a birthday story

It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy but decent, in which my friend arriving from Copenhagen this evening will treat me to dinner. He says I’ve got to choose. So I chose, and had lunch outdoors in the shade and a large German beer. Needing shade is such a luxury in grey chilly Berlin.

The bowl of noodles was delicious and the beer made me feel better. I sauntered home on my wheels, spinning down the quiet side of an overgrown local park and only gradually noticing that the man crouched forward on his bench was speaking to me. You are traveling much too fast, he was saying, and then his forbidding German conformity dissolved into a slow salty smile when I smiled at him, raising my eyebrows without meaning to, a smile that turned flirty when he flirted back.

“Sicher?” I said, slow and low – are you sure? “Absolut sicher,” he said, and his tone had evolved from censorious to self-mockery and enjoyment.

The African men at the bottom of the park looked me over and I looked at them. I miss Africa. Noodling along the pavement on my way home, which you shouldn’t, but people do, I was warmed when three men in identical backpacks like Mormons stepped aside to let my bicycle pass. “Das ist lieb,” I told them, that is lovely. The tallest one said, gravely, “I come from Stuttgart.”

“Oh,” I said over my shoulder as I zoomed past, “that is also lovely.”

The little German birds are high in their voices like tree bells. When I was in Ghana all those months I kept thinking: the birds fly away to Africa for the winter. So here they are! I kept expecting I might meet one and we would recognise each other. Hey, I know you. I’ve seen you in Berlin.