I know an eighty-year-old cafe where the day passes smooth and coiling as molasses poured out of a dented tin. I sit in the smokers’ room, not because I smoke but because of the candlelight and conversation. Today I stopped at an antiquarian bookshop that has trestle tables out front. A recent conversation reminded me I had never yet read Machiavelli’s The Prince. The bookseller had two copies, an Everyman and a Penguin; two different translators; a quick skim decided me I would buy both, and I carried them to my favourite table and curled up there, thinking if I read these two versions both at once, maybe I’ll be able to triangulate.
I read very slowly, laying each book face down at the end of a chapter and taking up its companion. Three tall, lanky, and very good-looking men came through in waterproof jackets, carrying boxes and boxes of lettuce and potatoes. Afterwards they sat down at a small table under the pastel portrait of Fidel Castro (cigar) and drank coffee and argued for over an hour. I tried something new off the menu: it’s German food, everything is new. Fidel Castro’s fingers resembled an abstract of a human hand carved from potato. Everything carved from potato. After the War Berliners relied on an American Rosinenbomber (the “raisin bomber”) dropping boxes of foodstuffs and dug up the forest called Tiergarten in order to sow vegetables. I thought of the various cafes I know in Brisbane and wondered how it will feel to adjust. The temperature has plummeted, and isn’t that a most marvellous word: like a fruit yet unripened on the branch, that finally gives in and plunges to the ground. Last night returning from a long forest hike it was perishing, four degrees. I ate my Weisswurst and Brezel and thought about the differences between reading in a cafe full of other people reading, and the dinner experience of last night, in an unreconstituted jazz and blues pub, where the cute barkeep turned down his infestation of immemorial blues and turned on a large white roped-up screen. Oh, God: Tatort. The awful detective show Germans watch as Sunday religion. Somehow the roomful of unstirring people watching a fourteen-year-old girl’s character get raped – the oldest man put his head into his hand, others watched unmoved – was so blinding and so effing awful, we got up and left. That household full of habitual viewers sharing the dirty hot tub of popular TV had somehow less in common than the people crouched in corners at my newly beloved red checked clothed cafe: reading newspapers or, in three cases, books, we were each of us turned away from our commonality but yet reminded me of swimmers foraging deep in the saltiest water, where the sunshine is sweet, where the strands of warmer and colder waters pass over one’s legs caressingly and there is always something further to be discovered. In only the one ocean, in always the one sea.
