In the late afternoon I walked down to the square. I’ve been indoors now every day of eight weeks. People were sitting round the edge of the grass as though it were a swimming pool they were dangling their legs into. The trees overhead are finally thickening with green.
A man who doesn’t have much had his tiny barrel-shaped speaker out and was blaring the blues. A bystander, so drunk he had lost his consonants, pitched forward and then arced backwards from the hips, hollering the blues. We have all been indoors since winter finally ended. We know the urge to holler. We know the blues.
Here the blues come marching back again, pouring from the settled sky, finally at rest and displaying all its sunny virtuosity which is kept from us in this dark city eight months of the year by thickset cloud.
The sky — the gorgeous preposterously cloudlit heaven of the springday sky. I sit down among the crumpled cherry blossoms, almost grey now in the grass. The sixth floor balcony where two weeks back a man had serenaded us with his saxophone is empty and the windows all dark. I sit watching two stout men drinking their beers, asking myself how is it I would know anywhere in the world they are Germans. Someone across the square sets up a rival speaker blurring AC/DC. Highway to Hell! screams the drunken singer, able to enjoy everything at once. A Turkish man who cannot afford to quarantine is collecting beer bottles, asking everyone first, may I have this. His face has patience and great sweetness. He stows each new bottle in his clanking bag. The pizza shop is open again but only for takeaway, ‘every one of our pizzas is nearly round’, their blackboard boasts. Last year at the end of the summer they had a drinks special chalked there: Soup of the Day — Gin Tonic. A man in a black Volkswagen sleek as a Beemer edges right in to the kerb and leaps out. He is prematurely casual in pink linens with a knotted sweater, it’s not really all that warm but he seems insouciant, he plugs in his car, a rental car, an electric car, and locks the keys inside the glovebox and goes strolling perfectly pinkly away. Like all of us, he is in rehearsal for summer, which is the future: summer 2021 perhaps, we’ll be able to travel, we’ll all be lightly and attractively attired, we will be slim and competent in public places, we’ll be free.
Tag: corona
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best friend’s unacknowledged son
My mother’s best friend is sick with coronavirus. She also suffers from dementia, so she likely won’t know about it or be able to understand what is happening to her – she’s just going to endure a terminal period of painful breathing, agony and frustration, medical isolation: a bodily grief.
Like many people, this woman has suffered enough. I’ve known her since I was seven, we all lived together in the luminous Seventies expatriate community of three- to five-year residents from foreign countries in Jakarta. We used to holiday together, cheaply in a row of bamboo cottages along the coast; I babysat her daughters. In 2016 I was home from Germany to care for Dad before the cancer ate him; as the only Labour and Green voters in the extended family the two of us hopped gleefully in her tiny, scuffed green car and hared off to the polling booth set up under huge spreading fig trees at a local primary school. We voted and felt good about ourselves. She hailed her former comrades handing out how to vote righteously leaflets. Then in the car her manner changed, she grew confused and started pulling out wadded clots of tissues from her bottomless bag. She was unable to explain what she wanted, only saying over and over, I know it’s here somewhere. I began to fear for her ability to drive. She was like a stage magician emptying out his pockets of their meaningless props, unable to produce the rabbit blinking with real life and twitching its nose.
As I digest this difficult news my timeline is clogged with people celebrating Boris Johnson’s identical diagnosis. He too may die in agony. “Karma!” people crow. They sound uncannily undissimilar to Johnson and his cronies, or Trump and his ilk, gnashing their hands in satisfaction when a raped women gets what’s coming to her, or a sexually active teenager falls pregnant, or an entire population of Jewish Germans are rounded up and eliminated because they are less human than Us.
This tyrannical Us. How it bonds us to our best humanity. How it can render us judgemental and pious, mean and censorious, dangerous, cruel. I want to know why people feel justified in celebrating the suffering of a man they despise because he seems, from his comfortable position of Etonian lifelong power, to celebrate others’ sufferings. Of course we are enraged by his deeds. We needn’t spend our time pining for him. All hail our sanity and survival and our ability to detach from those who have done us harm. But let’s not celebrate his – or anyone’s – suffering and painful death. Let’s not become more like what we loathe.
It’s my experience that sociopathic acts get easier for insensitive people the more they get practiced in ignoring cries of pain from their victims. Ordinary Englishwomen and Englishmen don’t have the power over Boris Johnson that he has over their lives. On the other hand, ‘involuntarily celibate’ incels who murder crowds of women invariably feel disempowered and victimised, not powerful. However delusional this feeling on the part of a man wielding an AK-47 or setting a carload of his children on fire, it is still dangerous.
Celebrating the release from bondage which Thatcher’s death brought her populace is very different from being savagely glad she herself is dead. How many rapists and murderers of women are spitefully glad the bitch got what she deserved? I will not allow my heart to become dehumanised, that is, less compassionate, by celebrating the suffering of anyone I abhor. By seeing our commonality I honour and celebrate my very real capacity to distinguish myself from such people.
How do rapists rape women? By dehumanising. How does Boris cut funding to the NHS? By dehumanizing sick people in need. And if you feel offended by the implication that you yourself are in any way comparable to this ‘subhuman piece of trash’ whose diagnosis has so filled you with glee… you are forgetting what he has forgotten. We all have the same capacities for good and for bad. It’s how we choose to use them.
That is, we are each of us *fully and utterly human.* I will never bend on this point, which is exactly what Johnson and his ilk have lost. My mother’s dear friend gave birth in the early 60s and was instantly separated from her child. Shein her seventies courageously chose to announce to her friendship circles that she was a mother to this lost son, and tracked him down, and loved him. Boris Johnson has been directly responsible for the deaths of thousands. If you feel able to separate ‘good’ persons, such as my mother’s friend, who don’t ‘deserve’ suffering, from ‘bad’ persons like Johnson who do, you are treading a most dangerous path. I hope I’ll never go down that road. I hope I will choose to use my humanity, today and forever, whatever the provocation, in the opposite way to how Boris Johnson uses his. -
cherry tree, wait for me
Today I would give anything to run outside into this suddenly warm sunshine. I woke to birdsong and discovered I had left my window open all night. This is the first night since October that’s even been possible. I don’t feel the icy breezes snaking round my feet in the chilly living room, I can’t hear the ticking of the heaters. When I stood in front of the glass and gazed out I could feel the sun’s mighty warmth on my face. My eyes sting with tears thinking about it. It’s reached us.
This winter staining gradually into pink blue yellow spring is now extended indefinitely, perhaps eighteen months, perhaps twelve, perhaps three, as if by a bad council order. Such a long winter under such low grey sunless skies.I miss cafes, I miss walking past people and feeling the foreign-communal energy of their own brisk, or vague preoccupations. The feeling of their thoughts and breathing fringing and wrinkling my air. I just miss them being there. I miss the little coughs and the unconscious throat clearings and sighs and the faint breeze as my neighbour in some plinking humming bistro turns a large page in his sagging newspaper.That’s how we sit, that’s how I spend time with people. Cafes are my communion. I love the delicacy of their shared but parceled space. All along the old wall strip, the dead zone through Berlin that divided families like a terrible quarantine, the decades of no mans land that now is all overgrown with trees and nested with sweet birds, torn down one by one for new apartments as the city swells, one Japanese cherry tree after another will be touched by the sun and burst into its perfect ineffable colour, its blossoms fluttering and the sky a web of blue trapped in its branches. I want to lie there dazedly noticing the comings and workings of ants for whom springtime is an unending toil. I want to hear the punks on their houseboat creaking and clinking at beers in their foldout chairs. I want to feel a fast bicycle zip past me. Lie under the trees and feel their placid embrace, like two hands turned slowly outward to show me something.
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cemetery days
I just spent a few precious hours working in a greensward where I could be safely distant from everybody and they could be safely distant from me. Then a woman approached me. She was wearing uniform. It is not permissible to sit in this space, on the grass: you must sit on a bench.I gazed at her. “I understand you, but… isn’t it somewhat exceptional circumstances? I have hardly left my house in six days, I need the sun. People need a place to sit that’s not hard surfaces which can retain the virus for hours.”
She repeated exactly, “Es ist nicht gestattet” I think it was – it’s not authorised. At home, on Twitter, I found two resourceful Italians playing table tennis, from window to window, one right-handed and one left-. They’re just going to keep playing until they lose the ball. I live for this sense of playful joy. As this lady approached me I was just thinking, ‘now: I have peace in my heart.’ It is hard-won. It’s mine. She cannot have it, no, indeed, I will not drop this ball, it is airy, it is light and it bounces.
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staying at home in the Spring
It’s wonderful to be cheerful and I will be cheerful. We are alive and are blessed with refrigerator and bath tub, bookshelves and beloveds, hot and cold running comfort in which to be trapped.Also, the sky today was wild blue outside. Our little drawing group normally meets. I longed for the bicycle ride across town, the hours of shared and quiet concentration, the chat. The trees are filling out slowly with leaves. It’s occurred to me that Australian friends have no idea what it feels like to have to stay inside for days on end and potentially months… right at the tail end of the winter when we have blue skies literally for the first time in months. My mother is staying home more in Brisbane, a dense and singing garden quarantines her house. Most Berliners and urban Europeans don’t have even a balcony. There are a few open spaces large enough to be safe but they are hard to reach. We can open the window and take sips of still cold air. The pinkening buds will be bursting soon and we’ve been trapped indoors since October.