A Crime of Cake

On my way home from my Dinner-with-Jews event, I stopped at the café bar where I’d had coffee the previous morning.

I wanted cake.

Nothing was open except for this café bar. I parked my bike and strode purposefully past the smoke-enshrouded Berliners nursing drinks. It seemed childish to be asking for cake at this hour when everyone else was getting drunk. But it's what I craved. And it's what I came for. I put it to the strapping young bartender: I wanted a slice of the cherry cake . . . ahem, to go. He looked at me as if I had two heads. Then pointed to a little hand-written card sitting on top of the cake display. Apparently, it said in German, which he kindly translated for me, that cakes were not for to go-ing. (It could have said no cakes for Canadians and I would not have been the wiser).

Mystified, I looked at him like he had three heads and asked what possible difference it could make whether I ate my cake there or to go. He said, "if everyone asked for cake to go, we’d have to have three cake displays!!!!" As if to prove his point, he swept his arms across the room to show the space the other two cake displays would take up. Imagine that! With three cake displays and everyone getting cake to go, why they’d just end up making more money selling more cakes! That simply CAN'T be good for business!

But that's Berliners for you. No one cares about business. They care about atmosphere, experience, quality of life.

Still, I wanted my cake, and I wanted it to go.

I looked at him and smiled. Then I looked right through his faux-tattered sweater that was supposed to give him an air of grunge. He saw me seeing him and knew the jig was up. But, bless him, he did keep trying. He lilted his adorable German accent at me like a lasso and said, "you know, you could just sit down and enjoy your cake here." I must not have looked my age in the dim light. But he looked every inch of his. A mere boy. So I said, "yes, I could eat it here, but it's very smokey in here, which would affect my enjoyment of the cake." That seemed to do it. He agreed to let me have the cake to go, but there were conditions. He put his finger to his lips and moved so close I could practically lick the deliciously pink landscape of his impossibly unpored skin, and then he whispered that I was not to let anyone else in the bar see me take the cake. I looked around to see if the lesbians in the corner were watching me, or the guy glued to the TV above the bar was watching me, or the two pretty boys dressed in expensive leather jackets perched in the window were watching me, but it seemed pretty safe to say my activities were going unnoticed.

The rest was as quick as a drug transaction: he slipped into the kitchen to secretively pack up my cake. When he returned with an unmarked box, I slid him some cash under the counter making sure no one had seen. Then I slipped out the door without raising so much as an eyebrow from the lesbians, the TV watcher or the pretty leather boys. It was sad, really. I would have liked to have been noticed! But perhaps it's because I'm passing as just another crazy Berliner now . . .