In the late afternoon I walked down to the square. I’ve been indoors now every day of eight weeks. People were sitting round the edge of the grass as though it were a swimming pool they were dangling their legs into. The trees overhead are finally thickening with green.
A man who doesn’t have much had his tiny barrel-shaped speaker out and was blaring the blues. A bystander, so drunk he had lost his consonants, pitched forward and then arced backwards from the hips, hollering the blues. We have all been indoors since winter finally ended. We know the urge to holler. We know the blues.
Here the blues come marching back again, pouring from the settled sky, finally at rest and displaying all its sunny virtuosity which is kept from us in this dark city eight months of the year by thickset cloud.
The sky — the gorgeous preposterously cloudlit heaven of the springday sky. I sit down among the crumpled cherry blossoms, almost grey now in the grass. The sixth floor balcony where two weeks back a man had serenaded us with his saxophone is empty and the windows all dark. I sit watching two stout men drinking their beers, asking myself how is it I would know anywhere in the world they are Germans. Someone across the square sets up a rival speaker blurring AC/DC. Highway to Hell! screams the drunken singer, able to enjoy everything at once. A Turkish man who cannot afford to quarantine is collecting beer bottles, asking everyone first, may I have this. His face has patience and great sweetness. He stows each new bottle in his clanking bag. The pizza shop is open again but only for takeaway, ‘every one of our pizzas is nearly round’, their blackboard boasts. Last year at the end of the summer they had a drinks special chalked there: Soup of the Day — Gin Tonic. A man in a black Volkswagen sleek as a Beemer edges right in to the kerb and leaps out. He is prematurely casual in pink linens with a knotted sweater, it’s not really all that warm but he seems insouciant, he plugs in his car, a rental car, an electric car, and locks the keys inside the glovebox and goes strolling perfectly pinkly away. Like all of us, he is in rehearsal for summer, which is the future: summer 2021 perhaps, we’ll be able to travel, we’ll all be lightly and attractively attired, we will be slim and competent in public places, we’ll be free.
Tag: summer
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supermerch
In the supermarket I queued for the African check out dude who’s always calm in the midst of all the Germanness. A blonde woman behind me set down, emphatically, a bagful of fresh pak choy and then behind it, all in a heap, several packets of cream-filled biscuits, a jar of chocolate pudding, some plump filled fresh pasta and a tray of chocolates. I said, indicating the leafy greens, “This seems cute to me. Because one buys that – one gets to buy all of this.”
She burst out laughing. “Stimmt.” True. I looked at my own pile and felt concerned its greenery might seem chiding. “I’m the same,” I said, showing her the huge bag of green grapes. “These are really a sweet treat but they look like vegetables.”
“Very wise,” she said, still laughing, “it’s perfectly balanced.” We were chortling. The man at the register bade good evening to the person in front and picked up my Toblerone, the excuse for all the grapes. “Guten Abend,” he said, and I said, “Guten Abend.” Every sly glance sideways between me and the blonde girl started us both spluttering mirthfully. I stashed the grapes in my thousand-use bag and took the bar of chocolate from his brown hand, saying, “Beautiful Celebration-Evening!” which is how Germans tell each other, I am glad for your sake it’s nearly knocking-off time. Heading out to my bike parked under the trees I was thinking for the hundredth time that some poet among Germans has decided the wooden divider separating my groceries from hers shall be called a cashier’s Toblerone: Kassentoblerone.
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wasp joy
This summer as the world goes to literal and immediate hell using bushfire and corruption, misogyny and greed, several small incidents have surfaced in my own daily life that help keep me afloat. I found a new bar, hidden behind a drift of trees, late last night as I was pedalling home from some arduous and exacting work that never seems to be done. I had passed this place half a hundred times but a man was sitting outside, on a comfy chair, his long legs crossed and his concentration sunk in a book. I went back around and locked my bike and walked inside, rather shyly.
They had faded couches and long rows of wine boxes lined with glinting bottles. I sat down and took out my book in turn. To be in Berlin, and be not the only person on the train, or in a restaurant, who’s reading. I read for about an hour. It slowly grew dark outside. The bartender came and squatted in front of me: what do you feel like? I’ll make you something nice. She made me something nice, involving cognac and whipped egg white, and I drank it very slowly and then got up and closed my book and went over to the bar. She was rattling ice cubes efficiently in a steel cocktail shaker. Ten euros exactly.
Oh, then… I gave her the note and held out my palm. Rather than picking through it vaguely to work out what might make a fair tip I would let her choose: so I informed her by my cheeky but underconfident smile. She dug in and showed me what she’d found. “Ich nehm’ ein Euro,” I’ll take one euro. We both smiled and I rode home to the pair of large ears which rise from the arm of the couch these days when I walk in. I have my little familiar, my smallest companion, the cat who was left behind in Brisbane six years back and finally got on a plane. She cheers me, too.
Today I sat in a quiet streetside cafe under the late summer trees. A leaf drifted by as I rode home last night and it’s unavoidable that winter will come. My subtropical heart quails each time. At the next table a beautiful man was reading. “Can I have your sugar?” I asked, without thinking, and his smile quirked.
“You can! the only problem is,” he said, in German, “a couple of wasps have been making it pleasant for themselves in there, so… I still took it.”
I opened the sugar and peered. Three wasps, butts bent up and heads gleefully sunk in the piles of golden sugar, made me laugh. The waitress brought me their largest glass filled to the brim with tap water. A car went past behind me very slowly. The cafe has scalloped blankets folded now over the back of some of the chairs. We will sit outside as long as we can, before it’s so cold and grey we have to turn for home and then never run into each other all the rest of the long Berlin winter, which is deadly low and close to the ground, obscures sun and stars, and lasts eighteen months of the year, I’m convinced of it.
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the Nazi airfield in summer
I will tell you what Berlin is like in the summer. As I cycle home from a far-distant errand I cross over an overgrown field. Near the hangars, part of the largest manmade structure outside the Great Wall of China, a thicket of neatly rowed white demountable houses has bicycles parked and pot plants blooming. These are some of the one in two hundred Germans who are now Syrians escaping the war.
Six police officers in flak jackets are guarding the asylum seekers, lounging in the afternoon sun. The other side of the wire fence a summer circus has set up its tents; then a rippled concrete path runs past and on the other side of that, a fake beach is lined with volleyball games.
Behind the volleyball courts people have built themselves a tumble of pallet gardens. All of this takes place in the old Nazi airport, which also hosts Berlin’s emerging designer festival in its cavernous and sombre hangars.
On an obsolete airplane bumper of concrete with fading scarlet stripes a woman in a beehive and three-inch stack silver heels is picnicking, with her shirtless golden boyfriend, silver-chested, with his skateboard lying by them. They are both in their sixties. Further into the field two young women are learning to kite surf on vast sails. The runways divide meadows filled with wild flowers and dredged by butterflies, because half the local taxes are paid by artists and the city can’t afford to mow.
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follow milk
I learned a poetic new German word just now at the little health food shop. The man behind me had put just one item on the counter, a carton of Folgemilch. I asked him, “What is… follow milk?”
“Well,” he began, and something about his tired, slightly harassed, but ever willing to be helpful expression and messy hair struck me with insight.
“Is it… what you eat when you are done with drinking only milk?”
I didn’t know how to say ‘breast milk’ let alone ‘solid food’ so I just said, only milk.
“Exactly!” he said, and then used that pricelessly dear word Germans have for breastfeeding infants. “It’s for sucklings.”
We both shifted our stuff along the counter as the person in front moved on.
“So can you use it for other things, in general, like… I’m just having a beer as a followlunch?” I asked, hopefully.
His brow clotted. “No. No, that is not right.”
Learning German. It’s one-third flights of folk poetry, two-thirds ‘that is not right’ and ‘we simply don’t do it that way.’
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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.
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equinocturnal
Today is the Autumn Equinox. As a southern hemispherian I decided to finally find out what that means. In the subtropics we barely notice a difference in the lengths of any days. Turns out ‘equinox’ is, of course, Latin for ‘equal night.’ Today (in the North) is the start of Autumn, when the days will start getting shorter and the nights, god damn it, longer.
All too soon it will be barely getting light in Berlin due to cloud cover and then never really dark as there are so many cities nearby. All panning their European lights up into the sky.
I found this nervous professor explaining to an eager interviewer, with his voice trembling as he is on TV, how it works. The sun appears to wobble slowly up and down in the sky across the year, as Earth’s axis is tilted. So for half the year the southern hemisphere is facing closer, for half the year it’s the north. He explains how this was important in pagan times as it is connected with fruitfulness and harvest. Her voice lights up. For Londoners, where can we go, what can we do, to be a part of this, to find out more?
Obviously she means with people. She wants to gather by moonlight at some standing stone with a bunch of arcane knowledge holders chanting incantations. She wants some insight into the mystery of long human endeavour, wants to be admitted to the meanings we have shut out, with our forever lit smartphones and our tube trains which run until three in the morning. Our eternal false daylight. I feel my heart quickening, too.
But the scientist misunderstands her. His voice quickens, too. He starts to offer his own secret gatherings – here is where the London Irregular Astronomers Society meets of a nighttime to study the far distant sky. Here is the observatory where you can see these mighty bodies through a telescope. The woman’s responses are cut off but I feel you can feel her dismay, palpable, almost palpating, through the screen. Their misunderstanding is absolutely beautiful and hilarious, and by it we see two approaches to understanding our lives on earth fall away, the one from the other, like the outermost hemisphere tilting from the sun. She doesn’t want to drink thermos tea with a bunch of boffins and discuss distance. She wants to get up close. She wants the wisdom and herbal knowledge of all the old women who are gone. She wants to be in the presence of wise men who can interpret the stars’ implications in our lives. She wants to get closer to the earth. She wants what’s human.
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East German joy
Today I was in a tiny bakery in Brandenburg and laid a ten euro note on the counter. The bakery lady picked it up, her face spasming with disapproval, and shifted it 20cm south before dropping it in the special shallow plastic tray which is supposed to hold the money. Then she turned away to make me a cup of German tea: that is, boiled water with a tea bag sitting limply alongside. Then she picked up the ten euros again, took it and laid my change in the plastic tray.
I said to the man queuing behind me whose hand was resting on a stack of newspapers, isn’t that a sad story? The full page story up front was printed on a black page – a cyclist in his seventies had been knocked from his bicycle by a car door and had died. This man shrugged. In astonishment I said, “Es ist Ihnen egal?” It’s all the same to you? He made a mouth. “Berliner Probleme.”
These are just Berlin problems. We were an hour’s train ride from the city centre and standing on the platform of a Berlin train station. The train had ended early and we were all waiting for the official ‘replacement transport’, a big yellow bus. The bus driver looked me in the eye as I approached at the end of a small queue of people and then closed the glass doors in front of my face and drove off.
I remembered suddenly that Berlin is an island, an island in the pleasureless wastes and Stasi prison camps of the former GDR. Eventually a new bus arrived, with a far friendlier driver, and only two other passengers, who befriended me and gave me careful, detailed instructions for my solo forest walk. As we drove through the little township I peered into people’s immaculate gardens, their kitschy window treatments and collections of tiny sculptures including various clothed animals and dolls made of clay or straw. Hours later the town’s only punk, who had given me directions to the town’s only affordable eatery which was not a snack bar selling mostly ice cream, stopped his matt black van beside me and said, “You must be tired of walking. Hop in.” His big caramel coloured hound loomed over the back seat and rested her head on my shoulder as we drove and he said, casually, “Yes. Hereabouts it’s pretty provincial. I came back because my Mother was ill.” We passed a beer garden crowded with big parties of bikers in their padded black jackets who had come out for the day while it’s still sunny. At the end of the street gleamed a beautiful lake. Shouts came from the sandy playground which had a large sign headed “Principles of Playground Conduct.” A swan stood among the ducks cleaning itself earnestly. I took a shot of rum in my hot chocolate and read my book, having lent the little boy next door in his pram my pen. A girl came out carrying a tray of unbelievably ornate ice cream towers in tall swirled glasses. She set out across the road in her perfect white sneakers. A large man came past toting a tiny bright eyed dog. The sun splashed the crumbling medieval town.
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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.
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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.