Nico. In the Cemetery of the Nameless
I no longer know what number of Maryhill Road it was and probably the tenement building was demolished a long time ago and I’m not even sure whether the flat was third or fourth storey, but I remember the dark hall and kitchen and the brown pattern linoleum and the two small rooms. Coming from St. George’s Cross it was a few entries along on the left-hand side. There was a Greek shop nearby with not much in it, though I recollect the open boxes of cubes of Turkish Delight, variously coloured, and covered in icing sugar.
Bill and I shared the larger of the rooms. Bill slept in the proper bed, I slept on the fold-down bed settee, Bob had the little room.
Apart from summer trips it was the first time I had lived away from home. I had moved out of my mother’s flat in Hyndland, in the West End, in autumn, at the start of the new term, and now it was almost Christmas and my mother hadn’t forgiven me yet and instead had for the first time rented a TV set to keep her company. Bill and Bob had gone home to their respective parents in Strathaven and Renfrew. I had no money and no one had invited me anywhere.
This was December 1968 and my attendance at university had been no more than nominal all year, great events had passed, but I was too cold and hungry to take personal and political stock. It was dark when I got up at four or five in the afternoon, I would eat, packet soup and white bread, read a little, feel restless and uneasy, listen to music and go out, spend whatever money I had on a couple of beers and ten Silk Cut, borrow some more money, go wherever I might see someone I knew, the Pewter Pot, the Halt, or the Arlington, corner of Woodlands Road and West End Park Street, the colour scheme not unlike that of the kitchen and hallway of the flat, same brown colours, or maybe a lighter brown, smokier, only with a higher ceiling and bigger, back after closing time, go to bed at two, three in the morning, rolled into a ball, knees to chin against the clammy cold and when I woke up again at three or four in the afternoon it was dark or getting dark again.
Bob had quite a big record collection, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Archie Shepp, Ornette Coleman, but I played just three LP’s again and again, back to back: ‘The United States of America’, as both record and group were called, and the first two Velvet Underground LP’s.
‘The United States of America’ was an early pop electronic record which was both innovative in applying Charles Ives and contemporary classical music but at the same time displayed some of its other influences – Sergeant Pepper, Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane – all too plainly. Some of the electronic effects were produced by what was described as a ring modulator, a primitive device (responsible for the distorted Dalek voices in Dr Who) already used some years earlier by Karlheinz Stockhausen among others. The record is sometimes referred to as ground-breaking. I’ve hardly heard it since, but there were wistful, melancholy songs amidst the electronic sounds, the tapes of marching bands and the attacks on American family life, and I can still sing “And in the stillness of an Oriente rainfall…” from ‘Love Song for the Dead Ché’.
The first Velvet Underground LP was entitled ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’. The words ‘Produced by Andy Warhol’ were equally prominent on the cover, and Warhol designed the big yellow banana on the front. ‘White Light, White Heat’ presented a stark visual contrast with its black and white, more black than white, shadowy cover picture. The whole second side of the record consists of a single track, the 17 ½ minute aural assault of ‘Sister Ray’. The first side culminates in the hectic, heart-accelerating rhythm of ‘I Heard Her Call My Name’, which is not so very different from the more discordant tracks on ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’ but without the interruptions of the songs performed by Nico herself. But the churning, rumbling, fuzz and feedback of ‘Sister Ray’ took pop, becoming rock or something else, in an unprecedented direction, beyond the wilful decadence of the first LP, finding a musical correspondence and more for the shocking, inimitable, forever imitated vocals and words, phrases and repetitions of Lou Reed: “I’m searching for my mainline/I couldn’t hit it sideways/I said I couldn’t hit it sideways/aw, just like Sister Ray says”. True, the words are little different in content and style from those Reed sings and declaims on the first long-player, but if the thing, ‘’Sister Ray’, is rock quartet collaboration, thudding drums underpinning it all, then the overall sound owes a great deal to John Cale. Here Cale was allowed to stretch out and match noise, not least that produced by his amplified viola, to Lou Reed’s cocksure, cynical whine.
But what about Nico? The second LP says it very loudly: This is the Velvet Underground without Nico. There’s no place for a ‘chanteuse’ on ‘Sister Ray’. Nico was already gone and on her way before ‘White Light, White Heat’’ was recorded. She sang on just three songs, out of eleven on ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’, all credited to Lou Reed alone, ‘Femme Fatale’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’. The opening track, ‘Sunday Morning’, credited to Reed and Cale, was also written for Nico, but is sung by Reed, who even, just once, sounds a little like her. Yet these three (or four) songs and Nico’s performance of them played a part in defining the Velvet Underground’s reputation for providing the unexpected. There was the prettiness of the songs themselves, contrasting with the pessimism of the lyrics and the deep, accented, hardly-singing voice of Nico. To non-Germans it’s just a little reminiscent of Dietrich, but the vocal range is even narrower and at the same time expresses a fragility quite absent from Dietrich. There’s a feeling of threat, too, in the songs, produced by the arrangements, in the unexpected tempi of the accompaniments, in the metallic, braying, brittle backing vocals, say, of ‘Femme Fatale’.
Nico and John Cale (who left Velvet Underground after ‘White Light, White Heat’) would work together on her solo records and appear in concert together, on a very few occasions she even shared a stage with Lou Reed again. In the winter of 1968/69, however, in the stuffy cold of the flat in Glasgow I didn’t know anything about Nico. She was German obviously and I must have read about her in the music papers (“ex-model”), but little had stuck. I only knew her voice, the songs, ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, as I knew the tormented instruments on ‘White Light, White Heat’, the deadpan Lou Reed, “Go to Lexington 125/feel sick and dirty/more dead than alive”, and the United States of America with their ironic name, and knew that this was the music I wanted to hear, the music for the time, of the moment, the music most of the moment, apart from some jazz tracks, since Bob Dylan’s ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ and ‘Blond on Blond’ a few years earlier and, even as it proclaimed its novelty, it appeared as funeral music of sorts.
Years later, I saw Nico perform, live, in Birmingham. The headline act was The Fall, and The Fall gigography on the internet tells me the date was 6th November, 1981. I’ve never collected gig or fan memorabilia, but the ticket for the concert reproduced in the gigography promised ‘THE FALL with special guest NICO plus Eric Random plus Dr Filth. £2.50 in advance, £3 on the night’. The place was the Imperial Cinema on Moseley Rd. in Birmingham, in the then rundown area of Balsall Heath. The Imperial had been boarded up for years, but was briefly revived as a location for concerts. The usual box inside, the walls painted black, the toilets too few, the stage high above the stalls (in old cinemas the best view of the screen was always from the most expensive seats in the front rows of the balcony). Dr Filth may or may not have played before I arrived, Eric Random is also a blank though I could or should have liked his kind of noise.
Although The Fall had top billing they didn’t conclude the evening. Towards the end of their set Mark E. Smith spat out, “…so we’re gonna do a quick one before the Hausfrau comes on.” At least that’s what I thought I heard. The gigography has: “…so we’re gonna do a quick one before (Kraut) comes on, the brackets indicating a degree of uncertainty as to what was actually said – before launching into ‘Middle Mass’. In an interview John Cale once said something like, really Nico just wanted to be a housewife. An apparently odd remark to make about a woman who seemed to do all she could to personify the myths of a bohemian lifestyle and whose many actual or rumoured liaisons included Alain Delon, Brian Jones, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop – and John Cooper Clark. By the time of the Imperial Cinema concert she was living in Manchester, Eric Random and the Bedlamites would, under one name or another, become one of her regular backing groups and that partly explains the tour with The Fall. Mark Smith’s comment, whether he used the word Kraut or Hausfrau, didn’t sound too friendly, but perhaps it was intended to be humorous after all, and perhaps, if I did hear him aright then Nico was habitually tidying up in some dilapidated mansion in Manchester housing a permanent and transient population of serious drug abusers.
The audience was pretty restless when Nico came on. Most of the crowd at the Imperial had presumably come to hear the noisy clattering background noise of The Fall (itself partly influenced by the Velvet Underground) and the nasal vocals and comments of Mark E. Smith. I don’t think Nico spoke much. I remember a tall, imposing figure in dark, but not black clothes, a long skirt, boots, from a distance making an almost tweedy impression, long straight hair, fringe, brown rather than blonde hair, she sat behind her harmonium, the instrument she had adopted after the Velvet Underground episode. If there were backing musicians they’ve faded from my memory.
She will have included songs from ‘The Marble Index’ and ‘Desertshore’. It’s possible she sang ‘The End’. I hadn’t gone out of my way to listen to her records after ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’, but the tone and style was familiar from tracks and LP sides I had heard now and again at the homes of friends. And maybe she sang this song from ‘Desertshore’:
Liebes kleines Mütterlein
Nun darf ich endlich bei Dir sein
Die Sehnsucht und die Einsamkeit
Erlösen sich in Seligkeit [1]
Desertshore was released in 1970, and that same year Nico’s mother, who had brought up her daughter alone, died. The lines, however, ostensibly addressed to a nameless mother, have I suspect, in their evocation of abandonedness, as much to do with Nico’s situation as with her loss. The song’s melancholy enhanced by voice and harmonium, transcends self-pity. Also on ‘Desertshore’ is a short song, ‘Le petit chevalier’ sung by her son Aaron, usually known as Ari, who was seven or eight at the time of recording. Perhaps ‘Mütterlein’ can be seen, in part, as a response to Alain Delon’s consistent refusal to acknowledge Ari as his child, even though Nico insisted he was the father. (Ari was brought up by Delon’s mother.)
Whatever the songs are about, the Imperial Cinema that November evening was not the best setting for them. Nico’s music is better heard on record where it can indeed produce a mesmerising effect, and not in the company of several hundred Fall fans wanting to hear more from ‘their’ group (perhaps even hoping that they would return later to bring the evening to a proper conclusion). There was nothing to which one could tap one’s toe, on returning from the toilet queue or the bar, nothing much had changed, the harmonium was still droning on.
A warm day in May. I got off the S-Bahn at Heerstrasse station and in a few minutes had reached the edge of the Grunewald, the best-known of Berlin’s city forests. This north-east corner of it is not so far from the western end of the city centre. The first landmark here is the Teufelsberg, Devil’s Hill, which gets its name from nearby Teufelssee, Devil’s Lake. Devil’s Hill is more recent and man-made. Before 1945 this was the site of a military academy designed by the Nazi architect and armaments minister Albert Speer. It was partly demolished after the war and then, from 1950, rubble from bombed buildings was deposited first in it and then on top and the mound grew and grew. About one third of Berlin’s ruins ended up here. From the road, screened by trees, the dimensions are not at first evident. I ascend a narrow, sandy path. There’s a surfaced route further along, but this is more interesting. Every kind of broken stone, lump of cement, glazed and unglazed brick and roof tile is poking out of the ground. This, I reflect, is where all that is left of my mother’s first home lies, of the flat in Charlottenburg, destroyed by a parachute mine in January 1944. The debris, plaster, dust and ash which were once walls and furniture, pots and plates, dresses, coats, photographs and books.
The top of the hill, a flattish plateau, is more than 300 feet above central Berlin. There’s an almost Alpine feeling, short grass, a breeze, the vegetation covering the hillsides is thick, but the trees and bushes growing out of the rocky new ground remain low. And up here you can see that the Teufelsberg is in fact two hills with a steep valley between them and that it’s the higher, more densely wooded one that has the buildings of the former US security and listening post.
To the north and east there’s the messy skyline of Berlin: 60’s multi-storey social housing blocks, a power station, Le Corbusier’s unité d’habitation, towers – Charlottenburg Town Hall, Siemensstadt, the little Eiffel Tower at the trade fair grounds – the Deutschlandhalle and, further away, the Schoeneberg gas holder, the TV tower at Alexanderplatz, more power station chimneys on the horizon. Looking west, past the second Devil’s Hill, there’s the illusion of endless forest stretching across ridges of low hills to Döberitz Heath and beyond.
I descended to the valley and looked for a way up. All the paths curved rather than going straight and I thought I’d lost my way in the trees, then, however, I came up against the wire fence of the installation. A double fence, in fact, the space wide enough for patrols and tall street lamps at regular intervals, which would have lit up the perimeter at night, another Cold War forbidden zone in Berlin. I worked my along the narrow track running outside, the ground falling away steeply. Holes in the fence had been crudely patched up, others were big enough to crawl through. I had gone nearly the whole way round the top of the hill before discovering the open gate almost at the point where I had started. At the gate a large fading sign promised luxury apartments for completion in 2002, eight years earlier, and listed contact telephone numbers. Inside the fence the facility, the former spies’ base, was wrecked, a ruin on top of rubble on top of a ruin. It had probably been partly demolished even before plans were drawn up for the luxury flats. Parts of the white casings of the radar domes and towers were shredded and flapping in the wind, broken glass underfoot, tangled cables, battered electrical and electronic junk, one building completely burned out, three floors up on another building, its sides missing, music from a ghetto blaster echoing over the hilltop, a big water tank, stagnant water, as big as a swimming pool. Some doorways and passageways concreted up, a bunker somewhere underneath no doubt
From up here in the island of West Berlin, the US National Security Agency (and an RAF signals unit) listened into radio and satellite communications of the Warsaw Pact. The Americans and the British gave up the base in 1991. it was then used for monitoring civilian air traffic until 1999. But the listening post on Devil’s Hill was not my goal.
I crossed the road leading to the gate and went down the west side of the hill, through a meadow, lost my way and came out of the forest at some houses on the north side of the Grunewald. That, however, allowed me to make sense of the map and I turned south and struck out along a fairly straight hillocky track between the trees. Insects everywhere, clouds of bird song, tiny forest flowers.
What used to be called the Cemetery of the Nameless (Friedhof der Namenlosen) is hidden away in the forest half a mile inland from the wide River Havel and a headland called Am Schildhorn. Once this was where unidentified suicides who had been washed ashore by the current or taken from the water were given a resting place. Later, after the First World War, it became a normal burial ground.
Only a low stone wall separates the cemetery and its blooming rhododendrons from the encroaching forest undergrowth. I go through the gate and begin to walk along the rows of gravestones, reading the inscriptions. “From Königsberg in Prussia. Emil Schweiger 9.3.1896 – 26.3.1960”; “Wilhelm Hintze. Royal Palace Administrator retd. 28.9.1844 – 4.10.1923 A loyal servant of the Hohenzollerns”; “Here rests our sunshine Elke 6.8.1940 – 18.1.1947”; “À mon meilleur ami Jacques Bordel 1.4.1946 – 29.5.1978”. A grave freshly dug, a heap of sand, ready for the funeral. “Willi Wohlberedt 2.9.1878 – 26.8.1950” is not forgotten: the city maintains his grave and there are pebbles on top of the stone. Wohlberedt, I later find out, was a historian of the cemeteries in and around Berlin, tracking down the graves, whether preserved or not, of the famous and notable of every kind. So almost a patron saint of Berlin cemetery explorers.
I discover no trace of the nameless suicides, but a row of wooden Russian Orthodox crosses without names and giving dates in 1917 and 1918 marks the burial places of Russian prisoners of war. A mass grave with dates from April and May 1945: Every age is represented, teenagers, infants, the elderly, male and female, known and unknown dead of the last weeks of the war in Berlin. Nearby: “Unknown died 1945”; “Unknown soldier”. A gravestone for “Margaret Pollock, née MACRAE 25.10.1860 – 5.5.1945”, an ivy covered mound. A Scotswoman by birth, perhaps, the last days of her long life will not have been peaceful.
I had walked round most of the small cemetery before finding the grave I was looking for.
Margarete Päffgen 1910-1970
NICO
Christa Päffgen
1938-1988
Nico, with her birth name, Christa Päffgen, her ashes buried here beside her mother.
Nico’s interment in the Grunewald returned her permanently to Berlin where she had grown up during the 1940’s and 1950’s. Around 1954 she had been discovered as a model by the photographer Herbert Tobias. A 1956 photo in a retrospective of his work exhibited a few years ago shows her at 18 modelling a cocktail dress. A teenager in flouncy skirts and patterned gloves, a blank, professional expression, big-boned, an androgynous quality to the face. Older, she would say she wished she had been born a man. Hair drawn back, not the long straight hair and fringe with which she would become famous. In the photo Tobias establishes sophistication with the simplest means, a stone wall, sunlight, broken by foliage, falling on her face, a round wicker tray with fruit in the foreground. It was probably Tobias, fashion photographer, photographer of Berlin, creator of gay mythologies, who gave Christa Päffgen the professional name Nico.
Her career as a model took her first to Paris, and in 1959 she had a small part in Fellini’s ‘La dolce vita’. Some time after that (and after the birth of her son Ari in 1962) she moved to New York was drawn into the orbit of Andy Warhol’s Factory, appeared in his film ‘Chelsea Girls’ before the brief but definitive collaboration, suggested or imposed by Warhol, in ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’. Previously she had already recorded a folk-inflected LP, likewise entitled ‘Chelsea Girls’. Bob Dylan supposedly introduced Nico to Warhol and contributed a song, ‘I’ll Keep It With Mine’, to the record. There’s also a story that Dylan’s ‘Visions of Johanna’ on ‘Blond on Blond’ from 1966 is dedicated to Nico or is in some way about her. And perhaps lines like “The ghosts of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face… And these visions of Johanna are now all that remains,” do refer to her, but I doubt whether Dylan’s lyric is so specific or unambiguous, to say the least.
In the first half of the 70’s Nico had a longer relationship with the French film-maker Philippe Garrel, who cast her in seven of his films, and at this time she was living more in France than anywhere else. Years later, many years later again, in 2005, Garrel made perhaps the best film about the mood and events of the year 1968: the theatricality of the revolutionary gestures, the tension between collective politics and private pleasures and troubles. ‘Les amants réguliers’ is shot in stark black and white and includes a party scene in a large flat. The life of the party seems to be going on off-screen, just out of sight of the viewer, out of reach of the party guests, perhaps in the next room. As elsewhere in the film Garrel underpopulates scenes, disconcerting the viewer who expects to see crowded apartments or streets. He may be making a virtue of budgetary necessity, but like much in the film the party is also a seriously playful allusion to the film-making of the late 60’s and 70’s, to Jean-Pierre Eustache, among others, or a to a dance sequence in Marco Bellocchio’s ‘Fists in the Pocket’. The music accompanying the four-minute scene is a song recorded by Nico called ‘Vegas’. The voice is instantly recognisable but the song itself is not in the mournful style with which she had become identified. Its guitar group backing brings it closer to conventional rock. In ‘Les amants réguliers’ the track is an anachronism, having been recorded in 1980 and released as a single in 1981. Possibly Garrel intended to use one of the songs on ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’, which would have been very appropriate, and made do with ‘Vegas’ because it was cheaper. But whichever song was used, it’s a small hommage to a dead lover and muse.
‘Vegas’ dates from Nico’s ‘Manchester period’, though recorded with French musicians. This was the Manchester of Tony Wilson, Factory Records and the Hacienda, Joy Division and New Order, the Buzzcocks and, of course, The Fall and later the Smiths. Perhaps by this time Nico was following the drugs (or the drug, heroin), drug contacts, but whether by chance or deliberately she became associated with a series of key artistic moments of very different kinds: with Warhol’s Factory in New York and on the edge of that the birth of a powerful strand in popular music which owed little to blues and rock’n’roll; in Paris, post-68, with the successors to the Nouvelle Vague film-makers and, strangest of all, the post-punk explosion which made Manchester a global music centre. Yet in each case she was somehow there and not there, unforgettable, yet not central, and already on her way somewhere else as she appeared to be making, leaving, her mark. If Nico lived in Manchester on and off for years, her heroin habit, the constant touring, the music she produced, perhaps her age and background made her presence a marginal one. There’s an interview with her, available on YouTube, recorded in 1982, so not so long after I saw her perform at the Imperial Cinema in Birmingham. In close-up and not seen from a distance, on a stage, in dim lighting, the camera eye is merciless. Nico was in her early 40’s at the time, but she has the glassy, staring eyes of an older woman, transparent shiny skin, smoking a cigarette right down to the filter. The very young, very clumsy interviewer asks whether she misses Germany. Nico takes the question quite seriously and replies that Manchester reminds her of Berlin. In the early 80’s both had the appearance of run-down cities, Manchester suffering the effects of de-industrialisation, West Berlin still showing the marks of war-time damage and further blighted by bad planning and decades without a true function.
Wherever she was based Nico was always on the move. Like the sailor who supposedly has a girl in every port she had a man (and the man) in every town and the men in one town knew or cared little about the men in the next. Through the 1970’s and into the 80’s she was constantly touring, presumably out of necessity, in order to make a living of sorts and to pay for her habit. While her records didn’t sell, there was always an audience, larger or smaller, willing to pay to see her, to approach a myth that consisted in large part of all the other myths that had rubbed off on her. Nico always came back to Berlin. Her last concert, in June 1988, was at the West Berlin Planetarium, built on another of the city’s rubble mountains, but she had been performing in Berlin as often as two or three times a year, usually at the Kant Kino or Café Einstein and invariably with the Berlin musician Lüül, also something like her manager for a number of years. (The latter has himself had a remarkable career, stretching from Krautrock - Agitation Free and Ash Ra Tempel – to the 17 Hippies. Lüül, Lutz Ulbrich, grew up in Im Eichkamp, a model housing development on the eastern edge of the Grunewald. Begun in the 1920’s, it attracted a number of left-wing intellectuals and artists, and before 1933 its resident included the writers Ludwig Marcuse and Arnold Zweig and the architect Max Taut. Im Eichkamp is only half a mile from the Teufelsberg.)
The grave of Nico and her mother is hardly cared for, quite apart from the junk which has accumulated on and around it: An empty bottle of rosé sparkling wine with a candle stuck in it that hasn’t quite burned down, photocopied pictures, bits of writing, verse, lines from Nico’s songs, sheathed in weathered plastic, a wilted chocolate bar, a sapling at one side is decorated with little yellow bows, eight in number, a burnt offering of some kind in a bowl at the foot of the grave. No flowers, either growing or brought there, just the neglected ivy-covered mound and the grave stone.
A middle-aged man weeding and cleaning at his wife’s grave nearby sees me taking notes and talks to me. He complains about the Ausländer, foreigners, who come to Nico’s grave, and the trash they leave behind. He connects nothing with the name, the actions and the loyalty of the fans remain incomprehensible. Even here where she is buried, Nico is there, yet not quite there. The widower tells me that after 2019 there will be no more burials in what was once the Cemetery of the Nameless.
[1] (roughly) Dearest mother mine/Now may I finally be thine/The longing and loneliness/Redeem themselves in blessedness
We started from the railway station with its six trains a day to Mezöhegyes. Past the two largest old houses in the village, one built for railway officials, past the little round shut-up kiosk, past The Joker, its door open, two men and a girl in white jeans and t-shirt playing pool and turned towards the dirt track at the edge of the village, on one side some of the poorest homes in the place, crooked gates, barking dogs, bare earth yards, pecking hens, no verandas, on the other side maize fields already harvested. We come to the fork, an asphalted road back to the centre and a track leading from the village, a green frontier police car parked there, border guards sitting and squatting beside it, they ignore us and we take the right fork away from them. A dog emerges from a sunflower field, we pick up stones, but the dog, thrown out or runaway, is warier than we are and plunges back into the field. We hear it as we continue along the track, staying level with us for a while, making more noise between the dry, crackling stalks and leaves than the birds fluttering up out of the vegetation by the ditch. At the wayside a stork’s wing, spread, splayed out as if waiting to be painted by a Dutch or German old master. We pass the abandoned house with the yellow-painted socialist-era iron gate, the overpowering smell of the unharvested, rotting, fermenting plums lying in the garden. Ahead of us the metal sign on a pole, a disk in the national colours, two words and a number, Hatar/Frontiera 100 meters, the border line otherwise unmarked. Another field of blackened sunflowers, heads hanging, all facing the same way, marching soldiers, stopped dead in their tracks by some sunflower catastrophe; a rusting, wheel less van.
On the way back, in the clear sunset light, all of Battonya’s towers are spread out above the trees from shadowy right to pale left, as if in a line, as in an 18th century town view, a vedute. The twin towers of the Catholic church, the baroque spires of the Serbian Orthodox and Romanian Orthodox churches, the small pointed Protestant church, the rounded shiny-topped tower of the art nouveau town hall and, as in every village in the Banat, the water tower. To our left the fierce red orb of the sun subsides in shades of grey and rose.
The Swans of the Landwehr Canal
Whatever the season the swans of the Landwehr Canal gather at Kottbusser Brücke at night. In summer they’re scattered across the water in two’s and three’s, the more distant birds luminous in the darkness. In winter they cluster close to the arches of the bridge itself, where people throw food, bread and buns, over the balustrade. Here the water remains a black pool even on the coldest nights, the frost and snow-covered ice stretching away on either side, to right and left, east and west.
Sometimes two or three swans come flying down the straight, over the bridges, Hobrecht and Thielen, and you can already here the whirr and whine of their wings a hundred yards away before you turn to see the long necks pushing the bills forward, wing blades to the rear. I always think of Sibelius, the swans of his 5th Symphony. Yet the stately theme towards the end of the 3rd movement doesn’t capture the speed of these low-flying swans. Sibelius must have seen his swans high above, the distance lending grace to their power, slowing them down, wings beating silently, perhaps indeed slower because these were migrating birds, pacing themselves on their flight across the continent. The swans of the Landwehr Canal don’t migrate, they feed and mate and raise their cygnets here between Urban Hafen, Kottbuss Bridge and the Neukölln Canal.
The canals have been frozen for six weeks now. One afternoon I saw a swan walking on the ice, slowly, lurching from side to side like a wind-up toy running down, the yellow-orange webbed feet leaving a monster’s trail of triangular footprints.
The end of something. The sign has been hammered together, the words painted on it. It’s been leaning against the wall for two days now without being put up in front. Haz elado. House for sale and a telephone number. In the pond the little frogs play hide and seek with the approaching observer. Only if one is very slow and quiet and only sometimes even then, does one see them, dark eyes and gills, shinily protruding from the water. Or suspended spread-eagled just below the surface. Like Joseph C. Gillis at the beginning of Sunset Boulevard, but with no story to tell. The big black water beetles bomb down into the two foot hazy depths, the one-man space ships of this aquatic universe.
(‘Battonya: late April (2011)’ and ‘A Walk to the Border’ first appeared in the Seagull Books Catalogue Fall 2012/Spring 2013)