‘Everything is
established in London. Here, there is still experimentation!
And liberation!’ An artist from
Chile is showing me the pictures of plants he has created on his MacBook;
skeletal and neon they look more alien than anything of botany. He tells me
about patterns and fractals, looking at me with earnest, amber eyes. Curls of
silver twist about his tangled hair, down his goaty beard and along his eyebrows.
He could be any age and I imagine he always has been and always will be.
He grabs my hand
and holds it up. ‘It has flesh! Like this here! The plant is still living! I have not killed this plant. It
is still alive today, back at home. ’
I fill the
silence that quickly descends and ask more questions about fractals which
excite him to the extent that ‘we drink!’ and he trots off to his dorm to bring
out some absinth in a glass, blue bottle. ‘Absinth,’ he tells me, while he
pours, ‘I have drunk, from this same bottle, at all the very special places in
the world that I have been. At the Eiffel Tower, on London Bridge, at the Cordillera
de la Costa… and now here with you. Prost!’
And we drink.
More absinthe is
poured and I see beyond the Chilean artist, Jann, the big South African, walk
morosely out onto the terrace. He sees me and comes over. The night before, Sam
and Sammy whipped up fifteen or so of us from the hostel into a frenzy with
tales of their exploits anecdotes about High Wickham that silenced stories from
Prague and Budapest. Jim from Sheffield, hanging at Sam’s elbow, suggests that
we play a drinking game but Sam begins rolling a spliff and tells us he knows
something better. He gives a nod to Sammy who goes into the kitchen and brings
back a glass and various other accoutrements for the game. After the game, at
about midnight, Sam talks of the guy he knows in Golitzer Park and says that he
is going to head there later to pick up. I walk with Sam and Sammy into the
park and with us comes a skinny guy from somewhere nondescript with darting
eyes and a high voice who began twitching as we enter and begins to hiss into
my ear, ‘-this is sketchy man, this is fucking sketchy…’
As we enter we
lose Sam and Sammy up ahead and are accosted by two latino looking men. One
starts bopping his leg up and down between my legs as if to try and trip me up.
I’m not quite aware of what is going and the two us hop together onto the grass
in a kind of jig, and I catch sight of the skinny guy’s aghast white face as we
dance past him. Eventually the bopping stops and I stumble back onto the path.
We head on. ‘Oh
man, what was that about? You dealt with that well man! I wouldn’t have known
what to do … Jesus this is fucking-’ At this point we are called back and one of
the guy is pointing to my phone that is lying in the grass; the phone I’m using
in Germany, of which a touchscreen is the most high-tech feature is possesses.
I pop back and pick it up thanking him and it is only much later that I realise
this phone must have been taken from my pocket and subsequently rejected.
Jann, with his
iPhone5, following us into Golitzer Park, was less fortunate. Hours later I
found him at my shoulder, keeping pace with my swaying and stumbling on the way
to a club in Kreuzberg. He put a heavy arm around my shoulder.
‘Bertie, man, I
gotta tell you something …’
‘whatsthat?’
‘I lost my
phone. I was mugged! They took my phone …’
‘When?’
‘Tonight. In
that park. These three guys surrounded me. And they took my phone man. But
shush …. shhhhh - don’t tell anyone. Shusshh man, ye? Just between you and me …’
I was too drunk to feel sorry for Jann but I did in the morning. He sat down
with us now and he launched into his day trying to sort out the mess. (He is
one of many. A week later a Texan wearing shorts laughs about the same
happening to him. ‘Fuck it! I suppose you can’t really say you’ve been to
Europe unless you’ve been robbed, can you?’) When Jann gets up to leave I hear
the Chilean jabbering the other side of me and I realise that he has been
showing me and Jann pictures of plants for the last five minutes. He pours us more absinth and resumes.
I am very happy,
sitting here drinking with the Chilean, half-listening to him talking about his
art but that morning hadn’t been happy at all. Groggy and more than a little miserable
I forced myself to leave the hostel and caught the U1 to Warschaur Strasse with
the intention of walking towards Friedrichshain in search of the an English
bookshop called ‘East of Eden’. As I got further from the hostel I felt better,
and gently began to fall into the city, content in the knowledge that I had a
lot of walking in front of me. I love walking through the city, through any
city; on foot no one has any reason or interest to stop you. On the pavement you
just walk and the houses and the tarmac and the railings were made for walkers
like you, and say ‘stay with me, you can keep walking here …’
I have scribbled
on to my map that ‘East of Eden’ is off Frankfurter Allee, passed Frankfuter
Tor walking away from the city. The television tower must be behind me, this
means. I follow my map diligently and find the street on which the shop is
supposed to be situated and find no shop but beautiful houses with falling ivy
and explosions of graffiti across the building, turning concrete space into
that crux that lies between surface and window into another world. Indeed, here
the sound of the road is muffled and it appears that I have entered another
city. I forego all plans to locate ‘East of Eden’, don’t think about how long
it has taken me to get here, how long it will take to get to the next book shop
on the list, and walk down the street towards an avenue with a two rows of
trees and a pebbled path running down the centre to steps leading up to a small
church at the end.
It is Sunday
morning and I sit down on one of the benches under the trees.
A man in loose
sky blue shirt and brown trouser pushing a pram slowly down the avenue towards
me. He walks slowly and looks about him, his eyes briefly passing over me and
then retreated unconcerned and relaxed to hover over nothing in particular. The
baby was silent and invisible under white blankets. The man walked slowly with
a slight board but content expression. After him comes a woman and her dog,
coming down at a quicker pace, the dog skipping ahead while she looked at the
screen in her hand. Neither noticed me save for half a sniff in my general direction.
A van drives up the avenues and parks opposite me, breaking the quiet for the
street, and then silence again for a moment before, the rumble of the men’s
voices, a quiet echo of the rumble of the engine, and the clap and swing as
they opened up the back of the van and began to unload furniture.
It is true, that
there are no foreign countries, just foreign people.
Here I see a
Berlin. That ‘real’ Berlin that I have had glimpses when, for instance, my
friend rushes to meet me, late because she got tied up in a meeting at work; or
the school children who play football in the playground that hostel balcony
look onto. (‘Jesus,’ Jann said to me one morning. ‘There are children in
Kreuzberg?’) A Berlin that is functioning like any other city, home to people
with lives like those in Paris and London, with work and school. There are no
tours to see that city, and it is one with almost complete exclusivity, until
you too live in this city. Until you work
in the city.
Rising from my
bench and thumbing my wind-battered Lebenslauf
I yearn to be part of it all. It was a beautiful autumn day, and as I wandered
about the pretty streets off Gneisenau Strasse and Sonnenalle and Kottbusser
Dam I watch people sitting outside cafes, restaurants and bars, eating and
drinking and laughing. It looked beautiful and I saw myself sitting with them
relaxing after a week of work and retiring to our favourite spot in the city
and complaining about things like construction on the U-bahn and negligent
landlords. But as I passed each table German words mocked my incomprehension
and attacked my spirit. The chirping voices on my BBC Learn German Disk (Kann ich hier deise Reisencheck erinlosen?)
were not from here. The people weren’t welcoming me with breezy, languid
directions. The voices are no more Berlin than I am
The light was
beginning to fade when I came across a great gothic church. I wasn’t sure where
I was and as yet haven’t been able to locate this church again: I was somewhere
in between a pub in Charlottenburg and a theatre in Kreuzberg. I decided to
stop and sit, and went up to the great gothic building that reminded me of the
castle in Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’. It was scissored by two roads where
cars and bikes sped past, and looked resentful and sulky at what had grown up
around him.
Old churches,
like old pubs, I love, and hold a presence that I find hard to feel in building
such as the Reichstag or Big Ben, impressive architecturally they may be.
Imagining Stresseman drafting laws or Churhcill or Disraeli’s speeches, or even
the lighting of the Reichstag fire of the Gun Powder Plot aren’t as accessible
as simply thinking at the doors or a pub or church: who has walked through
these doors to sit inside? What murder and conception and skulduggery happened
here? How many students, travellers, artists and pilgrims have arrived at these
doors seeking sanctuary and comfort from the road?
The Reichstag,
Big Ben and the like are to look at - you can’t see the Eiffel Tower from the top
of the Eiffel Tower. But confronted by this church here with only an imagined
history what is best to do is to go inside, and if closed – as this was - but
to sit on its steps, and feel place your hand on its cold stone – picking up a
pebble if there is one - and join the many that have come before.
Back on the
terrace that evening I don’t recognise many people. Sam and Sammy are nowhere
to be seen. Jim from Sheffield left that morning for Amsterdam; the Swiss
sisters were going home that morning as well, and camp Barry had caught a
flight to Munich the day before. Joseph and his girlfriend had returned to the
UK.
I sit down on a
table with includes four Israelis and an Australian who attempts, seriously, to
speak Hebrew to them, and cites his Syrian heritage every few sentences. Soon
it is too cold for the Israelis. They head inside followed by the Australian
and I am left with the Chilean artist.
‘Tomorrow I will drink it at the Berlin Wall,’
he smacks his lips. ‘Very good yes? Very special drink absinth. You an artist,
I can see that! Like me, you are an artist! And together we drink to art, and
the city. Of course, it is not completely right. If we could be like Baudelaire
and drink with opium. Then we would
be ready to create art!’
He falls into a
gabbled Spanish and I begin to laugh. He begins to laugh also, for no apparent
reason other than I am, and that we can, and that we are together and there is
really no reason not to, and now we have started, no reason to stop.
Bertie
Digby Alexander
Berlin 2013
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