Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: apartment

  • cigarette break

    A lot of noise round the house today as the Hausmeister – Deutschland brims with masters – has called a gang of workmen in to saw back the thorny bushes round the huddle of bins. Our bin system is complex because everything gets recycled – everything but, puzzlingly, aluminium and steel. The thorny bushes make it hard to access the bike racks without scoring one’s skin and I welcomed the intrusion, but after a couple of hours of swearing and sawing I took refuge in a cafe I love, to try to do a bit of writing.

    I miss Brisbane but I’m not missing having to google “cafes open past 2pm” when I want to work later. This place is groaning with shelves of books and they let me sit on a sagging couch with a single coffee in front of me for nearly three hours. I came out into the lissom afternoon and joined the slow streams of people heading down to the underground station. A man was playing the flute, with his eyes closed. He was entranced.

    The first flush of leaves has hit the ground and to me it feels too soon. I’m not ready! I rode home via train and bus and train because the middle section of the line was being repaired and in Berlin everybody files in orderly fashion from the ‘replacement vehicle’ back onto the interrupted line and sits down. When I had left, two tree surgeons were standing at the street entrance of my house in boiler suits, smoking by the big glass doors. When I came back hours later they were still there. As I came up to them, I had started to laugh. “Sie waren beide hier,” I explained, “als ich rausgegangen bin. Und es scheint meinetwegen zu sein, als ob es eigentlich eine sehr sehr lange Zigarettenpause war.” You were both here when I went out. From my point of view it is tempting to assume this was a very very long cigarette break. They looked uncertain. Were they being criticised, by a stranger? Then one man smiled. “So viele Zigaretten können wir gar nicht rauchen,” he said. We can’t smoke that many. “Wir schaffen es gar nicht.” We just wouldn’t manage it.

  • four years ago today

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

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

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

  • the peace yard

    Walking home down rainy streets my last night in this house. Tomorrow unnest, budge myself, nudge, shift. Winter has landed with its big wings. Now the warmth of the indoors folds us in, the subway’s roaring throat, we all descend, we bring our dogs and biscuits. I saw two small boys fighting in the subway train, one slammed his hand down on the other one’s shoulder their sister put back her head and roared. They were hipheight to everyone’s delicate glances, the mother looked estranged. In this city if they serve you tea it is a mess of hot water in a clear jar (hard, chalky water, that dries white) and with spoon and bag of leaves laid on the white milky ceramic… neatly. Effervescent neatness, the German delight: effortless neatless and high art and kitsch. German joy, Friede; German graveyard, Friedhof. I’m leaving I’m leaving. I’m coming I’m coming: Australia wait for me. Maybe forever as jet blurting travel grows inexcusably wrong. Standing stranded on the traffic island as the creamy lights pour in three strands down the hill like pearls and the crimson lights pour like Christmas up: I said something aloud to myself in German, I started to cry. Thank you for your hospitality, your kindness, your warmth to all the strangers, your strangeness, your calm. The leaves shaped like webbed hands that wave in the wind. The strings of lights under the lip of each awning. The Grüss dich, the Tschüssi in shops, the dogs. In 24 mornings more, I’ll be gone.

     

     

  • eggshellac

    Like a little eggshell in the sky. I have moved into my final Berlin sublet, just 3 weeks, and barely dare breathe. Everything is white down to the phone, painted roughly with house paint but still black on the inside when you pick up the receiver. In the little white bathroom a toilet with no lid and no seat. A tiny wooden vegetable brush perches primly across the back of the… mouth of the sewer. I said to my landlady, who is off to India for three weeks to translate Arabic manuscripts, “No toilet seat?” “Oh, did you notice that? Does it bother you?” “Well…”

    She said, “I guess it’s a bit cold, and kind of uncomfortable, but it broke and I just realized, I don’t really need this.” I foresee that within a few years she will be living cross-legged on the head of a pin. The place is quiet and curtainless and resembles a tiny Buddhist monastery. Floorboards painted white. White rugs which, she showed me, she cleans with a little brush. She pulled out a rush cushion from under the low white bed to show me: “This makes a great table, for eating.” Then she set off in the November rain through streets full of sticky wet leaves to fly south, with one little blue bag, wearing a pair of socks inside white sandals. Mysteriously there is no mat at the front door, yet everything within is pristine. My landlady had also painted her little computer white, including all the keys, but then had to scrub most of them back to the original black so that she could see what they were. Her patchy keyboard in the chalky white room was startling, a giant crossword. We exchanged money and keys this morning and she showed me around. “I have these two spoons.” Four plates, two bowls, and a couple cups, no pepper, oils, pans, forks, knives. “Poor little flower,” said the friend who helped me carry my suitcases. “You get the feeling that a gust of wind would blow her away.” I on the other hand will not be having that problem. In just 18 months my pile of cases and boxes has swollen like paper in water to twice their original dimensions. I think of the old cartoon of a bag lady pleading not guilty on a charge of shoplifting “by reason of static cling.” To get home I will have to divest myself of a rowboat full of leaves, intricately rusted bottlecaps, brochures and books that I picked up and brought home because they seemed beautiful or interesting. This might be the perfect place to do it. In between, I will loll in the tub and read, an egg in an eggcup in a large eggshell in the grey, minimalist skies over Germany.

     

  • decanticle

    decanticle

    I’m alone in the house and my heart feels filled with love. It’s a feeling like glass-slippered waves coming in over your feet on the sparkling, rough sand, so shallow you barely get wet but the softness of the water is inexpressible. Like water from stars, I mean light, I mean starlight, the salt water travels a long way to get to us. Maybe all of the love in my heart is from long-extinct volcanoes burning in other skies. I love the sounds of other people’s lives around me, I love the roaring restaurants that spill out along the street. I loved the girl dourly smoking Gauloises as her lover nuzzled into her neck. The little Thai restaurant, the bar on the corner with a waiter whose beautiful shoulders and tiny pigtail sprouting from the crown of his shaven head were so irresistible to watch. I love the sandpit at the playground with its no smoking sign. I love the little purling hair growing out of this soft mole on my cheek, its familiarity, its curve. I love the way the sky sets off immediately where the ground ends and goes, as far as we know, forever and ever and never ceases to be. Asking nothing and accepting everything. I love the blackness and the blue. The flowers that close up at night, like awnings. The irregular army of bottle-collectors, and people with spray cans and brooms.

    H2O HoL berlin popular bridge 2

  • living in the garden

    living in the garden

    Last night I slept under my own roof for the first time in four months. So to speak. It’s a beautiful sublet in a groovier part of town, bristling with bars, but very quiet behind the city wall of our foremost apartment building. I’m in the back, windows facing the trees, in a place with high ceilings and old DDR coal stoves clad in green and corn-coloured ceramic tiles. Downstairs is a baby with lusty lungs. A black and white cat sleeps in the courtyard. The owner of the flat spends her summers living ‘in the garden’ just outside town, which sounds idyllic, and has rented me her keys, her crockery, her weird hot water system, her dreamy curtains. Turning off the reading light I felt momentarily assailed by ghosts and spirits, a movement in the darkness, a sense of swarming: all the people who have lived in this old building in the past; and it occurred to me this was my first night sleeping out, beyond the palings, in the saddening wilderness of old-time East Berlin.

    H2O HoL windowglimpse

  • gambolling habit

    gambolling habit

    A few years back this young cat came up to me in a kitten shelter and climbed onto my lap. I didn’t want her, the others were all fluffy, rolypoly babies winsome with whiskers and she was an awkward teenager with a big splotch on her nose. Whenever I visited the shelter there were kittens cutely gambolling all over and sucking on my toes (“they like the sweat” explained the cat breeder, who loved animals and had bred so many the Council were compelling her to give some away)… then I looked down and this skinny, weird-looking animal had stowed her sharp chin on my hip. Every time. I put her in a banana box and took her home. Her name is Tisch, I miss her sometimes but she is a lousy correspondent.

    H2O HoL tisch goofyshy

  • a novel filled with good advice

    a novel filled with good advice

    The place I’ve sublet has a shelf of Joanna Trollope novels and I’ve just reread two of them. It’s so interesting learning all the signs she uses to indicate class. In the gentry, rudeness indicates an unwillingness to pander to form, it is authenticity. In factory workers, rudeness betrays a lack of breeding. Horsey women have good-quality possessions which they do not value and treat casually. They do things carelessly, having nothing to prove, dropping tea bags on the floor, “sloshing” milk into mugs and speaking in clipped half-sentences: “Shut up! Bloody dogs. Sit over there, it’s the only comfortable chair. Chuck the cat off.”

    The landed class recognize one another by signs: tea is always “China”, never “India”, perhaps because China eluded colonization by these characters’ forbears and thus like a spirited horse showed independence. To have middling-quality possessions and to take care of them is unmistakeably a sign one is trapped in the worst of all worlds: bourgeois, unimaginative, burgerlich middle class. At least the poor have their realness and dignity. At least the gentry have their self-assurance and intricate codes: ‘”Daddy says,” one ten year old said cheerfully to our main character Liza, surveying a French pronoun exercise almost obliterated in red ink, “that there’s really no hope for me because I’m as utterly thick as him.”‘ Very often Trollope’s plots seem to unravel the marital miseries of a couple ill-suited as to class: in the case of A Passionate Man, a lordly doctor and his timid wife whose appearance is dismissed as “pretty.” She’s not of good enough stock to be either ugly or beautiful.

    In fact the approval of both aristocratic and poorly educated character types in these novels seems to revolve on their ‘realness’ – excusable bluntness in the gentry, forgiveable gaucheness in the “frightful woman” who runs the post office. The middle class, by aping their “superiors” but without access to the insider knowledge that would let them buy the right kind of tea, show themselves to be false.

    The other novel I read yesterday, The Best of Friends, was reviewed (on the cover) by The Observer as “above all a novel filled with good advice.” Like a recipe book.

    H2O HoL goldfish