Niq was looking cool and unflustered in his grass green T-shirt and light shorts when he met me outside Interkontinental bookshop on a sweltering day last week. I was wearing a thin film of sweat from the heat on the train and the stress of being late for our meeting. There’d been a medical emergency on one of the carriages at Westkreuz Station. There were repeated calls for a nurse, and the driver ran up and down the platform. Everyone else sat in the train with its locked windows and doors slowly melting.
The day before, on a packed tram to some distant northerly neighbourhood of Berlin, I’d had to sit on a seat facing away from the engine, which always makes me feel queasy. I concentrated hard on not feeling hot and nauseous. It wasn’t easy with all the bags, prams and people, but at least I was seated.
About halfway there, a thunk made me turn my head. A woman in green trousers and a white shirt was lying straight as a fallen log in a forest of legs. A bunch of flowers she’d been holding was lying on her chest and her eyes were open. If they had been aware of anything around them, it would have felt like she was staring right at me, but the thing that makes you conscious and which presents itself as a light in the eyes had fled.
Someone vacated their seat and two men helped the bewildered fainter into it, gave her her water bottle, gave her her bouquet, and settled her backpack by her feet. The tram trundled on. There was another thunk. She had passed out again, sitting upright. The water bottle rolled against someone else’s foot and the bouquet leaned towards the tram window, which was more like an oven window.
I got off at the next stop so I don’t know how many more times she fainted and had to have her belongings restored to her.
Niq is a fellow South African, an accomplished and prolific author, and an enthusiastic flaneur. He wanted to take me to his favourite spot in Friedrichshain, but it was closed. His favourite spot is called ‘Home’. He likes it because the crowd is wildly diverse. ‘Home’ is a good name for a favourite pub in a city you didn’t grow up in. We chose instead a pub on the next block and sat inside, out of the heat, under a ceiling fan, and ordered icy beer.
I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but – apart from my dear German friend who hates heat and sitting in the sun as much as I do – it feels as though most Germans seek out sun like imbululu do. I, though, am on a constant mission to find the coolest spot in the room, on the pavement and in the bed.
The day after I met Niq, I was in a social situation in which a jolly man called Hans, ruddy with cycling through the hot streets, started a conversation with me that felt like a pre-scripted culture clash skit about mutual incomprehension. It went like this:
Hans: Where did you say you were from?
Me: South Africa.
Hans: Why are you so pale?
Me: Oh? Oh! No, there are some white people in South Africa.
Hans: No, I mean, why are you so pale? Don’t you go in the sun?
Me: No! No no no no! It’s bad for your skin. Look at the sun damage. (I thrust my forearms into the gap in our misunderstanding, but he ignored them.)
Hans: But what about Vitamin D? You need Vitamin D! Do you know that in some Scandinavian countries they put Vitamin D in the drinking water? That’s how important it is. You have to have Vitamin D!
I wanted to say that I store Vitamin D in my skin crinkles and liver spots, but language failed, so I just smiled and agreed that Vitamin D was important.
But back to meeting Niq.
Installed in the cool quiet place with our beers, and with no real knowledge of one another beyond our South Africanness and that we both write, conversation flowed as it almost always does between writers. We plummeted right down past the easy-grasp buoys of small talk into middle waters of proper conversation.
We spoke about walls.
Niq lives in what used to be East Berlin and was telling me how different it is from where I live in what used to be West Berlin. He has experience on both sides of that imaginary wall now, and that’s what we spoke about: how The Wall exists only in fragments around the urban landscape, but that it still exists in people and ways of doing things and attitudes.
We spoke about how the Berlin Wall was and was not like the walls – real and imagined – in South Africa, about how cultural and economic boundaries are not indicated by walls only, but by fields or tracks or highways.
We spoke about how skin can be a wall. And we ended the wall conversation more or less where we started: some walls never come down even when they have been declared fallen.
When I was a younger writer, and more idealistic, I used to believe that as a South African with a certain political view and a strong sense of how truly awful our past was, ‘my people’ were ‘the writers’. It was a kind of self-engineered, convenience-driven error to bridge the gap between our various cut-off lives: my friends were writers, and writers came in all varieties of human. That way I could skip issues of language, race, class and education. Writers were who I most felt the same as. I could always easily find my way to a pub called ‘Home’ when I found the writers.
But later, I realised that the damage of the rhetoric and laws of social walling off – and in, and away – could not be bridged even by the ideals of writers’ communities, where freedom, dignity and justice are ingrained. Are glue.
I feel liberated from the juvenile delusion that writers are made homogenous by their occupations. And at the same time, I feel enormously grateful that so many of the people I know are writers and that we can have thoughtful conversations about what binds and what separates humans.
Everywhere you are in Berlin, whatever conversation you are in, you cannot escape The Wall that is no longer there. Is there a better conversation starter than the concept of ‘walls’ though?
Walls in popular culture
Wikipedia lists twelve songs, eleven films, ten novels and short stories and two bands that have ‘the wall’ in the title. These are just in English. And these are not the movies, songs, series or books that feature actual walls. Walls are a timeless topic.
Here are some recommendations, not from Wikipedia:
Niq Mhlongo recommends the book Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada.
I recommend The Wall, by Marlen Haushofer, the premise of which is strange (an invisible wall suddenly appears around a woman on a holiday in the mountains), and the effect of which is haunting. The 2012 movie based on the book was also very good.
Here is a recording of the actor Samuel West reading that classic wall poem, ‘Mending Wall’ by Robert Frost (the second link is to the poem on the Poetry Foundation website), which he prefaces with a brief tally of how many border walls are currently in existence.
Ray Gonzalez’s poem The Walls fiddles with the barrier-fence-surface obsession by looking at the roles of walls in the lives of famous people. I’m not sure how much of what he says it is real and how much imagined, but I like it.
A crime thriller about a wall set in South Africa and written by the German author Max Annas which I thought was very good, was translated into English and published in South Africa by Catalyst. In it, a young black man finds himself inside a walled community in which mostly white people live. He becomes a target for the security operating inside the walls, and desperate as he is to disappear back into the unwalled world, he can’t get out, because they are everywhere and they are ruthless. The question of where people are safe in relation to walls is comically and explosively explored. I really wish someone would turn this book into a series.
A thriller-horror that involves walls and was recommended by my daughter, who is a horror junkie, is a 2016 movie called The Boy.
The scariest scene in a movie I ever saw involved a wall. I watched the Blair Witch Project to review it in 1999. I was highly pregnant. I walked out of there patting my bump and saying ‘Sorry, baby.’
The child that has night terrors is the one I was pregnant with. I’m not saying these two things are connected.
While I’m thinking about walls in movies, it occurred to me to ask Adam Walton, whose wonderful The Importance of Disappointment I read this morning, which movie, off the top of his head, featuring walls, he would recommend. His answer was:
‘Straight off the dome, has to be Paris, Texas. The climactic scene, between Travis and Jane, across a two-way mirror, where both are concealing themselves (literally and figuratively), is about as stunning as film gets. Acting, cinematography, editing, pacing, total pay off on everything that’s come before it. And the mirror as a device, and as a metaphor, all perfectly realised. Not sure if you’ve seen it; it’s one of those films you feel you should see, that actually surpasses any and all expectations.’
I love how Adam writes about movies. He is an excellent and funny human and was my intern for too short a time two years ago. If you like movies too, you should consider subscribing to Bald Men of The Nineties.
And my final recommendation for thinking about walls is this song by Anaïs Mitchell and it is is called ‘Why We Build The Wall’. In the clip above, she explains the song’s context, and mentions that in the song on the album, the character of Hades is sung by Greg Brown. Here’s that version. It’s worth listening to both of those, as well as Mitchell’s solitary studio recording.
Lots of love,
Kowski.
I also highly recommend both Fallada's novel, and the 2016 movie that was made of it (with Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson)!
My introduction to walls started with 2 books by Tim Marshall. 'Divided: why we're living in an age of walls' discusses money, race, religion, politics etc. But it was ''Prisoners of geography' on global politics that made a deep impression on me. He explains in layman's terms how a nation's mountains, rivers, seas and concrete are the driving force behind polital strategies. His books are very accessible, he is skilled in explaining things (no fancy big words), thank god for Tim Marshall.
And now back to this writer, Karin, what a great read, I hope we get to discuss walls too!