Yesterday a German friend asked me, could you ever imagine to live in Germany permanently. I guess my laugh was unflattering. Why not, he said. I’m sorry, but… the way you guys run your country – it’s like a bunch of very well-behaved eldest children looking after the place while their mummy and daddy are away. Now it was his turn to laugh. “Until the Führer gets back,” he said, slapping himself with mirth. Pretty much, yes.
A few years back this young cat came up to me in a kitten shelter and climbed onto my lap. I didn’t want her, the others were all fluffy, rolypoly babies winsome with whiskers and she was an awkward teenager with a big splotch on her nose. Whenever I visited the shelter there were kittens cutely gambolling all over and sucking on my toes (“they like the sweat” explained the cat breeder, who loved animals and had bred so many the Council were compelling her to give some away)… then I looked down and this skinny, weird-looking animal had stowed her sharp chin on my hip. Every time. I put her in a banana box and took her home. Her name is Tisch, I miss her sometimes but she is a lousy correspondent.
Almost a year ago I left Brisbane, on three days’ notice, to come to Berlin. I had looked up the weather map and packed a small suitcase and figured I would stay about a week. A very dear friend was in town and we wanted to meet up before he set off on his bicycling tour across Europe.
That came and went and the strange, metallic, leafy feeling of being back in Europe set upon me like moss. I decided to stay on and see what became of me. I met a gorgeous guy with a beautiful heart. Some weeks later the intrepidity or foolishness of what I had done came over me one afternoon in a storm of tears, and I just started crying and couldn’t stop.
We were sitting on a bench not far from here, under the trees, overlooking the murky canal. Swans then and now. My companion was alarmed by all this emotion but he was super-generous and sweet. It waxed into a burbling froth of mucus and salt water and he offered wouldn’t I like to blow my nose between his pinched fingers. Well, no: certainly not. I covered my face with one hand and kept crying, as quietly as I could. Sometimes it takes a man some time to notice that I laugh as easily as I cry and I guess this was one of the things on my mind as I sat there and people walked past smoking pot. Several benches down an Italian guy was playing guitar and crooning, three girls with long hair sat around him like groupies from the Sixties. One was perched on the back of the bench like a sweet bird. I looked up and there was my friend with a little wad of leaves in his hand. He had picked for me the softest, greenest, most tissue-like leaves, heart-shaped from a tree I don’t know, and had stacked them from biggest to smallest so I could mop myself up in stages. I remember the softness of the leaves on my skin and I wish now that I could remember the song that Italian bench star was playing.
Back in Berlin for a few days: what a strange feeling. Now there is no snow on the ground and the trees have appeared from nowhere, they are green, green, green. We ate at a Turkish grillhouse where you sit around a glass-cased cooktop fired with coals, onto which four brawny and frankly handsome men in white shirts loaded blade after blade of minced meat, chicken wings, lamb ribs, skewer after skewer of whole, red tomatoes and prongs of scarlet peppers like jewels. They scoop the heat together in a bottomless tin of blackened aluminium. Everything stinks of cookstove fuel. We drank several copper tumblers apiece of ayran, the salty fresh yoghurt drink, eyeing the mirrored cabinet of meats: a tray of kidneys, maroon and flecked with gristly white, a tray of ribs ready to be sliced and grilled, a tray of chops, a tray of wings. Afterwards a long, long bicycle ride through the city forest which leads in from a smurfish village of cutesy summer houses with adorable, tiny gardens. The sign at the side gate says “Freiheit” but the “Freiheit” gate is locked. Everything as pretty as a thousand words and worth a picture. A young waiter smoking on the gingerbread verandah of his Black Forest-styled Gasthaus told us, using the informal “you”, “you can’t get out that way.”
Drank a beer, one of those long German beers, on board a boat on the river which has a wooden cabin built on it, housing the kitchen and bar. There is grass growing on the roof. Grass, and little purple flowers. I stood in front of it blocking the way with my bike saying over and over and over, “It has grass! On the roof!” I had never seen that before: grass! on the roof! I am tired from travelling and the temperature has dropped ten degrees. When Berlin’s petticoat woods tilted up to meet the plane I felt a rush of unaccustomed homesickness: Australia, be less far away. Australia, be less vast. I miss you though I had almost forgotten, persuaded myself I had forgotten. This big city is not my city and that river is not my river. Doch.
I was in a strange city recently, got lost, felt overwhelmed momentarily, & needed comfort. Ducked inside a Guitar Shop to touch all the guitars. You pluck one string and wait for it slowly to come into stillness. At the back a man in a fisherman’s cap was playing a song of his own, I think, for the politely-smiling Guitar Shop man… they sat on matching, facing stools and one leaned in and one leaned back. Leaving the shop I felt just that bit more tuned in to sounds and to music, the traffic seemed rhythmic and spare, I kept hearing in the street the repeated curve-notes of a wolf whistle from somewhere high, or far away. Five times, six times, seven times, eight: was it a nerdy, somewhat serious guy who having gotten up the courage to catcall was now determined the object of his passing affection would not walk by without learning how beautiful he found her? Actually it was two college girls, leaning out of a fifth-storey window wolf-whistling their friend who was unlocking her bike oblivious in a stand of bikes downstairs, her hair wrapping itself around her in the wind. Wit-wheel! Wit-wheel! is how my ex used to spell it (and say it): Wit-wheel!
I went into a crowded little food boutique that had a whole wall of small-brew beers. They had beautiful, grotesque, weird, colourful labels. They were honey-coloured, molasses-coloured, golden, greenish, dark. I bought a chocolate wrapped in sardine-printed foil for a friend who is overcoming a phobia of fish. I went to the back of the store and picked up the brown-paper packages of whole coffee beans and held them to my face and breathed in.
Sauntered past the op shop where I bought some stuff yesterday, in the sun this afternoon, whilst wearing most of it. A lovely lady with white winged arms and white winged cheeks (a Twenties bob) was sitting out the front, resting and sunning herself. She showed me by gestures and impenetrable dialect, O! You look good in that… thing.
That Thing is a cute pair of dark denim dungarees I found in the half-price pile, when it finally got too hot for the winter layers I brought from Melbourne in November. In English I told her, Thank you! Actually I bought these from you guys yesterday!
Ok! she said, fanning herself. And this, I told her, tugging at my skintight navy and white striped top underneath. Cool huh?
Ok! she nodded, plucked at the fabric, smiled. Is pretty! Very good!
See I’ve been travelling – from Australia – for so long now…. I only have winter clothes. I showed her my feet. See my winter boots? See? My winter socks?
Ah! she said, ok! I see! Is very good!
I love the church ladies. In Brisbane I lived round the corner from an oppie which was run by the Uniting Church and had a genius for fastening on the unlikeliest stuff to price very high (suitcase in the window like a large sucked caramel, its sign saying “$20. No less. VINYL.”) It was staffed by a wonderful variety of ladies and I wished every one of them could be my grandmother.
An elderly couple pedalling uphill on a tandem bike: the Swiss are awesome! Casual bigotry in the marketplace: the Swiss are awful! These thoughts freewheeling through my head: generalizations are stupid! Yes: all of them.
Decades back I was here and asked somebody, a travelled, educated person, what was the population of Switzerland. His lip curled. “Four million. And *one million* foreigners!” He was speaking of Italians. Now you see black faces in the street which then was not the case.
Today I cycled to a nearby town in search of summer garments. Coming back to Berlin for winter I was only planning on three months, it was minus fifteen, I brought thick, fuzzy, woolly stuff and ugg boots. Now it is finally hot. The trees are blooming. In every shop I asked, Is there a second-hand shop in town somewhere? Maybe… the Red Cross? People not only looked blank, they sneered. I kept looking and finally on a back street found a merry collection of shoes, cheap suits, and household tat, with three African women presiding.
They invited me to try stuff on in the kitchen and over their cups of tea offered encouraging remarks: Nice colour that one! If you don’t have a jeans under it, this fits great! A white man in his seventies came in and the conversation instantly dampened. I went foraging among the racks and when I came back, he had sat himself next to the youngest, prettiest one and slung an arm casually round the back of her chair. She was just standing up as I came in. She went and stood in the far corner of the kitchen with her back to the inner door.
But you can’t keep a happy woman down and they kept talking around him, about a local woman who comes in causing trouble and pulling things off the shelves. “Police give me a card,” said the stout lady, reaching under the sink for her handbag to show it. I was pulling my sneakers back on, on the floor. The conversation between them was in a kind of pidgin, English and French with some German words, or is it a creole that people evolve when they are from different language groups and fetch up in the same place together? I think, creole. They were so kind and interesting and the atmosphere so pragmatic and humane, I too I would have liked to put my arms around them. I would have liked to stay on uninvited and bask in their presence all the afternoon long. I could understand his longing. His sleaziness, not so much.
When I went to Copenhagen on my own it was cold and windy and there were times I felt very lost and alone. When I felt lost and alone I would take refuge in one of two places: the library, which has free wifi and a cafe and people clustered around low tables on Eames chairs, earnestly chatting; or this antiquarian bookshop I found, labyrinthine and lined to the ceiling in leather books, which has been made over into a student caff. There are little tables tucked under the shelves and in corners. They make a very rich hot chocolate and they serve cheap food. I loved to sit in there out of the wind and just gaze and gaze, letting people’s conversations filter through me, feeling how the venerable books stand shoulder to shoulder, a phalanx of minds, and how their massed presence like the presence of noble clouds grounded and rooted me with a kind of magic spell. I grew sleepy and the world seemed much kinder. My ears blurred. I sat for hours as though underwater.