The ire of the Aldi-Karen

Bad and better adventures in Berlin

The man at the till at the Aldi grocery store – where I ended up on my mission to track down chorizo sausage for the dish I’m planning for the supper I invited the upstairs neighbour to – started out polite enough, but it took less than two minutes for things to go pear-shaped and for him to give into what seems like the national urge to correct people.

I don’t like generalisations because they are bound to be wrong in the detail, but mein Gott, Germans love to kak on each other! Every time I come here, I witness some kind of public set-to. Last week, in the grocery shop I’ve been going to, the queue was a little long and there was only one cashier. By long, I mean one person in front of me and three behind. The last woman in the queue walked past all of us to say, irritably, ‘Can’t you open another till here?’ The only cashier on duty said ‘Yes, yes. I have already called another cashier.’ The complainer made her way back to the end of the queue and the cashier called loudly after her: ‘But thank you! Thank you for pointing out the obvious!’

I’m always nervous grocery shopping in Germany and today’s Aldi expedition was the till conflagration I’ve always been expecting.

I packed everything out on the moving counter expertly and quickly from heaviest to lightest to make it easier to pack on the other side. I had my backpack and shopping bags ready and my purse in hand and I was calm because I knew I’d be paying with a note and not having to pick through a thousand coins trying to identify the right ones. German cashiers have a way of acting patient while burning you with their irritation vibes. They nod tightly when you apologise for the delay after finally finding the twenty cents you had to dig for.

‘This bag is broken,’ said Till Karen with the wheat-coloured hair chopped off just above his eyebrows. He was holding up a split bag of penne.

‘Oh!’ I said, in that effective way I have acknowledging surprises. Meanwhile my head is flipping through a Rolodex of possible solutions.

‘Do you want to go and fetch another one to replace it?’

Okay, so he wasn’t going to call for Boonzaaier over his shoulder, a lá Marc Lottering’s Colleen the Cashier.

What is the protocol here? At Pick ‘n Pay, I would usually be able to dash off and be back before everything was rung. I started to put my stuff down to run and fetch an unbroken bag of pasta.

‘Not now! You’ll hold up the whole queue!’  He almost tutted.

This glitch had interrupted my smooth packing, and now I was behind. I started stuffing things in willy-nilly.

‘Twenty-seven, seventy-six, Bitte schön,’ he chirruped.

I paused the wild packing to hand over the biggest note in my purse, half expecting to be told not to be ridiculous, where did I think he was supposed to get change for this. I packed another two things in before he held out my change and till slip, declaring the amount he was returning with loud confidence. I grabbed it and stuffed it into my jacket pocket so I could carry on packing.

Till man watched me while he held his own hands like a saint with extra patience. The next customer watched me. I didn’t look at them. I packed like I was trying to catch an octopus in my mesh grocery bag, all planning now out the window.

‘Next time, please go and pack your stuff somewhere else,’ Till Karen sighed dramatically.

Where, exactly, did he mean? There really was nowhere to pack groceries. A line of impressive containers for depositing bottles, but other than the floor and this here well at the back end of the till were the only other surfaces.

I grabbed my bags, half-packed, and scurried away to a corner by the entrance like a baboon with loot and dumped all my shit on the floor. I got my notes sorted, my coins stowed, my till slip folded. I took the mushrooms out of the bag with the tinned tomatoes and put them in with the bread, and put the water with the tomatoes in my backpack.

Then a familiar voice, now raised, was coming closer. He was following me! Till Karen was storming towards me holding the basket I’d accidentally left on the floor when I was trying to get out from under his withering gaze.

‘Wie kaufen Sie den ein?!‘ he shouted at me (‘How do you shop?!’), drawing the last word out into whine. He was holding the basket out towards me, indicating I had to put it away. I had three heavy bags going on and I was still rearranging things. I was also sweating under three layers of clothing and my beanie.

Which was when I decided, fuckit, oke, you really, really, really need to chill. So I began to chill. I went into full-on Cape Town mode and just looked at him until he tutted (for real) and stepped to the side where the baskets were and put the offending thing away himself.

‘Like a human, is how I shop,’ I wanted to say. Or ‘Keep your pants on, Mister.’ Or ‘Why so impatient, Poephol?’

But that would be lowering my standards around human interaction.

If you can’t beat them, feel superior to them.

Anyway, it started snowing as I left the Aldi-I-won’t-be-returning-to. And that was rather fun. I’ve never seen snow falling. Haven’t really seen it fallen either. My hands were too full to investigate the snowflakes accumulating on my jacket and trousers, but I was struck by how intensely white they were. They whirled down Heerstraße like a magic trick was about to reach its climax. The bridge of my nose stung as though tiny people with minuscule hands were pinching it.

It was twenty-five minutes home laden like a pack horse to make supper for the neighbour who last week took me to the shops in her car to save me having to schlepp my first big shop home. She’s a warm and lovely person and she deserves a thank you supper, but I’m not going to tell her my shopping story. She’ll probably find a way to tell me how to shop better next time and I can only be corrected by another adult once a day without wanting to hurl a can of tomatoes at a wall.  

At the front door of the building, the thumb of my glove got snagged in the carabiner inside my backpack that I had clicked the house keys on to. I had to put all those bags down, and go down on my haunches and wiggle and writhe myself out of a tangle of gloves and clips and straps.

I kept looking around to see who I might be irritating.

‘Wie kaufen Sie den eeeeiiiinnnn?‘

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Devil’s detail

I was 11 the first time I came to Berlin. My father, his siblings and my grandmother took me to a lot of different places that made impressions on me in a photographic way. One of these memory ‘photographs’ is of a green hill where a lot of people were flying kites.

As we stood there, my father told me this wasn’t a real hill. That it had been built from the ruins of Berlin after the war.

We were standing on broken homes. The hill’s name is Teufelsberg. Teufel means ‘devil’.

Last week, I walked there, approaching, I think, from a different side to the one we approached it from in the summer of 1979. The path took me up the back of the hill through woods.

The silence, except for the birds, was deep, and I was alone most of the way. It’s hard to describe how unsettling that is, and how long it took me to relax. I’m not sure I did relax. I will return some time so that I can walk with the delicious insouciance of a Berliner.

I came to a locked gate that seemed to lead nowhere, in a fence that seemed to ring nothing.

Wine forest garden? What does that mean? I saw no vines. Just a part of the slope measured off with a rickety fence and a mossy gate. If it had said ‘Mein Waldgarten’, I would have thought it the peculiar hobby of some eccentric. Or perhaps an extension of a nearby Kindergarten’s play area. Photo: KARIN SCHIMKE

I tramped up the last few meters of the 80-meter high pile of hidden debris to arrive at a tall fence behind which was a strange agglomeration of buildings decorated on every spare centimetre with spectacular street art. For eight Euros, you can go inside on certain days of the weeks and take a closer look. Someone’s making a fair packet here, and I doubt it’s the artists.

I walked around it to descend the hill on the other side, pausing a while to listen to the ripped canvas flapping in the breeze blowing through the domed tower.

On top of a hill of rubble collected by women from all over Berlin after the war and brought to the ruins of what would have been a training school designed by Albert Speer, the Nazi architect, but was never used, sits the ruins of a US spy station used during the Cold War. Ruins upon ruins upon ruins. Read here about this layered history. Photo: KARIN SCHIMKE

Down the other side, I zigzagged haphazardly. Everything was wooded, except a small part that may have been the kite slope I remember and maybe even have been Berlin’s only ski-slope at some point in the Sixties and Seventies, until the Americans said the skiers were interfering with the important work of spying.

If this is the slope I remember, then the forest has encroached more than I would have thought. Or perhaps it’s that trick that memory plays, where things that seemed huge in childhood are comically reduced in adulthood. Photo: KARIN SCHIMKE

On my way down, sliding now and again on mushy leaves, I came across some broken tiles. Berlin is very clean. The only rubbish I saw on my whole walk, were two small vodka bottles, like the kind you get in hotels, half hidden under some leaves by a rock under a tree. This is not a dumping ground now, though it was in the past, so I doubted someone had climbed up here to dump building rubble. Perhaps the tiles had sifted up from down below. Maybe someone – or someone’s dog – dug them up. Maybe they are more than a hundred years old, which is about as much history as I can grasp in one go.

Whose house were these in? Did those people survive the war? Were they German or Jewish? Do their descendants live here in Berlin? If the people whose houses these were in survived the war, did they sometimes recall the home they had before? Could they remember the exact shade of green of the tiles that might have been used in the kitchen? Do tiles have memories of walls? Photo: KARIN SCHIMKE

I walked home, past trees with eyes in them.

On the hill of spies, the trees have eyes. Photo: KARIN SCHIMKE

When I got home I made a cup of tea and read and watched, again, everything I could find about Trümmerfrauen, those women who, after the war, shifted and carted rubble to clear the way for rebuilding a physically and psychologically destroyed country. Recent academic work shows that the women were not necessarily heroic in and of themselves, but were given incentives (food or the promise of a place at a university). That doesn’t diminish the task or their valour though. The city of Berlin was one never-ending undulation of debris that needed shifting. The footage is so compelling to me because I know many of these places as they are now: orderly, clean, maintained.

When I was done with that, I read everything I could about Teufelsberg, trying to discover where the name came from. I wondered whether it was because it was a pile of war sin, the devil’s work. Turns out, it was named for Teufelsee, an acquifer that now forms part of the reserve of the Grunewald area, which is where Teufelsberg is situated. I couldn’t find out why the lake had been named that.

Whatever I might have uncovered, it would not have been as satisfying as discovering that a body of water filled mostly from precipitation is called a ‘Himmelsteich’ in German.

A sky pond!

If I’m still here when it stops being zero degrees at nine in the mornings, I’m going to go and find this sky pond and swim in it.

Love from Berlin,

Kowski