Looked up from my crouching position in the gutter to see this luscious young woman who works in my local deli. Uh, I said, I’m just taking some footage of this water rippling down the stones… look how beautiful it is! I rescued these from the bins at work, she replied, holding out her armful of red roses and yellow day-lilies. Do you want a bunch?
Tag: art life
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late night lemons
Late night supermarket in Berlin’s wild west. Two pretty girls in their pretty outfits are queuing ahead of me, they have high arses and high heels and high ponies, their hair spilling from the crowns of their heads. The blonde one rolls her three bottles away slightly from my lumpy ginger root and my mesh bag of greenish lemons.
A cheap, everyday discounter supermarket. They had organic lemons cheaper than the poisoned. Yay, Germany.
“We’re just buying these three bottles of wine,” she tells the cashier.
“I wouldn’t have assumed anything different,” he says, primly, and shoots her a mischievous look. He is round as a pumpkin and his face splits into creases when he smiles. I suck in my breath, exaggerating, and start waving my stiff-legged fingers in front of my face. I am blowing on them to convey this is a bad burn. “Oh,” I say, “das tut weh.”
That hurts. The girls are laughing. The cashier’s laughing. I’m laughing. We are laughing. They’re on their way out, I’ve been drawing and I’m on my way home, he’s just finishing his shift, and there’s room for us all in this sudden identically contagious grace of soft exhilaration. The brown-haired girl pretends to protest her complexity. “Or,” she says, rolling her hand over the lemons in their bright yellow mesh – “this could be all ours. Wine for tonight. And all this – is for the hangover.”
“The hangover,” he chortles. ‘Hangover’ in German is Kater: tomcat. “You’ve thought of everything!” His hands are suspended like kangaroo paws above the till keys.
We are partly laughing from love, partly laughing out of mirth. It occurred to me today as I was cycling to wonder why we burst out laughing yet burst into tears. Like the laughter is that which results from perspective, which puts us in touch with the wider greater world. The grief comes with acknowledging and unbarriering what is within.
“Just come to me in the morning,” I tell the two girls, “and I’ll sort you out. I’ve got the ingredients.”
They are smiling at me and their smiles are full of love. I’m smiling, too. “Where do you live?” It is hard to say why every sentence seems funnier than the last. When they’ve gone, intact in their miasma of beauty, the cashier and I face each other. You can buy a tiny bottle of schnapps at this checkout for fifty cents. We part, laughing a little still, and I carry my sack of citrus and my club-footed creature of ginger, the fruits and the root, and stash them in the bicycle basket and fling my leg over in its short flared woollen skirt. The nights are colder now but still fresh and all the dark roadside trees along the park seem to be reaching for me all the way home. Around me and above me the soft cold Berlin night. The passage of other bicycles, whose lights are not kaput like mine. The leaves which hurtle down between us without a sound and the wordless veering we make to give each other room.
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The Great Fire
Only Shirley Hazzard could end a novel by writing explicitly of a virgin woman’s clitoris – which she describes with a kind of cheerful poetic simplicity as ‘the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name’ – using it to literally embody survival, and art, and all of life; turn her back on the War, which is, as we see, unending – ‘the inextinguishable conflagration’ – and write, at last, ‘Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.’
Even to her, he would not say outright that he was thinking of death; of the many who had died in their youth, under his eyes; of those he had killed, of whom he’d known nothing. On the red battlefield, where I’ll never go again; in the inextinguishable conflagration.
These hours would be lived to the full. Years of hours would follow, but not this. He had felt their chance passing; she too, in fear. For this he had travelled to the airy, empty harbour where, like a legend, she lay in a mildewed swing-seat, waiting. As surely as if she had leapt from a planked deck into the ocean and swum ashore, she had jumped ship for him. Ten thousand miles had been retraced, down to the final fleshly inch where he could wake her and touch her, and say her name.
Many had died. But not she, not he; not yet.
~ Shirley Hazzard.
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house mousse
This week I’m going home to Berlin to find an apartment of my own, via a writing sabbatical in Thailand which I suspect I will sleep through. What was supposed to be two weeks has turned into a six week endeavour. I have worked from dawn til night, busted my finger, worn myself to a shred, and these are my small victories: Dad sat up and asked if he could have a cup of tea with lemon and honey. Dad wanted to sit out on the verandah and watch the sunset. Dad went on his first outing since the hospital and scoffed fish and chips and a giant fresh iced coffee laced with cream. Mum had someone to cry to. Mum went to a really good physio to whom I practically drove her with a stick and in a single visit was able to raise her damaged arm upright, from months of being stuck at a horizontal maximum. They learned how to use their iPad. The living room looks warm and congenial and less like a hospital. The garage has been cleared out and has one of Mum’s paintings hung to greet her when she gets in, as she starts now very cautiously to drive herself about now and again. The garden is healthy and the verandah brimming with fresh plants. The cat has been taught not to wash herself when she’s on the bed, which she was raised (by me) not to do but had forgotten in the local recent spoiling. In between I have packed up 11 cartons of painstakingly sorted and delicately couched feathers, crumples of fabric and shell, shards of perfectly worn wood, and partially assembled assemblages for shipping to Berlin. I feel replete.
This afternoon I made this for Dad, and he ate two teaspoons of it – victory! It’s velvety and rich. You can replace the honey with maple syrup if you are vegan.
FREAKY CHOCOLATE AVOCADO MOUSSE
1 frozen banana
3 tbsp cacao powder
1 refrigerated avocado
3 tsbp cocoa powder
2 tbsp honey, or maple syrup if you’re vegan
1 tsp lemon juice
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp iced water
A tiny pinch of saltINSTRUCTIONS
Blend.