On the bridge I pass two young women pushing prams walking with a guy chugging beer. They have their responsibilities, he has his beer. He is much larger than his baby mama, and in order that he can burp, twice, deliberately, right in her face, he has to crouch. Her head is down, she keeps pushing, and that is what makes me want to learn how to say in German: “You are in an abusive relationship.”
Tag: German
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zwiebelchen?
On the markets I passed a tourist with an American accent who was saying to his companion, “Jeez. So much amazing stuff to eat and drink!” Inexplicably he managed this in a tone of complaint. Jet lag? For how, I wondered, can you possibly turn that into a sense of personal injury. Woe is you. I bought a jar of honey; local honey is relatively flavourless because the Linden trees in Berlin have a very mild scent. I bought sweet potato at the potato stall where you can spend half an hour reading her scribbled handmade signs. She extols the nutritional benefits of orange vs purple sweet potatoes and sells fourteen kinds of spud. When I buy a bag of root vegetables she always pops a tiny round golden onion in the top, saying sweetly, “Zwiebelchen?” which means more or less ‘And may I offer you a tiny baby onion… an onionette?’ She’s so cute with it. What’s particularly cute is that she has clearly trained her husband to do this and he clearly doesn’t get it: when I buy from him he’s all blokey and dismal, ticking off the requirements almost visibly in his head: paper bag, turn down the top like a lunch pail, “Oh yes, the onion! Sorry – here, have an onion.” Muttering to himself that he almost forgot to throw that in. My eyes meet hers over the back of his head and we share a moment of feminine protectiveness and love.
The potato lady is an old punk and always has some raddled spud which has started to send out its purplish tendrils, turned upside down for hair and with eye holes nicked in its face with a toothpick. Generally these guys will be carrying a flag or dressed in a scrap of fabric, propped up in front of middlemost bucket. I skirted the Turkish stall holders who sing their wares and scold their customers and fronted up at the endmost cheese stall, where some of the cheeses are eight years old. She also has butter, far younger, in fact churned yesterday. The woman in front of me was buying a slab of butter and as I sometimes do I composed the German sentence in my head while I was waiting. “Auch so ein Stück Butter, bitte.” Ie ‘I’ll have another such slice of butter, please.’ One of my greatest difficulties on the market is I don’t know the words for piece, slice, bunch, punnet – the collective nouns. When I came home with my basket over my arm, my friend was stretching up over her bicycle’s rump to pull my doorbell again. I told her of my triumph and we hugged each other gleefully. We are veterans of Germany’s indefatigably formal and prolonged migration processes, where ordinary German seems to acquire a top hat and a moustache. You see, I told her as we mounted the stairs to eat the Dutch pepper cake I baked this morning: I performed three distinct linguistic somersaults in a row, to get out that sentence intact. First there’s the two different Ks: auch, and Stück. The two different Us, ü and u. Then the two different but similar words, Butter which ends in a dry R, and bitte which ends in the kind of disdainful e we rarely use in Australian English. Out it came flawless. I somersaulted home.
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feierabend
I love how in Germany restaurants closed on Mondays will say, Montag ist Ruhetag. Monday is our day of peace. And every single day, week in, week out, when you are finished your work and knocking off for the day, home time is Feierabend: celebration-evening. People will say to one another consolingly at the checkout: Not to worry, it’s nearly Feierabend.
The peace at one end of the day, festivities at the other: it seems to me somehow an ideal sweetness for the life.
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the lovely man
You know how sometimes two souls collide in a fleeting way, like two bells chiming in different trees, and you never forget that person even if you never again see them or think of them. Well, that happened to me today. A most beautiful man. I went out to buy eggs and to finally drop in and see my friend who runs an exquisite New Berlin gift shop – it is filled with lovely things – he sells liquors and vodkas brewed locally. He sells handmade cards on creamy laid paper which have perfect arrangements of tiny dried flowers on them. Each card is initialed by the lady who makes it and inside is a little sheet of paper with her wavering handwriting – she is quite old, he says, and lives in Bavaria – explaining which wildflowers she used for this card. After much hesitation among the meadows I chose one with violets and something called in German “geese flowerlings.” The lady’s name is Rotraud – that’s her first name. I imagine her an elderly maiden, Germanic, pure-hearted, fieldly.
While we were standing chatting a woman walked in whom I had passed on my way into the snooty health food store, she has a seamed and brown face round like a nut and he showed me the cards he also sells with her photographs on them. I was still reeling. Ahead of me browsing in the health food store opposite I had seen this lovely man, baby straps wrapped around his chest, long wrinkled pants and comfy shoes and somehow the back of his head attracted me. At the egg shelves we ran against each other and looked into one another’s eyes and smiled. I like you! I like you, too. As I was walking home feeling so filled with ardour and friendship he cycled past, slow and leisurely, making faces at his baby who lay smiling in the little wooden cart pushed in front of the bicycle. Hey, I said. Hey, he said. I came home to the man whose loveliness is known to me in more compelling detail and the sound of whose voice from outside the door lifts my heart. He took a photo of me in my crowded overalls, every pocket bulging with spinach, bananas, nectarines, tea. I put some water on to boil the eggs whilst telling him all about it. We gloated over the four different kinds of amazing German breadrolls I had chosen and their funny names. My favourite breadroll name is ‘Schrippen,’ a kind of ordinary light white bun. I bought potato rolls, farmer’s rolls, dinkel rolls and poppy and sesame fruit rolls, lifting each one out of its hutch with the long-handled scissor provided there for just that purpose.
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my favourite moments of the May Day march
The people dancing on bus stop rooves.
The leggy punk marching in ugg boots.
The giant skinhead I followed for several blocks who had a gentle face, was six foot eight or nine, and had a dolphin tattoo round the back of his skull.
The raddled Australian surfer turning steaks on his roadside barbecue and serving, in Strine, with ginger hair falling all over his face. Hours later I saw him propping up the corner of a pub, huge beer in his hand, giant smile on his face; he toasted us wildly, no splashing.
The fact that 25,000 people marched and the roar from the crowd that went up when this was announced.
The fast pace! Australian marches are often rather leisurely. At March in March last year we spent much of the route actually dancing. This was like 12,000 people running for a bus, for miles: actually three hours. A kind of political marathon.
The old dude, late into his seventies, who had modified a bicycle trailer with boombox speakers and was blaring the deepest, darkest old school hip hop for everybody’s edification.
The young guy who having accidentally kicked over a bottle someone had left standing in the street scooped up all the broken pieces and carried them to the side of the road to stash neatly under an overflowing bin.
The fact that people were marching with beers in their hands but there was very little broken glass.
The line of police officers blackened and bulky in head to toe riot gear, boots tapping to the music as they stood otherwise impassive with arms folded.
The smart punk who was combining politics with business by dragging a very narrow steel apparatus on wheels, strung with four large stripey airport bags, into which he harvested other people’s discarded bottles, choosing those with the highest deposit.
The stupid punk sitting in the middle of the road with his mates who refused to get up when an ambulance came sweeping towards him, and the ambulance driver who simply sped round him without bothering to swerve.
The pink blossoms fallen like tissues all along the centre strip of Kottbusserdam.
The blue, blue sky and the green, green trees and the river of black in between.
The people watching and waving from their windows along the route.
The bumper stickers people seemed to have clapped onto parked cars as they marched by, or which perhaps drove in on them, like: Sure. You can be a Nazi. It just makes you really crapola.
The hand painted sign two well-dressed women were carrying which said Out of the way, capitalism, the next decisions will be made by all of us.
The City rubbish collectors clad in hi-vis orange who were dancing as they swept up, dragging a wheeled trash can.
The piles of rubbish people had built after the bins were filled, in planter pots and around the bases of trees.
The intense conversations later that night sitting outside our friend’s photography studio and the various people who kept trying to come in because in Kreuzberg, a wide-open living room resembles a bar.
The songs that kept dragging me at a run back down to the milling square just when I got settled, for more dancing.
The raised cobbled square at the end of the march were everybody was dancing to a really good DJ. The silent disco that transpired when it came time to switch the music off and the DJ started handing out headphones for a 20 quid deposit.
The moon that came up as the sun finally went down.
The headphones, and the song whose name I didn’t know that pierced my waters as I skated under the fizzing trees in silence.
The dancing.
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belovedly
Oh, Germany. Sometimes I am just so grateful to you! I came three years ago, for a week, with a suitcase of summer clothes. Stayed on and stayed. Met a man. Made some friends. Found a Kiez, a barrio, a neighbourhood. Now I am back and the dense sweet piercing chill of this supposedly Spring evening has lifted and carried me when I most needed the lifting, I needed the carry.
Here’s what happened to me today. I kept running aground. Couldn’t work out why and there were things I was itching to do. Eventually I figured out: it was because I was in pain. This happens irregularly, more often than you’d like. It’s character building. I rang the osteopath, who is in the next street, and she was available within hours. So I just went to bed to wait. Reading my book. Third book this week, not a bad one. I like this osteo and she treats me, after three or four visits, familiarly, friendshippy: Lass dich mal wieder sehen, she sang out a month ago when I last left. Let yourself be seen, come back again. She reminds me of the Melbourne friend of my mother and I thought of her as motherly, underwinging, kind.
This time seemed to bring earlier events up to a clearer pitch. She wanted me to lie on my back shirtless, was reluctant to hand over a towel. She let her hands dig into my shoulders and then brought her face rather close to mine, breathing deeply in. For long moments we lay and stood like this and naked high in the sky as the blue faded to black I let my mind wash off into its meditative dream: life is deep and long, worlds are a forest, there is nothing I can change here but I bring my attention to bear on this shipwrecked beach, breathing. I surpassed it all with calm. When I got home I felt wrung out and bleakly alone. It is difficult working out how to say in German, you are too near, I want to be covered.
When I say home, I mean my hotel room. Two months ago my honey and I had a fight, it was 4am and we simply couldn’t bear it any more, and since then I have been living in an hotel and we find ourselves gradually so much more comfy and at ease. The reason for our fight was: two of us, plus one medium-sized dog, living in one room for months on end wore us down. We are both loners and creative types, used to the silence. We tried alternating headphones, I tried writing on the floor of the tiny bathroom and in cafes. It was snowing outside and no one could simply go out for a walk and lose themselves in the greenery. What greenery. Anyway I came home to my hotel, which is quiet and sedate and very old-fashioned; they let me stay here for cheap because they like writers. I was hungry; it was midnight; surely everything would be closed. I wrapped myself again and set out across the square. This bar I like was open, glowing with the hum. Serious German conversation at all tables. The one table in the window, where the cat sleeps, empty for me. I ordered onion soup from the menu open “til one hour early”, which means, til one o’clock in the morning. I ordered a beer. I let the stumbling crank and rumble of benign Germanness wash me all round. I watched the bar cat, sleeping in the hammock of herself. Her name is Zappa. Two gentlemen next to me had the chess board out, but it took them a long while to get down to playing. Something they were discussing took up all of their attention the way a paper towel blots milk. I love listening to German men talking over beers with their friends. There’s so little machismo. Their voices are often deep but they are excited by the ideas, by the shared experience, they converse. The cook, who has biker boots and a long skinny plait, came out carrying my onion soup and a basket of four different kinds of bread. I took my book out and just stared at it. The words printed on the pages were stars and I let them carry me, they were carpets, dancing on the orange horizon where one never meets oneself, where everything is wild, where languages are ribbons not unlike long-eared underwater plants writhing in the salt and combing themselves back and back and back, illustrious, clean. I sat there until the detritus of my day had sanded out of my bathers and then the warm oil of it lit me all the way home and I will carry this into my sleep, a moreish story.
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republic of unicornia
Making a pun in a foreign tongue: Lord, but it makes me feel smart. My friend is pfaffing about online & calls me over as I drift past. “Look! My unicorn name is: Soft Beautiful Erdbeerkaese.” Soft, beautiful, strawberry cheese. “Wow!” I say. And then lightning strikes. “So if you ever became King of the Unicorns, your unicorn name would be: Soft Beautiful Erdbeerkaiser.” The Emperor of Strawberries.
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the peace yard
Walking home down rainy streets my last night in this house. Tomorrow unnest, budge myself, nudge, shift. Winter has landed with its big wings. Now the warmth of the indoors folds us in, the subway’s roaring throat, we all descend, we bring our dogs and biscuits. I saw two small boys fighting in the subway train, one slammed his hand down on the other one’s shoulder their sister put back her head and roared. They were hipheight to everyone’s delicate glances, the mother looked estranged. In this city if they serve you tea it is a mess of hot water in a clear jar (hard, chalky water, that dries white) and with spoon and bag of leaves laid on the white milky ceramic… neatly. Effervescent neatness, the German delight: effortless neatless and high art and kitsch. German joy, Friede; German graveyard, Friedhof. I’m leaving I’m leaving. I’m coming I’m coming: Australia wait for me. Maybe forever as jet blurting travel grows inexcusably wrong. Standing stranded on the traffic island as the creamy lights pour in three strands down the hill like pearls and the crimson lights pour like Christmas up: I said something aloud to myself in German, I started to cry. Thank you for your hospitality, your kindness, your warmth to all the strangers, your strangeness, your calm. The leaves shaped like webbed hands that wave in the wind. The strings of lights under the lip of each awning. The Grüss dich, the Tschüssi in shops, the dogs. In 24 mornings more, I’ll be gone.
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unforgiveably gone
Today my hair kept tangling in the buttons at the back of my coat. I spent a long time standing in doorways or under trees, thoughtfully fishing there with my fingers, dreamily, gingerly unwinding. I’ve been spending time in a cafe that was opened “ca. 1930” by the stout pretty dark-haired woman whose blurred photograph on the front page of the menu (hand-written) may have been one of the last ever taken of her. Berlin’s dark, sour, staining history runs alongside every step, like the raised seam of bricks which traces where the much more recent Wall has been carted off and destroyed: maybe she was torn down, maybe deprived of her life and livelihood, maybe dispatched, grossly outraged, starved, murdered, ruined, unforgivably gone.
The brass plaques, size of a cigarette packet, that here and there replace one or two cobblestones with a name or a family of gone names are, I found out, the work of one artist.
I spent much of the day in her cafe, writing and writing, had a bowl of broth with pancakes rolled and thinly sliced into it, lingered, in the air spiked with smoke, over a menu of dishes I couldn’t understand. Because even where I can translate, the concepts are unfamiliar and dim: Leberknoedel, Schupfnudeln, alles mit Kartoffelecken.
When I came out the blue hour had struck and everything felt festive. I went into a hat shop and wound my way along the walls right to the back. I picked up and fingered things, stroking and probing. I stood in front of their long polished mirror wearing a crimson top hat that was too big and came down over my brows.
My new Kiez is studded with turreted buildings, an old tollhouse, an old gatekeep. Many of them now are restaurants and the golden interiors, the white clothed tables, the solicitous bending of waiters in the windows – the shimmering, old-glazed, inviting windows – were so irresistible. I resisted. I went into the supermarket which bursting like fruit from a basket was so much more vivid, more lively than the dreamily acquiescent twilighttime street, and filled with families. Stubbornly determined to cook in my two-room palace of hired minimalism which has no pepper grinder, no chopping block, and no knives, I snatched up a small sack of potatoes, some garlic and onions, a roll of butter. I have powdered stock and a Swiss army knife and I reckon it’s enough to make soup.
It’s so cold. The insides of the windows are cold. Not too cold. Not just yet. Deliciously so. My landlady hovers like a ghost in the hollow of her white apartment, her beauty, her wide frightened blue eyes with their large pupils staring like bullets. I found our bed last night to be beautifully cosy and soft, woke to a window of tree. Once I’d had a bath there seemed little else to do and I felt so happy about that.
In the evening after I’d moved in, before the bath, I went out exploring, feeling hollow and hungry inside. A restaurant golden and beckoning softened the corner of my new street. I stood shivering in the dark for ten minutes and walked up and down and up and down again before I found the courage to walk in the door and thus enter its enchanted, entire, intact civil world. It was disconcerting, after all this long travel, how hard it felt just to walk in. Intruding on the community of this new district, unknown to me like a new city, by this decision to eat out took far more courage than I’d expected. I so often eat alone and I like that. But I guess my adventurousness is exhausted.
In Melbourne I used to notice this, every morning even when I’d been writing over my breakfast in the same cafe every day for months: the forcefield that people establish or emit when they form an unconscious community, shiftingly, by being all in the premises, by forming a varied, large party, strikes me like shyness buzzing electric across the doorway of every new cafe, and always has; this felt far harder.
Now, this evening, everything feels different. I can feel I have found my way. The new part of town is becoming my Kiez. Its dark streets of houses feel now already less intimidating and austere, more quietly homey and interesting and wan. My sublet in its dank courtyard is divided from the welcoming bustle of shops by a river of rushing lights pouring the hill, like sand, from one glass to another. My sight clears and I start to see. Not everyone here has money. Between the lifestyle shops are the lifeline shops, where hungry people find what they eat. I am hungry. I’m always so hungry. At the supermarket checkout a man in front of me said to the cashier, Holst du mir mal vierzig Cent? Ich habe keine Brille mit. Can you grab me the forty cents? I don’t have my glasses. Obligingly the guy sorted through the coins, patiently, turning them and showing them til he found the right ones. The guy behind me made a friendly remark and I turned it to advantage – a politician! Laying a finger on his bright yellow toilet rolls I asked, Have you ever thought of trying out the recycled kind? No, he said, in a tone that showed it’s never crossed his mind. It’s just that the trees take such a long time to grow, I said. And it takes a long time to replace the ones we chop. He gave me his twinkling smile. Next time, he promised, I’m going to remember that. I piled the stuff into my knapsack and took up the mesh bag of potatoes by its uppermost root. The corner of the sack yielded a perfect potato, an archetype, shaped and sized exactly like an egg. I closed my fingers and palm right round it and used that to carry them home, internally a handle. The high blue wintery sky and red lights were so absorbing that I accidentally walked right past my street and found a brand new park. The grass was still dimly green but the trees already blackened by night. Little children darted round the path, excited, calling out. As I turned back for home I saw a little family, with very young children, slowly climbing the damp stone steps carrying candle lanterns. The parents’ lamps genteelly leap-frogged each step, one by one, the candles swinging three feet up from the stone. But the littlest child, to whom walking is still a labour of concentration, held his lantern outstretched and swung it right forward with the effort of each step’s climb. I came home and put the potatoes on and put on all her lamps. The window above the bare desk is a square of black in this white soft room and I can hear as I’m typing the dark-throated toll of some old church’s beautiful, wild, German bells.
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election earring
A federal election approaches Germany, they’ve a Conservative government to vote back in. It’s an unequal fight: the sitting Chancellor, Angela Merkel, is called “Mummy” by the press and one of her would-be opponents is the Pirate Party (they’re good, but they’re goofy). This town is festooned with candidates’ placards. Barely a one unadorned with some form of wry or dark or daft commentary. Most common, because easiest, is the black-marker scribble under the nose which denotes A Moustache Like Hitler’s.
One of the locally beloved candidates approached in the markets last weekend, handing out leaflets in person. He is well into his eighties. On his election posters he appears to be wearing lipstick and a light powder, has in his glaringly perfect false teeth. His posters are the least defaced. Today I saw a poster on a bus stop which had grainy B&W pictures of the two major party leaders with the legend, “Who sucks most? Vote with your gum.” People had stuck wads of gum onto the faces of each, an almost literal vox pop. On the poles down the cafe strip I noticed official campaign placards have been interspersed, must have been overnight, with photos of cheesy-looking 70s fashion models from large-format old magazines. Mounted on cardboard and strapped between candidates they look to me eminently electable. Though possibly the recent experience of picking through the bizarre and downright crazy single-issue Senate candidates for Australia may have soured my outlook.
