Beautiful sunset over Berlin today: pink, stippled like wet sand, and spacious. The man in the wine shop made me laugh. They were listening to Bob Dylan, who is now, would you believe? a Nobel laureate. So I told him: I keep misreading the name of your store. For a long time I translated it to, “Emergency Burgundy.”
Ah, he told me. We were going to go with that. But then we thought: let’s take that as a given.
In the cafe he showed me the pictures he had taken on his walk here, of a dog skateboarding in the park. “You should animate those into a thumb-book!” I said. Amy Winehouse was singing. “Or maybe a – gif.”
We watched a couple walking past in their somehow sweet and somehow matching outfits. He had on a blend of waterfront worker and Clash renegade, a scarlet beanie; she was doused in a long, woollen coat with skirts, like she had stepped out of the moors to take the city air. I was struggling to put all of this into words and he said, “Their cute sort of karate look.”
I pressed his hand. “Karate-karaoke-paparazzi.”
We walked back past the housefront biliously painted with darker green highlights which says at arm height worst green ever. He had a conversation with the guy whose dog is wrapped in a torn army blanket, on the metal access ramp to the ATM foyer at the bank. This man is American and clearly made his life here years ago, but his German is poor. As is he. His devilish rock and roll grin greets bank customers and he swoops the door open, when they leave and when they enter, so courteously and with an infectious warmth.
In the park, drug dealers and old ice: the frozen water kind. A girl cycles past, singing. The sun has been brief. “You should gig there,” he says, pointing over to a bar sunk underground with golden windows. “They host acoustic stuff.”
“I’d love to,” I say, looking in at the knee-height windows shyly, as we pass. “If I ever start gigging again.”
Reaching my Kiez in the late afternoon* I nearly ran into a boy-girl couple kissing strenuously outside the Turkish supermarket. This supermarket annoys me because they always reel off too many plastic bags and I have seen a man who had put his single apple into one bag accept another bag to carry it home in. My, how they kissed. He was twisting on his feet. She opened her mouth and throat, tipping back her head. I was so rejoiced by them I started to laugh, and then the flirty guy on the nub of the corner who sells his own ice cream laughed along with me, though he through an accident of geography had missed the kiss.
I went onto the market. Berlin markets start late. You can go down there at ten or even eleven and find people still sleepily setting up. But as the afternoon ripens it has settled into a groovous swing – that is the opposite of grievous, I suppose – a grievous swing, specially down the other end where there’s a platform built out over the water and it’s filled with people, many of them just gazing and smiling but some with their eyes closed or even eyes open are dancing, from a sitting position or standing up to shake it out. Two guys with a microphone had set up their bag. And were piling us all into it, gleefully. Och music. You’re indescribable, I know. I came through the markets carrying my head on its stalk and I have lost a little weight just lately and with it, years, and the man who sells bolts of plain linen and cotton, unbleached – are there that many painters in the region? – smiled at me lingeringly, when I glanced back and smiled he was still smiling and he tipped at me his head, consideringly, almost obsequious. That is what beauty can do for us and I had forgotten, but now I remembered.
At the jewellery stall set up on a bin with a velvet-clad board clapped over it by a Japanese man who wears busy gathered pants and feathers woven in his hair, another beautiful guy with golden shoulders was standing with his arms out and his hands held up, tilting his head from one ring to another, determining which one set off his gorgeousness the best. He amused but he bored me. I’ve known those men. At the organic vege stall run by curmudgeonly lesbians who all live together on a smallholding outside Berlin I asked, Hey, can I photograph your beetroots? They just look so proud there on their blue background, holding out their leaves. Yes, she said, winnowing flowering green leaves which are sold by the hundred grams for a woman who had two children with her, each child carrying her own tiny handbag and each pushing her own tiny pram. I left off grooving and came up home, walking on the other side of the market street, past the stall which sells nine types of potatoes. And as I came past the cheese lady who cuts pale butter off a sweetly sweating slab I ran across those same two kids, still kissing, wringing the greenery out of this day which as a leaf this afternoon fell past me just as my shutter clicked surely must be one of the last days of the year on which we can wander and groove, we can kiss in the streets and call out to one another, hey Berlin. I passed a discount stall flogging cheaply printed night shirts in cellophane, one of them said, in curly handwriting font, LOVE IS THE but I turned it over and discovered there was a slab of cardboard slid down the back, to stiffen the shirt for display, and that covered the rest of the words and though my mind flooded with suggestions I could not make it out. Now I have to spend the rest of my life wondering. What is love?
*Kiez is the few streets between you and your main roads: your own neighbourhood.
A knock at the door when we finally trudge home, carrying our groceries, exhausted. It’s the darlingest neighbour in the world. “Oh, hi!” “Hey Cathoel. Just wanted you to see the last supermoon.” I have gasped and clapped my hand to my mouth. “Oh my god!” He is telling me, “It was even better last night. But,” confidingly, “it’s pretty good tonight.” I am still gazing at the moon. “Fuck!” I say without meaning to. It has just sailed up coolly from behind a giant building. It has the sky to itself, apart from a few pilot fish like lesser boats milling round the giant sleek swans at the start of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race. My neighbour tells me shyly, “I love the moon.” He is wearing ugg boots and a pair of work shorts. It felt like summer today, suddenly, but it grew chill as it grew dark. When we set off to the shops an hour ago I had to laugh: partner in his ugg boots, me still stubbornly wearing sandals. “The pessimist and the optimist set out on a shopping trip together,” I told him, to make him laugh too.
At the supermarket we saw a display of premature mince pies. They were packaged in festive red and green with silver holly. September, October, November, December. I spoke to a man with a trolley full of plastic bags about whether he might ever think of bringing his own. A look of weariness passed over his face. He explained what I couldn’t know: They use them again. His particular household – the boy gaping silently from behind the flowering trolley – has special exemption. Circumstances. Babies. “We have a baby at home who uses disposable nappies.” I felt the sinking in my heart, could say nothing. He said, kindly, shifting into higher-pitched Real Estate Voice, “Thank you for your concern. I’m sure it’s helping.” You see, it’s different for me. I am selfish. I am lazy. I got my own reasons. We got a baby at home using disposable nappies. God knows you could never wrap those in, say, newspaper. I was blinking back tears and had to run outside to collect myself. When a pair of ugg boots appeared inside my line of vision I looked up. He was blinking, smiling, holding out his hand weighted down with the shopping sack rendered from old cement bags. We walked home and took refuge in our house and then the neighbour winkled me out and now the suberbmoon glides up this grey concrete sky as though drawn on an invisible string. It is blond and impervious to smaller, humbler craft, like the frantically blinking jet plane cruising low toward the harbour. It is better than anything you’ve ever seen. It just is. If you’re alive right now, run outside and look up.
I have here this neighbour whose skin is dark and seamy and white hairs sprout from him like surprise. He is beautiful, he sits quietly, often under a tree in his back yard on the besser block low wall with sometimes a friend sitting by him, sometimes a fat swollen silver bladder of wine from a box of wine lying between them quietly. They are talking and their voices rumble and I had an operation recently, quite recently, which involved a scary general anaesthetic and I remember thinking, when I woke up that morning and the light had sliced the curtains open: if I could do this procedure just lying on his chest, I would feel safe, I would be sure I would survive it.
I survived it. The man who is my neighbour downhill has survived much more, maybe forty years more than I. He likes his tree. He likes the day. He accepts it I think. I like when his eyes rest on me and he lets me rest his eyes on him and as I pass, trotting down the hill carrying my milk can or that is, my empty coffee mug with curling horns of handles, he says always the same thing every day, slowly: “You should be running down that hill!” When I come back leaning into the slope my coffee steaming in one hand and face gazing down into the asphalt of our very steep hill he says, squeezing a wheezing laugh, “It’s all very well coming down the hill…” Every time I answer him the same. “I should be somersaulting!” “Yeah, it’s the climbing that’s hard.” He said to me one morning, “Girl, what you eating there?” and I opened my hand to show him, crossing the road, holding them out pink and stainy: “Lillypilly. Would you like some?” But the little fruits are gone now, partly because season and partly because greedy girl moved in to the house on the high hill and has had a feed of them, every morning, on her way to buy caffeine.
Some delightful person left a little note in our letterbox this week, thanking us for something we had not done.
It is wrapped in a glossy little gift box hot pink with white polka dots, which folds open like a Chinese takeaway. There’s something so satisfying about those boxes. Inside is a mess of silver glitter, a note, and half a dozen transfers which are intended as play tattoos. One says, backwards:
We accept
the love
we think
we des
erve.
Another has a Day of the Dead skull drawn on it with flowers round the bone. The note, when I unfolded it, read:
“Thank you for being so kind this morning when I parked in front of your house. I was running late & had nowhere else to park, your kindness was appreciated! Have some temporary tattoos for your kids!”
It is a strange feeling to be thanked for someone else’s kindness. But I loved it. I wish I could get hold of this stranger and put them in touch with their real recipient. Only as I write does it dawn on me the obvious thing to do will be box it all up again, glitter and all, and deliver it to my lovely neighbour, who likely is the real fairy godfather. It is such a lovely sensation to open the crackling box, spill glitter on my toes, read the cutely lettered note and know that some person did some other person a small, meaningful favour and that other person noticed and appreciated it, and has gone to some trouble to thank them.