Bridging Berlin’s Borders
My office is in the city centre, overlooking the TV Tower, which pierces the cityscape like a needle (Credit: Florence Thomas)
On one of my last days in Berlin, my boss asks me to translate the word “cusp”. We are looking through the poetry collection I produced at work and, in a piece yet to be translated, which reflects on the beautifully curated children’s book Manchmal male ich ein Haus für uns: Europas vergessene Kinder (Sometimes I paint us a house: Europe’s forgotten children), I refer to someone being on the “cusp of sleep”. I ponder and eventually offer up “Grenze”, which translates as “border”. Here, I suggest, I am evoking the border between sleep and wakefulness, between the conscious and subconscious: that bizarrely elusive echelon of the mind which evades understanding. But this is a poor translation. Ironic, I think, that I have become so fluent in paraphrasing, so acquainted with peripheries, over the course of my year abroad but cannot translate the word that encapsulates my experience. Because “cusp” indeed it would be.
I walk home from the tram stop and watch the sun roll down the sky like a giant, orange marble (Credit: Florence Thomas)
In Berlin, I often feel like a stranger in my own life, on the cusp of understanding Germans – of understanding Germany – but somehow unable to. I don’t know whether to mimic the violently spluttered vernacular of the youths arguing on the tram or the eloquent exasperation of my boss lamenting the city’s cultural budget cuts. My German is imbued with a quintessential Englishness that will not abate. Even if linguistic fluency becomes possible, cultural fluency may always evade me. I can collect words and expressions like pebbles in my pocket, roll my tongue like playdough to fit the shape of German vowels, but I go home to my German flat and feel my emotions – in all their jagged, artless technicolour – in English. This, I often muse, is precisely the issue; it is difficult to imagine fluency when I have spent over two decades feeling, with all the fibres of my being, every aspect of my life in English.
At work, I linger on the threshold of conversations, at the edge of buffets; in the city, I peer into tourist shops. I wonder if I should still class myself as a tourist. A phrase from one of my poems – “taunting liminality” – echoes around my head and I wonder whether I should do more to Germanise myself. My mind is a soup of useless German colloquialisms and a loneliness that sometimes eschews vocalisation. After falling into a drowsy sleep, I wake up unable to remember whether any German wrangled its way into my dreamscape. I walk home from the tram stop and watch the sun roll down the sky like a giant, orange marble. I see the hours slide off the unsmiling face of my watch and wonder if the fluffy cows near our flat moo with a German accent. They stand and graze behind a barbed wire fence, another “Grenze”. I learn from a sign that they have foot-and-mouth disease and suddenly find them quite scary. Perhaps it is best that some distance is kept between us. My office is in the city centre, overlooking the TV Tower, which pierces the cityscape like a needle. I only notice on one of my last runs in the nature reserve that, even this far out, you can still see the TV Tower, launching itself like a cartoon rocket through the sunset’s shadows.
Even this far out, you can still see the TV Tower, launching itself like a cartoon rocket through the sunset’s shadows (Credit: Florence Thomas)
Perhaps, in the future, I will dream of my little room in the flat, my office with its pale walls and pelican poster, the sun-dappled bench where I ate lunch every day, and I will lie there, on the cusp of consciousness, feeling something that I cannot express.