It is now time to go back to my brilliant book to begin that next chapter, with or without those missing pages I ripped out in Berlin. This time I have no regrets, because life has its unexpected turns.
Fate sat next to the stretch of crumbling wall, which kept on getting repainted and resealed. At the house boat, where everything in Berlin begins and ends, I found the man I thought I had once, twice, three times or more lost. It was when I kissed him and he put his arms around me that I realised it was not a picture in a frame or a make-belief story on a blog. It was warm, soft, alive and real. He wore a piece of mended jewelry around his neck, and I recognised what had flown half way cross the world, dug up from the bottom of the garden I had tried hard to forget. His heart bled into mine, and the two of them were beating together - floating above water, inside a porthole. Once, twice, three times or more broken; once twice, three times or more wanting to be whole again.
You already know how the story ends. I went and saw him play for the last time. A packed out smoky room full of the usual, urber urban crowd that no one ever has a proper definition for. He still sang too fast and I still didn’t undertand a word he said, but I understood that he dedicated their last song to me, and I blushed as the audience turned around to look at me. After the show we sat at the corner table, and kissed over a glass of red wine, his prickly stubble scratching my face ever so gently. But its beginning to really hurt now.
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In my last few days here, I did all my favourite things with my favourite people. I shopped at the Turkish markets for all the ingredients for the Oasis Saland, and made it in our dainty retro and colourful kitchen and devoured it along with some devine sect with Suszanne; walked along the cafes and curiosity shops along Burgmannstr and went to the bookshop for dinner on Friday night with Wei; had a sunset picnic by the river with Franci entertained by spontaneous guitarists and fire jugglers; cooked Voku with Emma using gleaned ingredients and smoked rollies outside the Tea House; drank coffee with Amy on those long benches outside the local bakarei run by the Polish family; sat in the audience in Club der Polnischen Versager and saw Teresa pull off her finest performance as the feature act; a leisurely run by the river; tea at Ringo’s; ice cream at Isobel’s; doing homework in front of my open window looking into the neighbour’s windows – still trying to figure out whether there is a hidden rooftop library behind those green vines and purple flowers. Everything I’ve loved about Berlin, the people, the style, the flair, just like how I would have liked to live those every other day, not because these are my last.
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What is it like to make love to someone for the last time?
What is going on in your mind? Recreating something it treasured before so you can take it with you always? Consoling itself by savouring what little it has left now? Rewarding itself because it had made a wise decision? Punished by the aching body that disagrees?
What is going on in your body? In pain because it is about to lose something? In pleasure because the pain is so severe that it is so numbingly and intensely exhilarating? Fighting back the mind a little, giving into it a little?
There’s a battle inside you, the battle we have inside all of us. Love, hate, longing, resentment, passion, dread. Every emotion imaginable culminating inside you and you feel like you’re about to explode, the earth beneath shaking so hard that it splits open. And when you come, you come so hard because you are just so fucking angry. Angry at yourself, angry at him, angry at your over-competent mind and your incontrollable body.
No one ever walks away unscathed.
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My backpack is 11 years old now, and it has been to 39 countries with me. We are about to go onto our 40th. It has a favourite place to be: next to any front door, filled, clipped up, weighed and ready to be hurled upon my back.
Travel is an addiction, but the wanderer has to learn to live with the compromises. Every time I pack up an empty room there are mixed feelings. Exhilarated about the next destination, of the new colours and sounds and smells, and making most of the human experience; Lamented about leaving the place I’ve just become used to, of friends I can call now call family/ people that know me and understand me from just a few seconds of conversation, of leaving a place I’ve just managed to call home; Longing for the homes I’ll always have but I seem to never be ready to go back to, the birthdays and laughter I’ve missed, each petal that flowered and each whisker that shed that I never got to witness.
But I know these are my choices, because any of them are my opportunities, and that I have the knowledge that I have them, and the freedom to go down any of those paths according to the judgement that I am assured that I have. These are the things that my grandmothers or even my mother did not have, and to honour this, I will keep choosing for their sake and my sake, and keep going forth.
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I left Berlin on a Saturday. The train took me on a rickety line out of his graffitied suburbs, through broken depot yards and lines of abandoned carriages, out into the open green, until he simply turned into a little dot on the map.
(<-- to Part I & II) PART III Memory is a curse. Berlin’s schizophrenia exists in the sense of having too many memories. Like the rest of us, his past is erased physically each day by a new present, as he changes, shaves, eats, breathes. His body replaces those old cells with new ones, as each day fades into dusk, and disappears into the nigh. But memory stores them all, so well and so cunningly. All those fragments collected inside the unlimited abyss in our heads, and on a bad day, they haunt us and chase us, and on a good day, they pride us and reassures us. But unlike the rest of us, Berlin remembers beyond his present life. He remembers every soul that he had ever been before. He’s a 1000 year old stuck in a 23 year old’s body. His past lives come back to haunt him as sights, sounds, smells, touch, and tastes that triggered pain, sufferings, by-gone glories and battles lost.
800 hundred years ago he was a boatsman, running ships for Hansa merchants that traded bundles of fur, grain and logs of timber through the Spree, to the Baltic, to the North Sea, to far off places and to people that spoke different tongues and had a different shade of skin. On land, he lived with his wife and their 8 children, and his four brothers and their family in the market village next to Lange Brucke. They rose with the sun and worshipped the moon, and drank beer as if it was water, until a fire set by his debtors wiped out his entire clan. Four hundred years ago Berlin was a Jewish refugee expelled from Vienna that was invited into settle in Berlin by Kaiser Fredrik Wilhelm, who’s religious tolerance allowed immigrants of all trades and creeds to settle in Berlin to help him build a more sophisticated city of diverse, well skilled and resourceful population. Despite her family providing an essential lending and financial backbone to Berlin’s growing business life, when she died, at child birth aged 21, they still insisted that her family bury her outside of the city, nine or ten miles away from her home. Her family found her a fortification where she could rest in peace without her grave being desecrated. A hundred years ago Berlin was a man working in a sooty munitions factory for hours on end, but nevertheless made time to play football on Sundays after Church. He joined the Communist Party rallies, went on strikes, and handed out leaflets of propaganda. But despite all this, he still died a few years later, poisoned by British phosgene in a cold, muddy, rat infested trench in Belgium. Sixty-four years ago he was a women who tirelessly survived the bomb raids during the war, only to be raped by Russian soldiers as they took over the city in April 1945, spat on and kicked at as they left her sobbing in pain and in shame behind an alleyway. But she held her head up high as she joined the other women in cleaning away rubbles, planting vegetables in plots of shrapnel littered land, and brought up her children on rations, as the Russians, Americans, French, and British cut her city up in pieces again.
Nineteen years ago, his mother took him across the boarder to the West for the first time, to look for his father, who had fled across the Wall a few years back, and they had not heard from him since. Later he met his father’s new family, the spoilt brats called Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and the bitch of a stepmother called Paris. But he still smiles politely at their dinner table and drank their wine. He figured that he never remembered anything happy from those memories from his cursed past lives, and that in this life now, he should be creating something good, something worth remembering and worth living for. Something his future lives won’t have to shudder at the thought of. And he can. Because now he can do what ever he likes. He dresses in second hand clothes – a slouchy zip jacket with white stripes, multi coloured sneakers, fitted jeans, big rimmed glasses, panama hat adorned in a red pheasant feather, and sports a 3-day stubble. He can spray paint his poems on the side walk, smoke a spliff by the canal, he can even snog another man in the park without being arrested, jump a fence without being shot at, and put on a play about the Prime Minister without his books being burnt. He doesn’t care if no one else likes him, as long as he likes himself. And that I like him. Like how all the ladies like him.
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Much of old Berlin was erased during World War II, and with the East-West division soon after it, Berlin never had the chance to rebuild itself into its old pre-war form like Munich or Dresden. There were 3.7 million people living in Berlin in 1936, and by 1946 there were only 1.2 million, including the occupying forces. First the Jews – sent to their deaths across the concentration camps in Europe, then the soldiers – dying in battle for Fascism, then the other residents – women, children, the elderly, buried under rubbles. Undetonated bombs, as heavy as 2000 pounds, are still being found in and around Berlin after almost 70 years. During the Wall years, West Berlin was still very much an empty shell isolated from the rest of West Germany, and only attracted the young and the rebellious, and the Turkish immigrants that were sent in to support its lack of labour. Even after the Wall came down, despite the efforts in trying to rebuild the city and despite it being the capital of one of the most powerful countries in Europe, it had never really economically recovered from the WWII or the Cold War. Berlin today has 3.4 million people, still short of its pre-war population, and has no industry to support itself economically. The unemployment rate had been going up and down between 20 – 30% in the last few years, so a huge percentage of its population survives on handouts from the government. But neither has it been, reportedly, affected much by the current global economic crisis because, ironically, it is already ‘so poor’ that it doesn’t have much further to fall. Yet strangely, its renewed political prowess and its ‘poor but sexy’ character continues to draw an eclectic mix of intellectual, political and creative residents.
When the Wall came down, Berliners made immediate steps architecturally and infrastructurally to re-link the city, to fill both physical and mental voids and divisions created by the Wall and the no-man’s lands. The previous outline of the Wall could still be seen on the ground like a scars. Despite having the actual structure being leveled down, one can still see the bricks of the foundation clearly running along the ground. Cars drive over those lines, trains run through them, houses and gardens rose from the wasteland, and children throw balls across spaces where bullets used to fire from one side to another. History collects and shadows, like memory builds and curses. The grand and magnificent buildings like the Berlin Dome, Bode Museum, the Old Synagogue – a lush and glorious reminder of Berlin’s 18th Century grandeur at the peak of Europe’s industrialising and colonising prowess, stands side to side with the kitsch TV Tower, and the straight rows of rectangular, blunt Soviet building blocks that rose out of the rubbles. Further on, remains of bombed out sights like the Kaiser Dome and a large cordoned off section at the old Warschauer Str station is kept like how it was found. The former is kept on purpose, like the Peace Dome at the A-bomb Peace Memorial in Hiroshima, for future generations to ponder – on horrors of war that they shall not ever want to experience and on a collective guilt that shall be shared and inherited. The latter is simply kept there because it happened to be located in no-man’s-land during the division of East and West Germany, and even after the Wall came down, the lack of public funds and the subsequent take over of the surroundings by squatters gave people another excuse to not have to clean it up. A procrastination that has been gotten away with for so long, that it no longer needed to be attended to. That is, unless the multinational developers of O2 fame shall never lay their fingers on that part of the waterfront.
Like any other big city, the rich and poor, the haves and have nots live side by side. Except the rich here are better at keeping a low profile, not really willing to flaunt their wealth or status, and humbly keep to themselves in Charlottenberg and Shöneberg, or try and loose themselves amongst the yuppy young parents in Mitte or Prenzlauerberg. Apart from around Embassies, I’ve never seen big BMWs purring around the streets, and the affluent here still wear expensive clothes, but independent boutique labels from Scandinavia, and not bling-bling stuff like Prada or Louis Vuitton. At least not a despicable, filthy kind of rich. The have-nots seems to be everywhere in Berlin, not like in other big cities where they are only pushed out to ‘ghetto’ areas in the fringes. Its not that they are not out there, its just they are everywhere. The old beggars in the squares in Neukolln, drug dealers with their warted hounds at the train stations, drunks on the trains, Romas in the parks, Turkish teenagers selling stolen bikes on the bridge...This city has tolerance for them, cheap living costs, good social programs, methadone, a liberal outlook and a generous state that keeps them alive, if just. But it has decay, violence, history that comes in cycles, a culture of dependency, and more than anything else, sadness, and above all, no solutions. The students, artists and musicians are not really the haves or have-nots. Some of them are rich, though many of them are poor. But it seems like those questions are beyond their concerns. They have their mental and physical creative space, they have their government supplements that can afford to buy enough in this cheap city, their chemical vices, and their networks and communities that will always have a bed for them somewhere. They survive day to day on adrenalin, on freedom, on self-confidence and on hope.
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I dreamt that Berlin was chasing me in the clouds. Holding his banjo, running so fast his hat almost flew off, I wasn’t sure if it was play-chasing or real-chasing, but I ran. Except I was stepping in thin air all the time, my fleet slipped into the soft mass, going nowhere, and he was closing in. I suddenly fell into a big hole between the wads of cloud, and fell. I lost control of my body, and felt a sharp pressure as the ground sucked me down. I crashed through the roof of glass house, full of exotic plants in fancy pots. I lied there amongst broken glass, and discovered C sitting cross-legged next to me in a commercial pilot’s uniform, holding a clipboard. “I have a new ticket for you, to LA!” He beamed, pouring tea from an antique tea pot. I grabbed the ticket, still thinking I was fleeing from something, and jumped through a small cat door on the side of the glass house, only to enter deep down into a basement. The basement resembled a display room at Harrods or Selfridges, full of beautiful tableware and chic vases. N was there holding two air-blown toy baseball bats, and he encouraged me to take one and smash the place up with him. So I did, guiltily. A waitress came down the stairs and I asked her if I should pay for the damages. “No,” She said, “but you’ll have to pay for lunch, 7 Euros.” So I did. I appeared in the lounge at the RCS lobby. M-1 walked in, and gave me an animated black and white pencil drawing of a man on a bicycle. He said his mother did that drawing, and she would like me to have it. I was half baffled as he walked out. Then T walked in, and presented me with a felt-tip drawing by his mother, of a scribbled multicoloured sunset against the Eiffel Tower. He said she really wanted me to have it. I clutched the drawings from M-1 and T’s mothers under an arm, and opened a big heavy elaborately carved door, and disappeared into a grey misty evening. I just evaporated.
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Do I have memories? I thought I didn’t pack them with me in my backpack, but they tagged along anyway, obviously. They came back to me via melodies. Sounds linger in one’s mind longer than visions. One may remember words said as records of particular messages, information and meanings, but music trigger whole scenes, colours, an entire mood. When I hear a particular song by Feist, when I would be just sitting in a café or wandering in a bookshop, I would be transported back into an evening in the kitchen of the apartment I had in London, after a day trip to Cambridge, and floods of both sorrow and happiness would rush into my chest. Her soft wounded voice grinds at my heart but the lightness of the melody and strums sent me to another place, and I don’t know whether to love her or to hate her.
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Memory is indeed a curse. It haunts me like it haunts Berlin. When I lie next to him in the night, his back against my breasts and I could see the tattoo at the back of his neck, the vague outline of a little goat. I like to touch it with my finger, pat it on its head, tell it that it has the most beautiful coat and the loveliest horns. Sometimes it would smile back at me, and sometimes it would ignore me. Sometimes it looked like it was about to charge at me and push me to the ground. I think of the times when he had disappointed me and I had disappointed him. I think of what I couldn’t give to this man, even if I decided that he had deserved it. I think of what we could be, and what we couldn’t be. When I sighed into the night, the little goat would look up at me, blinking its little red eyes.
Because of Memory, the curse that it is.
Memory sliced off a piece of my heart and buried it at the bottom of a garden somewhere deep in another continent, amongst plump Jeruselum artichokes that grew out of abandonment, and cherry tomatoes, clear like droplets of blood in the desert sand. I wonder if it’s still there, pumping away, or if it had been dug up by a neighbourhood dog, and eaten for dinner. Either way, I don’t know.
If Amsterdam is the hippy little sister that teaches pilates by day and sells make-up in department stores by night, and Copenhagen is the preppy big brother that goes to Harvard and rides his Vespa to canoe polo on Saturdays, then Berlin must be the schzisophrephic fucked up half brother born to dad´s first girlfriend whom you´ll always find on the corner of the street high on acid and writing poetry with gastly spray paint.Therefore he is likely the most interesting family member you´ll meet at the dinner party but the least you´d want to end up in bed with at the end of the night. But then again...
I wrote this two years ago when I first visited Berlin. So how would the story end?
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But then again, I changed my mind. I was drunk. I was chuffed. We were happy. Bored too, perhaps. I thought it could be an exhilarating ride. Completely random, unreliable, unpredictable, interesting and complicated, fucked up, foreign, unknown, and much younger. Completely the wrong type for me, and certainly what I don’t need. So I took a chance in a whim. I like the idea that I can see an end to a story before it even begun. It entertained the recklessness in me, and in my still broken heart. Great love affairs never last. Condensed, intensified, self-destructive. Their greatness lies in the fact that they are made to be broken.
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“What the hell are you doing in Berlin?” How do I answer that question?
Two years ago I was roaming around Europe on a train pass, hopping from one city to the next, like a giant speed dating evening. Even though I loved Amsterdam and Paris, London was the most natural and safest first stop for me as an English speaker working in the NGO sector. And I would never exchanged that crazy hazy and educational year for a thing in the world. But I still vaguely navigated my way to Berlin, because its strange allure had never left the back of my mind. I was, and still am, quite taken back by the quirky, dark, irreverent, rebellious and eccentric colours and sounds it exuded. I liked the way that they daunted me, but pleased me at the same time – for the fact that it had daunted me, and for the fact that I am surviving it. A raw, upbeat, and almost vengeful energy about the city that seemed to be fresh and renewed every day, but all in the most unhurried, assured and carefree manner. That was what brought me to Berlin. So its probably not so odd that now, when I am surrounded by these fast moving and foreign sights and sounds that I have fallen into a mild, peaceful and restful frame of mind. Have you met anyone that’s always planning for tomorrow and forgot that today was yesterday’s tomorrow? Yes that’s me and I’ve had to remind myself again and again to slow down. I love the pace that I lived in London and in Wellington, and the personal growth and confidence that comes with traveling and experiencing culture shocks across the continents. But when I reached Prague in early April after a botched carpool attempt and facing a crowd of crystal shoppers, I realised that I had hit overdrive. I realised that in my entire life I’ve been over stimulated and distracted with too many things and too many plans, the things I possessed, the job I had, and the places I’d been had defined me, rather than the other way around. But you can’t hurry life if you don’t breath. Its time to be like Berlin, time to be unhurried.
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At 5 in the morning we could just see the pavement in front of our feet, and gentle rain sprinkled on our faces and formed tiny little jewels on our jackets. He lived in a little fifth floor apartment near Treptow Park. The room glowed like fading amber in a fire, nothing but a mattress, records and books, spread across the floor. He ran his fingers down my back. Silhouette of Alexander Platz formed through his blinds, in a smoky blue dawn. I closed my eyes and heard the wind chime tingle in the breeze.
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I own nothing and will take nothing with me.
I arrived in Germany with a backpack weighing 10 kilos, and apart from books I have added virtually nothing to my possessions. I have no job between the school holiday camp counseling work – I go to German classes and I write and read a lot by the canal, that’s about it. I don’t share much about where I come from or what I’ve done, because they don’t ask me that kind of questions here.
So I was going to come to Berlin to add another brilliant chapter to my book. But instead I’ve come to Berlin as a blank sheet of paper that’s been ripped out of the book. I left much of my past, and my plans and inklings for the future somewhere else for the moment, as if time ought to momentarily stop in Berlin, and shall begin again after it. I’m going to make a little paper aeroplane out of it and watch it fly away. ‘Weggeflogen’. Yeah, that’s it.
I’ve come here to just be.
PART II
Words were lost between us. I didn’t speak his language and he didn’t speak mine. It had meant that we could only communicate in the most primitive way – physically, sensually. Expressions on our faces, and the merging of our flesh, on a touch, and listening to one another’s strange tongue as the other person rambled on in their own language. Reading the raptures on his face, the distress in his voice, the contours of his drawings on a scrabble pad. Reading his eyes, reading each sigh, each laugh, each silence. Comfortable silences, uncomfortable silences, mysterious silences, intended silences. Yet communicating with the body is not free of cross cultural divides, as we have found out, the meanings assigned to physical expressions are not always the same in every culture, and having to translate that without a dictionary is actually quite a mission. And finding a way through another strange layer of prejudgment - what we assume of each other that our own social culture and its stereotypes taught us about who the other person may be/ may represent, and guessing what the other person’s prejudgment of ourselves may be, and the misunderstandings from the interlocking of all of these. A complex, risky, but exhilarating game. We explored each other like that, without words, and for the first little while it was confusing, then it turned intense as we got to know too much, but now we have become in sync, almost inventing a new language based on what we have become used to with each other’s habits, expressions, emotions, appetite.
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German was just a whole lot of sound bites that came out of people’s mouths, like every other language spoken in the places I’ve been to through my travels - nothing meant anything to me, and unless the other person could speak English, I just used signing and drawing.
It’s been almost two months now, living in Germany, and the situation of being a virtual illiterate is becoming easier – firstly because I am now getting used to being illiterate, and secondly, well, I am becoming less illiterate as my German improved. Words are like pieces of puzzle that I collect a bit of everyday, all falling into their own place, and creating a clearer picture in my head every time I hear sentences or read printed words. Tenses and the different conjugated verb forms are becoming more and more clear to me, and I keep recognizing key words or parts of words in every day conversations. Even if its parts of a sentence, I can then use those key words to form an assumption of the meaning of the entire sentence or phrase. I especially love listening to the radio, because of the clear and slow annunciations they say, and the repetition that I never used to notice that public speakers use a lot as a technique for honing in messages they want to stick in the audience’s heads.
My German flatmate was surprised to hear that my classes are very grammar heavy. I guess it’s a little bit like how in New Zealand no one ever taught you grammar at school – you just assume these things come to you naturally as a native speaker. (and probably why my grammar is still so poor – as you can notice on this blog!!) Admittedly I was first quite resentful too, thinking that it was all this crap about the German obsession with preciseness and discipline. But now I couldn’t really imagine learning a second language as an adult without knowing grammar, especially for a language laden heavily with conjugated verbs and gendered nouns etc. It’s the basic structure by which words fall into their places. Without these quietly achieving patterns and rules, words would just be alphabets disjoint. Learning a second language as an adult is not like for children learning their own mother tongue, where you progressively learn the meaning/significance of things/words. Because you already know the meaning/significance of things/words in your first language, a second language is basically like learning a different system of codes to express those same meanings and words you already know in your head. It’s a bit like learning to use a new software to perform the same task on the computer. Except learning a language in a total emersion environment is like regaining the sight and hearing that one had lost as soon as they touch down on the plane.
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Like everyone else in this city, he was a musician. His first band, of which’s Hungarian name I can’t pronounce, was a three piece gypsie ska band, which he leads/sings for, and plays the base or the banjo, while the other two guys are on either another banjo or guitar, and a violin. His part time band, called ‘Angela im Wunderland’ was a part children’s theatre, part political satire, part experimental group that shows up for street festivals or get booked by schools or birthday parties every so often. He also DJ’ed at private parties for free. Sometimes he got up in the middle of the night to strum his guitar, because a tune was stuck in his head and he just had to get it out. His fingers running up and down the strings so agilely, like a spider on its web, as I fell sleep under the lamp light.
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The music scene in Berlin is an eclectic smorgasboard of styles, groups, artists all with their own respective fame ratings and income generation from music. Berlin has had a very long history and presence in any type of alternative music, but perhaps made the biggest boom between the Cold War years, where West Germany's selectively rebellious and anti-estblishment youths 'escaped' to West Berlin to avoid being conscripted into the army. And the music and art scene is now one of the biggest in Europe, and the cheap rent/abundance of venues, state sponsorship loose squat policing attracts all kinds and styles of musicians and performers here.
In fact, pretty much 9 out of 10 of my friends here are some sort of a musician, from singers, fiddlers, soundscape artists, guitarists, drummers, to music video artists. Some good, some bad, some really really good, and a minor few excruciatingly bad, and are all still trying to get me to buy their home-made CDs. Subsequently, I’ve been going to gigs pretty much 4 or 5 nights a week. Most of the events like jam sessions and open mics are free, and they often let you bring your own beer – so its been a big eye(ear) opener for me. And there is always at least two or three bands invited to the numerous free gallery openings/shows across town, and the fleamarkets, fresh food markets, squat parties, and the numerous festivals going on at the moment would never be complete without eccentric looking performers adding some beats to the festivities… My favourite gigs at moment are the soundscape artists (bit like in this video by CocoRosie) using all kinds of mixture of instruments to create unusual but pleasing and often witty audio experience. Many of them also perform with a huge loop pedal emphasis (bit like Mihirangi or Camille), while others will go one step forward and add a screen for accompanying visual art. One artists was playing a bendy saw (yes, a bendy saw) with a violin bow, and another sang entirely to the accompaniment of her music box. There was another experimental group that performed at Maria am Ostbahnhof – that called themselves ‘Ballet Opera’ – there were 3 ballerinas and two hip hop artists that performed together, to the music of a small Pink Floyd-esque rock band, which swapped occasionally with a soundscape artist and a techno DJ, and cutting edge videos and lighting. The result was an unbelievably surreal experience for the senses. And just last night one of my mates Rob performed inside a recently closed swimming pool complex (with story reading from a local writer in between the sessions) – the acoustics from the bottom of a 5meter deep pool was haunting and dramatic, and the audience sat on the slopes of the descending pool floor as if in a cinema. Upstairs amongst the former offices a little gallery is set up, and turned into a makeshift dance club in the evenings, and an even bigger club is downstairs amongst the pipes and boilers… Again, this takeover was completely tolerated with half a closed eye by the city council…
A particular musician of note is a new acquaintance, a young Kiwi girl – the one and only Kiwi I have met in Berlin (but apparently there are 300 of us, with half of them being diplomats…); a fellow political scientist from Vic, except an entire generation younger, and a self-made singer/song writer, and arrived just a few weeks before I did. We talked about our Professors, student politics, Bodega, and writing for the Salient as if I was just walking down the stairs of the student union with a loudspeaker and a placard just yesterday. This world really is such the smallest of all places.
The first night I went to see her play, the music was actually a little intolerable… (I had invited a German friend along to ‘check out Kiwi talent’ as well…), the sound system was badly set up and basically her guitar overpowered her voice, and she had made a few mistakes. Moreover, she was dressed like a young Dolly Parton crossed with Farrah Fawcett, in a zebra striped boobtube dress and cowboy boots, blond boofy hair tossed out like a lion’s mane, and heavy black eyeliners. She is so different to the rest of the women musicians in Berlin, who are usually quite chilled, alternative and grunge, raucous and have to be boisterous enough to be noticed amongst the boys. So her sweet little country and western style had drawn a bit of sarcastic negative comments almost immediately – even though her style totally works for her and its just purely who she is. I kind of feel sorry for her, and almost disappointed that Berlin can’t seem to be man enough to except this ‘mainstream girl’ gate-crashing the party.
As the ‘only two kiwis’ in Berlin, and as part of a protest, its absolutely my duty to play groupie, and since that evening I’ve been attending pretty much all her gigs, sitting like a mother at her child’s music recital, tense, nervous for her, cringing at every mistake she makes, and always the first one to clap, and check up on her in the toilets before and after her appearances. I mean, how often is it in a complete foreign city that a kiwi girl gets up with her guitar in the middle of a crowded pub, and whip out her chops?
As the nights went by she got more and more comfortable in front of a foreign audience, and I am beginning to really enjoy the music. Her songs are actually really quite wonderfully pretty, and her voice range is huge and dynamic, and the texture, while still more or less immature, is complex and full of allure. The music is a mixture of ballads influenced by, say, The Sundays, Bic Runga, Alanis Morrisett, and Sarah McLauchlan, which is right up my ally (well, one of my alleys…). Her lyrics too reflect the kind of surprises and emotions confronted by any new comer in a new place, and often I relate to those words and emotions so much that my throat chokes.
So it was kind of funny and kind of surprising when I found out that she was a B-Grade celebrity back in New Zealand. One of my friends told me that she was actually a NZ Idol finalist a few years back, basically making her a household name back home, because it was such a popular program. She would have been on the front pages of women’s magazines and on teenage pop posters and made into stickers and cartoon characters, and betting agencies would have made fortunes out of punters predicting whether she would win the show. I had been living in Australia at the time, and so I had absolutely no idea that this young woman I’ve become very good friends with and supporter of in the last few months – is actually associated with bad reality TV in my home country. She was obviously too humble to mention it to me in passing. When I finally confronted her she gashed and told me that it was an embarrassing secret and that I’m not allowed to tell anyone else. Ever!
Aren’t we all trying to get away from something by coming to Berlin?
Wang Feng sat at the very back of the noodle shop, a midsummer’s evening drenched in Guizhou’s warm southwestern rain. It was a quiet night for business. The two waiters were so at ease that they smoked and joked about at the counter, flicking through the TV. Two men played cards at one corner of the eatery and a couple with a young child slurped their meals quietly at another. Wang watched them with vacant eyes, preoccupied with anticipation.
Wang lined his table with twenty pearl white shot glasses. Ten a row, two by two. They had already been impatiently filled with maotai, a playful, or rather, painful local hard liquor distilled from sorghum. He called the waiter for some peanuts. He looked at the clock then at the wall.Between two cheaply printed bamboo scrolls depicting flocks of herons in a waterfall scene, hung a calendar that displayed a large plump ‘4’ under a smaller ‘June’ across the top.
“A curse of a birthday.” He mumbled to himself as he lit a cigarette and sighed through the smoke.
Li Yi appeared from the front of the shop, in a fading white shirt almost breaking at the seams, tucked into his usual black trousers. He was younger looking than Wang, his high cheekbones and thin jaw line hung like mountains that dipped into sea on his pale face. Thin, lanky and looking ever so unnecessarily surly, he drifted past the rows of tables and tapped Wang lightly on the shoulders.
Wang almost jumped when he felt Li’s cold hands on his neck, but soon turned on a smile.
“Brother!” Wang cried as he stood up to greet his friend, shaking his hands keenly. “On time yet again! Happy birthday Brother!”
“Yes Brother, happy birthday to you too. Forty today. A big round number.” Li returned with a faint smile.
“Ah yes forty. What an age. Except you look like you haven’t aged a day and I’ve got this plump tummy to keep my fortunes!” Wang bellowed and laughed. “Sorry about the weather Brother. Suppose you’ve eaten…”
“Yes Brother, you know I only come for the birthday baijiu.”
Li settled himself opposite Wang, the shot glasses lined like soldiers on a chessboard between them. Wang handed Li a glass and held one up himself with both hands.
“Happy our birthday, and to twenty years of friendship!”
“Yes! To twenty years!” Li beamed, finally looking a little more energetic, and the glasses clinked crisply in the air.
“2009,” said Li. “And two fourty year-old men. Tell me about your year, Brother.”
“Well,” began Wang. “I managed. Better than the last. Ming Ming got into a good high school and Rong can’t stop bragging about us going to watch the Games at the Bird Nest to the neighbours...”
“So you went back to the Jing?”
“First time for, what, eighteen years, yeah. Couldn’t recognise it. Just couldn’t. Some times I wished I’d stayed there, would have been loaded by now.”
“You are loaded Brother. And the Square? Did you go?”
“No Brother.” Wang said, after a short thoughtful pause. “Rong went. She got a framed photograph with the Chairman in front of the Forbidden City. Everyone that’s ever been to Beijing has got one of those, you know what I mean? It’s a total joke to me. I was a bit tired that day so I slept at the hotel.”
“I thought as much.” Li shot Wang a look.
He handed Wang another glass. “2008!”, and then another, “2007!”.
The men knocked back.
“…and 2006. That year you finally bought out the entire garment business from your uncle, Brother, what more could you want?”
“I’m not a coward you know, Li.”
“No one said you were.”
“I’m just trying to move on. Move on from my stinking past, Brother.”
“2005.” Li continued, ignoring Wang’s desperate attempt to explain. “We met in Haerbin that year remember? Not much of a summer there for a birthday party but the damn vodka there was quite something.” He slammed the shot glass on the table.
“Twenty years, you track me down every time, no matter where I went.” Sniggered Wang with a bitterness in his voice, as he licked his lips.
“Friends are important Wang, and so are birthdays. Say, how often is it that you meet someone born on exactly the same day as you, Brother? We’re connected by fate.” Li said, tapping his nose cheekily. Wang let out a little sigh.
“2003. Tiento.”
“Don’t get started on that one, please.”
“What the hell were you doing there at the first place?”
“I went to apologise to Miss Ma’s family in person, and, of course…”
“Give them a handsome dosh so they’d not speak? Good one, CEO.”
“Could have spent the same amount on some proper safety latches and pressure gauges but Zhang told me they had just been replaced, but in actual fact he just pocketed the money himself. But to be honest she was just so clumsy.”
“After working for 60 hours a week in a factory line and seeing no more than an hour of day light a day, who wouldn’t be? And now she’s blind and her entire family’s stuck out there gleaning the rice paddy, they can’t even marry her out, and you’re still drinking here with me.”
“I told you I was sorry. Drop it will you? ”
Wang examined Li’s scathing face. Li’s self-righteousness irritated Wang, but he could never find words to prove him wrong.
Li sniggered, and reached for another glass. “2001. You know, my successors at Beida have completely no idea what happened that summer at that Square. Some journo from America showed a group of them a picture of the man in front of the tanks, none of them recognised the scene, and even said that it looked like a film set or a modern art installation or something. And all this happened right on the ground they stood on.”
“They’re kids, old as we were, how are they supposed to know? Or care, for that matter?”
“Ignorance is a bliss, Wang. Isn’t that what you say to yourself all the time? That’s why you’re out there in Ninghan running your boxed up sweatshop instead of climbing that lucrative ladder in the PLA?”
“PL fucking A indeed.” Wang spat. “That army ate me inside out I tell you. Now what? Downsized, modernised, revolutionised. They have the fattest, most brainwashed preppy boys in China, get paid a fortune and do nothing except parading around like Robocops, waiting for the day to take our motherland to global domination. Gave me not a cent when they booted me out, told me I was mentally unfit and lucky to not be put on court martial. You know, two of my friends in my regiment hung themselves because they couldn’t face going back to their families, that’s what I should have fucking done to save this miserable mess!” Wang almost roared, and knocked back another maotai, and Li followed quickly.
“No Brother, that would be stupid. Escapism is more cowardly than your ‘moving-on’ business. Besides, who would I drink with? And 2000… ha, good appetite we have tonight huh?” Li was growing more boisterous with the alcohol.
Wang refilled each of the shot glasses and called for more peanuts. The waiter yawned as he brought over the plate, impatiently returning to his late night television by the counter. The rain outside had finally stopped, and the other customers left as quickly as they finished their meal.
“Year of the Dragon, the beginning of our century.” Li quipped, sarcastically.
“I can’t believe you came and met me in Vietnam that year. I didn’t know you took overseas holidays,” said Wang, popping a peanut into his mouth.
“Neither did I. What a nice trip though. That melancholic erhu played by the old man on the corner of the street in Hanoi, that slow calm eerie sound amongst the screams of the fanatical motorcycle wheels, reminded me so much of my old Grandfather… He played a wonderful erhu... He cried himself to death after he found out what happened on the Square. You know, his father, as in, my Great-grandfather, was a fighter in the Boxer Uprising.”
“Yes you mentioned,” replied Wang, starring into the distance. “Beheaded by the Japanese in 1900. Almost the same spot us two met. It makes me sick just thinking about it.”
“He didn’t know there was an unborn baby in his wife’s belly.”
Caught in their own thoughts, they took another shot.
“You know what its like to never know your own father or mother?” said Li. “Its like not knowing where you come from - no one to explain to you why you have a round nose or double layered eye lids, why your name rhymes with the rain.No one to tell you who planted the big tall tree in the yard, why you are good at maths and not so good at science, why you prefer bok-choi over gai-lan. No pride about who you are, because you can’t see your past. To not know your past is to not know who you are. Like a leaf without a branch, a kite that broke its string.” Li said, as if reciting poetry. He looked right into Wang’s eyes, the pupils now wandering more and more as the maotai wore in, but he was determined to look straight back.
“You’re right. I need to be a better father to Ming. I’m hardly there.” Wang finally said, breaking the short silence. “I may as well have been beheaded to him. What are we up to?”
“1997.” Li replied.
“Xiaobi had a little girl that year, in Canada, yeah?”
“Wang, your memory is getting better as you get drunker, I am impressed.”
“You still see her?”
“When I can, yes. As friends, of course. Every August if I try.”
“She thinks that, you’re friends?”
“I know she does.”
“You’re a freak, Li. I can never imagine you as a romantic.”
“Part of her daughter’s name is actually mine, you know? Her husband has no idea. But he’s French, so as if he’d care.”
“She’s as much of a freak as you are.”
“Double Major in Film and Arabic, she’s quite something. It was 1989 after all.” Li grew very quiet, and Wang observed a little mist in Li’s dark sank in eyes.
They drank in silence until they reached 1994.
“The year you became father.” Li said.
“I was so lucky that it was a boy.”
“Would you have kept it if it was a girl?”
“I’m the only son, you know that.”
“So am I.” Li shot back. “But instead I chose eternal bachelorhood. It broke my parent’s heart, but what are they going to do? Besides, no more wasting time on those stupid games that women play. If there’s any women left in this country, that is!”
“What ever! its cos you’re butt-ugly Brother!” Wang added irreverently. At this, the men laughed hysterically together. The waiters observed their fits of laughter with some concern, but decided to leave them to it.
“1991!” Li took another shot. Wang paused at this. Looking deep into his shot glass, he felt his eyes finally welling up.
“The year you left the Army, Lao Wang.” Li said in a quiet voice. Wang finally took the shot, and fondled the glass in his hands, no longer smiling.
“Don’t be upset Brother, you’re not the only quitter. I would have gotten my Bachelor’s degree the same year too. But what would I have done with it? Write books that I couldn’t publish and swallow words I couldn’t say? Or follow every one else into a MacEmpire and watch my own soul rot trying to please every dog and his man in the bloody Party? Would have been a waste of time anyway. Damned first class education from Beida.” Li sighed and shook his head, taking one of Wang’s cigarettes and lighting it up.
Wang remembered getting off in an empty bus station in Jujiako, his home town, after he was finally dismissed by the army. He walked home in the dry dust along an empty street lined with old crumbling brick houses. His parents couldn’t bare the shame of their son coming home in disgrace, giving up a comfortably salaried future in the military. But really, they were glad to have him home. At least they knew he was alive, and an extra pair of hands at home, and they talked his uncle into offering him a management apprenticeship in his small garment business, which was just taking off. Not bad for a 22 year old, really. But he was more than 22. He saw more than he needed to and he couldn’t unload what he carried with him. It seemed like he no longer knew anyone at home. His friends all just seemed like such little kids to him, and his parents wanted to treat him like one too. Li caught him weeping on their birthday at the back of an old warehouse by the bank of the river. It was the first time he cried since he was a grown man. Not even in the army, where the physical pain of training and the hard abuse of the officers wore deep into his pride, not even after he washed the blood splatters off his face with a flannel at the dormitory that quiet morning after they took the human out of him, and no one in his regiment had said a single word to each other.Li knew him like no body else, his words reached him in the darkest places, and in the strangest way Wang was more and more glad to see him. Li and Wang sat together at the back of the warehouse watching sparrows flitter in the evening sun, against the green tips of the rice. Blades of the grass waved in the wind, like ripples in a storm. They skipped stones into the river, and drank gaoliang that year. Sweet, sweet gaoliang.
Li interrupted Wang’s thoughts with 1990.
“The first year we celebrated our shared birthday together. Baijiu was hard to come by on that anniversary day, but we got there. One shot each. You and I. One shot was good enough that day. Just one shot.” Li smiled, and Wang rolled back deep into his own memory.
All leave were cancelled that evening in the barracks, the Army being on full alert. It seemed like they were always on alert that year, and time after time they began to relax more and more on evenings like those, almost like in the story of The Boy that Cried Wolf. And so Wang and his mates sneaked in some baijiu for some late night birthday drinks, inside his boots. He was by himself in the dormitory trying to find a good place to hide it, when Li appeared out of no where, almost spooking him out. He asked to drink with Wang, explaining that it was his birthday too. Later on, Wang’s friends found him passed out on the floor late into the evening, but Li had already gone.
1989. They took the last filled glasses left on the table.
The day Wang turned 20 was an awful day. All week he’d been sitting at the back of the truck in the nauseating heat, rubbing his sub-machine gun, sweat and black oil running all over it, and inside the intricate crevasses of the sophisticated weapon. The crowd out in the Square had lost their optimistic party atmosphere of a few weeks ago, replaced by an anxious, tense, and slow grinding smell of fear. When things finally cracked late that evening he had no idea where he was firing or running to, his entire uniformed body was over taken by chaos and entropy. He was blinded by flashes of gun fire and leaned against a lamp post at the edge of the square to regain his posture.And there Li was. His white shirt and white banner around his head drenched in blood, dragging an incapacitated student from a collapsed tent. “Don’t die! Don’t die! I’m getting you out!” He hollered hysterically. He dragged his friend on his skinny shoulders and staggered towards the edge of the square, and when he saw Wang he was just as startled and frightened as he was. They both hesitated. Wang’s gun was slung behind him and he hadn’t had time to hold it up before Li did the most unthinkable thing. He let go of his friend and grabbed Wang’s shoulders and shook him. “Take us to the hospital, I beg you, I beg you! You are my Brother, like he is! Within four seas, all men are brothers! You hear me? Please Brother, please!” He screamed desperately, his face against Wang’s, tears, sweat, saliva, blood all running from his face. Wang tried to speak, but his tongue froze. Then Li let go of him. Wailing now, he went back to his friend. A moment later, Wang heard two shots, and Li slumped onto the concrete. A massive hole gaping at the back of his head, it broke the banner that was tied around it. Blood spilt out like a waterfall. A third bullet finished off his dying friend.
The entire bottle of maotai had gone, and Wang fell sleep on the table that was scattered with empty shot glasses and flakes of peanut shells. The waiter noticed an icy shudder of wind against his face that surged towards the door, and looked to the back of the shop, only to find Wang passed out. One waiter took Wang by the feet, and the other took him by the arms.They dragged the pot bellied drunken man to the foot path outside and settled him against the wall next to crates of empty beer bottles.
“He’s been drinking by himself and mumbling and yelling into thin air all evening. Gee - that maotai certainly did his head in.”
They returned to the television set that was playing a Sci-Fi movie.
“To not know your past is to not know who you are…” They heard Wang mumble in his troubled sleep. He was ignored.
Taiwan is my bones; New Zealand is my flesh. The World is - ahem - my oyster served in lemon juice, shredded red onions, and a dash of kaitaia fire and vodka, or what ever else that suites my budget at the time.
