Sojourn

An Indian writer has come to Berlin in the fall of 2005, invited to deliver a weekly lecture at a local university as the visiting Böil professor. This is his second visit to the city, but it has been some years since the last and it remains a strange place to him. Bemused by its names and its immensity and its history, he tries to settle in, but remains disoriented, passively waiting for something to happen to him. 

For a while he is taken under the wing of Faqrul, an enthusiastic and generous Bangladeshi poet living in exile, but then Faqrul is gone. As the protagonist wanders the city, he is more and more conscious of its having once been two cities, each cut off from the other, nit unlike, when he thinks about it, the way this present, unified city is cut off from the divided one of the past. Is this city that other city?

It is the fall of 2005; it is getting colder in Berlin; riots have broken out in Paris, and the protagonist is beginning to feel his middle age, to feel that the new world of the twenty-first century, with its endless array of commodities from all over the world and no prospect, it seems, of any sort of historical transformation, exists in a perpetual present, a state of meaningless and interminable suspense. 

Now the narrator meets Birgit, and soon she is playing a part in his life. Now he begins to miss his classes. People are worries about him, especially after he blacks out in the street. 'I've lost my bearings - not in the city; in its history,' he thinks. 'The less sure I become of it, the more I know my way.' But does he?