It’s 3am now in New York but when we landed in Berlin, it was 7 o’clock on a sunny Sunday morning. It is colder. I am tired. My first time arriving in Berlin from the States and the subway, the U Bahn, seems immediately different. People are different and I can’t put my finger on it. “Thinner,” he says, and I gasp. He is right. They do not seem to be eating themselves to death. They are playful with one another, with strangers, in a way that seems to me to take a different kind of things seriously. They chatter and laugh, fall asleep, excuse themselves to one another as they pass. There is a different kind of facial expression, something hard to quantify. There are many many fewer really giant large people. They seem, I don’t know if it’s more alive or simply more awake. I do not cherish myself making these observations but in between the long spells of sleeping sickness on the swaying bus and the whispering silky smooth train I keep noticing. The train platform is not a kind of caged forest. It feels spacious and light. I didn’t expect to feel this way. There is a lot less staring into phones. People look to me fresh somehow. They seem grimmer and less disheartened.
Tag: Berlin
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everywanna’s an artist
Giggling to myself at what seems a very typical Berlin expatriate conversation I just passed. American accent. Eight uses of “I/my” within two sentences. One “I need to find,” one “animation,” one “my Dad.” Everywanna’s an artist. Hey I just made that up.
This week life has handed me lemons & I’ve made lemonade. Actually life didn’t hand me the lemons, I had to go out and buy them but on the Turkish markets they were very inexpensive. We’re having an unaccustomed heatwave in Berlin & das Limo tut gut. The tart citrus and slight sweetness seem to me so unsubtly symbolic, so refreshing, so true.
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the true markets
On Sunday in the midst of strife I had a most wonderful day. Met an acquaintance who wanted something from me, and we walked into a foreign land so familiar that I fell into my childhood, and the sweet world intricate and divine which sustained my deepest breaths when I was seven, nine, twelve, eleven rose up in me and about me again and the trees were all there, we knew each other, the soft wind… I cannot describe and no one can transport that essence, the spirit of the place wrapping its tendrils like
a delicate sweet love
like a plant which is birdsong, a vine divine
or like the bride of the forest who shyly beckons shadows, and sings underwater, and has rooms for all our grief.
You walk in through the trees and there are people everywhere, eating and chatting. I took two hundred photographs. I remembered wandering on my own in the pasar, on the markets, in Jakarta
alone but never alone, and the trustfulness held in the colourful world back then. Adults were sexy and cool. They didn’t impose. Nobody touched me. Only the lady, the old ibu, wrapped in her thin scarf who took hold of my head in Blok M and cried all over my face, down my neck, her reddened betel-nut tooth stumps, and her grace and words: this child, this girl, she has depth, she is in the world, she is a soul I can see, she is one of the ones.
I can’t remember her words. But I will never forget the shy proudful sensation of her touch on me and her recognition, down from the mountains, the cave with a wall solid behind it which creates a resonance.
On the bright Thai food markets which began, my Peruvian friend told me, from the longing people had to scent and taste their lovely homeland
where food is beautiful, and fresh like birds, cooking a kind of singing
not all pickled, roasted, brewed, we found Asia in Berlin. The laying out of rugs and seagrass mats. The bright umbrellas and bold plastic implements, lime green, orange, blue. All the families squatted comfortably at their esky tables and their cardboard carton frying-boxes, each carton spattered inside with dark from the oil splitting off in the toiling wok –
There were stalls everywhere, low at ground level, people squatting on their mats pounding and chopping and skilfully frying things. Freshness drew me and my acquaintance, who had said “I will be there for you in this hard time” but in five hours asked me not one question about all of my news and myself, down one grassy alley after another, under the trees, and out in the big clear grassy field. I overheard a Berlin punk on his phone saying, “We are here in the Hauptfressgasse,” the principal pig-out aisle, “come find us,” and the sky
with its inimitable piles like God’s geography, pleasurable, transient. The sky was a beast you could watch for hours straining its leash. And then the train home so swaying and fast between the treetops and the speed was exciting, the lurching and long corners, the sense of riding rapidly above the grimy familiar streets and swinging, like an ape so joyous in his homeland, vine to vine, hand to hand, song to song – that was all I was conscious of. It was such a relief.
I wouldn’t say I was drunk. But I was so very, so very, just so relaxed. A lady under a purple umbrella with a carton-top of bottles, the world’s smallest, freshest bar, mixed up an unholy powerful brew. In Thai German Spanish she said, “You want capina? You want mosquito.” I chose mosquito. Then she sliced the lime with two sharp chops, into the palm of her hand, with a cleaver and crushed it in the cane sugar with her big pestle. Mint leaves then she filled the whole beaker to the rim with gold Havana rum. “Drei Euro.”
Clear tubs with jelly shapes swimming bright and glutinous in the milk, milk of the coconut, mother that travels long seas. The plangent scrabble and wail of unselfconscious Asian voices, familiar in my oldest memories and so sweet and salty and spiced and honest to my ear. Berliners roar, a guttural beery spume: in blaring Jakarta the screeching, the Bulgarian mountaintop want of modulation, the intensely modelled fineness and discretion – that is culture, or one early formation of cultural expectation, to me.
People sitting crouched around a frayed mat under the trees were throwing yellowed dice high again and again, some unfamiliar game printed on the cloth they had spread between the five of them. Little children kicked their legs. I ate and ate. Every mouthful seemed precious. The fresh feisty fruitfulness, realness, diverse sprung view. There were plates of fried insects, sweets wrapped in banana leaves, hot spicy soups. Bright pink milky drinks and bottles garlanded in flowers. I had satays, dumplings, green papaya salad threshed in a trophy-sized mortar which filled my mouth and throat with remembered fire. The high thick combing trees foamed around the park, a large, open park, almost concealing the buildings. We could have been anywhere, we could have been in the Seventies when adulthood was a charm I held inside me. Could have been in the tropics. Could have been out to sea somewhere in the congruent, lasting, more intricate world, that was built by many hands and had trees and is gone.
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feierabend
I love how in Germany restaurants closed on Mondays will say, Montag ist Ruhetag. Monday is our day of peace. And every single day, week in, week out, when you are finished your work and knocking off for the day, home time is Feierabend: celebration-evening. People will say to one another consolingly at the checkout: Not to worry, it’s nearly Feierabend.
The peace at one end of the day, festivities at the other: it seems to me somehow an ideal sweetness for the life.
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colourful, gleaming, a fresh crate of stairwell
I walked home at last through the markets and by the time I got to the street door of my new home I was struggling with parcels, camera because things kept flinging themselves at me in their peculiar beauty and a heavy bag of books from the discount box outside a wonderful bookshop I’ve wanted to step into for ages, and I had. At the door I met this man who was one of those so beautifully made, sculpted, just beautiful men built like manhood, his arms bare and brown and his black hair well cut but not obsessively groomed and his shoulders taut as he held at chest height a wooden crate of market vegetables, colourful, gleaming. You know how your breath kind of stops. He reached over me as I leaned my bicycle and fumbled the key and just – pushed – the heavy Haustür open for me, slid past, stood at ease with his lovely boot blocking the door from slamming on me. I said thank you and cambumbled myself and bike and packages inside. At the stairwell we bottlenecked and he was behind me as I hoisted up the bike and looped my book bag over one arm and climbed the wide stairs, measuring the treads with his comfortable, go for miles fit and perfect pace. I knew that he had seen my awkwardness and would be used to it and would take it as his tribute. As we both turned at the landing, me and my bicycle with him and his fruit behind me, he said, “Schönes Rad!” Lovely bicycle. Mine is on the first floor and by the time I’d worked out what he’d said (“He spoke to me!”) we were at my door. The suggestiveness of doorways flickered through my mind as rapidly as a fish and I fumbled my key and said, “Ja. Stimmt.” Yes: true. And he smiled and I smiled and he went on up the stairs and knocked at my upstairs neighbours and beauty is an accursed gift, I remember the luminous days of my own moon when people would stop me or cross the street to tell me what they had noticed about my body, my face. Your hair, your feet, the way your hand pushes back the door: inside this world of collapsed longings which fan out into every promenade and every boulevard you enter and entice and somehow enlist people, the whole world, in your sharedness, even when you are not thinking of it and when you are mournful or hurrying or bored: that is the fanfare beauty gives to our everyday, like a flag streaming across the peerless sky that gives weight to its innocent unmeaning blue and makes it for a moment everything and perfect.
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the father & son skateboards
Bearded guy walking past rather fast along the cobbles holding his cell phone up to type rapidly, with a sprig of green clutched in his other hand, at chest height. As he walks he types and as he types he keeps glancing over at the little torn-off sprout – it’s clear this green is what is informing his flow of ideas this fine morning. I guess he is describing it but can’t shake the sweet thought that it is somehow dictating to him: a poem, a song.
This street is crowded with ice cream shops which make their own blends onsite. “The surest sign of gentrification,” said boyf as we were queuing in the sunshine to choose between matcha (green tea ice cream) and white chocolate with parmesan. When I first moved in, was it only last week? a man walked past with his skateboarding little son. The father had a skateboard of his own clutched under his free arm and was holding the little boy’s hand. As I watched, the man dropped his boy’s hand, dropped his own much smaller board to the ground, and hopped on. From behind, they were unmistakeably linked: little boy in colourful t-shirt covered with tiny dinosaurs, and drab pants; daddy wearing his own groovy colourful t-shirt (covered in Donald Ducks) and khakis. They set off together, paddling solemnly, right down the middle of the pavement, wearing their genes.
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the night so vast
Walking at night through the little woods that runs along the shore. I can hear a muted guitar playing from across the water. The dirty water in the dark looks black and clean as ink. Spring is thickening and the trees reach in from either side, closing the path. You have to be swallowed in it. The low thrum of summer night conversation peppers along the canal. The smell of pot. The smell of cigarettes. The clinking of old bottles as a man wheeling his laden bicycle stops under a streetlamp to readjust them all so tenderly in their bags, with furrowing care as though he were collecting them to keep. When I turned down last night an invitation to the birthday party of a man who lives in a van in a village of vans in a thicket where the cherry trees were all pink in April his brother, who’d invited me, said, You should come, we will have a fire in a barrel. Like New York. His brother, he said, had a telescope and this was a telescope party. “Saturn,” he said, the German way, “and her rings and… Jupiter.” I turned for home under the linden trees and he told me how every village had its linden once: with a bench running round it, the Dorflinden. I’m alone now, in the manner of people who don’t go to parties, and my eyes are swollen from crying, and sore. The headache lifts and disintegrates from my shoulders as I walk on, caring for little and everything, reaching the peace inside like dark water. Right at the far end the moon hovers low over the broadening trees and the water, a doorway to infinite peace, an intermittently rattling blind, a prize.
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hair now gone to morels
Today I had my hair cut and lost enough length to stuff a small teddy bear. Afterwards I crouched on the floor in the horseshoe swatch of paler wood worn on the black boards where the hairdresser stands every day in an arc that sweeps back and forth around each customer, and tamped up the soft, drying clumps in my fingertips, and put them in a paper bag they gave me. My hair had spread across a wide area and I gleaned back as much as I could. I feel a bit weird saying, Can you give me a bag, I want to take this stuff home: and even weirder about leaving it there lying on the floor. To get swept up. Mingled in with other people’s hair. Dusted in landfill, with its bad magic.
I had chosen for this outing a place I felt safe in, in a chic part of town where women carry little dogs in their handbags. All the trees have sprung into service and the old buildings gleam. On my way home feeling lighter and breezier in the fresh afternoon Spring air I pulled the handles of the bag apart and peered in – a soft knot of washed and combed ends and curls lay there in a heap, big as my two fists, coiled on itself on the floor of the bag like some little dog lured from its home.
I so hate getting my hair cut that it happens only once every year, or two years; for a long time I used to cut it myself, with the scissors on my Swiss army knife. The girl who took my appointment earlier in the day had a blond bob severely asymmetrical but her eyes were soft. “I will put you with Damir,” she decided. “He has an unusual name too.” Damir was very cool, as all hairdressers are cool, and reminded me of my friend M. Same quirked brow, same smooshed beanie on the back of his head; same deft hips. He let my hair out from its elastic and said, Ahh, in a tone of satisfaction. Took his time, handling the masses of it for ten minutes, parting and lifting it, weighing it, judging the curl and its spring and the way the colour grows. Only then did he say, “Let us go wash,” lässt uns waschen gehen. It was a pleasure to close my eyes and let myself be handled. He said, see how it’s much curlier at the back. See how it’s ginger at the ends, I said, and he said: that’s because you wear it up in a knot and that’s where the sun most gets to it. Right, I said, slowly, thinking: oh, riiight. How little one notices oneself.
Would you like something to read? He went over to a low table by the huge windows and bent over, sifting and separating. In the mirror I watched him choose me out three magazines and order them into a stack. One had a photo in it of the beautiful photojournalist Lee Mitchell, shortly after the death of Adolf Hitler, in his apartment taking a bath in his tub. When Damir offered me a drink and I said I’d like some water he said, Still oder mit. This translates, “Still or with?” Germans ask each other these questions about water, still or sparkling? With or without. “With” means with gas: bubbly. The salon was huge and only one other person was getting their hair cut in it. How much was all this going to cost? “I don’t care,” I said to myself, trying to calculate when it was last cut: more than two years ago. It was peaceful there under his hands within the tent of my own hair. I remembered how I used to go to nightclubs just for the dancing, and would dance alone, all night, all night. When men came up to me I didn’t yet know how to get rid of them so eventually I would take the elastic out of my hair and let it fall across my face like this, making a thorough curtain through which I could see out but no one could see in. I used to smoke and I guess it was eerie to see a woman sitting smoking stolidly through the sheet of her own hair, certainly no one persisted past that curtain and this reminded me of that. I closed my eyes and let sensation scratch at me all round. The fingers brushing the back of my neck. The tugging as he lifted wings of hair up high to trim the ends. The soft feathering as it fell down over my face. The scent of tobacco from his fingertips, that lay on the hairs hanging combed straight over my nose. The faintly tropical, faintly chemical smell of salon shampoo. “You never blowdry it,” he said, and I said, “I don’t even own a blowdryer. Or a comb.” “You can feel it in the hair,” he said, letting it run through his fingers like water in sand.
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the lovely man
You know how sometimes two souls collide in a fleeting way, like two bells chiming in different trees, and you never forget that person even if you never again see them or think of them. Well, that happened to me today. A most beautiful man. I went out to buy eggs and to finally drop in and see my friend who runs an exquisite New Berlin gift shop – it is filled with lovely things – he sells liquors and vodkas brewed locally. He sells handmade cards on creamy laid paper which have perfect arrangements of tiny dried flowers on them. Each card is initialed by the lady who makes it and inside is a little sheet of paper with her wavering handwriting – she is quite old, he says, and lives in Bavaria – explaining which wildflowers she used for this card. After much hesitation among the meadows I chose one with violets and something called in German “geese flowerlings.” The lady’s name is Rotraud – that’s her first name. I imagine her an elderly maiden, Germanic, pure-hearted, fieldly.
While we were standing chatting a woman walked in whom I had passed on my way into the snooty health food store, she has a seamed and brown face round like a nut and he showed me the cards he also sells with her photographs on them. I was still reeling. Ahead of me browsing in the health food store opposite I had seen this lovely man, baby straps wrapped around his chest, long wrinkled pants and comfy shoes and somehow the back of his head attracted me. At the egg shelves we ran against each other and looked into one another’s eyes and smiled. I like you! I like you, too. As I was walking home feeling so filled with ardour and friendship he cycled past, slow and leisurely, making faces at his baby who lay smiling in the little wooden cart pushed in front of the bicycle. Hey, I said. Hey, he said. I came home to the man whose loveliness is known to me in more compelling detail and the sound of whose voice from outside the door lifts my heart. He took a photo of me in my crowded overalls, every pocket bulging with spinach, bananas, nectarines, tea. I put some water on to boil the eggs whilst telling him all about it. We gloated over the four different kinds of amazing German breadrolls I had chosen and their funny names. My favourite breadroll name is ‘Schrippen,’ a kind of ordinary light white bun. I bought potato rolls, farmer’s rolls, dinkel rolls and poppy and sesame fruit rolls, lifting each one out of its hutch with the long-handled scissor provided there for just that purpose.