Well, this evening I’ve reached the end of my first month in quarantine, 28 days, 4 weeks. It seems peaceful. I love my house a lot more than I did, which was a lot. Happy to have the two of us here and not to be alone, though we are both introverts and have to use the bath tub as our second office so we can spend some time apart and keep well. He wears headphones and sings and it makes me laugh for joy. I feel grounded and sane and interested in life. Have worked my way through a foot-high stack of Seventies romance novels and embarked on some real reading. I don’t know about you but I am trying to prepare for ten months of this so if it turns out to be less, that will come as a glorious surprise. And: we are making rocket fuel. Today my first rocket seeds sprouted in the windowsill and I would just love to have a garden.
I wonder when I’ll ever see the seaside, or my mother, who is eighty-two so that may be just never. Hope everyone is keeping well and if you would like to share your quarantine story, I will listen. Good night.
Tag: comfort
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Ghanaity
Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.
It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.
Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.
So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.
What are you learning?
O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.
You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.
The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?
Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.
Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.
Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!
But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.
Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.
Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.
The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.
We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.
Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.
It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.
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belovedly
Oh, Germany. Sometimes I am just so grateful to you! I came three years ago, for a week, with a suitcase of summer clothes. Stayed on and stayed. Met a man. Made some friends. Found a Kiez, a barrio, a neighbourhood. Now I am back and the dense sweet piercing chill of this supposedly Spring evening has lifted and carried me when I most needed the lifting, I needed the carry.
Here’s what happened to me today. I kept running aground. Couldn’t work out why and there were things I was itching to do. Eventually I figured out: it was because I was in pain. This happens irregularly, more often than you’d like. It’s character building. I rang the osteopath, who is in the next street, and she was available within hours. So I just went to bed to wait. Reading my book. Third book this week, not a bad one. I like this osteo and she treats me, after three or four visits, familiarly, friendshippy: Lass dich mal wieder sehen, she sang out a month ago when I last left. Let yourself be seen, come back again. She reminds me of the Melbourne friend of my mother and I thought of her as motherly, underwinging, kind.
This time seemed to bring earlier events up to a clearer pitch. She wanted me to lie on my back shirtless, was reluctant to hand over a towel. She let her hands dig into my shoulders and then brought her face rather close to mine, breathing deeply in. For long moments we lay and stood like this and naked high in the sky as the blue faded to black I let my mind wash off into its meditative dream: life is deep and long, worlds are a forest, there is nothing I can change here but I bring my attention to bear on this shipwrecked beach, breathing. I surpassed it all with calm. When I got home I felt wrung out and bleakly alone. It is difficult working out how to say in German, you are too near, I want to be covered.
When I say home, I mean my hotel room. Two months ago my honey and I had a fight, it was 4am and we simply couldn’t bear it any more, and since then I have been living in an hotel and we find ourselves gradually so much more comfy and at ease. The reason for our fight was: two of us, plus one medium-sized dog, living in one room for months on end wore us down. We are both loners and creative types, used to the silence. We tried alternating headphones, I tried writing on the floor of the tiny bathroom and in cafes. It was snowing outside and no one could simply go out for a walk and lose themselves in the greenery. What greenery. Anyway I came home to my hotel, which is quiet and sedate and very old-fashioned; they let me stay here for cheap because they like writers. I was hungry; it was midnight; surely everything would be closed. I wrapped myself again and set out across the square. This bar I like was open, glowing with the hum. Serious German conversation at all tables. The one table in the window, where the cat sleeps, empty for me. I ordered onion soup from the menu open “til one hour early”, which means, til one o’clock in the morning. I ordered a beer. I let the stumbling crank and rumble of benign Germanness wash me all round. I watched the bar cat, sleeping in the hammock of herself. Her name is Zappa. Two gentlemen next to me had the chess board out, but it took them a long while to get down to playing. Something they were discussing took up all of their attention the way a paper towel blots milk. I love listening to German men talking over beers with their friends. There’s so little machismo. Their voices are often deep but they are excited by the ideas, by the shared experience, they converse. The cook, who has biker boots and a long skinny plait, came out carrying my onion soup and a basket of four different kinds of bread. I took my book out and just stared at it. The words printed on the pages were stars and I let them carry me, they were carpets, dancing on the orange horizon where one never meets oneself, where everything is wild, where languages are ribbons not unlike long-eared underwater plants writhing in the salt and combing themselves back and back and back, illustrious, clean. I sat there until the detritus of my day had sanded out of my bathers and then the warm oil of it lit me all the way home and I will carry this into my sleep, a moreish story.