Walking down a street lined with other people’s houses, I feel light and breezy. If I notice that one of those warm, quiet terracotta roof tiles has started to crumble, I needn’t check my bank account and start planning to have the roof repaired. If the Polish Cultural Center seems deserted, I don’t have to come up with ingenious ideas for making it more popular. If the grounds of the Chinese Embassy are overgrown with weeds, I’m not the one who has to clear them away. And I can stand right in front of the house where Johan Becher once lived and, without having read a single one of his poems, not feel the slightest bit guilty. An afternoon stroll is never quite so luxurious as when you’re totally unnecessary to your surroundings.

But once in a while a building will catch my eye. I simply have to go inside. The entrance looks like a mysterious initial that I can’t help staring at. Like a wary cat, I softly lift the soles of my feet as I enter. The balance scale inside my head goes off-kilter, moving wildly up and down, and though the floor seemed solid enough when I tested it with the toe of my shoe, inside my body, the bits that were supposed to be heavy were so light they floated up, while the light bits sunk heavily.

Inside, the restaurant was dimly lit and perfectly quiet. That same old picture of Mayakovsky was hanging on the wall. The first time I saw it here I thought with a start that it might be a spirit photograph.

Although Mayakovsky did come to Berlin a number of times, he had no special relationship to this street. But then the street was named after him, along with its restaurant with his photograph on display, and as the customers looked up at it, talking about him as they sipped their coffee, perhaps his ghost heard the name and came to haunt the place. Ghosts apparently don’t come back to this world unless there’s a special place for them here. Marx’s spirit haunts Karl-Marx-Strasse, and Kant’s appears in Kantstrasse. There are so many streets named after Goethe that his ghost gets awfully confused and rarely manages to haunt any of them. But Mayakovsky would undoubtedly come straight here. There’d apparently once been a square named after him in Russia, but even ghosts are avoiding Russia now. I’ve heard that if someone happens to read a dead poet’s work as criticism of the current regime, his ghost is sometimes arrested. That must be why Russian poets are tearfully abandoning their native land to gather in Berlin.

I stared at Mayakovsky’s face in the photograph. He looks as if he was dragged out of bed while dead drunk, placed in handcuffs, and slammed against the wall for a mugshot. Looking slightly upward, he glowers at the camera, wary but not frightened, wearing what looks like a loose-fitting rubashka tunic. He has an irresistible charisma that reminds me of David Bowie. Being a photograph, he couldn’t be giving off an aroma, yet my nostrils are tickled just the same. My eyes dart quickly over the surface, searching for the source of that fragrance. Erotic charm is tangled in his hair, tousled from sleep. His eyes, angry yet lonely, come nearer and nearer, making me want to hug him.