Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: dog’s life

the hurly-berlin

Berlin, Berlin. Familiar and overwhelming. On the train back from the airport a girl with an extraordinary voice hopped on and busked. At the end of the song, the guitarist accompanying her took a bow and people burst into applause. “Wow!” she said, opening up her hat. A cute couple jumped off and a guy with his afro razored up the sides leaned after them, silently proferring the phone and wallet the girl had left lying on the seat. Two muscular men slightly running to fat had their dog with them, a pug named Princess Sheba. We got talking. The one holding the dog on his lap obeyed signals from the other one who said, wiping his own eye, she has something near her eye, and so forth. Princess Sheba stood upright on her owner’s sturdy legs, balancing against the train’s movement like a surfer. These trains travel high above the street and at intervals feel like you’re lost in the woods. The cool breeze flooded in every time someone got on or got off. “Mind the gap,” the safety announcement said in English. Later in the evening a guy snarled at me for making eye contact and called my German companion a Nazi. He was walking along spoiling for it, followed us, taunting, through some misery of his own. “Like the black women in Brooklyn say,” he said, bitterly, chasing us, “stay away from white people.” Berliners smoke in cafes and the street is filled with old litter. If you eat out, people beg, and sell newspapers, and beseechingly play the harmonica. At the next table a middle-aged blond woman painted her lips against a little mirror while her boyfriend watched absorbedly. It took both of them to make her beautiful, it was their tradition. She made faces at herself as though she were having a very emotional, silent conversation. We saw two Romany boys whom I’d seen busking last summer, a year ago now, the little one is bigger and wirier and his chubby brother is chubbier. The younger plays the trumpet and has a loud ghetto blaster with which he drives away all the other musicians. But he’s getting better. Last year he was confident but terrible. I told him, your playing has improved! so much! you’re getting good! and for the first time in all the dozen times we have spoken he gave me his slow, curling, lopsided and personal smile.

July 26, 2013
pearl-sheaves

Ran across the same little punk dog we’d met with last week, a scruffy little dude with green dye in his hair. His name is Schnitzel. I know this because he came scampering up the street and this long knotted rope of a woman, with five colours in her hair and a goodly stomp on her, came bawling after him, “Schnitzel! Schnit-ZEL!!” “Typical punker name,” my friend told me, casually. Really? Schnitzel?

We went to a new place, new to me, for a breakfast roll. “Let’s go to the Greek place,” he said. It’s a spacious, cool, shadowy deli, like an old-fashioned larder keeping its cool via the stone walls and not through the agency of frigid, piped gas. The proprietor Yannis has large colour photos of himself all over the walls, photos he says his customers have taken. Yannis frowning, Yannis carving meat, Yannis folding his arms. He has a wall of certificates for his olive oils. He sells spicy sauces brewed in this neighbourhood, and handmade Greek products with beautiful packaging: a tea made from ginger, mint, saffron, and licorice root. Watching him tenderly sloshing fresh, grassy-green olive oil on our bread and shaving a flapping slice of ham from the hock in his glass cabinet I feel filled with optimism and a sense of slow, rising well-being. Surely we can support small adventurous businesses whose response to a troubled economy is: I will make teas. Surely we can eat fresher, walk on the grass until we find a shady spot to sit, live longer. A dozen dogs tumble and writhe in the unkempt park whose waving dandelions and delicate pearl-sheaves of grass seed remind my lounging friend of “a punk hairstyle. This is how you can see this city has no money.” “It’s even green,” I say, remembering the little scamp Schnitzel. The arse of my dungarees slowly dampens on the dark, damp soil. It rained yesterday. The sun comes and goes like bees. Possibly wind sifting through high trees is my most beloved sound on this half-paved green earth. Wind in the trees, sun in a twitching lace like glass-slippered waves, waving green grasses and the white clouds still passing.

June 10, 2013
exact same clothes

Landsakes, do I feel cute. I helped someone out with some really boring writing work and feel all neighbourly & useful. We decided to celebrate with a beer. I had opened my two storage boxes (for posting back to Australia) and after months of wearing the exact same clothes ~ same jeans, same orange jumper, same ratty old Tom Waits~as~Jesus t-shirt ~ had dug out my ugg boots: ugg boots! And also a pair of huge dungarees: dungarees! So me and Tom Waits and the dungarees and ugg boots set off for the beer shop. Berlin is twilit. The streets are damp and swishy. Two guys were arguing at an Indian restaurant trestle and the end of their table said, in thick black marker pen, I love you. I loaded up four pockets with beers and came back with my friend’s dog whom he had dressed in honour of my new old clothes in a natty neckerchief. We were the wild West. Which is tame in this town. This looping, roaring, sprawling, sunbathing, dog-loving six-storey city.

June 9, 2013
some order

I find Berlin the most extraordinary city. Nothing is regular, not that in my life anything ever is. I guess in an individuality-seeking cult/ure this sounds boastful or false-meek, but I have spent a lifetime hunting the things I have (bountiful, it turns out) in common with other people. Went through the drug-dealer park this afternoon on our dog walk/bike ride to the river. Saw two pale-eyed people sharing a picnic of vodka, a scarfed family of women leaning wearily but free against the fence that divides (we hope) the water from the land, African men lissom in dreadlocks playing music & ball, metalheads holding a metal convention under a large chestnut tree all in black and with slogans and dark music dimly blaring; many couples making out that plenitude is privacy; dogs upon dogs upon dogs upon hounds; and a Turkish family playing cards and smoking spiralling blue cigarettes between thorny bramble bushes, just as though their country were not burning or perhaps as though they were all too aware, and were taking some time off from chaos, placing some orders.

June 9, 2013
everywhere at work

Berlin by night. Candles in the windows of quiet roadside bars. Soundless cyclists ignoring the lights. Puddles from the rain glinting under the trees, on the path alongside the canal. Pizza restaurant which has set out a yard full of benches and long trestle tables since I was here last, which was the end of a bitter, long winter. In the front corner of the yard are two spindly chairs, their feet looped about by overnight chains, standing perkily either side of a carved concrete round-topped table. A big quiet tree separates this lovers’ corner from the rest of the empty restaurant. We sit on the two chairs and watch quietly as the night evolves imperceptibly round us. This couple are walking their dog. A car is passing in a haze of invisible rain drops. This large tree on which I rest my hand is growing, sap rising, leaves unfurling and sprouting from the trunk in several places. Life is everywhere at work and leaves its carcases and traces.

June 5, 2013
punk snot green

Punker dog in Berlin, his hair matted and scrufflish, his gait insouciant. He has a green streak in his fur, top of the head between the ears, that matches the green quiff on his master. The thought of this dude dyeing his own hair like an old lady in a salon and then tenderly saying, Ok now we do yours, has undone me.

May 28, 2013
everything soft, and white, and powdery

Tramping through the fresh snow, everything soft and white and powdery. Like daylight the snow lies unequivocally on everything. Six bursting, screeching, whumphing shapes pass overhead like white explosions and resolve themselves, by a process of frantic backpedalling, into swans. As they land on the water they one by one become graceful and fleet. I smile at the tall man opposite, who stops. “I know you! I know your face.” “Well, I don’t think so, I’m Australian, I’ve only been here a few months.” “But I know your face! Pretty face, you’ve got. Can I take it?” He holds up a camera with a large, open lens. “What for?” I say. “Nicht zum verkaufen,” he assures me (not for selling), “just because I’d like to.” He shows me the picture, my kilos of red scarf and ridiculous beanie. Around us the world is white and a golden dog plunges through the fresh snowdrifts, spluttering. The swans have forgotten their panic and sail like perfection under the very old, arched green stone bridge.

March 10, 2013
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.

February 20, 2013