Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Berlin

  • today

    Today in Berlin I found a hand-blown wine bottle so beautiful I had to pick it up to carry home. I saw an elder descending the stairs from a sushi bar painfully and slowly. He crossed the pavement, leaning on his stick. To my surprise he came up to a bicycle and dropped his satchel in its basket. His hands must have been trembling as it took him some time to thread the walking stick diagonally through the carrier at the back. He set off walking, slowly and painfully, pushing his bike and I thought: ah. Perhaps he uses that as a kind of walker, perhaps he’s not willing to face yet that he needs support. But I was absolutely wrong. At the roadside he stepped gingerly over the crossbar and set off, turning uphill within a few yards and pedalling slowly but steadily home.

    I saw a busker on the markets who had attracted a little, attentive crowd. He sang Rocket Man and people clapped. Then he said, This next song is one of my own, and that’s when everybody began to disperse and turn away. In the crowd was a man in his seventies huge in a wheelchair who was wearing a kind of childhood dress-up box version of a Native American feathered headdress. He was tapping his scaly, swollen foot. Riding home I passed a bride, in her ivory tower of gown, sitting at a trestle table on the roadside with three blokes casually dressed in black. The four of them were laughing and opening two flat boxes of pizza. I saw a biker couple lounging over beers and she had the heel of her cuban heeled boot raked up at shoulder height on the railing.

  • 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.’

  • wasp joy

    This summer as the world goes to literal and immediate hell using bushfire and corruption, misogyny and greed, several small incidents have surfaced in my own daily life that help keep me afloat. I found a new bar, hidden behind a drift of trees, late last night as I was pedalling home from some arduous and exacting work that never seems to be done. I had passed this place half a hundred times but a man was sitting outside, on a comfy chair, his long legs crossed and his concentration sunk in a book. I went back around and locked my bike and walked inside, rather shyly.

    They had faded couches and long rows of wine boxes lined with glinting bottles. I sat down and took out my book in turn. To be in Berlin, and be not the only person on the train, or in a restaurant, who’s reading. I read for about an hour. It slowly grew dark outside. The bartender came and squatted in front of me: what do you feel like? I’ll make you something nice. She made me something nice, involving cognac and whipped egg white, and I drank it very slowly and then got up and closed my book and went over to the bar. She was rattling ice cubes efficiently in a steel cocktail shaker. Ten euros exactly.

    Oh, then… I gave her the note and held out my palm. Rather than picking through it vaguely to work out what might make a fair tip I would let her choose: so I informed her by my cheeky but underconfident smile. She dug in and showed me what she’d found. “Ich nehm’ ein Euro,” I’ll take one euro. We both smiled and I rode home to the pair of large ears which rise from the arm of the couch these days when I walk in. I have my little familiar, my smallest companion, the cat who was left behind in Brisbane six years back and finally got on a plane. She cheers me, too.

    Today I sat in a quiet streetside cafe under the late summer trees. A leaf drifted by as I rode home last night and it’s unavoidable that winter will come. My subtropical heart quails each time. At the next table a beautiful man was reading. “Can I have your sugar?” I asked, without thinking, and his smile quirked.

    “You can! the only problem is,” he said, in German, “a couple of wasps have been making it pleasant for themselves in there, so… I still took it.”

    I opened the sugar and peered. Three wasps, butts bent up and heads gleefully sunk in the piles of golden sugar, made me laugh. The waitress brought me their largest glass filled to the brim with tap water. A car went past behind me very slowly. The cafe has scalloped blankets folded now over the back of some of the chairs. We will sit outside as long as we can, before it’s so cold and grey we have to turn for home and then never run into each other all the rest of the long Berlin winter, which is deadly low and close to the ground, obscures sun and stars, and lasts eighteen months of the year, I’m convinced of it.

  • 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.

  • the Nazi airfield in summer

    I will tell you what Berlin is like in the summer. As I cycle home from a far-distant errand I cross over an overgrown field. Near the hangars, part of the largest manmade structure outside the Great Wall of China, a thicket of neatly rowed white demountable houses has bicycles parked and pot plants blooming. These are some of the one in two hundred Germans who are now Syrians escaping the war.

    Six police officers in flak jackets are guarding the asylum seekers, lounging in the afternoon sun. The other side of the wire fence a summer circus has set up its tents; then a rippled concrete path runs past and on the other side of that, a fake beach is lined with volleyball games.

    Behind the volleyball courts people have built themselves a tumble of pallet gardens. All of this takes place in the old Nazi airport, which also hosts Berlin’s emerging designer festival in its cavernous and sombre hangars.

    On an obsolete airplane bumper of concrete with fading scarlet stripes a woman in a beehive and three-inch stack silver heels is picnicking, with her shirtless golden boyfriend, silver-chested, with his skateboard lying by them. They are both in their sixties. Further into the field two young women are learning to kite surf on vast sails. The runways divide meadows filled with wild flowers and dredged by butterflies, because half the local taxes are paid by artists and the city can’t afford to mow.

  • summer treat

    The woman behind me at the supermarket checkout had a little pile of five caramel bars, two gossip magazines of the trashiest kind, the ones with really flimsy rattling paper, and a tub of flavoured yoghurt. She saw me looking and her brow contracted. When I said, “I’m so happy for you,” which in German is said, I rejoice myself for you, “that looks so delightful,” her whole face relaxed.

    “Ja,” she said, and picked up the stack of caramel bars and hugged them. “It looks really great, doesn’t it.”

    “It really, really does,” I said. When I reached my bike in the row of bikes out front someone had dropped a leaflet in its basket to advertise a yoga retreat on Corfu. It is colder today and the summer, only two days old, feels already threatened.

  • 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 homemade flower festival

    A woman in my neighbourhood has put up little signs all round the flower gardens in our local park. Her signs are handwritten, but laminated.

    “INVITATION TO THE FLOWER FESTIVAL, JUNE 16. Yeah maybe ‘festival’ is somewhat high flown. But I will bake a cake and hand a slice of it to everyone who feels themselves somehow connected to these plants and who wants to come by. There have been so many lovely engagements and so much enabling mutual assistance taking place locally, I would really love to offer my friends an impression of it all. And in case we haven’t yet met, then this will provide us an opportunity.”

    She writes a smily face, in her own handwriting.

    “It would be practical, if youse (the informal German you) would bring something to sit on and some stuff that goes with cake eating and coffee drinking. I’ll be glad if you come along!”

    Flowerbeds in Berlin are always overgrown, because the city is broke and there’s no money to pay people in fluorescent vests to destroy our every Sunday with leafblowers. Nearby, even more overgrown and underkempt, a tiny meadow has evolved where consistent and assiduous neglect year after year has allowed all the native flowers and butterflies to come back.

    On the main road, when I reach it, a man with a ZZ Top beard has settled himself and his paunch next to my favourite seat outside the writing cafe. He turns the pages of his newspaper with noisy harrumphs. We exchange a few words. “I’m going inside to order,” I tell him, as Berliners do, “are you here a few more minutes?”

    The informal ‘you.’

    “Then would you mind keeping an eye on my stuff?”

    “Either that,” he says, “or I’ll be gone, with your little red rucksack,” and he laughs, and I laugh, as I’m heading inside where it is shady and the bartender on his stool is reading Camus, in French.

  • skeeter mattress

    I just sold my air mattress, late on a Saturday night, to a small, muscular, warm dude whose name is Ramon. He rang me an hour ago from my online classifieds ad and asked, how much longer are you up? He described what he wants to do with it – lie under the stars among the mosquitoes (“And the moon,” I reminded, insufferably helpful), at his garden house in its green garden.

    I told him why I can’t stand the sight of the thing and must sell. I bought it brand new for a terrible houseguest who tarnished my last birthday, 2017. She was mean and I had not guessed it. Now I want rid. “Ahh,” he said, breathing out very understandingly.

    So when he rang to say, “Ich bin da,” I am there, I snatched up the mattress deflated in its box with the sales docket sticky-taped to the side and said to my current, far nicer houseguest, “Omigod. Now I hafta run downstairs in bare foots and my father’s pyjamas, to meet this guy, unless I change.” He was flicking Tinder prospects on his phone and I had been dancing round the living room like a wild thing that is not a thing. Who is not a thing. We had got into a game of what songs do you truly really love only you wish you didn’t, they are embarrassing? I playde him Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, whoever they are, dancing a hole in the floor and The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. “If anyone can, you can,” said my houseguest and friend, and when I came back upstairs at a run laughing with joy he introduced me to Feu! Chatterton, just as earlier we had been listening at his behest to the very weird and cluey New Zealander Aldous Harding.

    My mattress bequeathee held out a handful of coins and notes. I brought you your original price, trotzdem, despite everything, he said, and: Oh! you are in your pyjamas, you must be having a good Saturday night. Fireworks exploded above our heads and he said, shrugging, Maifest: the festival of May. The black Europe night was alight with sound. I described to him what kind of an evening my houseguest friend and I are having. Then we hugged.