It was an empty phrase sent to take hostage of the otherwise dull and stilted lunchtime conversation – a fluffy entrée for a completely different topic. “laxative pills.” Alex proclaimed solemnly, shaking his head. Curious smirks grew across the faces of my co-workers and I was warmed to see the veil of my inappropriate humour cast deftly to the gutter as I should have been. I have known most of them for less than a month yet we possessed a mutual affection for each other that most grown people only achieve with their dogs. This city and the people in it have become as much a home for me here as any I might have grown up in. If returned here an illegal alien, naked, with a price on my head, a glass eye and strategically unfortunate leprosy, I believe that there would be people here who would love me still. I feel that way about very few places.
In fact, my friends here seem to delight in my eccentricities. They nurture them inadvertently by loving me despite my tastelessness. This is a bad thing, as I am about to move to Amsterdam. Will my new co-workers see my blossoming eccentricities as a sideshow spectacle to be consumed and disparagingly mused at or will they accept them or love me for it? In a week I will arrive in a new place with the optimistic hope of nestling my fragile ego into the open hearts of strangers. This is no easy task in a place that deals efficiently with throngs of foreigners on a daily basis – the sort of place where you will find a reception desk behind the ‘welcome’ mat. And despite the reputation of tolerance and acceptance, my fear is that the do-as-you-please attitude is an intellectual one rather than a heart felt love of difference.
Berlin, by contrast boasts no such ethos but in truth, most of the people here truly don’t care what you do. It seems to have found a sense of individuality in the spacious poverty of a decaying city that was built for eight million people and accommodates just over three. I’m not talking about the kind of self-conscious ‘capital I’ individuality that causes cafés to be decorated with a melange of stuffed animals adhered to the ceiling with light bulbs in their mouths – although there is plenty of that – I am speaking of the kind of individuality that allows a transsexual yodeller to skip down the streets like a schoolgirl at 2am past a gang of drunk teenage boys and glide by, completely unencumbered. It seems as though having a problem with someone is an expense of energy nobody here is prepared to part with.
This was my experience of Berlin for at least the first three months of my stay. I had been told that Germans differ considerably from Australians in their ability to be implausibly petty. I must report that I was delighted to find evidence of this – despite waiting a good amount of time for the fireworks to spark – it finally happened. In summer. In the delightful heat of the underground train system.
My friends and I were on route from a Hospitality Club beach camp – an organisation devoted to the accommodation of strangers all over the world – to the Carnival of Cultures where Berlin celebrated its openness to diversity in all manner of parades, workshops, food-stalls, dancing and stories. The event had attracted a large amount of spectators and the carriages filled to capacity with bubbling conversation amidst the weary flopping of newspapers to quell the heat. I had the unfortunate encumbrance of my folding bike but as I brought it in, and by chance found a seat, I found that it folded discretely out of the way and was unnoticed by those around me. Across the way, an old woman of about sixty five twitched and rocked uneasily in her seat as if a little hernia began to rise under her poly-cotton grey skirt. A couple of utterances jerked their way out of her oesophagus like quiet, angry little burps. She turned to the window spitting words at it as if she had found something utterly reviling in the reflection of the pane. “Das kann nicht gut gehen! Ich denke ... was werden die jungen Leute an diesem Tag machen. Er ist nicht mehr der Juengste. Ich kann ihm nicht glauben. Niemals in meinem Leben!” With each word her body twitched a little more violently. Little tremors in her diaphragm bolted up her bulldog neck adding white and red blotches to the puffy mounds of her face. The pantomime did not go unnoticed by some of the other passengers and my attention was eventually caught by my friends who made gestures toward the woman who was imploding in the corner. It didn’t take more than a glance in her direction. “Unerhoert! Himmelschreiendes Unrecht!” She shouted shaking in indignation. Her left hand clutched her purse so tightly that her knuckles bore white. “um… err… I can’t…” I said sheepishly and to my astonishment the old woman switched fluidly to English. “You are not allowed to put your bicycle there! It is not allowed! It is illegal! You are breaking the law!” A broad smile stretched across my face as she attempted to rally those around her imploring them to involve themselves with remarkable theatricality. I was prepared for this. I had been told that it would happen and I relished the performance. “Where should I put it?” “It belongs there!” she retaliated, pointing to a spot in the carriage not 3 metres from our current position. “…but it’s full!” I said haughtily. “I would have to ask a lot of people to move just to put it there. Anyway, it’s not a bike, it’s a wheelchair!” the woman stopped breathless for a moment, examined the bike, looked at me and exploded. “You are a liar! A liar and a law offender” she shrieked. At this, a girl sitting opposite to her began to defend me, arguing in German as others watched expectantly “Was ist nur mit Ihnen los! Der Platz ist hier fuer jedermann. Was haben Sie fuer ein Problem?” The woman rose to her feet. “You are making Deutschland rotten. Shame on you!” I gleefully joined in. “I’m a bad man. Aren’t I?” The old woman looked up at me. “Yes. You are!” she pronounced. “I should be punished shouldn’t I?” “Yes. You should.” “I need to be taught a lesson!” I said as earnestly as I could. A sparkling little smirk appeared in the girl’s face as she watched. “Yes. You do!” “I need to be spanked. Don’t I.” I said gravely as I presented her with my bum. “Right!” she replied, genuinely surprised that I understood her point. At that, she gathered a newspaper and slapped it across my bum. The carriage was silent. Eyes glistened. Glances exchanged. “Again!” I cried, placing both hands on the opposite backrest, thrusting my bum out further and arching my back. She slapped me twice again in quick succession. “Again!” I squealed, with obvious delight. The woman glanced around with her hand raised, eyes wide in the shock of her realisation. The carriage erupted. The girl opposite beside me gathered her knees to her face, cradling her laugh and bighting her lip. A strangers hand tapped me warmly on the shoulder. “Welcome to Germany!” he chuckled. The old woman smiled coyly. “You’re still a naughty man!” she warned and waddled of to the other end of the carriage where she found a seat and busily studied the blackness of the underground tunnel. The train halted and everyone streamed out to see the carnival of cultures. A poster outside the carriage door welcomed us to the event. Branded across it were the words ‘diversity, tolerance, acceptance’. The old woman trundled up the escalator, eager to see the show.
At the festival I was joined by Leo, my housemate who had found yet a new lover on the beach camp. By 20 he had acquired a fabulous talent for attracting women as if it was a fortunate mistake that he was in the habit of, and couldn’t shake. To others it made more sense. He has a passionate personality and besides being attractive and affable, he is tantalizingly different – a pacifist boxer with a mane of long, shiny hair, a penchant for natural history and a solid dedication to music production – slipping seamlessly in conversation from politics to the intelligence of crows. He told me with an element of surprise in his voice that women said they found him attractive partly because he was unpredictable and partly because they were scared of him. Just slightly. “So glad you’re here” he shouted, bouncing energetically into an impromptu Balkan dance. Nadje squealed and grasped as his mouth and eyes as she tried to steady herself on his shoulders – like a shocked raccoon on a dancing bear that had suddenly sprung into action. Nadje, like so many others eventually became a close friend; garlanding Leo’s blessed existence with people who love him. He and my other housemate Michelle defected from their former housemate Mario after months of harassment and hyperventilation for such illegalities as not wiping out the insides of rubbish bins and dropping stray hairs on the kitchen floor. Their voluntary exile came not long after I stayed with them during a ‘Mario break’ we ate together, danced together, talked until the morning and fell in love.
Michelle has theories – and plays life with all the dedication of a favourite game. Love to her is measured in the passion of a conversation between a man ‘too old to get it up’ and his wife ‘whose tits are touching the floor’. It’s a place she is aiming to get to. We spend nights talking about rational crimes, public affection in Japan, self governing ant societies and liquid computers. Passionate, critical, flexible and curious, a conversation with Michelle is tantamount to a mental hammam. At the end, you feel refreshed but you need a sleep. Michelle and I first met through an internet site called Couch Surfing.com. Like Hospitality Club it is based on the assumption that strangers are unmet friends. The site furnishes travelers with a host to each foreign city they visit by way of introducing people who seek accommodation to those who want to offer it. It’s free. There is no expectation of reciprocation in this system – if you host someone in your city it is not a pre-requisite that they host you, but rather prociprocation – you are encouraged to offer what you can to foreigners, be it accommodation or time. It is a system that lives on the generosity and curiosity of its participants. Often you meet people who have only ever offered things to the community ‘because they think it’s a good idea.’
Security in this system comes from references. There is the ability for anyone you have met to leave a reference for you – good, bad or neutral with comments about the nature of the encounter. Even before I had received a single reference, A number of people had offered to host me in Berlin and Istanbul. One woman, an almost masochistically big hearted Italian named Silvia responded to me saying ‘I don’t have many rooms, but you’re welcome to stay with me in my bedroom. I am going to Hamburg for a week too, so while I’m gone you can have my place and use my bike.’ It took me an email to reconcile the fact that she was serious and another to understand that she wanted absolutely nothing in return. I had to chastise myself for not believing it, but in truth I probably would do the same for someone I trusted on first sight. When I realised this, the world suddenly became smaller, warmer, happier and more optimistic. I realised that I could go almost anywhere with a degree of trust.
During those first few weeks in Berlin, I fell of my bike repeatedly, one time hurtling over an open taxi door, I discovered Berlin in the light and dark grinning at the rain-wet streets before heading down tunnels that led to thumping vaults of writhing bodies. I found the hand patched luxury of cafes on the water that were assembled dutifully from carcasses of forgotten buildings. Beaches under bridges. Restaurants in abandoned factories and squats that had since become art institutions. The one thing I have not done to this day is visit the museums or the castles and palaces around Berlin. That said, on my last night in Berlin, Michelle insisted that I see at least some of her favourite memorials. It was past 12 on a warm night and the expansive, tourist filled streets had emptied to the tune of a film set ready to roll tape. Two churches stood either side of us, decorated in white washed cake decorations on the legs of stone Corinthian columns. She asked me if I noticed anything strange. “no??” I said reflexively, as I looked around for shadows in the dark. She brought me around to the centre of the square and revealed to me that the churches themselves were identical. And they were – down to the expressions on the faces of the cherubs – save one feature. On one, the banner read a German inscription, and on the other, French. It turns out that the two churches were ostensibly the same church, but the German and the French who had settled in Berlin were so revolted by each others presence that they couldn’t be in the same place together. So in order not to raise riotous acrimony between their god-fearing patrons, they made them identical in height, material, décor and place, and each Sunday at the same time, two groups enter two churches at opposite sides of a square to hear exactly the same sermon.
Down the Unten Den Linden, beyond the churches, another square opened up off to the side. It grew from a slot of light to an impressive open space, much larger than a cricket ground and surrounded on three sides by grand 5 storey buildings… although they weren’t actually buildings at all but rather elaborate scaffold hoardings made up to replace the crumbling building behind. Someone had done this to the point where – at least on one side – the ordinarily flat 2D cover-all had taken on a light three dimensional relief with beadings to represent window trim and articulated vases on the top. If it wasn’t for the intermittent splash of advertising across the print areas, the casual motorist may have casually slipped by without a thought.
In the centre of the massive square, another couple were taking pictures of a backlit paver laid into the concrete in the centre of the square. ‘This is one of my favourite things in Berlin” Michelle said as we approached the light and I wondered why she was so excited about what was sure to be a television screen or something lame behind glass in the ground. On approaching the tile of light, the glow became shapes, the shape forms and suddenly the sure ground that I was standing on swept away and I was hovering precariously over a vast, empty space. I was, in fact, looking down into the centre of a large white room lined with bookshelves that were completely bare. The monument – once a small tablet on the ground – had become so unnervingly massive in its negative space that it allowed my brain to believe that I was falling into it. The emptiness sounded in my mind. Millions of books were burnt right here, in this place, under a battery of rolling swastikas.
I returned home to find a note from Leo saying ‘wake me up before you go’ and as I prepared to slip out of the house in the morning twilight, the bleary eyed pair gave me their best and made sure I had the stock of presents that they had pushed onto me a couple of nights before. I boarded the plane with my phone flashing messages of luck from both of them and a few more who had timed their efforts to the moment of my departure.
To be continued…
