Berlin

19/5/22

Arrived late at night. Got on the S-bahn to meet Annina in Neukölln. I joined her and her choir (or who were left of them) sitting on the street outside a Lotto drinking store-bought beers. It was hot in the city and the tarmac still retained the warmth of the sun. Hearing Annina dip in and out of German to speak to me and her friends was a joy. She had bought me a bottle of pilsner with a bottle-top you pop open. After you finish drinking you should leave the empty beer bottle next to a bin, so that someone can come and collect it and get 8 cents from the state. ‘Never throw a beer bottle away into the bin Rimi, or else they can’t get recycled.’

20/5/22

We woke up in the spare bedroom of her cousin’s. It had a high ceiling with long white curtains that let the light in softly; outside I could see green treetops and blue sky and hear the hum of the city. We went to a coffee bar called Bona. The interior was decorated with wheat sheafs hanging from the ceiling, bare lightbulbs and raw wood. As with all of Berlin, their practical carefree attitude and cobbled-together cool aesthetic makes everything look interesting while simultaneously being nothing special. We shared a pecorino salami croissant and chimichurri avocado bagel, got two black coffees and talked about our parents’ generation. 

Next, Annina took me to a large disused airfield called Tempelhof nearby. She had brought her roller-skates and began drifting along the smooth tarmac of the air strip, while I mounted her bicycle which was too high for me and pedalled up and down. I returned to find Annina had done a backward somersault after crashing into a skater girl. We went back to Wedding where she lives and dropped off my bags and had a shower. For lunch Annina cooked me white asparagus with brown butter – crunchy, fried, wholesome – and freshly boiled potatoes.

I put her arm into a makeshift sling then we left the flat to go to Alte Nationalgalerie to catch a Paul Gaugin exhibition. There was surprisingly little of the modernist painter’s works on display. A few paintings of the sensual forms and vivid tropical colours of the Pacific, but really the exhibition was dealing with the controversy of the character. Gaugin was a French colonist who promoted an idealised version of himself as a native while continuously marrying underage indigenous girls (his first wife was 13, the second was 14 years old), contracting syphilis, becoming badly in debt and then dying. There were pieces by Polynesian heritage artists which off-set the white man’s cultivated image of Tahiti as a “primitive, pleasure-laden land”; contemporary video footage of women on the island remaining voiceless and a political poem that I liked called Guys Like Gaugin by Selina Tusitala Marsh.

We walked around the plaza of Museum Island with the newly built Homboldt Palace and heard the Berlin Cathedral bells tolling. There was going to be a storm, so we headed to where Annina works at the Kino Arsenal (an independent cinema) to watch a Frederick Wiseman retrospective. I met her cute colleagues who gave us bottled beers from behind the box office window. Before the 4-hour film was set to start we ran across the road to get the best fast-food burgers I’ve ever eaten from Burgermeister. The film called Belfast, Maine was a documentary detailing all the elements of an American town: church, school, healthcare, hunting, factory work, social care. It was a bleak and at times poignant long-ass film.

21/5/22

We woke up late and went downstairs to get food for breakfast. There is a fresh produce store on the corner of the street called Katofferladen, which translates to Potato Shop. We bought a punnet of strawberries, two sticks of rhubarb and homemade jam. Down the street there was a bakery where we got white crusty bread rolls, croissants and a pastry filled with spinach and cheese: Breakfast of Champions.

We visited a flea market where the stalls were crammed full of inexpensive wares. Mangled screwdrivers, phone chargers, chipped china. I rifled through some boxes as is my want and got two porcelain Chinese soup spoons for a Euro. Annina foraged a wonky golden candlestick and a beaten-up bell with stars like asterisks carved onto its body for me. It threatened to rain, so we ducked into a fancy Turkish café where we had sweet snacks and coffees and talked about what we feared the most.

It never did rain. The stall-owners were packing up and Annina bought a ship in a bottle and a vase with a broken lip that had been glued back together. We walked home stopping off at a well-stocked Asian supermarket where I bought soba noodles to make for our lunch. Annina read me an interview with Frederick Wiseman and I watched her 17-minute documentary she had made about Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in Georgia. A quiet, thoughtful, melancholic film. 

We walked through two large parks near her house: Goethe and Reheberge. Animals were being kept in the latter – I got to see wild boars! Dark and bristly fur, their bodies densely compact tapering down to tiny trotters, keeping themselves very clean. One was making satisfied grunting noises as it rubbed up against a wooden post to have a scratch. Small white tusks were visible above articulated snouts, a little longer than a pig’s and seemingly more dexterous. The three boars were happily rooting around and throwing glances at us humans who were watching them, while in the far distance we could all hear the thudding bass of a techno gig. The park has a beautiful lake with a fake beach on the other side. We sat overlooking the lake in the setting sun and talked about cultural differences in expressing emotion, as a businessman stripped off to have a swim in the lake.

We walked to Moabit where Annina’s friend Clara lives. Clara had invited us to a dinner party where she'd made the most delicious Syrian food. Stuffed roasted peppers, aubergines, courgettes with rice and meat, a rich red sauce, white creamed veg all served with helpings of olives, dill and lemon juice. The guests brought an interesting mix of heritages to the table I’d never experienced before. One girl was Jewish and had returned home to Berlin after living in Colombia for many years. An Iranian couple where the wife had lived in Tehran and Toronto. We spoke on the topic of strangers. How in some places strangers are suspicious or people in exile, while in some they’re welcomed or even seen as courageous for having boldly set out to find their own path. I realised that in Japanese there is no word for "stranger" only "someone you don’t know", apparently this is also the case in Farsi.

22/5/22

I packed my hold-all bag and wrapped my trinkets from the flea market in dirty socks. We had delicious breakfast and coffee again, then headed out to walk to Gesundbrunnen where I would catch my train to the airport. We stopped off at the Silent Green and enjoyed the summery garden there. We walked along the river and had an ice coffee in a café next to the flat where Annina used lived. At the station I bought currywurst sausages with a white bread roll and said ‘so long’ to my friend. It had been a real holiday from my norm and I'd been happy to see the city opening up post-Covid. I’d be visiting again while Annina is set to come to London in June. Good times ahead.

The Little Man In The Lights

The first time I learnt her surname was from the back of an identity card for the Film Biennial. That’s where they had met. Story checks out I thought as I hunkered down in to her wicker armchair shoes off legs swinging idly. I watched Annina move around the room silently like an insect with a headache whilst Layla got (un)dressed in to clean clothes. She had stayed the night on the flat floor on a semi-thin mattress and her knees were well-swollen in the morning; we had now completed the hunt for aspirin for Annina’s aching head. It was Sunday.

All our clothes stank from the night before of stale cigarette smoke. The bars in Berlin still allow people to light cigarettes indoors, and what’s nice is that most seem to be smoking and enjoying it rather than vaping in consternation. I felt more relaxed there than here, maybe because of the lack of language skills I possess around Germans (less pressure to be understood) or maybe because they do generally have a more relaxed attitude about city stuff. They ride a lot more bikes and everything is graffitied but runs on time. That’s cool efficiency for you: muck without stress. Amen.

Saturday we had been on a hunt for sauerkraut. Annina, my ever dear host and mythical shapeshifting cat moved to Berlin months ago and yet still we are on the hunt for sauerkraut. I can’t pronounce any of the stations or street names so have to make up an anglicised-equivalent to etch a trace of where we have wandered in memory. Once at Hamburger Hobanof [sic.] art gallery each of us wondered about the Manifesto exhibition with most sides agreeing afterward that it was post-ironic-pop-art-wank that involved Cate Blanchett thirteen times. I thought it was worthy because it was funny, Annina thought it was a bit much and if “new companion” Layla had been given the task to take it of leave she would have left it. Not a barge pole.

We traversed a street called Shoos de Yunga [sic.] where a traditional restaurant supposedly lay but it was closed because it was the weekend; and the story of its name goes something like a young man who sold or cobbled shoes did something with the shoes and that was it. The morning after when Annina had told me this shoe-based history she had felt sickly and I was still blurry from the beers the night before that we had drunk amply from the bottle in a bar that Layla called Bar (Untitled Two). 

I found the sauerkraut of my dreams! Jumping off and on U-bahn carriages - an urgent blinking red light like eyelids - snap to. This one word I’d learnt: ampere menschen (the little man in the lights).

One, two, three weeks on and the memory is so disparate. It has been squidged inelegantly between northern parts of England, fireplaces and chocolate eggs. Easter has come and gone and although it is a completely forgettable holiday for me each year, these last two I have been spoilt by a newfound family. I have to apologise to Annina for being so tardy in my writings and being so ineffectual in my rantings. Yesterday I celebrated 6 months of having stayed in one place, yipee! with my lodgemum whom everyone tells me to call my landlady but I think that’s not what she is because she’s more that that. The wise words from this woman were, ‘You should know it goes by in an instant.’ It rings in my ears as love laced with fear. This goes by in an instant. O no.

My favourite part is Prince Lower Berg [sic.] which is where Annina grew up and it feels somehow familiar, perhaps my subconscious pretends to be her in Berlin to steadfast itself. That’s where we found the sauerkraut and after the slap-up meal us three drank smooth beers in Bar (Untitled). The super-bar-man served us by sitting at our table and chatting whilst not really taking our orders but occasionally returning full-handed with delicious pitchers. There's old moustachioed men in the corner laughing and bellowing and sometimes sniffling; smoking cigarettes that looked like they had no filters and one big dog and a jaunty navy blue cap atop a brush of hair. Some women joined them and they sloshed about baring teeth to laugh and cry and the night had set in and I was still highly dubious of this thing called Spring. 

They serve a tofu sandwich. Shops are closed on Sundays. Emergency pharmacists speak through locked glass doors (port holes to peer through at little cuts and bruises). Bikes are ridden everywhere, cycle lanes on pavements.

Whilst scoffing gherkins and pre-cooked wieners larking about on the streets in the nighttime we heard a bicycle bell and then something - boof - turn around to see Layla on the floor she'd been crashed in to by a cyclist who looked like, it doesn’t matter what he looked like, he stood up apologising to tough sweet Layla who had cut her hand. The sausages were poking out from between his spokes. No severe damage done, at least. The next morning after the successful aspirin hunt and the unsuccessful bandaging of her hand the pair took me to a covered market filled with East Londoners serving me eggs benedict. I must have had 5 or 6 oysters, Annina examined, tasted and deliberated over some chocolate and we had coffees that sparked thoughts off about the future.