Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Berlin

feeding the swains

Yesterday I saw two people having a very cute picnic in a park. They were sitting side by side on one of the benches facing in to the path and had a card table set up with checkered blue and white tablecloth, two glasses, an open bottle, bowls of nibblies, real napkins… the whole nine yards. Which is about how many Brisbane backyards would have fit in this skimpy narrow green strip that provided space for a few lovely trees to grow between the six-storey apartment houses. The picnickers were in their fifties and looked to have dressed for the occasion, she had on make up and sparkly earrings and he had on his good jeans. They looked so happy. They saluted me with raised glasses when I smiled at them. Ten minutes earlier I’d passed a man feeding a swan, by the river, he sat cross-legged on a large tree stump with his own glass of wine, paper parcel of food, and the swan bent its elegant neck to fetch things from his hand. First sunny day in a while and the greensward was littered with revellers – revellers and their bicycles – room enough to sit but not to lie down. Plenty of swans foraging the riverbank in hopes of crumbs and morsels. My German-speaking friend calls them ‘swains.’

June 5, 2013
for beer and weed

Two li’l punks on the footbridge to the Warschauerstrasse station, lounging with legs crossed and outstretched, dog lying between them, begging bowl out and a large sign propped on her legs which says in English: FOR BEER AND WEED. He obviously adores her. They have matching frothy haircuts, blonded and shaved up the sides.

June 5, 2013
everywhere at work

Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of a bitter, long winter. In the front corner of the yard are two spindly chairs, their feet looped about by overnight chains, standing perkily either side of a carved concrete round-topped table. A big quiet tree separates this lovers’ corner from the rest of the empty restaurant. We sit on the two chairs and watch quietly as the night evolves imperceptibly round us. This couple are walking their dog. A car is passing in a haze of invisible rain drops. This large tree on which I rest my hand is growing, sap rising, leaves unfurling and sprouting from the trunk in several places. Life is everywhere at work and leaves its carcases and traces.

June 5, 2013
a bush tissue

Almost a year ago I left Brisbane, on three days’ notice, to come to Berlin. I had looked up the weather map and packed a small suitcase and figured I would stay about a week. A very dear friend was in town and we wanted to meet up before he set off on his bicycling tour across Europe.

That came and went and the strange, metallic, leafy feeling of being back in Europe set upon me like moss. I decided to stay on and see what became of me. I met a gorgeous guy with a beautiful heart. Some weeks later the intrepidity or foolishness of what I had done came over me one afternoon in a storm of tears, and I just started crying and couldn’t stop.

We were sitting on a bench not far from here, under the trees, overlooking the murky canal. Swans then and now. My companion was alarmed by all this emotion but he was super-generous and sweet. It waxed into a burbling froth of mucus and salt water and he offered wouldn’t I like to blow my nose between his pinched fingers. Well, no: certainly not. I covered my face with one hand and kept crying, as quietly as I could. Sometimes it takes a man some time to notice that I laugh as easily as I cry and I guess this was one of the things on my mind as I sat there and people walked past smoking pot. Several benches down an Italian guy was playing guitar and crooning, three girls with long hair sat around him like groupies from the Sixties. One was perched on the back of the bench like a sweet bird. I looked up and there was my friend with a little wad of leaves in his hand. He had picked for me the softest, greenest, most tissue-like leaves, heart-shaped from a tree I don’t know, and had stacked them from biggest to smallest so I could mop myself up in stages. I remember the softness of the leaves on my skin and I wish now that I could remember the song that Italian bench star was playing.

May 28, 2013
Tom Waits for no man

I somehow forgot Berlin’s imaginative beggars. This guy held open the door to the autotellers in the foyer of the bank, with a grand flourish, saying, “Welcome!” He was as confident as though he owned it. And he did! He was wearing a greasy navy-blue pinstripe suit like a boxer and had his hair slicked back. On the way out I gave him some coins and he snipped them up in the hand that was free from cigarette-rolling, clasped them to his breast, “Danke!”, kept rolling, grinning at me salty and devilish as Tom Waits. The joy of life is a great thing to share, if you’re a beggar or busker, if somehow you can manage it. Irresistible!

May 28, 2013
punk snot green

Punker dog in Berlin, his hair matted and scrufflish, his gait insouciant. He has a green streak in his fur, top of the head between the ears, that matches the green quiff on his master. The thought of this dude dyeing his own hair like an old lady in a salon and then tenderly saying, Ok now we do yours, has undone me.

May 28, 2013
dochdach, dochdach

Back in Berlin for a few days: what a strange feeling. Now there is no snow on the ground and the trees have appeared from nowhere, they are green, green, green. We ate at a Turkish grillhouse where you sit around a glass-cased cooktop fired with coals, onto which four brawny and frankly handsome men in white shirts loaded blade after blade of minced meat, chicken wings, lamb ribs, skewer after skewer of whole, red tomatoes and prongs of scarlet peppers like jewels. They scoop the heat together in a bottomless tin of blackened aluminium. Everything stinks of cookstove fuel. We drank several copper tumblers apiece of ayran, the salty fresh yoghurt drink, eyeing the mirrored cabinet of meats: a tray of kidneys, maroon and flecked with gristly white, a tray of ribs ready to be sliced and grilled, a tray of chops, a tray of wings. Afterwards a long, long bicycle ride through the city forest which leads in from a smurfish village of cutesy summer houses with adorable, tiny gardens. The sign at the side gate says “Freiheit” but the “Freiheit” gate is locked. Everything as pretty as a thousand words and worth a picture. A young waiter smoking on the gingerbread verandah of his Black Forest-styled Gasthaus told us, using the informal “you”, “you can’t get out that way.”

Drank a beer, one of those long German beers, on board a boat on the river which has a wooden cabin built on it, housing the kitchen and bar. There is grass growing on the roof. Grass, and little purple flowers. I stood in front of it blocking the way with my bike saying over and over and over, “It has grass! On the roof!” I had never seen that before: grass! on the roof! I am tired from travelling and the temperature has dropped ten degrees. When Berlin’s petticoat woods tilted up to meet the plane I felt a rush of unaccustomed homesickness: Australia, be less far away. Australia, be less vast. I miss you though I had almost forgotten, persuaded myself I had forgotten. This big city is not my city and that river is not my river. Doch.

May 26, 2013
a thousand species of money, each bigger-eyed than the last

I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? I never correct my friend because every time I hear “this cost me almost fifty bugs” it makes me so happy.

April 20, 2013
allure

Went out early, the sun through my window a lure. My favourite chic but drowsy wine bar cafe was playing Billie Holiday. Unusually it was filled up today with dishevelled, sleep-drowned people. A shovel-load. I was one of them. We sat in a row sipping & pecking at our breakfasts like a mess of half-fledged birds.

March 26, 2013
with my bare hand

Interesting coincidence between the accidents of physics and the compulsions of human nature: so often when a glove falls, in the street, like a leaf it will lie palm-side-up, as though its fortune is about to be told. That way when you walk past these lost lonely single gloves they are usually in postures of imploring, or appeal. It occurred to me retrieving my own glove outside my door that a nice filmclip could be made by stooping and dropping a coin or small offering – even a leaf, perhaps, as Balinese do – in the palm of each glove, randomly about the city.

March 19, 2013