On Sunday in the midst of strife I had a most wonderful day. Met an acquaintance who wanted something from me, and we walked into a foreign land so familiar that I fell into my childhood, and the sweet world intricate and divine which sustained my deepest breaths when I was seven, nine, twelve, eleven rose up in me and about me again and the trees were all there, we knew each other, the soft wind… I cannot describe and no one can transport that essence, the spirit of the place wrapping its tendrils like
a delicate sweet love
like a plant which is birdsong, a vine divine
or like the bride of the forest who shyly beckons shadows, and sings underwater, and has rooms for all our grief.
You walk in through the trees and there are people everywhere, eating and chatting. I took two hundred photographs. I remembered wandering on my own in the pasar, on the markets, in Jakarta
alone but never alone, and the trustfulness held in the colourful world back then. Adults were sexy and cool. They didn’t impose. Nobody touched me. Only the lady, the old ibu, wrapped in her thin scarf who took hold of my head in Blok M and cried all over my face, down my neck, her reddened betel-nut tooth stumps, and her grace and words: this child, this girl, she has depth, she is in the world, she is a soul I can see, she is one of the ones.
I can’t remember her words. But I will never forget the shy proudful sensation of her touch on me and her recognition, down from the mountains, the cave with a wall solid behind it which creates a resonance.
On the bright Thai food markets which began, my Peruvian friend told me, from the longing people had to scent and taste their lovely homeland
where food is beautiful, and fresh like birds, cooking a kind of singing
not all pickled, roasted, brewed, we found Asia in Berlin. The laying out of rugs and seagrass mats. The bright umbrellas and bold plastic implements, lime green, orange, blue. All the families squatted comfortably at their esky tables and their cardboard carton frying-boxes, each carton spattered inside with dark from the oil splitting off in the toiling wok –
There were stalls everywhere, low at ground level, people squatting on their mats pounding and chopping and skilfully frying things. Freshness drew me and my acquaintance, who had said “I will be there for you in this hard time” but in five hours asked me not one question about all of my news and myself, down one grassy alley after another, under the trees, and out in the big clear grassy field. I overheard a Berlin punk on his phone saying, “We are here in the Hauptfressgasse,” the principal pig-out aisle, “come find us,” and the sky
with its inimitable piles like God’s geography, pleasurable, transient. The sky was a beast you could watch for hours straining its leash. And then the train home so swaying and fast between the treetops and the speed was exciting, the lurching and long corners, the sense of riding rapidly above the grimy familiar streets and swinging, like an ape so joyous in his homeland, vine to vine, hand to hand, song to song – that was all I was conscious of. It was such a relief.
I wouldn’t say I was drunk. But I was so very, so very, just so relaxed. A lady under a purple umbrella with a carton-top of bottles, the world’s smallest, freshest bar, mixed up an unholy powerful brew. In Thai German Spanish she said, “You want capina? You want mosquito.” I chose mosquito. Then she sliced the lime with two sharp chops, into the palm of her hand, with a cleaver and crushed it in the cane sugar with her big pestle. Mint leaves then she filled the whole beaker to the rim with gold Havana rum. “Drei Euro.”
Clear tubs with jelly shapes swimming bright and glutinous in the milk, milk of the coconut, mother that travels long seas. The plangent scrabble and wail of unselfconscious Asian voices, familiar in my oldest memories and so sweet and salty and spiced and honest to my ear. Berliners roar, a guttural beery spume: in blaring Jakarta the screeching, the Bulgarian mountaintop want of modulation, the intensely modelled fineness and discretion – that is culture, or one early formation of cultural expectation, to me.
People sitting crouched around a frayed mat under the trees were throwing yellowed dice high again and again, some unfamiliar game printed on the cloth they had spread between the five of them. Little children kicked their legs. I ate and ate. Every mouthful seemed precious. The fresh feisty fruitfulness, realness, diverse sprung view. There were plates of fried insects, sweets wrapped in banana leaves, hot spicy soups. Bright pink milky drinks and bottles garlanded in flowers. I had satays, dumplings, green papaya salad threshed in a trophy-sized mortar which filled my mouth and throat with remembered fire. The high thick combing trees foamed around the park, a large, open park, almost concealing the buildings. We could have been anywhere, we could have been in the Seventies when adulthood was a charm I held inside me. Could have been in the tropics. Could have been out to sea somewhere in the congruent, lasting, more intricate world, that was built by many hands and had trees and is gone.
