Dispatches from Berlin III

Snippets from my iPhone’s notes app, and some 35mm photos I’ve taken.

5/11
At 6:35am precisely every morning the birds come to the tree outside my house. I don’t know if they sleep in the tree all together and all simultaneously wake up to chat to each other at 6:35am, or they all arrive in unison from wherever they have spent the night at 6:35am, but if I cared to sleep before the small hours and the sun cared to rise before 8 then they would make a pretty good alarm. (The bin men come twice a week at 7:20, another unsatisfactory alarm.)

7/11
I have promised to meet a friend for a cycle on the old airfield, but I cannot for the life of me lower my bike seat. I spend half an hour running up and down my stairs with different Allen keys before despairingly ordering an Uber. When I get out to eScoot the rest of the way my phone promptly dies. This is frustrating because I am lost, because I am 40 minutes late, but mainly because the the autumn light on everything is unspeakably beautiful and I have no way of photographing any of it. 

08/11
I buy a huge quantity of postcards and stamps from the extraordinarily, radically old woman who runs my local stationers shop. Communicating with masks in a language that isn’t your mother tongue is hard, particularly with someone clearly quite deaf. Everything is muffled, and misunderstandings and mishearings are hard to soften without being able to express warmth through a smile. She comments on the volume of letter-writing materials I’m acquiring, and I reply that there’s not much to do at the moment, which I later realize she has interpreted as a slight on Berlin in general. I will go in again and reassure her.

(When I do return to buy more stamps it is a very old man who is working instead; he is more thorough in investigating which exact stamps I require, and I learn much new German vocabulary relating to correspondence.)

10/11
I reach for my housemate’s shower gel by accident one morning. The bathroom fills with that artificial bottled smell of Man that makes my inner 14 year old feel fuzzy. This is also elicited by walking past Abercrombie and Fitch, and the overpowering Lynx of a mixed changing room.

12/11
I stand in the queue for the bakery behind an old man bringing back a loaf that is not to his satisfaction - it is the wrong one, but he hadn’t realized until he got home. He insists he has not opened it and is happy just to swap it for the right one. The baker seems utterly flabbergasted but unable to refuse in the face of his confident insistence that he honestly doesn’t mind, it’s no trouble for him. She apologizes several times for misunderstanding him, while clearly desperate to refuse him in a truly surprising display of politeness for a Berlin customer service interaction.

14/11
A large plushie of the snowman from Frozen is sat on a locked bike. A small child in a buggy points and shrieks wildly. “Yes, hello Olaf” his mum sighs.  There’s a crowd of middle aged gay men outside a cafe that has started selling mulled wine, and also two lesbians looking a bit awkward.

15/11
I take a walk on the last day of sun before a week of rain. It’s still gloriously autumnal, leaves like rainbow stars scattered across the pavement and liquid gold light seeping through branches.

Cemeteries are very important to me and, crucially, exempt from current restrictions. The Alter St. Mathäus Kirchhof is a 20 minute walk from my flat, housing a lot of grand mausoleums as well as the Brothers Grimm, composer Max Bruch, Claus von Stauffenberg (Hitler’s nearly assassin) and other less recognisable Big German Names. It’s very beautiful, all leaf-strewn pathways and well-kept sarcophagi, the less assuming blocks of modern graves nestled alongside temples and life-size stone angels. It reminds me of a beloved graveyard in Bristol I used to visit on my extended lunchbreaks of an unchallenging job.

There are visitor numbers unimaginable for a British cemetery, many of whom have brought their own mugs, or carry coffees from the resident cafe. There are racks of communal watering cans and tubs of water, and many people are engaged in clearing branches and leaves and pruning the older and grander graves, alongside those who are clearly there to visit someone specific. There’s a children’s section strewn with windmills, toys and flowers; many women (all women) are tending to the plots, or sitting quietly on benches. 

16/11
Two magpies sit in the tree outside my window, their hops knocking down the autumn leaves still clinging on. It is shockingly mild for November, but too chilly for sitting still without layers. I wear my dad’s quilted trench coat but paired with ankle socks and turned up trousers for a cooling breeze to balance out overheating while walking. An old woman cycles past me in a very long deep purple scarf that flows out behind her like an illustration in a children’s book.

17/11
A friend and I get a takeaway pizza in Neukölln and walk to the airfield. It’s a miserable day, and a thick mist of rain coats us as though we’re stood behind a waterfall,. We eat under a canopy of undergrowth in the communal garden before soggily squelching down the runway. I take the U-Bahn home and have a 40 minute nap before getting my first Glühwein of the year with a friend as we wander round my neighbourhood in the dark (it is 4pm).

18/11
I pass a building near my flat full of voices and laughter all talking at once, an entirely alien sound. In our strange reality the only possible scenario where this many people could gather all together is for school. No one under 18 is permitted that level of physical community. 

It’s very misty and a man is throwing a ball across the square for his tiny dog in a red jumper.