Two boys scribbling either end of the dinner table. “What are you drawing?” 6yo: “It’s a diamond. With a rainbow inside it.” 4yo: “This is a machine for making everything dead.”
Their mother, breastfeeding, laughs telling us how the 6yo asked her could they play “jumping over Amelia on the couch.” Amelia is three weeks old. She was wrapped and asleep and her brother said earnestly, “It’s okay Mummy. We’re not going to jump on top of her.”
@…………..
Sister-in-law: “Yeah that was my uncle who used to be a beekeeper. But then he lost all his bees.” Brother (mournfully): “Yeah. ‘I used to be a beekeeper but now I’m just… a keeper.’” Mum: “But he didn’t keep them, he didn’t keep them at all!” Brother: “‘I used to be a beekeeper, but now I’m just… a bloke.’” Nephew: “We have four chooks. Salty, Fairytales, Slippers, Goldie, and Superchook.” Second brother: “Only Salty turned out to be a rooster so we sent him out to a farm. He’s died now.” Me: “Really?” Brother: “Yeah. And the neighbours have two chooks that turned into roosters. The neighbours closer to town.” Nephew: “We could play chess. But there’s too many of us.”
Something I dig about the guy I’m travelling with. We are staying with my folks and Mum, fielding a houseful of hungry guests, sent us down to the supermarket with her credit card, and her pin number written on my wrist. We did the shopping and then looked at one another. I said, “Hey! We’ve got Mum and Dad’s credit card! And access to everything they own! Mwahahah!” I was just about to make a joke like, “Wanna go buy a car?” when my Berlin companion opened his mouth. He said, “Wanna buy an ice cream?”
Christmas can be excruciating. All this talk of love and family throws heartache, loss and loneliness into relief. A woman I used to know killed herself this week, from sheer isolation it seems. In German it’s called self-murder.
It happens sometimes that the people we love are not within reach, or they have died, or we are separated by sheer human awfulness. Sometimes you just haven’t met them yet and can’t be sure they are real. This year I feel bloody lucky to be living in a brimming household, spending the holiday with people I love and where trust is rebuilding. Other times I’ve been separated from my family for geographical and also more graphic reasons and there was one Christmas I spent alone entirely, in a deep sharp almost unendurable pain. You know that special holiday feeling: that you are shut out from some cosy universal nesting time all framed in glowing windows, everyone else has a family to come home to, a loved one to choose for, trusted friends to cook for and visit and call. I wish there was a sure way of dispelling this treacherous fantasy. I wish I had a way of reaching those who suffer this season, including my former self, to ask them to hold on, to try to let the joy emerge again.
Because it will. I remember seasons in my life when I asked myself, can you die of loneliness, and heard the answer in my heart: yes – yes, you can. I’m so grateful I survived the unsurvivable times. I feel exhausted but I want to embrace life, its torment and its sweet. The perpetual leisure and the frenzy of modernity, these new tools that can take us further into life or distance us from each other. Maybe as a race we are learning in tiny, clunking, incremental steps to please stop injuring each other, to stop neglecting and ignoring, to welcome one another to the day and to embrace the golden joys of solitude. I hope we all keep on quietly learning one another’s languages. Like shade on a hot day I long for peace. In myself, and the quivering peace of many hearts. All of our hearts have struggled and been tormented. Yet here we all are. Merry Christmas to all our strange golden stained souls. And I wish for a wonderful year. A turning point. A gateway to a liveable, lovable future. A freshness that learns from old wisdoms, particularly the still-most-human communities in remnant rainforests and on deserts who have most to teach. Between the future and the past: a door.
In an unpretentious Italian restaurant where all the pasta had been made by hand, the chatting-family atmosphere fell into something much deeper and richer and darker. A cellist had walked in and in his overcoat sat down on a backless chair in front of the servery and began to play. Something, I don’t know what. He drove his fibres of unholy sound into the great grail of all of us, each of us, like an ochre long-blown off the palm of his hand. I saw the small boy with dark lozenges of eyes climb down from his chair at the corner table in the second room and go to stand, unconsciously in the waiter’s path, his head a jar for the tadpoles of surety this man was making for us. He stood and stood, listening and watching, lost to every other thing. Behind him his parents and their friend kept chatting and only the older, grizzled, quizzical looking man at another table let his gaze rest on the little music lover so fondly, brimming with acceptance, and I let my gaze rest on him in turn and the music rested on all of us, like snow, that spares no needle in the pine forest and lifts its shifting darkness turn to stars.
Oh, gosh. A friend of mine is visiting Berlin from Finland with her young family, they came here instead of to Budapest so that we could catch up for only the second time since we were both 11 and schoolmates in Indonesia. We saw each other on Friday and again just now, they are leaving in the morning. What’s happend is her little diaghter, about the same age we were when we were close, fell in love with me and I with her and her mother and I meanwhile have grown apart, though with plenty of mutual liking awash between us and respect, I think; the two of us, plus her fourteen year old brother, had such a good time once we broke the ice the other day, talking to each other in ridiculous accents and assigning magical powers to such landmarks as the scrappy scaffolding you have to pass under in order to reach the supermarket. I say assigning, but it feels more like you understand some genuine enchantment that is lying there, like the face of the moon in a puddle which from another angle reflects only parked bumper bars and tyres, waiting for us to know it and see it as we blindly pass. The parents went methodically through the supermarket, trying to work out which margarine was best for the breakfasts this weekend in their holiday unit. It’s easy for me to be revelrous and unresponsible, rebellious and responsive, I don’t have care of any kids. The girl took me by the hand and towed me to the softdrinks section, which til now I had never penetrated, it is right up the back of the giant side room supplying local Germans with their alcohol. Her brother had found a new variety of Coke and wanted to show it off. Ooh, we said, in our arch voices, eet ees like we are in a seeeeety of all Cokka-Collar, eet ees surrrrounding us on all sides, we cannot escape. Like me the little girl enjoys rolling her Rs.
Today I caught up with them after their river cruise, my friend texted to say We are still climbing, can you come down, the kids want to show you their moves. I remember how passionately I fastened on any Lady produced by my mum’s social life who had qualities I could identify as those I wanted to embody when I was grown. How I longed to tuck my hair behind my ears with bobby pins, like our first-grade teacher. I went down to the climbing centre built round an old watch tower in the grubby club park. My friend’s daughter came and grabbed me. She was leaner and faster than her brother, both climbing astonishingly like insects climbing water, up and over the sloping walls which lean over forbiddingly, studded with holds. It was fantastic to watch. When her mother said it was time to go she put her regular shoes on and took me round to show all the climbs she had executed earlier, each one a higher grade colour of difficulty than the last. “I did those ones, too,” said her brother, “…. but not that other one.” I ruffled her silky hair. She has slanting Finnish eyes, a witching snow princess. “You’re like Tank Girl,” I said, passing on a compliment somebody paid me when I peeled off all the sweating layers of wool at the end of a not so long forest hike yesterday. “No,” she said, her eyes bold and secretive, her bow-legged aristocratic accent reappearing, “Iiiiii… am: a Niiiinja.”
You are, I said. I see you are. We all walked up the street together, past the two tall punks begging for their Saturday night beer money at the video store, past the guy who sits cross-legged by the bus stop and does not beg at all. The little ninja spurled her spiels about each local artefact that caught her eye: mostly, people, and their behaviour, alongside reminders of the games we had invented walking two days ago and that had sunk into her imagination. The green signal man in the traffic light who is so busy, so so so busy, who appears to only have one arm and whom we had mimicked, hurrying so-busily over the crossing with our bodies bent forward. The red signal man with his arms spread wide who appears to be blessing the waters. They decided they would eat at a restaurant my friend had noticed. When it became clear I was not planning to join them, my little friend drooped, everything about her sagged. I felt tearful. “Why you not longer?” she said, with her hand on my arm. My eyes met her mother’s. The invitation had been there but wan. Or possibly I was just feeling over-sensitive: very often that’s the explanation. “Because,” I said, “I feel like… this is family time, it seems like you guys have had a big day, a big weekend, and everybody’s tired, maybe people are getting grumpy. Her mother, my friend, did not demur. “I’m not tired!” she said, “I’m not grumpy!” “Oh…” I cast about me, I don’t know why I had to escape. We had our arms around each other by this time and I was crouched so as to enfold her as completely as possible, my little familiar, little kindred spirit, I didn’t want to leave. I told her I would write to her and asked her to write back. Then I came home and phoned a friend and cried about it for a time. “You know how…. some children…. are just so…. special,” thinking how when I was a girl I would have given anything to get to know just one adult who seemed to still have humour without teasing and intrusion, who was like me, who liked me, who had the keys I had myself, given by god or whatever inanimate coincidences take the place of god, the power of noticing and knowing that you cannot know, the feeling that the trees also know you as you know them when you step amongst them on a night when the road seems to lead off right into the sky, the curious power of finding out coded language in the stones and in the curve of the street, I don’t know how to say it and have probably never described this before but I will go to my grave knowing this is what we are for, this is who we truly are, this is what we’re waiting for, the world of moon that is waiting for us despite flags and currency, despite gossip and news, despite additives, work choices, busyness, boredom, underneath and in spite of and above everything, and in it too.
Climbed a mountain today in a steep mist. We had to cross a lake to get to it, this was from Lucerne, shared a table on board with a godfather and grandfather and their little charge, who had unbelievably long eyelashes. After his biscuit and orange juice he grew sleepy, the godfather pointed, showing me, “See? his pupils get smaller,” and when they handed him his favourite thing, a green handkerchief called Noushy, he made a point of the corner of it and prodded himself thoughtfully in the ear with that. Then he brought it to his opposite palm and touched himself gently, thoughtfully several times in the middle of his little pink palm with the handkerchief point; then back to the ear; to the hand.
All four of us were laughing at him in the gentlest possible way. They said, he always does this: Handkerchief in the ear, handerchief in the hand. The little boy’s nickname was Noushy, too. What a solemn little fellow.
At the far side of the long and complicated lake that covers it seems several counties, and incorporates a steep-sided volcanic-island-looking outcrop that appears as if it would house a villain from James Bond in an eyrie reached only by helicopter, we reached a tiny town like a picture. Having late lunch there after our descent we saw a freshly married couple get off the same boat and start up the hill towards the only hotel, wheeling one small suitcase. She was still carrying her bouquet but had changed into a chic red frock matched with hot pink spike-heeled shoes. The bell of her hair swung forward every time she looked down at her flowers. At the souvenier shop they paused to talk to an elderly lady and then the bride tucked her hand under the groom’s arm and they climbed upward again.
Upward, upward; windward, snowward. Most of our climbing was done by train and part of it was done on foot. The train is scarlet and shiny, groaning and steep. A series of steel teeth run up the centre of the line to prevent the loaded car from sliding backwards. We got out and walked into a mist that raced down the sides of the mountain exactly as cold air snakes out of a fridge. In the mist we passed a large group of botanists standing with heads bowed as they listened to their group leader, who had crawled under the fence to grab a flower, describing something green and rare. Or something common and brown, I couldn’t tell which, to me Swiss German is an impenetrable dialect. Higher up we passed a woman in sturdy walking boots but dressed in immaculate white pants and a spotless white shirt. We passed many couples on alpenstocks, the cleated walking sticks you use on steep hills, wearing serious but also immaculate hiking gear. So many cows crowded round the dairy that was shaped like an after-ski chalet their bells clattered like a Tibetan or Bulgarian choir. My friend said, the farmer knows the sound, he can tell if one bell is not sounding. On our way back down from the sightless summit, where we had sat for an hour watching mist spurl round the base of the huge communications tower, one of those farmers left his house and picking up a sagging rucksack lying in the open doorway went striding down the hill, looking well-fed and cheerful. He lept the electric fence. We were both wishing we’d brought extra jumpers but this mountain man was dressed in surfer shorts and a dark blue t-shirt. In the tunnel into the summit that leads, mysteriously and lightedly, to a great double-doored lift that brings you up inside the giant restaurant and hotel, it was so cold I wanted to suck on my fingertips. I remembered touching the icy wet wall as we walked into a hole cut in a glacier when I was ten. It wasn’t so cold as that but the chill of forboding forbad me to wander any farther into the leaden heart of this mountain, I had to turn back towards the light.
On the restaurant terrace I watched a woman who looked like Yootha Joyce smoke a cigarette after her meal. Her husband didn’t smoke and it was pretty evident from the way she took in the smoke that this was the love of her life. Her lips pursed on the orange cork-patterned filter sucked and fondled at it so slowly, so intently, I almost felt had she not had a hold of it with her long fingers the entire cigarette would have flown into her windpipe. It was like she was finally breathing. “Please fit your own mask before helping others.” The movement of her cheek muscles, langorous and strong, made me think of the little boy Noushy who had fallen asleep on the ferry.
After the ride back down and our lunch we walked around the pretty foreshore. The Rigi, the mountain we had been on, is called by the Swiss “queen of mountains” and is where in 1903 I think the surveying process began. They built a marker there and from it measured to another mountaintop, and then a third, and then they triangulated. Now they have mapped out all of the surrounding peaks and beautiful etched steel landscapes showed what we would have seen had we been able to see anything. A sign cut into a steel plate fixed on the ground said, Sydney 16520km, with an arrow.
The train down was filled with elderly people, many of them German. The town at the bottom is like a clam growing at the base of a mighty pier. Evidently people honeymoon there. The red and white striped awnings and terraced cafe feel so 1950s I kept fantasizing Sophia Loren was about to saunter around the corner, or maybe Frank Sinatra. It felt like Monaco. In the foreshore park a semi-circle of chairs faced a three-walled corrugated iron shed. A trio was playing, tiredly, dispiritedly, and on the concrete apron in front was an overdressed lady slowly spinning her plump son, chivvying in a sing-song voice, as though making a bear dance. The music was awful. Saccharine and slowed. As we walked past I said to my friend, It’s like the world’s dreariest private function. Writing that, now, I add in my head: I don’t mean all of Switzerland.
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.
At the top of a very high hill yesterday, what in Holland or Denmark would be called a mountain, with a view over all of Switzerland ~ so it seemed ~ my friend taught me to peel dandelion stalks so that they spring into pretty green silvery curls. Behind us a family with very young parents were playing hide and seek. They had built a fire and the father, when we showed up, was juggling with three sticks. As we sat on our sedentary bench facing the green nation, he sprinted round in front of us and flung himself panting on the ground, his eyes gleaming, intent on the figure of his youngest daughter who was counting “eis, zwöi, drü, vier, füf…” Our legs and the legs of the bench blocked him from her and pure animal concentration blocked him from us. It was as though he didn’t see us. My friend gazed down the length of his back then flung her spooling dandelion out into the green. “We used to play that when we were children, too,” she said to me.
A melancholy day. We visited the grave of my friend’s husband. The room where I am sleeping is filled with his things, fishing trophies he won and a fearsomely engraved pewter hard hat with his name on it and, from underneath as I gaze up at the glass shelf, a space where his mind once was.
The graveyard is peaceful and small. It’s by the river. Big gates are closed but not locked. I asked did she want to be alone but no, this was a maintenance visit. Side by side we crouched down and plucked all the dead heads off the hyacinths growing over him. In another part of the graveyard an elderly man was drifting, carrying a candle in his hands. My friend looked surprised when he greeted her and told me afterwards, he had grown so thin she wouldn’t have known him.
