Changing the side of the street I walk home on to avoid having to avoid the strenuously charming guy who always seems to be patrolling in front of his shop – often with a pretty girl hanging on his arm, always a different girl each time – and whose carefully-established friendliness and benign compliments have now veered into lewd winks which topple my thoughts into a far less interesting range of topics than they otherwise inhabit. I now wish I’d not been so friendly and I dislike having to meter my natural warmth in order to evade some stranger’s mild sexual aggression. I don’t like the sensation that he implies he and I are linked together in some kind of secret agreement. We ain’t.
Category: street life
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echt Kinderbilder
I just saw a Berliner sitting with legs planted apart in the sunshine and hugely enjoying his hot dog – or some kind of meat that will never die forced into a large white bread roll. In his opposite hand he held a catering-size bottle of red chilli sauce and was squeezing a gout of chilli into the open end of the roll each time he took a fresh mouthful. Though perhaps ‘fresh’ in this context is not quite the right word.
The sun is shining. Four men spilled out of an art gallery wearing hats and overcoats and one said, “Das sind echt Kinderbilder!” – those are kids’ paintings – and all of them laughed. In unison like an old school barbershop quartet. I caught the eye of a little elderly lady wearing green and she gave me, astonishingly, her mute and carefully guarded smile.
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Kurfürstendamm
I saw a woman who looked just like you, I wrote to my friend, smoking a cigarette and wheeling her bicycle, big black spiky thing with a huge basket strapped on front, down the boulevard on swank avenue with her friend, who was peering in the glossy shop windows, also smoking.
Then as I posted the letter I thought: hey. If a red-headed person spots their own twin on the street – is that a doppelginger? The man who last week complimented me, “it looks so lovely with your open hairs”, that is, with my hair unbound, walked past and we were both hurrying in the cold and our beanies pulled down over our brows, still we managed to grin at one another and exchange a few visible breaths. When he said that, I felt so glorious and seventies, platform boots grew beneath my heels and I felt my freedom rising through me like a mist, like the mist on the old airport tarmac, my stride grew longer and the knotty bundle gathered in my parka’s hood felt its roots right to my brain. Oh, the well-placed compliment. It’s that blue light of evening makes everybody pretty. I assembled my adventures of the last several cold days. Crossing the old abandoned airport towed by a dog I felt the mist rising all around and how the sun burned a white hole in the dense white sky. People had erected little winter gardens using pallets and old baskets, others were flying their kites. And the virgin busker I think I spotted one night on the street. He was standing on swank avenue, swaying a little, jerking an empty paper cup and singing beseechingly, uncertainly; he made me think of the Mr Darcy’s younger sister who sometimes introduces shyly a sentence or two “when there was least danger of them being heard.” So I went up to him and gave him all what I had in my pockets (a whole 30c) and said, Beautiful voice. Really? he said. Yes, I said. He looked like a nightclub bouncer who had suddenly discovered folk roots.
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towed by the wind
Today crossed the old abandoned airport towed by a dog I felt the mist rising all around and how the sun burned a white hole in the dense white sky: people have erected little winter gardens using pallets and old baskets, others were flying their kites.
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the black hamburger of weddingworld
On the bus coming home from our forest walk we passed a billboard for Hochzeitswelt: Wedding World. My partner says it’s a giant sales emporium but I am convinced it is some kind of fun park. At the market hall we got out and walked. I was noticing the graffiti – hereabouts is my own minute but weirdly lasting contribution to Berlin’s conversation, in chalk, a grammatical correction: I added an apostrophe two years ago to someone’s vehement caps-lock scrawl WONT DIE IN SILENCE. On a windowsill stood a half-eaten hamburger, which at first glance seemed to have molded over. I started think of the experiments people do with processed food where you stand a burger under a glass shade and months later it has not rotted. I remembered the droll jazz lover I befriended in an Ethiopian jazz cafe in Melbourne who rather lucidly summarized this result: If microbes won’t eat it – neither should you. Whilst putting all this together in my mind I realized there was something strange about this burger’s black mold. It was paint. Trailing up the pebblecrete wall to the sill was a long swab of black spray paint, part of the grafitti. A man in his sixties, splendidly dressed in a mohair overcoat and Russian fur hat, stopped to see what we were looking at. I showed him. He rocked back on his heels to laugh. As we came round the next corner my partner, formerly a product designer, said, looking up at a sign he had made for a local late-night kiosk, “Really I think I did a good job on that one. It’s so eye-plopping.” “It is,” I said, with difficulty, “really it is eye-plopping.”
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a small town in West Germany
We came today to a small town in West Germany to stay with family, my out-laws, who are champion collectors. Outside the door stands the Christmas tree, an actual tree cut at the throat and still wrapped in its net bedding, because as mother-out-law promised, “We left it for you both to decorate the tree.” Two years ago we were here for the first time, my first time, and she broke the ice – that winter, actual literal ice – by leaving it to me to coordinate decorating of the tree. The old spun and woven and blown decorations came out in their plentiful boxes. These people live in a house that’s been theirs for generations, something hard for me to imagine, and they have filled it with stuff. I asked the son of the house, my beloved, what the name of their strange street meant. It is the last road before the fields and we saw a pheasant bent forward and clucking to himself crossing worriedly from one shorn side to the other, as though pursued by tax collectors. “Ah,” he said. “Well it means an old execution place of the Germanic peoples; in the forest.” “Gosh, well I am so glad I asked about that. What a bummer it would have been if I had Forgotten to Ask.”
A couple of hours into our visit after plates of breads and cheeses (three kinds of bread, two of cheese, and five kinds of preserved meat) I began to nudge him and wheedle with my toes until he finally realised, “Oh! Wir gehen gerne auf den Weihnachtsmarkt, we’d love to go onto the Christmas market, might just run in there on their second-last night, ok with you? Mamma can I take your car?”
The Weihnachtsmarkt for me is the entire point of our trip. It’s the reason I am in Germany. This is what my partner used to twist my arm into the winter again, when we could have been lying in our hammock in the sweet greasy green southern hemisphere, feasting on mangoes as they fell off the tree overhead. We drove in, on the wrong side of the road, round errant curves each festooned with the needle trees dark and sore which never lose their leaves despite the cold. Several times I asked, “Where are we going?” just to have him answer, patiently, humouring me, “I think we’re going onto the Weihnachtsmarkt.” We walked onto an old town so medievally beautiful that the first time I was brought here through the old arch I burst into tears. As we explored the golden stone lit by street lanterns I forgot the crowded family house where in manoeuvring my suitcase through the door I joggled an unevenly-built shelf and three different hair dryers and four hairbrushes fell to the floor. I forgot all family obligation. I forgot all junk everywhere. We were in the beauty, in the ages, in the kings. Once more. People, mainly couples, drifted dark as feathers down the narrow winding streets, arm in arm. Golden lights, bottle-end window fixtures, deep restful casements and star-bright lanterns. Windows lit with all kinds of crafts and art. Rounding a final corner we came into the burst of flame that is the yearly Christkindlmarkt, market of the little Christ child: people gathered, people standing, people laughing and drinking and stamping their feet. This year it’s not all that cold, I think I must have imagined that last bit. The stalls hung with lanterns wound all round the little cobbled streets where no cars go and people ordered salmon smoked over the flame, white forcemeat sausages and star-shaped bread rolls, gingerbread hearts, eggnog “mit Schuss” (with a shot – of rum, or amaretto); Glühwein. Everyone was jolly and, this not being Berlin, they couldn’t care how cool or uncool they seemed, they were just having a simply uproarious time on the close-packed stones, throwing their heads back, wearing their Santa hats. So much conversation, all in German, some few leafless trees bestowing their shadows underneath the venerable church.
“That one was built in 800 AD,” he said, as I lit into the dream and did not come back. Anyway where is there to come back to? only the eternal present, whereas old Germany presents a time immemorial, something I had forgotten and feel now coming alive along my veins as though fishing lights dipped into me and brought the life swimming to the surface, every Christmas I have had “in which” (I told him) “we ate salad” now fell away and the stars we cut out of quartered paper made sense, the blobs of snow we’d stickytaped on strings hanging from the ceiling in the tropics – cotton-wool snow – all of a sudden had a purpose, everything fell clear. A quintet of young men with brass in their mouths were playing and it was a song I recognised, “no,” I thought, still in my trance, “that is not a song, that is a hymn.” My partner asked, what is the difference, and I sang it to him then could not stop: O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him… it’s not so easy to write a melody that good. “I’m going to be singing that all the way home, I warn you, it is so beautiful like an old wine in the throat, so if you’ve any complaints let us hear them now and then you’ll hold your peace.” “No complaints at all,” he said, bending tenderly round me as though I had been a bell.
I noticed on every unfolding gold-lighted stall that the Germans love kitsch, they just love it! “Don’t you have kitsch in Australia?” “We have junk. Plenty of junk, and trash. But your trash has a kind of sentimentality to it that is all your own.” He laughed low in his throat. We jounced home slowly, gently, through the medieval town under the tall pink facade of the building that more resembles a cake, past the outer streets where cars travel on the cobblestones as rippingly as though they had, or so it sounds, each four flat tyres. I remembered the word and reefed it out, “Reifenpanne,” a flat tyre, and the resurrection of this long-ago-acquired German word touched me and blessed me, as though there were endless space in my mind, as though life stretched on eternally.
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reggae punk
Night walk in the late afternoon. There is a large punk stationed outside the supermarket, asking for coins as people emerge from the light within; he is tall, broad, and mighty, wearing a lycra miniskirt and dark stockings, his hands pouched in the pockets of a worn khaki windbreaker. He has as they say in German few “hairs”, but they are scraped from all corners of his scalp into a wispy but somehow fierce high ponytail.
There are three Polish tourists who ask us where they can find some reggae. My partner remarks afterwards that the combination of “reggae” with the German, Reggaeveranstaltung, “sounds like the death of paradise”. There is a windblown American stationed at the autotellers who speaks slushy, gentle German and is homeless, or on the skids; his calling is to sweep open the doors of the bank’s glass vestibule with a big smile and a grave, deep, “Well, good evening.” He has his dog with him and a large coffee tin into which people sometimes cast coins. He’s always cheerful.
There is a demonstration outside the refugee centre which necessitates the whole street being blocked off by police. Around ninety or a hundred people stand about looking, mostly, like spectators who have wandered in on their way home, around a central tableau in which a huge white banner spread on the street is flecked with flowers and lined with flickering golden tealight candles. Two activists in baggy coats pull a blanket and then several cushions out of a large plastic bag and begin setting up a vantage point beside this shrine, on the kerb.
A photographer is prowling the sparse crowd, attentive but bored. The police all seem like giants in their militant uniforms. They are laughing and chatting. Loud music from a boombox strapped to the top of a van is interrupted by a speech in German-accented English. What enchants me is the two busloads of surplus police officers, waiting in their seats out of the cold, just in case. Their green and white striped minibuses stand parked diagonally across the entrance to the roadway, as an obstacle. At the other end of the barricaded demonstration area five police officers stop us when we would pass: they are jovial and unbudging: even an ID card showing you live in this very street will not get you through unless your apartment building happens to be in this end of the blockaded road. We shrug and turn away, threading our way through the inactive demonstrators to where the police buses parked in the roadway seem weirdly unchanged. There is something so strange about their attitude of waiting. We walk from tail to nose and then nose to tail of the two vehicles slowly, glancing up. Every seat is filled and the seated officers are absolutely motionless, as though underwater. Each has his head bowed and it takes me a moment to work out why this could be. Are they sleeping? Are they praying? Are they each lost in some meditative private world, like soldiers about to go over the top, asking forgiveness, giving thanks? They are on their phones. Each of them curved round the spell of his own little screen. They look monklike and freed from all anxiety.
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you are like a fresh cranberry
God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.
We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.
They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.
Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.
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Abu Dubai
Abu Dhabi airport. The altered reality of long haul travel is hard to convey. It does feel like we are hauling something, up from under the water. My hearing is dimmed and my sense of humour sharpened. When the lights came on for our last landing my companion pulled a blanket over his head in despair and I laughed at him until my eyes ran and stomach ached. It is always such a joy to survive air travel. The man sitting behind me from Singapore was floridly farty, a round Irishman whose gases escaped him in his sleep. I felt how I was unable to sleep and yet unwilling to waken, trying to stay upright to take little sips of air as close to the ceiling jets as possible, a turtle with its neck stretched out from underwater taking little sips of consciousness. Back at home the hammock which I made myself lie in every afternoon just to soak up the last of the heat and the sun is folded and packed away. On the morning of our departure, some six or seven weeks ago now it feels like, I made everything ready and went down to lie in it, cuddling my pillow, closing my eyes. Every stir of the local breeze was warm and feathery distinct on my skin. The leaves shifted. The light changed. The traffic pounded behind. The tree I was fastened to may not be there when we get back, someone has bethought themselves to maybe chop it down. I thanked it for all its leaves and its mangoes and shade. For giving a home to the butcher birds and possums. The tree spoke amongst itselves, as a friend of mine once said when I had coffee with him and he left me alone to go order: you just talk amongst yourselves. I thought that was hilarious. When our friend arrived at 9am I had almost fallen asleep, and her voice and my partner’s voice seemed to approach from a long way off, as voices right behind you will seem to do in a pressurised roaring cabin. We went upstairs and collected all our luggage together. I got into my travel clothes: scarlet and white onesie from Denmark, for ease of lolling, and giant black zippered biker boots, trying to shave five kilos off my bulging luggage. I’m always carrying too much weight in aircraft because books and journals are heavy. Oh my god, I said: I look like Santa Claus off duty. My partner said, you look like a rock star. At the airport I caught a glimpse of myself in the long glass doors and said, Hey! I look like a rock star! Then a jolly fellow in his sixties came up laughing to ask, Are you here to bring me all my Christmas presents? Oh, ho ho ho. On the plane we folded and refolded our four metres of limbs ingeniously and repeatedly, trying to get comfortable. At each airport we stumble out and cover the concourses. If I described how loud the announcements are here in this giant waiting room filled with black leatherette seats, no one would believe me. They fill the room like black sun. Everything trembles, or maybe that’s just me. My Santa suit zips right up to the crest of the head, so if I cannot stand the strain of being in public for so long continuously I can just close it up and disappear. But when finally a horizontal surface presented itself just now, I just lay down and pulled my hair over my face for a scarf, and slept almost at once.
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the lascivicious wink
So it’s late afternoon and the storm has passed, the light has begun to pearl. I’ve ducked into the local store to buy tomatoes and am issuing barefoot out of their sliding doors and down their concrete steps under the low, spreading tree. There is a man standing across the road behind me but I don’t see him because my face is lifted to the changing sky, feeling the colours dissolve down like layers of espresso and frothed milk blending slidingly together down the inside of a glass. It’s been such a hard week, it’s such a beautiful day. At first the crowing, acquisitive wolf whistle that issues from the man standing behind me (or lounging) does not attract my attention because it’s not about me, it’s about something else, my mind is flowing like a river of milk clunking with thoughts and I am active, relaxed, upright, happy, and at peace.
The whistle comes again, this time with an insistent edge. I feel myself stiffen. My walk loses its swing, a little. I am self-conscious. The street apart from me and, I now realize, him, is empty and there is no traffic. I can hear the traffic sliding round the other side of the hill but too noisy and too far away to hear a person who needed help, if anyone did need help. His second whistle getting no appreciable response he calls out, “Oi!” because it’s not acceptable to him that I might direct my own attention and be mistress of my own thoughts, that my world is mine and not his to command, that I am not interested in seeing his face or his leer or his gesture that I could otherwise add to my repertoire – my quiver – of lascivious and demeaning gestures. His inability to accept, after two failed attempts, that a passing stranger has no interest in his sexual assessment of her all of a sudden gels in my mind and I realize what the worst thing is. It’s not the veiled possibility of attack, though sometimes a woman finds that is worse than anything the rest of us imagine. It’s not the shattering of the bold, beautiful, skyblown and well-earned day and these few moments in between working at my desk and cooking dinner when I can think about whatever I please.
It’s that moments ago I had escaped the ever-mirrored hall of minor torment that is girls’ guide to the universe. I’d slipped the leash. From birth I’ve been, like almost every girl, taught that my expression and the way I stand and how I sit – with knees together! at all times! yet mocked for pigeon toes – are subject to the constant and perpetual raillery of everyone outside me: they have authority over my appearance, it is not mine, it’s theirs, for them, to please. And somehow slipping out of the house preoccupied with my thoughts and not stopping to change my worn old tank top and stretched-out skirt, somehow browsing over the bags of round tomatoes and lifting them to catch the scent and emerging into the late afternoon with that soft red weight hanging in my hand I had momentarily forgotten, I had reached the open sea, I was making for the islands and I’d lost my sense of the lifelong liability of my gender.
They say some cultures – not ours, oh, of course not – have household-sized kings, many little Mussolinis. Drug kingpins and pimps are local emperors. Each man is entitled, if this be what he chose, to run the harem of his immediate neighbourhood. This man, to use the term (yet again) very loosely, is afraid of my independence and feels he has to broach it. What spurs him is not my luscious, unconscious walk nor my legs nor the way some sun or streetlight caught my hair nor how my skirt swings. It is that I sashayed past in my womanhood and failed to notice him, to put down my tomatoes and acknowledge his mandom. The little kingdom of him.
Once I’d not heard him, or ignored him, I had to be brought to heel. He needed to emphasise and impose his own right to impose a faint sexual threat, by which a man says to a stranger: You, girl. It’s you I choose. I’d like to do this and this to you and it’s immaterial to me how you consent to the idea of it, how you consent to it. As the distance between us sags and increases what’s bothering me is the thought policing. His outrage that I didn’t respond. His insistence on his right to control. He wanted to intrude himself onto my thoughts: a physically masculine impulse. And what injures me, only slightly and for the thousandth time, is the occupation of this sweet space I’m living in, which is full to the brim already with adventure, not all of it easy and fresh and rewarding, not all of it kind. It’s this intrusion by the flimsy failing fascism of some random stranger who strokes me with his stalk eyes as I go: but who will never, however powerful the zoom on his X-ray specs, ever really see me.
I turn the corner and arrogance, or rather privacy, reasserts itself and I start to notice the cupped corns held out by a neighbour’s mown bushes. I notice the soft crisping carpet of green leaves and blossom that has been cast down by the storm. I think: nor will he ever, surely, truly see himself. Nor see the sky for what it is. Nor feel the breeze landing cleanly on the naked parts of his skin. Nor feel the pale green of these undersides. The rustle of fresh joy in the trees and underfoot that announced the storm has now passed and all of us here have, as they say in German, overlived it.