Lotte

Lotte is thirty-six and lights rooms in Berlin for a living, and like everyone in this section she is invented: the name, the work, both rooms. There are two. An opera house in Mitte, where she is associate lighting designer and answers to a man with a reputation, and a club in Friedrichshain, where she answers to nobody and the club would like it to stay that way.

At the opera the job is visibility. Four hundred-odd cues plotted months ahead, a soprano who has to be findable from the back of the top balcony, and a director who asks for “an afternoon in October, but grieving”. She gets it for him in two cues and a shade of amber. The notes she gives back in production meetings are three words long, and one of the three is usually “no”.

At the club the job runs the other way. Concrete, a low ceiling, a haze machine, and a door that has made up its mind about you well before you reach it. The brief there is that nobody should be able to see anybody clearly and everybody should look better than they are. Phones get a sticker over the lens on the way in, a cousin of the rule our guide to etiquette calls the one convention with enforcement behind it, so this is light made on the understanding that no camera will ever keep it. She hangs six lamps and a single strobe, and runs the strobe twice a night at most, on the grounds that a strobe is an argument and a room should be allowed to reach its own conclusions.

One room pays her so that you see everything. The other pays her so that you don’t. She thinks it is one job done in opposite directions, and explains this at a volume suited to the second room while standing in the first.

Our City Index says Berlin does Milan’s trick in reverse. Lotte has worked both halves of it in a single night more often than she can count, with the same torch in the same coat pocket, alongside a roll of gaffer tape and a spare fuse. Between them those three have repaired, in her time, a cloakroom rail, a bride’s hem and a DJ’s opinion of himself.

She is blunt the way weather is blunt, and about as interested in your plans. She laughs like someone has dropped a tray, from anywhere in the building. She wins arguments with directors by agreeing with them, loudly, and then doing it her way on the night. Her plait has been caught in a moving light exactly once, and she tells the story as though the light started it.

Her own flat in Wedding has one lamp. It is on a dimmer, and it has never once been all the way up.