Crossing the park I passed the usual gatherings of African men standing about under trees, whiling away the hours until someone comes to buy some drugs off them. Sometimes they sidle up and say, “Alles klar?” and occasionally a whisper of “Grass?” comes up or, once, from a bolder guy, “Cocaine?” I’ve worked out at long last that not all of them are dealers, some are just hanging out because this is where they hang out; because they come from a culture where instead of everybody sitting in their own bedroom facing their own screen, you spend the day with everyone, you hang out. A shower of sparks fell across the park: four guys huddled round a low homemade brazier and fanning its coals with the lid of something. The smell of meat roasting. The sound of whickering trees. The way these recent settlers have brought the ineffable mystery of life back up under Germans’ noses. Two men were sitting on a bench in the shadows and a large, round, comfortably built black woman slowly passed. She was pushing a trolley. One called out to her, “Hey! Mama Africa!” “Yes,” she said, kindly but wearily, pausing, and I thought perhaps she was just someone whom everyone turned to for help, communities yield such persons, I explained to my companion this theory and he said, No, it’s even more beautiful. Mama Africa sells hot food to the dealers on cold nights, she goes around with her trolley and if they are hungry, they flag her down.
A few hours earlier coming through the same park I came across three dog owners standing about warming their hands in their pockets, their four dogs channeling and chasing one another, noses to bottoms, noses to groins. Another dog raced in like a flash of black fur and then two more dogs arrived, a merry flurry, soon there were eight dogs weaving and circling and joining each other nose to tail like elephants or ants and the tallest dog owner, an old punk, said in his dark gravel or asphalt voice It’s a regular dogfest, “Es wird ein richtig Hunde-Party.”
