Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: personal responsibility

  • I spoke first

    In a crowded lunchtime cafe we were pressed elbow to elbow. The couple beside me talked and talked, while both scrolling idly on their phones. At last I turned to the woman, whose mouth was open and full of food, and asked her,

    “Excuse me, would you please be so kind (in German we say ‘so dear’ or ‘so love’) as to swallow first, and then speak?”

    Her mouth dropped open further. Her gaze sharpened. So I said, “It’s kind of gross. And I am also eating.”

    People who lack emotional honesty are often intimidated by it, I think. They turned to each other and went on as though I had not spoken, except that the woman changed her habit. But the man must have been revolving it in his mind, like the visible food in her mouth. I went on with my meal gazing into the beautiful day around us and was startled by his hand on my arm.

    “Firstly. You should ask more politely. And secondly. If it is you who doesn’t like it, it’s you who moves.”

    “That’s polite?” I said, almost laughing. But she gained courage from his hostility and soon they were both railing at me, jabbing hectoring fingers in my face, telling me off as only Germans can.

    “Look, if you want to have a fight about this, can you do it amongst yourselves? I’m not interested.”

    This outraged them further and the woman’s chest was heaving. The people at the next table looked shocked. The waiter came so I could pay and asked, how was it. And I said, truthfully, it was ok, thank you, it wasn’t super like it usually is.

    Five German gasps went up around me like balloons. The Vietnamese waiter laughed. “It’s because today I cooked it myself.” It is interesting to me and I sometimes experiment, how much you can frustrate a German by simply refusing to make eye contact – whilst jaywalking, for example – because they long to tell off the transgressor and shepherd them back into the fold, but lack the straightforwardness to tackle someone who has not spoken first.

  • a homemade flower festival

    A woman in my neighbourhood has put up little signs all round the flower gardens in our local park. Her signs are handwritten, but laminated.

    “INVITATION TO THE FLOWER FESTIVAL, JUNE 16. Yeah maybe ‘festival’ is somewhat high flown. But I will bake a cake and hand a slice of it to everyone who feels themselves somehow connected to these plants and who wants to come by. There have been so many lovely engagements and so much enabling mutual assistance taking place locally, I would really love to offer my friends an impression of it all. And in case we haven’t yet met, then this will provide us an opportunity.”

    She writes a smily face, in her own handwriting.

    “It would be practical, if youse (the informal German you) would bring something to sit on and some stuff that goes with cake eating and coffee drinking. I’ll be glad if you come along!”

    Flowerbeds in Berlin are always overgrown, because the city is broke and there’s no money to pay people in fluorescent vests to destroy our every Sunday with leafblowers. Nearby, even more overgrown and underkempt, a tiny meadow has evolved where consistent and assiduous neglect year after year has allowed all the native flowers and butterflies to come back.

    On the main road, when I reach it, a man with a ZZ Top beard has settled himself and his paunch next to my favourite seat outside the writing cafe. He turns the pages of his newspaper with noisy harrumphs. We exchange a few words. “I’m going inside to order,” I tell him, as Berliners do, “are you here a few more minutes?”

    The informal ‘you.’

    “Then would you mind keeping an eye on my stuff?”

    “Either that,” he says, “or I’ll be gone, with your little red rucksack,” and he laughs, and I laugh, as I’m heading inside where it is shady and the bartender on his stool is reading Camus, in French.

  • kink shaming

    On the one hand, consensual sex is nobody else’s business. On the other, I feel sad for this person (surely a woman). I feel suspicious of her dominant/exploiting partner (surely a man). Sexual play is one thing. But if she is dependent on it, I start to feel like there are healthier ways for people to admit they need comfort and cosseting.

    As a friend who is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and is working with her own inner child has said, she cannot imagine a more damaging thing to do to your wounded inner self.

    I want to say a little more about this. Like many oldest sisters I grew up caring for my little brothers and, in some ways, taking responsibility to parent the woundedness exhibited by both parents. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to be little. I have a hunger for it. I’ve been 6’2″ since the age of 12 (and shy), and people attribute to me a lot of authority. It’s been so interesting to learn to own all of that and be unashamed and to teach myself, rather laboriously, to be able to say to my partner, I need to be comforted and babied, I need to be little, do you have the energy for that?

    It took me so much courage in adulthood to learn to finally be little. Asking for such indulgence and comfort and parenting straight out feels, to me, so much more enabling than other options I see people using. No blame to them, everyone is doing what they can. And again I emphasise that I am not speaking of individual people’s enabled choices for sexual play. But I’ve had damaged friends and exes who indulge themselves in tantrums, breakdowns, manipulations etc that demand cosseting and patient parental style understanding – which as a partner I will gladly give, only it feels so much more respectful to be asked for it clearly and outright. To be able to do this takes real work. I actually enjoy the sense of agency and grounded balance I have when aware and present for my own vulnerability and not trying to do something which would be so alien to my nature – dress up and protect that aching frailty by pretending it is sexy, hot, kinky, or hip.

     

  • that I fight

    The battle to take seriously my own life and prospects, and to treat myself well, is the great absorbing struggle of my life. After fifty or a hundred rapes, before which I had never kissed and been kissed; after being savagely beaten and thrashed by my parents one of whom is now dead for daring to leave that first relationship, a year later – this struggle absorbs more of my energy than I can tell. In Ghana I am free and scintillate, I roam the countryside of this strange and wildly interesting city. People greet me and I call back. I am smiling from my soul. But even here my lover and I must attend constantly the vigil of ensuring that I never provide myself to him as a service.

    Occasionally I do and he catches me out.

    Are you sure, he asks, and I lie, Yes. Am I hurting you, as we press ourselves into each other like metal into sand and heat into metal. No, I lie, and he stops still to look at me narrowly. This narrow suspicious glance in my case is a necessary feeler of love.

    When Judge Rosemarie Aquilina dropped aside the pleading, exonorous letter serial rapist Larry Nassar had written to the Court, when she told him his self-pity was nothing compared with the pleasure he took in these immature women’s forming bodies, let alone the pain and anguish he has caused them which inhibits still their talent-stained lives – I could relate. I waited months, until yesterday, to expose myself to parts of the footage and reportage, waiting til I could bear it. I watched the testimony of a young Olympian who told him from the stand, “I will not take my life. I am taking it back.” And on the couch in our rental in Accra I crumpled forward and clutched my hand around my so long sore heart and cried out and cried.

    These decades later, I still have no income. Having topped every class I took from the age of four to eighteen, when in the final semester of university and throes of this awful year of cumulative hell I dropped from my flock and barely passed, I have no career. The money I’ve lived on comes from waitressing, fifteen years of waitressing, which I was good at; and from sporadic coaching in which fellow writers tell me I have inspired them, and pay me for an hour; and from a stunning single purchase of property which I renovated and lived in, dividing the bank interest with a series of housemates I invariably chose for their resemblance to the abusive family who loved me as best as they could.

    The waitressing was mostly in a fine Paddington BYO which required me to carry seven full plates of food at once, and taught me to open a bottle of Moet after I dropped the first one, and to carry out twenty-one champagne flutes between my fingers and lay them out on the table one by one, shining and polished. It exposed me to the old man who pressed his face up against my breasts when I stretched across the table to set down his friend’s plate. It put me in the path of the stranger who stuck a fork in my arse as I bent over the table as though I had been a bird in an oven. Was I done?

    In Berlin, as a friend has only recently pointed out to me, I struggle some days to get myself off the couch. Leaving my apartment is a daily heroism. I am shy and exceedingly sensitive to start with. The performance instinct which is a lion dancing in me and roaring has been silenced externally for several years. Instead I practice dealing with bus drivers. If some random barkeep is rude to me I feel the talons of self-silence cage round me and I become a mouse, limp in the sailing claws of this bigger predator, playing dead lest he kill me, trapped in the freeze.

    The amount of energy this perpetually renewed struggle costs me is mortifying to tell. The spectre in myself of being someone who is de facto preoccupied with her own past, or at least, stained by it, humiliates me when I long with all my heart only to face the day, this day – the only day, and build all its fruits.

    My brother, who though he has three children mines coal, has told me when I tried to discuss this perennial battle, “There’s something wrong with your personality, that’s why you can’t sustain a decent relationship and you have no friends, that’s why you don’t have a job.” An aunt who discovered – or invented – God told me, when I timidly brought up the topic of her sister’s, my mother’s, rage, “It’s you. I sometimes think you are possessed by the devil.” I was so irritating as a child, that same brother assured me, that our parents had no choice to get violent with me.

    My mother, who once called me ‘a failure as a human being’, also supports my daily life. Fear of publicly shaming her – a shame that seems unearnt – and of hurting my family has long kept me silent. Having run out of my own miracle earnings, much of which I spent on unnecessary medical procedures whose invasive humiliations I was convinced were crucial for my health, I am living outright upon her, in her seventies – how dare I? –  while I labour to complete some saleable work, or to get some business started. Some days, the labour focuses still on finding the wellbeing to bother to feed myself. You see I have not always eaten every day. I find trouble keeping my little home clean and combing my own hair. Every now and then I have to take the nail scissors to it and cut out all the little knots.

    Meanwhile I write and make photographs every day, I draw and make assemblage and small films. I give all my work away for free and the album I made, lassoing twenty-eight musicians in New York and Melbourne, is still unreleased except online. I play my album to the jazz impresario who in the 50s brought Shirley Bassey to Melbourne, and my heart clutches when he says, “In my opinion, you will be one of the greatest artists this country has produced.” I finger the dusty piano I have lugged from Brisbane to Adelaide, and from Adelaide to Melbourne, and Melbourne back to Brisbane and now across the seas to Berlin. I cannot bring myself to touch it, I never sing, I have forgotten how to play my own songs on my own guitar. When I think about money, I panic and flail. It is almost not possible for me to believe my work has value, and that anyone would ever pay for it.

     

     

  • pedalling home

    Pedalling home along a tree-lined street which is set aside for bicycles, I heard a crash. A man reaching up to put his brown wine bottle in the brown glass bin had tipped forward and toppled like a tree – at first I thought he must be drunk. There was nobody about, just him and me. I had jammed on my brakes.

    He actually flung his legs up in the fall and took a few tips to settle, like a rocking horse set rocking. “Alles okay?” I leaned my bike and ran over. He was getting up painfully slowly and had that embarrassed expression that usually indicates want of serious injury. “Die Kante…” he explained as I reached him, the curbside had a camber…

    Falls, as we know, can be deadly in the elderly and I remember that Leonard Cohen had a serious fall, as so many older people do, in the days before his death. I remember locking myself in a wardrobe to cover my face and howl, when I heard that he had died, two weeks after Dad’s funeral. Our St Leonard of Koans.

    Shakily restored to his own feet, the man immediately turned to pick up his empty bottle and popped it in the open mouth of the brown bottle sorting station. They have three colours and beer bottles commonly have worn whited shoulders from rubbing companionably up against each other on all those trips back to the brewery and then the store. Och, Germany: you slay me. It’s like a magical land in which everyone behaves the way I’ve always done: we’re all in this together. I had just passed a crossing where another crash heralded a tipping bicycle, whose basket was filled with neatly sorted bottles, possibly heading for this same recycle station. They started to bounce and break all over the cobblestones. Before I could react a dozen people had swooped in to help, propping their own bikes and stooping like long-legged birds.

    I asked the elderly man, “Sind Sie verletzt?” Are you hurt? He passed a hand uncertainly over the crown of his head, showing me where there might be an injury, and in response to this mute plea for mothering I passed my own hand very softly over the tender scalp, as downy as a baby’s but for the sparse, short, grey, bristling old hairs. “How are you getting home?” I asked him, “you’re not driving, are you?” We stood there assuring each other. I told him the skin on his head was not broken. He told me he would be sure to be careful getting home. “Just be tender with yourself,” I told him, as I should rather more often tell myself.

    Nearer home I chatted on the phone for a long while with my dear friend, on a park bench under a stand of trees which were shedding their golden leaves as I watched. The light was just so. I found a stinking dog shit smear on the back of my hand, and made a face and started wiping it off on the grass, still talking. On the far side of the square a street dweller pulled from his breast pocket a little packet of paper handkerchiefs and drew out a fresh one and offered it to me. He bowed. I crossed over there and took it, still talking, thanking him.

    During the phone call I watched two dog owners whose dogs – one large, one small – had woven an enthusiastic wreath running counter-clockwise, passing the leashes over one another’s hands. They kept trying to untangle the beasts but the dogs running clockwise sniffing one another’s butts had passed into a blur. I saw a toddler pitched forward and running on the balls of his feet as he approached the road. There were no cars coming and his mother looked on unworried from a few paces behind but nonetheless a young girl stepping onto the pavement with her friend stopped her body in front of him, forming a kindly barrier. She stood mashing her feet and chatting to him, distracting him and making it a game, then stepped aside without a word when his mother had caught up with him and he was safe.

    This communal parenting moves me to tears. I told my friend and we both laughed with joy. I described to him the two dogs blurring themselves into a wreath on the cobbles, their owners doe-sie-doeing from above. It was dark when I put my phone back in my bag and walked uphill past the man who was still standing by his bench, with his beer, gazing up into the trees. He had on a leather hat with a feather to its brim and standing by him was a trussed wheelbarrow loaded with his things. I had gathered all my groceries in two hands and clutched them to my chest to stop them falling. “Thanks again,” I said, “for the handkerchief,” and the man said, ascending to the familiar or affectionate you, “You’re very welcome,” and I said, matching his informality, “That was love of you,” das war lieb von dir, and he bowed and pressed his hand upon his heart, and I pressed my crowded with bottles hand over my heart which was cluttered with a jar of honey, a bottle of biodegradable cleaning spray and a heavy bottle of milk; the other, free hand was splayed to keep hold of a second jar and a second bottle and I pressed the glass into my heart and we smiled at each other, at the end of an autumn day so beautiful it would make you want to resurrect belief of some kind in some kind of deity.

  • late summerhaft

    Across town today I had the impulse to come through an overgrown island of trees that surrounds a church, and went wheeling my bike along its narrow, littered path where, if I tuned out the traffic, I could feel as though I were walking through a tiny woods. Someone is living there and had stacked their possessions under a low, clotty pine and strung their meagre collection of spare garments on a bush to dry. There’s still sun. Stringy and mean but sun nevertheless. We have had perhaps fourteen inconsecutive days of heat and sunshine this summer and already in August it is growing autumnal. As I was pushing my bike a man appeared beside me carrying a green plastic watering can. Berliners are busy when the sun comes out with their wild, colourful, shared public gardens. I’ve seen a woman dunking her can into the canal on a long rope so that she could tend the sunflowers she or someone else had planted and marked off with red and white striped tape. “What,” he said, cheerfully, “a man’s bicycle for a lady? Come now.”

    “It’s true,” I said: stimmt. And we both looked down at my voluminous skirts, two prints in varying shades of indigo laid one over the top of the other. I passed a tiny preschool or as they call them, children’s shop, with nine little bicycles locked together out front and two double-barrelled prams parked side by side. As I came round the corner I started to laugh. A teenage boy was standing outside his ground-floor window, holding the end of a huge scarlet canoe which his friend fed from inside. He looked at me and I could see in his eyes the enjoyment of his instant recollection of the picture they must have made. They started laughing, too. It’s not the weather which keeps me here.

  • graffiti confetti butt

    I was cycling along the river where the water meets the trees, there is a little grove there which is sacred to me and it seems to be a forest in a parallel universe. It is a dreamy Spring day, grey like the winter but unlike Winter, studded with flowers; and I had just finished all the painful difficulties for the day, spending time in the bank explaining for the fourth time, you don’t understand, my card was lost, I had already reported it and blocked the card before this handsome spending spree happened; and then on the phone crouched on a bench at the local junkie corner explaining to one debt collection agency after another: see, you don’t understand.

    Somehow or other they understood. Now all I needed do was scan and email, or photocopy and mail, the stack of documents the nice pregnant police officer had provided to me; and this two month saga during which I had spent entire half days in her company would be finally vorbei.

    So I took some time to just cycle slowly along in my billowing favourite skirt, under the trees, listening to the voices of people who were quietly chatting on the benches and one man, very beautiful and with an outstandingly strong, slender ankle cocked, cross-legged reading his book and turning a page as I passed. I saw the glimpse of his natty sock and the gleam of his wonderful shoe. I saw the girl feeding compliments to her baby in its pram, in a sultry coo, and I followed down the path a little sister and much bigger brother, cycling end to end like a tiny chain of donkeys.

    Her little legs in their candy pink zebra stripes were pumping earnestly; she barely managed to keep up on her little silver bicycle, and as I watched, the big brother, who was barely pedalling, looked back to check up on her and as he did so, he flung up his hand and opened its fist. Out flew a perfect confetti of torn up bits of leaf and as he’d intended, from her delighted squeal, the fragments fell over her and all around her and it made her happy and it made me happy.

    A few weeks back late at night I was cycling home in the dark and my mind was drawn by the voices to the cluster of English-speaking Berliners, or touris, as real Berliners – old school, German Berliners, often themselves migrants who have fled Bavaria or Cologne – sometimes contemptuously call them. Maybe they tend to be loud and expressive; maybe they have money and push the prices up; maybe sometimes ’true’ Berliners can be seen in t shirts which say Berlin ♥ You but with the ♥ struck out; or merely ‘du bist kein Berliner.’ You… are no Berliner.

    From behind me a lighted arc flew up and over and it landed in amongst this group who were talking and clinking their beers. It is a delight to young people from Barcelona, from Zurich and Copenhagen, and from Seoul, to learn they can buy beer for about a dollar and can drink it here anywhere they please, just about; when you’re done you just leave the bottles standing for some less privileged person to pick up for recycling; maybe the place feels like one great big nightclub; maybe it feels like a music festival that goes on unending and to which you need have bought no ticket and where there is no ID check. Who knows.

    So it took me some time to work out that this lighted missile flying so gently through the air like a badminton shuttlecock was in fact a lighted cigarette butt, and it had landed — I could see it — in the black hoodie crumpled at the back of one girl’s neck, they had started slowly to go, Whut? Hey… and she had turned her head, just slightly, and I could see the dense cloud of her hair and that in another second she’d have swept her curls across the lit butt and she would go up in flames.

    I was shouting, in English through sheer discombobulation: Hey! Look out! Hey! Cigarette! There, uh — there on your back, it’s just —

    Slowly the group of them gathered what had happened and she stiffened and her friend brushed his hand round the back of the neck and shook the lit thing off and then I realised that the slowly strolling trio who had now caught up with me had sent this flying in on purpose, it was a tiny form of terrorism.

    They were Turkish Berliner kids, from the accent, and they snarled at me lazy and unhurried when in English I shouted, Hey, you — next time, don’t throw your fucking cigarettes at people. “Ja, ja, mach mal weiter,” said the girl who was already lighting another, yeah just keep walking, get lost, she was not interested in being told by one touri how she must treat another touri on her own god-given turf.

    I was pedalling again as my bike started to wobble and I felt a fear of this girl, with her massive sense of entitlement, and switching to German, hurried, unkempt German, I tried, “That was idiotic. It’s dangerous. Don’t fucking throw your fucking butts at people’s heads.”

    And I rode home, past the hipster cafe where I wrote every day all through the winter and which some local person with a very distinctive handwriting had labelled in great big black spider letters out the front where people sit in the sun, “If you want — to speak English — go to New York. Berlin hates you.” I had marched into the art supplies shop and bought my first ever spray can, in a decent hot pink, in order to amend this so it read, “Berlin hates hate.” I put a ♥. Because I so strongly felt that in this city with its devastated history of what can happen once you let hatred of Those Kinds take hold, we ought to be more conscious, and we ought to take more care.

    It did no good. My amendment stood for a month or two and then the disgruntled local struck again, writing boldly, harshly over my edited text and reinstating their insistence on hate. It is still a world though where older brothers collect bridal confetti for their playful little sisters; and graffiti and confetti and hurled butts of half-smoked cigarettes conflated in my mind and at the far end of the same street I passed the second instance of this same graffitied complaint which I had also amended, in full view of the people standing outside a restaurant across the street, where eventually the Hausverwaltung sent painters to clean it up by whitewashing the whole conversation away, but not without leaving the love. The painters chose to blot out everything that had happened on that stretch of wall except for the neon pink heart I had left there and there it stands, for all the world like it was put there on purpose, for all the world to see, for all the world — from me to youse.

  • the meagrely satisfying throne

    He didn’t want to be President. Not if President means making sticky decisions, and being blamed for things (most of the world calls this ‘adult responsibility’), and being woken at four to read the papers. 

    What he wanted was to be Mr President. Good morning, Mr President! He wanted to star in the biggest ticker-tape parade, and have flags waving, and maybe people would make Donald masks and schoolchildren would wear them and Melania would float into his arms like a giant swan.

    Same when he builds a hotel. He doesn’t really want to build a hotel: he wants to put his name on a big building in gold letters and it’ll have a glitzy big foyer and people will come in and swank around. He pays minimum attention to the hotel-building chore that gets him there, as we see when it starts falling apart, is cheaply built, and he hasn’t paid his contractors. A man who took pride in the thought that “I — have built a hotel” would pay his sheetrockers. 
    This expression, the day after his Presidential Inauguration, says it all. She is angry — possibly a thwarted Trump is no fun to go home to Friday night. She’s put up with him ever since the doors closed and the cameras dissolved away.

    But he is baffled, furious, bored, bamboozled — what is happening? This wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

    The greatest weekend of his life has been stolen from him — by a march. And life has not just stolen a march, it has shown him up with ratty thin combover crowds, hustled into position behind the Great Leader to swell the photographs; and dismal responses from the music community refusing to play at his party. The world is laughing at him.

    Half the jokes are infuriating to Donald because he can’t understand them. How could he? This is a guy who all his life has learned that you get what you want by getting your own way. You rant and shower some half-baked ideas and ream people, and they hurry off and make it happen. You don’t need to know how it works.

    He has no idea that he would now be wealthier if he had just let the fortune he inherited sit in boring bank bonds on Wall Street. His experience has taught him that success is more important than happiness or enjoyment, and success comes from making an appearance. He’s the shopping mall god. He’s a boy band with only one member, the one kept at the back of every group photograph.

    Screen Shot 2017-01-22 at 11.48.39 am

    He’s outclassed by his wife, the porn queen with her carefully prepared speeches, his daughter, smart enough to play along when she must surely see through him, the real King, that daughter’s husband, and now by the coterie of White House staff who have seen it all before and it was better. Poor Donald. Embodying all that’s most grating in America’s overblown sense of itself, he’s out of touch. And this weekend, the crown, the dream, the White House in the air, has taken everything away from him. If all you know how to do is bully and the most powerful seat in the land brings nothing but millions refusing to listen to you — what’s left?

  • the young man with a long way to go

    The young man in the place where we are staying is Moroccan and comes from the desert, which he describes to me as ‘sympa’, sympathetic, a kind place. As opposed to the hustle and throng of the medina where people greet us ‘welcome, welcome,’ and return smiles with great warmth and ease and employ the most genteelly probing sales techniques in (they say) the world.

    This young man is named ‘given by god,’ or ‘gifts of god,’ and we looked up his name in a list of the 99 names of Allah which, I only slowly realised as we were discussing these names with a nearby restauranteur, are perhaps not so much names as qualities. God the good, god the great, god the compassionate, god the wise. Similarly it dawns on me, belatedly, decades after the life on Java I so cherished as a child where we lived between three mosques and stayed indoors during the ferment of election week, that the prayers which play continuously in some hole-in-the-wall shops in the souk are not petitions, in the sense that I would understand prayers, in the sense I sometimes grope for in extremis and despair, longing in the depths of my pained heart to have someone to pray to; they seem perhaps more like resolves embedded in long and winding stories. And so they came upon a beautiful oasis. And there they could water their camels and have something to eat. And so god said to them…

    I am improvising, here. Who has any idea what god might be saying? not even the solemn Jehovahs Witnesses who came to my door with their beguiling brochures and then, when I grew just a little too interested, felt honour-bound to warn me away from the technicolor gloriosity of the illustrations. “This only… artist impression of heaven.”

    Ah – then. But god or, as I would put it, kindness, knowing, understanding, meaning, the connectivity of us with the world and with one another – a kind of exalted humanness, in fact – speaks to me in the trees and in the wind pouring through them; a sort of devotional prosperity I have dwelt in since childhood, when I used once to wander the markets in Jakarta and the coconut groves on the shore opposite Krakatau in a scintillated state of constant and ever-changing concentration.

    So, Gift of God has come to the city in the north, leaving his desert homelands behind, and he tells me he has been here in Fès only three months. He had a job in another pension but it was a bad place. He came to this house a week ago. Ah! I say, cupping his shoulder with my hand, from the side rather than from above because of the war between affection and a horror of condescension. Then you have been here only four days longer than us! Yes, he says, creasing his face in a serious, shy smile.

    This morning as I was lighting out across the courtyard with my books in my bag this young man approached me on his soft shoes. Would I like my breakfast now? I said, You know, thank you, but actually I think I might go into the adventure and just eat somewhere on the markets, today. Oh! he said, and dropped his head and an expression crossed his face that hurt me, as though I had hurt him.

    “It’s not because I don’t like the food! It’s just – I wake up and go, I’m in Morocco! And so I just have to go out and…” On the sunstricken square my lengthy sweetheart joined me where I was so deep in the book I was reading, a book about politics that I find difficult to understand, that when he crossed the sun and grasped me by the shoulder I started. Around us gentlemen of Morocco discussed – I imagine – politics, I imagine their talk is dry and knowing and cosmopolitan, world-weary, courteous, and wise, I hear words which are the names of countries and think, they are speaking of world events. The first morning I was almost too shy to sit down and had to approach the cafe, whose restful shelter I craved, by way of a huge loop up and around the street before I could cross the road at a tentative, oblique angle and ask the courtly waiter diffidently in my execrable French, excuse me? am I allowed to come in here? even as a female? I was the only woman in the cafe, almost the only woman in the square, and when I wanted to go downstairs to the bathroom they flew into a flurry of small-scale preparations and I was handed a door handle, by which to access the second stall – for women and for, I guess, tourists, as it has a Western toilet and sometimes even a roll of paper.

    The second morning I sat down in the blaring sun at a tiny table and was moved almost to tears when the man who had been sitting by me yesterday and whom I had greeted said, inclining his head, “Bonjour,” and even asked, “Ça va?”

    To have a courteous neighbour, who is reading the newspaper in Arabic and a battered paperback in English; to sit in the sun, after months in wintry Deutschland – it sends me down into a contentment that is very much like sleep.

    The young man in the pension, Gift of God, smiled his grave smile on our third night in Africa when we asked, where would be a good place to eat. He told us he had made a very small number of ‘connections’ in Fès, since he came here three months back alone, and his friend Mohammed runs a good place, very cheap, under the large tree which is a landmark as there are so few trees in the medina at all. “That young man has a long way to go,” says my companion as we cross the square. and for a few moments I am startled, before it clicks into place: that he will go far. We eat at his friend’s cafe, treated royally. We practice the gesture courteous Moroccans use, of a hand pressed level across the breastbone, touched to the heart, moved, thank you, I am sorry. Walking the medina I also use the fellow gesture which takes place a little lower, pressing across the tummy with my other hand, saying, “On a manger.” I hope this means, thank you, we have eaten, and use it to reply to the touts who hand laminated menus outside every restaurant (“We have wine!”) My German companion thinks the tummy is called the stummy, and recently revealed in conversation that to him this is because the stummy is the seat of all stamina. This makes sense. Stomach, stumina, stummy for short. Now I find out he is calling the guys who hawk the restaurants ‘shouts’, perhaps a better word than touts. Meanwhile in German, he says, I make ‘sweet’ childlike errors in a thicket, or fog, of laughably elaborate courtesy. Elaborate formality – to a German! that kingdom where a Keep Off the Grass sign will begin: Very honoured forest wanderers and forest wanderesses, please be advised…

    So on our first week in Fès we navigate our way with his terrible French and my awful French and the few paltry words of Arabic we have learned: principally ‘choukran’, thank you (hand across heart), and ‘la choukran,’ no, thank you, to which I’ve improvised a kind of Bollywood head-waggle of the hand.

    By the fourth night the influx of new sensations and sights have exhausted us and we go back a second time to the same restaurant. Mohammed greets us with cries of warmth and manifests a place to sit when almost every seat was full. He flaps the fancy tablecloth like a magician producing a bunny. I watch him do this over and over, I remember the rapid-fire thought processes and sly courtesies of hospitality work and comment, when he comes by to tip more bread into our basket, that it is like surfing. “Yes!” he says, jubilant, “exactly – like surfing.”

    This man has learnt all his English by listening to customers and he asks, what is the word in German for I will be awaiting you. Germans sometimes say to him, “Vielleicht später,” maybe later, when he offers a menu. We search among our words before lighting on Ich bin für Sie da, I am here for you, explaining this is “very gracious,” making gestures of graciousness like a king. “Ah!” he says, satisfied, Moroccan: “Ah! Yes! That – is most important.” He asks us to speak it into his phone so that he can learn it, and I take a photo of the two them with their sweet heads together, listening in on one departed French or Spanish or German tourist after another, speaking in all their different voices the phrases which comprise his vocubulary, each of them adding a drop to his store of hospitality.

    To my right, five Chinese students are spending the night with their phones. They are so absorbed that even when food arrives they ply their forks round it, scrolling onwards through the fascinating replacement world. A commotion of drums festers in the distance, around a corner in the narrow lane which is hung with handicrafts for sale. “Hand mad” says a sign above the racks of point-toed slippers. “Prix fixe.” I have seen tourists walking through the busy markets with expressionless faces shielded by devices set to continuously record, and I wonder how it must feel to be videoed a thousand times in a year by people who don’t seem to bother to even acknowledge one’s humanity. The students issue their drink orders (avocado juice, banana and orange juice, freshly pressed, with sugar and without) free from any thank yous or any please and Mohammed presses his palm across his heart as though it aches, saying in English, “Thank you, guys, I bring it right away, great, please, certainly.”

    The clatter of drums is coming nearer and I am craning to see past the French family who have stationed themselves in the passage to wait for a table. Two men, gaily dressed in such bright robes and complex festoonments my eye cannot grasp them, holding up their tiny drums, the skin of the drum painted with henna, stamping their soft leather boots and singing splendidly – I ask if I can take their photo and the taller says, “Foto!” and they both fall to attention, and then he puts his cupped hand out and I realise I have no coins. Mohammed is passing with a clutch of creamy avocado juices from the stall across the way. On his way back I put out my hand. “Est-ce que vous pouvoir me louer un peau de l’argent pour les musics?” This doesn’t exactly mean, Can you please lend me some silver to give to the musicians? but it’s the closest I can get.

    Sure, he says, without pause, digging in his pocket and showing me the coins. He selects for me and presses them into my palm: three, four dirham is plenty.

    At the end of the meal we want to pay and I say, “Plus the four dirham,” and Mohammed looks puzzled. “You lent it to me, for the musicians,” I say.

    “Ahh!” He shakes my hand, pressing his heart. “My friend.” “Thank you so much,” I say, “We love it here, we love your restaurant,” and behind us the French family jostles forward, scenting seats at last, and we say goodbye to the other Chinese students on our other side who have been telling us they woke up this morning in tents in the Sahara and could see the ‘galaxy’ but it was spoilt rather because there was ‘no service’.

    “You went on a self-catered tour?” I said.

    “No service,” the good-looking leader repeated, jabbing his finger at the sky. We walk away, tired in the stummy and thinking as we come home how extremely gentlemanly, how classy it is of Mohammed to have lent me the money for the buskers and then to have instantly forgotten the debt. Morocco seems to me so complex and inspired, I have the feeling of a rich, fine intricacy, am rejoiced to see how gently and tenderly anyone with a disability is handed up the stairs or into vehicles, I see the brutality, I feel my heart aching with the real inevitable charge of life that in ‘our kindergarten countries’ as my Berlin companion has called them this week is simply absent, or at least invisible, and when we are not afforded the luxe protection we experience as our right, we sometimes grumble at god, who has not given enough, whom we can call on with praise for sparing the floods our children, as though this were not an insult to the humanity of all the other children swept and drowned, as though the Acts of God excepted in the fine print of every insurance policy were not just and not our desserts, but rather an interruption to the service we expect, and for which we would pay nothing but our words.

  • a happy visitor

    My parents have a spare room which they have been eager to put to use as Dad’s medical expenses mount, so I offered to manage it for them as an Airbnb listing. Airbnb has been so problematic in rapidly gentrifying areas of Berlin that it’s actually been outlawed: developers were buying up whole buildings and certain streets became so filled with short term pleasure seeking tourists it was impossible for residents to find homes. However in a context like Brisbane, filled with overlarge houses where older people like my parents want to continue to live independently, it seems to me one of the best uses of the internet. Meanwhile Berliners have been making new arrivals from Syria welcome using an innovative ‘Airbnb for refugees’ set up by two local men. You can register your spare room and the government, who are not much addicted to locking up children and families offshore in tropical death camps, cover the rent so that a new family can settle in.

    This is the review left this morning by our most recent visitor, who arrived jetlagged and disoriented off an 18 hour flight from Shanghai. She is here to study for two years. I feel good to know we have welcomed someone on first arriving in a brand new country and brand new climate, and I love knowing that people can experience each other, as strangers, through this medium and can build trust. We stayed with an Egyptian family in the Bronx last October and their hospitable kindness was transformative of our visit. In this case the tiny errors in my guest’s English just make me love her the more.

    “This was the first week I came to Brisbane. I really love the house Cathoel offered. She is really a patient and warmhearted people and can offer everything I need when I live here. The room is tidy cosy and quiet which offers me a perfect circumstance to have a good rest and the Chinese decorative style impressed me a lot. The transport is convenient and easy to buy commodities nearby. All in all, it is really a wisdom choice for me to choose Cathoel’s house. Living here for a week was enjoyable experience for me.”