Wild Sovereign Development Site

Author: moseara

  • this German sweetness and its love

    The best thing about living in Berlin so long and getting better with my German again is I can really enjoy people. Quite often, Berliners are just sweethearts. Today I phoned the handmade brush and broom shop that stands not so far away, in a leafy street I covet and run by the man whose grandfather must have founded it. His name is the same. I said, I would like to buy one of your dustpans, and he said, Ach I just live upstairs! Come over and ring my doorbell and I will come down.

    I jumped on my bike, feeling a bit overexcited. Imagine buying a handmade dustpan which is prettily polished from steel. Imagine buying it from the fellow who made it.

    His shopfront is more of a billboard for his principles. He has filled it with neatly hand-lettered exhortations reminding us we are all Mitmenschen, fellow humans, and when I first passed the shop he had a giant orange inflatable louse suspended and slowly twirling in the front window, with the label on it, “TRUMP.”

    So I rang the doorbell and he let me in. The inner stairwell felt so cosy and sweet. Immaculately swept rush matting, a neat row of letterboxes, and more exhortations about common humanity. “My brothers are black,” I read, “my sisters are red.” From above I heard a decorous commotion as Mr Brush came down. Two other people gossiping at their upstairs doorway greeted him as he passed. “Hallo, ihr lieben,” he said: hello, you loves.

    He let me into the shop, by the back door, revealing an organised back room that resembled some earnest party headquarters. Pamphlets were stacked in boxes and on benches, a German flag stood furled in the umbrella stand. He gave me the dustpan and I explained to him, I have no heating at my place right now, I have been warming terracotta pots in the oven and then standing them in the living room to radiate heat. Today the Handarbeiter (the hand workers, that courteous term by which every German plumber, chimney sweep, and boilermaker is known) are coming to finish up and reconnect the heating. I’ve been wanting one of your dustpans for ages but today, I’m going to use it persuade these guys to clean up after themselves.

    I waved the dustpan at him like a pennant.

    Getting back on my bicycle I saw a woman in the accountant’s office next door, she was blowing up a silver foil balloon and we smiled at each other through her open window. The balloon was in the shape of a 3. “Machen Sie Party?” I asked, are you having a party. Nudging my chin towards the three: “Ihr kleinste Kollegin wird endlich drei?”

    Your littlest colleague is finally turning three.

    She started laughing into the balloon. “Keine Kindersklaverei mehr,” I encouraged her, “ist vorbei!”

    No more child slavery! we are done with it. She threw back her head laughing, the balloon for her three- or more likely 30-year-old colleague wobbled and squeaked in her fist. I rode home with the beautiful, perfectly polished dustpan reflecting an increasingly blue autumn sky. Trees passed in my basket as though I had caught them with this tray. At home I opened the door to my Handarbeiter, who set up in bathroom and kitchen and as I was typing I could hear the older guy, hammering in my bathroom, muttering to himself. “Well, that’s never going to work, what are you about, Micha? That’s better.” I emptied the garbage basket to get it out of his way and ran back downstairs, carrying compost in one hand and trash in the other. An incredibly tall, good-looking guy was standing by the rubbish bins. He opened the lid for me, courteously. “Wouldn’t it be good if we had separated rubbish collections,” I said.

    “Yes,” he said, “it’s so ridiculous that we cannot recycle. I tried talking to them about it.”

    “And?”

    “Didn’t get an answer. But maybe… if we all tried…”

    “Wow,” I said, “gute Idee, good idea! Maybe we can all apply at once. Or all sign something.” We stood smiling at each other. He was still holding the bin lid. His wife stood in the tiled hallway holding both their bicycles by the neck, like horses. She waved and I waved and we all dimpled at each other. “A beautiful rest of the day!” we wished in turn, as Germans do.

    When they opened the street door I glimpsed a woman walking past with her kid on a little training bike. This is how Germans teach their babies to ride bicycles with such confidence. A toddler training bike is walked rather than ridden as it has no pedals, thus it strengthens one’s walking and one’s riding at once. I heard a snatch of what she said to him: “weil die anderen Leute…” Because other people…

    This is how Germans socialise their kids, to keep brewing this lovely society in which if you find a scarf dropped in the street, likely you will drape it carefully round a nearby lantern so that its owner can retrace her steps and find it. The street door closed and I went back upstairs two steps at a time. The Handarbeiter was still telling himself off as he worked. His blue overalls were stained with plaster and he carried all his tools in a large bucket. I loved that people – if not our landlord – care that we should recycle and cherish everything. It seems to me ecological awareness is a form of appreciation, and appreciation is awakeness, is love. I loved that the man who makes brushes by hand as his forefathers did spends his spare time spreading leaflets which speak to our common humanity. I loved that the child who passed our door was looking up from his little bicycle to his mother; that she seemed to be explaining something.

  • walloped

    I went to have my hearing tested. This became necessary because a man had walloped me across the face: a man I loved. Needless to say, no man has ever hit me before and I’m damned if any man will again.

    Needless to say, I no longer love him.

    It was my fault as well. Not the blow, which remains inexcusable. The overheated situation in which it came. He had told me, all of a sudden over our omelettes at my place one summer morning, he thought he was falling in love with someone else. I refused to discuss it, threw him out within ten minutes, wouldn’t take his calls. So he went out on the fuck.

    The girl he’d found was married already yet carried condoms in her wallet. She was the kind of girl who rings a guy she likes very early in the morning to say, Hey. I just noticed I’m actually right in your street. I bought an extra coffee by mistake. What you haven’t had breakfast yet? Shall I drop round?

    Within three weeks it had run its course and she had dwindled to an obligation he still felt he should commit: he wanted to ferry her to drug therapy to make sure she would go; he felt if he cut her off, she might hurt herself. All that dreary jazz. He and I began to talk, gingerly. I was outraged and so hurt. One day we met on the riverbank and each brought a beer. We talked searchingly. Then he made a remark about her which I won’t repeat. It stung me to the bone: about her beauty. I threw my empty bottle at his feet and stalked away. He threw his empty bottle at me.

    Oh, we were unadmirable. Toiling in our longterm pain and both of us tipped by this turn in events into our oldest, most dysfunctional patterns. Fear of abandonment. Fear of violence. We argued that night, having followed each other down the street to his house, shouting like sailors, and then I stormed out and went tramping down the street with my hands stuffed in my pockets, muttering with rage. I fell in with a beautiful, soulful gay guy who was walking ahead of me. He said, Are you ok. I said, I’m not. Something horrible has happened and I feel furious and hurt. We started talking as we walked on and he went into a late-night shop and bought a two-euro bottle of vodka and we sat in the doorway of a Lebanese restaurant on the main road after they had closed and smoked a joint, my first ganja in five years, and drank our vodka. We went to an infamous dance club and talked and danced. Then I went back round my betrayer’s house, stoked up on alcohol and rage. I let someone let me in at the street door and jogged up the stairs and terrified him by pounding on his inner, apartment door. He opened it and I barged in. Where is she? I know she’s here.

    He was saying, She’s not here, Cathoel, I told you. I’m not seeing her anymore. But I wouldn’t listen, I couldn’t hear. I stalked about his tiny one room apartment spewing out my rage and pain. He was saying, You have to go, you can’t just come shoving your way into my private space. We can talk tomorrow. But I wouldn’t go. I wanted to make him as angry as I was. And I succeeded. He took my by the hair and tried to drag me towards the door. “You have to go!” This was more or less what I had wanted: vindication, proof, a release of the intoxicating vigour we all know, the most dangerous drug, that which fuels every mass shooting: righteous indignation. Oh, how dare he touch me. Oh, how he was a man.

    We began to wrestle. I imagine we woke the neighbours. I couldn’t stop from goading him but when he got goaded I screamed, almost triumphantly, Let go of me, let go, you brute.

    I remember in the delirium and loss of every control of this powerful night the tiny mouthfeel of the satisfying word ‘brute’ fat and meaty in my mouth.

    I said something about his bed, the bed he built for us and had now illegitimately shared. He pushed me onto it. I wouldn’t fall and he pushed me so hard I later found cuts along the sweet inside of the backs of my knees, that private, tender cave whose name I have so long loved to wonder about. Why is there no word in English for the inside of the elbow, the back of the knee? Do other cultures have a better way to love themselves than we do? The cuts took weeks to heal and then I had angry, flame-red welts for months. I flung my hands up in terror. He had gone into the stratosphere at last, this bullied child whose father whistled for him as though he had been a dog, this long-legged stranger chased through the village schoolyard for his sensitivity and height by his entire class all at once. “They hunted me,” he had told me, on one of the few occasions we talked about it. Now he drew his arm back and walloped. He hit me across the face. He hit me! Across the face! The signature that I am me. He hit me so hard a bruise rose up days later and stained me purplish green for several weeks. I wore it with an angry kind of prideful shame. I felt marked: a woman, after all. I was incensed. I got up and grabbed the most precious thing he had: his laptop computer, on which everything he’d made was stashed. I hurled it out the window and it came crashing into the parking lot below. He left me then. Ran outside and began peering over the edge. I locked him out. I was cold with terror. I thought he might kill me. I had that thought. I locked the balcony door behind him and this gave me the time to gather my things and get out of there. The man who had hit me was wringing his hands, he was crying, for his fucking computer, my ears ringing and my head on fire, I left him there and ran away and ran home with my cotton trousers torn across the front as though I had been raped, I saw people looking at me in the dark and then looking away, I was saying to myself, I will never forgive you for hitting me, I can’t believe you hit me, I’ll never forgive that you made me an object of desperate pity to all these strangers, I will never forgive.

    When I was gone the man whose computer I had destroyed had to climb down the scaffolding on the building and knock at a neighbour’s window, and the neighbour let him in, and he had to get a locksmith before he could gain access again to his own apartment, and I suppose he was carrying the smashed computer under his arm, but at the time, I didn’t care. Not that I didn’t care: I felt vindicated, I was glad.

    This was two years ago. We slowly tried to recover, we built on our inimical love, we tried to comfort each other: but it could not work out. That and the baby we had lost and some other griefs had stained us to the marrow so that like a series of transparent microscope slides you could have sliced our love thinly and seen the mark of these traumatic events in every cell.

    Now I had noticed my hearing was fuzzy. I wasn’t sure if this was just the flu. The Berlin flu this autumn that doesn’t go away. It lingers. I noticed because I was dating. I met men in bars and struggled to hear what they were saying. I was always leaning in, forming my hand into a trumpet like some old warhorse chaperone in a turban and lace in a country house in England before the Great War.

    The ear, nose, and throat specialist was Russian. He spoke careful German. I confessed my foul story. “Es tut mir sehr leid für Sie,” he said, courteously: I am very sorry this happened to you. I said, I’m not sure whether the blow might have damaged – my hearing (it was hard to get the words out, hard to let this thought form in my mind) – or whether it might just be age. You know?

    My Russian doctor widened his eyes. Sitting in his white lab coat he said, “But you are young! You are a beautiful young woman!” He drew his stool between my knees and separated them with his own. He leaned in on the pretence of examining me and said, “Sie schwitzen!”

    You’re sweating.

    “Yes,” I said, shrinking back but already questioning myself. This must surely be normal? His assistant behind us gave no sign of dismay when he put himself between my knees. “I rode here on my bike,” I said, helplessly explanatory, almost apologetic: “It’s warm, once you get moving.”

    The Russian doctor took a clean handkerchief from his pocket. He padded it tenderly up and down my neck, behind the ear. Then he returned it to his hidden, inner pocket, carrying my DNA, and leaning in to prod his old-fashioned steel devices into my left ear and then my right, one device after another, while I sat there with my knees parted for him unable to say a word.

    There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, he told me, later in the hallway. I was sitting under a Turkish carpet on a loom which spelled out his name, with the prefix, ‘Dr’, in wool. His assistant had put me in headphones and tested which tones I could hear, and – as they grew louder – how soon. He showed me his chart. “This is normal hearing. And this is you. I think you just have some inflammation from your cold. Actually your hearing is very good.”

    Thank you, I said. I could not wait to get away. The trees outside the surgery window were shifting in a silent wind. The doctor twinkled at me. “A pleasure,” he promised. “And if you need to come back again, for any reason at all – dann zahlen Sie gar nix. Then, you pay nothing whatsoever.” And so I had to thank him again.

  • everything in sequins

    Yesterday I was reading the paper over coffee in a huge, bleak market hall in Berlin. The place has all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, it was raining hard outside and had turned bitterly cold. I was reading about the coward shooter in Vegas and had screwed up my mouth. He shot from behind the curtains. He had no courage and no manhood. Next to me two people browsed on their phones, one of them breastfeeding a baby. All of a sudden a familiar hoot rent the air. The guy flipping pancakes at the next stall was singing along, joyous and loud, to the Rolling Stones riff everybody recognised, the oooh hoo hoodoo hoodoo hoo from ‘Miss You.’ I looked up, people looked up. It was as though John Travolta had come strolling in, jive talking, with his panther grace and his hands in his pockets and leaving a trail of tiny sequins.

  • three little children

    I was walking home up our rainy street when a woman popped her head up and spoke to me. She had the doors to her car standing open and was looking put-upon. “Entschuldigung,” she said, imploringly, “ich habe eine Bitte.”

    Excuse me: I have a please – a request. “Yes, gladly,” I said, as Germans say, and stood waiting.

    She told me she’d been looking for her phone for the past five minutes and just couldn’t find it. “Shall I ring it?” I asked, getting out my own.

    She almost wrung her hands. She dictated to me her number and I typed it in and it rang. I could dimly hear the phone ringing someplace close, and I watched her bobbing up and down, sighing and pushing back her hair. It rang out so I dialled again. “It’s right here,” she said, and I offered, “Shall I…” So then we were both diving amongst the seats, front and back, or just standing still and cocking our heads to listen, like two birds.

    On the third try she made a triumphant shriek. The phone in its black case was lying on the black carpet just under the lip of her front passenger seat. She was dressed in black, too, from head to toe and I had the fleeting thought that this must happen often. When I got home I sent her a picture of some flowers in autumn colours I had gathered this week on a long cycle ride across town, saying, I am glad you found your phone. I still have the number of the cool couple I met outside the hardware store who were loading up an unusually long stave of wood which he had fastened to his bicycle upright as though it were a flag. “The flag of your nation,” I said, and he said, “The flag of wood.” And so I said, “Can I take your picture? Would you like to have a photo of this?” His girlfriend was strapping a flat piece of plywood to her luggage rack. I sent them the photo, the two of them, thumbs up, smiling. That was long ago, in summer, in a different world. “Perhaps every flag should honour a tree,” I said, and they agreed, tolerantly, willing to entertain my flights of fancy. Now I picked up my bottle of milk and my bag of grapes and resumed my walk home. In the biological shop, as Berliners call a whole foods store, I had watched three little children jostle on the lime green bench by the cashier as they were waiting to go. They each had on a different coloured parka, with its hood up. The ‘day mothers’, Tagesmutter, from their little kindergarten were piling stacks of waffles and crispbreads at the counter. The whole mob of them had arrived on foot and I could see the Kinderwagen, the infants’ car, parked outside: a wooden wagon pushed from behind which was just large enough for six or eight children to sit in side by side, like visitors to a tiny amusement park riding on a tiny train. I smiled at the kids and they smiled back, swinging their legs. It isn’t the weather which keeps us here.

  • our neighbour grief

    Coming past the apartment below me I heard from the stairs the unmistakeable noises of grief.

    Fresh, recent, still shocking grief. It was new, and she was pleading with him. I stood hesitating on the steps. He had just delivered some devastating blow and her voice rose and I heard how clearly everyone must have heard me, all this year while I’ve been grieving.

    I could hear how it hadn’t quite sunk in, she still sounded like it might all go away, if she could reason with him – with death. With Fate. Oh, denial. Your friendly, obtuse embrace, like a bear hug from a family member we don’t quite know well enough and aren’t comfortable with.

    It is autumn and I pass a tree which seems always to be filled with birds. This singing tree is in the street where my former lover lives and which I pass down every week on my way to life drawing. I showed him the tree one day, five years back when we were courting, and remarked what good fortune it made to have a pretty, mop-headed tree shaking its tresses in your own street. “I’ve just never seen it,” he said, looking blankly at the coffee shop beside it where he bought his coffee every morning on his walk.

    That love is in the past now which is the natural goal of everything we have and are. I kept pedalling and a man with golden hair flopping over his face said, Careful there. Your skirt is in the spokes. “That is so love from you,” I said, using the German formulation and the Berlin-informal friendly ‘you’. And he went on with his guitar strapped to his back and then another man passed, riding with his hands folded in the pits under his shoulders and whistling.

    That night I tidied til everything in my house was sweet and in its good order. I chased down the characteristic daddy long legs of my own hair which dance around the corner of any house I ever live in, collecting fragments of dust and leaves which have dropped from the ferns as they dry. I ran a bath, which entails literally running – back and forth with saucepans and kettles filled with hot water from the stovetop to fill the tub. I whipped by hand a stiff batch of Dutch peperkoek, a spiced pepper cake whose batter is so thick you have to drag it with pastry hooks, if you have them. I battered the cardamom pods, the peppercorns, the anise stars, the cloves and the ginger with my pestle and later when I’d subsided into the brimming bath, my legs disappearing in the steam, I rolled fingerwads of peperkoek mix in my mouth thoughtfully, the raw batter, and the spicy sharpness had such fire it stung the insides of my cheeks and my tongue. Outside, the griefs of the world carry on and roll over us as they inevitably will. I’ve had griefs of my own, this year and last year and other times, continuous at some times like the waves that slap the incoming water traffic of the tide as they recede. But in my bathtub there were only the gentlest and the smallest waves, as the world slowly sunk to salt and storms for miles all around.

    For Alison Lambert and her son

  • Daddy why is your face rectangular

    Just walked past a cafe table where both parents had their phones out & were intent on… something, something elsewhere. Meantime the year-old child they had produced in an offline moment gazed at one and then at the other, seeing their faces round the back of a screen. When I next passed the mother was rootling in her mum’s bag for something for the kid and Dad was holding both phones, like a smoker with two cigarettes.

  • equinocturnal

    Today is the Autumn Equinox. As a southern hemispherian I decided to finally find out what that means. In the subtropics we barely notice a difference in the lengths of any days. Turns out ‘equinox’ is, of course, Latin for ‘equal night.’ Today (in the North) is the start of Autumn, when the days will start getting shorter and the nights, god damn it, longer.

    All too soon it will be barely getting light in Berlin due to cloud cover and then never really dark as there are so many cities nearby. All panning their European lights up into the sky.

    I found this nervous professor explaining to an eager interviewer, with his voice trembling as he is on TV, how it works. The sun appears to wobble slowly up and down in the sky across the year, as Earth’s axis is tilted. So for half the year the southern hemisphere is facing closer, for half the year it’s the north. He explains how this was important in pagan times as it is connected with fruitfulness and harvest. Her voice lights up. For Londoners, where can we go, what can we do, to be a part of this, to find out more?

    Obviously she means with people. She wants to gather by moonlight at some standing stone with a bunch of arcane knowledge holders chanting incantations. She wants some insight into the mystery of long human endeavour, wants to be admitted to the meanings we have shut out, with our forever lit smartphones and our tube trains which run until three in the morning. Our eternal false daylight. I feel my heart quickening, too.

    But the scientist misunderstands her. His voice quickens, too. He starts to offer his own secret gatherings – here is where the London Irregular Astronomers Society meets of a nighttime to study the far distant sky. Here is the observatory where you can see these mighty bodies through a telescope. The woman’s responses are cut off but I feel you can feel her dismay, palpable, almost palpating, through the screen. Their misunderstanding is absolutely beautiful and hilarious, and by it we see two approaches to understanding our lives on earth fall away, the one from the other, like the outermost hemisphere tilting from the sun. She doesn’t want to drink thermos tea with a bunch of boffins and discuss distance. She wants to get up close. She wants the wisdom and herbal knowledge of all the old women who are gone. She wants to be in the presence of wise men who can interpret the stars’ implications in our lives. She wants to get closer to the earth. She wants what’s human.

  • for the ages

    I went to see Paul Kelly play Berlin. I was going with my girlfriend and the evening of, she rang to say: I don’t feel well. I feel so tired and I just need to stay at home and curl on my couch. Can you go on your own?

    I went. Since I left my boyfriend I have been going to a lot of events on my own. I sat with a German couple and the man said to me, “Do you know him?” “Oh,” I said, awkwardly. “I once sat in the same cafe with him in Richmond, in Melbourne. Australia’s not quite that small.”

    This was in the Richmond Hill Cellar and Larder and Paul Kelly was sitting quietly with his friends and I was nutting out the playlist for my album, listening over and over through what we had made with cat-callers and buskers and students of jazz in New York and I looked round the room with my own music in my ears and saw the love: how everyone tried so hard to be courteous and pretend we had not noticed him there.

    “But you know his songs,” this man elucidated now. “I am the same year as him: 1955.”

    He patted himself on the chest, approvingly.

    The audience was filled with Australians. You can tell by the facial expression. A certain kind of friendly lazy openness that lends itself to generalisation. I looked around. You looking at me? asked an older, Australian man behind me when I glanced round. Oh no, I said, I was just… gazing in your direction. He had hopped up. Held his beer up in his hand. Can I come sit with you? Ok, I said, and so he bought me some beers and talked in my ear between the songs. But I hardly heard. I was transported. Someone brought on a bottle of water and stood it next to the central mic. The musicians came onstage and among them were Vika and Linda, the glorious Islander Bulls, it had not occurred to me they’d travel with him. I know they sing backing vocals on his albums. They were radiant and they owned the stage, from its wing. Paul Kelly introduced the new album he had written and they launched it like a ball of flame. These people, and their music.

    Linda sang one song and Vika sang another. In their salty, knowing womanhood they swayed side by side like palms. The beautiful affinity between them bespeaks sisterhood. The rest of the stage was occupied by men. They know each other. They can communicate with a bare glance. I was almost crying. There came a moment when the crowd threw back their heads and yawped, bawling along with the lyrics in our Australian accents: he took it pretty badly: she took both the kids.

    Then they sang How To Make Gravy and I was crying. Surrounded by beautiful, healthy, young Australian men in their t shirts I flung my arms open and one of them snatched me up and hugged me harder than I have ever been held. I emerged from his embrace and his face was wet with my tears. Every time I smiled he smiled back at me. The music finished and they all walked offstage and we weren’t having it, we hammered our feet on the ground and yelled and hollered. Paul Kelly broke the glittering curtains open by himself. The closing song had been a quiet one, “Darling, you’re one for the ages,” and he had spoken the lyrics, shyly, in bad German: mein Liebling, du bist zeitlos. It seemed like he had half the crew of Rockwiz on stage with him and half of those were my Facebook friends. Australia really is that small. Now he took up his guitar in silence and the crowd began to sing to him, irresistible, a capella, “Darling – you’re one for the ages. Darling… you’re one for the ages.”

    A grin tugged at Paul Kelly’s face. He is not a good actor, he is too authentic and sincere, as I had ascertained this evening by watching the film clip for Love is the Law, in which he looks uncomfortable and the film maker’s directions are almost visible on the screen. “Well this is probably my second favourite moment of tonight,” he said. “My favourite was when someone yelled out, ‘En-fucking-core!’” We laughed, proud of ourselves. He started to encore. We all stood still and listened. To awaken stillness in a big crowd is a consecrated kind of gift. Sweat was rolling down my spine and darling, I was one for the angels. When I got home I would hand wash every one of my garments in a trance of caretaking meditation and the beautiful young man had given me his number and so had the older Sydney guy, who sells Blundstones. But for now the rest of the band came back on and played like emperors. Much later, as I stood collecting my warm wrappings for the long bike ride home, a roadie opened the curtain and out the back I could see their white tour bus, Vika Bull standing beside it waiting for the gear to be boxed up and wheeled out, she was smoking a cigarette and our eyes met, and I felt a bolt of womanhood arc out of me and into the vast cold sweet dark Berlin sky which chuckled with the autumn wind, all the way home.

  • East German joy

    Today I was in a tiny bakery in Brandenburg and laid a ten euro note on the counter. The bakery lady picked it up, her face spasming with disapproval, and shifted it 20cm south before dropping it in the special shallow plastic tray which is supposed to hold the money. Then she turned away to make me a cup of German tea: that is, boiled water with a tea bag sitting limply alongside. Then she picked up the ten euros again, took it and laid my change in the plastic tray.

    I said to the man queuing behind me whose hand was resting on a stack of newspapers, isn’t that a sad story? The full page story up front was printed on a black page – a cyclist in his seventies had been knocked from his bicycle by a car door and had died. This man shrugged. In astonishment I said, “Es ist Ihnen egal?” It’s all the same to you? He made a mouth. “Berliner Probleme.”

    These are just Berlin problems. We were an hour’s train ride from the city centre and standing on the platform of a Berlin train station. The train had ended early and we were all waiting for the official ‘replacement transport’, a big yellow bus. The bus driver looked me in the eye as I approached at the end of a small queue of people and then closed the glass doors in front of my face and drove off.

    I remembered suddenly that Berlin is an island, an island in the pleasureless wastes and Stasi prison camps of the former GDR. Eventually a new bus arrived, with a far friendlier driver, and only two other passengers, who befriended me and gave me careful, detailed instructions for my solo forest walk. As we drove through the little township I peered into people’s immaculate gardens, their kitschy window treatments and collections of tiny sculptures including various clothed animals and dolls made of clay or straw. Hours later the town’s only punk, who had given me directions to the town’s only affordable eatery which was not a snack bar selling mostly ice cream, stopped his matt black van beside me and said, “You must be tired of walking. Hop in.” His big caramel coloured hound loomed over the back seat and rested her head on my shoulder as we drove and he said, casually, “Yes. Hereabouts it’s pretty provincial. I came back because my Mother was ill.” We passed a beer garden crowded with big parties of bikers in their padded black jackets who had come out for the day while it’s still sunny. At the end of the street gleamed a beautiful lake. Shouts came from the sandy playground which had a large sign headed “Principles of Playground Conduct.” A swan stood among the ducks cleaning itself earnestly. I took a shot of rum in my hot chocolate and read my book, having lent the little boy next door in his pram my pen. A girl came out carrying a tray of unbelievably ornate ice cream towers in tall swirled glasses. She set out across the road in her perfect white sneakers. A large man came past toting a tiny bright eyed dog. The sun splashed the crumbling medieval town.

  • late summerhaft

    Across town today I had the impulse to come through an overgrown island of trees that surrounds a church, and went wheeling my bike along its narrow, littered path where, if I tuned out the traffic, I could feel as though I were walking through a tiny woods. Someone is living there and had stacked their possessions under a low, clotty pine and strung their meagre collection of spare garments on a bush to dry. There’s still sun. Stringy and mean but sun nevertheless. We have had perhaps fourteen inconsecutive days of heat and sunshine this summer and already in August it is growing autumnal. As I was pushing my bike a man appeared beside me carrying a green plastic watering can. Berliners are busy when the sun comes out with their wild, colourful, shared public gardens. I’ve seen a woman dunking her can into the canal on a long rope so that she could tend the sunflowers she or someone else had planted and marked off with red and white striped tape. “What,” he said, cheerfully, “a man’s bicycle for a lady? Come now.”

    “It’s true,” I said: stimmt. And we both looked down at my voluminous skirts, two prints in varying shades of indigo laid one over the top of the other. I passed a tiny preschool or as they call them, children’s shop, with nine little bicycles locked together out front and two double-barrelled prams parked side by side. As I came round the corner I started to laugh. A teenage boy was standing outside his ground-floor window, holding the end of a huge scarlet canoe which his friend fed from inside. He looked at me and I could see in his eyes the enjoyment of his instant recollection of the picture they must have made. They started laughing, too. It’s not the weather which keeps me here.