Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: kindness of strangers

  • lifesaver

    A man saved my life today, deftly and in German. He sped past on his bicycle and veered in to make me stop. Excuse me, your brake cable is dangling and it’s gonna tangle in the spokes.


    I didn’t understand what he had said, my mind was on the sky and at first I just stared blankly. He got down to show me the cable. It was indeed dragging on the ground like a lightning tape from an old car and he bent down and coiled it into a ring and made it fast. I sat down under a tree at the roadside and ordered a bright orange summer drink. Life goes on, today, thank goodness, thank kindness.

  • supermerch

    In the supermarket I queued for the African check out dude who’s always calm in the midst of all the Germanness. A blonde woman behind me set down, emphatically, a bagful of fresh pak choy and then behind it, all in a heap, several packets of cream-filled biscuits, a jar of chocolate pudding, some plump filled fresh pasta and a tray of chocolates. I said, indicating the leafy greens, “This seems cute to me. Because one buys that – one gets to buy all of this.”

    She burst out laughing. “Stimmt.” True. I looked at my own pile and felt concerned its greenery might seem chiding. “I’m the same,” I said, showing her the huge bag of green grapes. “These are really a sweet treat but they look like vegetables.”

    “Very wise,” she said, still laughing, “it’s perfectly balanced.” We were chortling. The man at the register bade good evening to the person in front and picked up my Toblerone, the excuse for all the grapes. “Guten Abend,” he said, and I said, “Guten Abend.” Every sly glance sideways between me and the blonde girl started us both spluttering mirthfully. I stashed the grapes in my thousand-use bag and took the bar of chocolate from his brown hand, saying, “Beautiful Celebration-Evening!” which is how Germans tell each other, I am glad for your sake it’s nearly knocking-off time. Heading out to my bike parked under the trees I was thinking for the hundredth time that some poet among Germans has decided the wooden divider separating my groceries from hers shall be called a cashier’s Toblerone: Kassentoblerone.

  • skeeter mattress

    I just sold my air mattress, late on a Saturday night, to a small, muscular, warm dude whose name is Ramon. He rang me an hour ago from my online classifieds ad and asked, how much longer are you up? He described what he wants to do with it – lie under the stars among the mosquitoes (“And the moon,” I reminded, insufferably helpful), at his garden house in its green garden.

    I told him why I can’t stand the sight of the thing and must sell. I bought it brand new for a terrible houseguest who tarnished my last birthday, 2017. She was mean and I had not guessed it. Now I want rid. “Ahh,” he said, breathing out very understandingly.

    So when he rang to say, “Ich bin da,” I am there, I snatched up the mattress deflated in its box with the sales docket sticky-taped to the side and said to my current, far nicer houseguest, “Omigod. Now I hafta run downstairs in bare foots and my father’s pyjamas, to meet this guy, unless I change.” He was flicking Tinder prospects on his phone and I had been dancing round the living room like a wild thing that is not a thing. Who is not a thing. We had got into a game of what songs do you truly really love only you wish you didn’t, they are embarrassing? I playde him Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon, whoever they are, dancing a hole in the floor and The Living Years by Mike and the Mechanics. “If anyone can, you can,” said my houseguest and friend, and when I came back upstairs at a run laughing with joy he introduced me to Feu! Chatterton, just as earlier we had been listening at his behest to the very weird and cluey New Zealander Aldous Harding.

    My mattress bequeathee held out a handful of coins and notes. I brought you your original price, trotzdem, despite everything, he said, and: Oh! you are in your pyjamas, you must be having a good Saturday night. Fireworks exploded above our heads and he said, shrugging, Maifest: the festival of May. The black Europe night was alight with sound. I described to him what kind of an evening my houseguest friend and I are having. Then we hugged.

  • moon over Accra

    It’s a beautiful night in Ghana and the moon is very full. Immodestly so. What need has a moon of modesty? She has already pledged her love. “I will follow you though it turn me in circles all the rest of my rocky dry days.”

    I am sitting nursing a less and less cold beer at a local spot, at the junction. In Accra. These eight days I have sampled four of Ghana’s beers and I like this one. It has bitter local herbs and I am drinking it with a little sack of ripe plantain chips. I went back over to the lady nursing her child who bakes eight different kinds of chips and sets them out in little crisp cellulose bags. When I reached for the plantain chips she said, “Have you tried this one? It is ripe plantain. It’s better.”

    My first morning we went strolling through the hot dusty streets and, in my case, the jet lag, and found a lady selling mangoes from a bowl, who sliced me one, and a lady selling fat ripe bananas, and a woman with a tiny stall roofed in tarpaulin who fried up rice and beans with a headless fish and a curling slab of beef skin. She served it wrapped in a banana leaf and then two plastic bags. The beef skin quivered, nearly transparent, and I stared at it a long time before putting the corner very gingerly in my mouth. Oh, no.

    Jet lag is gone now and I am subsiding into this beautiful world. The moon is squared between four overhead wires and I gaze up, rustling the crisp cellulose bag with my fingertips, thinking of nothing at all. A man drawing a cart behind him heaped with yams stops to talk across the narrow garden bed to the spot’s owner. “How come you never buy my yams anymore? You buying from the other guys?”

    “No,” he says, “I will buy them soon.” I have watched this man, so relaxed under his awning of pink and white bougainvillea, tending his garden with a pointed stick to loosen the soil and a jar of tap water. The yam vendor creaks on and a man I don’t know, as I know nobody in Ghana, comes over the road and joins his friends. He says, “Good evening, madame. How are you.”

    “Good evening, sir. Thank you, I am well. How are you?”

    And he says, “You are feeling at home.”

    I raise my hand. I let it drop with its palm up and open. “It’s so beautiful here. I’m so happy. Your wonderful city.”

    Can one fall in love with an entire country? This one has.

    I came here on my second evening when the object of my visit was at work. I drank a cold beer and tried out the plantain chips. The owner of the little beer terrace invited me to share his table. Another man was sitting between us and he began drumming on the table’s edge, a rapid, complex rhythm, with his two stiffened fingers as though they were blades. I said, “Are you a musician?”

    And he said, “I hope so. I’ve got a couple of albums out.”

    Such a creative, thriving, diving, cormorant city. And so noisy. Wherever I go it is to a concert of honks and toots as every passing cab driver tries his luck. I joined Uber, with some nervousness, never having used it before, and was offered lifts in immaculate cars by drivers named Ernest, Ebenezer, Divine, Lord, Sumaila, and Wallestine. I spoke to a man on the street whose t shirt said LOVE and the O was the shape of Africa. “I love your t shirt.” “Where are you from?” And as we got talking he offered,

    “Let me give you my phone number. We just live in that house over there, the blue gate behind the plantain palms. If you need anything, or if you ever get in trouble or need help: you can call me.”

    This genteel, educated culture. This overwhelming sense that I am walking amongst gods. The tall, fit, gracious, courteously and warmly smiling people. Their patience and kindness. The sense that I’ve been right all along, and in our spoilt countries we have forgotten how to live. That these people in their exploited country are holding out something we are too miserable to grasp. Racism is envy. I have always known it and now I see it everywhere.

    The night passed serenely around us and I finished my beer and got up. My drummer acquaintance was at the next table. “What were you writing? A poem?”

    “Oh,” I said, touching my bag self consciously. “I was just writing about the moon.”

    He tipped his head back. “I hadn’t noticed it.”

    “Powerful moon, tonight.”

    “Eh,” he said, “Yes: it is full.”

    And I said, “Yes, and the crimes of passion and incidents of insanity are spiking tonight all round the world. The moon controls whole oceans. What are we but little seas? Sloshing with seawater.”

    “Seawater?”

    “Well,” I said, “salt water. We are mostly salt water. So the moon.”

    This is black Africa. The night treads endlessly on the sky. The lighted shop fronts with their sagging awnings and the smoke from the goat gizzard stall and the woman walking by with her fleet of buckets on her head are a world I have not met before and always, always longed for. As we stood there, a young man shot past on his bicycle, dressed all in white. A man carrying on his head a stack of neatly folded bright batiks walked by. “I am waiting for the pineapple woman,” my friend said. “I want pineapple.” Don’t we all. The heaps of fresh fruit, the dried fish, the bright plastic buckets. I have stepped off the planet of Europe and I may be gone some time.

  • everything in sequins

    Yesterday I was reading the paper over coffee in a huge, bleak market hall in Berlin. The place has all the atmosphere of an airplane hangar, it was raining hard outside and had turned bitterly cold. I was reading about the coward shooter in Vegas and had screwed up my mouth. He shot from behind the curtains. He had no courage and no manhood. Next to me two people browsed on their phones, one of them breastfeeding a baby. All of a sudden a familiar hoot rent the air. The guy flipping pancakes at the next stall was singing along, joyous and loud, to the Rolling Stones riff everybody recognised, the oooh hoo hoodoo hoodoo hoo from ‘Miss You.’ I looked up, people looked up. It was as though John Travolta had come strolling in, jive talking, with his panther grace and his hands in his pockets and leaving a trail of tiny sequins.

  • three little children

    I was walking home up our rainy street when a woman popped her head up and spoke to me. She had the doors to her car standing open and was looking put-upon. “Entschuldigung,” she said, imploringly, “ich habe eine Bitte.”

    Excuse me: I have a please – a request. “Yes, gladly,” I said, as Germans say, and stood waiting.

    She told me she’d been looking for her phone for the past five minutes and just couldn’t find it. “Shall I ring it?” I asked, getting out my own.

    She almost wrung her hands. She dictated to me her number and I typed it in and it rang. I could dimly hear the phone ringing someplace close, and I watched her bobbing up and down, sighing and pushing back her hair. It rang out so I dialled again. “It’s right here,” she said, and I offered, “Shall I…” So then we were both diving amongst the seats, front and back, or just standing still and cocking our heads to listen, like two birds.

    On the third try she made a triumphant shriek. The phone in its black case was lying on the black carpet just under the lip of her front passenger seat. She was dressed in black, too, from head to toe and I had the fleeting thought that this must happen often. When I got home I sent her a picture of some flowers in autumn colours I had gathered this week on a long cycle ride across town, saying, I am glad you found your phone. I still have the number of the cool couple I met outside the hardware store who were loading up an unusually long stave of wood which he had fastened to his bicycle upright as though it were a flag. “The flag of your nation,” I said, and he said, “The flag of wood.” And so I said, “Can I take your picture? Would you like to have a photo of this?” His girlfriend was strapping a flat piece of plywood to her luggage rack. I sent them the photo, the two of them, thumbs up, smiling. That was long ago, in summer, in a different world. “Perhaps every flag should honour a tree,” I said, and they agreed, tolerantly, willing to entertain my flights of fancy. Now I picked up my bottle of milk and my bag of grapes and resumed my walk home. In the biological shop, as Berliners call a whole foods store, I had watched three little children jostle on the lime green bench by the cashier as they were waiting to go. They each had on a different coloured parka, with its hood up. The ‘day mothers’, Tagesmutter, from their little kindergarten were piling stacks of waffles and crispbreads at the counter. The whole mob of them had arrived on foot and I could see the Kinderwagen, the infants’ car, parked outside: a wooden wagon pushed from behind which was just large enough for six or eight children to sit in side by side, like visitors to a tiny amusement park riding on a tiny train. I smiled at the kids and they smiled back, swinging their legs. It isn’t the weather which keeps us here.

  • Ghanaity

    Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.

    It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.

    Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.

    So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.

    What are you learning?

    O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.

    You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.

    The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?

    Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.

    Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.

    Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!

    But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.

    Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.

    Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.

    The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.

    We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.

    Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.

    It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.

  • welcome, Auntie

    I’ve joined a Facebook group which posts pictures of people’s dogs. The rules are long and repetitive: only dog pics and pics of dogs being doggish and cute: no lost dog posts, no questions about dog food… just hounds.

    In the last week this group has taught me all kinds of new vocabulary. Boop is the thought dogs have when they come up and touch you with their nose. A blep is where they stick out their tongue a little bit; a mlem is when they stick their tongue out further. Well today an older lady posted in public in the group, “Auntie! You are now part of this dog group. Please enjoy the dogs’ cute little antics!”

    Within seconds a woman had come along to comment, gently, “Maybe just send her a private message.” I commented, Hi, Auntie! and my comment now has 40 likes. Meanwhile a thread of joyous appreciation has unravelled, so divine: 460 likes and over a hundred people have posted pictures of their dogs for Auntie. One is of a labrador gambolling toward the camera and it says “Running to say hello to Auntie.” “This is Cecil, he says Hi Auntie.” “Welcome, Auntie!” One man wrote, “Now we are all Auntie’s Nieces and Nephews” and attracted a trail of love hearts under his comment. In between people are tagging their friends and coming back to the thread to muse OMG so pure! This thread! Those comments, tho. Sometimes I truly adore you, social medina.

  • camera ambulance

    Is it Germans who are so trusting, or just Berliners? A woman cycled up with her grandchild, I think grandchild, in a netted baby trailer and parked her bike under the tree where we were standing. We were waiting for the guy who repairs cameras, as I had dropped mine onto the cobblestones an hour before. His window was dusty and the handwritten sign promising, “Ich bin gleich wieder für Sie da,” was not convincing. Peering in I had the impression he maybe hadn’t been “there for us” in a century or more. The woman glanced up at the staircase leading into the house she as visiting. She glanced at us. “Sind Sie noch ein Paar Minuten da?”

    The child was sleeping and the stairs were steep: she clearly didn’t want to have to rouse him carry him, lock everything. Oh, yes, I said: we are waiting for the camera guy, we’ll be here a few more minutes, “wir passen auf Ihr Kind auf.” We will look after your child. Oh, thank you, she said, and bounded up the stairs – actually bounded – without so much as locking her bike.

    Is it Berliners who are so fit, or just Germans?

    The camera guy came strolling magnificently down the street carrying a little notepad. His belly was broad and his gait wide and easy. “That’s him,” said my partner, “it’s got to be.” And we were right – the guy pulled up outside the shop window and gazed at the small group which had gathered. “Ein richtiges Kamera-Party,” I said, we’re just having a bit of a camera party. He laughed, the sun is finally out and everybody is happy. The shop is called Camera Ambulance. Just as he was unlocking the door the grandmother came leaping down the stairs to collect her child. “Danke,” she said, and I told her cheerfully, “Der wollte nach München, um seine eigene Karriere zu folgen – ich habe ihn überredet.” He was keen to set off for Munich in pursuit of his own career – but I talked him out of it. “Ah! that’s a relief, many thanks,” she said, giving her fresh beautiful smile. On the cycle ride home we followed a woman with such a gloriously high round arse that as she was pedalling I turned to point her out to him, and he was on the verge of pointing her out to me. Berlin is filled with beauty. And babies. Perhaps it is not so much an attack of baby fever as the fact that all the babies who exist hereabouts already have now woken from their long sweet winter sleeps and taken to the streets, they are strolling in carriages, towed by their parents’ bikes, sitting nodding in half dozens in the large buckets on wheels by which local kindergartens transport their charges. If you gaze in at the window of a Kinderladen (a local ‘children shop’) you will see sweet little low tables with tiny chairs set with plates and sturdy cups, at which the Kinderladen staff crouch down to sit at child level, while everyone is served a proper hot lunch.

  • 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.