Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Australian traveller

  • or anything but

    Two Americans in a coffee shop staffed by Australians. This is Berlin where not everybody bothers to learn German. They come in and order and make themselves comfortable. One starts talking about Sylvia Plath.

    He is reading a book about her life only it’s not very good. “I mean, with Hughes,” he says, sounding oddly over-familiar. They talk about football, which is what everyone is hearing about this week whether they like it or not. Their voices, like the giant screens set up in front of every late night convenience store and in every bar, are loud and blaring. They’ve been raised to expect prizes for participating and the world is their awe, yeah.

    “I’m not patriotic or anything,” the girl says. In my mind I hear: “I’m not racist, or anything, but,” which invariably heralds the most racist remarks. This is my favourite of the yeahbuts, which I pronounce to rhyme with rarebit. Equal favourite is the woeful, “I mean I’m not a feminist or anything, but – ” which, oddly enough, is necessary to preface anti-sexist ideas.

    “I know,” the guy says, quickly. “I’m not patriotic, either.”

    “…But when it comes to football,” he says, ” – I’m strangely patriotic!”

    They laugh, looking away from each other. She confides, “Me too. I just want the little guys to win. I mean, not – win,” she says.

    “No,” he says, “you want them to win.” There is a moment of silence as this sinks in.

    I am writing in a cafe where punks come in to beg from hipsters. Punk is the indigenous nation of Berlin, they built the poor but sexy reputation that has lured all these web designers and makers of cupcakes, now they are thrown out on their own lands and rely on bottle collecting, ingenious begging, ever more resourceful squats. This week I was cycling down a sunny street when a woman accosted me in French. Did I know where there was a squat nearby which she could visit? “You realise these are people’s homes,” I said. “You can’t just go in and… take photographs.” I directed to her to a large, enterprising commune which hosts open air cinema evenings in the warmer months. Her lip curled. “That place… is filled with tourists.”

    This cafe is on a street rapidly filling up with ice cream shops and children’s shoe stores: the twin signs, to my mind, of gentrification. I am part of the problem. But these strange twenty-five-year olds leave me feeling more foreign than any German ever did. They are talking now about their projects, and about some elder expert. “I’m thinking of getting him as my mentor for the project,” she says, as though the famous professor were a new brand of wallpaper. “I think maybe it would be good for me.” As though everything were a new brand of wallpaper. As though wallpaper were a background on one’s sharp black cell phone and would never need to be hung with paper and with sweat and paste, at all.

  • at boyfriend school

    What bothers me most about getting older is losing that glorious, elastic authority which I used always to use to shame men out of behaving boorishly. This afternoon we came through the park and passed the boules courts along the riverside, ruled off with low fences like dust baths for human sparrows, and I was collecting blossoms from the various flowering trees, the Spring has waited so long. The park was full of drug dealers and pregnant women and dogs, everywhere dogs. It all seemed glorious and I collected eight different kinds of blossom. Finding a second bush with the same flowers as a sprig I had already collected, I went up to it to make my little sprig kiss a sister flower still attached and growing. Saying, “Sistah! Hey sis!” and making smoochy noises. Then at the next hollow where the table tennis tables are set up I found another bush with the same flowers and went over to it, making kissing sounds – my companion said, mildly, “Are we going to be doing this all the way home?”

    Alongside the boules courts we passed a man unzipped with his back turned, right there among the people, women, children, men, dogs, he had barely bothered to shunt himself into the bushes and it seemed so arrogant, so rude. I stared at him, turning my head as we walked past until he looked up and then I could say, witheringly, “I can see you!” He stared back, a complex expression crossing his face. I believe I read him perfectly. I said to my companion as we walked on, “You know – this is perhaps the most galling part about getting older. I lose that natural kind of authority of gorgeousness. Ten years ago he would have gone, Oh my god, that beautiful woman! and I have disgusted her! I’ve lost status in her eyes.”

    He murmured appreciatively and slung his arm around me. But I didn’t want his compassion, I wanted his incomprehension. After a few dozen more steps I nudged him. I was grumbling. “You do realise that now would be a great time for you to say something beginning with, wait but Cathoel you are a beautiful woman?” He laughed. “Jeez,” I said. “Didn’t they teach you anything in Boyfriend School?”

    “Cathoel,” he said, “you are still a very beautiful ~”

    “Nope!” I put up a hand. “Do not use the word ‘still’!” But he wasn’t done. Unperturbedly he carried on, “~ and you will probably be beautiful until the day you die.” “Ahh,” I said, my breath sailing out of me like a breeze, and then I felt my body relax and my face grow warm and I snuggled back under the crook of his arm, where I like to belong.

  • the oliver twist

    I have a friend who teaches piano. Today she said to me, “I have two students now from Australia. And both of them are called Oliver.”

    “Wow,” I said, “how many Australians called Oliver can there really be? There’s only like twenty-five million of us.”

    “Not that many,” she said, “because they’re all over here.”

    “They’re Oliver here,” I realised, making us both laugh, yay me.

    There are so many Australians in Berlin, I hear our accent in the streets. And three of my Berlin friends are Kiwis, which means that one in a million New Zealanders is not only living in Berlin but is within my own personal circle of acquaintance. This seems so astonishing and improbable.

    We were heading towards the door and she held it open for me so that I could carry my bike through. I was thinking of the election in five weeks which will hopefully depose inhumanity in Australia in favour of humanity; and how I hope all these Berliner Australians will get to the booths. I thought about our strange and resonant homelands so far away and as we parted at the foot of the stairs I burst out, “You know, sometimes I kind of get the feeling, like – who’s looking after the place?”

  • happens so fast

    Mum’s in hospital. Dad’s in hospital. Both in the same hospital and admitted on the same night. He has pneumonia, we think, and they’re waiting for the results of the PSA test on his prostate cancer this morning. If he has a heart attack, he told the doctor, he does not want to be revived. My mother ten minutes after Dad was carted off in the ambulance went downstairs to water the garden, tripped over her own pants leg, and broke her hip. My brother was trying to tend to both of them while they were two beds apart on the emergency ward and when Mum was wheeled off for her Xray, and Dad was wheeled up to the ward, he asked as they passed the doors of the Xray department, can’t we just open the door a crack? And let them say hello to each other.

    The door was opened. They got to see each other and wish each other good luck. Dad’s doctor was doubtful he would make it through the night. Describing my parents saying hello through the Xray department door my brother broke down and sobbed. He kept saying, We need to talk about this as a family, we’re not ready to say goodbye yet! I said, this is very hard what you are doing. I wish I could be there to support you, and them. I’ve been tormented since I heard by the thought of them both being in such pain, and under the same roof, but separated. I said, even though it hurts us, I think it’s Dad’s own decision. It is his life and no one can keep him here if he is suffering. I described my friend who died last month, of euthanasia, when her quality of life became unbearable. Yes, said my brother very slowly. I know it might be very hard for you to do I said, and it’s asking a lot. But if you were able to find it in yourself – when Dad is awake and alert – to provide him with a calm enough conversational space so that he can clearly, plainly express his own wishes for his fate: I think it would be a truly loving service you could offer him. My brother said, I think he’ll want to hang on, for Mum. May 28th will be their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We’d imagined that I was the only one who wouldn’t be there, for that.

  • Department of Honour

    I just acquired the most beautiful new German word. We are discussing privilege and a new acquaintance says he has to do something ehrenamtlich – oh, how divine, can ‘ehrenamtlich’ mean ‘voluntary’? An ‘Amt’ is a bureau, government department or office. But ‘Ehre’ means honour.

    Germany is overrun with Amts. Ordinarily they sound faintly menacing: the Ordnungsamt, Department of Order, takes care of ticketing people’s unlicensed dogs, illegal parking &c: a histrionic graffito in the local drug park screeches, in orange, Ordungsamt = Terror!!. Online I find a website called Ehrenamt Deutschland, which offers a definition: honourable offices can be anything which is performed “freiwillig, gemeinwohlorientiert und unentgeltlich,” that is, anything that is pursued of one’s own free will, is oriented towards the common good, and is unpaid. The formality makes it sound almost stultifying but there is all this generosity and warmth beating away underneath.

    As Australia turns itself into a vast gulag for imprisoning children, and other countries up and down the escape corridor into Europe close and razor wire their borders, Berliners are opening refugee cafes, holding garage sales and donating food, organising ‘Asylum Seeker Airbnb’ to help match people’s spare rooms with exhausted new arrivals. I find it so moving to think that by teaching German once a week in the giant refugee camp that was once the old Tempelhof airport, this Berliner becomes part of the Department of Honour.

  • zwiebelchen?

    On the markets I passed a tourist with an American accent who was saying to his companion, “Jeez. So much amazing stuff to eat and drink!” Inexplicably he managed this in a tone of complaint. Jet lag? For how, I wondered, can you possibly turn that into a sense of personal injury. Woe is you. I bought a jar of honey; local honey is relatively flavourless because the Linden trees in Berlin have a very mild scent. I bought sweet potato at the potato stall where you can spend half an hour reading her scribbled handmade signs. She extols the nutritional benefits of orange vs purple sweet potatoes and sells fourteen kinds of spud. When I buy a bag of root vegetables she always pops a tiny round golden onion in the top, saying sweetly, “Zwiebelchen?” which means more or less ‘And may I offer you a tiny baby onion… an onionette?’ She’s so cute with it. What’s particularly cute is that she has clearly trained her husband to do this and he clearly doesn’t get it: when I buy from him he’s all blokey and dismal, ticking off the requirements almost visibly in his head: paper bag, turn down the top like a lunch pail, “Oh yes, the onion! Sorry – here, have an onion.” Muttering to himself that he almost forgot to throw that in. My eyes meet hers over the back of his head and we share a moment of feminine protectiveness and love.

    The potato lady is an old punk and always has some raddled spud which has started to send out its purplish tendrils, turned upside down for hair and with eye holes nicked in its face with a toothpick. Generally these guys will be carrying a flag or dressed in a scrap of fabric, propped up in front of middlemost bucket. I skirted the Turkish stall holders who sing their wares and scold their customers and fronted up at the endmost cheese stall, where some of the cheeses are eight years old. She also has butter, far younger, in fact churned yesterday. The woman in front of me was buying a slab of butter and as I sometimes do I composed the German sentence in my head while I was waiting. “Auch so ein Stück Butter, bitte.” Ie ‘I’ll have another such slice of butter, please.’ One of my greatest difficulties on the market is I don’t know the words for piece, slice, bunch, punnet – the collective nouns. When I came home with my basket over my arm, my friend was stretching up over her bicycle’s rump to pull my doorbell again. I told her of my triumph and we hugged each other gleefully. We are veterans of Germany’s indefatigably formal and prolonged migration processes, where ordinary German seems to acquire a top hat and a moustache. You see, I told her as we mounted the stairs to eat the Dutch pepper cake I baked this morning: I performed three distinct linguistic somersaults in a row, to get out that sentence intact. First there’s the two different Ks: auch, and Stück. The two different Us, ü and u. Then the two different but similar words, Butter which ends in a dry R, and bitte which ends in the kind of disdainful e we rarely use in Australian English. Out it came flawless. I somersaulted home.

  • pure new cold all over

    It’s snowing! It’s snowing! It’s snowing! I came into a cafe going, It’s snowing, and she said, I know, and I said, But – it’s snowing! and then hours later walked out into the dark and under the golden lights every car wore a fresh crisp white bonnet, my old tears burst its banks, oh – snow.

    In my cafe two fellows in black beards were drawing at a big round table and as the cafe closed two girls in long tresses came up to say, So? Are you drawing? They looked up, patiently. The girls were pretty and the boys kind. “So do you do this professionally? Or…”

    Ah, yes. That tasteful first question, also asked of every dentist and every builder’s labourer – so how much do you get paid for that? The taller girl plumped her bag down on top of the nearer guy’s paints. She got out her phone. “May I?” Yes, he said, standing back so that she could take a picture of his work. Her friend said, Doesn’t it bother you, working in a cafe? Behind her packing up my laptop and my notebooks I answered for him, only quietly – the only thing that bothers me about working in a cafe is that people come up and interrupt, this has happened to me many times, someone actually waving their hand under my nose to get my attention so that they can say, Doesn’t it bother you working in a place like this, how can you concentrate?

    Coming out into the fresh snow, unexpected and perfectly flawless just yet, I saw a man – let’s say a man – had drawn a huge erect penis on the rump of one of those anointed cars, cos some people don’t understand perfection. I could hear children cluttered round the corner shrieking in their snowsuits, that time of year! is here! so I put down the palm of my hand on someone’s bonnet to make a snow angel of five long fingers, marking: I too see this snowing time of year. This indoor landscape. Domain of families and gold. I too am here.

  • New Zonked

    In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made me laugh by innocently mispronouncing his views (sane) on American gun laws (insane): you walk into a school and it’s like that film, he said: The Texas Chainsaw Moussaka.

    Many Americans have a naivete that makes me feel protective of them, and not just about guns. More than once I have been complimented on speaking such excellent English, for an Australian. It doesn’t always seem to be because the speaker has confused us with Austria. I guess the sensation of believing one’s nation the centre, and pinnacle, of the civilised world – the use, even, of phrases like ‘the civilised world’ – might engender a certain self-satisfaction. On my very first visit, a few years back now, to New York I would marvel to anyone who’d listen how much better of a time I was having than I’d expected. “That’s because New York is the centre of the universe,” explained four or five unrelated New Yorkers, innocently.

    At JFK we had queued with our passports and I overheard the officer herding the line answer an anxious tourist’s question with, “I’m just doing my job here. Anything else you’re asking – is irrelevant.” “They’re handling people like goods,” said my companion, shuffling forward. Three days later up in the Bronx we went walking through one of the giant parks that make that part of town so beautiful. As we were coming down the hill a crocodile of children was climbing up. A little girl in front was walking rapidly backwards, her head tilted round to guide herself. “You can do it,” the teacher encouraged. “I believe in you, Destiny!”

    I said, to make her laugh, “We believe in you too, Destiny!” A second group of students followed them. One little girl was walking with her teacher, saying, “I’m serious!” “You can’t call a taxi,” the woman told her, “in a park.” It occurred to me I’d never said I believe in Destiny, before. I’m just… not American. Yet the sense of kinship with random passersby as we wandered up Central Park right from the bottom to the top, as we ventured into Harlem, as I got tangled in conversation with fascinating people on the D train, forever a stranger, was so spicy to me and so sweet. I loved the guy on the subway whose Superman socks were pulled high to the knee and inside out. I loved the wide-eyed baby whose daddy was so stoned he gave off a pungent weed reek. I loved the crazy Christian lady who tried to pick up my companion and when she’d asked, are you alone, looked at me and said, “And is that your… sister?” I loved the man who glanced into my camera’s screen when I stopped short at the top of the stairs into the subway station at Canal Street and said, “Nice photo.” It felt as it always to me feels in New York city, one of earth’s prototypical cities, as if we all are engaged on some giant endeavour, and none of us will ever see the outcome – in completion – we are fragments in a kaleidoscope like moths, we are our own art, we are brushing up against each other every day all day long as we go, handling the good like it was people.

  • knowing one another in the dark

    Knowing one another in the dark: this is life in the wintertime, in Germany. Three days ago the late summer turning purple in Central Park; tonight the moist grey soft air, the dark day, the lighted bicycles on the path. I have only just realised in Berlin we are on a latitude with Alaska; New York is on a latitude with Spain, a far sunnier prospect.

    It felt strange to me, coming home to a home that is no home at all, where I’ve lived less than three years in total and always in spates, looking over my shoulder to the next project which had to be done in Copenhagen or in Madrid, or back in Brisbane. My father has cancer there and I’m here. My nephews are growing up there and I’m here. My cat lives over there and I’m here. For a cat who spends her afternoons tormenting tiny tropical lizards and basking in the endless pouring caramel sun, I remind myself: relocation to an indoor apartment life in northern Europe would be cruel. But she’s so soft and we used to sleep tucked into one another. When I was ill and alone once and could not very often struggle out of bed, this cat licked me, with great earnestness and a harsh tongue, all over, like a giant kitten until to her satisfaction I was clean. She is a wonderful companion but a horrible correspondent. I mourn about it over the phone to my mother in Brisbane, to make her laugh: all these months and not one phone call… Not a postcard… “She is scuffling at the receiver,” my mother says, and I hear soft scratching sounds. “She hears your voice.”

    At JFK airport everybody was white. Everyone except the wait staff, the security personnel, the cleaners and the guy emptying the trash. At the security gate he lifted a large plastic bag of plastic bottles of water from the bin and carried it away: I watched the glinting light that is really a terrifying form of the endless dark that will take us all underwater sift through all that plastic and bobbling trucked water and thought, America… it’s be part of the solution, not part of the dissolution. We ate a meal and the waitress brought us so many paper napkins my knife and fork fell off the top of the pile. Wait, she hadn’t brought a second set of – yes, she had. A second tower of waste paper stood across the tabletop and this tree graveyard was all for me. They hand you napkins when you order a coffee. They use polystyrene. Let’s not talk about that.

    At length in our airplane by which I am responsible for far more pollution than any squanderer of napkins can ever claim we left the land behind, at Nova Scotia, and began our crossing. The dark Atlantic. Thickened up with polystyrene chunks that never break down, only into smaller chunks of polystyrene foam. And roofed, increasingly, with a dully cluttered sea foam of plastic bottles, mostly the bottles in which Americans have bought water.

    Germans buy water too. Recycling the bottles is only a partial improvement. We landed at Tegel, the gloriously Soviet styled airport which was actually part of West Berlin. Germans streamed past with their big square heads looking serious yet warm. They recycle. They carry their empty bottles back to the place they were purchased and retrieve tiny amounts of loose change. There are no returned soldiers sleeping on subway platforms. Instead, in Berlin there is a Coldness Bus that travels round on frigid nights collecting homeless people who might otherwise perish in their sleep. There is something here to learn, for you, America, I think, and also for us, Australia, where we lock up desperate families behind razor wire and have turned landfill production into a sport. The clouds of pollution and damage are closing around us and we need to learn to know each other in the dark.

     

  • god bless the adult

    I met a man with shit-stained pants on the subway and we sang together. He had been swaying by his pile of plastic bags for half an hour, offering speeches to the cabin. People ignored him and looked away. Only the Hispanic man behind us covered his face with split fingers and laughed into his hand. When at last a voice spoke, mysteriously, smoothly, over some unseen PA – good afternoon folks, sorry to disturb, I am going to be making a little music for you this evening – it startled us, mildly, and the shit-stained man looked over, eagerly, and we all saw a younger man, also black, beautifully groomed with a high-maintenance beard, bending to the floor to switch on his little blaster which filled the train with some R & B groove.

    He began to sing, effortlessly, like a bird on a branch who is free. He sang about Her, She’s gonna leave me, I know it, I know my heart is hers. Bending to the instrument again he chose a Michael Jackson groove, Rock with You, with that lovely tripping flute that everybody recognises instantly.

    Oh, Michael Jackson. We love you and we were happy to be transported by your music. Your music and the MTA. The shit-stained man left his pole and his pile of bags and ventured up into the cabin, dancing, smoothing his shoulders across the air. He tapped the singer on the shoulder and passed him some coin, “his last dollar” said my friend. Then he instantly, uncrazily, turned away and sashayed back to his post, his literal post, making no demands on the singer and not importuning. The man singing was emboldened to dance around a little. “He’s good,” said the fellow next to me, and I said, “He is! And he’s dancing like that while the train is crazy swaying.” I got up, grabbing a pole, and swung my hips a little, in joy with the music. When the singer came past collecting “anything you have helps, and if you don’t have, I love a smile,” we all dug eagerly into our pockets, you have gave us joy.

    The shit-stained man hollered, “Baby! You’re great! You need to get yourself in the studio!” The singer answered, ruefully, “Man. I am in the studio.” “You need an agent.” The man behind me was laughing anew. Tears fell in splinters from behind his outstretched fingers, he gripped his face and wept with the mercy of it. “Oh yes!” he was saying, helplessly, to himself: “He needs you to be his agent, baby!” New Yorkers are aware, I think, of one another’s ludicrises.

    The singer returned to his portable blaster, the subway doors still open, and he picked it up and called out thank you and left I thought how he could lose all his profit if someone grabbed the music box and ran away with it. The doors slid shut and we began to move. Left alone to his audience the man in stained pants began to declaim in song. He sang, movingly, God Bless the Child, in a cadence and tune of his own. I joined in, a lovely melody we wove and we were glancing at each other, shyly. I said, “You have a lovely voice.” He said, “I’m 71 years old. I begin to sometimes wonder, what is God’s plan for me.” “Ah,” I said: “that I don’t know.” He said, “My mother always told me when I was little. Boy, God has a special plan in mind for you. But I begin to wonder sometimes, what it is.”

    He collected all the crumpled bags at his feet, laboriously, very often missing when he went to grab them by their outstretched necks. At the next station he was gone and another busker came on, young, Mexican, radiant, and silent, a stocky boy wearing a sandwich board with his two stumps of arms held out in front of him, like Jesus on a candle. His sign read, Hi, my name is Felix. I lost both arms in a work accident. God bless you and thank you for any help you can give. The cabin fell silent. All the joy fell away. We are lost in an industrial accident, this fractured world. Soberly people fished in their pockets, to help. Felix’s face was suffused with the grace of joyous living. He came past and I fished shame-faced in my emptied-out purse. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.” “Thank you.” His voice was soft and filled with humour. “I just gave all my money to the busker,” I said, uselessly. He smiled at me, and I smiled at him a smile that turned down at the corners and pressed my hand to my heart where it ached, and at the next station he got off and walked away, inside his sandwich board, a human pyramid only one head high. As I watched him disappearing into the mystery of his own devilishly difficult life and its challenges, his form flickered with metal stripes as the train took off, I realised my hand was still pressed to where my heart lives and that, unlike the man in stains, this younger man trapped in his sandwich board “for life, as it were,” as Washington Square has it, has made, is making decisions; he has formulated a plan; he is not waiting for some unseen God to evidence in his life. God, if you’re there, bless the child that gets his own. Make us less helpless (we say, helplessly). Give us this day each the daily breadth to see where we are in this life, where we can get to in this world, and how we can all help each other. Amen.