Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: trains

  • Ghanaity

    Had to change trains twice to get home and I was reading Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, great, familiar, female, underrated. On the second train I glanced up when somebody laughed and saw a short, beautiful African man gazing longingly at me.

    It was so startling. I hurried back to Cranford, the village where the old ladies are not nearly so old as they were in Miss Matty’s own youth. At the next station I looked up, focussing between the heads of people sitting back to back all down the left side of the cabin, and saw that he was still looking at me. His eyes were soft and fond as though I were terribly familiar. We smiled. I went back to my book.

    Someone got off, occasioning the usual genteel German shuffling whereby everybody shifts their knees to one side saying, Bitte, Danke, Entschuldigung. All of a sudden the man who had been gazing plumped into the vacated seat opposite, he slung his bag down on the floor and had altogether an air of decision.

    So I looked up and said, How are you? Good, he said, and you? Good, I said. Thank you. Then we all travelled along in a kind of noisy trainside silence for a while.

    What are you learning?

    O, it’s not really study, just rereading a book I have read so many times before. I turned the cover to show him.

    You have a very nice face, I told him, and he smiled. You, too. Thank you, I said. In fact he was beautiful, with a pointed cat like chin and slanting eyes and in the middle of his forehead he had an asterisk-shaped scar as though someone had shattered him with a mallet and then put him back together again.

    The moon, upstairs, was rounding white and only slightly eroded down one side like an aspirin in water. I hadn’t seen it yet but later it led me right home. The man said, My name is Maxwell. And so I stuck out my hand and said, Cathoel. We shook hands and I said, Are you new in Berlin?

    Three months. Ah, I said, welcome. He had lived four years in Italy. So I speak Italian. But no Dutch.

    Ah, I said, again. And then he began talking to me about Jesus. Jesus knows how many hairs you have on your head. He took hold of a lock of his hair and tugged it.

    Well, I said, that must be very comforting. I am getting off here. Good luck in Berlin!

    But as I was standing on the platform he appeared beside me, standing too close. Are you married? No, I said. Why not? It’s not my way. I stepped away a half pace and he stepped up close to me again, in my shadow. Can I ask you a question, I am not a bad man.

    Thanks, I said: I don’t want to marry you.

    Ok, he said. But can I give you my phone number, friends? Friends. I am lonely and it’s good to have a friend in Berlin. Berlin is big.

    The train pulled in and he said, ingeniously, I can get on the train with you. I can always ride back again after I give you my number. Oh, well, I said. Okay then. But I am going to be reading my book.

    We sat opposite a lady with a fiery head of hair and a warm wrinkled smile. She was holding up a magnifying glass on its stalk to read some tiny photostatted text closed printed across an A4 page. She listened to our conversation, smiling at me over the man’s head, and when he got off, as promised, at the next station and I folded his phone number and put it in my pocket I said, in German, He wanted to talk because he is lonely, I think.

    Her smile grew warmer. She reached into her pocket and handed me a card, much creased, printed in black and white. This is a church where people get together, she said, plenty of African people go there, he can make friends.

    It was evident neither of us were native speakers. Oh, I said, then I am glad. I will pass it on. I got out at my own stop and walked up the stairs into the night and the incomplete moon made me gasp. If you are Ghanaian and you come here over Italy, you cannot access refugee services because you have Italian papers. The trees on either side of my road have bloomed and lost their bloom and though the forbidding Germanic cold has now returned still it seemed to me something warmer, something Springlike was afoot, a pussyfoot, an affair of the filigree trees, afar.

  • this one time?

    I came home after a long day, festooned with groceries. The bench on the subway platform was occupied by two girls and their shopping. I said, “Excuse me,” in German, and they said, “Excuse me,” in German, and cleared a space. Then one turned to the other and said, in flawless Brooklyn Privilege, “So I’m like, ‘the person who cooks’ in the relationship, but one time? Eli was like, ‘let’s make spaghetti together.’”

    At the station where I climbed out two men were playing a complex and delicate classical duet on two squeezeboxes. I passed a man in my street who was carrying a double bass upright on his back. Its long neck sticking straight up behind the face made him twice as tall. I’d been noticing the rows of inverted and upright Vs of manspreading and women’s frequent shrinking in public spaces on the train, and I thought: sometimes privilege is visible; and sometimes, it is audible; sometimes it hoards itself, and sometimes it emanates.

  • stitch grandeur

    In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You can dance on street corners. One of the blisses of living here is that everyone is stranger and no one’s a stranger: my lifelong habit of conversing with passersby as though we were resuming a discussion only briefly interrupted is welcomed and usual, it’s easier, fine.

    I had never seen anyone embroidering on the underground. Sleeping, yes, fighting, putting on make up; drunk men banging in unison their fists on the roof of the carriage on their way home victorious from some football game – those were English men, ‘educated hooligans’ – and people jump on and sing, for money, or make speeches, and sell things, or just beg: and the man on the U1 who shows mutely his malformed and tiny index finger that pokes the air like a children’s puppet, the more whole hand holding a grimy crumpled cup for coins. A week ago there was a can of green peas, with a spoon standing in it, empty and neatly tucked under the corner of the seat were someone, presumably, had been eating them from the tin. To say it took courage to pull out my embroidery seems ludicrous. But so it felt.

    It is an egg I drew freehand, a world egg, and have been filling with gradual slow stitches ever since. The egg shape is crossed with a bulging peace sign. I started it to sew for my suitcase, a new suitcase, khaki swirling, for my first trip to New York in 2011. The suitcase was a present, its army camouflage motif bothered me. “I want to sign that there can be peace, there can be love, that I am not part of the army,” I said, stitching next to the Brooklyn nightclub singer who at the request of our mutual friend was putting me up. We had bonded. We’d spent long hours sitting side by side on her bed, talking about our lives. “But,” she said, “you are also a warrior.” And hugging me, on her stoop opposite “the park” (an all-concrete basketball court) in the snow. She was smoking, and her voice was deep and compelling and rough.

    I made that trip, and another, longer trip, with the peace egg still missing from my luggage. Now in Berlin I have decided it is time to get it done. So on the underground I pull it out. With trepidation but not sure why. The first thing that happens is a good-looking, somewhat raddled man whose tangle of hair attracts me gets on and sits opposite. We are the only two people in the carriage. Noticing my stitching he says, terrifyingly, “This city belongs to us True Germans.” Nods many times. I try to smile, neutrally. His arm goes up in a blessedly hybrid but tyrannical salute. “We belong here. All of those foreigners need to just get out. They should go.” I say something, noncommittal and small, afraid of what violence I might bring on myself if my accent or choice of words gives me away. Then nodding also I get up and slide from the carriage, clutching the fold of canvas and my hidden needle.

    Real Germans sew in public. I felt I had identified myself with a certain kind of wholesomeness, or primness. The screaming mess at the back of my tapestry, with its gouts of wool and complex knotting clots of colour hardening the cloth, embarrassed me. It was so clear to anyone looking on – which they did – that I was a rank beginner. Perhaps that’s why the man in his seventies who had been strap-hanging nearby finally swung his upper body over me and confided, in a shy, sweet voice, We used to learn embroidery in primary school. We made cross-stitch. (Modestly, with a soft pride): I was really good at it.

    As she got off at Wittenbergplatz a lady clutching her hands before her chest paused to say, It’s hard, isn’t it, keeping the tension even. Yes, I said, relieved that she had articulated this issue I had only half-noticed myself noticing. You need an embroidery hoop, she said. Oh! I said. I really do. Thank you for mentioning it. Then I carried the feel of her all the way home. There is something innate, I think, in us – in me – which responds to the wisdom of an older woman, however pragmatic and small, however tentative, because it is what we are missing wherever else we look. Sneering at age, excluding the oldest cultures, enslaved to the young and the new; literary festivals falling over themselves to include schoolkids’ first raps at the expense of experienced writer elders; orchestras staging dismal photo shoots in which fiddle-clutching violinists leap uncomfortably. The trouble with hip is, it never lasts. I long for the inner knowing, the voice of experience, the hip replacement: the lasting.