Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Australian in Berlin

  • shriveled bulb of god

    shriveled bulb of god

    My stomach feels like a shrivelled bulb after two martinis, no dinner. Whoever invented alcohol is my god: right now, my god. The last time I had one of those (a martini, a god) was in New York, it was summer then, I came out of the studio where we had been working on the album I’d wanted to make since 1999 and whose songs had been written over fifteen years and it was all so exhausting, so wonderful, on the street a man came past me pedalling his cab, a pedal-cab, like the becaks that used to carry us to the markets when I was a child, in old Batavia. “Take me to a rooftop bar,” I said, and the next twenty minutes were alive with light: those huge buildings shooting up into the sky like terraces, palaces, penthouses’ skeletons, every one stippled with windows alight and the warm evening breeze exciting my cheeks. I was crying with joy. New York! New York! Like Berlin she is one of those cities where on the subway, on the bridge, under the trees you would cry out “New York!” and feel like she hears you. So I found a banquette in the scarlet-lit rooftop bar that was rapidly filling with Manhattenites after work and I told the Spanish bar girl, I like olives, so she made me a martini festooned with skewers, each one so laden with green olives it was as though the glass had greenly exploded. I sat and sipped, turned my pages and sipped. After a while the volume level rose and I drew out the headphones I had bought that day, a remote birthday present from my Australian family, began listening back to the work we had made. Tonight was very different but same, same, same. This Russian bar in my leafy street that I’ve passed several dozen times suddenly beckoned, as if it were a painting of a bar that had come to life. I went in. “Can you make me a dirty martini on Bombay Sapphire?” And she did. The bar was tenderly tended by this woman, in 1950s sailor costume, her hair spooled back with nests of pins behind her ears, the luscious soft sound of the ice cubes as she rattled my drink u and down over her shoulder then poured away all the vermouth down the drain. Apart from the dark-haired girl in a beanie studying at the bar I was then her only customer. The dark-haired girl looked up and said to the bartender, This is so hard. I took my drink by its frost stem and the two of us drifted outside, wicker chairs where in a little while the bartender would come round with her basket, lifting aside the daytime posies of flowers and putting in their place red glass candleholders. I watched the street, where nothing passed. In an hour only two cars, ten pedestrians, five bicycles. The sky has changed, it is settled in a grey now and when I mentioned yesterday “you know at this time of year this means it’s grey for another five months,” the woman clearing my coffee cup said, “Ist das nicht furchtbar!” Isn’t that terrible! Well, yes, it really is. In the balcony opposite, on the first floor, three girl-silhouettes were enjoying their cigarettes. I wished I smoked. Occasionally a yellow leaf sauntered down through the still-warm air and landed on the cobblestones, in the garden bed, on the roof of a vehicle. I have never experiences a Fall before: it is what it is: life falls colourful to the ground. The dark cold skeletons reassert their empire. Winter is arriving, time to get out of here.

    ~ from Berlin via New York City, 2013

  • be the big smoke

    On the underground train above ground the whole carriage overheard two rather stoned young dudes speaking about Art, that is, themselves. As we unzipped the treetops people glanced at them, glanced away, smiled. One dude had a wry American accent and the upper hand. The other dude was Persian and explained at some length that his name is traditional, it means (if I heard right) secret treasure. What do you do, man, you must be an Artist? he asked. Yeah, American wry dude allowed. But like, what kind of Art, what do you Make? Well, mostly drawings and…. tattooing.

    Instant rapture. Oh, wow, I should show you this tattoo I want, it’s like, I’ll have to show it to you, it’s so beautiful, man. There’s this guy and he’s smoking. And then there’s this girl. She’s, like, smokeface, like, she IS the SMOKE.

    I remember that feeling, I thought: BEING the SMOKE. By the indulgent expressions on other passengers here and there in the cabin I thought that other people might once have experienced this, too. Persian dude said, you could like, do me with this drawing and then I could like, show everybody and make you totally famous.

    God, I loved them. Their fatuous fellowship and impulse-buy tattoos. Just type my name into facebook, American dude promised, you will find me. Out in the strangely humid night there was a high round moon barrelled way up into the still-blue sky like cannonshot; people crossing the crowded railway bridge seemed to me ceremonial and slow. A tall princely man with Ethiopian features walked by in state, pushing a wire shopping trolley with five empty bottles in it.

    9 years ago in Berlin, I lived this tiny story.

  • cherry tree, wait for me

    Today I would give anything to run outside into this suddenly warm sunshine. I woke to birdsong and discovered I had left my window open all night. This is the first night since October that’s even been possible. I don’t feel the icy breezes snaking round my feet in the chilly living room, I can’t hear the ticking of the heaters. When I stood in front of the glass and gazed out I could feel the sun’s mighty warmth on my face. My eyes sting with tears thinking about it. It’s reached us.

    This winter staining gradually into pink blue yellow spring is now extended indefinitely, perhaps eighteen months, perhaps twelve, perhaps three, as if by a bad council order. Such a long winter under such low grey sunless skies.I miss cafes, I miss walking past people and feeling the foreign-communal energy of their own brisk, or vague preoccupations. The feeling of their thoughts and breathing fringing and wrinkling my air. I just miss them being there. I miss the little coughs and the unconscious throat clearings and sighs and the faint breeze as my neighbour in some plinking humming bistro turns a large page in his sagging newspaper. 

    That’s how we sit, that’s how I spend time with people. Cafes are my communion. I love the delicacy of their shared but parceled space. All along the old wall strip, the dead zone through Berlin that divided families like a terrible quarantine, the decades of no mans land that now is all overgrown with trees and nested with sweet birds, torn down one by one for new apartments as the city swells, one Japanese cherry tree after another will be touched by the sun and burst into its perfect ineffable colour, its blossoms fluttering and the sky a web of blue trapped in its branches. I want to lie there dazedly noticing the comings and workings of ants for whom springtime is an unending toil. I want to hear the punks on their houseboat creaking and clinking at beers in their foldout chairs. I want to feel a fast bicycle zip past me. Lie under the trees and feel their placid embrace, like two hands turned slowly outward to show me something.

  • happy birthday from afar

    Tomorrow is my Mum’s birthday, she’s eighty. Tomorrow is already today in Brisbane because Australia is tomorrowland. I rang her on the videophone we used to so dread in my youth. She looks pretty in her top and skirt. I had a red ‘H’ and a purple ‘B’ from the cafe table where I sat in the rare sun last week, where the cups had not been cleared and someone else had opened presents and left the wrapping and these lettered candles behind. The two letters fit in the bright orange persimmon I had halved and set on a blue plate. I lit the candles and sang her happy birthday. Then she blew and I blew the candles out. I opened the tiny bottle of champagne I have saved in my fridge ever since summer. That special occasion had arrived. Mum had to rush off to meet her two sons and I have not yet told her about the deep massage I plan to enact by long-distance, now she’s had two hips and both knees replaced and requires some tender and gentle loving care. Imagine to be 80 and to have outlived your husband. That’s something hard and good, I think.

  • bicycle fascist

    I was overtaken on the bike path today by a puzzlingly hostile man. He seemed to have a store of labels and insults saved up and was eager to put them to use. The sun had finally come out. I had ridden clear across town to collect my Ghanaian visa. I was thinking as I rode: honestly there’s nothing like crossing the first bridge to open between East and West Germany in 1989 in a sudden sharp hailstorm to make you want to leave the country for a while.

    Later on all the errands and grocery shopping were finally done and as I was cycling home – the clouds broke apart and a glorious sunshine lit the local world. I slowed down and looked about me, enjoying the pretty sky. Indescribable light at this time of year, sometimes. A pinging from behind warned of another, faster cyclist. I veered wobbling to the left, defaulting by accident to my Australian road rules, and the other rider pinged his bell furiously, with small intermissions, four or five times over. He called out to me. “Can you pull over to the right to let a person pass?”

    “I have pulled over to the left,” I said, “to let you past.”

    He pinged his bell again though he already had my attention. “Are you deaf?”

    I said, “What? Are you German?”

    “No,” he said, primly, as he passed me. “I am a Swiss. Keep your German fascism to yourself!”

    Fuck you, I said, reverting to English, and then the tail of my skirt jammed in the spokes and I shuddered to a stop. As I disentangled myself and set off home I was thinking how quickly we had skipped through the steps to the full apparatus: accusations of physical handicap, warning sirens, curt instructions, national identity and then – within a mere moment, it seemed – we were already arrived at the most unimaginative form of terrorism there is: Fascism.

  • winter blast

    Try to work out whether I can afford to get back over to Ghana to see my sweetheart, I asked a friend: how long will this pretty autumn weather last? We know all too soon it’s going to get misty and grey and damp and bitterly cold – but when?

    Oh well, he said: November is the greyest month. You could go in November and miss the Nieselregen.

    Nieselregen is a kind of drizzly slushy snowrain that gets inside your spirit and rusts it out.

    Or, he said, December is ok because everybody’s looking forward to Christmas – and at least if it rains, it might snow. But you could go in January. January is the coldest month.

    January seems to me such a long way away, I said, in a very small voice. We were sitting under the trees in a quiet marketplace and had large beers in front of us.

    Go in February, he decided. Because by February, even Berliners are sick of it and everybody just wants to stay in bed for the rest of their life. At least in March, the weather is still horrible but you can feel the change approaching. Like, ‘Just sixteen more weeks til I’ll be wearing my t shirt.’

  • I spoke first

    In a crowded lunchtime cafe we were pressed elbow to elbow. The couple beside me talked and talked, while both scrolling idly on their phones. At last I turned to the woman, whose mouth was open and full of food, and asked her,

    “Excuse me, would you please be so kind (in German we say ‘so dear’ or ‘so love’) as to swallow first, and then speak?”

    Her mouth dropped open further. Her gaze sharpened. So I said, “It’s kind of gross. And I am also eating.”

    People who lack emotional honesty are often intimidated by it, I think. They turned to each other and went on as though I had not spoken, except that the woman changed her habit. But the man must have been revolving it in his mind, like the visible food in her mouth. I went on with my meal gazing into the beautiful day around us and was startled by his hand on my arm.

    “Firstly. You should ask more politely. And secondly. If it is you who doesn’t like it, it’s you who moves.”

    “That’s polite?” I said, almost laughing. But she gained courage from his hostility and soon they were both railing at me, jabbing hectoring fingers in my face, telling me off as only Germans can.

    “Look, if you want to have a fight about this, can you do it amongst yourselves? I’m not interested.”

    This outraged them further and the woman’s chest was heaving. The people at the next table looked shocked. The waiter came so I could pay and asked, how was it. And I said, truthfully, it was ok, thank you, it wasn’t super like it usually is.

    Five German gasps went up around me like balloons. The Vietnamese waiter laughed. “It’s because today I cooked it myself.” It is interesting to me and I sometimes experiment, how much you can frustrate a German by simply refusing to make eye contact – whilst jaywalking, for example – because they long to tell off the transgressor and shepherd them back into the fold, but lack the straightforwardness to tackle someone who has not spoken first.

  • follow milk

    I learned a poetic new German word just now at the little health food shop. The man behind me had put just one item on the counter, a carton of Folgemilch. I asked him, “What is… follow milk?”

    “Well,” he began, and something about his tired, slightly harassed, but ever willing to be helpful expression and messy hair struck me with insight.

    “Is it… what you eat when you are done with drinking only milk?”

    I didn’t know how to say ‘breast milk’ let alone ‘solid food’ so I just said, only milk.

    “Exactly!” he said, and then used that pricelessly dear word Germans have for breastfeeding infants. “It’s for sucklings.”

    We both shifted our stuff along the counter as the person in front moved on.

    “So can you use it for other things, in general, like… I’m just having a beer as a followlunch?” I asked, hopefully.

    His brow clotted. “No. No, that is not right.”

    Learning German. It’s one-third flights of folk poetry, two-thirds ‘that is not right’ and ‘we simply don’t do it that way.’

  • a birthday story

    It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy but decent, in which my friend arriving from Copenhagen this evening will treat me to dinner. He says I’ve got to choose. So I chose, and had lunch outdoors in the shade and a large German beer. Needing shade is such a luxury in grey chilly Berlin.

    The bowl of noodles was delicious and the beer made me feel better. I sauntered home on my wheels, spinning down the quiet side of an overgrown local park and only gradually noticing that the man crouched forward on his bench was speaking to me. You are traveling much too fast, he was saying, and then his forbidding German conformity dissolved into a slow salty smile when I smiled at him, raising my eyebrows without meaning to, a smile that turned flirty when he flirted back.

    “Sicher?” I said, slow and low – are you sure? “Absolut sicher,” he said, and his tone had evolved from censorious to self-mockery and enjoyment.

    The African men at the bottom of the park looked me over and I looked at them. I miss Africa. Noodling along the pavement on my way home, which you shouldn’t, but people do, I was warmed when three men in identical backpacks like Mormons stepped aside to let my bicycle pass. “Das ist lieb,” I told them, that is lovely. The tallest one said, gravely, “I come from Stuttgart.”

    “Oh,” I said over my shoulder as I zoomed past, “that is also lovely.”

    The little German birds are high in their voices like tree bells. When I was in Ghana all those months I kept thinking: the birds fly away to Africa for the winter. So here they are! I kept expecting I might meet one and we would recognise each other. Hey, I know you. I’ve seen you in Berlin.

  • Springlike

    Whole streets in Berlin have grown into green tunnels while I was away in Africa. Trees so heavy with bloom they are almost touching sag together across the road. From above, they must resemble giant posies.

    To resolve my sense of cultural and geographic dislocation I decided to focus on the sky and the trees, not looking so much at the buildings and the people. But Berliners are irresistible. I passed a park as it started to sprinkle with rain very briefly, and a whole mousecapade of people rushed out carrying round grills on three little legs in their arms, in a panic. One of them was carrying a fire of coals still burning. I saw a cool couple holding hands, two metres apart on their bicycles, slender in matching jeans. I all of a sudden remembered the balding man in his topless silver sports car who drove very slowly down a cafe street, stopping outside every venue to sing along, imploring with his hands and magnificently confident and loud, to “That’s Amore,” which was blasting from his excellent speakers.

    A man pedalling his two small children home in the cart mounted on the front of his bicycle passed me on my bike, and the two blond little heads lolling out either side of the Kinderwagen reminded me of two tiny flopping soles you see when an African woman passes with her baby tied to her back. He got to the pavement and met a step up that might have jarred them awake, so he stopped and climbed down, came round the front and lifted the whole apparatus tenderly onto the footpath.

    I rode past a Trödel shop of collectibles and junk and saw two women bent to a basket of broken, glinting strings of beads, lifting them out and delving with identical enthusiasm. One was the shopkeeper. She’s still loving it.

    I saw three African and four Turkish men sitting at their ease on milk crates out the front of a coffee shop and had to stop myself from climbing down from my bike to say hello.

    And I passed the Denkmal, which means, I guess, ‘think, why don’t you,’ a very simple plain memorial listing Germany’s crimes during the war, in rafts of black the names of all the awful prison camps, titled, “Places of Terror which we must never be allowed to forget.” It was standing on a busy shopping street because it was from normal streets that people were taken, from their own homes. A seedy-looking man with tattered blond dreads was sitting on the bench in front drinking his afternoon beer and gazing up thoughtfully. In the time it took me to get out my camera, two other men had stopped on their own bicycles, wearing suits, and stood there, reading the names and pointing them out to each other. Someone had left a huge, costly wreath with long red broad streamers printed with something I couldn’t read and the taller man got off his bicycle and wheeled it round to lean down and untangle the ribbons, dragging them so they lay more legibly on the ground.

    I saw a survivor of those pogroms, a Romany man, crouched in the shade of a roadside tree with a flower garden built around it, and he was holding up a bunch of creamy snowdrops bundled with broad blades of green for one euro. I bought some flowers and asked if he would like to have a photograph of himself. So he allowed me to take his picture and gave me his phone number so that I could send it, later. His name was Yonut.