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  • mansplendour

    I was working in a cafe, head down, muttering the words aloud under my breath as I forged down the page writing for hours. The man next to me started to take an interest. I was unwilling to give over my concentration to him but gradually angled my screen away to avert his possessive interest, shaded the words with my hand, made it clear I was busy and it was none of his business.

    Some men cannot bear to be shown they have no influence in some woman’s life.

    As soon as his companion got up to go to the bathroom this man spoke to me. Loud and assured, in German. “Something something astonishing you are able to concentrate in here” – a pure ruse to get my attention, as by speaking of this concentration he hoped to dispel it. When I still didn’t look up but went on chasing the verge of the idea which 20 seconds later broke over me like a wave and transformed my expectations for the writing I was working on, he was visibly, audibly miffed.

    It reminded me of a man in Melbourne I had met only because he came to stand alongside me as I sat at the bar in an overfull restaurant, filling rapid pages with my thoughts. He stood there for a while, as I realised later, and when I didn’t react he actually passed a hand between my face and my page. This felt like someone had reached their big hand inside my head and stirred it round. I reared back. “What?” Where’s the fire?

    This man was smiling, jovial, his hands back in his pockets. He rocked on his heels a little. “I was just wondering. Writing in here – don’t you find it difficult to concentrate?”

    All the responses I could have made buzzed on my tongue like flies. But he was blind to his blindness and deaf to his own noise. This entitlement is also of course where mansplaining, manspreading, street harassment and rape come from.

  • hand to hand

    I went to a new physiotherapist today for my injured hand, and experienced all the Germanness. Me and the therapist, who is 23, have to call each other Mrs So and So, Mrs So. Her first name is not vouchsafed on her nametag and the surname was very German and unfamiliar to me. I thought of the writer friend whose multilingual office reverts from “Tom,” “Iris,” “Nancy” etc in English to “Herr Geltrausch, Frau Petersilie, Fräulein Kartoffelpuder” when they switch to German again.

    I am learning, with reluctance, the kinds of boring German words which mean “cancellation fee” and “referral” and “health insurance.” She measured the ring finger whose persistent swelling since it was ‘ausgekugelt’, that is, the marble popped out – dislocated – in Brisbane in July, makes it difficult to bend and refrained from making the insensitive joke other hand therapists have made, which is that if I want to marry I will have to wear the ring on my thumb.

    She asked what do I do, and I told her, I used to play guitar, and we both looked down at the swollen sore knuckle and I started to cry. Germans are often so compassionate. But they’re formal. In the waiting room a special chair for children was piled with comical stuffed animals, each in its own way an expressive beast. The sun shone through the window like the first day of Spring. It is cold but the ice cream shops have opened and as I walked home I passed junk shops which have laid out their junk for the first time since September. In the waiting room of the physiotherapist practice numerous framed notices began, formally, “Very Honoured Patients and Patientesses…” then invited us to help ourselves to coffee and tea, therapeutic toys and basins of lentils to sift through, heat pads and cold pads, filtered water, and biscuits.

  • this one time?

    I came home after a long day, festooned with groceries. The bench on the subway platform was occupied by two girls and their shopping. I said, “Excuse me,” in German, and they said, “Excuse me,” in German, and cleared a space. Then one turned to the other and said, in flawless Brooklyn Privilege, “So I’m like, ‘the person who cooks’ in the relationship, but one time? Eli was like, ‘let’s make spaghetti together.’”

    At the station where I climbed out two men were playing a complex and delicate classical duet on two squeezeboxes. I passed a man in my street who was carrying a double bass upright on his back. Its long neck sticking straight up behind the face made him twice as tall. I’d been noticing the rows of inverted and upright Vs of manspreading and women’s frequent shrinking in public spaces on the train, and I thought: sometimes privilege is visible; and sometimes, it is audible; sometimes it hoards itself, and sometimes it emanates.

  • refugee dinner

    This is the lunch I had today, in a Saturday cafe set up by a refugees welcome committee (one of the many) in Berlin. When I ordered, a smiling Syrian woman plump and beautiful in her brown scarf came out to me carrying this bowl: a dish I had never eaten before, and when I was done she came back for the plate and hovered anxiously, asking in English, “Did you like it?” I told her I liked it, and we smiled at each other. The food was noodles cooked with brown lentils, tamarind, lemon peel and pomegranate. It cost five euros, around eight Australian or American dollars.

    I was thinking of my lunch as I read a stranger’s post lambasting Muslims as universal terrorists and lauding Trump’s ban. Or as someone the other day brilliantly dubbed him: Crybaby-in-chief. Today I decided I would start calling him POUTUS, for his glorious petulance. I thought at first he was more of a misogynist, but now I feel sure pouting is his real superpower.

    This cafe was crowded and buzzy and I had come to concentrate and write. Much of the conversation was in German, which allowed me to tune it out and focus on my page. They played lazy, sunny, splashy sitar music. I stayed for three hours. Run on Saturdays to raise money to help house new arrivals, this is just one form of the pragmatic welcome given Muslims from Syria who have turned up here at Angela Merkel’s noble instigation, now comprising about one German in one hundred, and welcomed with Refugees Welcome stickers and t-shirts all over Berlin. I wish I could organise a roadshow of new arrivals who were not too traumatised to perform and travel, taking them through the so-called flyover states in the US where Trump has been hailed a saviour. I feel sure if people could just sit down with a Syrian person, or a Moroccan person like the many interesting and cultured individuals we got to know over Christmas this year, staying in Fez, the hatred that masks fear would begin to dissolve in curiosity, conversation, and ken.

  • a virgin busker

    On the subway a woman suddenly opened her mouth and began to sing. Her voice was tentative and good. She had a little loudspeaker rigged up through her mobile phone and had set herself to perform some songs in her own native Spanish. She was rugged up like the rest of us in a puffy blizzard jacket, was in her late middle age, and shy: and I would be willing to bet this was her first day out busking.

    She sang, Kiss me… kiss me all over, or as it renders in the Spanish, kiss me a lot. Her voice trembled with nerves but she kept going. She tried to set up a swing with her hips, stiffly, appealing to the stony crowd with outstretched hands. “Music?” her voice, her hands, her eyes seemed to be saying, “remember music?”

    I got up and went over to be nearer. She was standing in the doorway with her back turned to the glass doors. She smiled shyly at me and I smiled shyly back, nodding encouragingly, clinging to the yellow pole and hanging my head against it as though it were a mother.

    Shyness in public. It makes life so much more challenging. A little way into the song she switched up the tempo and the backing music began a familiar rumble. “Bamboleo,” she sang, wistfully but clear, “Bamboleah…” A moment later she was saying, thank you, danke schön, and pulling out of her jacket pocket a crumpled waxed-paper cup. It is easy to fall on hard times so rapidly. Well-dressed people are begging and collecting bottles for the deposit all over the city. I gave her two euros saying, Sie haben solch eine schöne Stimme, eine echt schöne Stimme. You have such a lovely voice, a really beautiful voice. This was perfectly true and she knew it. We thanked each other bashfully and she went off down the swaying carriage where to my surprise people pulled out their wallets and broke the fourth wall. I, too, am afraid to sing in public; I, too, have a voice. Her courage by this stage had moved me to tears and when the door at my station opened unexpectedly a second early, while the train was still moving, I stood back saying, “Whoa,” and smiling with surprise. German trains are seamless. The man waiting outside the doors stood facing me as the platform slowed. He smiled back. We smiled at one another. In the stairwell a man with his face turned to the wall was shooting up into his elbow, bared in the literally freezing grey cold.

  • a Berlin evening, so cold, so sweet

    After an exceptionally difficult night and a day of doing difficult work, I said: I need to go out. Let’s go someplace we can have a glass of red and a plate of food. I had in mind Italian but the restaurant was closed for some sawing and hammering, we ended up at a Swiss place run by a Swiss man who aired his Swiss accent to amuse us.

    The wine was nice, the food was ok and the atmosphere thriving and red-checked. People came in from the cold in little gouts. We had a basket of bread and the waitress brought a little marble slab like something chipped out of a wall with a scrape of herbed butter splayed onto it. In the flickering candlelight we talked about his work and mine. I kept picking up the white enamelled wooden pepper mill and holding it in my hand, for the consolation.

    Is it true the Swiss eat apple tart with lavender-scented soft cream? These Swiss do. I remembered the word I had made up to describe the natty fellows in late middle age circling the lake in Zurich in their roll-top cars, who had pink and lemon coloured cashmere jumpers knotted round their shoulders and some of whom were wearing mint green pants: immaculate contraception. We whined a little, pleasurably, about the music, which was one of those wan girls who spoons the stuffing out of twelve or fourteen formerly robust intricacies (The Cure, baby, the Rolling Stones) so that you feel faintly perturbed by the recollection: hey, didn’t I once used to know this song? More than the Queen, she was the opposite of punk. Feeling warmed inside and far more unwound we paid our bill and walked home across the hardening snow, and it had grown so terribly cold during the evening I started to tremble inside my duvet jacket and we both became nauseous with chill.

  • it has sun

    In the cafe he showed me the pictures he had taken on his walk here, of a dog skateboarding in the park. “You should animate those into a thumb-book!” I said. Amy Winehouse was singing. “Or maybe a – gif.”

    We watched a couple walking past in their somehow sweet and somehow matching outfits. He had on a blend of waterfront worker and Clash renegade, a scarlet beanie; she was doused in a long, woollen coat with skirts, like she had stepped out of the moors to take the city air. I was struggling to put all of this into words and he said, “Their cute sort of karate look.”

    I pressed his hand. “Karate-karaoke-paparazzi.”

    We walked back past the housefront biliously painted with darker green highlights which says at arm height worst green ever. He had a conversation with the guy whose dog is wrapped in a torn army blanket, on the metal access ramp to the ATM foyer at the bank. This man is American and clearly made his life here years ago, but his German is poor. As is he. His devilish rock and roll grin greets bank customers and he swoops the door open, when they leave and when they enter, so courteously and with an infectious warmth.

    In the park, drug dealers and old ice: the frozen water kind. A girl cycles past, singing. The sun has been brief. “You should gig there,” he says, pointing over to a bar sunk underground with golden windows. “They host acoustic stuff.”

    “I’d love to,” I say, looking in at the knee-height windows shyly, as we pass. “If I ever start gigging again.”

  • the meagrely satisfying throne

    He didn’t want to be President. Not if President means making sticky decisions, and being blamed for things (most of the world calls this ‘adult responsibility’), and being woken at four to read the papers. 

    What he wanted was to be Mr President. Good morning, Mr President! He wanted to star in the biggest ticker-tape parade, and have flags waving, and maybe people would make Donald masks and schoolchildren would wear them and Melania would float into his arms like a giant swan.

    Same when he builds a hotel. He doesn’t really want to build a hotel: he wants to put his name on a big building in gold letters and it’ll have a glitzy big foyer and people will come in and swank around. He pays minimum attention to the hotel-building chore that gets him there, as we see when it starts falling apart, is cheaply built, and he hasn’t paid his contractors. A man who took pride in the thought that “I — have built a hotel” would pay his sheetrockers. 
    This expression, the day after his Presidential Inauguration, says it all. She is angry — possibly a thwarted Trump is no fun to go home to Friday night. She’s put up with him ever since the doors closed and the cameras dissolved away.

    But he is baffled, furious, bored, bamboozled — what is happening? This wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

    The greatest weekend of his life has been stolen from him — by a march. And life has not just stolen a march, it has shown him up with ratty thin combover crowds, hustled into position behind the Great Leader to swell the photographs; and dismal responses from the music community refusing to play at his party. The world is laughing at him.

    Half the jokes are infuriating to Donald because he can’t understand them. How could he? This is a guy who all his life has learned that you get what you want by getting your own way. You rant and shower some half-baked ideas and ream people, and they hurry off and make it happen. You don’t need to know how it works.

    He has no idea that he would now be wealthier if he had just let the fortune he inherited sit in boring bank bonds on Wall Street. His experience has taught him that success is more important than happiness or enjoyment, and success comes from making an appearance. He’s the shopping mall god. He’s a boy band with only one member, the one kept at the back of every group photograph.

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    He’s outclassed by his wife, the porn queen with her carefully prepared speeches, his daughter, smart enough to play along when she must surely see through him, the real King, that daughter’s husband, and now by the coterie of White House staff who have seen it all before and it was better. Poor Donald. Embodying all that’s most grating in America’s overblown sense of itself, he’s out of touch. And this weekend, the crown, the dream, the White House in the air, has taken everything away from him. If all you know how to do is bully and the most powerful seat in the land brings nothing but millions refusing to listen to you — what’s left?

  • pity flamingo

    Every week I cross town on the train and we pass a tower block of identical grey-frame units which have grey balconies. One balcony, at eye level with the train, has a bright pink inflatable flamingo hanging like a lurid fern, I guess somebody went to Florida or Havana and brought it back with them to bring back the tropics. It doesn’t look tropical. It looks more defeated. The air has shrivelled out of it, or perhaps shrunk in the bitter chill of Berlin’s below-zero winter. The bird sags, motionless, its head drooping over its breast and hanging down to the shrivelling feet.

    Poor tropical bird, alone trapped in glassy Berlin and its colourless end of year season, after all the other bright birds have vanished down to the southern shores to caw and preen.

    Snow lies on the ground in greying patches. Hardened scars of black ice have been strewn with sharp pocks of gravel from the big grey plastic bins. This fake bird is the only pink thing. Apparently flamingoes, naturally flamboyant or perhaps insecure on their wavering stalk legs, will not make babies unless a crowd of other bright pink flamingoes stands round them watching.

    Zoos have had to set up elaborate peacock tails of mirror to encourage them to breed. Gazing out at this sad blow-up bird sometimes I think about staging an intervention. What if every passenger put on a pair of Edna Everage sunglasses. What if we all stared out the windows and flapped our arms. Maybe the dying flamingo would stir on its still leaf of string. Maybe the neck would waggle and stretch, and the tiny head come up again to display proudly its improbable and superciliously curled coconut ice pink swan lip.

    But Berlin’s trains are courteous and pragmatic. People stand back tiredly to let each other on. This week I’ve passed a junkie shooting up right into the arm, against a pillar at my nearest U-Bahn station; five people in a row who were all reading books but seemed unaware of each other; and a sturdy Polish tourist who rolled, under my nose, a plump head of ganja into his palm so that when we all got off the train, he could light it.

  • salami baby jesus

    I may or may not have been down to the markets today to visit the man who runs a wonderful salami stall; he offers salamii (that’s the plural) of goose, duck, venison, and pig. This man has taught me that the original salami were loaf-shaped, like baby cheeses, and the familiar linked sausage format is an innovation. What’s for certain is that I bought from him a plump, nipple-ended salami powdered in white rice flour which he says is called ‘the little baby Jesus.’

    He cradled it in both hands and rocked it a little, to show me. I had on my Dad’s pyjamas under my jeans and was only waiting to get home to get really, truly comfortable.

    After that I may or may not have suggested to him, Hey! You should make a nativity scene on your stall every year – and have The Little Baby Jesus as your Jesus.

    I would, the man said. He was rueful. I would love to. It’s just that – some people might get offended.

    I was crooning over my plump swaddled baby, sniffing its pungent head. “Offended?”