Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: seasons

  • this German sweetness and its love

    The best thing about living in Berlin so long and getting better with my German again is I can really enjoy people. Quite often, Berliners are just sweethearts. Today I phoned the handmade brush and broom shop that stands not so far away, in a leafy street I covet and run by the man whose grandfather must have founded it. His name is the same. I said, I would like to buy one of your dustpans, and he said, Ach I just live upstairs! Come over and ring my doorbell and I will come down.

    I jumped on my bike, feeling a bit overexcited. Imagine buying a handmade dustpan which is prettily polished from steel. Imagine buying it from the fellow who made it.

    His shopfront is more of a billboard for his principles. He has filled it with neatly hand-lettered exhortations reminding us we are all Mitmenschen, fellow humans, and when I first passed the shop he had a giant orange inflatable louse suspended and slowly twirling in the front window, with the label on it, “TRUMP.”

    So I rang the doorbell and he let me in. The inner stairwell felt so cosy and sweet. Immaculately swept rush matting, a neat row of letterboxes, and more exhortations about common humanity. “My brothers are black,” I read, “my sisters are red.” From above I heard a decorous commotion as Mr Brush came down. Two other people gossiping at their upstairs doorway greeted him as he passed. “Hallo, ihr lieben,” he said: hello, you loves.

    He let me into the shop, by the back door, revealing an organised back room that resembled some earnest party headquarters. Pamphlets were stacked in boxes and on benches, a German flag stood furled in the umbrella stand. He gave me the dustpan and I explained to him, I have no heating at my place right now, I have been warming terracotta pots in the oven and then standing them in the living room to radiate heat. Today the Handarbeiter (the hand workers, that courteous term by which every German plumber, chimney sweep, and boilermaker is known) are coming to finish up and reconnect the heating. I’ve been wanting one of your dustpans for ages but today, I’m going to use it persuade these guys to clean up after themselves.

    I waved the dustpan at him like a pennant.

    Getting back on my bicycle I saw a woman in the accountant’s office next door, she was blowing up a silver foil balloon and we smiled at each other through her open window. The balloon was in the shape of a 3. “Machen Sie Party?” I asked, are you having a party. Nudging my chin towards the three: “Ihr kleinste Kollegin wird endlich drei?”

    Your littlest colleague is finally turning three.

    She started laughing into the balloon. “Keine Kindersklaverei mehr,” I encouraged her, “ist vorbei!”

    No more child slavery! we are done with it. She threw back her head laughing, the balloon for her three- or more likely 30-year-old colleague wobbled and squeaked in her fist. I rode home with the beautiful, perfectly polished dustpan reflecting an increasingly blue autumn sky. Trees passed in my basket as though I had caught them with this tray. At home I opened the door to my Handarbeiter, who set up in bathroom and kitchen and as I was typing I could hear the older guy, hammering in my bathroom, muttering to himself. “Well, that’s never going to work, what are you about, Micha? That’s better.” I emptied the garbage basket to get it out of his way and ran back downstairs, carrying compost in one hand and trash in the other. An incredibly tall, good-looking guy was standing by the rubbish bins. He opened the lid for me, courteously. “Wouldn’t it be good if we had separated rubbish collections,” I said.

    “Yes,” he said, “it’s so ridiculous that we cannot recycle. I tried talking to them about it.”

    “And?”

    “Didn’t get an answer. But maybe… if we all tried…”

    “Wow,” I said, “gute Idee, good idea! Maybe we can all apply at once. Or all sign something.” We stood smiling at each other. He was still holding the bin lid. His wife stood in the tiled hallway holding both their bicycles by the neck, like horses. She waved and I waved and we all dimpled at each other. “A beautiful rest of the day!” we wished in turn, as Germans do.

    When they opened the street door I glimpsed a woman walking past with her kid on a little training bike. This is how Germans teach their babies to ride bicycles with such confidence. A toddler training bike is walked rather than ridden as it has no pedals, thus it strengthens one’s walking and one’s riding at once. I heard a snatch of what she said to him: “weil die anderen Leute…” Because other people…

    This is how Germans socialise their kids, to keep brewing this lovely society in which if you find a scarf dropped in the street, likely you will drape it carefully round a nearby lantern so that its owner can retrace her steps and find it. The street door closed and I went back upstairs two steps at a time. The Handarbeiter was still telling himself off as he worked. His blue overalls were stained with plaster and he carried all his tools in a large bucket. I loved that people – if not our landlord – care that we should recycle and cherish everything. It seems to me ecological awareness is a form of appreciation, and appreciation is awakeness, is love. I loved that the man who makes brushes by hand as his forefathers did spends his spare time spreading leaflets which speak to our common humanity. I loved that the child who passed our door was looking up from his little bicycle to his mother; that she seemed to be explaining something.

  • the ride home was the best party

    Imagine a lake. It is vast and extends, if you swim out to the middle and gaze round, at either end as far as the horizon. We set off very early in the morning from town and have cycled for hours, climbing endless sandy paths. It’s ferociously hot, nearly forty degrees, we have left the last village and are deep in the pines. With my narrow city tyres I have to climb off and push, slaloming again and again in the hot sand that grabs my wheels like bulldust in the outback and I sink aside and slew. The closest railway station is by now a long way back. Even where the path is harder, juddering pine cones tumble over the ruts. They are numerous and tiny, an infestation of bronze, authoritative and resplendent against the dense matting of their own gold blonde needles that lie in great drifts on the banquets of deep green moss.

    Occasionally the trees stir and everything smells of lemon pepper from the pines.

    We have reached the water and taken off our clothes, a duck floats past out on the artificial waves serene and glowing-eyed. A butterfly feeds for butterfly hours at the prongs of cow parsley nearest the edge. The underside of the bank is eroded and when a boat passes I see why. The slopping of the waves against the bank’s underside, a chain of caves under the roots, resumes a slurping, dragging slow ruction like the sound of sex. Two white swans sail under the sloping belly of a white boat, its glossy wood striped by the green tree stems lying along the water like city lights. On the back of the white boat a golden man is balancing naked, poised to jump.

    This was a month back, one of the last hot days. We would catch the train as far out of town as it goes, then cycle on to the garden house where our friends spend their summer weekends at the edge of the forest by a lake. We cycled all day, stopped and swam, took photographs, arrived late and everyone had eaten. A cluster of a dozen bicycles stood inside the gate at the end of the road. A winding path engrossed the grass under tall dark trees to the little handmade house. We passed a kind of treehouse built up high above the sweet old-fashioned bathroom which had a tiny verandah, and later I took my drink up there and climbed the narrow steps and sat looking out at the night. I could feel the forest all around, its siftings and shiftings; its damp.

    All day long travelling through green tunnels, further and further, deeper and deeper. A party in a forest, now settling to drowsy hums. The candles and lamps lit long after dark, the trellis glowing golden in the flickering green with a row of tiny lanterns in the vine. The little boy, maybe four years old, who wanted juice when all the juice was gone. He stood between our host’s knees in the open doorway of the fridge and gazed in. The large poodle thrust her head eagerly over his shoulder and all three faces were lit as the man showed him, patiently, what each bottle contained. A speckled rope of tiny bronze lights wound up the trunk of the tallest tree all the way to its distant canopy. The boy must be put to bed, slowly and peacefully, by both his parents at once. His father carried him into the magic tipi and his mother laid him down. He was so little. They knelt over him and it seemed they were talking to him. The little boy at the centre of the universe. I could not hear their soft voices but I watched from the candlelit table, fascinated, filled with terrible soft yearning. His mother had taken him on her knee and sat cheerfully on the luggage rack of someone’s bike, when we went down to the lake that afternoon and lazily swam. Now she lay down and curled herself around him, and the father sat back on his heels and they all three waited for sleep to come.

    Late in the night the German voices began to blend into a fairytale nonsense tongue and I grew sleepy. I got up and went quietly up the back of the garden to the tipi where the little boy lay. Next to the softly sleeping boy I lay on my back, with my ankles crossed, in Kinderparadies, my eyes open and all the trees leading me up into the dark glinting complexities and simplicities of night. “Who’s that,” the mother asked her husband quietly, “in the tipi with Thomas?” “It’s me,” I said. “Ah…” And I lay there close to sleep myself, not just his but my own, until at length I heard people standing up and getting wakeful and we gathered all our things and took our bikes from the flock of bikes inside the gate, and we all mounted and swooped off down the hill towards the water.

    It was nearly midnight, all the houses’ lights were dark. Freewheeling down the hill and making swoops of joy I realised: I was the only woman setting off to swim. My swimsuit in the bottom of my bag, damp and uninviting. At the little meadow by the lake I let my clothes drop in the dark and walked into the water unadorned and very slowly; and a soft furry nudging at my hip was Fleur, the lovely large piebald poodle, pressing herself to me as we went in together. “Oh!” I said, “You’re coming in with me, are you, lovely girl? And it’s just us girls.”

    The water was silent and reeds stood quietly at either side of the shallow beach, only a few metres wide, where we stepped in. The men were joking and teasing behind us and joined the water gradually. The lake lay black as pitch to the horizon around us. The sandy bottom is soft and forgiving, as though filled with salt. Nothing dangerous lives here: I kept telling myself.

    I turned my face up and could see the stream of stars, a river of frozen timelessness of which the dark clotting trees low on the ground were banks. Afterwards for the joy of silence I left my bike lights switched off. At the crossroads we set out to the left and our companions set out right, Goodbye! Thank you! Goodbye! Through the little village we were joined by another couple on their bikes, who came out of a side road silently, she had lights on and he hadn’t, as though we were their ghosts, or they ours.

    We entered the forest, at the edge where it envelopes the road. The little train station lay the other end of this swarm of long-limbed trees, other side of the dark. It was so late at night and so quiet. The wheels. I left my light switched off and plunged in, following the leader bike whose own light swooped graciously, five bike lengths ahead. Everything was invisible around me but the sense of the tall trees, running for miles on either side. Riding fast I was enveloped in a blackness absolute and reaching, the forest spirits catching after me. I must trust that between his passage and mine, nothing will have changed, no dark animal jumped into the path with its big arms out to block and to swallow me, without a trace or sound.

    When we arrive at the station the train is there, silent like all German trains. A dishevelled man standing with his dirty backpack on the platform is accosted by two blonde girls who climb out to say, Excuse me is there a late-night shop nearby? “Here? I doubt it. What do you need?” “Oh. We only wanted to buy some water.” “But this is great – look!” Opening his pack. “I have gallons of water. I made a bet with my friend that I couldn’t sell all this water before dawn. One euro per bottle. And would you like this free magazine?”

    We lean our bikes up against each other and fumble at the ticket machine. We also buy water. We also decline the free magazine. It is one in the morning: yet again the first morning of the world. I slump down in a corner seat and with tiredness and satiety am almost swooning. I am thinking of the tall trees high above the tipi, whispering night sounds to themselves, the voices of the party adult and dark, the eyrie on its grassy rise, the sleeping child lost in no doubt the safest, nicest feeling in all the world tonight. Under my seat the pulsation of the train’s workings begins to climb, all doors are wide open still, and the glass breeze fills the cabin with freshness as if it were light, again and again, and then again and again.

  • house of gingerbread

    So it’s Friday night, I am in my pajamas and baking sticky gingerbread for dinner. About to devour some more of Shirley Hazzard’s insightful Greene on Capri, about her friendship with Graham Greene. She calls his writing landscape, in which women are conveniently passive, ‘Greeneland’. The descriptions in passing of her ease with her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, are so beguiling. They sit and talk a lot, often about what they are reading. Greene soars in like a small eagle who casts a large shadow.

    The world is run by noisy extraverts and tonight three of them had a bang-up row in the Hinterhaus, the building at the back of this courtyard. Glass was thrown. Police came pouring in with walkie-talkies at the ready. Now all is restored and the night has taken possession of the leaves and every sill. Far up in the corner of the highest apartment two facing windows are joined by a little covered bridge, for their cat. I had coffee today with the woman whose apartment I am leasing, who has moved to Vienna to make a film, and she said her cats (who travel everywhere with her – to Berlin and back by train; she takes them on set; she takes them to the beach) have a little case which they climb into so she can carry them down to the garden in the back courtyard every day, to play and explore and pounce and poo. She knows they are ready to go out when she comes into the hall to find them sitting quietly in their windowed carry case – “it’s like their bus.”

    It is beautiful to have a home and to stay home in it. It is a lamplit evening. I have the double doors open onto my tiny balcony – Berliners call this “Balconia.” The land of summer, of lurid sun umbrellas and bright geraniums in pots.

    Recently I passed a guy tenderly polishing his very fancy bicycle, outside the discount markets where junkies drift like zombies underwater. Gee, I thought: that’s a fancy bike he’s got. On my way back the same guy was pushed up against a police van. The beautiful bicycle was nowhere in sight but the back of the van was wide open.

    The dwindling end of the long twilit nights which seem to trail into evening like cloud drifting for the horizon – the endless days, blue and filled with pleasures – I have loved these nights. I have loved all these days. Now when the sun clouds over and the sky bleeds grey I start to panic, just a little, just skimming over it, dipping into it with one wing: is this it, then? is this the last of it? No more blue til May – or June? I know what we are in for. No more birdsong. The leaves fall to the ground. The grounds turns to iron. The limited colours, low white skies.

    The outdoor cinemas are closing. I saw candles in the windows of a backstreet cafe today. I wore a scarf in the afternoon sun. These little deathknells make me sentimental and bleary, like a Dickens character. Little Deathknell, and the Year That Took Three Months to Die. I’m standing with one leg on the ground and one in the rippling cool water. My bookshelf glows in the lamplight and I feel unafraid of the cold.

  • this wind

    Brisbane is in the grip of its Spring gales and of a morning I wake up to a back deck strewn with leaves and towels blown off the line. Yesterday sharp seed pods rained down on my head as I crossed the street. Posted out another 20 poetry books yesterday and I had the feeling if I just held them up high on a hilltop and then released them, they would fly off in all directions like rain-beaten pigeons, saving the postage.

    A hippie friend used to warn me never to try to conduct difficult conversations when it’s windy: “Too much friction.” This same person always intoned one must beware of anger because “think about it, that’s just Danger without the D.” But as songwriters point out, “Take the L out of Llama, and it’s… Lama.” I shall try agreeing with everybody about everything because: new experiences are broadening.