In the late afternoon I walked down to the square. I’ve been indoors now every day of eight weeks. People were sitting round the edge of the grass as though it were a swimming pool they were dangling their legs into. The trees overhead are finally thickening with green.
A man who doesn’t have much had his tiny barrel-shaped speaker out and was blaring the blues. A bystander, so drunk he had lost his consonants, pitched forward and then arced backwards from the hips, hollering the blues. We have all been indoors since winter finally ended. We know the urge to holler. We know the blues.
Here the blues come marching back again, pouring from the settled sky, finally at rest and displaying all its sunny virtuosity which is kept from us in this dark city eight months of the year by thickset cloud.
The sky — the gorgeous preposterously cloudlit heaven of the springday sky. I sit down among the crumpled cherry blossoms, almost grey now in the grass. The sixth floor balcony where two weeks back a man had serenaded us with his saxophone is empty and the windows all dark. I sit watching two stout men drinking their beers, asking myself how is it I would know anywhere in the world they are Germans. Someone across the square sets up a rival speaker blurring AC/DC. Highway to Hell! screams the drunken singer, able to enjoy everything at once. A Turkish man who cannot afford to quarantine is collecting beer bottles, asking everyone first, may I have this. His face has patience and great sweetness. He stows each new bottle in his clanking bag. The pizza shop is open again but only for takeaway, ‘every one of our pizzas is nearly round’, their blackboard boasts. Last year at the end of the summer they had a drinks special chalked there: Soup of the Day — Gin Tonic. A man in a black Volkswagen sleek as a Beemer edges right in to the kerb and leaps out. He is prematurely casual in pink linens with a knotted sweater, it’s not really all that warm but he seems insouciant, he plugs in his car, a rental car, an electric car, and locks the keys inside the glovebox and goes strolling perfectly pinkly away. Like all of us, he is in rehearsal for summer, which is the future: summer 2021 perhaps, we’ll be able to travel, we’ll all be lightly and attractively attired, we will be slim and competent in public places, we’ll be free.
Tag: Germans
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bicycle fascist
I was overtaken on the bike path today by a puzzlingly hostile man. He seemed to have a store of labels and insults saved up and was eager to put them to use. The sun had finally come out. I had ridden clear across town to collect my Ghanaian visa. I was thinking as I rode: honestly there’s nothing like crossing the first bridge to open between East and West Germany in 1989 in a sudden sharp hailstorm to make you want to leave the country for a while.
Later on all the errands and grocery shopping were finally done and as I was cycling home – the clouds broke apart and a glorious sunshine lit the local world. I slowed down and looked about me, enjoying the pretty sky. Indescribable light at this time of year, sometimes. A pinging from behind warned of another, faster cyclist. I veered wobbling to the left, defaulting by accident to my Australian road rules, and the other rider pinged his bell furiously, with small intermissions, four or five times over. He called out to me. “Can you pull over to the right to let a person pass?”
“I have pulled over to the left,” I said, “to let you past.”
He pinged his bell again though he already had my attention. “Are you deaf?”
I said, “What? Are you German?”
“No,” he said, primly, as he passed me. “I am a Swiss. Keep your German fascism to yourself!”
Fuck you, I said, reverting to English, and then the tail of my skirt jammed in the spokes and I shuddered to a stop. As I disentangled myself and set off home I was thinking how quickly we had skipped through the steps to the full apparatus: accusations of physical handicap, warning sirens, curt instructions, national identity and then – within a mere moment, it seemed – we were already arrived at the most unimaginative form of terrorism there is: Fascism.
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the Nazi airfield in summer
I will tell you what Berlin is like in the summer. As I cycle home from a far-distant errand I cross over an overgrown field. Near the hangars, part of the largest manmade structure outside the Great Wall of China, a thicket of neatly rowed white demountable houses has bicycles parked and pot plants blooming. These are some of the one in two hundred Germans who are now Syrians escaping the war.
Six police officers in flak jackets are guarding the asylum seekers, lounging in the afternoon sun. The other side of the wire fence a summer circus has set up its tents; then a rippled concrete path runs past and on the other side of that, a fake beach is lined with volleyball games.
Behind the volleyball courts people have built themselves a tumble of pallet gardens. All of this takes place in the old Nazi airport, which also hosts Berlin’s emerging designer festival in its cavernous and sombre hangars.
On an obsolete airplane bumper of concrete with fading scarlet stripes a woman in a beehive and three-inch stack silver heels is picnicking, with her shirtless golden boyfriend, silver-chested, with his skateboard lying by them. They are both in their sixties. Further into the field two young women are learning to kite surf on vast sails. The runways divide meadows filled with wild flowers and dredged by butterflies, because half the local taxes are paid by artists and the city can’t afford to mow.