Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Berliner

  • don’t stand so far from me

    Och, my heart’s pounding! I just queued in the supermarket next to a man taller than me (rare) with whom I conceived one of those fleeting yet it stains your day – your weekend! – mutual desire curves founded in, apparently, mutual liking as well as pheromonal drift. Oh, I stood next to him and he stood next to me. He came up behind me and I cleared my stuff out of the way, as Berliners often do for one another, so that he could lay his heavy armfuls of groceries on the band. “Danke schön,” he said, in just this irresistible voice, and I glanced up and met the most beautiful eyes and a shock went through me and my face lit up and I said, “Bitte!” A pleasure!

    After that we both crowded up close to one another and he was humming and after a little while started singing so that I would see what a gorgeous voice he had. I was immersed in the glowing feeling running up and down my nearer, left side and in parsing his collection of groceries (single!) and in searching round the vault of my brain for some plausible, yet open-ended, conversational gambit. The woman ahead of me had already greeted the cashier and her goods were being rung up. We hadn’t long.

    I picked up the plastic divider between his stuff and mine, only later realising what a perfect psychological expression of my wishes this really was. “Ich habe gehört,” I remarked, holding it out to offer to him, “daß diese manchmal ,Kassentoblerone’ gennant werden.” Ya know, I’ve heard these are sometimes called Cashier Toblerones.

    “Stimmt!” he said, yeah that’s right! He took the thing from me and lifted it up. Pretended to stuff the end in his mouth and tear off a hearty chunk. We laughed and then there was nothing else to do but grow shy, so we both turned back to the belt and gazed at the groceries. He checked out my stuff and I checked out his. I was buying the ingredients for a carrot and ginger soup and he likes decent cheeses. My side was humming. Oh, I was just so happy and contented to be standing just that little bit too close to him, and to be in each other’s aura. There was nothing more to say, apart from, “When will you be here next, you’re so goddamned cute,” so when my goods were rung up I sang out, “Tschüss!” and he said, “Tschüss!” and I ran laughing out of the supermarket, saying to the giant punk out front who holds out his little army cap for donations of spare change, “Du siehst ja so total schön aus, heute!” You’re looking so beautiful today! It wasn’t just the punk in his Saturday outfit of fishnet stockings and a zebra print mini, it was the light, the few trees left in the corner of the car park, the little boy zooming on his scooter with a great determination, the dad who stood and watched with his arms grimly folded – I ran home and said to my companion, who was sitting up in bed holding his stomach and had requested, when I said what might make you feel better, carrot soup, “I just met this man in the supermarket and we liked each other so much! Oh, it was such a joy just standing next to each other.”

    Ordinarily these kinds of stories are just part of the ongoing conversation between us but today, stricken with stomach flu and hungry for his first solid meal in three days, the poor guy went, “Don’t, I’m gunna vomit!” He was clutching his stomach. I has pushed open the window and was peering out in case the cute guy and his cheeses might have decided to walk home down our end of the street, in case I might see him. Bye, love.

  • 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.

  • better to have loved and won

    The guy I adore has conversations with birds. These appear to be actual reciprocal chats, where the bird says something and he answers. After he has mimicked what the bird has to say, the bird often answers again. Again he responds, using a sound palette of his own devising: whistles, chirrups and chirps, clucks of the tongue, and little spoken fragments that remake in our alphabet what the bird’s liquidity of throat has offered out into the air. He has a dozen ways of answering and the bird has endless spurls of its own devil-may-care. To me the birds as I hear them relating to him out on our verandah of a morning often sound rather curious and questioning. They sound like they like being answered, albeit clunkily, in translation.

    This is mostly magpies and butcher birds, sometimes a noisy mynah: though he is more wary of them after they chased onto the four-lane road a nestling we found, on Australia Day when we had been in the country only five weeks. He scooped up the fledgling in his long hands and carried it down to Kurilpa Hall, where John Pilger’s excoriating film was being shown.

    Australia Day, Invasion Day. Utopia, Utopia.

    He was so worried about his baby bird that he couldn’t concentrate on the film we’d come to see. I was mortified. What could be more important than the showing in this community of this film, why should two white people with their tiny adopted bird get to disrupt the long-awaited screening. I sent him outside with his orphan and sat alone through the shaming, ennobling, uplifting film. It was crowded, it was hot. I wasn’t the only one crying. Afterwards we all filed out in silence and I found the two of them sitting outside in a folding chair under a tarp, surrounded by elders who were sipping their cups of tea and offering advice. My long-legged monster had taken off his beanie and had filled it with tufts of grass for a little nest, and the bird was perched on his lap and he had worked out a way to feed it droplets of water by dipping a long grass stem into a paper cup. “I’m going to call him Harry,” he said.

    We walked home after the barbecue, after dark, it was a long walk which took us nearly two hours of hill-climbing. The little bird rode on his outstretched finger and, unbelievably, snuggled down into its own self and grew drowsy. To see this Berliner, new to Australia, carrying home a tiny fig bird on his finger and to see the bird trust him enough to fall asleep and ride asleep, this wild creature, this orphaned unnested one, was incredible to me. I said, I think he seems more like a Clarence. I think you’re right, he said, lifting the bird very gently to peer at him as we turned down to walk home along the river.

    He spent the next weeks reading up about fig birds and their habits and habitats, mixing up revolting pulps and stews which Clarence wolfed down avidly, talking to him in whistles and purrs, evading the cat. Whenever the bird really liked something he would trill his little scaly wings by instinct, as though keeping himself hovering in the air in front of a favourite fruit or flower. His eyes were big and round and his neck was moulted of its baby fluff and bare of feathers. He was the funniest little guy you could imagine. The two of them sat at the computer for hours, working, and Clarence rode about the house on his friend’s shoulder. After a while there were flying lessons in the leafy backyard, a long arm held up high and swooping suddenly downwards to give Clarence the idea that he could take off, he could fly. Unmistakeably they were two best buds. We hid our smiles. They were inseparable.

    Heartache came when we called the wildlife rescue people and were told you’re not, ahem, allowed to keep a wild bird in your home. My soft-hearted Berliner shed tears. He had arrived from so many miles away, from the snow, and made himself a root to fasten down into the soil by falling helplessly in love with this little halfclad chirping cute and ugly barely airborne birdie. On the day the two of them were due to meet the wildlife carer and try to put Clarence back in the same tree he had fallen from – “They’re unusual,” she said, “they’ll actually take them back” – a pall hung over the house. And even now, 10 months on, sometimes a fig bird comes to visit our mango tree and sings its song and this Berliner always cranes his neck: “Maybe it’s Clarence!”

  • never the swain

    Two swains drifting like white roses on the dark canal. My Berliner swain calls them swains and I never correct him. Similarly I refrained for reasons of selfish enjoyment from pointing out to an earlier, South Australian swain, who though a native speaker was heartily dyslexic (he called our chimney ‘the chumley’), that the swans’ babies are commonly called ‘cygnets’. ‘Look Oel. A mummy and a daddy swan. And all the little swanlings.’

  • blood of the camellia

    blood of the camellia

    Proud of a conversation I had, in German, with the guy in the corner shop just now. He met me just inside the door, and rolled his eyes vehemently. “I was just about to close!” With a sigh he swung his swag of chains – yes, chains, that’s how you shut up a shop in Berlin – over the back of a chair and came round the counter to serve me. I stayed courteous and curious and soon he was telling me about his day. The Ordnungsamt, sort of a local city police, came in and made him change his display. He can sell ice cream by the cone tomorrow, and beef jerky and foiled sausages, but no beer and no ice creams already packaged. “No ice?” I said, misunderstanding the word. “Only if it’s not already wrapped,” he said gloomily. “But, ah – because of… God?” I wondered (Gotteswegens?) Yes, he said. He started showing me one by one the items on his crowded counter that would have to be stowed away at the end of every week so as not to offend the Lord. I said, You know, whoever God may be… don’t you wonder… whether maybe this is not quite what he meant? “Ihr koennt das kaufen, und das und das, aber nicht das.” Yes, he said, I’m not convinced that God minds what I sell, either.

    I used to sing in a tiny madrigal ensemble which performed in an old cathedral and we would have to sit through the services as they droned on in what, to me, might as well have been Latin. Choristers brought puzzle books and read poetry. Every Sunday after the service everyone would be invited to partake of the blood of the camellia bush and the bread of the fields, sponge cake and tea bags served with plastic plates and (mega groan) polystyrene disposable cups. I was almost thrown out of the choir for suggesting that if there is a God, and if you believe God has made this whole earth for our dominion and we are somehow or other in charge…. wouldn’t God want you to wash up your cups and use them again? Isn’t God, by God’s very nature, fundamentally opposed to polystyrene? I mentioned this to the choir at large and to the choir master and also, a couple of times, to the minister and his wife. Oh, they said vaguely, the washing up…. Later the choir master visited me at home, to tell me two of the sopranos had made a deputation to request I be thrown out, as a troublemaker. Aren’t the manufacturers and purchasers of polystyrene the real troublemakers? I feel like Charlton Heston brooding over his precious gun, or Scarlett O’Hara clutching her handful of carrots. This is my land, it’s our land, so help me I’ll never give up. Because ‘not til the last tree is felled and the last river dried up’ will we realize, it seems, that you cannot eat God.

    H2O HoL nuts

  • for quitters

    for quitters

    I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the rainy window like tears, I experienced coffee grievings. Coffee, you sweet sorrow, you sultry wench.

    H2O HoL victoria st red bar

  • 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.

    H2O HoL grey graffiti muse

  • a thousand species of money, each bigger-eyed than the last

    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.

    H2O HoL winterbound apfelherz