Late night walk through the freezing fog. “Like Blade Runner.” We turn down all the opportunities in the park to buy pot. Here is a street where all the houses are Fifties, which must have been a firebomb hell in the 1940s. I stand there picturing it. Smoke curls up from the narrow tin chimneys of the caravans walled in along the water’s edge. Overhead, a syncopated honking. “It’s very late… for gooses to be flying around in the sky.” The laughter escapes between my closed lips. “Oh,” he says self-consciously – “I mean geeses.”
Tag: language barrier
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the organic drunk
In the supermarket carrying my two jars of honey, because it’s been nonstop chai masala weather, I fetched up queuing behind a guy in a vinyl blouson jacket who had just unloaded his entire cart. He turned his back on me to demonstrate that there was no way he would be letting me in front of him with my measly two items, just in case I was getting any ideas, and so I turned to the man behind me. There is nothing else to look at in this vast discounter warehouse, next door to the bottle shop which offers tiny toddlers’ shopping carts to educate your kid into alcoholism, a local outlet which sells everything unfresh and also, inexplicably, organic honey.
So there I was with my organic honey and he started unloading onto the belt long, fresh, green bottles of wine. They looked like stalks of grass, their lovely labelling, and on each the promising word ‘Bio.” Bio in German is pronounced bee-ohh and it means organic. “Wow,” I said, “Biowein. Bei einem solchen Supermarkt ist’s schön, so was zu finden.”
I think I said, Wow, organic wine. Nice thing to find in a supermarket like this. My German is riddled with infealties and infelicities but I live oblivious, above all that, smiling. He looked rather startled. Unloaded five bottles of wine and one flask of apple juice and now some random stranger has commented on his shopping! I tried again. “Ich bin Australierin. In Australien findet man Biowaren nicht so leicht.” In Australia you don’t find organic products this easily; I’m Australian. A look of compunction crossed his face, streaked with humour. He leaned in. Conspiratorily,
“Es steck noch Alkohol drin.” There’s still alcohol in it. Ah yes, I said: and also, though – vitamins. I mean… it’s made from fruit.
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born by scissory section
A German’s interpretation of my Australian pronunciation of flasher just yielded the phantom of the flesher: a guy who walks round with his coat open, flashing people with his flesh. Having cherished sundry other examples like “this cost fifty bugs” and “you have a great bump” I was reluctant to point out the error – but I’ve been made to promise so I broke it to him, gingerly; then had to turn away to hide my overweening affection when he confessed he now felt totally discombubbled.
Yesterday my osteopath described his daughter’s birth by making a scissors motion: she had to be cut out, his wife had “a scissoring.” Thus we render unto scissors that which is scissors’, yield unto flesh what’s in flashes. It’s all gold.
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New Zonked
In New York we had dinner with two New Yorker friends, one from Chicago, who are both broadcast journalists, and a Southern boy one of our friends had picked up in the street and they had bonded. Southern boy had on a Hallowe’en pumpkin shirt over an American flag t shirt. My German companion made me laugh by innocently mispronouncing his views (sane) on American gun laws (insane): you walk into a school and it’s like that film, he said: The Texas Chainsaw Moussaka.
Many Americans have a naivete that makes me feel protective of them, and not just about guns. More than once I have been complimented on speaking such excellent English, for an Australian. It doesn’t always seem to be because the speaker has confused us with Austria. I guess the sensation of believing one’s nation the centre, and pinnacle, of the civilised world – the use, even, of phrases like ‘the civilised world’ – might engender a certain self-satisfaction. On my very first visit, a few years back now, to New York I would marvel to anyone who’d listen how much better of a time I was having than I’d expected. “That’s because New York is the centre of the universe,” explained four or five unrelated New Yorkers, innocently.
At JFK we had queued with our passports and I overheard the officer herding the line answer an anxious tourist’s question with, “I’m just doing my job here. Anything else you’re asking – is irrelevant.” “They’re handling people like goods,” said my companion, shuffling forward. Three days later up in the Bronx we went walking through one of the giant parks that make that part of town so beautiful. As we were coming down the hill a crocodile of children was climbing up. A little girl in front was walking rapidly backwards, her head tilted round to guide herself. “You can do it,” the teacher encouraged. “I believe in you, Destiny!”
I said, to make her laugh, “We believe in you too, Destiny!” A second group of students followed them. One little girl was walking with her teacher, saying, “I’m serious!” “You can’t call a taxi,” the woman told her, “in a park.” It occurred to me I’d never said I believe in Destiny, before. I’m just… not American. Yet the sense of kinship with random passersby as we wandered up Central Park right from the bottom to the top, as we ventured into Harlem, as I got tangled in conversation with fascinating people on the D train, forever a stranger, was so spicy to me and so sweet. I loved the guy on the subway whose Superman socks were pulled high to the knee and inside out. I loved the wide-eyed baby whose daddy was so stoned he gave off a pungent weed reek. I loved the crazy Christian lady who tried to pick up my companion and when she’d asked, are you alone, looked at me and said, “And is that your… sister?” I loved the man who glanced into my camera’s screen when I stopped short at the top of the stairs into the subway station at Canal Street and said, “Nice photo.” It felt as it always to me feels in New York city, one of earth’s prototypical cities, as if we all are engaged on some giant endeavour, and none of us will ever see the outcome – in completion – we are fragments in a kaleidoscope like moths, we are our own art, we are brushing up against each other every day all day long as we go, handling the good like it was people.
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don’t shoot
Jeez, America, stop shooting each other. At least in Australia we only drown refugee babies, jail children, beat young Indigenous men to death in jail cells with phone books.
I am thinking today of the Albanian security guard who came out of her way to welcome us to the Cloisters, a museum in Tryon Park which seems to have salvaged all the bits of bombed-out churches and cathedrals in Europe that had survived, as splinters, the War to Unending War. We saw the daunting entry price and had retreated to the entrance hall to confer. “We have our tours available in German,” she told my companion, twinklingly. Then, turning to me, the Australian, “I’m not sure we have anything available in your language.”
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good wipe ratio
Feeling a bit unsettled and displaced today in unfamiliar Berlin humidity and the eventual but sudden storm, I got into a conversation with my love about Australia which seems so far away and I feel so denuded of it. I got out photos of my little cat and began to paw over them. Outside his big windows the thunder was rolling long, loud, and distant. I said how it’s so hard to imagine being back in Brisbane or Melbourne right now. He said how he sometimes wonders could he ever settle in Australia at all. “It’s the wipe. Especially the wipe of your government.” After a few seconds’ freefall I worked out this meant the vibe. It’s your vibe, Australia.
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lost in the cake station
A literal translation of the conversation that took place between me and the gorgeous dark-eyed Turkish boy working in the Turkish deli just now:
Me: Hi! Can we have two pieces of that, please, to take-with?
Gorgeous dark-eyed Turkish boy: Sure! Rightfully to take-with or simply for underway?
Me: Oh, just for underway please. We can take it on the hand.
Gorgeous dark-eyed Turkish boy: So not packed-in. Does it reach, like this?
Shows me two paper napkins and stands the slices of cake on them.
Me: Yes, that reaches well, thank you beautifully.
Gorgeous dark-eyed Turkish boy: Two Euros please!
Me: Beautiful thank you, little bye-bye!
Gorgeous dark-eyed Turkish boy: Little bye-bye! A beautiful day still!
Elaborate German courtesy plus cultured Turkish hospitality. It’s like a match made in Heaven, if Heaven were an 80s cruise ship with lairy pure wool carpets and a big band.