Ich bin Fremd hier #12

            I ordered a gross fass Bier that I couldn’t afford and tried to read about Merkel’s electoral triumph in Ex-Berliner. There was no mention of the Nazis of Marzahn.

It was a small little bar with French music. The drinks were cheaper than at the hostel, but not by much. The atmosphere was superb however and I begun to feel cheered as I sipped on my second beer. The bartenders were polite and unobtrusive. There were quiet couples on most tables and I felt undisturbed, unacknowledged and at peace. The toilet for Herren was up some stairs. There were two urinals, a mirror and a sink that is out of order. This means that when I returned to the bar the tenders must have knowned that there was no way that I could have washed my hands. I wondered if this bothered them. 

The bartenders there speak French to each other. I tried to catch what they are saying but only understood the odd word and phrase. Putting Merkel aside, I opened my book ‘city-lit Berlin’ and contently started to read. The Kneipe was almost empty save for me and another punter a little down along the bar. I carried on reading perfect gems of literature from and about Berlin. I made notes in the margin. Without looking up I noticed a man sit next to me. He spoke French to the bartenders. It was the most French I have heard in Berlin yet and he said as much to me in German.

‘Besser als English,’ I reply.

‘Woher kommen Sie?’ he asks.

‘London,’ I say in a low drawl that I have subconsciously perfected.

We get talking and he asks me what I do. I tell him what I do, and that I like to write.

’Write! You must write and keep writing. We have few gifts, only one usually. So we must use what we have. I cannot write. I can speak seven languages – none from school, only from listening – but I could never write. To me it is like a storm. Too many words I do not know what to do with them and cannot make sense of it. But you, if you can write – and I take it that you can – then you must write. You must tell stories. There are so many stories to be told and so few that are – because people can’t write or because people can’t be bothered. My talent is in painting and sculpturing ….’

‘And you tell stories with that?’

‘Let’s not talk about that,’ he says. ‘But if you can write you must write! Write, and keep writing! And you must dare! You must dare, and meet people and ask questions and get drunk and then you write about it all! You must dare and write! They are the two important things. Forget everything else. And if only two people in the whole world understand what you are saying. Then there is still success. Fuck the rest! If you are on a desert island with one other person and you tell him a story and he believes in it and thinks about it, then voila! You have changed his life. You have changed his world.

‘We only have a few talents. Most of us only one! Some of us none. We must concentrate and focus on only that talent.’ He makes a ring with his thumb and forefinger and grabs my hand so I do the same. ‘Look through that and focus on only that.

‘You are young but I am old. I am fifty in February. But you are young. You have something to say. The Berlin that lies around you now is your Berlin. You can own this city. You can own this city! You can tell this city because you are here now and you are seeing it and you are surrounded by it. You can write about this barman and this bargirl.

‘You are young now but one day you will be my age. So often we are embarrassed. And why? Embarrassment freezes us and chains us to convention. We have to dare!’ He roars into my face, and I, suddenly taken up by his faith, roar back in his face. We bellow together into each other faces. I don't feel embarrassed. I fear this is only because of the beers I have drunk, and that I would not be able to do this without them, failing in his believing eyes.

He continues.  

‘To dare, and to think, and then to write. You write and you get published, and most people won’t understand your story but you keep writing. I can’t write but I wish I could. I dare and I think but I cannot write and tell my story. I am forty-nine, in February I will be fifty.

‘I look at pictures of myself when I am fifty and I think, that is me? But it is me, and it is me when I look at a picture of myself when I was five. When I liked a girl in the playground. It is still me. I have learnt stuff but it is still me. I haven’t changed. And nor will you.

‘You come from a good family? You have that. You have that and your friends at home. You have that there safe and you have knowledge from that but you are here now. You are here in Berlin but it could be anywhere. It is city XYZ. It is a foreign city and you have left your family and friends and now here you are immersed in it.’

All this time I have nothing to say. All that he says is resounding inside me and telling me to not give a fuck about having brought no-one to the Pub Crawl three nights in a row. Or to worry about the Irish Pub or where I will live. I am in Berlin. I am in Berlin! I am lucky.

‘I fear I do not dare enough,’ I say.

‘Don’t think about it, just dare!’ And he says I think of just catching a U-bahn to Bergheim.

‘There is nothing that we could do today that the world hasn’t already seen. That God hasn’t already seen! There are naked men … and there are naked women … There is nothing we can’t do. We have to enter the world and meet people and ask questions and let the rest take over and allow ourselves to be pulled and to drift and be dragged and blow in the elements of the world and then return to write about it. I can’t write about it but you can. But you must!’ And he makes the circle with his forefinger and thumb again and I do too and he looks through his at me and I look through mine, through my beer fogged eyes. ‘You can write so you must write! That is all you should do, because that is all that matters. All we have is our brains. Dare Think Write.

We clink our drinks together.

Once when I was in Antigua, Guatemala for a few days, I ventured into the park and was accosted by a boy. He was, like most of them there, a shoeshine boy. But he also sold drugs: weed and coke mainly. He would offer it to me each day and each day I would decline. He would then linger about me and we might talk a little about the other people in the park and other things, though I can’t remember what. Or we would sit and he would stand in indifferent silence. One of the days when he again offered me drugs I asked him, ‘How old are you?’ He looked at me with a withering scorn and said, ‘Fuck off’ and left.

And damn right. My question had been only formed only in curiosity. I wasn’t going to be particularly shocked if he was younger than I thought and still dealing drugs. In Guatemala it wasn’t to surprise me. I just wasn’t sure how old he was, and was curious. He had a high voice and puppy-fat cheeks. But I felt the child after I had asked that question. I didn’t know where he came from, or what his family or home was like, but imagined he had grown up tougher and more resilient and in many ways more worldly than I had grown up in Bath, Great Britain. That ‘fuck off’ I deserved and I felt small and infantile and utterly embarrassed. In one way, because in a pathetic moment, I thought we could have been friends. For three days.

My conversation with this man reminded me of that, in the sense that at times of pause in our conversation, social etiquette – or perhaps merely convention – pushed me to want to say ‘Sorry, I’m Bertie by the way …’ or ‘Woher kommen Sie?’ I don’t know how he would have reacted. But I think that it could have been similar to the boy. Apart from asking where I came from and what my family was like, he hadn’t really asked me any questions at all. And for my part, it didn’t really matter what his name was or where he came from. Like it didn’t matter what he name of that bar is, or why everyone there speaks French. I still don’t know these things. Yet I have been there many times since.

This man’s age mattered, but I never would have asked that anyway. But his name didn’t. And so I resisted asking anything else. We were talking about me, after all. What would it matter if he was Thomas or Matthias from Vienna or Montpeilier? Asking for such detail would have been an attempt to put a tag on this, to block and mark it. ‘Ah yes, remember Nicholas from Budapest I met that third week in Berlin …’ A tidy name and province to log away like Jann from South Africa and Roger from Hampshire. He story didn’t matter either, as our subject was me.

So I resisted asking these question that an excessive sense of politeness drew me towards. He didn’t need that. And I certainly didn’t need that. He simply spoke honestly, and truly, and gave me hope and inspiration in a foreign city after a dry shift. And then he left, and I wasn’t to forget what he said, even if I can’t now recall his face.  

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Ich bin Fremd hier #11

I arrived at the Irish Pub as Panama was leaving. She wished me good luck as she emerged from behind the bar. After her great form appeared Erik, looking particularly serious. He regarded me quizzically when I introduced myself, and then brightened fractionally and said in a clipped, perfectly-American accent, ‘Oh yeah. Right, hi. C’mon this way.’ He showed me his office, the store room, the walk-in fridges, beer-cellar and changing rooms. He took my bag from me and gave me a Guinness t-shirt with the writing, ‘Paint the town black …’

‘You will be working in Sonic tonight, with Johnny. I know it’s your first day, and so you are going to make mistakes, I’m just looking for you to be a barman. Just be a barman. Got it?’

I had been calling Erik for the last few evenings in spare moments while promoting for the Pub Crawl. Each time he had asked me to call him back the next day. And then that day, as I had been handing around CVs in Friedrichshain, he had rung me back. 

            ‘Hello Bertie? It’s Eric.’

            ‘Hi Eric! How are you?’

            ‘Good. Bertie one of my girls can’t work tonight. This would be a good opportunity for your trial shift. Are you in Berlin?’

            ‘Yes, I am in Berlin. I arrived a few weeks ago.’

            ‘Good. Can you work? 7 o’clock start. Bring comfortable shoes. And black trousers. I’ll have a shirt for you.’

            Johnny, who I was to work with that night, was lanky and long-haired and turned out to be one of the barmen I had handed my CV to in another Irish pub the week before. He greeted me cheerily. ‘You smoke? Come with me?’ And he led me through iron gates to a gothic, dusty dark section of the pub. There were no lights on and all the chairs and stalls were stacked up on the tables, save for one where there was a dirty ashtray and various smoking accoutrements scattered about it.

            As we smoked he reeled of the names of the five bars in the pub.

            ‘We have Central, Sonic, House, Ship and Swamp. Central is that big one in the middle. It’s the busiest one, the only one open in the day and the last one to close. If you’re working Central then be prepared for a long one. Sonic – that’s where we are tonight - is where we do cocktails. Can you make cocktails? I will do the cocktails. House is just here, and that’s Ship. You see the sail? We do cocktails there too. This is where the band play. But not tonight, only on the weekend. And then Swamp. No-one likes Swamp. That’s usually manned by one person. Remember that it is table-service only there. Make sure you don’t take orders from the bar otherwise the waitresses won’t give you their tips. Ready?’ 

It had been years since I had last poured a pint and it soon became clear that despite his earlier warmth Johnny had not patience for mistakes. And I made plenty. I tried to stay calm and keep them to a minimum. Erik was strutting about the place looking over at us in Sonic. The waitresses were unsympathetic, and the customers spoke a lot less English than I had been lead to believe. After yet another overflowing pint of Kilkenny Johnny said to me, ‘I’m not trying to contradict you Bertie, but you have actually worked in a bar before?’

He would jump in between me and customers when there was moment hesitation on my part, rushing past with two perfectly pored pints hanging from his fingers, typing the order in to the till and dropping the change into the customers hand. At one point when he was occupied with cocktails I spent a good five minutes unable to understand a German shouting his order at me. I had no idea what he wanted, and could only apologize vociferously and wait for Johnny to come over.  

‘It’s Irish Pub, Not Irish Bar,’ he viciously reprimanded me when I named the pub incorrectly to one curious punter. ‘You know this isn’t even busy Bertie …’

Our waitress was Jordan from New York, dark haired and Netflix-beautiful with thick rimmed glasses, curling her lip at the drinks I delivered on to her train. The only comfort I received was from two drunk Germans from the North at the end of the bar who told me I was doing a great job and would make a great barman. ‘Look! You already are one!’ I wasn’t so sure but by 3am didn’t care, and took my staff drink to the table where I had sat before the shift. Johnny came up from behind me and slamming me on the back with his hand he sat down grinning and said, ‘So! How was that?’

He was much nicer off now the shift has ended and appeared to hold no grudge for my poor performance. He laughed at my bashful self-deprecations, and told me, ‘We all make mistakes when we are learning! I’m not the one you want to watch out for.’ Jordan was much nicer too. She came and sat down with us and they invited me to join them at a twenty four hour café they knew around the corner called Schwarzes Cafe. A handsome Indian barman called Vernon was to come with us, as well as a girl from Yorkshire and two others from Hungary. Though I was no longer being reprimanded, I didn’t really feel comfortable in their presence. Vernon was particularly unpleasant, saying my name in a mocking camp drawl and looking at me like I was an amusing but pitiful child. At about half four I left them at the café.

For some reason Mario was still awake when I returned. As I crashed once more through the door he emerged from his room, and smiling brightly ushered me into to see a new wardrobe and a new desk he had bought.

‘You see? You see? All new. Brought to day!’ I smiled encouragingly. He stood in front of his new purchases and grinned at me, hands on his hips as if posing for a BHS ad. I wasn’t sure what more I could say at this point. I walked up to the cupboard and stroked it a few time mumbling, ‘umm yes, very nice, schön, sehr sehr schön… ‘

He was already awake when I entered the kitchen the next day at around 12. He had cooked another fantastic pasta dish for himself with eggs, bacon, tomatoes and cheese. The kitchen was full of the smell and he sat now at the kitchen table eating it. He greeted me with a jovially with a full mouthful when I entered and then returned to the Italian television show he was watching on his laptop; laughing with his whole, vainly attempting to keep control himself while shovelling more immense forkfuls of food into his mouth.

It was a beautiful morning and I was in good spirits as I left the flat to meet my friend’s sister for coffee. She had text me the day before insisting I come over and offering sympathies that has been left all alone with Mario. She said that her sister would find it hilarious that there was a chance that I would move to Marzahn. I like my friend’s sister, and she had the same effect upon me that my friend had: that smile and unfolding belief that not only could I make it in Berlin but that I would, and soon we would be drinking cocktails together, and I would be speaking German to them about my new job and inviting them over for supper at my new flat.

After coffee I left her flat to check out the Volkschule the American in Another Country had mentioned. Reaching Pankow I eventually found the school down an old mud track and lined with crumbling houses. It was a great black building which looked like a church under construction, but inside like a dowdy high school. I saw no one but an old crippled man in a small study at the corner. There were no signs but lots of flyers and posters on a little desk next to me in German. I asked the man, ‘Spechen Sie Englisch?’he shook his head, and I so I said, ‘Ich suche Arbeit. Konnen Sie mir helfen?’ He nodded his head and began rustling through a great brochure on the desk. He did this for about ten minutes, constantly apologising, and then proudly pointed to a double page spread on Deutsch lessons, smiled, and retreated back to his office. I took the broacher anyway, and returned to the U-bahn station. Who knows, maybe one day I could teach there?

            Erik had said he would get back to my regarding a possible second trial shift. I wasn’t overoptimistic. For the time being most of my chips rested with Garth and the Pub Crawl. It wasn’t going so well: the Bulgarian had got us banned from another hostel, both Welsh and English Dave there was no sign of, and Mo had his smart job in Alexanerplatz with Chuck the rich Canadian. Walking over to Frankfurter Tor that evening I had received a message from the bespectacled student from Bayern saying that I hadn’t been quite the right fit for the flat. I wondered if Mo’s offer for me to sleep on his bedroom floor was still open.

That evening Garth had managed to pull in some new promoters and I was tasked with showing an Israeli girl the ropes. We went to a hostel near Senefeldeplatz, drank some expensive beer and had no luck.  We headed to a second hostel named after a prison, which was always dead.  When we arrived there seemed to be only staff. They were out drinking and told us they didn’t know where their guests were. The Israeli girl asked if they have any jobs going.

‘Do you speak German?’  

‘Ein bischen.’

‘Forget it. Unless you want to clean toilets. And the pay is terrible.’ And they all laughed.

The next night I was coupled with a guy called Karl from Melbourne. He had arrived in Berlin at the beginning of the Summer and spent the season busking at Warschauer Strase and Mauer Park wearing nothing but white briefs and a huge horse mask. He had actually made a hell of reputation out of it and was surprised I hadn’t heard of him. ‘Karl the Neigh-kid Horse’ he called himself.

‘Sometime I really spaz out and fall on the ground as if I’ve just had a fit. And just lie there for a few minutes. Lots of hot girls come and seek me out. But it sucks cos they never want me to take the mask off.’

We were to promote at the hostel I had left the week before. On the train he told me his plans to set up a real party hostel here in Berlin. ‘It would only be the third real party hostel in the world. It’s amazing there that there isn’t already one here. This is one of the last cities in Europe left where freedom has been sacrificed for security.’ We talked about tubing in Vang Vieng and he told me about how often he was beaten up in Australia for being skinny, or having long hair, or piercings ‘Hey you fucking faggot! People would shout. Living here is freedom to me.’

The two of us were to work that evening at the second hostel I had left the week before. The hotel was as lethargic and peaceful as always. Karl and I sat outside on the terrace with some other Australians and let the time tick away. I eventually called Garth. He sounded depressed on the phone and told me that we would speak tomorrow. I remember Ela words, two weeks before on that terrace.  ‘They told me they were going to fire me after my first week. But then I got lucky and brought in twenty Scottish soldiers.’

The next day a pale and pretty mournful looking girl walked up to us next to a beaming Garth. She was called Lucia, and for the third day in a row I was given a partner for the evening. Lucia looked at us all and Garth as he went through the hostels we were to go to, the games and drinks they were to be playing that night, and the deals that would be on offer at Fritz club. It soon became clear to everyone except Garth that Lucia had no idea what she had signed up for.  As we travelled to the hostel together she told me that she had been expecting to ride on her bicycle handing out flyers to hostels. But she was unable to return home to Prague and desperate as her singing career wasn’t taken off.

She found the whole concept of a Pub Crawl and our role in it unfathomable, and laughed a high and mirthless giggle at the ridiculousness of the whole thing. She stopped doing even this when we reached the hostel. She was miserable all night and so I blamed her for my third consecutive night of no success. At 10 she left and I decided to make a last pitch at the prison hostel. As I approached the hostel I realise that I have lost my card saying that I am a valid Pub Crawl promoter. It began to rain as I searched the streets for the slip of plastic. That would be 10€ I would have to pay Garth for a new one. With my current dry record, I expected the worst.

I couldn’t find the slip of plastic. Having nothing else to do, I return to the first hostel, cursing myself and the whole situation. Getting out at the U-bahn station it was horribly cold. The wind splattered the rain in my face and I felt my socks soaking up the muddy water I splashed through. Nothing had changed at the hostel. Both staff and guests looked at me with weary irritation, waiting to see if I would make another desperate pitch.  When I leave it is raining harder. Seeing the lights of a bar on my way back to the station I change my direction and enter. Fuck the Pub Crawl. Fuck it all.  

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

           

Ich bin Fremd hier #10

Behind the bar was my favourite, winter fox barmaid, who still had a warm hat on. I munched on little salty snack, in loads, shovelling them into my mouth, turning pages as the head of my  beer sunk lower in the glass, the cigarette burnt down, and wondered where the hell I would live when my German friend returned. I read the narrator’s description of the eponymous hero’s room, in Hermann Hesse’s novel, Steppenwolf.     

‘A few volumes of Dostoyevsky bristled with pencilled slips. On the big table among the books and papers there was often a vase of flowers. There, too, a paint box, generally full of dust, reposed among flakes of cigar ash and (to leave nothing out) sundry bottles of wine. There was a straw-covered bottle, usually containing Italian red wine, which he procured from a little shop in the neighbourhood; often, too, a bottle of burgundy as well as Malaga; and a squat bottle of Cherry brandy was, as I saw, nearly emptied in a very brief space – after which it disappeared in a corner of the room, there to collect dust without further diminution  of its contents … all these signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust.’ 

            I imagine a life in that book, with my bottle of Burgundy as well as Malaga and scattered about my beautiful sun-drenched flat there would be signs of a life full of intellectual curiosity. A few evenings before I had gone to visit the flat in Marzahn, and found none of this there. On my way over I had thought about what I might find there. ‘This is flat is too big for me’, she had said in her advert. How big was it? And how long had she been rattling around inside it alone? Had there been other people living there with her before? And if so, were they now? I imagined her to be a mature student working hard in Berlin, indifferent to life inside The Ring. She would study something like science or maths, or if a humanity, she would do so as if it were science or maths. Comer by comer, neat steps of her argument ping-ponging their way down the page. She would never take a sip of Guinness with Joyce, and would think that Shakespeare on stage was a distraction from what was on page. She dreamed of being a lexicographeror or a teacher in a quiet school. She wouldn’t care about where she lived so long as it was affordable and functional. The neighbours wouldn’t bother her because she was quiet, and she wouldn’t think on them at all. It was a riddle she rarely dwelt upon, as why it happened to be that they were there, and she was there too, so close. But a riddle nonetheless, and when she occasionally did dwell upon it, she found it a preposterousness that they shared the same view, the same bricks, perhaps even some of the same thoughts. She was confounded, and thanked God for walls. 

            When I found the building a man came out of with a small terrier. He looked at me blankly and walked on a few steps then stopping and rummaging through his pockets turned to me and asked, ‘hast du Feur?’ I didn’t understand him but the unlit cigarette hanging from his course lips were enough of a clue. He lit his cigarette, returned the lighter and thanked me. I thanked him and feeling cheered rang the buzzer.

‘Hi, come up!’ she sounded shrill and excitable. I clambered to the fifth floor and still hadn’t reached her but looking up I saw a face and shoulders bending over the banister above.  She was younger than I had expected, probably about my age, bespectacled with crimson hair. When I reached her she smiled a little awkwardly and ushered me through the door. As I clambered past what I imagined were bin bags, heaps of clothes and tilting pieces of furniture, she called from behind me,  ‘I am sorry there is smoke but my Canadian friend is here.’ I tumbled over something in the darkness and hit my knee on the floor. She cried out and putting a tentative hand on my back, apologised as I got up and guided me through a door into a light and smoky sitting room. To my right was an open arched doorway and to my left an L-shaped leather sofa with a blonde boy cross-legged upon it who smiled up at me with the same uncertainty that she had. There was stuff everywhere.

The boy shook my hand and introduced himself. I wasn’t quite sure, what he had said, where he was from, and if this was the Canadian who I was to blame for all the smoke. As I sat down on the sofa he got up and left through the door we had just entered from and the girl took his place, and curling her legs under herself dragged a laptop onto her lap.

‘We are looking at the election results,’ she told me. ‘All the Nazis are in this area here. Fucking fascists. Oh! You want a beer?’

            She got up to grab me one from the small kitchen which the arched doorway lead to. I took off my glasses and looked around the sitting room. Through the smoke, the place smelt of some kind of animal. There were bottles and papers, and piles of clothes on the floor, on every surface, and dripping from two large bookshelves. The boy came back into the sitting room, and the girl returned with my beer and they joined me on the sofa, leaning together over the laptop, their foreheads almost touching. They spoke in German again in front of the screen, and then she turned to me again:

‘Do you smoke?’ she asked. I assented and they gave a little cheer and a gleeful glance at each other, and she took out a cigarette. And I took out my tobacco. The girl now began speaking very fast, both in German to him and in English to me, but I couldn’t make out much of what she was saying in either language.

‘I am sorry my English is very bad now. It has been so long. Not since Henri  has been speaking German …’ And as if to prove the point he began sparking away in German to her and they occasionally broke into peals of laughter.

            She fell sober looking at the screen again. ‘Yeah this is a very Nazi area …’

            ‘Really?’

            ‘O we must have a tour!’

            I stood up with her and turning around I saw a cage and in it a big white rabbit.

            ‘You have a rabbit!’

            ‘Three actually!’ and she took me to the balcony and showed me a large cage. ‘Inside is Mila,’ she said, introducing me to the white one. ‘And the junges are Calimero and their son Bumblebee. We keep them separate because she always attacks Bumblebee.’ From the depths of the great hutch two rabbits hopped forward, one jet black with pointed ears who looked wild and impressive next to the chubbier brown one, that lolloped towards us, his ears drooping.  I bent down to Mila and poked my finger through the cage.  The girl smiled at my excitement, and said. ‘That is so cool! You are the first person who has come here and liked that there are rabbits!’

The tour continued to the two bedrooms that were off the corridor and I had entered in on, a bathroom next to them and then a spare room situated in the opposite corner of the living room to the kitchen. Each room was as cluttered as the living room, especially the spare room which looked like a dumping ground for all laundry and rabbit paraphernalia. I couldn’t initially make out the toilet and sink in the bathroom, for books and towels and boxes of toilet roll tubes. 

The girl had kept up a heavy flow of chatter as she took me around the flat and didn’t stop as we joined Henri on the sofa. In a momentary pause he asked me if I wanted another beer, and jumped up to get me one. They offered me a wrinkled clementine from a bowl on the coffee table in front of them. As I ate the sour fruit, the peel sticky from spilt alcohol, she said she wanted to show me the television shows from which the cartoons Mila and Calimero were named after. Bumblebee was from Transformers. The Canadian looked at her with an amused expression, and occasionally at me, cautiously. Not once did either of them ask me any questions.

 When I had left she said to me again at the door, ‘I am sorry I speak so much I get so nervous when people come here and we have had some really weird people coming here. And most people don’t turn up at all so I am really glad that you came. No one like Mila and so it is so great that you love rabbits so much. Henri didn’t like them at first either but now he is always liking them and feeding them peanuts and even Calimero comes up and sits with him on the sofa.’  And then she had said, ’I think it would be nice if you lived here.  I think it would be cool if you moved in.’

That night I dreamed off living with her in Marzahn. The white rabbit in the corner sprung, and we drank and kept drinking, and the ash flew about us, and Mila, and Calimero, and Bumblebee came about us, and not just them, but their namesakes as well; the little Anime volleyball player with big, astonished, mindless eyes. She screeched in her squeaky continuous English, and he now screeched with her, as we danced with stuff everywhere, about us. I took off my shirt, and my glasses were stepped upon . None of it mattered as with this rent I could buy new ones, and the rabbits leapt, and we kept drinking, and the Nazis outside waved their flags, and the old man next door with his terrier, began playing the  piano as his dog barked along in tune.

The next day I was to meet Ollie, the French teacher who had also got back to me about the room in his flat. On my way to meet him I suddenly realised that I couldn’t remember if Ollie actually was his name, or whether the one I was meeting was Pete. Was it perhaps the same person? Or were there two, both language teachers? Hovering about the statue he had designated we meet at I felt a presence behind me and turning saw a pale looking man, young with limp blond hair, and glasses. He had a scarf wrapped tightly round his neck, and looked harassed, and a little miserable.

            ‘Bertie? Shall we?’

            ‘Yes!’ I said, and headed towards the stairs which lead down to a smart looking café.

            ‘No, actually, I don’t have much time. I thought we could speak here.’ And he indicated towards two hard chairs that sat in the corner of the lobby.

            ‘Of course,’ I said, and he sat opposite me, letting out a sigh. He had weary, faint, blue eyes that were slightly opaque like thin clouds, and a pimpled damp forehead. This furrowed an unfurrowed, into and out of a resigned, pitiful frown. He was French, but spoke English perfectly, and lacked any of the excitement or colourings one would presume of a typical Frenchman. He questioned me on my history and on my motives to moving to Berlin, which I don’t think I told very well. He was unable to understand the concept of the Pub Crawl. I tried to explain it to him clearly, returning to the beginning without stopping when his expression refused to clear, using different words, and coming at it from different angles. After my third attempt he said, looking pain-stricken, ‘Excuse me, one more time please …’

            He told me about the various stipulations that he was compelled to put upon any new tenant, and a little about the house. He told me of the horror he had had to go through with his last flatmate – ‘An Australian’  – and mentioned Pablo his current flatmate, saying his name flat like it was just a sound, a label of something that he had no inclination to speak more of. He didn’t smile but once I managed to coax out of him a dry chuckle and a resurgent sparkle fired up through the fog in his eyes. I didn’t think he was convinced with me, but at the end of our meeting invited me to come see the house the next day.

            It was a wet walk to his house from my friends. It was in Neukölln, though not nearly as far out as Marzahn. It was a depressing, empty area. As I walked further towards the teacher’s house and I realised that I hadn’t expected it to be any different. ‘No cafes or bars nearby, I’m afraid,’ he had said to me the day before. ‘But there is a Lidl.’ It was residential and reminded me of Neighbours but here no-one was good friends. No-one even new each other. As the ugly street stretched out ahead of me I envisaged the damp, depressing life I might lead here.

I would leave the house each morning with an umbrella. Ollie would be awake when I woke, and so would Pete, and both would be in the kitchen and would greet me with a ‘good morning’ and return to their own little occupations: Ollie to the most boring pages of the Berlin newspapers, Pete to wiping the counter, collecting the moist crumbs in to his palm. They were silent and gave each other no more attention than they granted me. But they were united in their silence. Their silence against me and the world that they, ploughed through and resented. I asked if I could have the half grapefruit that was in the fridge. They nodded, after a pause, and watched me as I put it on a plate and began to eat it, the surface crusty, and flesh dry.

            And where was Pablo? Where was the third flatmate? Pete raised his eyes, and Ollie did the same on the table. And they asked me to sit down and they told that Pablo was out late again last night and had come crashing home in the early hours of the morning. Something has to be done, they said. It was decided.

But could they put themselves through the stress of finding another flatmate?

            Each shuddered with the idea of it. Pete said something to Ollie in another language and his hairy eyebrows hopped in accent. They looked at me as if I were one of their students who bored them by incorporating the unwavering proof that there really wasn’t anything in the world getting excited about. At least the world of grammar and sums could provide a little meaning, provide them with a little satisfaction, and give the days at least the semblance of meaning  …

            My feet were wet when I arrived at the house. He looked even more exhausted when he greeted me at the door, and even older. Through our second interview, at a clear kitchen table he kept sighing even more, rubbing his forehead and looking hopelessly at me. ‘I am sorry, I have been interviewing people all morning. Remind me again, what is it you do in Berlin?’

            ‘Well you see Ollie- shit, Pete? sorry, it’s the emails they’ve got me …’

            He waved his hand as if he had expected nothing else. ‘It’s Bertie isn’t it? I am saying it right? It is a strange name. Not common in England?’

            ‘More common in Germany,’ I said. ‘Or at least it used to be. ‘

            ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Bertie Bertie Bertie Bertie.’

And that was it. I thought, I would never know Pete from Ollie. And he would accept it in a resigned, unsurprised sigh. And he would rub his brow again, and despair stoically, still.

            And that afternoon I went to the third flat in Wedding, to meet two sociology students from Bayern. Wedding reminded me of Shepherd’s Bush. I saw few bars and cafés here, but there was undoubtedly life going on which hadn’t been the case at the last two places. Reaching the right building I walked through an arched doorway into a quant Hinterhoff and up pretty stairs into a white and floral flat. The two girls looked at me slightly warily as they stood in the door frame, as if they were children, home alone and opening the door to their new babysitter. They welcome me to a table where flowers stood, as well as biscuits a pot of tea, a jug of cool water and a pot of coffee. They showed me to what would be my room, which was a beautiful white box, with flowers on the walls, clean as a pin, empty, and tidy. They looked at it proudly, and at me, expectantly. It was fresh, and unspoilt, and I imagined my dad’s army bag sullying it, slouched in the corner with its contents hanging out.

Back at the table they offered me some homemade lemonade which was sickeningly sweet. The bespectacled one who seemed to speak for both of them drank a clear tea, and a lot of it, while the other one, her figure short and thick like her hair, sat in the corner, cracking nuts in her hands. We spoke for a bit about vegan markets, and reading, and relaxed Sundays. They told me all the financial details and about the kitty for vegan daily food and toilet rolls. And that was it. There was nothing. Nothing at all. It was as bare, and as pretty, as frozen as the empty room.

I wasn’t to receive any more offers.

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014

Ich bin Fremd hier #9

             The next day was the day of the meal in the quirky English bookshop. I had been looking for it all day, and I had had fun imagining what would happen. Six or seven of us there would be, each of them much older than me. They would have had families but be estranged from them now, even if they didn’t admit it. This would be their current family, the ones around this table now, meeting as they had done for years since they were young and their lives outside the shop exciting and wild. Inside this bookshop they would look out of high windows into ideas and arguments and poetry. But then their lives would have dried up a little, until the bookshop became the best part of the week, and with the other relics of the city, the other queer fish that were no longer beautiful – in fact they looked a little ill - still frequented, and yet the wrinkles on their face, the food that they ate and the quantity of wine they passed around harked back to a freer age. An age that though a mere shadow of delights past to them, was a shining example of how life could be to me.

            They would smile on me and welcome me as I was introduced by the lady behind the desk, now in her cooking apron and oven gloves. A ruddy cheeked lady of inexact age and origin, with orange hair and bright eyes, would take my hand in her small and wrinkled one and sit me down next to her, peppering me with questions of unpracticed motherly tenderness. At the other end of the table, far from me, would be a man with the broken voice of an old sea captain and he would barely recognise my presence, not valuing me enough to see me as a hindrance but more of a nuisance, at worst, a display of disrespected to the sincerity of their friendship around that table.

            But he wouldn’t be enough to dampen the evening, and I would munch happily away on the food – principally vegetarian, but with fish, all organic – and accept more wine poured by the ginger haired lady who took none herself.

            There would be a pretty young woman there who acted, due to her eagerness and youthful energy as a kind of waitress, in and out of the room with dishes and jugs, and jumping up when someone realised that the salad dressing or salt had been forgotten. She would speak good English in an Italian accent, and looked up at the others with an admired, awe and respect, and they to her with an amused delight, covering up dependence with tenderness.

            It wasn’t to appear too different from this. Though there would be more people, and I would eat more food.

I arrived at eight, an hour early, keen to explore the book shelves. I paid for my plate and a beer from the fruit and entered eagerly into the back room where there were more books and about six chairs and a few side tables on which ashtrays and more books sat alongside flyers for the shop.

Noticing the label ‘travel’ I bent down and after seeing Bryson, Morris, Palin … I pick up a book lain on top, clean and seemingly unread. To my wonder it was Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘Between the Woods and the Water.’ My father had given me Paddy’s biography for my birthday that year. Besides his kidnap of a German general in Crete during World War Two, Paddy is perhaps best known for walking from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople when he was just eighteen years old. ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ was the second of the intended trilogy he wrote years later accounting this trip. Beautiful and insightful, Paddy accounts his trip through from his crossing of the Mária Valéria bridge between Czechoslovakia and Hungary, to reaching the Danube on the boundary between the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and Romania. He writes at this point, ‘there is one more book to come which will carry us to the end of the journey and beyond.’ However the third and final book is unwritten. His biography I had kept through Spring and Summer, through exams and embarking upon declinations, and then, at my grandmother’s house, a couple of weeks before coming to Berlin, I had started it. Talking of her late husband, my grandmother had said: ‘Do you know he was on the same ship as Patrick?’

The idea of walking from Holland to Constantinople had instantly excited my imagination. Paddy had simply woken up one day in London – with a hangover I believe - and started to walk. He had a bag, a sleeping bag, and a winter coat. I don’t think he had a stick. Though his possessions were sparse they were not tied into a handkerchief pouch. Yet it reminded me instantly of the travellers of old, those I had known as a child, from Hazel and Fiver, to Pigling Bland. Where to go to find this lost adventure? I would read of the excitement of pigs skipping over a bridge to pastures with dancing rabbits, or the Sound of Music, going up through the mountains, and I would want to join them. You never know where they will go, what was over the hills and where they would end up. One can only return again and again to the beginning.

Paddy left home, on foot. Walking is important.

At the beginning of ‘Between the Woods and the Water’, he quotes from Robert Brownings’ The Flight of the Duchess.

Up and up the pine-trees go,

So like black priests up, and so

Down the other side again

To another greater, wilder country.

Towards that greater, wilder country there was a freedom there like no other. A freedom, whether possible or not, inconceivable to many, and terrifying to others. The sensation of movement and the idea of following a trail through forests and fields or walking no path at all over hills was terrifyingly exciting to me. ‘Why was I travelling?’ was a question Paddy never asked himself, but was frequently asked by others. ‘To see the world, to study, to learn languages? I wasn’t quite clear myself. Yes, some of these things, but mostly – I couldn’t think of the word at first – and when I found it – “for fun” – it didn’t sound right and their brows were still puckered.’

It was this excitement that had got me to Berlin, but later, when I had a job, and I had a flat, I harboured doubt that in moving to Berlin and in getting all these things I had been yearning for in these first few weeks, I was simply swapping one capital city for another. One cheap district for another cheap district, one job, one routine, one tedious life for another. I wasn’t satisfying the desire to travel. The preference for the journey over the destination. I know that many people feel this way but I had in the past feared that my case was chronic. I would love taking a train journey where I could dwell on leaving one place, mull over the memories, echoes and reflections, savouring them in their nostalgic glow, and bask in the poignancy of leaving somewhere. And then I could look ahead to the exciting next step, the towers rising in the distant, the wall circling and the gates opening. Those waiting, and the expectancy of the arrival somewhere. On the train you are in neither place at all. And I would be cherry picking the refractions and angles of my life, splinters of existence, into an unreality.

And these cherries inject poignancy into the real pleasure of what you find on your travels. It could be looking at the lights of an urban sprawl at night, a river glowing purple at sunset, the smell of in the city in the morning. I find nature has the effect, more often than which is manmade. The touch of greenery, the sinking of a food into soft mud, the crunch over leaves and crumble over stones. The auburn of trees. In Between the Woods and the Water Paddy went to grand diners and stayed with barons of the old empires of Austria and Hungary and Romania, and they spoke to him in German and French as well as English and he responded. Yet the author Jan Morris writes that it was on the plains, in the countryside with the sheep trotting across the river, or coming face to face with a stag in the night, that Paddy was most joyous on his journey. It was with nature and the world and walking that he found a fulfilment that had eluded him before.

I think everyone knows this feeling. My heart at times appears to expand and a swell in my breast in a moment of innocent unabashed pleasure at the modest beauty of the world and our presence in it. CS Lewis wrote of ‘joy’, which he depicted as the pleasure at catching a glimpse of what live is like in the Kingdom of Heaven; and he asks us to try and imagine the bliss of living in such a state of ecstasy for eternity. Think of the rapture. When we stay too long, the moment we recognise such an emotion inside us it falls away, like water through open fingers, and we are left perhaps a little startled, swaying inside, at what had just hit us. As the enormity of what you are appreciating is too much to comprehend, too much to feel, for longer than a moment. It is a beauty that cannot be rationally appreciated, and when I feel it, I love myself in that moment for responding to it so fully.

Dickens talks of this sensation, which like Lewis he writes is only invoked by nature. Contrary to Lewis, he casts the sensation as more of a memory of heaven, as oppose to a foretaste of heaven.

In Oliver Twist, he writes:

‘Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft tranquility, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green hills and rich woods, of an inland village! Who can tell how scenes of peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded hearts! Men who have lived in crowded pent-up streets, through lives of toil, and who have never wished for change; men to whom custom has indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even they with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at last for one short glimpse of Nature’s face … Crawling forth, from day to day, to some green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within the by the sight of sky, and hill and plain, and glistening water … The memories which peaceful country scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes.’

Indeed, this motif reoccurs again and again in my reading. This is from Paddy Ashdown, former leader of the UK Liberal Democrat Party:

'When I crossed the shoulder of Goat Fell that night the sky was clear and blazing with stars, and a deep frost, sparkling under a full moon, lay over all the land below. As I crested the hill I saw the great shimmering expanse of the First of Clyde, pointing like a silver finger towards the loom of Glasgow's lights in the distance and edged by the dark mass of the Ayrshire coast, spangled with towns and villages spilling down to its water's edge. I am not a religious person but twice in my life I have had what I think were quasi-religious experiences, in which I felt, almost tangibly the presence of something far beyond my comprehension and which was both sublime and omnipotent. One was in 1996, when I looked down from the to of Brunelleschi's dome to see Florence and the Arno laid out at my feet; the other was on that March night on Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran.' 

The second of Ashdown's 'quasi-religious experiences' is inspired, as we see, by not only nature but also man's addition to it, in the form of Florence. Nevertheless I believe it is the wonder and incomprehensibility of nature and our seemingly accidental place in it that provokes the awareness of a greater, conscious force. 

Walking through Kreuzberg weeks later I came across a little churchyard. Here there was a great conker tree. I was taken aback at the return of excitement at these, and remembered me and my sister scrambling fiercely about after conkers in a churchyard back at home. Treasures to prise open; slits of an eye peeping out of thick jurassic lids. Running about we would desperately collect those shinny smooth balls, clenching the cold hard flesh in our soft young hands. As I spotted some on the floor I filed with a sensation like a child's excitement at Christmas. I picked up the first one I came to, unwrapped it and saw it was the biggest most perfect conker I could have found, polished and smooth. I stuffed it into my pocket, rolling and my hands over it and rubbing it as I walked down Oranienstraße. A week later it sat shrivelled and malformed on the shelf in my bedroom and I threw it away. 

That week I had been sweeping up autumn leaves at the English Theatre Berlin. The entrance to the theatre is a beautiful little spot, as perfect as any set they could ever create inside. There is a winding iron staircase that goes up to somewhere, and graffitied over the side of one wall are big colourful words shouting something. There are little huts and buildings which contain machinery and hardware behind wooden doors with bright peeling paint. Apart from the theatre the buildings are all low and face a narrow courtyard that functions as a track leading to a dead-end. Many leaves had fallen on the courtyard and sweeping them up I came across one that was so red it looked like it was a frozen flame. This leaf would have made a fantastic Instagram photo. It was utterly tweetable. I held it, and wanted to keep it and put it into my ‘Book for Berlin’ alongside dry scraps of newspaper cutting and reflections of my time in the city. But I had a restraint and understanding of the true nature of my desire that I hadn’t had with the conker in Kreuzberg. In my ‘Book for Berlin’ this leaf would be squashed and would dry out and eventually lose its form and colour. So I dropped it to the floor, and turned it over when it fell on its face. I didn’t need to do anything to it, or to possess for it still to be so beautiful, and for me to appreciate that. Instead I write about it here.

After this leaf I began to take even more pleasure in my sweeping. I couldn’t remember when I had last swept leaves. It was cold enough to know that I would shudder in relief when back outside, but not so cold for it to be uncomfortable to stay outside. The sun was fading across this corner of the city, behind the most beautiful street in Berlin. And I happily swept, and made an effort to clear every leaf, and thought that, this kind of job, working with nature – even just a little bit of it – when light and darkness had a tangible meaning and things were done for real results, was the kind of job I wanted. Where there are no screens, few people, but lots of leaves …

A couple of months after I first went to the little bookshop for supper, and after weeks of dreaming to be out of the office and in the country; to the soil and the sheep where I could live in a little hut and wake up to breathe fresh air and see the sunrise and grant the seasons autonomy over my daily routines; to feed the animals, and dig for carrots … months after these thoughts I was taken to a farm. Not to live and work, but for a birthday brunch. I was given coffee and fine whiskey on arrival, and then we had a tour of the farm and the big farm dog, Fritz or something, lay on his stomach for me as I scratched his belly and smelt the stench of cow shit. It was all very wonderful. But in the cow shed it was cold, and something stuck to my hand as I held the railing. I yearned for my lost gloves, and in just a quick sharp moment I knew that I had been fooling myself in my daydreams.

The romantic glow of the country is not a reliable reality in this world, but the view from the warmth of a train cabin. We do not have to see those grubby lives inside or feel the cold of the water. It is special because we only see the beauty. Travelling allows us to not commit, to have minimal responsibility, to be cut adrift. However, we are aware that by only looking for a moment, we are not experiencing the entirety. And it is the entirety we seek. An entirety Lewis and Dickens would call heaven. What we do experience is comparatively weak to what we sense is there, somewhere, and yearn for. The belief that we won’t find what we are seeking – the greater whole of that beauty - by entering that door, or plunging into that river, keeps us seated in the viewing gallery. The knowledge that it isn’t enough just to see, makes us stand up and walk on. And so we move on to one place after another, fooling ourselves that we will find the entirety there. To keep going and going and appreciate mountains and seas and islands and forests only for a moment as we fly past them and beyond them and towards the next dazzling light.

On a flight to Bangkok when I was eighteen - my first time going to Asia and my first flight alone, the start of six months away from home - I had a read a book called ‘Are You Experienced?’ by William Sutcliffe. It was my stepmother’s, she had given it to me, having read it herself when she was not much older than I was then. It was about a boy going off to India for the first time and having an awful time. He didn’t ‘find himself’ but ended up hating the girl he was traveling with and getting dysentery. I loved it, and read it the whole time from London to Sri Lanka. Waiting for my flight to Thailand in Columbo, I finished it, lying across three steel chairs in a quiet terminal. Just like that it was over. His adventure was done. And I felt suddenly very alone. For the first time since the night before travelling, I was nervous. I was terrified. I had fucking flown over Iraq. But I had done it with this character from this book lying in my lap. And his horrors were comical, and calmed my fears with the thought that anything that may happen to me had happened before, and would always look better through a fictional glaze. But then I was alone.

And now, in Berlin, I was to sit down with another fellow traveller. I had thought of Paddy during the darker moment of my week in the first hostel, and at moments of worry looked at the letters I had scrawled on the first page of my ‘Book for Berlin’: WWPD? Through him I would take spirit. I would take courage. And as when looking out of a train window, or over a fence at a frozen pond, I would long for even just a teaspoon of that magic and beauty to be dropped into my life. How I can I get that? How can I feel that?

Of course, our adventures are always quite different from those we read about, from those we dream about.

I read Paddy’s biography down on the coast of Cornwall. The beaches on which I had played spies, imagining Germans swimming across the Camel Estuary. My stepmother had ripped out a cutting about the unfinished third part of the book, and I had read them. And then my sister and I had driven out of the drive, and we had waved to them all, and left. Paddy’s biography had been the last book I had read before coming to Berlin. In fact I had finished it the night I left London.

In the bookshop I picked up one of their flyers, - Another Country it said in bold writing, with a picture of a woman looking like she should be on the cover for Anna Karenina – and used this as a book mark. I picked up, Between the Woods and the World, settled into a chair, tore a corner off the flyer to use a roach, rolled a cigarette, lit it, popped open the beer with my lighter, and opened Paddy’s book.  

Bertie Digby Alexander

Berlin 2014