Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: hemisphere

  • house of gingerbread

    So it’s Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard’s insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls his writing landscape, in which women are conveniently passive, ‘Greeneland’. The descriptions in passing of her ease with her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, are so beguiling. They sit and talk a lot, often about what they are reading. Greene soars in like a small eagle who casts a large shadow.

    The world is run by noisy extraverts and tonight three of them had a bang-up row in the Hinterhaus, the building at the back of this courtyard. Glass was thrown. Police came pouring in with walkie-talkies at the ready. Now all is restored and the night has taken possession of the leaves and every sill. Far up in the corner of the highest apartment two facing windows are joined by a little covered bridge, for their cat. I had coffee today with the woman whose apartment I am leasing, who has moved to Vienna to make a film, and she said her cats (who travel everywhere with her – to Berlin and back by train; she takes them on set; she takes them to the beach) have a little case which they climb into so she can carry them down to the garden in the back courtyard every day, to play and explore and pounce and poo. She knows they are ready to go out when she comes into the hall to find them sitting quietly in their windowed carry case – “it’s like their bus.”

    It is beautiful to have a home and to stay home in it. It is a lamplit evening. I have the double doors open onto my tiny balcony – Berliners call this “Balconia.” The land of summer, of lurid sun umbrellas and bright geraniums in pots.

    Recently I passed a guy tenderly polishing his very fancy bicycle, outside the discount markets where junkies drift like zombies underwater. Gee, I thought: that’s a fancy bike he’s got. On my way back the same guy was pushed up against a police van. The beautiful bicycle was nowhere in sight but the back of the van was wide open.

    The dwindling end of the long twilit nights which seem to trail into evening like cloud drifting for the horizon – the endless days, blue and filled with pleasures – I have loved these nights. I have loved all these days. Now when the sun clouds over and the sky bleeds grey I start to panic, just a little, just skimming over it, dipping into it with one wing: is this it, then? is this the last of it? No more blue til May – or June? I know what we are in for. No more birdsong. The leaves fall to the ground. The grounds turns to iron. The limited colours, low white skies.

    The outdoor cinemas are closing. I saw candles in the windows of a backstreet cafe today. I wore a scarf in the afternoon sun. These little deathknells make me sentimental and bleary, like a Dickens character. Little Deathknell, and the Year That Took Three Months to Die. I’m standing with one leg on the ground and one in the rippling cool water. My bookshelf glows in the lamplight and I feel unafraid of the cold.

  • blue last

    The sun is shining over Berlin today and I feel so glad of the blue it lights. All too soon it will be dark all the time, a world half-awake, candles staining fogged daylight windows and all the birds have flown except for ducks, pigeons, sparrows, swans. I wonder how it feels in the heart of a tiny brown bird, to cock your head on the grass and study the inner knowing that will bring you sweeping up into the slipstream to sail south, a sailing that’s more a machine, a relentless effort, the seamed world a faraway town under your belly feathers and your dream map: that you’re on the right path, that you have twelve days’ further of flying to go, eleven, eight, five, three. Imagine the chatter when everyone gets there first. Imagine the mournful little spaces here and there in the loud crowd of trees where one voice or another bird’s is missing, deleted by accidental death during the year or maybe simply falling out of the sky on the way over. Plummet. All labouring down the round world to beat the icy creep of winter, that consumes everything edible and buries all the seeds.

    Birds know Berlin only in the sun. In Switzerland climbing a mountainside by steep red rail with its leather seats my friend said to me, in the dim clatter of the neck bells wooden-tongued and serene, the farmer can tell – if one of his cows is missing – he hears it from the herd in their song. Penguins find their young among twenty thousand birds all milling, every one screaming. I will search all winter for the one whose voice is silenced to me, out of my earshot, out of reach, a sweet subject I cannot leave alone like a sore tooth, a tree falling, a shot out of frame.

  • the cold, the dark, the spots on my apples

    So cold outside that I can keep cheeses and yoghurts fresh by stowing them in between the inner and outer window. So warm in my room that I can ripen bananas by just letting them sit on my table. Not that there’s anything at all strange about that, Europe.