Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: kindness of strangers

  • I can escape! if you’ll only believe in me

    I can escape! if you’ll only believe in me

    I was standing on the Underground platform just now gazing at a poster for a guy who calls himself the New Houdini. His hair was frosted & his hands outstretched imploringly: I can escape! If you’ll only believe in me! A voice came at my elbow, from a very small, very elderly man: “Might I offer you something to read?” He spoke so humbly I could hardly hear him.

    Now, ordinarily this would be an ideal question from a stranger. But the highly-coloured brochure he held out looked so familiar. I laid my hand on his upper arm as gently, as affectionately as I could. “Geht’s um Gott? (Is it about God?)” Yes, he said, nodding soberly. I had the feeling of reaching round in the back of my brain for any extra shards of kindness that might be lying about unclaimed. “You know… I think perhaps I might have read that one before.” He nodded again and turned away, back to his tiny wife who was wearing a soft pink beret, hand-knitted, and was also carrying brochures. With a pang in my heart I watched them conferring, about, perhaps, who they might approach next. He had offered me his treasure, and I loved him for that.

  • bunnyhutch

    bunnyhutch

    I was in the petshop section of a department store, because pets were next to pens, as if alphabetical, and it is remarkably difficult to find decent, practical biros in Deutschland that are not too fat to hold. Those I brought with me are all written dry. Standing gazing at the rabbits, whose noses whickered as they twitched and munched, I felt someone come up alongside me. This was an employee of the store, a brand-new rabbit clutched in her hands. She stood there regarding them. “So,” she said at last. “Ihre neue Kollegin.” (Your new colleague). “Be courteous to one another.” Then abruptly stooping she stowed the fuzzy bunny, a ginger-coloured flop-eared morsel, in the straw.

    Berlin has a higher population of dogs than any other city in Germany: a nerve-wracking place for a bunny rabbit. I watched. The other bunnies snuffled round slowly but no wars over straw started. After a moment the girl turned and went backstage again, to the ranks (I imagined) of yet-unlabelled white mice, Siamese fighting fish, ferrets, maybe camels. Her formality, her use of the polite form of “you”, the girl form of “colleague”, and the word “courtesy” – the use of the word “colleague” altogether, for bunnies – struck me as inexpressibly wise and drily loving.

    h2o HoL bunnyhutch

  • shop of owls

    shop of owls

    Went into my favourite bookshop today, which has owls carved of different woods stashed in all its corners. For the first time I noticed the sign on the back of the door: Antiquarian shops are places of inner peace. There followed a series of red circles crossed by red lines, like no-through-road signs for traffic: no headphones. No mobile calls. No shouting.

    However I was so delighted I broke the rules immediately, by shouting. The proprietor, who is always barefoot or wearing a pair of rubber thongs & who drinks at one of the cafes I love, had got up from his desk at the back of the shop to say hello. “Inner peace!” I called over, beaming. “No mobile phones! I love this!”

    He came down between the stacks of books which seem both wobbly and solid. “Most people like the hectic,” he suggested (it makes more sense in German). “Never stopping for a minute.”

    “To never need to think!” I said. “To never… never die, right?” He nodded his head and we gazed at each other with a feeling, or so it seemed to me, on this one subject of utter likemindedness. Us & the owls. Hoo hoo.

    H2O HoL shop of owls

  • the c-u- in court

    Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into a bag and thrust it at me, saying, One Euro. A little further on, a stall of organic produce, flecked apples and satisfyingly plump brown mushrooms. “I’d like 400g of those please and a lemon and a….” Reaching into my stash of German words I realized I’d no idea what is the collective noun for leaves of spinach. A bunch? A bouquet? A posy? I can’t say any of these things in German. “… a piece of spinach, please.” She was already stacking it into the bag I had handed her. “A piece! I like that.” “How would you normally say it?” “Ah, well… I’d like some of that spinach, or a little of your spinach, or a bag of spinach… But I like ‘piece.’”

    In German piece and peace are different sounds but I do love the way they have named their cemeteries: literally the resting place, “the peace court.” Court as in shared space: courtyard. So I guess höflich (polite) means really, courtly. God… that was exhausting. But at least I have a mountain of strawberries to fill my bath.

  • like a cake

    Went down to the print shop to ask him to make me a copy of one of the two novels I’m hoping to finalize this winter. Like a PhD student at the far end of his thesis I lean on the counter and say cosily, “I wrote all of that. Can you believe…?”

    The man laughs, a friendly laugh. I am thinking of the cartoon where the doctor examining an X-Ray tells his disappointed patient, “I’m sorry, Mr Bundle. I’m afraid you really don’t have a novel in you.” I say to the print guy, “I can see now why not everyone writes books. They are hard work.”

    He spends a long time stacking and restacking the pages with his expert hands, the paper silky and obedient. Turning the pile of pages to stand landscape, then portrait, then landscape again he deftly slaps all the spiky leaves into one great block. Then he stows the whole thing in an exactly A4-sized carton which springs open from flat stowage. Glancing at me he reaches behind him and takes another carton, which he fits over the top. “Like a cake!” I say and carry it home in two hands through the freezing wind.

  • we were dancing

    we were dancing

    On the Weihnachtsmarkt before it closed I had this most marvellous adventure. Rounding the corner my friend & I following the thread of sound came on these two solemn, courtly black American musicians, not young, setting forth the Gospel According to Lionel Richie. I have never been a convert but somehow the lissom groove of All Night Long got underneath my skin. I started to wiggle, stepping tentatively, dancing. My friend went rigid with embarrassment: Cathoel don’t! My arms were full of parcels and my boots were caked in snow but I danced. The dudes onstage picked up their feet, the groove came issuing from them, I love it when music is hired but you feel the mastery and its freedom. You can’t buy me!

    Now, I was shy! this took some effort! but I had to, the sinew of the tune was irresistible: the thread. Within a few bars this strange miracle had started to happen. A lady near me raised her beaker of Glühwein and danced a little shimmy for her stolid male partner, jokingly. Our eyes met and she kept dancing. Within moments it seemed all the crowd was moving. We were dancing! We were dancing. At the end of the song another came and we all danced to that too. Then I shimmied away up the alleyway between the lighted stalls, night was coming on and it was so cold, women and men were laughing and showing one another their moves and applauding in little local circles and the sense of a shared joy gave everything this golden warmth; everything but the sky, the snow, the cobblestones. As the strains of sound fell back behind us we came round another corner and there people were skating, silent and as if motionless, around and around in a spellbound circle. Because I constantly battle my shyness I have started groups of people dancing before, but never with such universality. And this seemed a middle-aged, cold-stamping crowd. Maybe that’s why, in fact. Nothing to lose.

    deutsch iii

     

     

  • knifegold

    An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks.

    One was called Coia and the other something even more beautiful which I forget. They stood there in their pigtailed dreads and ludicrously cute knotty woollen hats, relaxed with hands in pockets, offering one carrot after another so I could slice and scrape and find out all the properties of the knives laid out like eyeless sharks on the flowered cloth. Thinner, lighter blades go through things easily and are best for small vegetables and watery stuff (like fruit). Denser blades suit heavier applications like meat and potatoes and bone. You can sharpen your blade every six months or so on the underside of a ceramic plate, and Coia demonstrated for me what the sound should be like (a kind of tabla whoomph). A few stalls along the Turkish keycutter had a whompa-slupf, whompa-slupf going from behind his counter somewhere and I stopped to ask is that music? Or is it a machinery.

    Turns out it’s a machinery. But it had this sort of repetitive organic quality like two taps dripping at a sink that made me want to record a sample and build something over the top of it. Key music, knife music. Market friendships. Golden lights.

     

     

  • eros unregulated

    eros unregulated

    On New Year’s Eve after a quiet dinner party at the home of a Romanian artist & Swedish poet, I climbed the round hill that gives Kreuzberg its name: cross mountain. In the dark it resembled Borobudur, with heads facing outwards as far as the eye could reach like ten hundred white buddhas. Three different, unevenly consecutive countdowns announced midnight’s arrival: I was tempted to start a fourth, even more raggedly: Zehn! Neun! Acht! 7! 6!~ Looking back as flares lit the sky I noticed something strange: though walking here we had passed through dozens of gaggles of Turkish dudes with their mini rocket launchers & quivers of searing flares, this crowd was Caucasian entirely. My companion looked thoughtful when I remarked that I could not remember ever being in such a homogenous crowd. Maybe it’s more segregated here, he said at length. Hmm maybe.

    Meantime the most unregulated fireworks display in living memory had gotten underway. All around us people let off Roman candles and stepped back (with difficulty) to let lighted rockets propped upright in empty champagne bottles go off. Within seconds of the first countdown the entire city rim was alight. I was laughing with jubilation, such a night: for ten minutes or more the crowded mountain was the sparkling centre (from the viewpoint of those on it) of a sparkling city, its whole horizon lit and sinking and sparking and burning with explosion after explosion. I’m not describing this very well but the effect was just transporting. We screamed and hollered. People waved giant sparklers. And every ghost in the vicinity picked up its tatty skirts and hiked out of there. 2013::EROS.