Today was a sad and complicated day and I couldn’t get myself off the couch. Life seemed at once too little and too much and I lay coiled under a faded rug that I love, cat curled on top of me, reading one trashy novel after another. Just now with the afternoon sun streaming in I went out to admire the work my incorrigible companion has been making: he is determined to transform the weedy, shaded wasteland out back into a luscious lawn, “so,” he said, “in the summer you can lie down on the grass and read your book.” He went to the hardware store and bought boxes of light-and-shade lawn seed and some kind of strewable powdered fertiliser. He yanked out all the flowering weeds and raked up dried twigs thrown down from the large camphor laurel that spreads its branches over our tiny yard, into a furry, untidy pile in one corner. He made a proper compost pile. The old man who lives next door and spends his days sitting either end of a splendid gold-figured couch in a little garden shed with his best friend struggled over on his stick to see what went on. He is Italian and speaks so little English and in so husky and broken a tone it was almost impossible for us to understand each other. He said, “No rain.” The grass would not grow. “I know,” I said, rolling my eyes and pointing – “Optimist.” “No sun,” he said, indicating the tree with its complication of fine branches. “Yes,” I said. “Maybe we are lucky,” said the man scattering fertiliser. Our neighbour gazed across the yard. He pointed to the huge shaggy mango tree two doors down. “I plant that.” He was immaculately dressed, a feat which in an older person living alone fills my throat with painful tears. He told us his grandchildren used to play in this yard and that is why he’s put the plastic netting up, to protect the lady (Mrs Something, I couldn’t decipher her name) who sold this house to our landlord from having to rescue their balls all day long. He told me his wife died, five years ago, and when I said, “I’m so sorry,” his face was consumed with sadness fresh and undigested. Mrs Something has died too. Now he rents out the top floor of his house to the man who two days ago knocked on our door with five rooting sprigs of Roman basil tenderly wrapped in dampened “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” paper towel and then kept moist with a layer of cling wrap. He had attached with string a little label written in cursive, “Roman Basil. Very good for eating.” This tenant has filled the Italian man’s concreted yard with pots of herbs and vegetables and sometimes glances out his top window to wave to us on our shaded verandah. It’s a long time since I’ve had such wonderful neighbours. The Italian man rested on his stick, watching. He explained, or I think he did, that he is waiting for his sister who calls every morning from Venice. Talking about the death of his wife and the death of Mrs Something from this house he patted his chest with a knotted hand. “I too, soon.” “Me too,” I said, “eventually. Happen to us all.” “No,” he said, shaking his head, smiling: “92! 92!” It astonishes me how some people can be so self-centred and cruel and others light their eyes on the world like birds resting on a beautiful branch: the fire in their belly is a generous flame, lighting everything around it with compassion and love; were it not for those people I would not know how to make a home of this strange and wonderful, terrible world.
Tag: garden
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I slept out
Last night in Switzerland. I slept out. The moon disentangled itself from the cherry tree and slowly drew a shallow course across the horizon, pulsing through the cloud its fitful gleams. Every time I opened my eyes the stalks and undercarriages of daisies on the bush by me struck dark green and white as white into the grey moon sky. Airplanes drew chalk lines back and forth at long intervals: there is something more for me to learn here. Nearer by far a single mosquito visited, penetrating sleep in its several manifestations. I slapped myself again upside the head. I could hear two people talking quietly on the verandah in the apartments downstream. I could hear the river’s greedy mumblings, little sucking and slurping rushes and a longer, darker bass dragging underneath. In Berlin to orient myself I will dip my feet one by one in the Spree and tell myself as so often I have told, My darling, All water is one.
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dochdach, dochdach
Back in Berlin for a few days: what a strange feeling. Now there is no snow on the ground and the trees have appeared from nowhere, they are green, green, green. We ate at a Turkish grillhouse where you sit around a glass-cased cooktop fired with coals, onto which four brawny and frankly handsome men in white shirts loaded blade after blade of minced meat, chicken wings, lamb ribs, skewer after skewer of whole, red tomatoes and prongs of scarlet peppers like jewels. They scoop the heat together in a bottomless tin of blackened aluminium. Everything stinks of cookstove fuel. We drank several copper tumblers apiece of ayran, the salty fresh yoghurt drink, eyeing the mirrored cabinet of meats: a tray of kidneys, maroon and flecked with gristly white, a tray of ribs ready to be sliced and grilled, a tray of chops, a tray of wings. Afterwards a long, long bicycle ride through the city forest which leads in from a smurfish village of cutesy summer houses with adorable, tiny gardens. The sign at the side gate says “Freiheit” but the “Freiheit” gate is locked. Everything as pretty as a thousand words and worth a picture. A young waiter smoking on the gingerbread verandah of his Black Forest-styled Gasthaus told us, using the informal “you”, “you can’t get out that way.”
Drank a beer, one of those long German beers, on board a boat on the river which has a wooden cabin built on it, housing the kitchen and bar. There is grass growing on the roof. Grass, and little purple flowers. I stood in front of it blocking the way with my bike saying over and over and over, “It has grass! On the roof!” I had never seen that before: grass! on the roof! I am tired from travelling and the temperature has dropped ten degrees. When Berlin’s petticoat woods tilted up to meet the plane I felt a rush of unaccustomed homesickness: Australia, be less far away. Australia, be less vast. I miss you though I had almost forgotten, persuaded myself I had forgotten. This big city is not my city and that river is not my river. Doch.
