Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: charity

  • is still a man

    A homeless man was sleeping in the stairwell when I came home. Or, to put it in the terms which my instinctive body understood, a stranger, appearing unexpectedly, had barricaded my door; his body was coiled and his face hidden; I had to step round him to get in.

    Raised in Australia with its pleasant acres of ground receding from each family’s door to the nearby street, and in Indonesia where we lived in a compound, surrounded by high fences topped with broken glass, I struggle to ignore the constant stampede of human traffic that passes within a few feet of me where I sit at my desk or curl on the couch. That is mostly families who live here, plus the thundering party animals upstairs. Occasionally delivery men, wrong numbers, post. This was new: the street door downstairs stood propped open, because dusty workmen were clambering in and out all day long with their lengths of wood; a man had slipped in, with all his belongings in two filthy rucksacks, and curled on our stair.

    It was hard for me to be compassionate. My first instinct was fear. I felt afraid of him because I couldn’t see his face. I unlocked my own door as quickly as I could and tried to shut it soundlessly behind me. Then I tried to think what to do. There was only one thing to do and that was, make him a cup of tea. It is so cold. A man without a roof is still a man. I boiled some water and hesitated in front of the stock pot of chai masala I brew every few days on my stove. Perhaps it would be too weird, too spicy for him. Germans don’t like tea; if you order it in a cafe you will get a tall glass of hot water with a tiny plate on top, a tea bag resting on it. I didn’t like to offer him coffee as he was clearly about to try to sleep.

    I made the cup of tea in a clean honey jar, not liking to risk one of my landlord’s mugs. It was hot and I had to cut a strip off my old pyjamas, washed and stashed under the sink, to wrap round the glass with a rubber band so he could hold it. I added milk and honey. Then I went cautiously out onto the landing.

    He was still there. I came towards him, keeping at arm’s length, fearful of alcoholic rage, resentment, violence. “Entschuldigung.” He turned away, gathering the hood of his jacket more closely around him. “Ich habe Ihnen eine Tasse Tee gemacht. Es ist Milch und Honig da drin, und Kardamom. Für die Wärme.”

    When I get nervous my German deteriorates. What I tried to say was, Excuse me. I have made you a cup of tea. There is milk and honey in it, and cardamom – for the warmth.

    He sat up. Pushed back his hood. I knew him – a man who often begs in the cafe where I write. This was not reassuring as he carries with him a sort of leashed impatience or suffering which made me yearn to be not recognised by him, lest he learn where I live. “Was ist drin?” he asked. So I repeated, Milk and honey. For the warmth. “Just leave this standing here when you are done.”

    “Danke schön,” he said, taking the warm jar in its undignified skirt.

    “Bitte schön.” I ran away. Locked myself into my house and roamed for an hour from one room to another, unable to concentrate. Why have I three rooms and he has none? Why have I not listed my living room as a shelter for some person recently arrived from devastated Aleppo? I picked up a book on mindfulness and laid it down again. There are days when I cannot even leave my house, when the thought of facing anybody undoes my heart. This is a luxury.

    I sat on my bed with my head in my hands. It seems to me life is filled with suffering. It seems to me every one of us, before we went down this path that has brought us into our limited, anguished adulthood, was somebody’s baby, somebody’s child, and brimming with almost infinite potential and easy to love. I think we get harder to love as we get older, as every classist, racist anti-abortion campaigner so elegantly demonstrates. I went out an hour later to my chores and it felt so sweet and reassuring to find the skirted jar resting on the common window ledge, which looks out from the ‘stair house’ as Germans call their stairwells into the bleak winter courtyard behind; the man was gone and as I drew closer I could see he had drunk about half the tea, much good may it do him in his hunted, hounded, and unwelcomed bitter day.

  • he who comes for us all

    Walking under the devastated trees the afternoon after a huge storm, their fresh scattered blossoms and leaves all over the pavement and all over the road as though some glorious festival has been by, I passed an elderly man walking with a stick, painfully it seemed, his upper body listing forward. As we drew near each other I wondered how bitter it might feel to be passed, without effort, by a member of what he perhaps thinks of as the fairer or even the weaker sex. He turned his turtle head and I said, Hi. On the instant a warm gleaming coal awoke deep in his eye, he had beautiful, unusually large, well-spaced brown eyes, and as I passed him I noticed his posture had changed. He was walking almost upright and seemed struck by pride in himself, joy in life, something of that sort I could see it in his gait. I thought: it’s crushing the way we treat our own elders. I thought: The meaning of life is love, what else can it be. I don’t understand why people keep asking. And as I flung the gorgeously aged garden tools someone had left in a pile of trash beside the road into the back of my ute, disturbing the spider who lives there on her quivering and much-travelled web, and slung myself behind the steering wheel and roared off I was crying out in my heart: I say this every day of my life, I will keep saying it til I die: we need to be kinder to one another.

  • so much spoilt

    It’s very nice to “take time every day to think through your day and see if there’s anything you can be genuinely grateful for”. But such advice also makes me a little sick. Why don’t our social-media lists of “today I am grateful for…” start with breathable air (thank you, Shanghai), clean running water (thank you, Sahara), and supermarkets overflowing with foodstuffs? How numb do you have to be before it requires a deliberate hunt through your day to see “if there’s anything” you can be glad of? If there’s anything? Anything? How slowly and creakingly does this process have to run before it will effect an actual change in our over-consuming, greedy, wasteful, polluting and entitled habits? We are wrecking our globe. Very fast. Not just for us but also for the people who have no clean running water and for the children of the children who work in toxic factories making our iPhones. There is no point blaming ourselves for the lassitude and ennui, the misery of depression and anxiety that too much meaningless abundance and a dearth of social connection and life’s meaning inevitably creates. I get that reminding ourselves to be grateful is a huge improvement on whinging and complaining, like the woman on the home renovations TV show who wailed when her house was passed in at auction This Is the Worst Thing That’s Ever Happened In My Entire Life!!! But I want us to change faster and wake up more thoroughly. And glib phrasings like this one on Upworthy “Add #365Grateful to your Instagram photos and instantly be part of the gratitude movement!” make me feel ashamed. How bleak would that sentence feel to a hungry person, a person without land or a roof, someone who’s living out their adulthood in an endless refugee camp that stretches in tents as far as the sandy horizon. How they must wish that people who have enough disposable income to give each other cards and presents on so many occasions annually that two weeks from Christmas we are already complaining about Valentines and Easter merchandise in the shops ~ ~ ~ would be more than grateful.

  • beware of the god

    I passed a Turkish döner shop where they carve shreds of meat from a large, limb-shaped conglomeration that’s turning very slowly dripping grease into the grill. In front of the low window sat a patient Alsatian. His nose was lifted towards the man sunning himself on his elbows, dreamily staring along the street while the meat crisped up behind him. I said, indicating the dog, “Er hat Hoffnung.” “Is he yours?” the man said. “Oh no, he’s not mine, but I think he has hopes.” He was already dipping his curled fingers into the tray of meat shards, peeling off a long strip and lifting it over the sill. He threw the meat and the dog caught it. Gulp. Gone. I said, “Wow, aren’t you nice.” As I got back on my bike the man was delving back into the gleaming pile of flesh and the dog was gazing at him as at a temple statue that has moved and revealed itself a god.

  • a jeans under it

    a jeans under it

    An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.

    Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.

    Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.

    They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.

    But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.

    H2O HoL opshop manekin