Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Germany

  • calvados, ahoy

    Miserable with flu I staggered down to the markets in search of star anise, lemons, and fresh coriander. There was a golden-lit stall with a radio blaring which sells raclette, a stinky, melty, fondue-like cheese, and “hot apple punch.” Hot apple punch! Irresistible. I came round the front of the stall and presented myself; moments later the bloke, who had been sneaking a quick durry out the back, lifted the flap of his tent and introduced himself with the flourish of a magician: “You see? I am already there.”

    I’d like an apple punch, I said, and he said, lifting a golden bottle and tilting it towards me, would you like a shot of calvados in it? Good on a chilly night. In German they say, ein Schluck: a swallow. Oh yes, I said, absolutely: I am wanting it against the flu and I think with the calvados it will be just… “Hervorragend,” he finished for me. Capital, tremendous, outstanding.

    Carrying my steaming cup I went around the vegetable stalls, gathering a bunch of coriander, a quiver of cinnamon quills. At the cheese stall where she cuts slabs of butter fresh from a giant block I bought eggs for the weekend, waiting til she had served the family of Syrian refugees whose host, a Berlin woman in her fifties, hastily appeared to translate for them. “These are really good eggs,” she said, using gesture: “they’re organic.” The Syrian man wanted the eggs but he and his three children screwed up their faces at the pervasive stench of over-mature German cheeses, something they have perhaps never encountered before. The stallholder met my eye and very gently we started laughing. “Stinks, hey?” she said cheerfully to the youngest child, holding out the swinging plastic bag of eggs invitingly. When I got home I put my stock pot on the stove and have added to it the following ingredients, a witches’ brew for colds and flu that I have sworn on for twenty years: it deals with aching bones, the twitching burning skin, the sore throat and feeling of lassitude: heat in a pot full of water for an hour or two, slowly, then serve each cupful with honey and the juice of half a lemon. You’re welcome.

    Witches Brew

    6 cloves garlic, split in half
    5-6 chilies
    half-thumb chunk of ginger, sliced
    6 anise stars
    5-6 quills cinnamon
    rind of a lemon or a lime
    bunch of fresh coriander

    Simmer one hour in 8-10 cups of water. Let stand one hour. Serve each cupful with honey and juice of half a lemon.

  • 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.

  • wake in flight

    In my dream I was in this amazing cafe taking five floors of an abandoned building in Brisbane. Right at the top was a little terrace looking out only on treetops. There was a waitress dressed up in a robot suit she could not see out of which blinded her from doing her work, she struggled cutely from table to table and her colleagues were laughing gamely but I thought: how annoying. A boy who wanted to move to Scotland the next day & was saying farewell said to me, that is the thing about Brisbane! just when you leave something incredible opens up in the trees. Then I was talking with this man who lived on a remote island where he showed me how to find my way to his camp and said, this is where the olds are doing a lot of planning to take their Country back. Then he came in to wake me up pulling up the dense shutters and the sound of the dog snuffling and squeaking outside the door and it is time we went to the markets, we direly need vegetables and the birds are teeming life is like a dream, only people have chilly creaking jackets and their hug is cold because they have been sitting outside scented with coffee and the wind is icy although the sun is warm.

  • citizen’s arrest

    I walked into one of those joyless lunchtime buffets so ill-suited to Chinese cuisine. The name of the place was China-Haus, China-Garten, something like that. They had long ranks of bains marie, tepid with cornflour. Another woman came in behind me, rather young with a lot of glossy hair spilling over her parka, and stood there pulling off her gloves. “Do you have coffee?” she asked the waitress. “Not… not really.” “Oh good. I’ll have a latte machiatto. Do you have aloe vera juice?” I started to laugh. The waitress looked over her shoulder at the kitchen, uneasily. “We basically just have normal coffee.” “Oh,” said the coffee loving yoga monster, dismally. She was so bewildered that I sort of fell in love with her humanity.

  • writing hardily

    Today I was writing in a cafe and when I pulled out my laptop to transcribe out of a messy notebook the woman next to me got up and slid between our tables, saying something over her shoulder under her breath. “I’ve just come from the office…” I was wondering why she would feel so insecure that she would need to explain her movements to a stranger when it sank in – as she sank in, to the bench seat opposite – what it was that she had said: “Ich komme gerade vom Büro, I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” The funny thing was she was clutching her mobile phone like it was a huge reefer she was about to lift on the ball of the hand to her lips, and the flickering of her screen had caught my eye and momentarily bothered me, before I caught myself and realised how insane it was to resent someone for poring over their screen while I pored over mine. She was staring at me across the room, I raised my shoulders and spread my hands. “Was, denn?” She called the waitress over and repeated her complaint in the exact same words: “I’ve just come out of the office and I don’t want people doing their office work around me.” Around the flower arrangement she pointed me out. The waitress shrugged helplessly, her face relapsing from an attempt at sympathy into a foolish smirk. What could she say? I let go the sward of ideas I had built in the air as they demolished themselves and dissolved in the face of such tiny, such concerted ill-will, and took out my notebook again and tried to let my gaze fall into the precise point of the middle distance where happiness and contemplation and, it sometimes seems, poetry lie thick on the chilly air like leaves on the ice. I told myself this place – a “literary cafe” attached to a bookshop – would not exist if not for writers like me and took up my pen again and foraged on.

  • peeling back the years as trees

    Oh, I love my little desk in my little borrowed room. At night the night is all around and silent, absolutely silent unless you hear the unending majestic progress as if across tundra after tundra of the wind. This desk is surrounded on all sides by literal towers of the possessions of the host who’s put up with us for three weeks now but in its centre in the circle of the lamplight I find peace. Television quacking in German from the far end of the house. The book I am reading face down with its spine open to the pool of gold. Robinson Crusoe. Incredibly racially presumptive. He saves the savage from himself. I wish that I could do that for me. Tonight I took my bowl of “Eierschnee”, that is, meringue mix or as they call it “egg snow” across to the family household three doors away closer to the mouth of the woods. I stowed it in their lovely oven; ours was blooming with pizza. “See you soon!” she said, and an hour or two later stashed with pizza we were back, for a round-table game of Risk. The man next to me said, That’s not in the rules, and I stuck out my hand. “Wanna bet a million, billion, squazillion dollars?” I said in English. “I’ve been playing this game since I was ten.” We somehow were laughing all night. Presumably because nobody actually cared about winning the world – or, as it is calling in the German language rules (snicker), “freeing” the world country by country. I acted out the illustration I had seen in an article on the US today: photo of a bold swollen warcrafty flying boat, which dipping through the clouds was labelled: “This is a Freedom Machine. It seeks out people who have no freedom and gives them some.” So there we were five of us around the table, giving each other some freedom.

    I had a long bath this afternoon and as I let out the water and stood up a name, or idea, came to me. How profoundly refreshing it feels to think none of such ideas or insights for three hours while we visit and a sixth person comes home, no, I don’t want to play, I just don’t want to talk, been talking all day and now I will just sit here and give advice. I understood what he said and what everyone said and thought, how proud I am to play a whole game, whole evening, in German, hooray for me. I am a guest. It is such sweet and cloudy relief, I have almost no thoughts, it seems. So long as I cook, sometimes, and wash up a lot, and let out my bath water and bring in wood; so long as the dog gets walked and there is someone to photograph the forest and to notice the seams and quiet crickles in the water of the old winding river as wide as a small moat; so long as I stop at the crooked gate to talk to the brown family of fuzzy goats who all crowd curious yet abashed on their hillside in case you have brought them anything sweet; then I have no other job while I’m here, and that’s why we have stayed so long, sleeping 13 hours a day and eating like a caterpillar, book after book, salad after greens, and one vista on another of the quiet level countryside where so many long generations of tall Germans have settled back into themselves after the various empires including their own. Shame is sodden in the ground here as almost everywhere. Pride and shame. The candles flickering all night in the little cemetery, the tap hung with half a dozen green watering cans. The wreaths on doors. The fact that among Germans, a game of mock war brings these stinging and pungent jokes quoting the Führer and certain words, “Tomorrow from 8.45 we fight back” for example, can reduce them all to weeping and slapping themselves on the thigh with mirth.

    Laughter is the only weapon of sanity that insanity cannot corrupt. So I will keep mine high. We walked round the block, which is a brown mown long field, and passed no more than a half-dozen houses with their scratchings in chalk year after year where the Sternsinger, the star singers, dressed in robes and following a star to Bethlehem have passed; he pulled out his harmonica and the medium dog ran his own way among the rivets, and I told him our story: We are just a minstrel couple decamped from our last home, passing under moonlight and the two large mother-trees. These trees are merely a bunch of sticks, like witches’ ravelled hands. We’ve nothing but our little dog, our mouth organ, our magic bag of words. We pass under the windows of the village, they hear us in their sleep. The land is settling, for winter, folding itself under into its ice. I will be gone by then and the land won’t remember because this is not any of my ancestral home.

  • walnut hound

    We are travelling with a medium-sized hound named Felix and tonight I learned something uncanny about him. There is a bowl of walnuts on the low coffee table by the horde of tealight candles, santa-shaped geegaws, and slinky Christmas lights. The adult son of the house picked up a walnut. “Now watch,” he instructed, and gave it to the dog. Felix stretched himself under grandma’s chair and propped his two paws out in front of him. Delicately he turned his head first left then right, cracking the walnut shell from either end with his long white teeth. The turns of his head on the floor looked so adoring, he held the nut between his two hairy paws. Having dispersed the shell he spent a few juicy-sounding minutes extracting for himself the slivers of meat and scarfing them down ecstatically. I’ve never seen a dog behave like that. When I cracked a walnut for myself – with a nutcracker – he came and sat beside me and gazed with reproachful intensity at every movement. They told me how Felix climbs on the couch and puts one paw up on the coffee table so he can reach the bowl.

    The other discovery I made this evening is that if you crack a walnut open cleanly enough, the halved nut with its blade of faintly gleaming wood still attached down the centre can be made to flutter through the air and resembles a tiny butterfly.

  • now I don’t want you to get too excited

    All my life people have been telling me not to get too excited about things. They say, “I don’t want you to be disappointed.” And the truth is the thing I have so vehemently looked forward to almost never resembles the picture I have built in my mind. It’s often disappointing. But it feels like I experience the same thing twice: in glorious living freshnicolour in my own imagination, and then the worldly version, frangible in a different way, that arises through weather, and temperament, coincidence and sheer human effort.

    This afternoon we went out of the house and walked into the forest. There is ice on the ground. It’s all two colours: the listless copper of dead leaves and the warping green of moss. My favourite plant, each mound of it a tiny city. Tramping in silence we passed several small clumps of people with their dogs. My tramping companion who by now knows me rather well asked casually, “What would you have preferred this afternoon? Walk in the forest? Or a nice coffee shop.” “Oh!” I said, “I would love to go to a nice coffee shop.” These while plentiful in Berlin are thin on the ground in the outback towns. “What if I told you there was a coffee shop in the forest? Would you like to visit there, on our walk?” “A coffee shop? In the forest?” This has been a dream of mine for a long while, I always complain there is no coffee shop when we are out walking. I began to imagine what it would be like. “Maybe it’ll be like a little ski chalet, with an open fireplace where you can toast marshmallows on long sticks.” I was hopping with excitement. “Actual sticks, and then when the marshmallow’s toasted you dunk it in your hot chocolate. The hot chocolate comes in steins.” My partner gave me an old-fashioned look. I said, “Maybe there’ll be Swedish girls with white-blonde hair, wearing ugg boots and onesies. Maybe they serve Glühwein!” I grabbed his arm. “I’m so excited about the coffee shop I can hardly breathe.” “Do you want to see some old ruins, an old castle?” he said. “It would mean putting off the coffee shop a while longer. About a half an hour.” We cut across the main path and took a winding way uphill. As we rose up from road level we could see a couple of triangular German houses built under a clump of willows, with a little brook running past in front. “That’s where the hobbit-folk live,” I told him, “and in the warmer months they put up a maypole and dance around it by moonlight. Those fields are where they grow their magic beans.” “How can you tell?” “Oh,” I said, “you can see it just by the look of the houses.”

    The castle is actually an eighth-century farmhouse built within an acre of fields, the whole pasturage surrounded by high stone walls on a hilltop, with round look-out posts on all its corners. The dry stone walls have worn away and remain in only three or four places, but a large sign on the path up the hill shows how it once would have been. It was so cold on the hilltop, with a view of the green countryside all around. The ground was slushy. The wind was icy. The path downhill was treacherous. Not far now to the coffee shop, I thought. “Maybe they’ll serve tankards of ale, warmed by a red hot poker.” “A poker?” We were speaking in English. “It’s kind of a stick made of metal. You heat up the poker in the fire til it’s glowing hot, and then you just plunge it into your mug, to heat the ale.” “Really?” “Yes, in medieval times. Because otherwise, it was so miserable, living in these drafty stone houses. No heating. Dressed in stinking animal furs.” He stopped, grabbing a tree branch to prevent himself careening down the hill. “Look: try not to get too excited about it. I doubt they serve tankards of ale. And they might not even be open.” Indeed the buildings looked medievally dingy and unlit. There is a very deep stream that rushes by in front, with an old earthern bridge trampled over an arch of stone; the mill wheel stands motionless and the water pours past fast and loud. A granary or old barn built on the other side displays its mullioned windows. We went round the side of the third building, which had a series of unlit lamps stationed in its tiny ground-level windows. It looked like an old wayside inn. The side door had thick panes of glass let into it and from inside a faint light was beckoning.

    An overweight nun was taking coffee with her family. Our dog growled at their dog. A few growling Germans were seated outside in a kind of glass atrium that had been thrown out of the stone wall and clad, inside, with green plastic astroturf. They were smoking with gusto and beers. There was no one else about, but from the kitchen out the back a sound of clashing pans and shouting came through the green-painted door. It all seemed to have been redecorated with great enthusiasm in the mid-90s. We sat down at a long table made from fake wood and after a leisurely interval one of the men smoking out in the gardenhouse came and asked us, “Was darf’s sein?” He had filter coffee, teabag tea, and apple strudel, served with a distinctly canned custard. There was a real fire burning, in one of those glass-fronted cast iron stoves. I guess it should have been rather disappointing; I guess if I learned to rein in my imagination I would have only the stolid reality to endure, and never the wraithlike phantasy. On the other hand many’s the time the world in its unreachable immediacy has blown my own thought-pictures aside like so many dull orange leaves. I watched the dogs on our way home to the car park sniffing and prancing at each other; the little dozing houses; the burbling stream. I couldn’t work out if it was reasonable to expect myself to apply the control of imagination that I use, say, when someone’s describing a painful operation over dinner and I need to keep eating, to random coffee houses in the German woods. Castles collapse in forests, you know, as well as in the air. All I know is that that chalet with its steaming mugfuls of cocoa is mine and nothing short of Alzheimers can ever take it away from me.

  • frauenpower

    Tiny revolutions in other people’s lives, I just can’t stop making them. When we got here and had eaten our first meal together I said to our hostess, No, I’ll wash up. Because as everybody knows, it’s not on for the person who cooks to wash up as well. I made sure to say it loudly and clearly in front of her husband and all her grown children, but got mere glassy looks in exchange. “Cathoel is very industrious,” she noted, approvingly, later, to her son. Christmas morning I made the only grandchild thank her after she’d been brought a cup of cocoa when everyone else was drinking coffee. She decided she’d like some once her grandmother had already sat down, and without hesitation the grandmother left her own breakfast untouched and got up again.

    I couldn’t bear to see how everybody sat down at the long, laden table and started saying, “Some jam would be nice,” and then when she had already returned from fetching it, “Oh, you know what? Let’s have some dark bread as well.” Tonight my partner cooked and I washed up. Afterwards we played cards, just him and his mum and his dad and me. The father got up and got beers. As I got up to go to the kettle I announced, “And I’ll take a cup of tea… does anybody else want a cup of tea?” With slight embarrassment my partner corrected my German: “No, Cathoel, in this case you say ‘I’m going to make a cup of tea.’ ‘I’ll take a cup of tea’ is for when you’re expecting a waitress to bring it to you.” “Yes,” I said, primly, “I was making a joke. Because I’ve noticed in this household people just sit there and say, I’ll take a cup of tea, and then your mother instantly gets up and goes into the kitchen.” His mother began to laugh. I’ve never seen her laugh so heartily. She slapped herself across the knees. “Thank you! Thank you!” Her cards spilled and she picked them up and began tucking them back into a handful, wiping away tears. We played on and I drank my tea and they drank their giant beers, and in the end it turned out the two men had trailed behind and the winners, bringing home exactly the same number of points each, were the two of us. “Sieg der Frauen!” I said, victory of the women. “Frauenpower,” she said, and we shook hands diagonally across the table.

  • what Jesus did

    Christmas edition of the local paper, West Germany. Four pages of articles welcoming the first couple of hundred asylum seekers into the area. Photos of Syrian and Pakistani families lugging their suitcases off the bus and of all the local dignitaries who turned out to smilingly shake their hands and welcome them; photos of the Christmas feast that was put on to welcome the new arrivals: a little Afghan boy says gleefully, “We are famous!” Editorial reminding everybody of the story of pregnant Mary and her husband Joseph searching for a shelter in which their baby, Jesus, could be born, and how this is no different to our communal obligation to offer shelter and a welcome to people currently seeking asylum. I’d like to send a copy to Canberra.