No longer a barbarian
Eavesdropping at the nudist lake
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Back in Berlin
Berlin*
Population: 3 677 472
Distance from Cape Town: 9 625km
Second arrival date of the year: 1 June 2023
Today’s temperature: 24 Deg Celsius
Berlin thickened and fluffed in the month I was gone. The room where I stayed before is darker because the tree outside it has leaves now. The grass is plump. The birds start their conversations early and end them late.
And Sam arrived.
I lift his T-shirt sometimes when I lean against his chest, and I tickle his sides until he has goosebumps, and remember what Seni once told me when she and I were visitors in heartbreak city. She’d gone to a braai (a South African barbecue) and sat chatting to a couple late into the night. The man was sitting with his ankle crossed on his knee and the sole of his sandal had come away from his foot a little. His partner put her finger between the sandal and the sole of his foot as they chatted.
‘That intimacy,’ Seni said. ‘That’s what I miss.’
Sam’s been in Berlin before. What’s different this time is that we’re together. And that he’s begun to learn German. We were getting a SIM card for him yesterday and he surprised me by asking a question – a simple one, ‘How much does it cost?’ – and then following the less simple answer fully.
It’s hard to learn a language from point zero. I’m full of admiration. He practises German twice a day. ‘Wir müßen Regale kaufen,’ I hear him tell his iPad. Or ‘Wollen wir schwimmen gehen?’
What’s also different is that it’s summer. He’s only been here in winter. So we did, in fact, go swimming. Wir waren schwimmen.
Or we went out with the intention to do so. He braved the chilly water of the sky pond. I didn’t. It wasn’t that warm outside, though the sun was hot. We sat in the shade on the grass at Teufelssee with our long-sleeve T-shirts on, reading and eating grapes. I don’t love the sun the way Europeans do. A life of getting burnt has made me wrinkly and liver-spotted and afraid of skin cancer.
‘Spot the South Africans,’ I said to Sam. He looked around.
‘Where?’
‘Us! We’re the South Africans! Over-dressed and hiding in the shade.’
The Teufelssee lake (‘See’ is ‘lake’ in German) is FKK, short for Freiekörperkultur, which means you can swim or lie around in the buff. The English word for ‘free body culture’ is ‘naturism’.
Naturism is a lifestyle of practicing non-sexual social nudity in private and in public; the word also refers to the cultural movement which advocates and defends that lifestyle. Both may alternatively be called nudism. Though the two terms are broadly interchangeable, nudism emphasizes the practice of nudity, whereas naturism highlights an attitude favoring harmony with nature and respect for the environment, into which that practice is integrated.[1](Wikipedia)
We lay there reading and flicking bugs out of one another’s hair and eating our sandwiches and dozing. And eavesdropping, of course. Which was how I discovered that one of the two bearded men beside us had had four orgasms that morning. I looked at the time. It was twenty-past one. Impressive, I thought. The sex, he told his friend, is fantastic, but he really did wish that he (the partner in question who was absent) would get a job already and contribute to the rent. Fifteen hundred Euros a month!
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said, ‘I’m not struggling, but imagine what I could do with an extra 750 a month!’
There was a fulsome fwup sound that surprised me. I turned towards them in time to see the friend fanning himself with the biggest paper-and-bamboo fan I’ve ever seen, probably about 45cm high and at least an inch thick. It had delicate pink cherry blossoms on a background of white across which was written, in monster black letters, CUNT.
Mr Multiple Orgasms hooted.
‘How much did you pay for that,’ he laugh-asked.
‘You don’t want to know. Guess,’ said his friend, fanning merrily and smiling at the reaction to his party trick.
‘Thirty-five?’
‘Good guess!’
Seven days worth of groceries if you’re a parsimonious freelancer travelling on the South African Rand.
I tried not to think about that. Money makes me so…clenchy.
More of their friends arrived and their circle began to encroach on ours. They all tucked into the enviable picnic provided by orgasm-guy: couscous salad, make-it-yourself wraps, strawberries. They made their own little food orgasm sounds and complimented him on his guacamole.
Sam and I packed up.
‘Do you have everything,’ he asked me in Afrikaans as I zipped up my backpack. ‘I hope you packed that couscous salad.’
The pleasure of our sandwiches had been totally upstaged by that salad sitting there in the soft grass of the little slope of naked and less-naked people.
We came home and Sam made us a salad.
‘When I was alone, I felt that as long as I was making myself a salad, I wasn’t turning into a barbarian,’ he told me.
We haven’t seen one another for two months.
On my own, I went full barbarian. No salad was made. I survived on beer and bread and butter. And a banana for breakfast.
‘What did you like about being alone,’ I asked.
‘Not having to think about anyone but myself.’
Me too, I said.
He rubbed my head in that way that makes me want to fall asleep.
I tickled the skin on his sides until it went goosebumpy.
PS: Here’s a recording of Sam and I reading a poem we wrote together.
Media bits and bobs
I had a brief and intense reading time over the last weekend of May when I was staying with my nephew Rory. He reads (and has) a lot of poetry. I read Beauty is the case they gave me by Mark Leidner and Anne Carson’s Glass and God. The latter was familiar and equal parts frustrating and emotional. The former was new to me and bracing.
Here’s a poem by Carson:
I half read other poetry collections but put them down because they didn’t shake me like those two did.
I also read The Practise of Not Thinking by Ryonosuke Koike, which ties in with a lot of other reading I’ve done in the past. It reminded me in some ways of Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles, which I wrote about here. It also reminded me of the Waking Up course by Sam Harris, which has had me gripped for a while now.
I’ve never understood sitting meditation. I can apprehend its well-documented benefits with my brain, but its practise is hard for me. I’m very restless. I prefer moving meditation. What is so different about Sam Harris is not the meditations so much as the mini lectures between them which explicate the whole, mysterious process in a way that I understand for the first time. Ollie has been urging me for years and years and years to do the Waking Up course. Oliver was born anxious and has also been plagued by sleep paralysis in the past. He was helped by learning meditation in this particular way and is a convert. The effects of it have been visible to me as his mother. And yet, I always resisted it. (Sorry, Ollie. I get it now. I really get it. Thank you for nagging.)
One article I read this month that was worthwhile – and probably only because Sam is Duolingo’s current best German student (I’m making that up…I have no idea whether the app rates your performance against other learners’) – was about the founder of the language learning app, Luis van Ahn. Many of my friends are learning a language on Duolingo. Everyone talks about it so warmly, it makes you want to learn a language, even if that’s not your current priority.
One evening, after Rory and I came back from a stomach-breaking feast at OKKO on Broadway market, slightly drunk on hot sake and tired from laughing so much, he put on an album by a group called Black Country, New Road. The album is called Ants From Up There (2022). I haven’t listened to a full album all the way through for a long time, but I’ve listened to this one three times now. I really like it.
I hope you’ll find something you like in my meagre mix of media consumed inside. Maybe you’ll tell me what you’ve been listening to and reading and watching.
I’d love to know.
Lots of love,
K.
You have so many words in your mind, K, I am grateful for what you do share with us. Even just a taste. I don't focus on what is not/could also have been shared.