Zeiger clasped his briefcase against his chest, using it like armor. He spotted his Trabant across the street, mapped his route, and wove his way through the crowd, veering to circumvent clusters of people and avoid slipping on biscuits softening in patches of rain. In a puddle, frayed and wet like roadkill, slumped the towering ushanka that Zeiger had seen from his window.
He reached his car without incident. He could not conceive of what had caused the brawl. The amount of bread scattered across the ground suggested there was no shortage. This was not desperation. This was joy in chaos. It was then that he spotted Schreibmüller. His neighbor stood on the steps of their apartment building, one hand propped leisurely against the wall, the other wound tightly around the waist of a woman in slippers and a large men's coat. Her hand was cupped against his ear, shielding her whisper. His handsome face was tilted back and upward, away from the crowd, his blank eyes raised to the lightening sky. The king and his whore presiding.
* * *
Zeiger rolled onto Leninallee, followed it northeastward en route to Hohenschönhausen jail. Pairs of red taillights and windshields smeared with wet street dust and droplets of rain. The boulevard was flanked by rows of concrete slab buildings, symmetrically choreographed and angled as if in a giants' ballet. Elderly Berliners walked the sidewalks pulling caddies of food; people pedaled by on bicycles, their faces protected by shawls. A row of parked police cars stretched along the side of the road, their cherry lights ablaze. Zeiger craned his neck but could not locate the source of the commotion. Maybe a car wreck, a gas leak, or punks throwing rocks at passing cars.
Excerpted from The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures by Jennifer Hofmann. Copyright © 2020 by Jennifer Hofmann. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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