The alarm does not even go off but I stir anyway at 6.10 and realise I have 15 minutes to get out of the room and downstairs into the taxi. Time stretches.
In the taxi I’m barely functional – still too close to the sleep world – but as we wait at some traffic lights some way into the journey to Tegel ask about a building we are stopped near.
Is it a prison?
Yes. But for economic crime.. not murders and such.. I don’t know what you call it. White collar crime?
White collar crime.
It’s the place they kept Erich Honecker and the last politicians of the GDR.
I nod. Yeah. OK.
Then a minute later, a way along the road, I ask:
Are they all dead now, those guys?
Yes. I think so. He died in Chile, he asked for asylum there and died there.
OK. Yeah.
The next light we stop at the driver reaches for a card index box on the dashboard. Flips through it. I’m thinking that she probably checks her next job, or consults some personal info about a doctor’s appointment of something, thinking that this is a very bureaucratic taxi driver.
She looks up, slides the box back. 1994 she says. He died in 94.
I’m pretty puzzled. I wait a moment and then I ask – What’s the card index?
Thinking that it’s very weird to have a card index in your taxi that contains this kind of information.
I write things down, she says. From the newspaper. Just facts and things. Things you dont find in the guide books. Sometimes I do guided tours. So I write down interesting things. Things people might want to know.
We drive in silence for a while. But the rest of the journey I’m thinking about this card index. The kinds of things it might or might not contain.