Blueberries

by Ellena Savage

  − The riot police mirrored them, but with a cartoonish glint of horror. An identical line, but this one with military haircuts and firearms.

  − The chanting was deep, unified. Like church.

  − The air was tense and I felt afraid. And proud. And pissed off.

  − There was only one woman in the front line.

  + Yesterday, at least sixteen people were killed in flash floods on the outskirts of Athens. Photos show red mud rivers that used to be streets, upturned cars. People whose houses had filled with water a metre deep. I’m wearing sandals, said an older man on the news, because they’re all I have now.

  + Just now, I went outside to pull the old cane chairs off the balcony before they got destroyed—it’s hailing and raining at the same time—and I took in a big breath of the livid air. It smelled like a chemical fire. There’s been so much lightning the smell could be from a fire.

  + Eleven days ago, a few guys on motorcycles shot at a van parked outside the socialist party’s headquarters, half a kilometre from our place. Yesterday, an anarchist group took responsibility for it. Part of their 17 November insurrection.

  + Last night, walking around, I saw that most of the stores were closed and shuttered. In solidarity? Or to secure themselves against property damage? The things you don’t know when you’re new in town.

  + Yesterday, the IMF conceded that they had got the bailout wrong, that the austerity package may have been a bad idea. As in: they didn’t anticipate the extent of the recession that ensued.

  − Right.

  + Earlier, before going out to get a pie, Dom and I had sex in the kitchen. It was great. The cabinet in our new kitchen is the perfect height, which is good to know.

  + Tonight, we will have dinner with a self-identified anarchist who will tell me that ‘identitarian’ politics is destroying the ‘workers movement’.

  − I will tell him that if the first thing he hears when he hears the words ‘feminism’ or ‘queer’ or ‘Black liberation’ is that he’s not invited, then he is probably not all that invested in redistributing power sideways.

  − He’ll explain to me slowly and without pause the reasoning behind his position, as if Twitter had never been invented.

  − I’ll get a major cramp in my gut, think it’s food poisoning and go home before anyone has even finished their meal. By the time I’m in bed, the cramping will be gone completely.

  + Tomorrow, I’ll wake up early and read for an hour or two before getting up. Because I’m not scared of time running away from me now. Then I’ll make coffee and do whatever dishes there are and wipe all the surfaces before starting work.

  º Me, wishing domestic concerns had no impact on the day’s productivity.

  º Me, secretly delighting in becoming a crappy kind of homemaker.

  + But nothing’s a choice, though, is it? It was waiting for me all along.

  º None of the cabinets in the apartment have door knobs yet—I bought a box of them, they arrived the other day, but the screws are all the wrong lengths and I don’t know how to trim them, or even what tool I will need. This is probably the most bourgeois problem I’ve ever had. But I’m not bourgeois enough (yet?) to hire a person to work it out for me. And I don’t know handy people. Not here. So if I want to open a cupboard, I have to squat down and press my fingertips up hard on the edge of the door and pull it towards me.

  + This is more difficult than it probably sounds.

  º Things have slowed down and at the same time they have sped up. The cord part of my phone charger broke a few days ago and I haven’t bought a new one. I might get another one soon, but also I might not. Because I don’t really need a phone right now.

  + Thirty is old enough to realise the link between looking at other people’s photos of their fantasy lives and feeling fraught, fat and misinformed.

  º I don’t want as much now as I used to want.

  + I always longed for these hideous guttings, leaks of anguished, bloody love. And to wake up alone and unscathed. For my work to be anointed by the blessings of the someones higher up.

  − Not anymore.

  + Now I want an emotional range of five to eight. Nothing less than average. But nothing more than surprisingly good.

  + I have more now than I ever did before. Or maybe now I know it.

  Houses

  Behind the serene vases of flowers, behind the teapots, the rugs and the waxed floors, is the other, the true face of the house, the horrible face of the crumbled house.

  —Natalia Ginzburg, ‘The Son of Man’

  The city without love is an unjust and cruel city.

  —Elena Ferrante, Frantumaglia

  In the twenty-second house one night, it’s an apartment, really, you make me spanakopita. We agree that the spinach in Germany is okay, not limp and tasteless like the other supermarket vegetables here, and we wash it down with a three-euro bottle of bordeaux. We eat so early here, it’s disconcerting. The light drops out quickly at the four p.m. dusk—a smashed rose petal one second, blue-black the next—and the almost-always darkness of this city is almost-always suggestive of mild depression, or of moody love. From our narrow kitchen table, I look across the courtyard into other people’s yellow windows. For the first time in forever, I’m in love, and so, for a moment, I see every other couple in the world finishing their meals together, delaying bed with a bottle of something, while at the same time I feel that we have invented a new tradition. Called eating dinner together.

  We pack up the dishes and enter the warm burrow of darkness. The bedroom is the only room we keep heated with the old Berlin pipe heaters.

  …

  I don’t know whether to put in the things I do not remember as well as the things I do remember.

  …

  The way we lived—my family, that is, in childhood—was that Mum, Dad, my brothers and I shared a house. It shifted place and shape a few times, but it remained steadfast in its spiritual arrangement, which was more or less a rejection of the petty tyranny of the domestic. This manifested as a bohemian chaos that my friends feared and pitied, and that their parents, at least some of them, looked upon smilingly. Bedlam permeated the gaps between every object, the result of working, breathing life. But it would be careless to dismiss the moral superiority, the presumed nobility, of that mess. Grubbiness, in suburban life, can speak to the spirit that soars above the corporeal. If there’s not enough money for self-determination, at least you can have Charlie Parker playing in a room full of people who are screaming ‘where is my shoe/homework/cat’. Something honour-able about that. A family of opinionated men (even the females in our house were male) rejects beauteous domestic order as uptight, prissy and superficial. While every once in a while we’d have to ‘blitz’ the house—bundle up the rank laundry, hose down the dying shrubbery, powder every floor with lavender-scented carpet deodoriser and suck it up again with the vacuum—the idea that a space could be controlled by human discipline appeared never to cross my parents’ minds.

  A little boy who lived down the street, who was eventually forbidden to play with my brothers and me, had, in his house, a perfectly white room. His father was an air traffic controller and slept all day. His mother guarded the silence fiercely. These facts, the dewy weight of clouds, the starched pilot’s uniform, the white colour of sleep, have congealed in my memory of this room, this living room that was governed by the principle of sleep. It was no coincidence that children were prohibited from entering.

  My mother lit up with laughter when we reported to her this strange room. Cold, she’d say to describe people like that. Mean. Stingy.

  …

  In the twenty-second house, I dangle your underwear from a priggish finger. This classical pose says, Could you please pick up after yourself. It says, Do you see me here at all?

  It says, I long to live with you in a perfectly white room.

  White rabbit-fleece carpet; a wide bed piled high with down, silk, velvet; a bright marble desk. Dead silence
, and the whisper of a fingernail sliding over the page. The buoyant fragrance of narcissus.

  A windowless monad? I have declined the nobility of mess, wanting instead to live untouched by others. As though this childhood, emancipated from the hegemony of order, had no emancipatory effect on me at all.

  …

  Australians are passionate about property. I got that line off the internet, from the real-estate website Domain dot com, but it could have come from anyone’s mouth. We Australians are passionate about property.

  …

  You and I sit together looking at apartments in Athens online, eighteen thousand euro for a studio, fifty thousand for a two-bedroom in a down-and-out area. Being from Melbourne we know that down-and-out areas yield high returns in the long term, but perhaps we don’t know a thing about Europe, its history of forever down-and-outedness. You and I are flirting with property. Together we have pooled some money I have saved from my scholarship, from teaching and waitressing, you your prize money and a bump up from your grandmother’s will. And then; although I believe I can commit to you and I can commit to living long enough to pay the price of a passion for property, the idea of permanency, or a longer-than-two-year residency, fills me with terror.

  …

  The third house, home, maybe, was white double-fronted weatherboard with colonial green trim, then after a renovation frenzy heritage cream with colonial green trim and a colonial green Colorbond roof. A lot of colonialism for a cheap cottage built sometime during the post-war decades to accommodate the nobodies coming back from war, the nobodies coming from other countries, not knowing there’d be no garlic here, nor parsley. An elm so old it reached out halfway across the backyard. We called it an elm, but it was in fact a box elder maple. A quarter acre; chickens down the back; an ancient apple tree, diseased, with black-barnacled fruit. We installed the Hills hoist, added the fibro extension. Rose, the previous tenant of this quarter acre, was briefly, famously, the oldest person in town. Did we visit her before she died? Was she a hundred and nine?

  …

  The fifth house is the other home. Home Number Two. Home in this case is not a warm feeling but one of desolation. It’s been years since I lived there, yet still I dream about it with a dread that cannot be argued into good-sport spirits. A sullen and deprived teenager feeling. Brick cladding, and sinking into silt, the fifth house had no right angles; its doors were constantly ajar. The view from the lounge-room window was of a street lined with panel beaters. The sky above it was pugnaciously grey. After a decade or more there, my parents passed this house along to some person more passionate about home renovations than they ever were. Some keen bean in the property market. Then they moved into a rental near the station for five years, and then, now, to their final (or so they say) house, a brick thing with tall, wide windows at the furthest edge of the city. Dad finally retired, Mum will work forever, and the two of them have taken up an interest in indigenous botany. The garden they are building there is lovely.

  …

  After leaving my parents’ house at eighteen, I count sixteen moves, but possibly there were more. If you want to contact me, email or skype. Or just don’t. Old-fashioned mail is (usually) out of the question.

  Through my frequent use of iPhone apps, my movements are recorded and stored for private trade between corporations I have never heard of. This is not as…romantic? to me now as it might once have sounded. For example, I ordered a yearly planner online. To place the order, I was asked to enter all my personal data—birth date, sex, things that would seem irrelevant unless I was booking in for surgery. I ticked the terms and conditions box, of course, which presumably outlined all the ways in which this online store planned to sell my personal information. Normally, faced with such an invasion of privacy, I’d close my laptop, put on a broad-brimmed hat and tram it to a bookstore. But now is not normally—I’m staying temporarily in a city I don’t belong to, which doesn’t sell the planner I want in the language I speak. It’s cold outside. Freezing. These small desires for small comforts left unmet accumulate in a mundane sort of way. Nothing much happens with them; they just accrue to create a sense of incompleteness.

  Partly, I am in a city I don’t belong to because it is affordable, and I can work from home, from anywhere. Partly, I am here because I can be. Because I have let myself remain untethered, as frivolous a privilege as it is perilous. Partly, too, I am in a city I haven’t been invited to because melancholy elsewhere is more bearable than melancholy at home.

  In her book Traumascapes, Maria Tumarkin writes about her wish to avoid tourist activities at all costs when she’s abroad. Tourist, she writes,

  is a category from which I obsessively exclude myself. My inner need to have a different kind of presence is overwhelming. I buy no souvenirs, walk purposefully, eat and drink little and try to avoid, if I can, obvious landmarks and destinations…In other words, I try to enjoy myself as little as possible.

  Until I read that passage, I didn’t know it was possible to excise oneself from the category. When I leave Australia it’s rarely because of an enduring need I have to see the landmarks deemed historical by government men or guidebooks. More likely I am fleeing, for a moment, what I see as the oppressive small-mindedness of my people.

  It does not escape me that when I set foot in a city that is new to me, I am likely to encounter minds just as small, and just as oppressive, as those I am escaping, or my own. All people must live their daily lives, and to live a daily life is to live a narrow life. But the people in these places, ‘other’ places, places other than my place, crucially, are not my small-minded people—I wasn’t raised within their institutions, I don’t know the cruellest terms in their dialects—and so for a few weeks, a month, or more, I’m suspended from the burden of seeing reflected my own petty cruelties in the day-to-day world around me.

  Which is precisely what makes me a tourist, if I use Jamaica Kincaid’s thinking. Her description of the asymmetry of power in an encounter between the ‘native’ and the tourist:

  …some natives—most natives in the world—cannot go anywhere. They are too poor…They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go—so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself.

  …

  At an age when I didn’t know that I could do as I liked, that I could choose to remain untethered, that I could disappoint my parents or anyone else and it wouldn’t affect the spinning of the globe, I went overseas (on credit—barely legal), a gambling-dad kind of move, wildly irresponsible, but once there, overseas!, for the first time, I felt compelled to tick off the main attractions. I was never really sure what I was looking at, or why. When I arrived in Newcastle, English Newcastle, to meet Dad’s family for the first time, a sweet cousin my age I’d never met before picked me up. He drove me home the long way, awkwardly pointing out an obelisk at the axis of the roundabout we circled. Because his mother had suggested he do so. I felt ignorant for not knowing what it was I was supposed to see.

  In Paris—mecca of clueless tourism: cathedral, bridge, tower—I visited Oscar Wilde’s tomb at Père Lachaise, its elegant masonry eroding beneath layers of fetid lipstick. At the crypt, I waited. For something to click in me. I don’t think I expected to feel moved, exactly, but I wasn’t prepared for the nothing I felt in my heart. I didn’t leave greasy lip marks of my own, even though I had just read and adored Dorian Gray. I sat on a bench and wrote in my diary, a diary I was rigorously filling with untruths, preparing for the horror of somebody reading how desperate my day-to-day had become. Although I was overseas! I was still a sad teenage girl: my heart was torn up, I didn’t know how I was going to pay off my rapidly increasing credit-card debt, I was paralysed by the truth of my not being any of the peo
ple I longed to be. I wasn’t grown enough to untangle my desires from my reality. If being grown is desirable at all. My writing, even my diary writing, was terrible. Not because I didn’t know about sentences, or because I didn’t have literary ambitions, but because I couldn’t tell a truth. Insincerity, I now know, is the language of those who deny their interiority. Sitting in Père Lachaise that spring afternoon, I scribbled false feelings I’d had about Jim Morrison, wilted flowers, ancient death all around. A tourist. A bore. Nothing more.

  …

  The seventh house, down a mediaeval alley in central Barcelona, was formerly a flamenco bar. A squat, really. In this dwelling, my new friend Annalisa posed the topic for the afternoon’s discussion: With liberty there’s no justice; with justice there’s no liberty. A college application essay question she’d recently aced. We rolled up the overhead door that separated my garage-bedroom from the sulphur stench of the street, pulled the tatty couch to the edge where the house met the plaça and drank innocent tea in the sun.

  The question posed a serious problem for me. I wanted justice and I wanted liberty and I didn’t want to choose.

  It was summer, and the speed fiends from Italy had come over to Barcelona and taken up residence in the square my place backed onto. They had come across the sea because, they told us, the drugs were more plentiful in Spain that year, and sleeping rough was safer. These men and women, whose every cell depended on chemical gratification, struck me as vivid shadows: they’d slip between rage and affection, terrible agony and glorious elation. Like us. But more. But more.

  As the blistering heat drew on, a woman who slept curled up in a rug in a private corner of the plaça, wild curls on her head, became more and more primitive. Seeing her terrible freedom—in the clutches of dependence—I felt that I could very easily become her. That I was forever on the cusp of being her, and that this was not an identification I was supposed to feel. She stalked the alleyways with her chest completely bare. She held her emotions like trophies. From my window, I saw a man charge his flesh into her, for cash, or maybe for something harder. I looked away and then looked back. I thought about all the women I knew and didn’t know who compelled me, who I revolved around as though they were the sun. Women who were looking for something other than a home. Looking, maybe, for something harder. Would do terrible things to get it. The city’s smell, a complex funk from the bowels of ancient plumbing, I grew to associate with liberty, deep and rattling. Terror dark red freedom, and not, not ever, justice.