5. 2. 2013

Today is Monday. This means it’ll be a very busy day. But it could just as easily be Saturday evening and everything’d be the same. E. is in bed for the second week with a fever – his ear is inflamed and now he has conjunctivitis as well. F. coughs and sniffs, and when she’s sleeping she has that funny dream that young girls with blocked noses tend to have – a dream of running and, judging by her movements and the chomping of her mouth, of adventure too. In between making tea and reading children’s books, I’ve only made one trip to the butcher’s. But even the short journey there and back can be a silent adventure, a form of meditation. So as midnight approaches I write:

There’s this man. He’s our Berlin butcher. I often go there just to have a look. He offers me pork shoulder and chops. A lot of workies go there. He is kind. I observe his fat, fleshy fingers as they go over the pussy meat. They call it pussy meat, but what’s it really called? Was wollen Sie? he asks me in German. He doesn’t speak Czech. And I’m definitely not Russian? So why am I wearing a fur coat, huh? Well, it’s a long story, you silly bugger, I answer him as usual, its previous owner’s no longer alive, you butcher detective – butcher and detective, that’s a new one. Polish is good too, he says, continuing to mock me, the cheeky little bruiser. And he smiles again, the blood sausage is divine. The meat’s disgusting there with flies all over it. It’s a typical East German butcher’s in a scrubbed-up district of Berlin that will soon go bust. I don’t want to buy anything, I say, I just want your meat inside me, silly… Echt? But that’s ekelhaft to me, he says to spite me as usual. Well, yes, I must admit the idea is repulsive to me too. So forget it, three sausages, please. And when I’m outside and no-one’s looking, I neatly place them next to the nearest bin for the dogs and rats as usual. I’ll buy the children better ones, without the ground-in flies, near our home at Bioladen. Today I made my way home from the butcher’s between police vans and crowds of demonstrators. They’re protesting against a squat closure – it’s all drums and megaphones, clapping, one heart, one crowd. A scary, aggressive parade of elderly left-wing vegans, militant porridge eaters, masculine insecurity, feminine vacuity, and third-generation hippies with credit cards in their pockets. I was the only one among them who remained calm. I didn’t clap or dance, I didn’t bang any drums, I didn’t shout. My feet were firmly on the ground and I felt light in the February rain. Our Berlin butcher is a hard worker. He would never join the mindless crowd of alternative types. I’ll need to tell this story to my husband before bedtime, once he finishes a level. About the butch butcher.

12. 2. 2013

There’s this Berlin man. He has a gold tooth and stands on a bridge near Möckernbrücke station. The game could be called Catch Your Grandfather. When I happen to catch him there in the winter, I throw some change into his accordion case and he plays for me. I stand there listening and looking at the canal, the lazy swans and the ducks in the white Berlin landscape. The bridge is covered and glazed, and when he plays he too is glazed, covered and calm. I listen to him and I feel love. I don’t want to budge. When he plays he also looks at the lazy swans and ducks. Sir, you’ve chosen a wonderful corner of the globe, I said to him once, filled with emotion, after he’d finished playing. He smiled and his tooth gleamed. Spasiba, he said to me, spasiba. He’s an aesthetic grandfather. He is a grandfather of aesthetics. He is graceful in the Russian manner. Whenever I catch him there his life becomes important to me. As long as he plays, I won’t leave him. And it seems that he won’t leave me either.

There’s this other Berlin man. He is a dustman. I watch him from the kitchen window. He discreetly urinates onto the snow by the wall in the courtyard while his mates in orange vests from the Berlin council services roll out the bins, spin them round, and yank the skips on wheels sharply and noisily from the yard out onto the street. The skips hold sorted waste, as well as a couple of rats, an unused train ticket, an unsent letter from a woman to a man, an old comb, used nappies, a burst ball, a lamp and somebody’s purple lipstick. Could I love this man? Could he love me? But what kind of February question is that? After all, I’m just watching him. What is he to me, what are we to us? I see him urinating against the skip I’d just thrown a bag of rubbish into. I see him urinating, leaving behind a small yellow stain, a gelbe fluss, a žltá riečka, in the snow. And someone who really loves that dustman will lovingly examine that small yellow rivulet. They’ll caress it with their gaze and, satisfied, will leave. Maybe one of his mates. Or an Asian, perhaps a Chinese man. In a better world, one where Antony (and the Johnsons) sing their hits.

There’s yet another Berlin man and he’s a slight, young Hungarian from Pest. A

Hungarian dancer. Our paths often cross on Krossenerstrasse, Seumestrasse and sometimes also on Gartnerstrasse, but we pretend not to see one another there as it’s outside our territory. However, most often we meet in the hallway of our building, where we literally bump into each other. No matter how we try to avoid it, we bump into each other. The hallway is narrow and we bump into each other, albeit not too forcefully. It’s rather strange. Entangled in all sorts of ways – atavistically, hand to eye, elbow to eardrum, lips on the knee. We prop each other up in the style of the Habsburg monarchy; then we apologize to each other, we explain, we defend. Each time I want to ask him how in God’s name it’s possible that we end up jostling like this. I mean, he’s a dancer, not some kind of clumsy oaf; and I’m not that doddery yet either. But as I’m about to open my mouth he always says to me: “Muss ich leider schon, mein Geliebter wartet auf mich!” OK, I reply. We are able to maintain proper neighbourly relations. The hallway returns to its original dimensions. And that’s probably for the best.

19. 2. 2013

On Saturday my friend N. celebrated her birthday. Thirty-nine years old, thirty-nine degrees. A birthday fever. In the end, it was only women who showed up (even so we had a great time). Oksana, a Ukrainian politician, spoke emotionally about the Femen movement, which is trying to discredit the good things which are happening in Ukraine, and she started to cry when she talked about the hope that followed the Orange revolution. Forty-year-old Julia, who has Polish-Jewish roots, laughed madly when describing how Tel Aviv was the most racist place in the world. Rike, an extreme left-wing Berliner with rings in her top lip, talked about life in a caravan as being the only sensible solution to the confusion of today.

We were all committed, albeit in a slightly neurotic way; women entering the zone of middle age, and this zone was the room of my friend who was celebrating her birthday… There were flowers and lots of food and wine (though no risqué chats about men – well, not until later on, when all our languages got mixed up…). The only one to disturb the Fassbinder atmosphere was Jasminka from Croatia. Poetically drunk, she talked about her uncle from Herzegovina who built a house which no-one wanted to live in, and so the uncle moved all of his relatives’ clothes into this large, empty house; clothes all the way from Bosnia to Slovenia. “It’s a house full of clothes, a house full of family history,” cried out that pure soul, but the other women were more interested in Femen, Pussy Riot and Ethiopian refugees in Tel Aviv. Then we talked about urine therapy. I can’t remember how we got on to that; but it was a safe topic. I remembered hearing that President Miloš Zeman drinks his own urine – that’s if he doesn’t have a glass of Becherovka to hand. Then I realized that it wasn’t true, that I was getting it mixed up with some confused dream and that none of these friends know who Zeman is; but then again, do I know who he is? Have I drunk urine with him? At any rate, urine therapy was more of a fun topic. I stayed quiet, drinking and eating too much, thinking how February only has 28 days and can’t really be blamed for anything.

And today I realized that it was still February and that I still had to go to Carinthia to record an interview with the Austrian writer Winkler. But I’m not going. In the end the trip didn’t work out. Who cares why not. In February it’s nice that a lot of things can just happen in your imagination. Travelling, for instance. A few days ago I actually made up an account of a journey just in case it didn’t work out. So all is as it should be. A short, dreamy February.

26. 2. 2013

In general I believe that people don’t really understand each other. In February.

Yesterday, for example, a house exploded in Fernštát pod Radhoštěm. Apparently it was a deliberate act by a problem tenant who was to move out and threatened to kill his neighbours. And then he actually did it – the apocalypse came. But what if these accusations are false? It’s awful news and it’s also February news, media news from an endless winter which should be slowly coming to an end. And on top of that the lack of understanding. Without doubt the strongest of the three films I saw last week at the Berlinale was a Georgian film with the untranslated title of Grzeli nateli dgeebi. The story is set in Tbilisi against the background of war, children’s adolescence and parents’ alienation, a film full of tenderness as well as violence. After the film there was a discussion with the Georgian director, Nana Ekvtimishvili, who answered questions from two militantly feminist German women. “Why do you show male aggression in such a positive light?” asked one of them and the other interrupted her. “Why did you not explain how relationships between men and women really function in Georgia?” The director smiled, trying not to show her sadness, but even from the eighth row it was impossible to miss how furiously she squeezed the hem of her blouse. The other questions were more appropriate, but they were still (in their West European way) arrogant and entirely missed the point of the film.

(Translated from the Czech by Graeme Dibble)