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  • the young man with a long way to go

    The young man in the place where we are staying is Moroccan and comes from the desert, which he describes to me as ‘sympa’, sympathetic, a kind place. As opposed to the hustle and throng of the medina where people greet us ‘welcome, welcome,’ and return smiles with great warmth and ease and employ the most genteelly probing sales techniques in (they say) the world.

    This young man is named ‘given by god,’ or ‘gifts of god,’ and we looked up his name in a list of the 99 names of Allah which, I only slowly realised as we were discussing these names with a nearby restauranteur, are perhaps not so much names as qualities. God the good, god the great, god the compassionate, god the wise. Similarly it dawns on me, belatedly, decades after the life on Java I so cherished as a child where we lived between three mosques and stayed indoors during the ferment of election week, that the prayers which play continuously in some hole-in-the-wall shops in the souk are not petitions, in the sense that I would understand prayers, in the sense I sometimes grope for in extremis and despair, longing in the depths of my pained heart to have someone to pray to; they seem perhaps more like resolves embedded in long and winding stories. And so they came upon a beautiful oasis. And there they could water their camels and have something to eat. And so god said to them…

    I am improvising, here. Who has any idea what god might be saying? not even the solemn Jehovahs Witnesses who came to my door with their beguiling brochures and then, when I grew just a little too interested, felt honour-bound to warn me away from the technicolor gloriosity of the illustrations. “This only… artist impression of heaven.”

    Ah – then. But god or, as I would put it, kindness, knowing, understanding, meaning, the connectivity of us with the world and with one another – a kind of exalted humanness, in fact – speaks to me in the trees and in the wind pouring through them; a sort of devotional prosperity I have dwelt in since childhood, when I used once to wander the markets in Jakarta and the coconut groves on the shore opposite Krakatau in a scintillated state of constant and ever-changing concentration.

    So, Gift of God has come to the city in the north, leaving his desert homelands behind, and he tells me he has been here in Fès only three months. He had a job in another pension but it was a bad place. He came to this house a week ago. Ah! I say, cupping his shoulder with my hand, from the side rather than from above because of the war between affection and a horror of condescension. Then you have been here only four days longer than us! Yes, he says, creasing his face in a serious, shy smile.

    This morning as I was lighting out across the courtyard with my books in my bag this young man approached me on his soft shoes. Would I like my breakfast now? I said, You know, thank you, but actually I think I might go into the adventure and just eat somewhere on the markets, today. Oh! he said, and dropped his head and an expression crossed his face that hurt me, as though I had hurt him.

    “It’s not because I don’t like the food! It’s just – I wake up and go, I’m in Morocco! And so I just have to go out and…” On the sunstricken square my lengthy sweetheart joined me where I was so deep in the book I was reading, a book about politics that I find difficult to understand, that when he crossed the sun and grasped me by the shoulder I started. Around us gentlemen of Morocco discussed – I imagine – politics, I imagine their talk is dry and knowing and cosmopolitan, world-weary, courteous, and wise, I hear words which are the names of countries and think, they are speaking of world events. The first morning I was almost too shy to sit down and had to approach the cafe, whose restful shelter I craved, by way of a huge loop up and around the street before I could cross the road at a tentative, oblique angle and ask the courtly waiter diffidently in my execrable French, excuse me? am I allowed to come in here? even as a female? I was the only woman in the cafe, almost the only woman in the square, and when I wanted to go downstairs to the bathroom they flew into a flurry of small-scale preparations and I was handed a door handle, by which to access the second stall – for women and for, I guess, tourists, as it has a Western toilet and sometimes even a roll of paper.

    The second morning I sat down in the blaring sun at a tiny table and was moved almost to tears when the man who had been sitting by me yesterday and whom I had greeted said, inclining his head, “Bonjour,” and even asked, “Ça va?”

    To have a courteous neighbour, who is reading the newspaper in Arabic and a battered paperback in English; to sit in the sun, after months in wintry Deutschland – it sends me down into a contentment that is very much like sleep.

    The young man in the pension, Gift of God, smiled his grave smile on our third night in Africa when we asked, where would be a good place to eat. He told us he had made a very small number of ‘connections’ in Fès, since he came here three months back alone, and his friend Mohammed runs a good place, very cheap, under the large tree which is a landmark as there are so few trees in the medina at all. “That young man has a long way to go,” says my companion as we cross the square. and for a few moments I am startled, before it clicks into place: that he will go far. We eat at his friend’s cafe, treated royally. We practice the gesture courteous Moroccans use, of a hand pressed level across the breastbone, touched to the heart, moved, thank you, I am sorry. Walking the medina I also use the fellow gesture which takes place a little lower, pressing across the tummy with my other hand, saying, “On a manger.” I hope this means, thank you, we have eaten, and use it to reply to the touts who hand laminated menus outside every restaurant (“We have wine!”) My German companion thinks the tummy is called the stummy, and recently revealed in conversation that to him this is because the stummy is the seat of all stamina. This makes sense. Stomach, stumina, stummy for short. Now I find out he is calling the guys who hawk the restaurants ‘shouts’, perhaps a better word than touts. Meanwhile in German, he says, I make ‘sweet’ childlike errors in a thicket, or fog, of laughably elaborate courtesy. Elaborate formality – to a German! that kingdom where a Keep Off the Grass sign will begin: Very honoured forest wanderers and forest wanderesses, please be advised…

    So on our first week in Fès we navigate our way with his terrible French and my awful French and the few paltry words of Arabic we have learned: principally ‘choukran’, thank you (hand across heart), and ‘la choukran,’ no, thank you, to which I’ve improvised a kind of Bollywood head-waggle of the hand.

    By the fourth night the influx of new sensations and sights have exhausted us and we go back a second time to the same restaurant. Mohammed greets us with cries of warmth and manifests a place to sit when almost every seat was full. He flaps the fancy tablecloth like a magician producing a bunny. I watch him do this over and over, I remember the rapid-fire thought processes and sly courtesies of hospitality work and comment, when he comes by to tip more bread into our basket, that it is like surfing. “Yes!” he says, jubilant, “exactly – like surfing.”

    This man has learnt all his English by listening to customers and he asks, what is the word in German for I will be awaiting you. Germans sometimes say to him, “Vielleicht später,” maybe later, when he offers a menu. We search among our words before lighting on Ich bin für Sie da, I am here for you, explaining this is “very gracious,” making gestures of graciousness like a king. “Ah!” he says, satisfied, Moroccan: “Ah! Yes! That – is most important.” He asks us to speak it into his phone so that he can learn it, and I take a photo of the two them with their sweet heads together, listening in on one departed French or Spanish or German tourist after another, speaking in all their different voices the phrases which comprise his vocubulary, each of them adding a drop to his store of hospitality.

    To my right, five Chinese students are spending the night with their phones. They are so absorbed that even when food arrives they ply their forks round it, scrolling onwards through the fascinating replacement world. A commotion of drums festers in the distance, around a corner in the narrow lane which is hung with handicrafts for sale. “Hand mad” says a sign above the racks of point-toed slippers. “Prix fixe.” I have seen tourists walking through the busy markets with expressionless faces shielded by devices set to continuously record, and I wonder how it must feel to be videoed a thousand times in a year by people who don’t seem to bother to even acknowledge one’s humanity. The students issue their drink orders (avocado juice, banana and orange juice, freshly pressed, with sugar and without) free from any thank yous or any please and Mohammed presses his palm across his heart as though it aches, saying in English, “Thank you, guys, I bring it right away, great, please, certainly.”

    The clatter of drums is coming nearer and I am craning to see past the French family who have stationed themselves in the passage to wait for a table. Two men, gaily dressed in such bright robes and complex festoonments my eye cannot grasp them, holding up their tiny drums, the skin of the drum painted with henna, stamping their soft leather boots and singing splendidly – I ask if I can take their photo and the taller says, “Foto!” and they both fall to attention, and then he puts his cupped hand out and I realise I have no coins. Mohammed is passing with a clutch of creamy avocado juices from the stall across the way. On his way back I put out my hand. “Est-ce que vous pouvoir me louer un peau de l’argent pour les musics?” This doesn’t exactly mean, Can you please lend me some silver to give to the musicians? but it’s the closest I can get.

    Sure, he says, without pause, digging in his pocket and showing me the coins. He selects for me and presses them into my palm: three, four dirham is plenty.

    At the end of the meal we want to pay and I say, “Plus the four dirham,” and Mohammed looks puzzled. “You lent it to me, for the musicians,” I say.

    “Ahh!” He shakes my hand, pressing his heart. “My friend.” “Thank you so much,” I say, “We love it here, we love your restaurant,” and behind us the French family jostles forward, scenting seats at last, and we say goodbye to the other Chinese students on our other side who have been telling us they woke up this morning in tents in the Sahara and could see the ‘galaxy’ but it was spoilt rather because there was ‘no service’.

    “You went on a self-catered tour?” I said.

    “No service,” the good-looking leader repeated, jabbing his finger at the sky. We walk away, tired in the stummy and thinking as we come home how extremely gentlemanly, how classy it is of Mohammed to have lent me the money for the buskers and then to have instantly forgotten the debt. Morocco seems to me so complex and inspired, I have the feeling of a rich, fine intricacy, am rejoiced to see how gently and tenderly anyone with a disability is handed up the stairs or into vehicles, I see the brutality, I feel my heart aching with the real inevitable charge of life that in ‘our kindergarten countries’ as my Berlin companion has called them this week is simply absent, or at least invisible, and when we are not afforded the luxe protection we experience as our right, we sometimes grumble at god, who has not given enough, whom we can call on with praise for sparing the floods our children, as though this were not an insult to the humanity of all the other children swept and drowned, as though the Acts of God excepted in the fine print of every insurance policy were not just and not our desserts, but rather an interruption to the service we expect, and for which we would pay nothing but our words.

  • all for you

    Alone in the house for the first time in days I feel a sadness descend and take me in its wings. I’m sad for Dad. It has come from pottering and tidying, I washed up a bowl and set it upside down on the board to drain, I folded a pair of his old pyjamas I had laundered and hung out on the little rickety rack which I found folded in the street one day. These pyjamas have a gayer, tartan pattern in reds and blues and I find them so pretty and cheering; but compared with the bigger, saggier, more worn out pair I’ve been wearing while writing at home they’re almost crunchy. I guess they’re newer and were bought towards the end of his life. Just a usual daytime fabric, not that special soft-flannel ear-fur homey plainness old flannelette pyjamas wear into.

    I find I am wishing he had had more pairs of the ultra soft old worn ones, against his skin when he grew frail.

    He had to be lifted in and out of bed. He could only swallow very soft foods. He had a little suction cup that attached to him to catch the urine. It led in a narrow flexing pipe over the edge of the hired hospital bed and down onto a flat pack on the floor which somehow reminded me of one of those foot-pumps for inflating a bed, or a half-deflated water bed itself, or sometimes the bladder out of a cask of wine which the two old men who lived in our old street used to let lie like a dog on the brick wall between them, companionably sharing as the afternoon passed away.

    The euphemisms we use for death have enraged me since my father died. The sentimental poem chosen for the service while I was on a plane made me angry and sad:

    Do not stand at my grave and weep
    I am not there.
    I do not sleep.

    This fatuous deceit is bearable only if we take it literally. He is nowhere. Not in the vase of ashes. Not sleeping, waiting. He is gone, dead and gone. This person whom I loved no longer exists.

    But the pyjamas. I folded them to take to Morocco. We are escaping family life, into our love. We are escaping turgid Christianity into the fire and nobility of ancient Islam, which sang to me from every all but corner of our house, throughout childhood, on Java where we lived between three mosques, and I can still sing by heart and by body the peeling keening mesmerising tunes which rang out seven times a day.

    The funeral poem, written on the back of a brown paper bag by someone inspired by her landlady’s loss, in the War, of her son, ended badly – or worse. “I did not die” it lied, unsuccessfully. Well, yeah, I thought: yeah, you did. That is why we’re all standing here with these sharp lumps in our throats all the time. That is why we are holding this service, so formal, so inevitably pompous and off-putting. Because you died and are dead now, and will be dead forever. You died and that is why I booked a ticket late one night, near midnight, and left for the airport at four the next morning. Don’t lie to us, poetry/You dishonour yourself.

    I wanted to go to Marrakech, just so that on Christmas morning we could wish each other a Marrakechmas. The pun took hold of my heart. But we chose Fez, because it is the most intact medieval Islamic city anywhere; it is the old world, the New City was added outside the walled medina in the early twelve hundreds. I folded my pyjamas to wear in our room there at night. Compared to the pyjamas I had just taken off, after a drowsy day writing by lamplight, they weren’t particularly tender under my palm as I stroked them smooth and lay them on top of the suitcase I’ll pack tomorrow. And I thought: if only Dad had had these soft pyjamas to wear every day. I wish he had not died with a chronic headache. I’m glad he died at home. I’m more than glad I was able through my family’s generosity to get home to their house to be with him, for six weeks because every week Dad would say, “Can’t you just stay another week,” and I hadn’t the heart to turn him down, to turn away, to just board the plane and go back to my Berlin life and let him die there alone – or without me – I needed to be there, to see him, and the headache came from an incident that happened while I was standing by his bed – his hospital bed at home – my mother only told me about it after he had died. We didn’t have the money for me to get back a second time. We’d decided I would see him while he was still living. But now he was gone I felt an ache and like a satellite whose rope was cut, I was just floating in cold featureless space, in endless space, miles from any world I knew, and I had to go home, and be among my terrible people, and hope we would be good to one another.

    So I obeyed the overpowering instinct that said find the money, get home, they are my family, after everything: be with them. The brother who would have preferred I stayed away gave up enough of his frequent flyer points that a ticket could be booked. I flew, awake the whole way, and landed in a dinner party of twenty people and afterwards slept for fifteen hours. Then I spent a month keeping Mum company as she took up her skirts and stepped down into the river of widowhood. That was how it seemed to me, what I was doing.

    The four weeks turned to three because one night my mother frightened me so much with her anger that I ran out of the house, my heart pounding, crouching in my car outside a cafe ringing a friend, to say can I come stay with you, can I come right now.

    In the last months of his life Dad had a carer who lived with them, and she loved him and he also loved her. Her husband would come home from work every evening and climb the stairs to shake Dad’s hand solemnly. Meanwhile the rest of the world talked over him. Every few days a nurse, or sometimes two nurses, came to give the carer time off after she’d been woken every night til four by Dad’s raging thirst and Mum’s call through the baby monitor: Tiiina. Tiiina.

    These supplement nurses from a palliative care service run by the state were sometimes lovely. Two of them turned up at Dad’s funeral and one of these came up to me almost unrecognisable with grief, her face contorting, saying what a lovely man he had been, what a loss it was. Yes – often. True. He could be lovely, and had a fundamental sweetness that everybody saw, especially in his last years after the stroke. But some of the temporary nurses were careless and callous and half-awake. One I had to reprimand after she sat scrolling her phone until her hours were done, only rousing when he asked for something in particular. Find something to do, I said: the household’s overloaded. I had just arrived, then, from Berlin and it was really none of my business. But I saw all their systems and workloads from the outside and brought my fresh energy. One day two of these hearty nurses hauled him too fast up the bed from where he sank every day into a coil crushing his sore feet against the railed foot of the bed. The gas-lift bed. The single. And so they wrenched him higher onto his pillows and smashed his eggshell head against the headboard. I felt the shock go through me. I cried out Careful! He’s very frail! Take care!

    My mother, trapped behind a lifetime’s politeness with strangers and staff, laughed with them. They said, Oops! and they actually laughed. But I said, it’s serious! It’s very serious! He is so fragile, can’t you see how frail he is. He’s so unwell. Be respectful. Don’t at least cause him any more pain than what he –

    The cancer was eating him now almost visibly, from the inside as if he ought to grow more transparent. He died one night very slowly, and when my mother rang me after midnight our time she said my name and I knew. I heard the groping for self-conscious courage infecting her voice, the terrible curse of self-consciousness that makes life more death-like. Within a few days, in the tropics, I was there and we began our vigilant grief. When he’d been dead three weeks and burned away to ash, I mentioned the nurses one day and she said, yes: he always complained, after that, of headaches. Well, she said, he rarely complained. He was so sweet-natured. But he had – my heart swelled and my eyes blurred and stung – he had a headache for all the paltry rest of his life. Because of those women. Oh, Dad. The golden surfer boy, the strong man who stood on the steps in his grey suit at some University function and one woman, who came up at the wake to tell me this, had seen him there for the first time, she said, “I said to my girlfriend – who’s that? And she said, That’s Peter Jorss. Isn’t he delicious.”

    He was. He had a pettable sweetness, a roguish painful humour, a terrifying temper. Dad. I don’t have a pet name sweet enough for a loved one frail and approaching death, approaching it shyly, unable to speak of it. He died in pain. He lived in pain. He ‘often complained of a headache,’ she said, as though it said something only about the slackness of the nurses and nothing about his overwhelming experience.

    My mother can’t bear and sometimes torments herself with the fact that he could never get close enough – to her – they were in separate beds now side by side, and there was a gap which she with her recently replaced hip could not tolerate, they were both in such pain and she berates herself that she can never get close to him now, and all he wanted to was to be by her, and I tell her each time about the time he managed to get right up next to her and how his thin hand disappeared under the belly of her shirt, and he tucked himself into her like a koala or possum baby and was making tiny humming sounds of suckling satisfaction and good cheer. Dad. I wish I could have worked out that you needed softer clothing. I wish I had been able to prevent the injury to your skull, almost exposed still after the chemo that (it sometimes seemed) was really what killed him, what killed him and ate him. I wish I could be by you now, just be by you and be gentle with you, offer you something soft off a small spoon, be patient as you gathered your concentration, heroically to tackle another pulpy mouthful that took you three minutes of revolving. Just to sit with you, as far too few times I did, just watching and being there. So that when occasionally you opened sleepy blue eyes, “so blue!” my mother always said, and now consumed by fire, your lashes burned, your hands, your speckled skin, but when you saw me sitting there your loving and beatific smile overspread your face, every time, in a moment, though in repose it fell into suffering’s creases, and I smiled back, each time, and we both said, “Hello,” and maybe you said, sometimes, “Hello, darling,” or, “Hello, pet,” in your voice which is now not a sound in the world, in this far too crowded world from which some people are missing, we just smiled at each other, I wish we could, I wish you were.

  • welcome, Auntie

    I’ve joined a Facebook group which posts pictures of people’s dogs. The rules are long and repetitive: only dog pics and pics of dogs being doggish and cute: no lost dog posts, no questions about dog food… just hounds.

    In the last week this group has taught me all kinds of new vocabulary. Boop is the thought dogs have when they come up and touch you with their nose. A blep is where they stick out their tongue a little bit; a mlem is when they stick their tongue out further. Well today an older lady posted in public in the group, “Auntie! You are now part of this dog group. Please enjoy the dogs’ cute little antics!”

    Within seconds a woman had come along to comment, gently, “Maybe just send her a private message.” I commented, Hi, Auntie! and my comment now has 40 likes. Meanwhile a thread of joyous appreciation has unravelled, so divine: 460 likes and over a hundred people have posted pictures of their dogs for Auntie. One is of a labrador gambolling toward the camera and it says “Running to say hello to Auntie.” “This is Cecil, he says Hi Auntie.” “Welcome, Auntie!” One man wrote, “Now we are all Auntie’s Nieces and Nephews” and attracted a trail of love hearts under his comment. In between people are tagging their friends and coming back to the thread to muse OMG so pure! This thread! Those comments, tho. Sometimes I truly adore you, social medina.

  • the boast of Christmas past

    Last year and the year before that and four years ago too we went down on the train to West Germany, to a tiny village lying under the skirts of the old woods. This is where my sweetheart was born. His father was born in the same house and to me the village, the house, the family symbolised most of what I’ve longed for all my life – the continuity and cosiness of grandmother living upstairs and now sleeping in the graveyard, the grooming visits, where we trimmed her candles and scattered flowers for her; the dog racing joyously through unbroken snow; the stacks of firewood and the window dense with flickering lights.

    I felt so welcomed the very first year, when he and I had known each other only six months; his mother was kind and his father jovial yet somehow forbidding and she had saved for me the tree to decorate, “because you are an artist.” I persuaded him to go down there early in the season so we could hang out in his family, since mine is so fraught; and on December 9, 2012, four years ago today, we woke up at the other end of our long train ride and opened the door on a perfect world. Here is what I wrote:

    Waking up in a tiny German village. It has snowed and the snow extends away across the fields. The woods stand shoulder to shoulder up the hill. Opening the door I can hear church bells howling like dogs, everything is beautiful because everything is covered in snow, a white democracy. The phrase forms in my mind and a series of sour images ensues: what is white about a democracy? Everything in Germany is tinctured with its history, the way everything in Australia cries out black stories. Nonetheless this fairytale landscape has a hold of my mind, I feel relaxed and browsing, last night by the candleglow Christmas market I found a bookshop displaying eleven different editions of the tales of the Brothers Grimm in its front window. Tiny sparrows dart at the small wooden house outside pecking at seeds. A fierce wind has sprung up from, apparently, the Arctic Circle and I close the door thankfully. Good morning, winter world.

    Then last year, a huge family shindig. I should put ‘family’ in inverted commas because part of the substance of the fight – the potatoes perhaps, if not the meat – was that I was not part of the family, being a newcomer; therefore he had no right to bring me into important family discussions.

    This important family discussion was about money, aren’t they all. Previous family visits had been laidback, shambolic, tilted round long evening board games and wine. Now something was brewing, but I couldn’t work out what. All week we’d been trying to work out why everybody seemed so tense. Then January second I stumbled out of bed and down the dark hallway to find my honey and his father locked in fiery argument.

    I sat down and took my partner’s hand. To be locked inside a fire is grievous indeed. I had never heard this family shouting before, though the father’s a bit of a bully: our very first visit I had called him out on his treatment of his son, when the man whistled for him to bring something; He’s not a dog, I said, and the old man said: Doch. (“Au contraire.”) This visit he had been mocking us for our failure to produce a child; the sister, a thistly blonde, was swollen with her third and we had lost our baby and been unable, thus far, to bring forth a living sibling. The proud grandfather sat with his injured foot up on an ottoman, making my partner’s dog beg for walnuts; his son said, please don’t spoil my dog, it is I who will have to live with him, and the father said: “Well. If I had a grandchild, I would be spoiling the child. But as there is no grandchild…”

    These coarse country people occur in my family as well. Ours also drink too much and hoard things and are suspicious of fresh food. All week we had been walking in on whispered conferences which urgently suspended and then remained hanging in the air, swinging like baubles. Now the underwater fire had burst forth. It was a question of inheritance. They had cooked up an arrangement which seemed to me bitterly unfair as well as financially unwise, and I said so.

    My own family finds me outspoken, too. It inconveniences them to the point of injury. When I flew home for my father’s funeral and suggested, in sentences very tentative and clothed in sticky tact, a less sentimental poem for the ceremony, my brother said flatly, “That’s not open for discussion, Cathoel.” I said, “But – ” and he ranted, “See! this is why I was saying it would be better if you didn’t come back – you’re just this person who comes in and changes everything.”

    “You don’t belong in this family,” he had also said, on another occasion, and when I retailed this story after Dad’s funeral to my friend she said, bracingly, “This is perfectly true, of course. The only difference is, he doesn’t realise that it’s a compliment.”

    “She doesn’t belong in this discussion,” the father said now: “because you two are not properly married.” Well, I told him, wounded and enraged. When your daughter got married – it was on two days’ notice and in the town hall, because they’d worked out at the last minute they would save eight thousand euros in tax by becoming officially a couple – I had to borrow a set of unwashed clothes from the bride, else I’d have had to go along in my overalls. It wasn’t exactly love’s young dream.

    Well, but you have no children, he blustered, so you don’t really belong. And thus silenced me with pain.

    I told him some home truths and he told me to shut up. We had never spoken to each other like this before. I got louder. So did the dad, but I suspect everyone is so used to his roaring and his barked commands that they barely noticed. Afterwards I was accused of having said things that were beyond the reach of my imperfect German vocabulary. I reminded the father that he had told me several times to halt den Schnabel, hold your muzzle. They were so outraged at my insurrection “under my roof, to me, as host! in my Own Home!” that they had no room left over to contemplate what might be due to a guest, a vulnerable guest trying to celebrate their daughter’s umpteenth glowing pregnancy, a person separated from her own family and far from home. When I first saw the daughter, clomping on her sore ankles and complaining about the weight, I had followed her outside and asked that we could hug each other. “I’m so happy for you. It’s just painful for me, kind of, because we tried so hard – but I’m happy for you. I just wanted to give you a hug, you and your belly, and try to get myself used to it.” She embraced me with tears in her eyes. Now all of that was forgotten. I had called the messy patriarch of this outlander tribe a bully, to his face. I had said, inspired by rage and a kind of foaming disgust at his harassment and meanness, Your son – is a real man. He has manhood. I have seen him do terrible things and then hold himself to account. I’ve seen him struggling to learn and to make changes in himself. You should respect him. You should treat him with respect.

    I think we can’t bear when a woman speaks out. When a woman questions things. How dare she, how could she, and who does she think she is. The day after the fight we caught the train home to Berlin. I went up to the father, sitting at the table with his arms folded, and put out my hand. After a moment, he took it. I said, thank you for your hospitality and for having us in your home. The next morning a phone call. And the word, Hausverbot. This means, I forbid you my house. It is kind of a ‘don’t ever darken my door.’ In German, my partner said, very serious. You would give Hausverbot to a repeatedly violent pub guest who started a knife fight and stabbed somebody. Or to someone who’d been stealing in your store.

    The son, of course (they assured him) was welcome. But do not bring that woman under our roof. I spent January dissolved in tears, before distaste began to displace the other pain. You don’t belong in this family. All year long the wound festered. My father died and I went home. I confided how I was dreading this Christmas, worse than all the Christmases before. Afterwards my mother, in a bout of generosity, offered to send us both to Morocco for a holiday to replace the painful season. In an ancient Islamic city we could forget about the festivities we’d not share. We could put aside the sore points like the pregnant sister who didn’t bother giving either of us a gift, and whose kangaroo skin rug we had lingered over for an hour in the ugg boots store, wanting to bring her something luscious and Australian and Scandinavian for her comfy home, stroking every skin to find which was the softest. They are soft like the tender belly fur of a little cat. A day later, when all the piles of gifts had been opened and I was putting mine away, I asked her: hey what did you give me? I can’t seem to find it. Oh, she said – I just never thought of it. This hurt, and I told her so; not that she has to give a gift, but that she didn’t think. Now somehow this long-ago frisson of discomfort has been revived and painted glossy and put in the front window. We, who brought an extravagant gift we could ill afford, are designated materialistic, and grasping. My outspokenness is insufferable. My partner is greedy, because he feels sad and hurt at being all but cut out of his parents’ will. Last week the father, tricked past his pride by the wife who pretended his son had called first, finally rang. “I lift the Hausverbot,” he said, grandly. “You are very welcome and I hope you’ll come to us. But please don’t come to Christmas – your sister and her husband wouldn’t like it.”

  • late night and overhead

    Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys of the caravans walled in along the water’s edge. Overhead, a syncopated honking. “It’s very late… for gooses to be flying around in the sky.” The laughter escapes between my closed lips. “Oh,” he says self-consciously – “I mean geeses.”

  • is still a man

    A homeless man was sleeping in the stairwell when I came home. Or, to put it in the terms which my instinctive body understood, a stranger, appearing unexpectedly, had barricaded my door; his body was coiled and his face hidden; I had to step round him to get in.

    Raised in Australia with its pleasant acres of ground receding from each family’s door to the nearby street, and in Indonesia where we lived in a compound, surrounded by high fences topped with broken glass, I struggle to ignore the constant stampede of human traffic that passes within a few feet of me where I sit at my desk or curl on the couch. That is mostly families who live here, plus the thundering party animals upstairs. Occasionally delivery men, wrong numbers, post. This was new: the street door downstairs stood propped open, because dusty workmen were clambering in and out all day long with their lengths of wood; a man had slipped in, with all his belongings in two filthy rucksacks, and curled on our stair.

    It was hard for me to be compassionate. My first instinct was fear. I felt afraid of him because I couldn’t see his face. I unlocked my own door as quickly as I could and tried to shut it soundlessly behind me. Then I tried to think what to do. There was only one thing to do and that was, make him a cup of tea. It is so cold. A man without a roof is still a man. I boiled some water and hesitated in front of the stock pot of chai masala I brew every few days on my stove. Perhaps it would be too weird, too spicy for him. Germans don’t like tea; if you order it in a cafe you will get a tall glass of hot water with a tiny plate on top, a tea bag resting on it. I didn’t like to offer him coffee as he was clearly about to try to sleep.

    I made the cup of tea in a clean honey jar, not liking to risk one of my landlord’s mugs. It was hot and I had to cut a strip off my old pyjamas, washed and stashed under the sink, to wrap round the glass with a rubber band so he could hold it. I added milk and honey. Then I went cautiously out onto the landing.

    He was still there. I came towards him, keeping at arm’s length, fearful of alcoholic rage, resentment, violence. “Entschuldigung.” He turned away, gathering the hood of his jacket more closely around him. “Ich habe Ihnen eine Tasse Tee gemacht. Es ist Milch und Honig da drin, und Kardamom. Für die Wärme.”

    When I get nervous my German deteriorates. What I tried to say was, Excuse me. I have made you a cup of tea. There is milk and honey in it, and cardamom – for the warmth.

    He sat up. Pushed back his hood. I knew him – a man who often begs in the cafe where I write. This was not reassuring as he carries with him a sort of leashed impatience or suffering which made me yearn to be not recognised by him, lest he learn where I live. “Was ist drin?” he asked. So I repeated, Milk and honey. For the warmth. “Just leave this standing here when you are done.”

    “Danke schön,” he said, taking the warm jar in its undignified skirt.

    “Bitte schön.” I ran away. Locked myself into my house and roamed for an hour from one room to another, unable to concentrate. Why have I three rooms and he has none? Why have I not listed my living room as a shelter for some person recently arrived from devastated Aleppo? I picked up a book on mindfulness and laid it down again. There are days when I cannot even leave my house, when the thought of facing anybody undoes my heart. This is a luxury.

    I sat on my bed with my head in my hands. It seems to me life is filled with suffering. It seems to me every one of us, before we went down this path that has brought us into our limited, anguished adulthood, was somebody’s baby, somebody’s child, and brimming with almost infinite potential and easy to love. I think we get harder to love as we get older, as every classist, racist anti-abortion campaigner so elegantly demonstrates. I went out an hour later to my chores and it felt so sweet and reassuring to find the skirted jar resting on the common window ledge, which looks out from the ‘stair house’ as Germans call their stairwells into the bleak winter courtyard behind; the man was gone and as I drew closer I could see he had drunk about half the tea, much good may it do him in his hunted, hounded, and unwelcomed bitter day.

  • apple a day

    Saturday night, home with the one I love. We cycled over to the Korean grocers’ in the freezing cold mist to get ingredients and I made soto ayam, my favourite Javanese chicken soup from childhood. He is nutting something out for himself on the guitar. I read him something I had written earlier, while he was shredding the chicken. Then we lay down for a while in silence and after a long time I said, want to hear the song I wrote on my phone the other day? I can’t remember how it goes. And he listened to it and then said, Cathoel just drop the ‘& the New Government’ and publish your songs as Cathoel. I said, but why? It’s my favourite band name of all time! And so then he told me why, mentioning some features of what he hears in my voice that made me curl my toes with delight.

    The song, I tell him, reading off the tiny screen, is called In the Human Senses of the Word. He closes his eyes. Outside the window it is silent and completely dark. I can see a few lights on in a few other houses. What’s your day like right now? Catch me up.

  • the organic drunk

    In the supermarket carrying my two jars of honey, because it’s been nonstop chai masala weather, I fetched up queuing behind a guy in a vinyl blouson jacket who had just unloaded his entire cart. He turned his back on me to demonstrate that there was no way he would be letting me in front of him with my measly two items, just in case I was getting any ideas, and so I turned to the man behind me. There is nothing else to look at in this vast discounter warehouse, next door to the bottle shop which offers tiny toddlers’ shopping carts to educate your kid into alcoholism, a local outlet which sells everything unfresh and also, inexplicably, organic honey.

    So there I was with my organic honey and he started unloading onto the belt long, fresh, green bottles of wine. They looked like stalks of grass, their lovely labelling, and on each the promising word ‘Bio.” Bio in German is pronounced bee-ohh and it means organic. “Wow,” I said, “Biowein. Bei einem solchen Supermarkt ist’s schön, so was zu finden.”

    I think I said, Wow, organic wine. Nice thing to find in a supermarket like this. My German is riddled with infealties and infelicities but I live oblivious, above all that, smiling. He looked rather startled. Unloaded five bottles of wine and one flask of apple juice and now some random stranger has commented on his shopping! I tried again. “Ich bin Australierin. In Australien findet man Biowaren nicht so leicht.” In Australia you don’t find organic products this easily; I’m Australian. A look of compunction crossed his face, streaked with humour. He leaned in. Conspiratorily,

    “Es steck noch Alkohol drin.” There’s still alcohol in it. Ah yes, I said: and also, though – vitamins. I mean… it’s made from fruit.

  • buy for me

    Young, scruffy, insouciant Indian boy is walking by the greasy canal with his parents. Evidently he’s been showing them Berlin. Lifting his shapeless hand in a vague gesture towards the old, carved terraces he says:

    If I were ever rich –

    the slight rush of his r’s making it clear he quite expects this to happen, doesn’t expect it to be all that difficult –

    and they pass on, his parents well-heeled and looking rather bored as though Berlin in its filthy grey boilersuit does not impress them, barely glancing at the costly apartment houses he has chosen out for them to buy for him.

  • Uruk

    In the museum today we followed the script, that is, the writing. Ancient forms of writing carved in stone, and some felled onto papyrus that was torn out of its location later and jammed into ‘found’ metal boxes. What is it about inhumanity that allows one to covet a culture’s gorgeously wrought temple at the same time as dehumanising them enough to justify tearing down the temple, or carving a chunk off it, and then rebuilding in a far colder climate in your own museum? We found this headstone densely scribbled which I so longed to touch. Only that I wouldn’t have put my fingers’ oils all over the ancient, four thousand year old stone. But if I had this in my house (I told my companion) I would rub my face over it every day: like this.