I’ve a German-speaking friend who since quitting tobacco suffers terribly from grievings. ‘Grievings’ are what happens when you depend on a drug and then give it up: heroin grievings, nicotine grievings. I quit coffee in January, and today in the Lebanese shop where the machine sent out aromatic blasts and the steam collected on the rainy window like tears, I experienced coffee grievings. Coffee, you sweet sorrow, you sultry wench.
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.
Bizarre visit to the local physiotherapist today. For one thing, we speak different languages, and the overlap (in creaking German) was slim. It took us a while to understand each other. At the top of his full-length consulting room mirror was a Post-It note with a downward arrow, which said, “This is what a person who is loved by God looks like.” But we didn’t get to talking about God straightaway. First he had to ask, what is the matter. I summarized the very ill-advised dance improv manoeuvre which originally tore my knee. The physio ran away with my first half sentence, making sketches to explain, building rapidly a diagnosis that showed the problem with my ligaments. “It’s not the ligaments,” I said. I finished my sentence and off he raced again. This happened five times before he grasped what was the matter.
Ok not a good listener, no worries. I told him what I think (after various scans & examinations) is going on and eventually he heard me. “Please take off your jeans.” Then I sat in my t-shirt while he asked me about any previous illnesses, the age of both my parents, was I married, etc. During this time the physiotherapist’s ten-year-old son wandered in and was kissed by his father all over the top of his head. The boy left. I lay down. The physio asked if I would consider giving his son English lessons, “for his pronunciation.” He reached into my knee and began inflicting intense pain, good pain, pain which bore out his relieving theory that there was nothing wrong inside the joint, it is just that the muscle is cramped. “What religion do you have? Are you Catholic?” I blinked. “I don’t have any religion.” He looked grave. “We say, there are two ways to live. The good way. And: the bad way.”
The bad way, it seems to me, involves ceaseless physical pain. Sometimes it wakes me out of my sleep. It’s a small kind of hell. “How’s the knee?” I asked him, pointedly, to bring him to the task. He had stopped massaging and was leaning on the sore leg, gesticulating. The weird thing is that when he stuck with it, his ministrations were lucid and effective. He worked his way into the joint and eased it, more professionally but in the same way as I have been instinctively doing. When he looked me up and down and said thoughtfully, You’re built like a mannequin, he wasn’t being creepy. “Know what I mean? Like a model? Like… an athlete?” (Yes, I said). “And when you were a teenager, clearly you would have been: Wow! Pretty as a picture!” (He flicked his loose hand as though shaking off water, to convey to me how goodlooking I used to be. Yes, I said. And sighed) ~ When he said all of those things, he wasn’t being grisly. It was said benignly: innocently, almost. A simple observation. Never mind the fact that his fingers were under my kneecap and I was lying there in my underwear.
I might have forgotten to mention the skeletons. They were the first thing I noticed, apart from the Post-It on the mirror. Just plastic, educational skeletons – but somehow he stores them in an open-weave kind of hammock, suspended directly above the treatment table. I was gazing at them as he concluded his appearance-based theory of diagnosis: “I think you’re just athletic, and you’re fit and strong, and your muscles would naturally cramp up.” (Makes sense. And *of course* it would have happened a lot more – or is it less – when I was prettier.) He asked me to turn on my stomach. He dug his fingers into my shoulder, which has also been sore. I am stoical about pain but, man, this was pain. I did not cry out. I opened my mouth and rolled my eyes at the row of musculature posters. He dug his fingers in further and I gasped. Then he swooped down so that his head was level with mine on the table, and said in my ear, “Jesus said ~”
Who?! “Jesus said, I am the vine. I am the roots and the trunk. If the branches are cut off from the roots, no grapes can grow.” Finally he let me sit up. The pain in my knee began to ebb, more than it has for months. “You see, Jesus is the only true teacher.”
Like a traffic cop I put up my hand. “Actually, there have been lots of teachers. Plenty of great teachers. And not all of them men. Some are even alive today. The Dalai Lama for example.”
He picked up the clipboard with his sketches of my ligaments and sat down beside me to draw the roots, the vine, and the grapes cut off from the source, apparently believing I’d missed the metaphor. “No other teacher rose from the dead,” he told me. “I get it,” I said. “I understand that this is what you believe. But I don’t believe it.” “What do you believe in, then?” I hardly knew what to say. “I believe in people. I believe in nature and people. I believe people’s hearts are full of love and that we want to be good to one another.”
“If you’re cut off from the vine…” But I stopped him. My knee was throbbing. “Have you not noticed something? All of these teachers say the exact same thing. They say, love. They say, be good to one another, try to understand, treat as you would be treated.” We stood up and he put out his hand to shake mine. “I’m a philosopher at heart,” he said, unexpectedly. Walking me back down the corridor to Reception he asked was the little girl I’d been playing with when he came out to fetch me my daughter. “But you looked so happy together!” He asked about my health insurance and when he worked out I don’t have any, because I am not Swiss, said, “Then give I you this session gratis.” “I think you will find that in a few days,” he said, “all of your pain will have vanished.”
I have a cute, European friend who talks about money in the slang sense as “bugs.” This cost 75 bugs and the other was a steal at only 20 bugs. To talk about bucks of course makes no more sense: why would a male deer have more value than a bear, a bitch, a bison? I never correct my friend because every time I hear “this cost me almost fifty bugs” it makes me so happy.
Drowsy today & introspective and I had to sort of tip myself out of the house like the last olive clinging in the jar. The market stallholders seemed to me noisy and boisterous, cheerful in an inflicted way. When I paused in front of a mound of strawberries the guy shovelled a dozen punnets into a bag and thrust it at me, saying, One Euro. A little further on, a stall of organic produce, flecked apples and satisfyingly plump brown mushrooms. “I’d like 400g of those please and a lemon and a….” Reaching into my stash of German words I realized I’d no idea what is the collective noun for leaves of spinach. A bunch? A bouquet? A posy? I can’t say any of these things in German. “… a piece of spinach, please.” She was already stacking it into the bag I had handed her. “A piece! I like that.” “How would you normally say it?” “Ah, well… I’d like some of that spinach, or a little of your spinach, or a bag of spinach… But I like ‘piece.’”
In German piece and peace are different sounds but I do love the way they have named their cemeteries: literally the resting place, “the peace court.” Court as in shared space: courtyard. So I guess höflich (polite) means really, courtly. God… that was exhausting. But at least I have a mountain of strawberries to fill my bath.
An hour ago I made friends with two Israeli dudes selling Vietnamese knives on a drearily dripping, cheerily lighted Berlin market. It is so warming and cozy to wander under damp vinyl awnings and it has been so frustrating trying to chop vegetables with a bread knife all these weeks.
One was called Coia and the other something even more beautiful which I forget. They stood there in their pigtailed dreads and ludicrously cute knotty woollen hats, relaxed with hands in pockets, offering one carrot after another so I could slice and scrape and find out all the properties of the knives laid out like eyeless sharks on the flowered cloth. Thinner, lighter blades go through things easily and are best for small vegetables and watery stuff (like fruit). Denser blades suit heavier applications like meat and potatoes and bone. You can sharpen your blade every six months or so on the underside of a ceramic plate, and Coia demonstrated for me what the sound should be like (a kind of tabla whoomph). A few stalls along the Turkish keycutter had a whompa-slupf, whompa-slupf going from behind his counter somewhere and I stopped to ask is that music? Or is it a machinery.
Turns out it’s a machinery. But it had this sort of repetitive organic quality like two taps dripping at a sink that made me want to record a sample and build something over the top of it. Key music, knife music. Market friendships. Golden lights.