Passed a remaining section of the Berlin Wall and saw tourists of all languages leaning up against it for photographs, posing with big smiles and often two thumbs up; one Japanese girl had a coy, sexy grin. I wonder what it is they imagine they are visiting.
photograph is of a building-site skip transformed into street art with the aid of a shopping trolley turret, carpet-roll gun & many layers of clingwrap plastic.
What I dislike about these dos is they seek to rope in passersby. It reminds me of why I don’t like street theatre – at least not the kind that leaps, rehearsed and scripted, onto a tram and then claims the other passengers, immersed in their own train of thought, their lives, their worries, their books, have no sense of humour/are ‘inhibited’ if they refuse to be bullied into taking part. This seems to me to give what might otherwise be actual fun an aggressive quality. There’s always one girl lagging behind, her arms folded, her handbag protecting her heart. Why must a woman be willing to consume penis-shaped chocolates to marry the one she loves? Why must she dress like a lap dancer in order to prove she’s a good sport? In a small northern town over Christmas we saw a man sweeping the town hall steps. His friends called us over and dispensed beers from the open hatchback of a small scarlet car. “He’s thirty,” they explained. “This is his birthday. He has to sweep the steps until nightfall, or until a virgin comes past and kisses him.” Eventually his girlfriend, her expression an unutterably painful combination of the wry and the humiliated, scampered up the steps and kissed his cheek. He put down the broom. A cheer went up. Somehow celebration seems to me – Christmas notwithstanding – far less convincing when it is so scripted.
Berlin, Berlin, I cannot but love you. Unbelievable, unmistakeable. The contrast to Copenhagen is immediate. At the airport nothing works. Every toilet is barred with tape and the man in the kiosk is grumpy but funny. He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. We are laughing. The train smells faintly of old urine. When we get out to change trains at Ostkreuz, for a moment I’m wondering can we have stumbled into a party? A party on the train platform, doesn’t that seem unusual? But it’s just a bunch of Sunday night revellers, standing about talking loudly and all of them wearing various casual, scraped-together outfits, some in funky, messy costumes, a girl with her afro pared into a kind of wave and bleached orange is crouching earnestly over her bags, sorting methodically a magical melee of things from one gaping leather satchel to another. She has on a short pair of shorts and some kind of shearling vest cut high around the ears. The moon drifts high, high, high above the scene, it does look like a scene, grubby and fitted out like a film set built by many hands. The train fills with the noise of someone’s ghetto blaster and the smell of stale alcohol. People are drunk. By the smell of it, some have been drunk for several days: a smell not of spilled beer or Red Bull breath but of old booze leaking from people’s pores. Three ladies with their suitcases ask my friend directions, he answers confidently and then grows confused for a moment when pointing out the outermost stations on the map above the door. The boy opposite catches my eye over his girlfriend’s head and we both laugh, laugh for a while, one setting the other off with a glance when the other stops gasping. The three pretty girls with demure frocks and curly hair are smiling tolerantly. The newly-arrived ladies wave when we get off. “Have a great time in Berlin,” my friend says. The love. The moon. The insanity. The mess. The three drunken Polish guys who ask for money, shoving a filthy coffee cup under my nose and rattling it. “Für beer und weed?” The gasp that leaps out of me when we reach street level and a low tide of litter has buried, like old snow, the bottom of all the tyres on all the bicycles locked to the railway station railing.
Last night a lost soul brushed past me on the street and I could feel the black, sucking wind. She was very beautiful, extremely young, just-enormous eyes. Bare feet and ankles swollen like stumps. Bruises. Old bruises. She was leaving the curb as I reached it to cross the street, making a decision, counting out some kind of breath or strange fairytale with soft beats of her hand on the air. She crossed halfway and came back. Same again. Described a formal square on the asphalt with sober steps, watching her own feet, slightly smiling. In the middle she balanced herself on the white lines and turned to open her arms at the approaching traffic imploringly. I said, We have to help that girl. She cannot have heard me but her gaze focussed on me vaguely, like air. She came back over the road and put herself beside me, very close, her head yearning towards this source of passing kindness with a tilting raise of the chin. I stood beside her. I said, Kommst du mit uns? and invited her to cross the street. Now it was safe. The traffic gathered at a distance, thrumming bulls. She was so surrounded by the sense of imminent threat, or so it seemed to me, it was like she was towing a thunderstorm on a kite string.
She looked into my eyes like a dog. A slow blink. “Alles ok?” I said. “No,” she said, very quietly, in English, very distinctly. I said, “Do you need help?” She sort of spread her hands on the air, two floating castles. Helplessness, helplessness: mine, hers, ours. A young girl like a flower, a roaring jungle infected with needles, coins, tricks. We crossed the road without her, her attention dissolved from me as love dissolves. I looked back and two friends had surrounded her, they carried her back in their intent to the side of the road. She was reasoning with them. In the park one of the African dealers caught my eye and I smiled and he smiled. Then he looked self-conscious, shy. “Are you laughing at me?” “No!” I said. “I’m smiling at you, because you’re beautiful.” He walked on a couple of paces alongside. “That,” he said, thoughtfully, “is a really nice thing.” The girl in my mind made a feint at the traffic from the roadside again, describing circles and air squares all paved in asphalt, more than a dog but less than her altered self, a welter of physical injuries, little fiend no doubt who would steal and shame and was lost in helplessness, waiting for her accident, a ghost already.
It was breathlessly hot. Almost every inch of Berlin seems to be paved. I went out with a friend who has a dog. The cafe we found has three guardian trees, sentinels of sensibility on a long glaring featureless street. The dog flung himself onto the shaded pavement. The cafe owner brought him a basin of water. He brought us menus written on little lined notebooks, with pictures of writers pasted inside. They made perfect coffee and perfect eggs. The owner, a motherly, middle-aged gay man in a blue gingham shirt, came over and said, holding up two biscuits between his thumb and forefinger, “And is my little friend allowed to have something to eat?” He crouched by the dog and stroked his head, offering the crunchy treats coaxingly. The awning over our heads was caramel-coloured and had strings of golden lights looped underneath. The tables had little sprouting pots of flowers on them and those glass sugar dispensers with a tilted steel nipple like round fat ducklings. We gazed up and down the street, falling into silence, stunned by this unusual heat. I told my companion, cafes save my life every week. What would this street be without this oasis? A bleak, suburban hopelessness. Cafes give the feeling that human civilization has been for something. They collect up the beauties of what we have made. This lantern, this music, this length of printed cloth, this sturdy tumbler just right for the grasp. From a cafe vantage point one can sit and look out. One gazes on the world passing ceaselessly, in starts and spurts, and says, Aye. So it is. Such is life. This is us. Here we are. It’s a funny old world. And so it goes.
I saw a gorgeous black girl climbing off the train yesterday in this heatwave, her hair was intricately braided in pulpy masses and then the braids woven into a long plait, her cork soles were three inches high and a tiny skirt swished around her legs. Her shoulder bag said in huge letters, AFRICA IS THE FUTURE.
Whenever I pass someone having their photo taken by a friend, this is me in Berlin, this is me in front of a famous monument, I feel the urge to put up my fingers in bunny ears behind the head of the one taking the photo. Generally it makes them laugh. I figure they’ll have umpteen hundred snapshots of ‘this is me
Yesterday walking down a very Turkish street I saw four groups of boys, one after the other, carrying large, menacing, (plastic) bazookas. One held his fake sub-machine gun to his friend’s head as the friend squirmed and several times tried to bat it away. An eight-year old carrying the Ramadan bread tucked it under his arm and pulling a pistol from his pocket shot his five-year-old brother in the face. Then they both walked on, their pistols bulging in the pockets, carrying the bread of God and guns like it was nothing.
Berlin, Berlin. Familiar and overwhelming. On the train back from the airport a girl with an extraordinary voice hopped on and busked. At the end of the song, the guitarist accompanying her took a bow and people burst into applause. “Wow!” she said, opening up her hat. A cute couple jumped off and a guy with his afro razored up the sides leaned after them, silently proferring the phone and wallet the girl had left lying on the seat. Two muscular men slightly running to fat had their dog with them, a pug named Princess Sheba. We got talking. The one holding the dog on his lap obeyed signals from the other one who said, wiping his own eye, she has something near her eye, and so forth. Princess Sheba stood upright on her owner’s sturdy legs, balancing against the train’s movement like a surfer. These trains travel high above the street and at intervals feel like you’re lost in the woods. The cool breeze flooded in every time someone got on or got off. “Mind the gap,” the safety announcement said in English. Later in the evening a guy snarled at me for making eye contact and called my German companion a Nazi. He was walking along spoiling for it, followed us, taunting, through some misery of his own. “Like the black women in Brooklyn say,” he said, bitterly, chasing us, “stay away from white people.” Berliners smoke in cafes and the street is filled with old litter. If you eat out, people beg, and sell newspapers, and beseechingly play the harmonica. At the next table a middle-aged blond woman painted her lips against a little mirror while her boyfriend watched absorbedly. It took both of them to make her beautiful, it was their tradition. She made faces at herself as though she were having a very emotional, silent conversation. We saw two Romany boys whom I’d seen busking last summer, a year ago now, the little one is bigger and wirier and his chubby brother is chubbier. The younger plays the trumpet and has a loud ghetto blaster with which he drives away all the other musicians. But he’s getting better. Last year he was confident but terrible. I told him, your playing has improved! so much! you’re getting good! and for the first time in all the dozen times we have spoken he gave me his slow, curling, lopsided and personal smile.
