Newham Writers Workshop Anthology 1999

		GEORGE FULLER Waving not drowning! This is a piece from a diary I kept while working as a bricklayer in Berlin in 1994. I’ve been working on it for quite a time now. But I still feel enthusiastic about it. [German speakers, please excuse my English builders pidgin] SWIMMING IN THE MUDDLESEE SATURDAY 2ND JULY 1994 I’d just started work again when Olaf the foreman and an important looking man wearing a grey suit, maybe the boss, came round the corner of the block of flats. I was in a fix: if Olaf asked me where Brendan and Mick were I couldn’t say - ‘You’ve missed them. They’ve just gone back to their lodgings’ - split on them. Neither could I say, ‘They’ve just gone to the shops to get food for their break’ - because Olaf and the boss man would probably wait for them to come back. So I pretended I hadn’t noticed Olaf and the boss man, and kept my face to the wall, slapping compo into the cavities and smoothing it off with my trowel. I could hear them talking, getting closer, then they stood on the ground below me. Olaf called and I turned. He gazed around the site, open hands extended. "Wo ist Turks?" For some reason he pretended to be looking for Turks when he was looking for Englanders. I shrugged, "Nicht verstehen." (Not understand.) Olaf muttered, "Turks Shisse." (Turks shit.) If he talked like that behind the Turkish workers’ backs, what did ‘smiling’ Olaf say behind the Englanders’ backs? The pair ambled off, Olaf exclaiming: "Ein! Ein!" (One! One!). I thought now Brendan and Mick, those two idiots, have dropped themselves in it! I could hardly admit it to myself, but I hoped that Olaf wouldn’t believe my two workmates had even turned in for work. I hoped he would refuse to pay them for the couple hours of Saturday overtime they had put in. That would teach them - the pair of scheming numbskulls - to listen to my advice! I left off work at 12 noon (we’d told Olaf we were working until 6pm) and after buying a copy of the International Guardian newspaper went to a Turkish cafe near the Kottbusser Tor tube station. For some reason, I felt more at home in this Turkish district than in a German district. Though to judge by all the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) posters with stern-faced man and woman clasping Kalashnikovs, plus slogans on every wall - it was more a Turkish Kurd district. The reason I felt more at home there could have been that I was a foreigner amongst foreigners. Though the Turks, who had been in Germany in large numbers since just after the war as ‘Gastarbeiters’ (guest workers), weren’t exactly foreigners. And with all the fruit stalls and shops, with goods halfway across the pavement, it felt like the inner-city areas of London I’d lived in for the last twenty years. After my meal and a read of the paper, I went to the Turkish grocery shop next door and brought a big round loaf of Turkish bread which was light and easy to chew - unlike most of the German bread. When I worked in Berlin in ’93 I’d seen a couple of bloody fights between Turks. In the first a big man was leisurely delivering heavy punches into the face of a little man, as two screaming women tried to stop him. In the other fight a group of men outside a pub were hitting each other over the head with chairs. Back at her flat I’d said to Janet, "Some of these Turks seem a bit violent." She looked up from making a salad, slicing a cucumber on the kitchen cutting board. "They’ve a right to be a bit wild. They do all the dirty jobs and the heavy work in factories that Germans won’t do." She pulled the leaves from a lettuce. "The Turks are an important part of the labour force that makes Germany the bloody economic power house they’re so bloody proud of. Young Turks were born in Germany, but they’re still not allowed to become German citizens or even vote in elections." She gave me a sharp glance as she sliced a tomato, then opened a tin of salmon with a tin opener. She didn’t have many good words to say about the Germans. That night I went to the Irish pub in the Europa centre. But nobody I’d met the previous Saturday showed up. I tried to get talking but the racket from the music and voices was too much, so I went home at midnight. SUNDAY 3RD JULY After breakfast in the Oscar Wilde, an Irish pub in Friedrich Strasse, I caught an S Bahn train and then a tram to a nude bathing beach at a lake called the Muddlesee, outside East Berlin. In ’93 I’d seen this lake marked on railway map of Berlin. I wanted to explore. The driver said he’d put me off at the Muddlesee. The tramcar was crowded with men, women, and children carrying towels and bottles of soft drinks. When it reached the terminus everybody got off then paid at a turnstile to get to the lake. That’s when I noticed all those bare backsides and bodies of various shapes and sizes. This year, as last, people were stretched out like seals basking in the sun. I stripped off and went for a swim, the water was murky with silt but cool and refreshing. Sunlight reflected off the lake. In the distance a few sailing dinghies barely moved in the still air. Trees on the distant shore were a shimmering dark line. When I got out I laid on the grass and dried in the sun. Then I moved under the shade of a tree to read a book. But I frequently glanced at the naked people: skinny old men and women, young girls like oil painting nymphs with pointed breasts running in and out of the water splashing with their younger brothers and sisters, fat old men and women launching into the water like barges. A tall athletic man paraded along the lakeside, one ring in his ear and another dangled from the foreskin of his limp stallion’s penis. I bought a glass of beer and a worst (sausage) at a imbiss then went to sleep under my towel. When I woke up I remembered I’d brought a map. I couldn’t see any footpaths marked so I asked a woman a few feet away, "Wo ist Fussweg bitter?" (Where is footpath please) "Fussweg?" She sat down beside me and looked at the map. In her late thirties, blue eyes in a round face topped by a fringe of brown hair. She looked like a school teacher somehow. Her breasts grapefruit size with big brown nipples. "Fussweg!Fussweg!" Her finger on the map. We looked at the map for several minutes, our knees touching. She shook her head. "Keine Fussweg." (No footpath). Then in halting English she said, "I’m sorry. I cannot help you." Germany didn’t seem to have network of public footpaths like Britain. She laid back on her towel. When I stood up to dress she glanced at my cock; the done thing by the lake: men glance at breasts, women at cocks; some men at each others etc. I tried to find my own footpath along the edge of the lake but barbed wire fences soon stopped me. I wished I’d stayed with the schoolteacher. MONDAY 4TH JULY As I sat on the S Bahn train on the way to work I thought of my girlfriend, Lucille. She was back in New York for the Independence Day holiday, attending her sister’s backyard barbecue along with the rest of her family and friends. This was a comforting thought, as the half-empty train trundled along under a sunlit sky. At the Zellendorf blocks of flats, we’d been working for an hour before I told Mick and Brendan that foreman Olaf and the bossman had been on site on Saturday checking up on who’d worked overtime. "What did you say to him." "Nothing." Mick glared at me through his thick glasses. "Nothing! Why didn’t you tell him we were at the shops getting food for breaktime?" The crease in Brendan’s brow got deeper, his eyes more manic. "You fuck’n told him we’d gone back to the lodgings didn’t you!" "What do you take me for!" "Why didn’t you tell Olaf we were at the shops?" "What good would that do. They’d soon find out I was telling lies if they’d waited and you two didn’t turn up." "What did you say to him?" "Nothing! I made out I couldn’t understand what Olaf was saying. Don’t blame me. You two left the site early!" Brendan and Mick ranted at me for half an hour. They were so into fiddling and double-dealing that they couldn’t believe that I wasn’t. They had their heads together for an hour before they went down the ladder to Olaf’s office. I was hoping Olaf would take a hard line with them: "You pisstakers. Do it again and you’re sacked." Knock some reality into their heads. But when they came back with Olaf I was puzzled: they were all smiles. Brendan pointed up at where we’d worked on Saturday, giving Olaf some bullshit.