Unable to stomach any more Spanish food I went out and found a tiny Thai place. It was up a narrow staircase from the paved street where people wander in the evening in great numbers; the combination of Thai intricacy with Spanish kitsch in the decor was eye-watering. The girl tried to seat me at a little table under a limeskin-green wall but I asked her: can’t I please sit and look out? “This table is reserved,” she said, indicating the last little window seat. The owner came out and asked her what was going on. He was a dapper Thai gentleman who reminded me of the portrait of the King above the bar. He came over and swept the chair back invitingly, ushering me in and then jamming the table back further into the alcove, saying ruefully, “For Thai people,” as I worked my legs in under it. “Or,” I said, “Spanish people.” “Yes…” opening a large menu in front of me. I sat eating my dinner all alone and gazing down into the street where people towed their children, and several tall black men down either side of the pedestrian zone were running an illegal market, holding their stalls (spread on canvas) by four guy ropes, one at each corner, and all of them looking around constantly, alert. There seems to also be a trade in contraband recycled cardboard; I saw one man towing a giant carton by a rope like a small boy playing battleships come speeding down the alleyway and hastily harvest the best, cleanest folded boxes from the large pile all the local shops had planted out under the streetlamp; without waste of time he towed his bounty away. Not five minutes later another man pulled up diagonally across the walkway in a dirty white unmarked van and jumping out threw his back door open; looking about him nervously he stashed several large cartons of folded boxes into the back of his truck and then drove away, still looking anxiously all around. The restaurant owner came back to ask would I like a “cocktail” “of the house”, “it is a kind of Baileys,” he said, in English, “so you digest.” Thank you, I said, I would. And when he came back with the bill (I think it’s “la quinta, por favore,”) I used the formulation taught me by eavesdropping on Germans in cafes in Berlin: “Just give me fifteen back, please.” As he turned to go I touched his arm as lightly as I could. He could have made four times the money on my table had he given it to a group. “You are a very cultured person,” I said, “thank you for your hospitality. I appreciate it.” “Oh,” he said, “oh!” and touched his open hand over his heart. I grabbed my bag and ran away shyly and at the top of the staircase he caught my eye as a large group of Germans came in and his hand went again unconsciously over his heart.
Tag: culture
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unAustralian Day
The aspects of Australianness I feel most dearly attached to, and which are also the aspects Germans, Americans, other people seem most intensely curious to hear reports of whenever I’m travel outside Australia, are these:
1. the land (the shape of the land, like an upside-down heart); the surf, the rock formations, the desert, the landscapes.
2. the creatures we tyrannize and extinguish and who seem to threaten us
3. the peoples whose cultures, whose survival and quietude makes them an irresistible secret, beloved of every thinking person, a guide to what we are generally doing wrong and where we might go right
Survival Day: a clue to the changes we are making too slowly to survive, all of us, aboard our beloved earth. Unfold the new flag, raise up our fresher songs, institute a Council of Advisory Elders to put a check on our Parliaments. I want government by tribal elders and old women. I want pride and humility to be our standards.
[-O-]
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alles ganz frisch
No Murdoch press and the sun has come out! How much fresher can Germany get. We have eaten a breakfast of thinly sliced things rolled on platters served with other, slightly more thickly sliced dark and chewy breads. My companion sinks into his first cup of filter coffee with condensed milk, “Aaahhh.” The familiar is sweet. He makes me smell its unmistakeable scent but I hand it back, unimpressed: “That is not the coffee to make me forget my vow.”
Instead of The Australian and The Courier-Mail, with their perpetual racist beat-ups and photos of women murdered by their husbands who are described invariably as “decent blokes” who simply “got pushed too far” (by the serially battered victim, presumably), instead of a cover photo of some actor who happens to have dark hair and “swarthy” skin staged in an “ISIS” pose like some deranged hip hop artist, there are four pages of literature and art events with listings – in the plural – each day of readings and book signings. Some are in bookshops I recognise, one is in the genteelly decaying place round the corner where in the week I was first in Berlin alone I took my own book and asked would they sell it. They did. Its sole purchaser was a tall beautiful man whom I approached as he was turning over novels in the English language section, saying, “You should read this one, I wrote it.” “Alright,” he said, and bought it. That man was a bookshop and cafe owner in gorgeous Copenhagen and is now one of my dearest friends. He told me, before I ever thought to visit, his little shop sells “three of my favourite things – coffee, books, and records.”
Much though I applaud the ferocious independence and gall of the newly established Saturday Paper back home, it feels wonderfully civilized to have a wide choice of newspapers all run by different owners and all presenting a variety of views. The Tagesspiegel, “mirror of the day”, has a long, two-page article titled “Wie Besser Helfen.” How you can better help: it details the “lonely elderly neighbour,” the “fallen person selling Motz” (a homelessness fundraiser similar to the Big Issue), the “prostituted girl”, and the “belaestigtes Maedchen” – I don’t know the word and wonder what kind of needing-help girl this could be: my partner, in labouring to describe it to me, reveals that he has heard the recently much-used word “cat-calling” as “scat-calling.” I want to go out into the streets of Berlin and feel the frigid sun on my face and get scat-called by traffic that stops and starts like a jazz composition on the right-hand side of the road. I want never to hear the name Rupert Murdoch or Tony Abbott again. I read the stories of “alcoholic apprentices” and lonely elderly neighbours, followed by short, pragmatic paragraphs contributed by people who know how best to offer help – social workers, for example – and I think how a country’s press can shape its social life. My partner reads out an article on an American novelist we met at the University of Queensland, who dropped his head when I asked a question from the audience and tore in a deep breath when I mentioned how Australia, “to our shame, leads the world in child suicide rates among Indigenous young people.” Last night we passed a synagogue with a police officer standing outside stamping in the cold, he had a little hut with Polizei written on it. Every Jewish gathering place in Germany is thus guarded, my partner says, and has been since 1949, “because we are guilty for a thousand years.” I suggest to him that there have been times when a German police guard would, to a Jew, not be very comforting. Like the escort offered in my homeland to its Indigenous people whenever they are picked up for not paying a fine, or for being drunk: a one-way train that leads to nowhere but the ironic and ferocious hell whose gates are tiled with good and insufferably pious intentions. The Murderochracy.
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in The Circle
I decided to stay home from the Writers Festival and read, all weekend, in the hammock. Yesterday I read three Mills and Boons, today I am reading a novel by Dave Eggers. The writing is so beautiful it’s almost a liquid. It is modest. It does not proclaim about itself. It’s blood temperature, so I can move through it without noticing. But every now and then I turn the page and read some startling description that has to be reread aloud, like the summing up of the book’s character Mae, offered to her by a woman sitting in a deck chair, with her eyes closed, on a boat.
I am that woman today, moored near an island. Outside of the hammock world, which is permeable, storm clouds mass up on the horizon behind the big spiky city. The camphor laurel tree whickers and sways. A sudden gust casts down a spray of its gentle, tissuey blossoms on me, and its red-veined leaves.
A seed falls into the seam of my book and I tilt it and shake it away. The sky is blue but clotting with piled hulks of soft-serve cloud. It’s always blue but only when lit. As I watch, it grows colder, and the blue begins to sour into a sweet daytime stay-at-home white. A lamplit day, an indoor day. I’m outdoors, slung on a sharp hilltop. Outdoors is always blue but whitening now and filigreed with the leaves’ underbellies, which churn in the wind like a school of fish, and closer to home by the large open net I am lying in. Sky in the gaps. Today my own writing is not modest, it’s first-drafty like a camp bed slung between two trees, it takes a fancy word like ‘filigree’ and cuts it right open, filleting like a fish whose screams outside the water are conveniently inaudible. The writing and the day and its transience fill me with greed and contentment. I’m full’o’greed. My thoughts are sounds that make no sense and I’m so comfortable. Outdoors, and at home, all day.
Down the street aways two crows seem to be boasting to each other. Ark, says one. I don’t believe you, says the other. I lay the book down open on my chest. Willing to be dragged through the day by my own brain and by another brain’s writing and communion. The grey cat, who is herself a hammock, turns into herself, bristles, and sighs. Far behind the big boat of this city and its festivals I ride the churning water. A long time later I pick up the book again, wishing it was heavier and fatter. I will read to the end today, then read it again, I’m so glad and relieved that greatness exists still among us, that it won’t all die when Shirley Hazzard dies, that it didn’t all fold down into the grave with Elizabeth Gaskell and her “kindly spirit that thinks no ill [and] looks out of her pages irradiate.”
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tattoo virgin
Wandered into a cavernous caff in West End and the girl there was showing me her tattoos. I am squeamish and have never pierced my ears. Tattoos are beyond me, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t. We stood poring over her long brown arms, turning and tracing the story which evolved from something simple into something faceted. “It’s nice talking with like-minded people,” she said.
I thought about this word like-minded and what it means. The people I hear using it seem to be people I feel comfortable with. I wondered is it just what I’m hearing, or is it that people who use this word tend to be people I get along with and like. Is it a less judgmental and more fluid term than for example “they have values I respect.” Is it less confining and more welcoming and free from expectation than the older “we have a lot in common.”
This girl bristled with insignias I don’t desire or share. There was an age gap. We were strangers. I was her customer. What was it that lept the gap in such a brief conversation, that left us feeling comfortable, feeling even a mild affection? How did we divine our like-mindedness? Well, through expression and language and tone and eyes, the languages of the soul and body. Does like-minded maybe mean not so much “our minds are alike” as “we both tend to like people’s minds”?
I think about the conversations I have with the people I would call “like-minded.” Every week, some spark, and some do not. There is something exploratory. An acceptance of difference. A failure to require the stranger to conform to a recipe either of us have arrived with, or that has been ready-handed to us.
In the miracle bowl of my brain and the miracle foreign world of hers, something gleamed. There was an element like sunshine or moonlight or rain that we could enjoy in one another that was universal and therefore shared. The sparkling sea of rain that sloshes round a souvenir: an experience there are more than fifty words for: two separate worlds stood side by side for a fleeting instant, worlds transparent yet ineffable, in a shared kind of frame, like snowdomes for entirely different monuments.
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the human scenery
On my last day in Berlin I visited at last the Museuminsel, Island of Museums. It feels strange to ride an arched bridge onto an island on your bike. The island being castled with stately buildings filled with treasures only makes it the stranger. My favourite was the first, which holds treasures rescued or stolen from ancient cultures around the world, many of them excavated and painstakingly reconstructed by Berlin historians. Bits are still missing. You walk into a temple rebuilt under a soaring roof and begin to feature on a hundred fellow tourists’ documentary records. So few people were examining the faulted relief work with their eyes. They carried screens, like bashful eighteenth-century ladies shading their virtue with fans.
I was wearing a comical and very old beanie bought in a bead shop in Copenhagen. The lady who sold it to me bought it in Cameroon: she wanted a good price, saying, I am too old now to go back there and find more of them. “Kings wear them,” she told me, and showed me a photo of several kings standing about splendidly wearing hats like mine – it is woven out of navy and soiled cream yarn, and has all over little inch-long prongs sticking out like a fully occupied pincushion, a sea anemone. I went back to the shop three times and every time I put it on my head I felt a warmth and powerful groundedness rise down in me. In the third chamber of the museum a vast and mighty gate became the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It was clad in tiles in marine blue, sea green, round white daisies plopped one by one along the base of each wall. So beautiful, so moving, when my companion who had been reading the signs sidled up to me and whispered, Babylon, all at once I understood and my eyes filled with hot tears. I stood in front of the giant gate with my head tilted back, lost in that world, feeling some shard or fragment of how it might feel to live in a city of Babylon. I could feel the song in my blood, you know the song you have as a child and that revisits at odd occasions. Like lying face down in the hot sun watching the insects burrow among grass-stalk forests. Like half-waking, half-sleeping. Like sliding into a lake. When I turned there was a scampering behind me as a small tableau dissolved. Three Japanese ladies, elbow-height to me, were posed less than two feet from me as their friend, holding a camera and shooing them together like school children, took their picture using me, the giant with sprouting head, as colourful blue background.
Sure, we all do it. At least, I do. But I try not to hurt or molest or offend people. I either ask permission with a lift of the brows or if discovered, make a laughing confession out of it and offer to show the picture. Sometimes if I happen to take a beautiful photo that has someone in it, a stranger, I’ll go up to them with it and ask if they’d like me to send them a copy. These women’s refusal to meet my eye was irritating and unnerving. I spoke to them, gently enough: Excuse me. It’s not very comfortable for you to use me as human scenery. They put their heads down and scurried away, whispering to each other as though an animal had spoken. I wanted to be heard, to be human. I went over to the lady who was packing up her camera. “Excuse me, do you speak any English? I really wish you wouldn’t use me for your pictures without acknowledgement. It’s unkind.” She too ducked her head and backed, holding up both hands and waving them flat to ward me off, an invisible windshield. I could imagine the stories accompanying this picture in the slide show: And then ~ she attacked us~! I saw a security guard look up and went over to him, feeling assailed and dismissed, wanting to talk to someone. “I just had a kind of upsetting experience,” I told him, in German, “those ladies used me as human scenery in their photos and then when I spoke to them, they wouldn’t answer me.”
The expression on his face changed minimally. “Lord,” I said, “this must happen to you, like, 57 times a minute!” He said, “I hide in the corner there sometimes to get away from it. They look past me like I’m not even there.” “How awful!” I said. We were smiled by now, we kind of loved each other. “And don’t you feel… it’s as if, if I photograph everything instead of seeing it directly… am I really actually here?”
Leaving the museum hours later I waved to the guard and he waved back. “Danke!” On the way in his colleague who’d collected our tickets had said, pointing at my head, “Tolle Mütze!” “Danke!” I said. The old man who snatched a photograph when he thought I couldn’t see him I followed around the corner til he stopped, then raised my own camera and took his picture, expressionless. That felt better. But mostly my bones and my blood were immersed in the sacred, cool atmosphere of the place, a whiff of many places, the ‘first megacity’ Uruk which was one of the seats of writing. They had small clay tablets like gingerbreads propped on clear plastic feet and telling how many fish had been provided for the workers, how to repel the evil left behind by an expected eclipse of the moon. Afterwards we walked to the Bodenmuseum where people had carved marble into lace. Many many Marys and many small Christs, the repetition struck me as humidity does when you return home to a tropical climate. “I finally get it!” I whispered to my friend, on tiptoe (he is 6’8″). “The Mary worship – it’s about motherhood!” “Yes,” he said, shrugging, raised on the stories. “Mother and son. And the son becomes king. And is murdered for love.” I think that’s what he said, I was in a daze with the old, perfect works, the high wooden ceilings, the light lapping over them when you tilt your head back reflected from the green canal lying outside the Museum’s windows. At the top of the Bodenmuseum is a tea rooms with lovely long windows and not, when we visited, a single customer to absorb and be blessed by its splendid, gently-urging, lace-stitching music.