A confluence of kindness in the Sunday cafe this morning. People were slouched about, eating their brunch. A series of wan songwriters entertained us from the speakers. When we first walked in a classical guitarist had just done playing, and when he walked around the tables with his cupped hand outstretched, everybody gave. Then a commotion at the doorway. A very very drunk lady sloshed her way in. She shouldered her way between two quite closely placed tables and sat down. Oof. Began talking to the woman on her right, who clearly didn’t know her. It was a long bench seat along the wall so now all three women, ladies who brunch with a lady who lurches tucked between, were sat shoulder to shoulder like pigeons under the framed oil paintings of Karl Marx. The place is called Cafe Marx, been there for years apparently. The drunken one pulled off her filthy beanie, revealing sparse tufts of grease-darkened hair. She was loud. And she looked smelly. The woman she’d spoken to rose to the occasion like the Queen. “I know,” I could hear her saying agreeably, “it’s freezing outside.” The drunk one said something inaudible, affable. “Ja,” said her invaded neighbour, “gemütlich.” Gemütlich is a word like the Danish word hyggelig: cosy, it means; warm, comfortable, comforting. The kind of word you invent when you live in a climate where a person consistently turned away from every door can die just by sleeping in the park overnight. The waiter came over to reason with her. Her voice rose, she waved her beanie at him. At first he said, Can you go, please, and You will have to leave, and Do you want me to call the Police? “I am the Police,” she said grandly, settling her beanie back over her ears. But the women either side of her and their companions were wonderful. Unworried. Well, worried but cool. They started suggesting to her, Perhaps you’d be more comfortable in the corner there, that looks so cosy, wouldn’t you like to have a table to yourself? Why shouldn’t you have your own table? “Yeah,” she said, in tones of worn aggrief, “yeah, why indeed.” And as she staggered to her feet and lurched towards another table (ours) the waiter once again stepped in, more respectfully, more kindly this time. His customers had taught him that – or rather, reminded him, as we do for one another. Gently he took her arm. “Could I ask you to sit outside?” he said, in such courteous tones that she was able to pretend she had been given a choice, to deliberate a moment and then decide, “Also dann.” Ok then. He escorted her to the door, more like a nephew than a bouncer suddenly. The people on the bench seat shifted and laughed quietly, restive with relief. You know how belligerent you get when you feel like your humanness has been ignored. She was aggro. But lost. In the wind outside she sat down with some difficulty. I went over to the counter and spoke to the waiter in a low tone. “Das haben Sie so schoen gemacht,” I said, “so freundlich.” You did that so beautifully: so friendly. “Aw,” he said, looking down. He was putting something on a plate behind the high counter. I said, I would love to buy a coffee for that lady, if… you don’t mind providing one for her. (Thinking of the risk to his china). But by the time he brought the coffee, hot and rich with crema in a takeaway cup, she had gone. The overturned table and smashed ashtray on the ground were all she’d left behind. I walked up and down the square for a while looking for her but she had moved on. And would continue to be moved on, I imagine, all the rest of the winter. And would perhaps be picked up by the Winter Bus that goes around collecting people who have fallen asleep in the snow. And whose fire in the belly, lit and swollen from the magic bottle, might not be enough to keep them alive til morning, in the dark cold lonely treesung night.
Tag: compassion
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replanting
“Aw!” ‘What?’ “Aw just… somebody’s torn this little plant out, and now it’s gunna die.” I could hear my surprised, injured tone of voice, high like a disappointed child. My friend stopped and I had already squatted in front of the dismal garden bed built round the trunk of a tree, in which someone had planted four or five tiny evergreens and a wilting marigold. It was two degrees this morning; I had on leather gloves. Ideal for scraping out a hole in the soil. Took up the tiny shrub, lying on its side in what seemed to me a foetal position, and stowed it in it new hole, tucking soil around its roots and talking to it as I pressed the dirt into place. “There you go, that’s better…” I stood up, brushing my gloves against one another, and turned back to my friend and our conversation. A woman on a bicycle had stopped to watch. She gave me this head-tilting, compassionate look with two very very slow blinks of her eyes, acknowledgment.
At home on my kitchen windowsill I have a shred of pelargonium stolen from someone else’s window box, a present for a friend who cannot keep sprigs of basil from the supermarket alive yet dreams of being a gardener. He only has a tiny, bricked-in, West-facing balcony that looks dismally over a supermarket car park. I’ve shown him photos of how, in an Australian climate at least, you can grow a lot of food in such a space. When I saw this still-flowering window box with not just red and pink but also the darker, sultrier, more sophisticated velvetty maroon flowers, I filched a bit, peeled from the undermost hem of the plant where the person caring for it would lose least enjoyment. A few paces further on I found an empty plastic cup. Scooped up a cupful of leaves for the bottom layer and then a handful of rich dark friable soil. Stowed the incipient plantmonster in there and will nurture it until it has begun to send out some roots, hopefully before I leave Berlin, so then it can be passed on to its new owner with hopefully some chance of surviving the grey winter.
As a child in the tropics I used to worry about the trees, who seemed to me buried to the neck in hot, foetid soil, unable to move, >trapped!!< It took me years to work out that this kind of simple projection is not really compassion, does not help anyone. Years, and some lambasting from a Tibetan Buddhist nun who yelled, “You have too much compassion & no wisdom! No wisdom!” In any case one imagines suffocating heat is less of a problem for a German tree.
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hitting the child
Today on the markets I saw a man hit his child. He and his wife were standing among the racks of a bright clothing stall, I did not see what the boy had done but I noticed a woman sitting at her sock & beanie stall knitting had stilled her two needles and taken up watch. He said to his son, We are sick of you today. You must stop this. Look: people are staring. The child looked unhappy. He was maybe 7 or 8. Maybe he had done something monstrous, we were bystanders. I exchanged glances with the sock lady and her mouth tightened. Walking towards the little family I saw that the boy had flung himself on his father, wrapping his body around the man’s leg, his arms tightly clasped round the thigh and his face buried in the fabric of his father’s jeans. The father was speaking to his wife about clothes. I went up close to him. I dropped my hand quietly on his shoulder. “Let him say sorry,” I coaxed.
“Eh?” He looked up. I repeated, “He wants to say sorry. Let him say sorry.” My hand came up to cup the back of the boy’s small, silky head. “Yeah, yeah,” said the father, dismissively, “we will.” But his own hand crept up into the boy’s hair. Because I think, whether we are parent and child or two adults, by instinct we follow each other’s example. Later I wondered how had I got away with it. Why had the father not slapped me, as well. I think because I had no sense of righteousness, I didn’t feel entitled, I felt irresistibly moved. I felt back to my voice, my tone, and felt its gentleness. I felt the way my eyes were burning with love in my head. You know how you can feel them in their sockets, fires in the skull, your soul on fire inside them, like a pair of windows opening out instead of in.
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just married
Last night I had occasion to take a taxi and struck the cab driver from hell. Well, hell is an understatement: he was from purgatory. Drove with his hands in the air as he banged on to me about greenies and their so-called eco crisis, a plot to make money.
I couldn’t help it, I laughed in his face. “Gee, sorry. I think if I was out for a quick buck I’d be in oil wells, not solar panels.” “And what about palm oil?” he ranted. “All it’s doing is making money for the Indonesians.”
You can always tell, when someone lumps a group of people together and prefixes with “the”, there is hatred involved. Or at the very least, disrespect. “Palm oil’s not green,” I said. We charged down the streets. I changed the subject three times. “Isn’t it a wonderful night?” (It was.) “Have you been working long this evening?”
All ruses led back to Rome, and the Fall. He was breathing heavily with rage. Meantime an iridescent something had appeared in the road in front of us, it seemed to be some kind of fine streamer whickering in the air – “Did they just get married, you think?” I asked, pointing.
The car on the right had the same gleaming trail. “I think maybe they both just drove through an old cassette tape,” said the driver, and he was right. Long loops of glorious analog spurled through the air, dancing with light and with movement, a magic. He started talking about fisheries, how ridiculous it is to have quotas: because who is going to explain to the fish that they must not swim into the net? I wasn’t listening, I was watching the wind. The scarf that bore Isadora Duncan to heaven had unfurled itself from the car in front and whipped round the passenger-side mirror, inches from my hand. I unwound the window to let the night in. So beautiful, so triste. Because no matter how we block each other out – by hating greenies, by not listening to taxi drivers – sooner or later life slings its tendrils like lassos around our hearts and we have to wind the window down and let the night in.
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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.
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the bowled soul
Today I had to face some things inevitable but leaving pain. They are not my fault nor anyone’s and there’s nothing I can do about them. But it’s ok. You know how you grapple til you get to grips.
While I was grappling I walked the streets. As I walked I passed a very well-dressed woman talking with an equally well-dressed man. They were speaking in English. As I passed, she said: “and sometimes I feel like I could just lie down? and cry? You know?”
The clipped question marks at the ends of her sentences showed me a desperate soul. How courageous to tell it all to this man who had on a leather jacket and who when she said these words put both of his hands behind his back. I wove round some parked bicycles and came up beside her. “Excuse me. Did I just overhear you say, sometimes you want to lie down – and cry?”
Her eyes were blue and spiky with mascara. To her infinite credit their pupils did not shrink at this accosting by a stranger. “Yes,” she said.
I put my hand on her arm. I have no shame. “I feel that way too… sometimes. May I just say – as a stranger – please – just do it.
“Find someone who can hold you, and really hear you -” (we both inadvertently glanced at the well-dressed man, hovering nearby with a studiously disengaged expression on his face) “- or maybe a counsellor, and just do it. Don’t try to be brave.”
She was wonderful. I just loved her. Her face crumpled into compassion – for me. Women are incredible. “Oh,” she said, “that is so kind of you.” She put her hand on my arm too, as though we were dancing. “Oh thank you.”
As I walked on I felt the tears on my own heart lift and leave. How can this world be bad, that has such beautiful persons on it?
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the moss today
Today all I can think about is the moss that grows on furrowed wood; the sound of traffic, that reaches everywhere; my desire to sleep for a hundred years; the fact that not everybody wants to hurt people.
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I can escape! if you’ll only believe in me
I was standing on the Underground platform just now gazing at a poster for a guy who calls himself the New Houdini. His hair was frosted & his hands outstretched imploringly: I can escape! If you’ll only believe in me! A voice came at my elbow, from a very small, very elderly man: “Might I offer you something to read?” He spoke so humbly I could hardly hear him.
Now, ordinarily this would be an ideal question from a stranger. But the highly-coloured brochure he held out looked so familiar. I laid my hand on his upper arm as gently, as affectionately as I could. “Geht’s um Gott? (Is it about God?)” Yes, he said, nodding soberly. I had the feeling of reaching round in the back of my brain for any extra shards of kindness that might be lying about unclaimed. “You know… I think perhaps I might have read that one before.” He nodded again and turned away, back to his tiny wife who was wearing a soft pink beret, hand-knitted, and was also carrying brochures. With a pang in my heart I watched them conferring, about, perhaps, who they might approach next. He had offered me his treasure, and I loved him for that.
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bunnyhutch
I was in the petshop section of a department store, because pets were next to pens, as if alphabetical, and it is remarkably difficult to find decent, practical biros in Deutschland that are not too fat to hold. Those I brought with me are all written dry. Standing gazing at the rabbits, whose noses whickered as they twitched and munched, I felt someone come up alongside me. This was an employee of the store, a brand-new rabbit clutched in her hands. She stood there regarding them. “So,” she said at last. “Ihre neue Kollegin.” (Your new colleague). “Be courteous to one another.” Then abruptly stooping she stowed the fuzzy bunny, a ginger-coloured flop-eared morsel, in the straw.
Berlin has a higher population of dogs than any other city in Germany: a nerve-wracking place for a bunny rabbit. I watched. The other bunnies snuffled round slowly but no wars over straw started. After a moment the girl turned and went backstage again, to the ranks (I imagined) of yet-unlabelled white mice, Siamese fighting fish, ferrets, maybe camels. Her formality, her use of the polite form of “you”, the girl form of “colleague”, and the word “courtesy” – the use of the word “colleague” altogether, for bunnies – struck me as inexpressibly wise and drily loving.
