Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: kindness of strangers

  • a rise in Berlin

    Went for a long wander in the forest with a local acquaintance to guide me. We climbed Berlin’s highest peak, which sounds more dramatic than it is. The lake is called Muggelsee and I had to use actions rather than words to explain what is a muggins, or muggles, in English: the kind of affectionate puzzlement you might feel while rubbing someone’s whole face with the palm of your hand. We stopped among some very tall birch trees and they were tinkling & tingling with tiny tiny sound. Very far up there was a hole, in the bole of the trunk. My companion pointed. “In that hole,” he said. “Bird kids.”

    ~ Four years ago today, I was shown a slight rise in flat as an omelette Berlin. I fell in love with a man who loves birds and since then we’ve been working it out. There is a German word for the displaced denizens of the East who feel a painful craving for the lost Ost: they combine it with ‘nostalgia’ to reach Ostalgie.

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”

  • four years ago today

    Walked into a Turkish convenience store late on Friday night, they sold water pipes as well as a dazzling array of alcohols and sundry sweet snackettes… behind the counter stood a very untall & wizened woman wearing a scarf, her hands on the counter at chest height in front of her, and beside her a large, slightly slavering dog, standing on his back legs with his forepaws folded on the counter. I said to him, “Excuse me. Do you sell yoghurt?” She said to me, “Sie haben eine so schöne Stimme, eine richtig wunderschöne Stimme. Bitte singen Sie weiter.” But I was too self-conscious to keep singing under this barrage of compliments. We talked about the dog and his jolly helpfulness & how tidily & sweetly she kept her shop and then as I was leaving, she called after me, “Keep singing! Always keep singing!”

    ~ beginning of my second month in Berlin, second date. We held hands and took it in turns to walk blindfolded round the city. Later that week I wrote:

    Tomorrow I am moving ~ boldly! ~ into a sublet apartment of my very own, here in Berlin! I was only here for a week but I have staid & staid ~ and so it is the last day in the sweet sunny breakfast room with its big basket of soft-boiled eggs, tucked in a cloth ~ the man who serves coffee came in to clear and I went over to him and touched him on the arm. “I’m moving out tomorrow, and I just wanted to say, thank you for the ~” ~ floundering in my early-morning German like a shallow foaming surf ~ “the service?” he suggested ~ “the um,” I said ~ “the table service?” he wanted to know. “The love,” I said, finally. And then ran away back to my table. Every morning he brings me a pot of hot water & some honey, my life in Berlin has been far cosier since I discovered that chai tea is called “yogi tea” and that you can buy it in bags at a Bio Store.

  • a cheerful man

    Heavy in the heart today and the German man I ran into at the mailboxes, who returned my hello so cheerfully, was a shaft of light. Coming through the heavy courtyard doors a moment later he met me and my bicycle coming out, and backed up his bulging wheeled suitcase, his handful of mail, his keys and his big bag of groceries so that he could prop open the door for us. Oh, humanity. You are a lifesaver.

  • the two languages of dream

    I went to a strange and interesting event which was sentimental and yet truthful and moving. Afterwards we stood around in tiny groups and two men who had spoken out about crying in public put their heads together and let their voices drop low. A woman who is four weeks fresh in Berlin said to me, “What do you do?” And I answered, like I always answer, “I write ~ ” and then wondered, as I always wonder, how to best finish that sentence. ” ~ poetry and jazz,” I said, and she said, peerlessly, “Oh! But those are two such beautiful languages.”

  • Department of Honour

    I just acquired the most beautiful new German word. We are discussing privilege and a new acquaintance says he has to do something ehrenamtlich – oh, how divine, can ‘ehrenamtlich’ mean ‘voluntary’? An ‘Amt’ is a bureau, government department or office. But ‘Ehre’ means honour.

    Germany is overrun with Amts. Ordinarily they sound faintly menacing: the Ordnungsamt, Department of Order, takes care of ticketing people’s unlicensed dogs, illegal parking &c: a histrionic graffito in the local drug park screeches, in orange, Ordungsamt = Terror!!. Online I find a website called Ehrenamt Deutschland, which offers a definition: honourable offices can be anything which is performed “freiwillig, gemeinwohlorientiert und unentgeltlich,” that is, anything that is pursued of one’s own free will, is oriented towards the common good, and is unpaid. The formality makes it sound almost stultifying but there is all this generosity and warmth beating away underneath.

    As Australia turns itself into a vast gulag for imprisoning children, and other countries up and down the escape corridor into Europe close and razor wire their borders, Berliners are opening refugee cafes, holding garage sales and donating food, organising ‘Asylum Seeker Airbnb’ to help match people’s spare rooms with exhausted new arrivals. I find it so moving to think that by teaching German once a week in the giant refugee camp that was once the old Tempelhof airport, this Berliner becomes part of the Department of Honour.

  • spring peaces

    The hottest bath imaginable. Coconut oiled my hair. Wrapped head to hip in towels. New book and early to bed, ahhh thank you blissful alone time. I can hear people on the street outside cobbling and shouting, gearing up for their Friday night, and it just seems to drift by like leaves on the wind.

    I have to hand an Abdullah Ibrahim album which just never tires. Here come the well-placed stepping stones down into the deeper river, where he seems to pick up both of his hands together as though they were horses’ reins and we are ready to go down together, ready to immerse. I am thinking of that Ted Hughes poem that moves me so dearly, Wodwo. “What am I?.. very strange but I’ll/go on looking.” The sparkling splashes thrown up by the pianist like clots of gleaming mud from effortlessly racing hooves reach me from the next room. I love these high ceilings. I love the sense of resting and nestling in a little, after all the long line of moves from apartment to apartment and from town to town. It’s good to stay home on the lean-in to the weekend and to have no one waiting for me, no one who expects anything. It feels rare. It feels like music resting on my skin.

    I just downloaded my photographs from the week and was glad to see they begin with a walk in the slightly greening forest over Easter, there is colour in the pictures now, life revives and the dank sour world underground can be escaped, at last, the old winter closes. In the sunshine today I walked all the way up to the junction to pay my rent and stood in line with all the Germans who were sorting out their Friday afternoon banking. Courteously we turned to one another to indicate when a machine fell free. I love participating in these almost sensual German community signals, by which everyone lovingly tends one another. In the vestibule which separates the cold air without from the heated air within a woman sat with her colourful cup, a ruined junkie’s face, on a tiny square of cardboard she has folded. Outside, another addict held the door back, broadly, smilingly, for everyone who enters and then offers up his greasy paper cup with its few coins. I walked home slowly in the last of the sunshine, our second sunny day since perhaps October, it has been delicious and chill and fresh. I lack the local knowledge to dress for the right weather so when the sun comes out I’m always caught out too cold, it’d just hard for me to picture it can be so sunny and still so frigid. My hands turned hard on the handlebars this morning and I pedalled harder, past all the drug dealers lining the entrances to the park, past the leafless trees, past the falafel stand the size of an ice cream cart, past the bins. In the afternoon I did the banking and then when all my errands were done and I was walking home I bought a plant, a long, trailing gout of ivy in a hanging basket, and carried it home through everyone’s smiles at the sunshine and at each other and at this greenery, this grasping for greenery we all have here just now. The man in the plant shop introduced himself when I was leaving. His name is Kadir. He is Turkish and lived most of his life on Cyprus, where he had another plant shop; he says he has only been in Berlin for a month. He handed me a flower, a purple short stemmed tulip, and I tucked it into the mop of my overgrown basket having chosen the most outrageously florid ivy specimen from the back of his uppermost shelf.

    The flower was in recognition I think of where our conversation began, which was when I was fingering the piney-scented sage pots and he came outside to find out what was happening on the noisy roadside outside his shop. A commotion had occurred. I don’t think I caused it but I did make it worse and now I was standing with my back to the road, burying my fingers in the lambs’ ear softness of the leaves and my heart pounding, hoping I was not about to get set upon. Over my shoulder I saw the car drive away, having idled a long, threatening minute, and then the man Kadir from the shop came out and we began to talk normally. What happened was that as I stopped for the plants, the pots of flowers, the buckets of lilies, a woman gorgeous with long straight black hair swinging pushed aside the man she was with, saying something in Turkish which could have been playful or not playful. It was hard to tell. I watched covertly. He shoved her. He took hold of her ungently. He pushed her down into the car and went round the driver’s side to get in.

    Across the screen of the greenery I shouted. “Hey! Hey.” I made my voice dark and authoritative: people can see you, people see. He glanced at me, hesitated only a moment, went back round to the kerb side of the vehicle and opened up her door, and bending to the level of her face he inserted his head into the car and roared something right at her. Slammed the door shut on her then went round and got in and revved the engine. I put the plant down and scuttled. Was frightened. Wasn’t sure what to do. Was frightened for her. I tapped with my knuckles on her window. She turned a startled face, shrinking, crying out in fear. Oh, my god, woman, do not let this fear take up its residence in your sunny female heart. He leaned across her and opened the window. I said – something. “Misbrauchen Sie sie nicht!”, don’t mistreat her, something far too formal and grammatically scrambled. Reaching across her the man shoved the passenger door open on me sharply, trying to push me off balance. I skipped out of his reach, wondering: now, would he get out. There were people everywhere. Or would he – yes, he just turned back to her and they turned to each other and I could hear her plaintive reasoning tones as I walked away across the only very shallow pavement and buried my attention in the sage for dear life, holding the soft furry leaf wrapped tightly round my index finger, waiting for him to go away, waiting for them all to just go away.

  • New Zonked

    In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made me laugh by innocently mispronouncing his views (sane) on American gun laws (insane): you walk into a school and it’s like that film, he said: The Texas Chainsaw Moussaka.

    Many Americans have a naivete that makes me feel protective of them, and not just about guns. More than once I have been complimented on speaking such excellent English, for an Australian. It doesn’t always seem to be because the speaker has confused us with Austria. I guess the sensation of believing one’s nation the centre, and pinnacle, of the civilised world – the use, even, of phrases like ‘the civilised world’ – might engender a certain self-satisfaction. On my very first visit, a few years back now, to New York I would marvel to anyone who’d listen how much better of a time I was having than I’d expected. “That’s because New York is the centre of the universe,” explained four or five unrelated New Yorkers, innocently.

    At JFK we had queued with our passports and I overheard the officer herding the line answer an anxious tourist’s question with, “I’m just doing my job here. Anything else you’re asking – is irrelevant.” “They’re handling people like goods,” said my companion, shuffling forward. Three days later up in the Bronx we went walking through one of the giant parks that make that part of town so beautiful. As we were coming down the hill a crocodile of children was climbing up. A little girl in front was walking rapidly backwards, her head tilted round to guide herself. “You can do it,” the teacher encouraged. “I believe in you, Destiny!”

    I said, to make her laugh, “We believe in you too, Destiny!” A second group of students followed them. One little girl was walking with her teacher, saying, “I’m serious!” “You can’t call a taxi,” the woman told her, “in a park.” It occurred to me I’d never said I believe in Destiny, before. I’m just… not American. Yet the sense of kinship with random passersby as we wandered up Central Park right from the bottom to the top, as we ventured into Harlem, as I got tangled in conversation with fascinating people on the D train, forever a stranger, was so spicy to me and so sweet. I loved the guy on the subway whose Superman socks were pulled high to the knee and inside out. I loved the wide-eyed baby whose daddy was so stoned he gave off a pungent weed reek. I loved the crazy Christian lady who tried to pick up my companion and when she’d asked, are you alone, looked at me and said, “And is that your… sister?” I loved the man who glanced into my camera’s screen when I stopped short at the top of the stairs into the subway station at Canal Street and said, “Nice photo.” It felt as it always to me feels in New York city, one of earth’s prototypical cities, as if we all are engaged on some giant endeavour, and none of us will ever see the outcome – in completion – we are fragments in a kaleidoscope like moths, we are our own art, we are brushing up against each other every day all day long as we go, handling the good like it was people.

  • New York is hard to write about

    New York is hard to write about. There’s so much of it and it keeps changing. So much human landscape, people breathing, tucking their feet. And the streets, where it lives, with this endless panorama. The feeling of spectacle and the dense sharp wild feeling of endless participation. The relating to the city in itself, a creature of its own. I have every day many tiny full ripe conversations with strangers on subways, in pharmacies (they sell vitamins shaped like Darth Vader’s head!), in bookstores. Sometimes we talk for a little while, like the Hispanic man with his huge happy smile on the way to Yankee Stadium with his kid, his young pretty wife who spoke up now and then “when there was least danger of it being heard,” his two mates who were African American. I love the Bronx-bound trains where racial normality prevails, exposing the patronising lie of that persistent white-privilege word ‘minority.’ He held up the flattened round ball of black when I asked about it, turning it to show that its two steel antennae were its little legs. “I thought it was an alien,” I told him, pointing, “I thought maybe it was your little pet.” “It’s a speaker,” he told me, turning it upright on the grimy floor to show. “When we get there, we going to listen to some music. My little girl loves it.”

    Oftentimes when you have some exchange with a New Yorker you will both turn away afterward, so as to show – or so I think – that there is no harm, no foul, that we are both not crazy people, the city has not unhinged us and there is no intent to latch on and keep talking once the moment’s gone. You might both say, See you later, when one of you climbs out, and I always find that beautiful and moving. And how at the checkout at the grocery store it is normal, it’s friendly, to stand and chat whilst buying but if I were to stand another five minutes, chatting on as the next customer piled their bags, I would become instantly a freaky aberration. All that openness and friendliness now has an agenda: we recoil. And in fact that friendliness and openness often does have an agenda: I want all beings to be happy. That is my secret and now it’s out.

    We walked clear up the centre of Grand Central Park, as my German-speaking companion calls it, til we reached the tiny walled gardens of the Conservatory Garden by East 104th Street. There is a lily pond there where water lilies bloom in threes: pink, and hydrangea blue, and a strange candling white. Fish churn under the water now and then and two gentlemen who bought them, from a shop in Chinatown, and who have wondered, they tell us, every year what to do with the koi when the pond is drained for winter (“they can survive underneath the ice”) stand feeding them, occasionally, lavishly, from a crinkling foil bag that says colour enhancing preparation. This whole day is colour enhanced, to me: I have in my hand the middling growth of a breastplate I’m building on a scarlet leaf that was just lying on the path by the lake, splendidly maple-pointed, and every time I find another blue or purpling spray of berries, a tiny lavender or soft pink flower, I pluck it (“darf ich?”) and add the stem to my thumbsward of stems. The day is purple and blue like a beautiful bruise. The grey winter days have cleared away and we are out, everyone is out, we’re all bleeding into each other in the sun. We are urban animals, we can survive under the ice. The beautiful young Black prince staring at his black sneakers on the subway, wearing his trackpants as though they were a suit, who held himself tensely waiting for the demand when I said, Excuse me. You have such a beautiful, striking face. I think – if you were to go into a really good quality modelling agency in Manhattan – they might be very excited about you. Then I turned away to my friend, to show him this is not a clumsy pick up, the agenda is transparent and shown. My friend said afterwards, casually, relieving me, “That man was smiling so much to himself all the rest of the ride. What did you say to him?” My first time in New York, scared and determined in 2011, I spoke to a tiny white-haired lady on the Harlem bus. This was my first foray into Madison Avenue and the expense had exhausted me. The legions of unhappy looking children, presaging an article I read later online which said How to Tell if Your Child is Spoilt. Question one read: do they find it impossible to be happy? When I climbed on the bus, drawn by the enchanting name Harlem, its juicy community sound, its soft music, this tiny lady was sitting opposite. I said, You’re so beautiful! And she looked startled, to my surprise. “No one’s ever told me that before,” she said. I said, “What? I would have thought people would have been telling you, all your life. You are a beautiful woman.” We gazed at each other til we both had tears in our eyes. I have thought of that lady and her seventy years’ bloom. I have wondered what kind of fears lurk in the hearts of men and families, that we cannot say to a beautiful woman, or man, this is your just tribute.

     

     

  • stitch grandeur

    In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You can dance on street corners. One of the blisses of living here is that everyone is stranger and no one’s a stranger: my lifelong habit of conversing with passersby as though we were resuming a discussion only briefly interrupted is welcomed and usual, it’s easier, fine.

    I had never seen anyone embroidering on the underground. Sleeping, yes, fighting, putting on make up; drunk men banging in unison their fists on the roof of the carriage on their way home victorious from some football game – those were English men, ‘educated hooligans’ – and people jump on and sing, for money, or make speeches, and sell things, or just beg: and the man on the U1 who shows mutely his malformed and tiny index finger that pokes the air like a children’s puppet, the more whole hand holding a grimy crumpled cup for coins. A week ago there was a can of green peas, with a spoon standing in it, empty and neatly tucked under the corner of the seat were someone, presumably, had been eating them from the tin. To say it took courage to pull out my embroidery seems ludicrous. But so it felt.

    It is an egg I drew freehand, a world egg, and have been filling with gradual slow stitches ever since. The egg shape is crossed with a bulging peace sign. I started it to sew for my suitcase, a new suitcase, khaki swirling, for my first trip to New York in 2011. The suitcase was a present, its army camouflage motif bothered me. “I want to sign that there can be peace, there can be love, that I am not part of the army,” I said, stitching next to the Brooklyn nightclub singer who at the request of our mutual friend was putting me up. We had bonded. We’d spent long hours sitting side by side on her bed, talking about our lives. “But,” she said, “you are also a warrior.” And hugging me, on her stoop opposite “the park” (an all-concrete basketball court) in the snow. She was smoking, and her voice was deep and compelling and rough.

    I made that trip, and another, longer trip, with the peace egg still missing from my luggage. Now in Berlin I have decided it is time to get it done. So on the underground I pull it out. With trepidation but not sure why. The first thing that happens is a good-looking, somewhat raddled man whose tangle of hair attracts me gets on and sits opposite. We are the only two people in the carriage. Noticing my stitching he says, terrifyingly, “This city belongs to us True Germans.” Nods many times. I try to smile, neutrally. His arm goes up in a blessedly hybrid but tyrannical salute. “We belong here. All of those foreigners need to just get out. They should go.” I say something, noncommittal and small, afraid of what violence I might bring on myself if my accent or choice of words gives me away. Then nodding also I get up and slide from the carriage, clutching the fold of canvas and my hidden needle.

    Real Germans sew in public. I felt I had identified myself with a certain kind of wholesomeness, or primness. The screaming mess at the back of my tapestry, with its gouts of wool and complex knotting clots of colour hardening the cloth, embarrassed me. It was so clear to anyone looking on – which they did – that I was a rank beginner. Perhaps that’s why the man in his seventies who had been strap-hanging nearby finally swung his upper body over me and confided, in a shy, sweet voice, We used to learn embroidery in primary school. We made cross-stitch. (Modestly, with a soft pride): I was really good at it.

    As she got off at Wittenbergplatz a lady clutching her hands before her chest paused to say, It’s hard, isn’t it, keeping the tension even. Yes, I said, relieved that she had articulated this issue I had only half-noticed myself noticing. You need an embroidery hoop, she said. Oh! I said. I really do. Thank you for mentioning it. Then I carried the feel of her all the way home. There is something innate, I think, in us – in me – which responds to the wisdom of an older woman, however pragmatic and small, however tentative, because it is what we are missing wherever else we look. Sneering at age, excluding the oldest cultures, enslaved to the young and the new; literary festivals falling over themselves to include schoolkids’ first raps at the expense of experienced writer elders; orchestras staging dismal photo shoots in which fiddle-clutching violinists leap uncomfortably. The trouble with hip is, it never lasts. I long for the inner knowing, the voice of experience, the hip replacement: the lasting.