Organic Dance, Recycled Sound: Pick a Piper at Fluxbao

The room was smoky, and filling up. There was condensation on the window that looked out to Warschauer Strasse, enveloped in the fog that had descended upon Berlin. Inside the club - that magical place we hear about in the charts, where anything can happen and we put our hands in the air - the crowd wait for Pick a Piper.

This club was Fluxbao, near Schlesisches Tor in Berlin. It was the beginning of December and no-one was sure at what time the ban were to start. It didn’t appear to say anywhere. But at some point after 9 o’clock the three-piece from Canada appeared from the shadows and onto the stage to whoops and claps and a slight ripple of bodies forward. They begin with a loud clash and in moments the beat of the drums and synth chords had taken possession of the club.

But they were called to an abrupt stop only a few moments later, as with a scratching hiss one of the speakers blew and the last remnants of the introductory song trailed off ...



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'White Rabbit Red Rabbit' at the English Theatre Berlin

White Rabbit Red Rabbit, by Iranian writer Nassim Soleimanpou, challenges us to evaluate the extent of our autonomy and examine the role we play in the world. Soleimnanpou achieves this by turning the mechanisms of theatre in upon themselves:  there is never a director, there are no rehearsals, and a different actor takes the lone role every night. The stage is the same each time: a chair, a ladder, two glasses of water, a vial, and, in a sealed envelope, the script.

In the case of the English Theatre Berlin, where White Rabbit Red Rabbit played for four nights in November, the script was brought on stage by the artistic director, and handed with quivering fingers to that night’s actor, both smiling gleefully. The artistic director introduced the actor and says, ‘I will leave you in his hands …’ and shuffles backwards into the wings.  

The theatre is still with excitement. The forth wall is broken as the actor cheerily introduces himself to us in his own, improvised words, diffusing any awkwardness as he fiddles with the envelope, attempting to extract the script. He tells us he is nervous. He finally manages to open the envelope, takes out the script, and begins.

Of course we are not really in our actor’s hands at all. We are all in the hands of Soleimanpou. There is an empty seat in the front row reserved for him. It is he who is to guide us blindly through the evening, and it is he that addresses us directly when our actor beings to speak.   

As a conscientious objector Soleimanpou is unable to leave Iran and is currently writing this play in his garden, so he tells us, which is fucking hard. Where are you? This play is his way of travelling out of Iran. The idea of the play came from a dream he had of committing suicide on stage, and tonight, he tells us, it is the onstage suicide of our actor, that we may bear witness to. Dear actor, you didn’t know what you were letting yourself in for …

Our actor makes comical aghast expression and the audience laugh and he continues to read.

He paces up and down the stage as Soleimnapou tell us more about himself and his motives for writing this play, our actor dropping each white, double-spaced page to the floor as he goes. Soleimanpou tells our actor to give each member of the audience a number, and then call No. 9 up on to the stage.  No. 9, a blonde girl of about that many years, happens to be our actor’s daughter.  We are told that the vial on the table contains poison, and are all, save for father and daughter, under Soleimanpou’s direction, requested to close our eyes while the latter pours the contents of that vial into one of the glasses of water.

At the end of the night the actor will have to choose one of those glasses to drink from. They are left to stand on the table behind him.

Amongst chuckles and cooing his daughter returns to her seat and the evening continues. More audience members are invited up on stage, white rabbits who must hide their ears, and bears that ensure that they do. No. 23 is a wonderfully meek white rabbit, and No. 41 a suitable stern bear and under our actor’s direction we follow them into Soleimanpou’s circus where there are leopards pretending to be ostriches and ostriches pretending to be leopards, and bears who have fallen on to the stage and so pretend to be leopards pretending to be ostriches, so not to upset the play.

And then the ladder is brought to centre stage and more numbers are called out, and more members of the audience called up. They are all white rabbits, and when our actor fires the starting gun four of them shuffle and smile sheepishly around the ladder, while one leaps up to the top to grab the prize, and there is both supportive laughter and distrustful applause at such boldness.

Soleimanpou is telling us about his uncle. And he continue this process until all the rabbits in the cage were new. They continue to attack each rabbit that ascended the ladder, even though not one of them knew the reason why they did it, other than ‘that is what is done here’.

An iPhone is summoned and a picture is taken of our four white rabbits and one red rabbit standing next to our actor and Soleimanpou asks that it be sent to him. I would love to see you all.

The members of the audience return to their seats but the ladder remains on stage and under it the table with the two glasses of water. Soleimanpou regularly brings out attention back to the ominous pair, but our actor is no methodist and so rolls his eyes whenever suicide is spoken of. It’s only a play after all. Suicide? Ha!  

It’s only a play after all.

Just a play? Soleimanpou challenges us.  But what if, what if … People don’t really die in plays, we know this. Yet each time our actor is addresses as ‘Dear actor’ and we are addressed as ‘Dear audience’, and we see another page of script fall to the ground, this becomes less of a play. Each time the suspension of disbelief is broken, the possibility of ‘what if’ blooms in front of us once more. For if this isn’t a play, what exactly is it? And what exactly are we doing here? What if there is poison in the vial? What if the daughter does hold a grudge? What if there was a great conspiracy? What if this isn’t just a play?

Ah! but come now, it is just a play! And the actor must diligently play his role, read his lines, until we leave the theatre at the end of the evening. That is how this works. What is left of our actor if he is not to act?

And yet, likewise, if we too play out part and deign to believe, we are to witness a suicide tonight. And if we decide not to believe, we decide not to care, and we leave our actor and the empty glass, and the shadow of the theatre hangs over us.

Night is closing in, and the excitement we can hear in Soleimanpou’s voice tells us that the moment when the actor must choose which glass to drink is approaching. He tells our actor to put the pages of the script down. Who will take them up? Who will finish the play? Who is our red rabbit? There is silence in the auditorium, and it is still once more. Our actor has no more lines to read and so cannot dispel the tension. The script lies on the floor and we wait for someone to pick it up.

Why would anyone dare put their neck out? Why, when so much comfort is gained by settling into the crowd? Why when we simply want to fit, and to belong? To rest in peace with hearthside contentment? I will sit still. I will not make a fuss. I will excuse, and qualify, and maybe, if there is no hope, say, ‘Well then, next time …’  

So the two glasses are placed in front of us as well. We have two options. Firstly, though ignoble, and selfish, and cowardly, we are offered a way out, if things were ever to get too bad. A way to pull the curtain cord, announce the end, drop our script and end the treadmill of suffering.  Secondly, we could try and save the actor? We could storm the stage. We could tear the script, and break the vial, knock over the glasses and with rabid eyes and bared teeth destroy the theatre. We could smash up the empty, reserved seat, while the frantic artistic director hops about in the wings: ‘Naturalism! Next season, only naturalism!’

But this will never happen. The artistic director will return in comfort to the lobby, and take a drink with the actor, two glasses in front of them, and his daughters and partner. We will leave the stage, and return to the world. But White Rabbit Red Rabbit will not leave us. For if the world truly is a stage, and we merely players, then all the world’s a cage.

And the script sits on the floor of the theatre and we wait for someone to pick it up.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Lights of Christmas Present

Christmas was coming. But there was still no snow.

Oh it will come! the girls has said to her. You wait and see! And they badgered her into buying a great, bright winter coat.

She wore it now, and despite the cold outside was sweating as she turned up and down the aisles in search of Thai salad, looking like a fat, synthetic goose. She was despairing, and considering hanging it all - and fuck them all too – when the music began again. It had felt like an instant of Christmas each time it had played in November though she wasn't sure it was supposed to be festive. All jingles jingle, after all … It certainly wasn’t the song she had thought it was at first and her stomach twisted in new surprise each time this became apparent. The jingle was jaunty, and whistled and sounded just like a Christmas ought to sound. But she didn’t know it. It didn’t feel like Christmas at all.

She stood in front of a shelf of bottles and grabbed one calling itself 'cherry likor’. Was that the same as liquor? It also had the word syrup, lower down on the label, in big letters. On the shelf below there was a darker, more expensive bottle called 'Sour Cherry'. She didn’t think that would go down well. Her phone was almost out of battery. She didn't dare another call. She had already made a fool of herself with the frozen vegetables.

Her eyes drifted, hoping for a sign, and rested on a bottled of Baileys. She remembered one night the Christmas before, when they had all drunk mulled wine heavily dosed with amaretto, long into the evening. When everyone had left, Roger fell asleep at her feet and she put on carols, and sat drinking and smoking until she was sure that if she stood up she would wobble, her legs deliciously weak. It hadn't been snowing then but the moon had been bright, and the air that occasionally whipped in through the window was harsh, and exhilarating. Wrapped in a blanket she had cracked walnuts with her hands, letting the pieces of shell drop to the floor, skipping the boring carols, and played her favourites over and over again. Later she had clambered up to pick at the turkey, pulling of the strings of tinsel that stuck to it, and then returned to the sofa and played the carols again.

The next day she had taken a train home and listened to more carols on her ipod and waited for the snow to fall. She felt a reluctant shiver of excitement. She had left it as late as possible, and she would be back soon enough, after all.

On the platform where she had to change trains, a portly and ruddy cheeked, poorly-dressed, but sweetly-decorated troupe had begun singing carols. She had paused the music on her ipod and watched them. She laughed to herself as she imagined her mother in the crowd. When they ended to splattering applause, she called Roger.

She read the message again, to check she hadn’t forgotten anything and heaved the basket up towards the counter.

Her first step out of the shop fell into an icy puddle and she froze as she felt the cold creep around her ankle; through two pairs of socks and a sandwich bag. She walked on, slowly, swearing as her toes accustomed themselves to the cold.

Robert had rung the day before. How long are you staying? She had been taken aback by the question. Indefinitely, it had always been, he knew that. But there was no sign of a plea in his voice, and she surprised herself when she answered, We’ll see what happens in the summer. Because she never lied to Robert.

Are you looking forward to Christmas? He always was; the advent calendar, the lights, the songs. But not this year, he said. Only a few of them would be there.

Dispirited after speaking to him she called Mick. He was excited and told her that he had managed to miss the carol service this year. Izzie had to go though, alone with Dad.

She had once gone alone with Dad. He had sat stiff, and staring straight ahead, but would look down at her when she looked up at him, wanting for the thousandth time to tug on one of the curly hairs that sprung loose from his beard. He would nod and give her a small smile, and then resume looking straight ahead.

A child wailed intermittently through the carols. The choir were singing at the front, two groups of them across a gangway perpendicular to most of the congregation. Some however, those closest, were sitting facing the same way as the choir, and in this group she had seen a woman crying to herself. She still wore her coat, and scarf but her black hat and gloves sat in her lap. She dabbed at her eyes, as the choir sang. Looking up at her father she saw that he was still stiff, and again looked down at her and smiled, though a briefer smile this time, and he appeared more stern when he looked back up. Her impression of churches were confirmed and she felt like she was in a film, or a book.

And she remembered another Christmas, when she had been working in a café, her first full-time job, and one evening Roger met her excitedly as she was closing up, and dragged her to their favourite bar; and on their favourite table he had told her that he had got an audition on Christmas Eve in the capital.

‘We can see the lights! And the tree!’

‘The trains will be expensive …’

‘Not if we stay for a few nights.’

‘And make our own Christmas lunch?’

‘We can find a funny old pub to have it in. Just have a bit of meat and sprouts and something.

And get a few bottles of wine. And make friend with the other people there.’

‘Your family won’t mind?’

‘Not if I say it’s for work.’

But they did mind. And so she was at home for Christmas. And it was as lovely and as tiresome as always.

Her left foot was now growing cold in empathy with the other. The shopping was heavy, and she damned the whole night, and the whole month. The Christmas lights ringing the heads of the tower blocks ahead of her were a throbbing, nauseous green. They pieced through the fog, above the other twinkling multi-coloured and dancing decorations that shone on the windows.

She was coming up to a stall that had been erected the previous week. It was steaming and she could smell chocolate and nuts. A woman, tall and tightly wrapped up, was standing at the counter speaking to the man inside who tied something up for them in parcels. Around her legs wobbled two little children, the same size and in identical ivy green snow suits, making them look like little aliens, or giant gherkins that had sprouted limbs. One toppled over, unnoticed, as she approached them.

She was only a few feet away when a little dog rushed out from behind the legs of the woman, and hopping around the struggling child on the floor began growling and snapping at her. It was on a lead which was a neon-red, like its collar and shining in the night. The woman turned to her with a blank, questioning expression, and from her hands the red lead seemed to extend indefinitely as the dog came closer to her, snarling from its scrawny throat. She stumbled back guiltily from the family, and the shed, and the smell of chocolate and nuts, and hurried on towards the green lights, fearful that they would

engage her in conversation.

*

Up in one of the building, out of one of the high windows, a small face peeped out, watching the figure in the bright coat hurrying away along the damp path.

No snow, still, he thought.

The steam billowed out of the mulled wine and crepe stand. He and his mother had been there that morning and she had bought little stocking-fillers and glazed apples; decorated almond biscuits and chestnuts in bow-tied, paper bags.

He watched the tall woman walk away from the stall in the opposite direction to the figure with the shopping bags. The two little girls stumbled and tripped along next to her, and the dog trotted amongst them all, playfully snapping at their green boots and turning its pointy nose into the fog, its tail erect. And further on, others bundled into and out of the supermarket, and the lights of the city were accompanied by whirling rides in the squares, shining baubles in the trees, and lit hut upon hut amongst the crowds who thronged into the Christmas markets.

He heard the girls cry out in the flat below him. He couldn’t make out the words, but they were bright and cheery and welcoming and would annoy his father. He yawned, pulled the duvet higher up around his shoulders, and resting his chin on the window sill, prayed for snow, like there had been last year.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Secret Fragments #3

Do you realise,’ his uncle said, slowly, ‘…she was born exactly one hundred years after Bobo ... Now that’s a thought, isn’t it!’

‘Good Lord, is that right?’

That summer, away from London to the sunflowers he had gone with his uncle and Alma and their children. Sofia had come too and everyone had said how much their cousin looked like Sofia, and Sofia smiled and their cousin smiled; she shyly, Sofia indulgently. He had thought that there was more of Sofia then in her now than in Sofia now, and he wondered how much of Sofia now would be in her then. When she spoke gently to her brother or her face was startled into a little ‘o’ and her black eyes grew, or silently at breakfast when her shoulders caved about her Coco Pops, yawning, and she refused to be goaded by uncles.

‘We can only imagine what we would find in that book,’ his grandfather said, grizzling, and placing tobacco in his rolling machine. His eyes flickered over his hands at work, and ten rested still, his voice quiet. His sons were silent either side of him and looking steadily at nothing.

He rested his head back and wanted to close his eyes. The room was running around them. For a moment the wind picked up outside, rattling the window in its frame just for a second, and a draught ran cold over him. His grandfather looked asleep. Tired, he tried to imagine him a little boy like Lutino. At first gambling, like a twinkling cub but quickly became a great, old snowbearpolabear pawing a landscape of white rock. He looked about the horizon, out over the flat white ocean and over the sprawling iced beach embedded in dark cliff leading up to an empty sky and the dark lip of cliff where the wind howled.

He looked upwards, hitting the ceiling, and thought of Pest and Buda, with whom he had spent the night earlier that week. The twins hadn’t look well. One was getting fatter each time he saw her. The other was wasting away, slurping at her drink and sucking cigarettes.  In Angel they had planned to go to the funfare that weekend at Battersea Power Station. When they arrived it was already closing down. Only a small selection of the smallest, and squeakiest, and brightest rides were still in operation and they were scowled at as they approached and asked for a go. They retreated to a bench at a beer tent that was half packed into a van.

They sat amongst employees of the funfare morosely celebrating the end. They sat and drank and he tried to keep the twins talking, or at least listening to him talk, and because he wouldn’t stop they did and the three drank cheap beer fast. Later, as the last of the sun shone, multi-coloured on the tarmac he had gazed up at the sky and watched as the planes flew past. One by one they came, one always following upon the other; in straight lines they flew, black, geometric birds.

He left still unsatisfied and so kept the girls walking with him, speaking loudly and holding hands and swinging their arms. And although Buda’s dyed red hair was faded as her dark brown roots took hold, and although Pest’s shoes were tattered and splitting they still clung to her feet, and so they flowed into a quiet but full pub and ordered drinks and laughed and shouted raucously and discourteously as they drank them and the other punters made mute sign language behind their backs.    

Afterwards he had gone back to Buda’s house and they had bought a bottle of wine, and, crept around the back of her building passed the bins to the swimming pool. They had uncovered it, and taken off their clothes and slipped in. They took their glasses of wine with them into the water. They drank and whispered and chuckled and he looked up to the sky and heard the train rolling past. Each train sounded thunderous and brought drama into their little quiet world in the water. He was smiling into the sky when Buda said that they should go in, and their white dripping bodies scrambled out of the pool.

Walking home along the river he had stepped up on to the ledge to pee into the Thames but couldn’t. Voices gave him quiet juddering startles and one person amongst goads and squeels slapped his ass as he went past. Buda and Pest hadn’t texted him since that evening – one had stabbed herself on a metal railing; the other just went silent.  

But now, sitting at his grandfather’s table, he returned, as he often did, to the sunflowers. On the final days he had walked with Lutino up a long road to a park full of bushes and plants and great trees. They walked up to two great pillars at the entrance; upon which crouched a fierce dog, puppies straining up to her dripping dugs while she turned to the other pillar, snarling and spitting at a wolf, as large as the bitch, legs spread and hair bristling. Under her belly there were also puppies, but dog-puppies not wolf-puppies. He was unsure whether they were dead or alive, writhing or frozen below her bridged belly. Looking up at them, Lutino’s eyes expanded for a moment, into smooth black buttons, and then his head turned back to the other, and he looked straight forward and stumbled into the park, leaving behind a cloud of dust where he shuffled his small legs forward.

He walked up to one of the pillars, looking up at the snarling beast above, and scratched upon one pillar the words liebe luxus anarchie.

Alma followed with her camera.    

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Secret Fragments #2

 ‘My aunt was thirteen years older than Bobo. She was already crawling out of her youth as her sister was emerging out of childhood and into her beauty. My father was engaged to my aunt first, you see. But one summer he fell in love with Bobo. Over card games and chess. She would slink up to him and ask if they could play a game and he wouldn’t be able to say no, and they would play, and she would ask for one more, and he would lose on purpose until he realised he could no longer win. I can see him at it now, twirling a circular counter in his hand under the table, while attempting to raise her eyes to his …’

‘He used to do it to our nannies and young waitresses on holiday in Portugal-’

‘But my mother’s eyes would be fixed on the ball, the board, the table, watching his hands. It’s how she always was.’

‘Yes I remember her teaching us Poker and it was just like that: eyes on the table, on the cards, on the chips, only looking at us for a moment to check we were paying attention-‘

‘But it was over chess that Dad fell in love with her. And after chess he would chase her in the garden or try and catch up with her in badminton … and it was perfectly obvious, to my aunt at least, what was happening.’

That which was perfectly obvious to his grandfather’s aunt was hidden from his father. Bobo didn’t see it either, lost behind the wonder of her own ascendency and the world it brought. And because it was perfectly obvious, it was only a matter of time before the loser, without a struggle, gave up trying to find reason or compensation for the perfectly obvious, or look for what lay beyond the reflection, and joined the great multitude who pass gently from reproach to lament to submission.

The food had been set down. He had already finished his wine and now he swallowed the last of his water. He picked up the bottle and filled everyone’s glasses up as they had also finished. He then did the same with the water jug.   

‘The Book of Secrets was a book owned by a lady called Florence Baxter-White. She was a great lady of society in London between the wars. She was also a great friend of Bobo’s. She would host these fabulous parties, and at these parties, when the guests would be leaving, she brought out this great book in which she asked them to write a little remark or impression of the evening, or a snippet of gossip perhaps. Because it was like a visitors’ book apart from that no-one would be able to read what the others had written-’

            

‘A cloth,’ his grandfather said, ‘with a circle cut out of it was placed over the pages when someone was writing in it so they could only see their own blank space and their own words.’

           

‘And there was absolute trust that Florence would show the book to no-one-’

            

‘When Florence died, hit by a taxi on Marylebone Street, she left the Book to Bobo. But –‘

            

‘It never reached Bobo-’

‘Why?’

‘Years and years after that summer it was …’

‘Fantastic chicken, Dad.’

Years and years after that summer, working on the dry banks of the Thames, Bobo’s sister found herself forced by unhappy circumstance to seek her sister at one of Lady Baxter-White’s fabulous parties. Waiting, she stretched her neck like a stalk’s through red curtains to the dancing beyond.

‘Her ersatz presence at Florence’s attracted the attention of a guest by the name of Hoogerwerf, who on discovering her identity, subjected her to a celebration of her sister from great purple lips …’ 

‘I am yet to pin that little tyke down in a game of tennis! One of these days … Tell me, was she so delicious when she was younger?’

And it was only a few months after that-

‘Could you pass the potatoes, Dad?’

'The elder holds the secrets of the younger! My aunt was entrusted to pass on the book to Bobo but on the day Florence died she spirited it away. It was only a few months later when-’

‘Are you finished here Dad?’

Only a few months later, as men in black and white shuffled about the Baxter-White house, a young girl, a favourite of Florence’s, hid the Book of Secrets in an old stone oven in the garden kitchen while she attempted to reach Bobo.

But no-one knew where Bobo was. The house was filling up with more sweeping black coats and jackets and they young girl began to panic. Just as she was about to shriek to the other young girls that they ‘simply light the oven and let the Book burn!’ one of them said that she had recently seen Hoogerwerf with a woman who claimed to be Bobo’s sister. They hadn’t believed Bobo to have a sister but Hoogerwerf, who was holding his hanging head in one of the long corridors of the house was brought forward and consulted and irritably assented that there did indeed exist ‘a tall, dry giraffe of a woman’ who called herself Bobo’s sister. Enquiries were made and the reality was verified and before midday the dry giraffe with the weak flutter of a resurgent heart was being hustled down the back passageways of the Baxter-White house and then presented with the Book of Secrets with the fierce instruction that it was to be delivered to the hands of no-one but Florence’s ‘Darling Bobo’. Little moist hands pushed her down the garden: ‘Tell her to send a note when she has received it. To Victoria!’ And then with a desperate nod the door was slammed shut.

Cut off from the garden, standing still, amidst a damp, charcoal alleyway Bobo’s sister clasped the Book of Secrets to her bosom. Summer was ending and the chill morning, with clouds overhanging, held the essence of decay. Her long trembling fingers stroked the black leather and played at the while linen cloth that poked out of the Book’s white lips.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

Secret Fragments #1

Up against a stone pillar, the light shone down upon his head and chest like a halo or a Tudor ruff, or a large, translucent bib, as white as his skin and the flower of hair that sprung at his temple. At his mouth, about his chin, a stain sat; mud or muck or chocolate, like the scruffy goatee of a middle-aged Parisian artist.

‘Alma took it. Not a bad snap eh?’ His uncle sported neither beard nor ruff but a speck of red chilli dip – conspicuous as a black mole hair or white-head – hung to the crevice of his mouth. He smiled at his father and him and put the picture back on the shelf. His uncle’s voice fluttered about his ears and he hoped that a smile would suffice as a response.

‘I sent this to Dad last week. He has pictures of the other two when they were the same age. Hmm? Yep, two.'

His father reached for more crisps and chilli dip and smeared it over his own mouth. His blackberry blinked on the table. ‘Two already! Good Lord …’

‘Young Lutino two already!’ His grandfather entered the room, grinning, the skin about his mouth stretching out in wrinkled folds. He walked briskly with the stiff edge of a decommissioned rocking-horse. He saw that a drop of urine had formed on his grandfather’s crotch and also spotted a speck of green caught between two of the old man’s teeth. He drew his tongue over his own teeth and put a hand up to his mouth and chin and felt only the dry beginnings of the scruffy goatee of a middle-aged Parisian artist. 

His father and uncle were up in London. Just for a couple of days, his uncle said. And his father too, ‘Just for a couple of days.’

‘Then back to the country.'

The three of them had come from different corners of the city and met in a pub, a five minute walk from his grandfather’s. It was fun and they were very content to stay but resisted a second round and got up to walk around the corner. His grandfather had greeted them all heartily and fixed them drinks.

Now standing around his table, his uncle said, ‘You know Spangle told me the funniest thing the other day. He said that years ago when he came to stay at weekends and Alma stayed behind on walks after lunch, he had thought that she had been smuggling lovers in behind our back. Because she always insisted so vociferously that we should go out on a walk, but would never come herself. Each Sunday he had imagined her hurrying them all in as soon as we crossed through the trees into the field!’

They laughed and he thought of the raised eyebrows and meaningful looks that would pass about Alexandria’s table. Sofia would laugh with them and drop a little remark that ripped the seal the others dared not pick at, and they would cackle in a spurt of relief, howling and clawing at the table. This table was as long and light, as his grandfather’s was dark and squat, and sitting around it earlier that Summer, Sofia had said:

‘I’m giving up in the autumn. As soon as I can. It’s disgusting. It’s just not worth it.’ Alexandria silently nodded along, and the girls looked up at Sofia and her cigarette with eyes content to believe in the autumn and she nodded down at them. ‘It’s not worth trying in the first place.'

‘How old were you?’ Alexandria asked.

‘How old were you?’

His grandfather lit a cigarette and passed the lighter.

‘I remember the first time they met. We went on a walk and the two of them were lagging behind and he was telling her all about the books he had read and his favourite jokes and stories from school. Funny to him but awfully dull to poor Alma. But she laughed and listened and asked questions and I remember looking back and saw him allowing her to help him over the style, the silhouette of them as she cautiously guided him over ...’

Once, on a walk with his grandfather, blackberry picking, hanging back to pee into the bush, he had spotted a voluptuous blackberry amongst the thorns. As he reached out to pluck it the mole hill he was standing on collapsed and he tottered into the ditch peeing over his trousers. For the rest of the walk he stayed back from the others so they wouldn’t see. Later he would hang back and try to surreptitiously smoke one of his grandfather’s cigarettes. Walking with his uncle and Alma in the sunflowers that summer he noticed Spangle hanging back and wondered whether he was smoking or had peed on his trousers.  

‘It kills us. I know it kills us; we’ve just finished burying Dad after it killed him, and look at me!’ That is what Alexandria had said while she smoked in the fireplace and he and Sofia wished to smoke crouched in the fireplace themselves, but couldn’t so she had gone to the bushes at night and he to the bins in the warm sleepy moments after lunch. But then Alexandria had woken up one morning and recognised it as the foulness it is and that was that and Sofia now really wanted to stop and that would be that, and he now loved not going to the bins but went to the flowers instead and thought of his grandfather’s curt cough and his rolling machine.

He offered him another drink saying, ‘He should try some of mine. You boys’ feet never grew to my size I think. Though I think they are now beginning to shrink …’

‘-I haven’t told Alma. I don’t know what she’d think! …’

            

‘-It’s funny actually I was talking to someone at work …‘

            

Alexandria was giggling somewhere while Sofia gave him a gesture as she had earlier. ‘She will probably have a rosé but go and check.’ He had gone out to try and find Alexandria and hadn’t found her but found the sunflowers and he had sat and in the end she had found him on her way back from the bins and he had offered to get her a drink and they walked back together, him helping her over the gate and back towards the house, and she told him stories that hovered about his ears and didn’t require a response.  

            

‘She was having her nap of course,’ his uncle said. ‘That’s all it was.’

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

     

Begin again, and again: Phia at the English Theatre Berlin

She is often referred to around the lines of, ‘that girl with that funny instrument who does the looping thing’ and this was the accumulation of my knowledge on Phia as I went to see her this October at the English Theatre Berlin. Shuffling within the bustling crowd that was fidgeting to see the final show of her tour, at first no-one I spoke to was particularly sure what the instrument she played was. ‘A mobiro,’ someone eventually said, nonchalantly. ‘From South Africa’. This created a momentary flutter of excitement in our corner of the lobby, and a little scepticism too. ‘It certainly doesn’t sound very African to me,’ someone said.

Amidst the wires and mics and lights, as Phia begins her set I crane my neck forward to get a better look at the thing in her hand that she introduces as not a ‘mobiro’ but a ‘kalimba’, a thumb-piano, a descendant of the South African ‘mbira’.  The kalimba, with the dexterity of the cell phone generation, can be played with just one hand by plucking at the mettle strips that run across the wooden tablet, creating a sound like a xylophone or a little bell; but the sound is cleaner than a bell, and has more body than a xylophone. With her loop pedal, Phia records a melody with the kalimba, or a beat made with her mouth or hands, or sings an introductory refrain, and plays it back, allowing it to loop again, and again, throughout her song, as she adds layer upon layer, created with her hands, or mouth, or the kalimba. Phia isn’t the only one to use a loop pedal, or indeed to play a kalimba, but she’s one of few to use them together, and it is this unusual aspect to her music that brought many of us to the English Theatre Berlin that evening.

In her songs Phia expresses the relationship she has with ‘home’, which was Melbourne for her until she moved to Berlin – ‘this village’ – two years ago. As Lily Allen presented her home in ‘LDN’ with crack-whores and Tesco bags ...



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Ich bin Fremd hier #7

That second Friday evening found me once again feigning enthusiasm on the steps of Frankfurter Tor. I was designated to promote at the hostel that I was actually staying at. This was a little awkward as I was acutely aware that due to my focus upon learning German and applying for jobs, like at the last hostel, I have built up an unsocial reputation. Each day I sit on the much desired high-table that I claim early each morning, reciting verb formations, remaining until lunch when I munch upon some tomato and cheese, before leaving for an afternoon handing out CVs. In the evening I continue the job search online. And now, I will have to casually join them around the fuseball table or discussing politics on the terrace and try to entice them upon a night of shots and Beer-Pong.

To my relief, as I return to the hostel I spot new arrivals. Four lads from Liverpool. I approach them and open a discussion on the city and when asked tell them that a little shisha bar I know in Friedrichshain is undoubtedly the best spot I have found in Berlin. ‘In fact I am going there tonight,’ and pull out some flyers from my pockets, attempting nonchalance. My heart thumps as they mumble to each other, ‘Well we’re pretty lost here … have no idea where else to go …’

I leave these four drinking on the bunkbeds and am approached by a Swedish guy – with an accent so British I initially thought he was mocking me - who had spoken to Ela the night she was promoting at the hostel. He has shown interest in coming along later in the week and said that he would ‘poke his head in’ that night. He directs me towards an Australian girl who was also keen, and she in turn nods her head towards Gerty of Holland, who was meeting three friends from Amsterdam that night who would were hoping to visit a few bars in East Berlin. With the addition of one lone traveller from Australia twiddling his thumbs on his last night in Berlin, I suddenly found myself elatedly leading eleven people back to Frankfurter Tor, repeatedly multiplying eleven by four. 44€! I think of Leo shepherding myself, Barry, the Swiss sisters and the rest of that crowd on this route just a week before. Look at me now!

I was still happily multiplying on the tram when the Swede calls out to me: ‘Ur-hum, excuse me! Are we not supposed to get off here?’ We were. I sprang into action and leaped in between the beeping doors of the tram, holding them back as my group tumbled excitedly passed me under the red flashing lights and out onto the pavement. I released the doors and I follow them out, thanking the Swede as he delicately folded his map and placed it back into his breast pocket. Trying to regain some authority I trot in front of them spieling off some garb about the classic Stalinist architectural style, and lead them onwards to the first bar where Garth is waiting for them outside.  

I don’t join them on the Crawl that evening but think of them the next day as I walk along Warschauer Straße and past the club they would have ended up in. I love walking about here as it reminds me of the last day of my first trip to Berlin the previous summer. It was a Sunday and my German friend took me down to a flea market here and I came across a bright orange school satchel with red reflectors and a picture of Disney’s Robin Hood and Prince John. The man on the stall didn’t speak English so I told my German friend that she would have to bargain for it. I told her I would pay no more the 10€, but my will was week and her bargaining half-hearted and so I walked away with the satchel strapped upon my back having paid 25€. We then walked to another flea market. This second one was further into Friedrichshain and much bigger. Here I had leafed through German children books, Peter und die Wolf, Emil und die Deketive, Die unendliche Geshichte, and quietly contemplated learning the language. Afterwards we had had ice coffee off the grass square and I had thought of Berlin as not the scruffy underdog of Europe but in its Wilhelmian splendour. And it was with the taste of that coffee in my mouth and that satchel digging into my shoulders that, on the way back to Schonefield Airport, I had looked at my faint reflection against the landscape of bare Templeoffer Freiheit and half-consciously thought to myself, I could move to Berlin.

Through Friedrichshain and then up to Prenzlauer Berg I hand out more CVs to more hostels and bars and slowly my enthusiasm for the city begins to ebb once again. Walking down Landsberger Allee I saw a stone archway with a rusted iron gate leading in to a tatty rubble and grass lane at the near end of which I could see only trunks and leaves. On one of the pillars there was a mettle plaque with illegible German. If the gate had been closed I would have thought it was perhaps the entrance to a small mid-city estate. Wearily I turned up the path and came to what first appeared to be an ugly and deprived city park, shaded from the light and noise of the road and flowing self-absorbed city life that I had been traipsing through.

As I entered, amongst the trees to my right was a mettle railing which barred me from a gravelled playing court and I thought I spotted a little wall that enclosed us. About me in other directions were scraggly bushes and shrubbery and immersed between these I saw grave stones and realised to my delight that I was in a cemetery. I was tired and knew that here I wouldn’t be disturbed. I found a little bench along the twisting paths and saw a gap in the wall which I assumed led to another great road of the like that I had just escaped. I would stay here.

I sat on the bench and sighed into my solitude. In front of me were a couple of small, neglected and slanted grave stones and to my right there was a man crouching silently on the ground. He had come here not to get away, I thought to myself, but to connect, or travel back to what was lost. A moment later a woman turned up at his side and they began bickering in agitated muffled German. Was he visiting the grave of dead mistress? Were they perhaps siblings, rivals over the disputed will of a lost parent? Old lovers encountering each other at the grave of their lost child? In bursts and beats they argued there for about ten minutes and then disappeared down the path, still snapping at each other.

In time I rose and thought to do a quick round of the cemetery before heading back onto the noise and stretch of Landsberger Allee. I took the path the couple had taken and found that it led through another stone archway and saw that the cemetery expanded to an enormous size in leafy splendour housing magnificent graves and small crypts, reminding me of Angkor Watt and ‘Lara Croft: Tomb Raider’.  This place stretched far beyond the little guttering corner I had stumbled upon and lingered in so readily. In the distance I spotted the man and woman quietly sitting on another bench by other gravestones. Maybe they were also simply searching for a fragile tranquillity, meeting tempestuously in their lunch breaks. 

On the path I was confronted by a fat cat with a squashed face. It was no Salem or Binx but looked arrogant and satisfied, at complete at peace with the world, living and dead. I was wondering from whence he came when I heard a voice saying ‘Langsammer! Langsammer!’ Walking on I saw that crouched amongst the grave stones was an equally fat woman pouring cat food into a steel dish, next to watch filled up with water. Two more cats meowed about her ankles, squeezing their portly bodies under her thighs and buttocks, needing at her calves and then dipping their ugly, crumpled faces into the bowls. As I wandered further along the path I saw more of these cats, licking their paws and gazing indifferently at me. They didn’t seem very graveyard; they didn’t seem very Berlin either. But nonetheless, I was certainly on their turf.  

I turned off the path to a where there were more family crypts and no path but wooded floor; more leaves and twigs here. ‘Familie Otto’, ‘Familie Shmittd’, ‘Familie Ende.’ Often it was only a husband and wife named. Where were all the children? Perhaps they were sterile siblings. They were dying in the 1920s and 1930s, as Weimar and then Nazi Germany took hold, and the Imperial country of Prussia and Wilhelm dissolved further into the ground.

I was aware that I was gratifying a voyeuristic tendency. My German friend told me that she believe we like art galleries so much as they have enough life within them to engage us, but are devoid of the clutter that the rest of our lives confront us with. Cemeteries are similar; simply walking through them there is little of people to see or know, but enough to stir interest. I am always surprised how sparse the words on gravestones are. How does one connect to that person beneath there? Is it possible at all? We like to think that a connection is possible. That because once men levelled the coffin down into a whole that was dug by other men and a stone was placed and the beloved’s family knelt by it, and that we are now standing in that exact same spot we have somehow bypassed time.  Do these places have a memory? Is there still an essence of what was? The ivy and shrubbery took the stones back and the inhabitants lay quiet and neglected and forgotten inside. Such a sight, though beautiful to the uninvolved wanderer, is a fantastic argument for incineration. Two generations go by after your death and you are left to neglect and vegetation. Not part of it, but simply held beneath it, as vagrants drink tinnies and people walk their dogs. Bertolt Brecht’s had apparently requested that his gravestone be just an ordinary stone ‘which every dog wants to piss on.’ This would be a place for that. Not somewhere like the famous Père Lachaisey cemetery in Paris. Brecht should have been buried here. If the dogs aren’t scared off by the cats.

Walking my aunt’s dogs in a cemetery in Fulham, it was not cats but foxes that I was wary of. I saw no foxes here in Berlin, but did to my joy look at one point to see a bushy red squirrel swinging from the branches above me. This was the first time I had seen a red squirrel and I remained swaying with the branches underneath the tree after it had disappeared. Fat cats and red squirrels! In his book ‘Germania’, Simon Windsor describes the latter, ‘with straggling tufts of unkempt hair and hectic eyes that give them something of the air of traditional Berlin squatters.’[1] I sat down on the twig-strewn ground next to a particularly black grave and looked up in the trees, hoping to see more of these squatters. I felt very much alive. Cemeteries give me this feeling; a feeling of youth, and power in being alive, when so many others aren’t. The sootier and grimier and more crumbled gravestone, the better I feel spending time amongst them. I would like to think that those beneath would be grateful for my time, if they could be. And I dwell upon that imaginary connection that only exists in a mind turning in upon itself.  For what can be felt in cold stone but the comparative heat of our own palm?

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

             

           

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[1] Simon Winder, Germania, (Parador, London), 2010.

Ich bin Fremd hier #6

‘So I went into the house and took off the wall the fiddle I played so well, and my father gave me a few coppers to help me on my way, and off I strolled down the long street and out of the village …’[1] Another adventure begins in Joseph von Eichendorff’s ‘Life of a Good-for-Nothing’ and I wonder what my fiddle could be in Berlin. I turn to look out at the city below but the window has misted over. Another feast is being prepared behind me. The smell of fried egg and mushroom fills the hostel and I look down morosely at my Turkish yoghurt and soft banana. The meals that are created throughout the day at this hostel are fantastic: all kinds of food from all the cuisines that Berlin has to offer, frying and roasting and boiling and bubbling over my shoulder, and backpackers conglomerate together over the roasted banquet of vegetables and steaming sweet potatoes and sprinkled nutmeg, and delicately torn meat that spits and sizzles giving up scents of home, and healthy luxury throughout the hostel.

Through the haze of blazing peppers Happy Henry, in suit and tie, waves at me from reception, ‘Cheerio!’, and disappears with his briefcase down the grey stairs into the vortex of Kottbusser Tor. He would appear out of place, offensively so perhaps, but for his great ginger afro and huge grin places him at ease with everyone, staff and arties and Turkish kebab venders alike. Having flamboyantly quit his job at PricewaterhouseCoopers after only one year, with great eyes brimming with excitement and a juddering Adam’s apple, Henry had arrived the day before with his neat black briefcase inside his shining black suitcase, and told us – by ‘us’ I mean everyone else in the hostel, while I crouched like a gremlin over Craig’s List in the background - that he was starting an internship the next day and now frantically (but exuberantly) was searching for a flat. He was soon pointed, with whispers, in my direction with the information that I had also recently moved to the city. He parked up his laptop next to mine as he introduced himself and told me about his search for accommodation. I wasn’t yet searching for accommodation, having decided to stick it out for now in hostels and friend’s places, until I had regular employment. I didn’t want to break Henry’s excitement though, so kept this quiet and kept asking questions about the flat. That evening, through a tangle of leads and tottering bottles of Berliner Kindle, he would swivel his screen around every few minutes to show me another great two-bedroom find.

‘I could cover you for a bit,’ he offered, ‘if need be. And I can pass a credit cheque and can easily show my last three month’s pay checks. Although getting hold of them from the office might prove a little tricky …’ and he raised his left index finger to tap ponderously upon his chin. Henry had a plan that we put on suits and ties and shave and go round some of these flats pretending that we are based in London but looking for a work-pad in Berlin. ‘It would be much better than a flat-share. It would just take a little preparation. You have a tie I suppose? If not I could lend you one. And we could both get haircuts.’

Henry was only the latest in many that I have met in Berlin who like me had come to the city in search of exciting opportunities. ‘Not trying to start a life but find one,’ he said to me as we add each other to our German sim-cards. At the first hostel I had met Francisca who had moved to Berlin from Italy. She had begun a language course and the school had found her a flat. She was hoping to find work in an Italian restaurant, then try to set up a stall at a flea market and sell her jewellery. There was Joseph of course, and also Niel from Conventry, teaching himself with Tin Tin in German (Tim und Struppi), confident in finding work as a manual labourer then searching for something better when his German improved. And I met Calan, the bracelet-sparkling Amazonian Queen of this hostel and rich fountain of knowledge on secret corners of Berlin which she had pioneered into the week before. Calan had – as she related with stressed nonchalance the next day over breakfast of steamed pumpkin and cinnamon – paused on the street to look at a mural the other morning in one seldom-frequented district of Berlin and been approached by a couple of Germans who liked her look and asked her to a photo-shoot in Tiergarten. They took her for a beer afterwards and then offered their sofa for as long as she wants it.

And I was to meet Serious Roger who like Henry had left a well-paid job in the UK, but otherwise opposed the smiling cockney right down to his, gaunt gullet, and dark mournful eyes, and the tone of a professor of Emily Dickenson. Then there was Leo, of the Pub Crawl, who had only been staying in the city for the summer while his girlfriend had an internship here; and Ela who had been studying here for one semester, and the great Garth who had arrived in the spring, the crazed Mike from Leicester, cherubic Mike, smoky Mike. And there was Dai and Baz and Sam, Evelyn … I would meet more and more in the next few weeks, who like me had come to Berlin hoping to stay. Each of us one of the many flooding to the city, not out of necessity but with the thin idea that Berlin is simply cooler than London, or Melbourne, or Shannon. In search of the spark that we read about and hear about and watch on each cinema screen and yet is so elusive under days of necessity and CVs and TV; that stone conveyor belt we have stepped since Reception.

How is Joseph different from, Calan, or Leo or Evelyn? We are all Auslanders, happening to be in Berlin. Nuzzling our way in, or finding comfortable corners; walking confidently through Alexanderplatz and looking down upon those with packs on their back. This place, before it was filled with dawdling tourists bending their heads back to look up at the television tower, and before the U-bahn station and Döblin’s nightlife, and before the enterprising Jews from the eastern marshes arrived and occupied the ‘Scheunenviertel’, what is now Alexanderplatz, home of the World Clock, was a cattle market where outsiders from afar would come to trade their stock and make some cash. Since the Friesians, still cheap and with space to grow, Berlin has continued to develop as a ‘Welstadt’, welcoming the world to its streets, from refugees to the rich and beautiful, and seemingly thriving because of it; the place Bowie and Kafka and Isherwood escaped to.

Simon Winder writes that the infamous Berlin of the ‘20s, portrayed in the pictures by Grasz, Dix and Beckmann, was not the reality. ‘Berlin was in the 1920s a city of ghosts, both at a private level and at a public one, with the militaty and imperial heart of the city ripped out and thrown away. The orgiastic feeling of the city, so enjoyed by foreigners, was based on a void.’[2] What are people like myself not seeing in Berlin today? How much can be seen from a hostel in Kreuzberg? It is from this district of the city, that which has taken a large brunt of the immigration to Berlin, where a wall can be found sporting the words: ‘Echter Berliner!!!! Ihr Nicht Fuck You’. ‘Real Berliner!!!! You’re Not Fuck You’.

The influx is many folded: tourism, the Wall and Nazism, the story of Berlin, sitting comfortably alongside night-time pursuits to Berghaim and the city’s famous moonlight offerings, originating in Isherwood’s cabaret. And then beneath these, are the immigrants and expats, begrudging the former group who give them a bad name. ‘Immigrants’ and ‘expats’. These two names conjure up different images and there are many of one group who would never label themselves under the title of the other. Is one of these groups less welcome in Berlin, or simply easier to mock, to rage against, to differentiate?

Immigrants and expats and real Berliners were the theme of a play staged at the English Theatre Berlin the month I arrived in the city. Having found no work going at the theatre I signed up as a volunteer and soon found myself serving customers Moscow Mules, drinking with the theatre staff, and watching their productions from the front row, kostensloss. The first play I saw was ‘Echter Berliner.’ Talking to a fellow volunteer before the show, himself a born and bred ‘Berliner’- though we were both tentative, before the show, to use the term – sighed when I told him where I was staying and asked me earnestly: ‘Where are all the Germans in Kreuzberg?

The director of the ‘Echter Berliner’ was from the States, and so like each of his five fellow actors, was, willingly or not, counted as part of an immigrant/expat community in Berlin.  The six of them interviewed ten members of their respective community to explore what it was like to move to and live in Berlin. They asked these people whether they felt like an outsider in this city; what it was to be a Berliner; and whether they could ever be one.

In attempt to recreated the tedium and anxiety of the dreaded Auslandercentre, when the audience received their tickets they were given a specifically coloured ticket dependant on where their passport was issued, and told, ‘There is likely to be a delay in the start of our performance as we are running behind.’ Indeed, they were taken into the auditorium fifteen minutes after the published starting time. The mass of Germans, clutching their red tickets in their palms, were taken in last.

Inside, the audience were faced with a sad looking character, in Jewish garb, sitting morosely on a stall and rummaging through a plastic rucksack, looking like the lost boy of a school trip. When the play begins, he is joined on stage by the other five actors, including the director looking suitably American in baseball hat and aviators, another shrouded in a Muslim shawl and a third looking like she has just glided off the set of Crouching Tiger Hided Dragon. Presented in such stark contrast, the six display the diversity of Berlin (or indeed, for that matter, New York or London) but also the stock stereotype that are cast upon individuals from these cultures. It is these stereotypes that the director is attempting to break down, however as the play continues such caricatures re-emerge to comic effect and are therefore more reinforced than dissected.

What was briefly looked at in the play is Berlin’s relationship with the rest of Germany. ‘Berlin needs to sort out its hate of people from Stuggart first!’ one of the actors cries. It is true, like London and Paris, Berlin sits apart from the rest of the country, inspiring narrowed suspicious eyes in the hinterlands beyond. Bismark distrusted Berlin. As did Hitler, who harboured designs to turn it into ‘Germania’, sporting a great dome to be called the Kuppelberg, which would dwarf St Peter’s by sixteen times. Indeed, hanging from the ceiling in my hostel, is a sign – alongside ‘I survived KitKat Club’ and ‘The staff are hot!’ – shouting: ‘Berlin is NOT Germany.’ Is that the criteria for a World City, to provoke the cold shouter of its home country in hosting the rest of the world?

As the audience listens to the trials of those who have moved to Berlin from Turkey and Taiwan and upstate New York, I wondered why there are was no testimony from someone who does undoubtedly consider themselves a true Berliner. Perhaps this is addressed at the end of the play where the one actor ‘originally’ from Berlin shouts that she knows where she’s from and doesn’t need to be told about it. Or the very last line of the play: ‘perhaps a Berliner is someone who doesn’t need to talk about it.’ Or perhaps, it is the audience who are considered the Berliners, being taught about the others in their city. Even so, it would have been nice to consider the identity of the author of that piece of graffiti in Kreuzberg.

            In Kreuzberg, from the edge of my hostel’s terrace, I cannot spot the any sign of the sad little wall that wants us out. Smoking next to me is a girl, also looking over the streets and roofs below us.  She lets out a ‘wow’ as she exhales. What do we not see? The view isn’t particularly pretty, but then much of the most spectacular in Berlin isn’t pretty. Not pretty like Paris. Neither does it have the golden grandeur of Westminster, or the crumbling splendour of Rome. Not a pouting, postcard beauty, but the rusting red balconies and swamps of ivy crawling up the building; the stretched stories that play out, frozen yet compelling, on the sides of buildings, provoking the wow of one gratified pilgrim.

‘Auslander Aus!’ one interviewees of ‘Echter Berliner’ had shouted at her once by a group of neo-Nazis. The word ‘Auslander’ has a sound to that is more repellent, than ‘foreigner’ for instance. Or even ‘extrangjero’, verging upon ‘etranger’ where loaded ‘stranger’ and clinical ‘foreigner’ ominously meet. ‘Auslander’ sounds foreboding. So I think of the word ‘Fremd’ and feel welcom here once more.

But what do I not see?

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2013

English Theatre Berlin - http://www.etberlin.de/

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[1] Jospeh von Eichendorff, ‘Life of a Good-for-Nothing’

[2] Simon Winder, Germania, (Parador, London) 2010.