As the crow flies

Dateline: Westendallee

Berlin*

Population: 3 677 472

Distance from Cape Town: 9 625km

Arrival date: 20 March 2023

Today’s temperature: 8 Deg Celsius

A crow woke me this morning and I can say unequivocally that that crow – perhaps all Berlin crows – has the worst crow voice I’ve ever heard. Why do crows sound so awful? Is it their sound – surely it must be – that has given them such a bad rap? Death birds. But are they?

I doubted myself as I wrote that so I went to look at crow symbolism and the very first entry that came up said crows represent change and transformation. So perhaps my first sensory experience on my first morning in Berlin was fitting. Less than 48 hours ago, I was almost 10 000km away (as the crow flies) and in the Southern Hemisphere.

It is grey as an overused washrag out there and I know that this is not a colour to get excited about the way we do when the clouds gather in South Africa. It’s very uniform for one thing – you can’t discern a single cloud. And it’s quiet. Or quieting. As though sounds cannot ring as true in it as they would in sunshine. As though it could strangle up crow cries in little black crow throats.

The long journey from the airport to the suburb I’m living in was grey, grey, grey except for the loud, big, bright, tall, high, low, absolutely-everywhere-on-every-surface graffiti.

I just got up to pull down a blind so I could see the hedge outside and my eyeballs felt like they bulged and zinged for a second because as I looked down, I saw this:

Here’s your morning daffodil instead of sun in the sky. Picture: Karin Schimke

The colour was a shock.

I can see why the Northern Hemisphere has produced so many spring poems.

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It’s only just my first few hours here so I have very little to report. Also, travelling produces in me a peculiar neutrality of emotion, so I feel as though I’ve been in standby mode for the last day or so. My brain is on, but inactive.

I did wrestle a few observations from flying though.

• Flying is a thoroughly uncivilised way to travel. I’m grateful for it, but I kept thinking: this is not a natural way to be. It’s why I always sit as far back as possible and on the aisle seat so that I can move and stretch in the night.

• My father travelled from where I am now to Australia and then to South Africa by ship. Weeks spent in transition. How would it feel to arrive that slowly?

• Not all men manspread. The one next to me, a healthy-sized male who was neither fat nor thin nor tall nor short pulled back his leg every time he relaxed enough to allow it to touch mine. I felt so sorry for him squashed there in that ridiculous space. I didn’t want to say, please lean your leg, because that would be weird. He feel asleep quickly and the leg relaxed and so did the throat muscles and he snored us merrily all the way to Europe. He got up once in the morning to go to the toilet and sat quietly trying to keep himself small the rest of the time.

• I cannot sit still. I don’t think it’s nice to sit next to me on a plane.

• What is that weird sleep that overcomes one on public transport sometimes? It’s like a force you cannot win against. I got it on the plane from Charles de Gaulle to Berlin and I tried very hard to fight it, because I cannot bear it when my head lolls uncontrollably in public. I feel like such a tit when that happens. But you can’t do anything about it. I’ve often wished that on planes that don’t have reclining seats they would have a seat belt for your head to spare you the indignity of five kilograms of brain and skull and teeth dropping forward as though they were unconnected to anything.

• At least there is the mask, which I still wear on planes like some Covid relic and probably always will. It feels protectively anonymous and you can fall asleep with your mouth wide open, while germs – in my happy imaginings – fail to penetrate the barrier.

• We are so vulnerable when we fly: to shame, to indignity, to infection, to invaded boundaries, to anxieties, to embarrassment, to cultural faux pas, to confusion, to discomfort in all its forms. The more experienced we become at it, the more we can mitigate against its taxes. But, at root, flying is unnatural.

I’m going to stop writing now because I have a strong urge to get out there and exercise my walking shoes and to see where I have landed. To be glad that I am landed. To be glad to have a means of getting from one place to another without have to fold myself into a matchbox.

Lots of love,

Kowski

*Berlin is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. The name Berlin has its roots in the language of West Slavic inhabitants of the area of today's Berlin, and may be related to the Old Polabian stem berl-/birl-("swamp") or Proto-Slavic bьrlogъ, (lair, den). (Source: Wikipedia)

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