Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: homesick

  • a birthday story

    It is my birthday and I had kind of a depressing morning because (various reasons). But I reckoned I could make a go of the afternoon, and I was right. Riding out into the day aboard my trusty, failsafe, foolproof bicycle I zoomed around town for an hour or two looking for the restaurant, cosy but decent, in which my friend arriving from Copenhagen this evening will treat me to dinner. He says I’ve got to choose. So I chose, and had lunch outdoors in the shade and a large German beer. Needing shade is such a luxury in grey chilly Berlin.

    The bowl of noodles was delicious and the beer made me feel better. I sauntered home on my wheels, spinning down the quiet side of an overgrown local park and only gradually noticing that the man crouched forward on his bench was speaking to me. You are traveling much too fast, he was saying, and then his forbidding German conformity dissolved into a slow salty smile when I smiled at him, raising my eyebrows without meaning to, a smile that turned flirty when he flirted back.

    “Sicher?” I said, slow and low – are you sure? “Absolut sicher,” he said, and his tone had evolved from censorious to self-mockery and enjoyment.

    The African men at the bottom of the park looked me over and I looked at them. I miss Africa. Noodling along the pavement on my way home, which you shouldn’t, but people do, I was warmed when three men in identical backpacks like Mormons stepped aside to let my bicycle pass. “Das ist lieb,” I told them, that is lovely. The tallest one said, gravely, “I come from Stuttgart.”

    “Oh,” I said over my shoulder as I zoomed past, “that is also lovely.”

    The little German birds are high in their voices like tree bells. When I was in Ghana all those months I kept thinking: the birds fly away to Africa for the winter. So here they are! I kept expecting I might meet one and we would recognise each other. Hey, I know you. I’ve seen you in Berlin.

  • postcard torrent

    A few years ago I was living in Berlin and it felt indefinite. I had not made plans to stay and felt unable to leave. I felt homesick and unsure and one day I asked on facebook if anybody felt like sending me a postcard through the mail. I just love postcards. Occasionally I send them to myself.

    Weeks later I came home and opened my postbox at the door of my new sublet apartment with its old-fashioned sign, “Briefe und Zeitungen,” letters and newspapers. This torrent fell out. As we get closer to Christmas I want to remind myself and us all that this world is made up of seven billion diverse humans, and that by and large, humans are constituted of love.

  • pity flamingo

    Every week I cross town on the train and we pass a tower block of identical grey-frame units which have grey balconies. One balcony, at eye level with the train, has a bright pink inflatable flamingo hanging like a lurid fern, I guess somebody went to Florida or Havana and brought it back with them to bring back the tropics. It doesn’t look tropical. It looks more defeated. The air has shrivelled out of it, or perhaps shrunk in the bitter chill of Berlin’s below-zero winter. The bird sags, motionless, its head drooping over its breast and hanging down to the shrivelling feet.

    Poor tropical bird, alone trapped in glassy Berlin and its colourless end of year season, after all the other bright birds have vanished down to the southern shores to caw and preen.

    Snow lies on the ground in greying patches. Hardened scars of black ice have been strewn with sharp pocks of gravel from the big grey plastic bins. This fake bird is the only pink thing. Apparently flamingoes, naturally flamboyant or perhaps insecure on their wavering stalk legs, will not make babies unless a crowd of other bright pink flamingoes stands round them watching.

    Zoos have had to set up elaborate peacock tails of mirror to encourage them to breed. Gazing out at this sad blow-up bird sometimes I think about staging an intervention. What if every passenger put on a pair of Edna Everage sunglasses. What if we all stared out the windows and flapped our arms. Maybe the dying flamingo would stir on its still leaf of string. Maybe the neck would waggle and stretch, and the tiny head come up again to display proudly its improbable and superciliously curled coconut ice pink swan lip.

    But Berlin’s trains are courteous and pragmatic. People stand back tiredly to let each other on. This week I’ve passed a junkie shooting up right into the arm, against a pillar at my nearest U-Bahn station; five people in a row who were all reading books but seemed unaware of each other; and a sturdy Polish tourist who rolled, under my nose, a plump head of ganja into his palm so that when we all got off the train, he could light it.

  • to meet my father

    I’m going into the difficult embrace of family life to say goodbye to my father. Our family relationships have been fraught with miscommunications, outbreaks of insanity, and violence. Now it’s all coming to an end and we will have to, I hope, focus on our common humanity.

    My mother says, you’ll find him much changed.

    I’ve barely spoken to Dad since his cancer swelled and got into his bones. It has taken him over only slowly. The oncologist gives him so and so many months still to live. Meanwhile the effects of the stroke a decade ago slow his walking and, sometimes, his concentration and that makes it harder for his body to cope with the disease. What will kill him, it seems, is one in the string of pneumonias and influenzas that have infested him since he’s been in and out of hospital. An iatrogenic death: caused by the healer.

    Dad is so generous and has faithfully tried to be a good father to us. In recent years he has taught himself, probably at my brother’s prompting, to say, awkwardly, “I’m very proud of you.” On the rare occasions when I speak to him over the phone he says, every time, “I love you, pet.” He never used to say this. If I said, “I love you,” he would say, “I love me, too.”

    I find these feats of compassion to be particularly moving as his own father leapt from a bridge when Dad was only twelve. His brother was ten and their baby brother three weeks old. Sometimes people’s opportunities to learn parenting skills are so cruelly limited.

    On Saturday I will fly out to Frankfurt, and then to Bangkok. This was an innovation we cooked up because I need to turn up healthy and strong and not be one more member of an unwell household ailing and needing care. When I first flew to Berlin the thirty hours’ travel left me trembling and unable to rest, I was swimming uphill, underwater, and though I was sick with hunger trying to eat made me vomit.

    The thought of leaving Berlin as the hot weather finally unfolds, and of flying in to Brisbane where winter arrives in inverted commas, fatigues me more than I can say. I have just gotten settled and it’s taken me 18 months. I’m so slow to adapt. Parts of me stay behind, or perhaps travel by the old seaways. I have looked up the forecast for Brisbane and it’s planning to be blue, beautiful one day, perfect the next. Mum says, “There’s a cold front coming, in Tenterfield they’re predicting snow.” The weather channels show rows of cheerful whole suns, and temperatures similar to Berlin in the Spring. So I guess I’ll be wearing the same clobber I’ve been wearing these last sweeter months.

    In Berlin now Spanish tourists are beginning to cycle past in the street bare-chested. Girls come out in their fluttering dresses, like pennants; there’s a fashion for unpleasant prints. All the tattoos are on display and we’ve seen the first way too stoned person of the season, sitting on a bench under an invisible sack of cement, their eyes so round and so sore it looked as though someone had drawn in cartoon rings.

    My father’s muscle tone is so deteriorated he finds it difficult to swallow. He has to eat sitting forward, with supervision and great care. So I have chosen out for him all the disgusting comestibles he loves, in the softest forms possible: raw meats, and potted intimate organs, all the indelible edibles with which shelves in a German deli seem to me literally to groan. I’m going to make him builders’ marmalade for breakfast, which is Metz – raw pig mince – mashed with raw onion and served on bread. I’m going to tempt him with Sülze, a kind of jelly quivering with the flesh of a pig’s head and sundry choppings of gherkin and carrot.

    As well as the pulverised raw meats in glass I have a light jumper, four fresh new blank notebooks and a jar of ink, six books to read, and my sunglasses for crying in public places. I have all my old familiar fears and they’re heavier than anything. I have visions of our plane catching fire in the engine and plummeting out of the sky, extinguishing in the giant ocean, coming to rest in the plastic-loamed sand. I pray that an accident won’t happen. I pray Dad will be there when I get to the house, for there is no one now well enough to come pick me up, and I’m planning to call him and tell him so. It’s hard to say goodbye but it would feel even worse never to say it at all. To say: fare thee well and thank you. I will honour your name. I will never waste the kindness you showed. I have loved all the love.

  • 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.

  • knowing one another in the dark

    Knowing one another in the dark: this is life in the wintertime, in Germany. Three days ago the late summer turning purple in Central Park; tonight the moist grey soft air, the dark day, the lighted bicycles on the path. I have only just realised in Berlin we are on a latitude with Alaska; New York is on a latitude with Spain, a far sunnier prospect.

    It felt strange to me, coming home to a home that is no home at all, where I’ve lived less than three years in total and always in spates, looking over my shoulder to the next project which had to be done in Copenhagen or in Madrid, or back in Brisbane. My father has cancer there and I’m here. My nephews are growing up there and I’m here. My cat lives over there and I’m here. For a cat who spends her afternoons tormenting tiny tropical lizards and basking in the endless pouring caramel sun, I remind myself: relocation to an indoor apartment life in northern Europe would be cruel. But she’s so soft and we used to sleep tucked into one another. When I was ill and alone once and could not very often struggle out of bed, this cat licked me, with great earnestness and a harsh tongue, all over, like a giant kitten until to her satisfaction I was clean. She is a wonderful companion but a horrible correspondent. I mourn about it over the phone to my mother in Brisbane, to make her laugh: all these months and not one phone call… Not a postcard… “She is scuffling at the receiver,” my mother says, and I hear soft scratching sounds. “She hears your voice.”

    At JFK airport everybody was white. Everyone except the wait staff, the security personnel, the cleaners and the guy emptying the trash. At the security gate he lifted a large plastic bag of plastic bottles of water from the bin and carried it away: I watched the glinting light that is really a terrifying form of the endless dark that will take us all underwater sift through all that plastic and bobbling trucked water and thought, America… it’s be part of the solution, not part of the dissolution. We ate a meal and the waitress brought us so many paper napkins my knife and fork fell off the top of the pile. Wait, she hadn’t brought a second set of – yes, she had. A second tower of waste paper stood across the tabletop and this tree graveyard was all for me. They hand you napkins when you order a coffee. They use polystyrene. Let’s not talk about that.

    At length in our airplane by which I am responsible for far more pollution than any squanderer of napkins can ever claim we left the land behind, at Nova Scotia, and began our crossing. The dark Atlantic. Thickened up with polystyrene chunks that never break down, only into smaller chunks of polystyrene foam. And roofed, increasingly, with a dully cluttered sea foam of plastic bottles, mostly the bottles in which Americans have bought water.

    Germans buy water too. Recycling the bottles is only a partial improvement. We landed at Tegel, the gloriously Soviet styled airport which was actually part of West Berlin. Germans streamed past with their big square heads looking serious yet warm. They recycle. They carry their empty bottles back to the place they were purchased and retrieve tiny amounts of loose change. There are no returned soldiers sleeping on subway platforms. Instead, in Berlin there is a Coldness Bus that travels round on frigid nights collecting homeless people who might otherwise perish in their sleep. There is something here to learn, for you, America, I think, and also for us, Australia, where we lock up desperate families behind razor wire and have turned landfill production into a sport. The clouds of pollution and damage are closing around us and we need to learn to know each other in the dark.

     

  • 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.

  • you are like a fresh cranberry

    God, I am so in love right now. Partly because of food and partly because of language.

    We decided I needed to really touch down in Germany, not to be always looking back over my shoulder at sunstruck Queensland. We went for a long walk, through the marshy parks where the back of every sign has stickers and the benches are scribbled over and the leaves already bearing along their spines the shadow of ice that feathered into them in the long night. We went out for breakfast, late enough that it could be called lunch. My partner had tagliatelle but I had a big plate of Deutschness: ragout of wild venison, which I had never tried before, and bread dumplings, which I adore. And dazu einen kleinen Schnapps. To get the heart started.

    They pack down good German bread into a kind of loaf and slice it, and sop it in gravy. It’s so good. Venison it turns out tastes not unlike kangaroo. My second schnapps set everything on fire, the flavours, the light, the two men talking in English at another table, the awful U2 covers, the scenery almost sunlit outside. My plate was decorated with a fan of fresh sliced pear and a few bright red berries. I tasted these, liking their tartness. They have a tough, wrinkling red skin. I said, surprised, “I’ve never eaten a fresh cranberry before, in all my life.” My companion stroked the crook of his finger down the side of my face. “You are like a fresh cranberry,” he said.

    Then, gazing out the big picture windows as I ran my finger round the edge of my white plate and licked off the last of the sauce, he said, musingly, “You know, I can see really why you have such a big culture shock. People here are kind of sloppy. They look poor. They look a bit desperate. Whereas in Brisbane, really everyone is so very well-broomed.” I smiled at my polished white plate. Then we came home across the tiled streets that have been swept clean of their autumbled leaves and when we reached our minute apartment I said, You build the rest of the bed. I’ll just write.