Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: European

  • forever leaving home

    So on December 4th I stripped myself out of the hammock tied under a tree that is no longer there, and put on a Santa suit and biker boots, and we went out to the airport in Brisbane and got on a plane. We left summer and got here to Berlin in winter, it never grew light and it never grew dark. Having parked my tiny cat with my parents we went into West Germany by train to pick up his dog from his. Dog was hysterical. Family were loud. A New Year ensued and we came back to Berlin to begin 2015, moving both into his one-room studio apartment, with the dog, until a bare four weeks later a sensational four a.m. barney – involving all three of us – saw me move into an elderly pension over in another, more genteel part of town, and stay away.

    I lived in that desiccated hotel for three months. After a month they gave me a kettle and a mug so that I could make cups of tea in my room. The room I’d started out in is their biggest and grandest and has a great desk, so it’s popular – we made a cosy arrangement where I could stay at a reduced rate but had to move rooms every time they had a new booking. I could hear the conversations at the front desk and the sense of stringently absent privacy was wearing, after a while.

    Meanwhile outside my window on the golden street with its slicked-umbrella trees the winter melted into Spring. I went to Spain and came back to find all the street had bloomed, you could walk very slowly from one end to the other between one glossy scintillating treespan and the next; under one, one day, a man huddled by his shopping cart of rescued bottles was sleeping, on another bench a young man rocked his bored child back and forth, staring intently past the trees and the spattered sunlight into the embrace of his gleaming dark phone. I felt I was always alone there. I sank into myself, in the old town, in Europe, and Germany.

    We went again to Spain, this time I took my beloved, with whom things were better the moment we stopped trying so hard to share the one long desk, the one room, the one window. Madrid became my favourite place, I felt childhood reawaken in me like a scent, like palm trees and cinnamon, and when it came time to leave I was sad and did not want to face Berlin at all. It feels like we’ve been away for months. It is three weeks I think. We went back down to the small town to fetch the hysteric dog and then at last yesterday, late in the evening, I met the woman who had advertised a large white apartment for sublet and I gave her some money and she gave me some keys, and I loaded all my suitcases thankfully, exhaustedly into the back of a cab and woke up here this morning, all alone, alone in Germany, not far from my sweetheart and his morning walk and for the first time in six months – to the day – I have my own place, my own home, a place I can write in and read when I want and where no one engages with me and I need not move, if I can gather the money to stay on and if the German government are willing to have me, for as long as I need to… I counted up all the times I’d moved down the hall from one hotel room to another and the travelling we had both done since we left our little cottage in the middle of screeching Brisbane, where I barely left home at all, and after I got to thirty removals I gave up the count, and I hope to resume it again only after some long, restful interval has passed, and my soul has repaired itself from all the tumult, and I have been blessed with many months of languor and dishevelled, resting solitude, and never packed my case or had to remember my notebook and toothbrush, Australia seems another lifetime and I cannot reach the beaches, the desert, the dense greenery, I am here in this stony iron country with its brass plaques outside the doorways where people were stolen from their everyday lives and its much browner birds and whiter sky, its tyranny.

  • jazz bar, balconies, bikers, busker, moth, Madrid

    The moth which landed in the glossy black curls of a woman sitting on the Metro so lightly and delicately without her noticing, and which spread its dun linen wings like opera skirts to reveal the sheer, white gauze underneath. The two boys who jumped on and played joyously, their guitars facing belly to belly. The long, arching trees filling curving streets with greenery and palpably articulating the breeze into soft whistles and dim spirit presences, into a welcoming and retired song, almost a language. The man and woman whose voices caught my attention from above and whose conversation diagonally across from his first floor balcony to hers on the third seemed frank and gossipy, reflective, unhurried. The jazz bar with windows open right onto the street and spilling glorious plants, which served gin and tonic in round-bellied goblets with surprisingly sweet, chewy, nutlike juniper berries bobbing against the cubes. The lovely dog opposite, above the antiquarian bookshop, who stands on the balcony and gazes up and down the street with such a mournfully intent expression; the man playing a baby grand under a white cloth in his open window and gesturing to his colleague, playing violin, and the crowd of silent witnesses standing with their phones and faces raised on the curving road underneath. The security guard reading a volume of poetry on the underground, so intent he almost missed his stop. The three tiny ladies chatting loudly and volubly on the train who parted with light, smacking kisses at Nuevos Ministerios. The BMX bikers who practice outside the opera house every day, every day, waiting their turn and daring each concrete bench and set of steps to rout them like ballet dancers swimming far out to sea. The low doorways and Metro tunnels against which my sweetheart has to watch his head. The expressiveness of public life with a girl flying into a passion of sobs at the post office counter, a woman crying openly as she was talking on her phone walking through a crowded restaurant district at lunch time. The yoghurts brewed in little glass pots desde 1992 which we top with strawberries, blueberries, bananas; the milk section of the supermarket which is on shelves unrefrigerated because everybody likes powerfully adulterated longlife milk yet luscious, unpasteurised, handmade yoghurt. The quiet, hot siesta hours when shops are barred and windows shuttered and the Metro crammed to the gills. The people who gaze up so curiously, so unjudgingly, at me and my two metre tall lover as we bow our heads to enter the train. The busker in orange top hat who tied his dog to the railings and turned aside into a shop window to tune his guitar. The little backstreet shops which build guitars and the man with his cardboard box desk on the shopping street who carves crosses out of two sticks and binds them together to sell, one after another, he was here at Easter and he is still here now, filling the paving creases with whittled shavings as though there can never be enough crosses in the world and he must fill the lack.

  • casa de correos

    A beautiful girl went into meltdown at the post office counter at ten o’clock at night and we saw her wailing, sobbing with her mouth open, pleading in liquid Spanish. Tears ran down her face and arms, she was almost screaming with some kind of unbearable grief, what could be the matter? I felt like a psychopath unable to share her intense suffering. People behind us in the queue started shouting and pelting the staff members with accusations. No, said the man at the end, no, we’re closed now. I asked the man next to me, Hablo pocolito Ingles? Do you have a tiny bit of English? Yes, he said, hesitating. “Why is that girl so upset? What happened to her? Do you know?” He said, “She have to deliver something and the staff is working extra slow, that is why she’s unhappy.” I looked the girl over, carefully. I had never seen anyone cry so unashamedly and I envied her. She had dropped her head onto the counter and long black hair fell across her shoulders and pooled on the desk. She lifted her head suddenly and with both hands spread imploringly cried out to the postal worker in her husky treble, oh you can not do this, you are ruining my life. This tableau took place in a surreal setting as at some deserted wedding reception or garden party, we were right up the back of the seventh floor of a department store where the post office is located – other floors had advertised a travel agent, health insurance office, cafe – and on three sides were palatial suites of bright gleaming garden furniture, orange and pink and purple, sleek beige couches which fold out into beds, Chinese vases, immaculate mirrors. The rest of the store had closed and we went slowly, reluctantly down the escalators past floor after floor of unlit displays of homewares, women’s clothing, children’s fashion, appliances. Outside it was high blue hour and all the creamy ancient buildings reared into the perfect endless Spanish sky like stagecraft, I have never seen anywhere more beautiful and its mix of comfortable acceptance and torrid drama is a constant astonishment to me. Last time I flew home to Berlin from Madrid I noticed Spanish passengers tend to applaud, once the plane safely touches down – something English-speaking people will do only when the weather has been perilous and the landing dicey. They did it again this time. A ragged shout of “yay!” went up when we took off. The streets are crowded with tablecloth stalls which are held by four ropes to be picked up over the shoulder if the police happen past; there are stores filled with gold-crusted crosses and confirmation cups, long white candles with gold stickers round them, baby Jesuses the size of small bears. The sacred Andalusian baths in a grotto underground which are lit only by candles and have tiled signs in every room which say Silencio, Por Favor are always crammed with people gossiping at the tops of their voices. At the end of the night we walk home very slowly, worn out by the endless stones and the glaring heat, and in the Museum of Ham and the Paradise of Ham along the zinc-topped counters men in white aprons are sweeping, very quietly, a dirty snowfall of white crumpled napkins flung down by the day’s customers as they have finished their meals, one by one.

  • a small town in West Germany

    We came today to a small town in West Germany to stay with family, my out-laws, who are champion collectors. Outside the door stands the Christmas tree, an actual tree cut at the throat and still wrapped in its net bedding, because as mother-out-law promised, “We left it for you both to decorate the tree.” Two years ago we were here for the first time, my first time, and she broke the ice – that winter, actual literal ice – by leaving it to me to coordinate decorating of the tree. The old spun and woven and blown decorations came out in their plentiful boxes. These people live in a house that’s been theirs for generations, something hard for me to imagine, and they have filled it with stuff. I asked the son of the house, my beloved, what the name of their strange street meant. It is the last road before the fields and we saw a pheasant bent forward and clucking to himself crossing worriedly from one shorn side to the other, as though pursued by tax collectors. “Ah,” he said. “Well it means an old execution place of the Germanic peoples; in the forest.” “Gosh, well I am so glad I asked about that. What a bummer it would have been if I had Forgotten to Ask.”

    A couple of hours into our visit after plates of breads and cheeses (three kinds of bread, two of cheese, and five kinds of preserved meat) I began to nudge him and wheedle with my toes until he finally realised, “Oh! Wir gehen gerne auf den Weihnachtsmarkt, we’d love to go onto the Christmas market, might just run in there on their second-last night, ok with you? Mamma can I take your car?”

    The Weihnachtsmarkt for me is the entire point of our trip. It’s the reason I am in Germany. This is what my partner used to twist my arm into the winter again, when we could have been lying in our hammock in the sweet greasy green southern hemisphere, feasting on mangoes as they fell off the tree overhead. We drove in, on the wrong side of the road, round errant curves each festooned with the needle trees dark and sore which never lose their leaves despite the cold. Several times I asked, “Where are we going?” just to have him answer, patiently, humouring me, “I think we’re going onto the Weihnachtsmarkt.” We walked onto an old town so medievally beautiful that the first time I was brought here through the old arch I burst into tears. As we explored the golden stone lit by street lanterns I forgot the crowded family house where in manoeuvring my suitcase through the door I joggled an unevenly-built shelf and three different hair dryers and four hairbrushes fell to the floor. I forgot all family obligation. I forgot all junk everywhere. We were in the beauty, in the ages, in the kings. Once more. People, mainly couples, drifted dark as feathers down the narrow winding streets, arm in arm. Golden lights, bottle-end window fixtures, deep restful casements and star-bright lanterns. Windows lit with all kinds of crafts and art. Rounding a final corner we came into the burst of flame that is the yearly Christkindlmarkt, market of the little Christ child: people gathered, people standing, people laughing and drinking and stamping their feet. This year it’s not all that cold, I think I must have imagined that last bit. The stalls hung with lanterns wound all round the little cobbled streets where no cars go and people ordered salmon smoked over the flame, white forcemeat sausages and star-shaped bread rolls, gingerbread hearts, eggnog “mit Schuss” (with a shot – of rum, or amaretto); Glühwein. Everyone was jolly and, this not being Berlin, they couldn’t care how cool or uncool they seemed, they were just having a simply uproarious time on the close-packed stones, throwing their heads back, wearing their Santa hats. So much conversation, all in German, some few leafless trees bestowing their shadows underneath the venerable church.

    “That one was built in 800 AD,” he said, as I lit into the dream and did not come back. Anyway where is there to come back to? only the eternal present, whereas old Germany presents a time immemorial, something I had forgotten and feel now coming alive along my veins as though fishing lights dipped into me and brought the life swimming to the surface, every Christmas I have had “in which” (I told him) “we ate salad” now fell away and the stars we cut out of quartered paper made sense, the blobs of snow we’d stickytaped on strings hanging from the ceiling in the tropics – cotton-wool snow – all of a sudden had a purpose, everything fell clear. A quintet of young men with brass in their mouths were playing and it was a song I recognised, “no,” I thought, still in my trance, “that is not a song, that is a hymn.” My partner asked, what is the difference, and I sang it to him then could not stop: O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him… it’s not so easy to write a melody that good. “I’m going to be singing that all the way home, I warn you, it is so beautiful like an old wine in the throat, so if you’ve any complaints let us hear them now and then you’ll hold your peace.” “No complaints at all,” he said, bending tenderly round me as though I had been a bell.

    I noticed on every unfolding gold-lighted stall that the Germans love kitsch, they just love it! “Don’t you have kitsch in Australia?” “We have junk. Plenty of junk, and trash. But your trash has a kind of sentimentality to it that is all your own.” He laughed low in his throat. We jounced home slowly, gently, through the medieval town under the tall pink facade of the building that more resembles a cake, past the outer streets where cars travel on the cobblestones as rippingly as though they had, or so it sounds, each four flat tyres. I remembered the word and reefed it out, “Reifenpanne,” a flat tyre, and the resurrection of this long-ago-acquired German word touched me and blessed me, as though there were endless space in my mind, as though life stretched on eternally.