This evening, after a long and aimless day, my sister and I wrapped up our evening at work with a ping pong game — far less a battle than a polite exchange, except whenever the ping pong ball went careering off into the table legs, chair casters, black cords, and cushioned chairs of the office. Then we clapped together the table again, opened the windows now that no ping pong balls could seek freedom out of them, returned to our tasks, in my case gobbled down a slice of quiche that T. had made and brought to the office, closed the windows, turned off the lights, locked the door, and then left out the courtyard in the front.
I went on no proper walk today, since it was 28°C or so and I wore a turtleneck for some reason, and instead I retreated to the staircase every now and then — with its linoleum?-lined treads, thickly painted wood railings in warm brown, old-fashioned turbid white windows with multiple frames and little window hatches inside them, and the dark painted bricks in the pleasantly cellar-cool walls. And I sat down on the steps to cool down again. At times I don't have much need of a thermometer to gauge the weather, since my temperament's temperature rose in rough proportion, and against heat my capacity for stoicism has its evident limits. It breathed a dead, desert-like heat in the morning, and reminded me of beetles that eat carrion and stones that crumbled long ago; but later there were cool wisps of wind that were so chilly in contrast that they nearly gave me an 'ice cream headache.'
Two days ago I did go on walks and stumbled upon a funny thing, which I've already told ad nauseam to my patient family: I was walking along the sidewalk when I saw something hanging from far higher in an apartment building. Once I reached the hanging object, I saw it was a piece of paper in a plastic sleeve with rainbow-coloured writing on it. It looked like something made by children for school. But instead it said: 'Ich sammle für den Urlaub. Freue mich auf jede Spende.' I am saving up for a holiday. Every donation is appreciated.
I passed by the sign a third time — it vanished for a while, as I had expected because perhaps a passerby would pinch the money, or be angry and rip it down to get rid of it, and I saw nothing the second time. I saw as I had expected — I was too dazed to inspect the eleemosynary contraption more nearly the first time around — that there was a coin box attached with the sign. But what I did not expect was to walk a bit further, and then see another venture that had been apparently, if halfheartedly, inspired by the first. It was a piece of yarn, which dangled from one corner of a window in the ground floor much like a cigarette from the mouth's corner of an exhausted smoker, with a plain white plastic drinking cup attached. 'Bitte Spenden' — 'Please Donate' — was written in black letters. It was an odd form of urban fishing.
Hypocritically, though, I enjoyed a huge 'freebie' myself. I walked along a little farther and saw a cardboard box on the sidewalk. 'Zum Mitnehmen' — 'Feel free to take' — was written on a plain sheet of paper above it. Nearer our apartment, I've come across some lovely stuff that people have cleared out of their apartments before, although I rarely (subjectively speaking) take advantage of it, so I was eager to see what there might be this time. Underneath a plain book in a paper sleeve and a magazine of sorts, there were clothbound and leather-bound editions of Herder, Möricke and Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. And, to my especial delight, there was a tastefully powder-blue clothbound translation of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, from the 1960s. I took it with me back to work, and when reading the preface on the U-Bahn afterward, decided that the word choice of the translation was as exquisitely direct but well-chosen as I had sensed that it might be. I last read much of Swift's magnum opus in 2003; at the time, A Modest Proposal thrilled me more than Gulliver's Travels. At the same time I did not necessarily want to wade through the fussy older English. In short, a translation is just the right thing.
***
As for work, there was a lot; but then it disappeared again because my orders changed. And then I was left at sea, unable to do very much because Monday has a heavy workload anyway which it's best not to aggravate the week before. Then work reappeared that I haven't much experience doing, so that will have to wait until Monday. And I felt rather sad about the amount of work I get done. Perhaps not very much? As for lunch, we had chicken roulades with a dark mass of spinach, like the knobbly green background of a medieval tapestry, in the centre, and the spinach had flecks of red pepper and a mighty suggestion of garlic about it. Oddly enough, the garlic did not prevent it from being gentle on the stomach (please pardon the TMI). It lay on a bed of orzo grains in a creamy sauce; and I also took rice from the vegan bin, of course trying to make sure that it wasn't so big a portion that the vegans didn't get any. And the air smelled of kerosene again.
(Also, the repairs on the staircase in our building still aren't being carried out, but everyone who has tried it has complained about the complex arrangements one would need to get in through the back entrance: double gates, button that would cause an alarm to resound through the entire building, locked door at foot of rear staircase near the garbage bins, and need to prop the corresponding door to our floor on the staircase open. Next week should be interesting.)
***
Afterward, T. and I walked again to an U-Bahn station — past the trottoirs with their tables, signposting decorations, foliage of potted plants and after-working-hours crowds — I had another of my adventures-that-are-not-adventures again.
On Fridays the U-Bahn is paganishly festive; it is also the apex of the tourist season: people more brightly dressed than usual, with bright red or pink shirts, carrying things whose purpose is amusement — beer or otherwise — and more talkative and inebriated. Only a BVG (Berlin transport authority) worker tootled with a neutral mien up and down the platform, pushing in front of him a brightly orange rotary vehicle that washed the floor. Inside the train later, two women, one in tight black clothing with a slit-back skirt and the other in a festive flowery skirt and red top, were raising themselves in partial chin-ups on the horizontal bars in the U-Bahn. One of them demanded the attention of a pink-shirted tourist of middle age in a voice so high that I was convinced she was a child. A hardboiled-looking young worker with a tough though symmetrical face, in blue garb, watched without much apparent interest. And a shortish-looking middle-aged man sat on the bench and played slap-hands with a boy likely over ten. The boy seemed too big to shriek as delightedly as he did, and accidentally brushed or raked my arm with his fingertips in his enthusiasm. But neither of us minded (much).
As for the 'adventure':
I was fascinated by the sight of a man who was sitting in the fold-down afterthought seat at the end of the wagon, beside the door. The first thing I seemed to see of him was a wheeled dolly that had a dark grey backpack resting in its c-shaped frame, and a pile of empty banana cartons that seemed taller than the dolly was high. Then his feet, bronzed like our Hawaiian cousin's, in green-strapped sandals. The silky-looking synthetic cuff of his black pants — walking pants possibly or simply track pants — and a short-sleeved white and red plaid button-up shirt. His garb, I thought, and his backpack, were those of a tourist. I guessed from elsewhere in Germany.
But when I changed to an empty space beside the door (not for spying purposes but for being-out-of-the-way purposes) and caught sight of him properly, his neat black wristwatch, his eyeglasses, and his respectably cut grey hair and expression, denied the bohemian suggestions of the scuffed boxes and the synthetic sandals. His wedding ring made me wonder what his wife was like, since I thought that he seemed like half of a comradely couple that would be much more likely to be traveling together than apart; and I wanted to imagine her face and what her opinion was of her husband's banana boxes (or if she was the originator of the idea). More to complete the story, as a fictional thing rather than reality — not because I was really hellbent on finagling details about a stranger in real life.
His tiny, leashed dog was a piece of a 'tale,' too. From time to time it lifted up to the traveller large eyes that were fairly pale and yet — of course — profound in their expression. It had white cropped hair all over, and reminded me of a little elderly cousin of Milou from the Tintin comics, crossed with a lady's companion dog from an 18th-century painting. When its owner pulled the banana boxes nearer to himself and to the dog, to make space for new ebbs and flows of passengers in the train, it shifted uneasily from the foot of the tower. By the end it had found refuge under the folding chair, resting with its paw angled sideways under its head, looking thoughtful; and its little tongue (rather disturbingly) perhaps instinctively lapping at what must have been an incredibly dirty floor for a while — until the dog found its repose. I wondered whether the dog would usually walk in the countryside rather than the city, where it would walk (green fields? suburban pavements?), and whether it felt that its owner was dragging it around uncomfortable distances or it was content as long as it wasn't being threatened with being crushed under banana boxes, and if it was in an uneasy or tired mood as it appeared to be.
Long story short, it seemed to me that the banana boxes, the small dog, and the owner were full of stories, and that I had just stumbled into the middle of one of them.
(Of course it also struck me that I might have been staring a bit too much.)
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