Sometimes at night I like to talk to myself
in the dark, on the way home, on my bike
and then Berlin you drive me crazy with desire
for you, the trees which flicker over my back
like beetles’ wings, going light and dark, light
and heavy, all three at once
Tag: magical
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light at night ja
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the night so vast
Walking at night through the little woods that runs along the shore. I can hear a muted guitar playing from across the water. The dirty water in the dark looks black and clean as ink. Spring is thickening and the trees reach in from either side, closing the path. You have to be swallowed in it. The low thrum of summer night conversation peppers along the canal. The smell of pot. The smell of cigarettes. The clinking of old bottles as a man wheeling his laden bicycle stops under a streetlamp to readjust them all so tenderly in their bags, with furrowing care as though he were collecting them to keep. When I turned down last night an invitation to the birthday party of a man who lives in a van in a village of vans in a thicket where the cherry trees were all pink in April his brother, who’d invited me, said, You should come, we will have a fire in a barrel. Like New York. His brother, he said, had a telescope and this was a telescope party. “Saturn,” he said, the German way, “and her rings and… Jupiter.” I turned for home under the linden trees and he told me how every village had its linden once: with a bench running round it, the Dorflinden. I’m alone now, in the manner of people who don’t go to parties, and my eyes are swollen from crying, and sore. The headache lifts and disintegrates from my shoulders as I walk on, caring for little and everything, reaching the peace inside like dark water. Right at the far end the moon hovers low over the broadening trees and the water, a doorway to infinite peace, an intermittently rattling blind, a prize.
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to stars
In an unpretentious Italian restaurant where all the pasta had been made by hand, the chatting-family atmosphere fell into something much deeper and richer and darker. A cellist had walked in and in his overcoat sat down on a backless chair in front of the servery and began to play. Something, I don’t know what. He drove his fibres of unholy sound into the great grail of all of us, each of us, like an ochre long-blown off the palm of his hand. I saw the small boy with dark lozenges of eyes climb down from his chair at the corner table in the second room and go to stand, unconsciously in the waiter’s path, his head a jar for the tadpoles of surety this man was making for us. He stood and stood, listening and watching, lost to every other thing. Behind him his parents and their friend kept chatting and only the older, grizzled, quizzical looking man at another table let his gaze rest on the little music lover so fondly, brimming with acceptance, and I let my gaze rest on him in turn and the music rested on all of us, like snow, that spares no needle in the pine forest and lifts its shifting darkness turn to stars.
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unforgiveably gone
Today my hair kept tangling in the buttons at the back of my coat. I spent a long time standing in doorways or under trees, thoughtfully fishing there with my fingers, dreamily, gingerly unwinding. I’ve been spending time in a cafe that was opened “ca. 1930” by the stout pretty dark-haired woman whose blurred photograph on the front page of the menu (hand-written) may have been one of the last ever taken of her. Berlin’s dark, sour, staining history runs alongside every step, like the raised seam of bricks which traces where the much more recent Wall has been carted off and destroyed: maybe she was torn down, maybe deprived of her life and livelihood, maybe dispatched, grossly outraged, starved, murdered, ruined, unforgivably gone.
The brass plaques, size of a cigarette packet, that here and there replace one or two cobblestones with a name or a family of gone names are, I found out, the work of one artist.
I spent much of the day in her cafe, writing and writing, had a bowl of broth with pancakes rolled and thinly sliced into it, lingered, in the air spiked with smoke, over a menu of dishes I couldn’t understand. Because even where I can translate, the concepts are unfamiliar and dim: Leberknoedel, Schupfnudeln, alles mit Kartoffelecken.
When I came out the blue hour had struck and everything felt festive. I went into a hat shop and wound my way along the walls right to the back. I picked up and fingered things, stroking and probing. I stood in front of their long polished mirror wearing a crimson top hat that was too big and came down over my brows.
My new Kiez is studded with turreted buildings, an old tollhouse, an old gatekeep. Many of them now are restaurants and the golden interiors, the white clothed tables, the solicitous bending of waiters in the windows – the shimmering, old-glazed, inviting windows – were so irresistible. I resisted. I went into the supermarket which bursting like fruit from a basket was so much more vivid, more lively than the dreamily acquiescent twilighttime street, and filled with families. Stubbornly determined to cook in my two-room palace of hired minimalism which has no pepper grinder, no chopping block, and no knives, I snatched up a small sack of potatoes, some garlic and onions, a roll of butter. I have powdered stock and a Swiss army knife and I reckon it’s enough to make soup.
It’s so cold. The insides of the windows are cold. Not too cold. Not just yet. Deliciously so. My landlady hovers like a ghost in the hollow of her white apartment, her beauty, her wide frightened blue eyes with their large pupils staring like bullets. I found our bed last night to be beautifully cosy and soft, woke to a window of tree. Once I’d had a bath there seemed little else to do and I felt so happy about that.
In the evening after I’d moved in, before the bath, I went out exploring, feeling hollow and hungry inside. A restaurant golden and beckoning softened the corner of my new street. I stood shivering in the dark for ten minutes and walked up and down and up and down again before I found the courage to walk in the door and thus enter its enchanted, entire, intact civil world. It was disconcerting, after all this long travel, how hard it felt just to walk in. Intruding on the community of this new district, unknown to me like a new city, by this decision to eat out took far more courage than I’d expected. I so often eat alone and I like that. But I guess my adventurousness is exhausted.
In Melbourne I used to notice this, every morning even when I’d been writing over my breakfast in the same cafe every day for months: the forcefield that people establish or emit when they form an unconscious community, shiftingly, by being all in the premises, by forming a varied, large party, strikes me like shyness buzzing electric across the doorway of every new cafe, and always has; this felt far harder.
Now, this evening, everything feels different. I can feel I have found my way. The new part of town is becoming my Kiez. Its dark streets of houses feel now already less intimidating and austere, more quietly homey and interesting and wan. My sublet in its dank courtyard is divided from the welcoming bustle of shops by a river of rushing lights pouring the hill, like sand, from one glass to another. My sight clears and I start to see. Not everyone here has money. Between the lifestyle shops are the lifeline shops, where hungry people find what they eat. I am hungry. I’m always so hungry. At the supermarket checkout a man in front of me said to the cashier, Holst du mir mal vierzig Cent? Ich habe keine Brille mit. Can you grab me the forty cents? I don’t have my glasses. Obligingly the guy sorted through the coins, patiently, turning them and showing them til he found the right ones. The guy behind me made a friendly remark and I turned it to advantage – a politician! Laying a finger on his bright yellow toilet rolls I asked, Have you ever thought of trying out the recycled kind? No, he said, in a tone that showed it’s never crossed his mind. It’s just that the trees take such a long time to grow, I said. And it takes a long time to replace the ones we chop. He gave me his twinkling smile. Next time, he promised, I’m going to remember that. I piled the stuff into my knapsack and took up the mesh bag of potatoes by its uppermost root. The corner of the sack yielded a perfect potato, an archetype, shaped and sized exactly like an egg. I closed my fingers and palm right round it and used that to carry them home, internally a handle. The high blue wintery sky and red lights were so absorbing that I accidentally walked right past my street and found a brand new park. The grass was still dimly green but the trees already blackened by night. Little children darted round the path, excited, calling out. As I turned back for home I saw a little family, with very young children, slowly climbing the damp stone steps carrying candle lanterns. The parents’ lamps genteelly leap-frogged each step, one by one, the candles swinging three feet up from the stone. But the littlest child, to whom walking is still a labour of concentration, held his lantern outstretched and swung it right forward with the effort of each step’s climb. I came home and put the potatoes on and put on all her lamps. The window above the bare desk is a square of black in this white soft room and I can hear as I’m typing the dark-throated toll of some old church’s beautiful, wild, German bells.
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unter den berlinden
When I leave I will miss the magical wildness of Berlin, that is already being built out for apartments and hotels; the overgrown factories with railway lines running through them; the fact that on every sunny spot, a railway bridge, a low brick wall over the river, people will bring out their paperbacks and their beers, arrange themselves quietly, spend an afternoon, publicly lolling. I’ll miss the laundromat round the corner from me which is also a pub and has a pool table and couches. Old punks, living in squalor in huge squats but running them as businesses now – showing open-air movies, collecting beer bottles for their glass deposit. “Was your father a glassmaker?” my dad used to say to me, when I was a kid and would sit hunched too close to the screen blocking his view of the TV. I set my TV out on the nature strip seven or eight years ago, I do not miss it, but in Berlin my whole of life is like a child’s, sitting too close up against the screen – everything in colour, everything sharp and growing and broken, everything wailing and wrecked. On the medieval bridge I pass five buskers, all with their CDs out. The bricks smell of piss. This besieged city, surrounded by untouched ancient villages which were, until a few years back, clammy East Germany. The Wall runs like a cold seasnake through the town, you can look down at your sneakers and gasp, it has grasped you, the double line of bricks that show us: here is where we once were two. Isn’t it strange how a city itself can hold our patience and attention, an affectionate contract – the unending tolerance one will bring to one’s surroundings: like Melbourne, like New York, though perishing of loneliness some afternoons I’m in love with the stinking vile city as a whole. I love its dogs, haunting and purposeful and striking out each alone on some adventure of perception, one by one, differently spotted and scarred and with or without a collar, muscled or fat. Berlin, its train rides, the foul breath of the underground, I love its filthy pavements and its skies, almost invisible now that it’s autumn but breaking out late in the day with a luscious deep Fabergé blue that brings cameras up from chests and phones out of back pockets. I specially love its bicycles, spindle traffic of a woven city. I know nothing I experience or say here or see can make sense, not ever ever, I could grow old here (oh! a year, give me a couple of years yet) but I still would never know the deep dark nature of our violence, the way we entertain each other like guests on the front porch, the beeriness, the weary wary tolerance and mighty longing that like an oily octopus deep in the works drives this city and all who sail on her: show me the way to the next itch to scratch. “Berlin”, the name has become a spell, to me. I’m bound, bonded, blinded. In Berlin a spell.
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I slept out
Last night in Switzerland. I slept out. The moon disentangled itself from the cherry tree and slowly drew a shallow course across the horizon, pulsing through the cloud its fitful gleams. Every time I opened my eyes the stalks and undercarriages of daisies on the bush by me struck dark green and white as white into the grey moon sky. Airplanes drew chalk lines back and forth at long intervals: there is something more for me to learn here. Nearer by far a single mosquito visited, penetrating sleep in its several manifestations. I slapped myself again upside the head. I could hear two people talking quietly on the verandah in the apartments downstream. I could hear the river’s greedy mumblings, little sucking and slurping rushes and a longer, darker bass dragging underneath. In Berlin to orient myself I will dip my feet one by one in the Spree and tell myself as so often I have told, My darling, All water is one.
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in kindly whispers
Long night ride home between the trees, the trees, the trees. They are dark and tall and reach down into the night, yearning away wild from the centre of the earth its boiling core. They are reaching the night down for us on earth, in whispers, like kindly adults explaining something magical to children.
My bicycle is silent and has no lights.
You know that high still cloud at night that seems creamy and shattered like when someone, really stoned, showed you how custard powder is the only substance on earth that can be stirred, when mixed up thick enough in a bowl of water, and at the same time shattered at a blow from the back of a spoon. A liquid, a solid. Like glass. That was last century and in a different hemisphere but, yes, Gus, I still remember it.
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in the dark
Things you can do in silence, in the dark. Cycling alone under trees, flicker, flicker. Watching petals fall in flakes of tiny silver alight on the black liquid wind. Swinging on a swing someone’s fixed to a low bough overhanging the water, the wind rushing gently and softly as cat’s paws past your ears.
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golden lion
I went upriver two nights ago with a box of matches in my pocket. It was overcast and just beginning to get dark. Went down a green gladed path that I know and found the place I’d found before. I’ve never seen anybody there but once there was a girl playing her guitar on the next promontory, sitting on a fallen tree with her hair falling over her face.
As I went I collected twigs and dried stalks and small fallen branches. I made a bristling bundle with each hand, I stretched my palm to carry more. At the place I built a fire. Last week someone had played a game there: twelve squares deep and ten squares wide, etched into the dirt, it had three teams: one playing with smooth stones, one with dandelion flowers, one with short sticks each piercing a leaf.
In front of the fire I sat down to rest my back against a tree. The water rushed behind me, rushing rushing. It had begun to rain, not too heavily, I put on my coat and let the tree shelter me. A blue egg had fallen from the nest, egg-blue and speckled. On the inside its broken shell was white as teeth. Last night I took a different way and when I came to the clearing downstream where a bench and firepit have been built, in front of the bench someone had made a heart with stones. The stones said: “I <3 ..." The inner body of the stone heart had been filled with clumps of moss, and every few inches the green dense moss was punctuated by a golden dandelion flower. Again it grew dark, and again it rained, and I sat and watched by the water.
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mouth bandit
Some days I really miss my cat. She is grey & downy and is a right little snuggleupagus. She’s also a kind of miracle cat because she got lost one night, this was in inner Melbourne, and stayed lost for five months until one day someone rang in response to one of my posters, saying, I think your cat is living in our backyard. She had survived as a street cat and was thin but unharmed. Whilst not living in alleyways she likes to harvest unattended hair elastics from the desks of working poets and will carry them about in her mouth for hours, tirelessly playing fetch…. like a little dog. I love her but we always had two separate piles: mine (to hold my hair back) and hers (a bit manky from being scuffled and chewed).
One thing I love about cats is their ambition. I would see her crouched at the foot of a wall, every fibre bristling with concentration as she sighted up a browsing mosquito or a shadow under the ceiling. “I can take that, I can totally take it!” And yet they seem to have no other desire than to laze. Most important of all is: be comfortable. Always be comfortable.
