The Rats of Rush Common

By Michael Eades:

7.30am in the drizzle, waiting for a bus by the side of Rush Common in Brixton. I am watching two large rats as they bound across the wet grass and forage in the litter. It is broad daylight but they are not afraid. Their nut-brown bodies and long tails and darting movements are there for all to see as they zigzag around, bouncing from place to place, occasionally scuttling back to shelter in the hollow of an ivy-covered tree stump. 

In the haze and blur of the early morning, I see people walking across the common. Trudging along, hurrying to work, they see the rats and stop briefly. The look on their faces as they react is the same every time (the same as must surely be on mine). Shock, then disgust, then resignation. 

In folklore, rats are bad news. The Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions tells us that, ‘rats gnawing the hangings of a room is reckoned the forerunner of death in a family’. It tells us too that there are people in East Anglia ‘who will not say the word “rat” but will call it some other name, like Joseph. They say it is unlucky’.

When a brown rat crosses your path in the morning, in other words, it is bad luck. Little feet, sharp heads, long writhing tails slipping through the dew… It is a hex on your day to see this. Walking across a patch of municipal grass, lost in your own thoughts, it is unsettling to see that grass twitch and scurry beneath your feet. It is a sort of curse for this to happen: a bad omen, a glimpse into a dark and different world.

You never used to see rats in London. They were always there, I suppose, doing their own thing. But they stayed mostly out of sight. Over the past few years though they have become more and more visible. Ten years of austerity and council cuts, along with the litter-generating bonanza of lockdown, has brought them to the surface. They are there in the parks, rustling in the bushes. They are there on patches of wasteland at dawn and they are in the gutters and alleyways at dusk, spilling out of municipal bins. They dig underneath garden decking and tunnel beneath patches of fake plastic grass. They come up through the drains and gnaw through the floorboards of our flats, apartment blocks, housing estates. 

A century ago, in The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot used the figure of the rat to conjure a sense of the slinking dread running beneath the surface of his ‘unreal’ London. ‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation’, he writes. ‘Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse’. 

White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

Year after year, rattled by the claws of a rat’s foot and the swish of a tail through the undergrowth, we go about our business. In a city where you always have to tread carefully, avoiding pavement cracks and patches of spilt grease and litter disturbed by the foxes, the scurry of rats is becoming a common sight caught in the corner of your eye. A sudden movement twitches your head around with an alertness that you would rather not have, to catch a glimpse of something you would rather not see.

In a brief and fleeting moment, you stop and twitch and grimace. Your face says it all. ‘I do not want this’, says your face.  ‘I didn’t think that my life would be like this. When I was young, I hoped for better things than to be walking to work on Monday morning in the rain in South London and seeing rats foraging in my local park’. 

Eliot, again, whispering over your shoulder. ‘I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.’

Back on Rush Common, you put your head down and walk on. In the rain, you keep walking, past the bins and the picnic tables and the playground and empty swings and the litter. The rats are here and so are you, and you have a bus to catch, and what can you do? The rats of Rush Common crawl and swarm towards you across the grass, invincible. 

 In the end, I suppose, you will stop noticing them. Or, rather, you will learn to ignore them. You will learn not to flinch, or twitch, or curse superstitiously. You will learn not to notice the tails and the darting movements and the rustling of the litter and dead leaves. You will learn to live with them. 

That’s all that we have left. That’s all that there is to do. Walk on, in the sad morning, and ignore them. You just have to get used to the rats. 

***

Michael Eades is a writer and researcher based in London.  His work has appeared in places like Confluence, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Londonist, The i, and Reflex Press. His writing is rooted in an interest in ritual, folklore and (urban) nature. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @DrMichaelEades and www.michaeleades.net.

Book extract: Fragments of a Woman, by Emma Venables

Berlin, UNter den linden, 1937 – Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1998-011-01 / Hagemann, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0

It is always an exciting day when someone that we know and admire has their book published, especially when it concerns itself with our home city of Berlin. Emma Venables is an extremely talented writer (whose work we are proud to have published here on Elsewhere) and her debut novel Fragments of a Woman is both startling and impressive. Following the lives of five women in National Socialist Germany, I was extremely privileged to be given the opportunity to read an advance copy ahead of its publication this month. 

Exploring themes of identity, nationalism, womanhood and motherhood, trauma and the crimes of National Socialism, this book is unflinching, moving and beautifully written, and for this reader at least posed a number of uncomfortable questions about how we as readers approach certain types of characters and the expectations and preconceptions we bring to someone else’s words on the page. Fragments of a Woman tells stories of Nazi Germany, at a time when there are no longer many around who can share their experiences, and stories such as these, when written with diligence and intelligence, will be increasingly important.

This book holds the reader by the head and makes us look, which we do with both empathy and, at times, horror. It is a fine achievement, and we thank Emma for the chance to share this extract with you… – Paul Scraton

Fragments of a Woman – Chapter 4

By Emma Venables:

Gisela loves the smell of a Berlin bar, loves the smell of stale beer, of smoke, the hint of vodka, sweat, and polish. She loves the sound of good music – the whine of a violin, the tinkle of a piano. She loves the way heads turn when she walks in, even though the men around her, in this particular bar, are not inter- ested in her curves, her flesh, her pulse. A few smile, raise their glasses as she makes her way through the crowd. She raises herself to her tiptoes, looking over familiar and unfamiliar heads to find Volker. She recognises his back, would recognise it anywhere, for he always wears a waistcoat, and tonight his chosen one is her favourite shade of purple. 

She steps left, then right, around the patrons blocking her way. Someone steps on her toe, and she winces, utters a curse under her breath. She wafts a cloud of smoke from her face, scowls at the man responsible until finally she stands behind Volker. She reaches out and rubs his back. He turns, wobbling on his barstool. 

‘Steady on,’ she says. 

He leans back, resting against her shoulder, and gives her an awkward kiss meant for her cheek, but landing on her nose. 

‘Happy Birthday, Gisi!’ he says. ‘It’s 1934, and you’ve been on this earth exactly nineteen years today. And how honoured you must be to share your celebrations with the Chancellor of Germany.’ 

‘Have you been drinking for me or for him?’ she asks, pushing him forward. 

Volker turns, pauses, and squints as if trying to do a difficult equation. 

‘You, naturally, because you know my feelings for you know who.’ 

Gisela raises an index finger to silence him. He shrugs, waves a hand around as if to indicate everyone agrees. Gisela grabs his face between her hands and plants a kiss on his lips. 

‘You’re adorable when your face is all squished up,’ she says, and kisses him once again. 

Volker shakes himself free. ‘And you’re wearing an exquisite dress. Spin for me.’ 

Gisela obliges. ‘Kaufmann’s’ finest. His wife is quite the seam- stress,’ she says, smoothing the skirt of her navy-blue tea dress. 

‘I approve. I love the neckline,’ he says, with a wink.

‘Stop staring at my chest.’ She places a hand to her collarbone. 

‘You know your chest would have to be much flatter for me to feel any fire in my loins.’

They laugh. Volker turns to the bar, and waves for the barman’s attention.

Gisela taps the shoulder of man on the stool next to Volker.  ‘I think that’s my seat.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Don’t worry about it, but you need to move now.’

The man sighs but vacates the stool. Gisela sits down. 

‘You’re shameless,’ Volker says.

‘I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, it’s my birthday.’ 

Gisela takes a swig of her drink, leans her head back, and smiles at the damp ceiling above. She still feels slightly nauseous from eating the giant slice of cake decorated with a swastika a woman in the street handed her earlier. It’s my birthday, too, she had told the woman, but refused the second slice of cake she was offered. Although, she did take the flower from the boy in the Hitlerjugend uniform. A pink carnation, which she dropped into her handbag and forgot about until she got her purse out in Kaufmann’s to pay for her dress. She had felt around the lining for the loose petals and stem and asked Herr Kaufmann if he had a bin. 

‘God, I’m glad this place hasn’t been shut down yet,’ she says, moving her gaze to the row of bottles behind the bar. 

‘You, me, and every one of these beautiful people,’ Volker says. 

‘But it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?’ 

‘Don’t get mournful on your birthday, Gisi. You go down, I go down, isn’t that the way it’s always been? Ever since I was six and my mother dragged me away from you because you weren’t our kind of person, and your mother certainly wasn’t.’ 

‘Well, a respectable little German boy shouldn’t play with girls from the gutter.’ 

‘To hell with that. Cheers.’ 

Volker raises his glass and clinks it so hard against Gisela’s that a tiny crack appears in the rim; he runs his finger back and forth over the uneven surface. 

‘I almost got caught on my knees in the Tiergarten the other day,’ Gisela says. 

He wipes amber droplets from his chin. ‘You need to be more careful, Gisi.’ 

‘We were behind a tree, hidden by several trees, actually, but they’re relentless. In the end, I had to leap up, wipe my face, push the pervert I was with into action, and feign a proposal.’ 

‘A proposal?’ 

‘Yes. He was down on one knee by the time they appeared between trees, and I was professing that he’d have to ask my father for I wasn’t that kind of girl. They nodded and left sharply, which is a relief because when he stood up his limp cock was still hanging from his trousers.’ 

Volker’s head rests upon the bar now, and his shoulders shake. He still grips his half-filled glass of beer in his left hand. 

‘Are you laughing or crying? Because at the time I wasn’t sure what to do either.’

‘Both, I think,’ he says, his voice muffled.

Gisela rests her head on Volker’s shoulder. Even here the band strike up a chorus of ‘Zum Geburtstag viel Glück’ in honour of Adolf Hitler. Gisela and Volker remain silent, but Gisela smiles at the sardonic tone she can detect in the voices around her. Applause fills the room. Glasses clink. A barmaid places a cake on the bar. Gisela sighs. 

‘I’ve eaten more swastikas today than I care for. Shall we go?’ she asks. 

‘So early?’ Volker says, sitting upright.

‘I’ve got something to do at ten,’ she says.

‘You’ve got someone to do at ten, you mean,’ Volker says. ‘I suppose I could go and see Hans.’

‘Not home to mama?’

‘God, no. I’ll slip in in the early hours and she’ll never know. She sleeps like an elephant. I’ve really no idea how an elephant sleeps but I presume it’s heavily.’ 

‘I imagine she’s exhausted from all the celebrating today,’ Gisela says, sliding off her stool. 

‘Yes, she was feeling rather exuberant when I left. I had to tell her I was going to celebrate Hitler’s birthday with friends.’ 

‘I’m surprised she hasn’t dressed you in a little brown shirt.’ 

They step out onto Motzstrasse, and Gisela links her arm through Volker’s. She looks up and breathes in the cool air. She likes looking at the windows above, at the light escaping through cracks between curtains, knowing people go about their lives behind walls: that men kiss men, and women kiss women, and the government cannot stop them all. A car’s brakes squeal in another street. Someone opens a window above and the white noise of an un-tuned wireless seeps out. Volker lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and offers it to Gisela. He holds the cigarette while she inhales. As she exhales, she notices two men walking towards them.

‘We just saw you coming out of that bar over there,’ one of them says.

‘And?’ Gisela says, eyeing up their uniforms. ‘My boyfriend and I were enjoying a quiet drink, celebrating the Chancellor’s birthday. Then they broke into song and brought out a cake. Lovely cake. Swastikas and black icing. Looked just like that band on your arm. We all sang for the Chancellor. Then we ate cake.’ 

The men look at Volker. Gisela feels a tremor in his arm. She clenches her muscles, attempting to reassure him. One of them loops his fingers around his braces. 

‘And now my boyfriend’s walking me home to my mother, so we have to go. Good night.’ 

Gisela gently tugs on Volker’s arm, and they begin to walk. Volker stumbles slightly, but she holds him upright. The men do not seem to notice. She listens for the sound of their footsteps receding, determined not to speak until they have moved on. She turns her head a fraction to the right, pretending to admire the doorway of an apartment building, and from the corner of her eye watches them walk in the opposite direction. 

‘Are you OK?’ she asks. 

Volker nods, keeping his eyes on the street ahead. ‘I can’t believe you sleep with men like that.’ 

‘They pay me well, and sometimes they’re quite gentle. It’s as if they’ve spent all their hatred out here and they just want to give affection in bed.’ 

Volker shakes his head. Gisela takes his hand and grips it in hers. 

‘We must be careful, you and I,’ he says. 

He breathes sharply and throws his burnt-out cigarette towards the gutter. 

‘We must be bold and beautiful, as always,’ she says. 

He pulls her towards him, muffling her face against his chest. She puts her arms around him and breathes him in – aftershave he cannot really afford, cigarette smoke, the tinge of sweat – until the buttons of his waistcoat become uncomfortable against her face. 

***

Fragments of a Woman is published by Aderyn Press in paperback £8.99 and is available to purchase from your local bookshop or from the publisher directly. Support independent publishing!

Emma Venables' short and flash fiction has been widely published in magazines and journals. Her short story, ‘Woman at Gunpoint, 1945’ was a runner-up in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and Liverpool Hope University.

Film: Single Use Only by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

This piece started with the music, composed and produced by Patrick Wray at the start of 2023. It seemed a little sci-fi to me. Also it conjured for me a sense of Elsewhere, coincidentally the name of this journal, a place other than here. I thought about the places which evoked the early series Star Trek technicolour aesthetic and for me and these were definitely fairgrounds and seaside resorts. These spaces do have out-of-season periods too where the atmosphere changes.

The photographs are from Blackpool, Llandudno, and Sheffield and were all taken by me during the summer and autumn of 2022.

Last year I posted a picture of a sock I was knitting on Twitter and someone asked if I would photograph the sock turned inside out so they could see how I had constructed it. I felt like that was a really personal request, unseemly almost, like being asked to undress, and I resisted. Here I wanted to show some of these images inside out, from behind, as a kind of concession to the potential curiosity about the process, even though you never asked for it.

This is a companion piece to Surprise View.

***

Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

What We See 04: Sonnenallee Onwards

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Tom Rollins:

“It’s a grotesque contradiction, a spring evening in this part of town whose grime and greasepaint don’t so much conceal its Levantine-working-class nature as emphasize it”––only it’s winter now, late cretaceous tail-end of it at least, never ends until it does, sudden and too late. 

And anyway, here and now, the contradictions are grotesque but related to different things, different people. 

*

Passing the old petrol station and the Damaskus Konditorei, a newspaperman trying to interview someone on the street about the ethno-political significance of fireworks and who exactly is it that actually runs these shawarma restaurants, I am distracted momentarily by a man in a tarboush, red-velvet and tassel-topped, who is pushing a trolley full of cardboard boxes along the pavement. It is distracting—an orientalist cartoon for the feuilleton emplotted onto a street named after the sun that somehow always feels cold as concrete. 

But despite others’ best attempts, nothing here takes precedence. This is a mid-morning corso of faces, snatches of conversation, wholesale delivery men forever moving boxes into shopfronts. 

As I keep walking, someone is shouting the prices of vegetables, first in Arabic and then in German. Two young lads, arms interlinked, greet an older man, surprised, with a familiarity that is years old, from another place. “Peace be upon you, uncle, how are your things? When did you arrive?” Theirs are warm, knowing smiles that acknowledge the distances required for this conversation to be happening here. 

*

A Syrian storyteller said recently that, here, “even a plate of hummus isn’t like the plate of hummus [one] knows from back home…a bag of za’atar isn’t either.” 

It is, at the same time that it isn’t. Community that is not quite community, common access. Tied together by a loose thread, a street. 

*

Oh by the way, the other day I was reading my copy of Roth while waiting for the M41 opposite Pannierstr. Roth was either in the middle of describing the city as framed by an apartment window-frame or the other way round. I forget. 

I was holding the book in my left hand, my peripheral vision looking down framed by dragon-skin cobblestones and a smashed bottle of Pilsner Urquell. I couldn’t concentrate. 

And then I heard an Irish guy on a date, waiting at the bus stop, saying, “Well yeah…so the reason it’s called Kreuzkölln is because it’s more like Kreuzberg than Neukölln, the restaurants are nicer, even though it’s still in Neukölln.” 

*

Off the bus, further south, the city’s dinosaur bones start to bear themselves, vertebrae-bumps of cast-iron and brickwork still traceable by hand and foot. 

Two bricks thick, the cobbled trace of the Berlin Wall darts off, crosses a road past a Lidl then takes in a really big breath. Shape-shifting through a 19th-century railway arch, it reappears on the other side, and casually walks off down the pavement. 

The Ringbahn passes overhead, and a new addition to the dual carriageway ringroad is being built underneath it. Somehow in between, an A-road leads south toward forgetful commuter towns. The canal is never far away.

Dumper trucks are shipping the sandy, loamy earth away from a construction site for the new road—how many more of them would it take to uncover all that has happened here?—digging beyond the wasteground shrubs, plastic bottles and crisp packets, past the concrete foundations of the Wall and through the underlying strata of abandoned wire-frame spectacles, rotting leather boots and saxophones, Prussian moustaches, novels about aristocratic romances frustrated in corsets and drawing-rooms.

This is what the graves of dinosaurs look like, the evidence of mass dying, bones on bones. 

***

Tom Rollins is a researcher and writer from the north of England, based in Berlin after several years in the Middle East. He's interested in place and displacement, political geography, walking, and Syria. 

What We See 02: A Meadow, A Park

Photo Vincent Mosch © ZLB

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Daniel Perlman:

The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek is open on Sundays. SoAGB the program is officially called. There are no librarians, they are forbidden to work on the sabbath, but as long as the library hosts events and activities the doors may remain open to the public.

—

The meadow in front of the library is a pleasant place to sit on Sundays and weekdays alike. Staff set up lawn chairs when the weather is fine, hauling them out of a blue storage container. The Frischluftbibliothek it is officially called. In the late afternoon, if you look up from your book, you might see a gray heron flying past Halleches Tor, over the Landwehrkanal.

—

There is a feather-filled stairwell in Hallesches Tor that leads to the U1/U3. The windows confuse the pigeons and they get trapped and some of them die.

—

A lanky, long-faced fellow in stiff dungarees visits the AGB nearly every summer’s day. He sits on the low stone wall that rings the meadow and releases his pets on the grass, two box turtles, then turns his back and smokes cigarettes. The turtles take off as soon as they touch ground, making a beeline for the east. Most are delighted by the reptiles, but some simply snort and get back to work, as if to reassure themselves that they have better things to do than look at turtles. By dint of some internal turtle timer the man always knows when they’ve strayed too far. He strides forth, snatches them up, and rubs their wagging heads on the way back to his seat. Then he puts them down again; the scene repeats. 

—

Sometimes the man trades out his turtles for a remote controlled car which he crashes at top speed into Doc Martens on the sidewalk. 

—

One Sunday at the Frischluftbibliothek a man with a ponytail and cut off sleeves crawls on the ground beside me. He wears a plastic bag over his hand and scours the earth with a diligence I find disquieting. For over thirty minutes he’s at it, picking up debris. At last he rises. He ties a belt around his waist, a red band around his head. Kung-fu masters are permitted to work on the sabbath, apparently. Two children appear, pushed forward by their parents. Punch! Kick! Roll!  One of the pupils promptly quits. The remaining child wavers. Now, kung-fu master, bring your training to bear! Your dignity hangs in the balance! He adjusts his headband, draws a deep breath. . .but his little apprentice defects. Berlin Berlin/Du heiße Braut, how can you be so cruel?

—

When the wind is right, as are the time and the day of the week, smoke wafts over the meadow. Its source is the park next door. Hundreds of people, friends and family, claim their spots and set up their grill kits. Chairs and fold-out tables, footballs and paddles, charcoal semaver, fleisch and sides. Not a kartoffel in sight. An unkempt man ambles from camp to camp, piling his plate high with kebabs and cutlets, gladly given. He is not partial to vegetables or rice and accepts them, if he must, with a look of undisguised disgust. 

—

I sit in this park on a bench and inch from one end to the other to keep in the oak tree’s shade. A panorama of joy around me. I fill up on it greedily.

—

One evening at Grillfläche Blücherplatz (for so it is officially called, after the Prussian General who sent Napoleon back to Paris from Waterloo) I see a woman walk down the path that bisects the park. Sinewy, tanned, wearing faded Camp David, she pauses to admire a plastic pink scooter and even takes a picture of it. I return to my book. Entschuldigung! Entschuldigung! A girl, no older than nine, runs down the woman who is absconding with scooter in hand. I settle in for a session of that favorite local pastime. Bystanding, it is officially called. 

The girl is slight, patient and polite, but it soon dawns on her that this is no innocent encounter. She puffs out her chest, pluck undaunted, and holds her ground against the stranger until, baby on hip, her mother arrives. Surely, now, the woman will relinquish her ill-gotten prize. But no. She takes out her phone. She displays the picture as evidence that the scooter is her’s by right. So brazen is the claim that mother and daughter are rendered momentarily speechless. But only momentarily. Two aunties arrive, crowding the would-be thief. Her plan was to sell the scooter, I think, but who’s to say there’s not a little one in her life in dire need of a gift? She releases the toy and flees.

—

The aggrieved return to their grillplatz, I to my reading. Not really of course. I continue to spy. I hear them tell their comrades what happened. The little girl chimes in from time to time, emphasizing certain details with wild gesticulations. But an even grander gesture is in order. The entire clan rises as one. Young and old, men and women, they take off marching through the smoke, hot on the trail of their antagonist. Somewhere, the ghost of General Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher tips them an approving nod.

—

Will they call the police if they catch her? Demand an apology? Cuss her out? It is a moot point of course, she is long gone. Sure enough, a minute later the group returns, foiled, triumphant. 

***

Daniel was born and raised in the USA. He earned his MFA in Fiction from New York University. Currently he lives in Reinickendorf where you'll find him shopping at Penny.

What We See 01: Tentstation

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Jen Metcalf:

Berlin was once a city of empty spaces. Many were voids created by bombed-out buildings from the war, and a wide scar left by the death strip that sliced the city in half for 28 cruel years. I didn’t move to Berlin, didn’t start “building my Berlin” like a Colson-Whitehead New Yorker, until 2006. But even then – decades after the bombs had stopped falling, the Wall had been chipped away, and the city had stitched itself back together – even then, Berlin was a city of vacancies.

The year I arrived, one of them, a former lido, had become a campsite. Tentstation. It occupied a leafy, paused space smack-bang in the centre of Berlin, right by the shiny new main station. Prime real estate given over to four young Germans on a temporary contract that should have ended after one year, but went on for six. 

The lido’s 50-metre pool remained, drained of water, but still blue-painted and with graffiti splashed over the walls. A basketball net had been fixed up in the deep end. The diving blocks and diving boards stood motionless at the edge, waiting for the swimmers to return. Instead, they got young backpackers, local clubbers, and fashion shows. Then the dancers came.

That was us. A patchwork community of lindy hoppers. We were scientists, teachers, office workers, freelancers. We were in our 20s and still new to the city, or in our 70s and part of the fabric since the days of the Wall. Most evenings we could find each other in spaces all over the city and dance the day out of ourselves to Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and all that jazz. A world away from the techno thudding in Berghain or Weekend.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

Sometime around 2009, we began gathering by the pool on summer Sundays, surrounded by trees heavy with leaves, the needled disco ball of the TV Tower just visible over the top. As we walked down the path from the campsite entrance, the rumble of the city faded, replaced by the DJ’s music weaving through the bushes to meet us. At first just the suggestion of that familiar eight-count beat, the rise and fall of a song. Then hooting trumpets, rolling drums, and Ella singing louder until we were there, at the edge of the pool, its blue floor already part-filled with couples connected in an easy embrace, bouncing and twisting their steps to the beat. One, two, triple-step, one, two, triple-step. On and on in a hundred different variations as the sun set, the fairy lights clicked on, and the night air began to cool our sweat-soaked skin. 

After those evenings I would cycle home, breathless and in flight. Soaring past the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and down Unter den Linden. All of Berlin’s proudest buildings and boulevards lit up against the ink-black sky, carrying their centuries of history forward in steadfast, unforgettable bricks and mortar that are familiar even to those who have never visited. 

Tentstation was never going to join those ranks. They are out of its league. And anyway, it was never meant to survive. After six summers, the actual owners of the land were finally ready to send in the diggers. I never saw the construction site, never watched the heavy machinery in action, but I recently found a photograph online. A still life of a death. A white digger is parked by the pool. Its steel teeth have ripped up the grass where the tents once stood, turned it into mounds of dirt and excavated a mess of cables that might be electricity, or maybe they have been brought there by construction workers – ready to tie around a diving board and rip it out of the ground. The pool’s blue, graffitied walls are torn at regular, blocky intervals that suggest the teeth of the digger’s bucket have been gnawing at it. 

When the ground was level and the diggers had retreated, the architects and their team moved in. They built a new, shallower pool, surrounded it with timbered patios, sun loungers, and low-roofed buildings. This is Vabali Spa. It offers Eastern-themed wellness and overnight stays to white-robed, well-off customers. I hear it’s very popular, though I haven’t seen it for myself. This description is entirely thanks to Google Images. A few Christmases ago a client of mine gave me a voucher for a day’s pampering there. It occurs to me now that I must have mislaid it. 

And so the void disappeared. Of course it wasn’t the first, and it was small fry by comparison. This is Berlin. The city is laden with places that were once hollow ghosts of the past, now restored to their former grandeur, or filled with bustling office districts, tourist sites, and shopping zones. Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, and all the buildings we dancers flew past as we cycled home beneath the sky over Berlin. Chances are good that you’ve heard of them all. But I doubt you’ve heard of Tentstation.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

So many parts of a city are never visible to those who don’t live here – never even visible to all those who do live here. My boyfriend has been a Berliner since the 1990s. He is an honest-to-goodness German, not just a card-carrying one like me. And still he had never heard of Tentstation. Why would he have? He has built a different Berlin to mine, one constructed of people I will never know, places I will never remember. 

And yet all of Berlin’s small, secret places like the pool live on, even once they are gone. Not because they are so solid a war can’t crumble them, or so important that they will be rebuilt. But because we were there, danced among their graffiti, took care not to step backwards into the deep end, found friends and a skill we never knew we had. They survive because – to borrow again from the great Colson Whitehead – “what was there before is more real and solid to us than what is there now”.

***

Jen Metcalf is a copywriter, translator, and editor who arrived in Berlin in 2006 and accidentally made it her home. Having spent most of her adult life working on other people’s texts, she recently decided to start creating her own. Berlin is a recurring feature in her essays, which she uses to try and understand her place in a city that now feels like a partner in a long-term relationship -- with all the joy, disappointment and compromises that entails. 

Photos by Joerg Heidemann, who organised the swing dance evenings at Tentstation (and DJ'd and danced at them, too).

The Old Fishing Village

By Holger Klein:

For us it was once a landmark, the old rusty wind wheel beside the channel connecting the small fishing harbour with a large lagoon, a former bight of the Baltic. The wheel was the first we saw when we approached the harbour on the new road from the west. Once the wheel drove a wooden Archimedean Screw which drained the surrounding wetlands for agricultural use. In our early years, we visited the wheel occasionally, musing how it works. 

The lagoon was separated from the Baltic by a spit which was extending westward over centuries until only the small channel-like outflow was left. During the last decades I often visited the harbour at the mouth of the channel, but it was only a few years ago when I realised that the wheel is no longer visible from the road. Rusty and motionless, it is now hidden behind high trees and only to be seen from the small bridge crossing the channel. 

In early summer, I took the small path (No Trespass!) through high reeds towards the wheel. I was curious if the Archimedean Screw was still in its place, possibly even workable. But there was no way through. The shaft for the inflow was totally overgrown by thick brambles, unpassable in shorts and without a machete. But a few metres away I found a new drainage ditch where an electric pump took over the wheel’s work. 

For me, this wind wheel stands for all the things that changed during the last decades, in the harbour and in the old fishing village about 2 km to the east. It was by the late 1960s when we discovered the village and the harbour, surrounded by lakes, large beech woods and endless fields in the hinterland. 

On our first visit to the village, we took the old small and curvy road leading north-eastward from the main road directly to the beach near a row of green wooden sheds. Here the fishermen stored their gear, mended their drying nets suspended between wooden poles, or repainted their boats. In the shallow bight small open fishing vessels were gently rolling at their moorings, gulls and other waterfowl soaring in the wind. We instantly fell in love with this place and for me it felt like paradise.

On both sides of the village the cliff line changes into smooth shores. In the west lies the former bight with the channel and the wheel, the spit secured by a long dike. Eastwards lies a smaller lagoon, separated from the sea by a barrier beach. It is also a former bight, connected to the sea by a small, meandering outlet. Both lagoons are surrounded by extended wetlands and reed belts, partly protected as bird reserves. 

All along the coast are broad sand and pebble beaches, surrounding the shallow bight with a seabed of sandy patches, big boulders, and seagrass beds. The colour of the water changes according to the weather, offering a range from a dull steel grey over all shades of blue and green, culminating in a tropical turquoise over the sand beds on sunny days. I especially love sunny days when cloud fields are drifting moderately over the sky, causing a pattern of continually changing water colours with different intensities.

One or two years after our first visit my father bought a holiday apartment on the backside of the cliff. Here I spent most of my leisure time for years: First school holidays and weekends, and later, with my own kids, also a lot of our vacations. Right from the beginning I loved to walk the beaches for hours at all seasons, becoming a real beachcomber, a passion I’m still following today. 

However, gradually things were changing. The little harbour was enlarged and is now a marina for leisure boats, the fishery declined step by step, many houses have been renovated and enlarged, and of course new houses and hotels were built. The pub favoured by young people was closed and a spacious golf course was laid out just a few kilometres away. New green sheds were added to the old ones, hosting a sail and surf school and a cosy café. Today there are only one or two part-time fishers left who still use their sheds for the initial purpose. 

The coastline changes gradually too. Due to heavy landslides after strong, eastern gales the cliff retreated metre by metre over the years, an accelerating process due to climate change with severer and more frequent storms and higher sea levels. On the other side, the local campground at the small lagoon was closed, removed and changed into a nature and bird reserve, a place we often visit to observe birds. Not all changes are bad. 

The surrounding landscape changed only marginally. The lagoons are still surrounded by their broad reed belts, the large beech woods not cleared. Like a long swell on the open ocean, the seemingly endless fields are still waving over the soft moraine ridges, partly still owned by local counts. A few weeks ago, I swam together with my youngest brother out into the bight and we realised that, compared to the last decades, from this perspective only marginal changes are recognizable. However, the locals have to make their living and must adapt to the demands of modern tourism and therefore there are more changes to come during the next few years. 

Some years ago, the municipality set up a couple of plates along the promenade, showing old black and white pictures of the village. They were taken in the first years of the last century, about 120 years ago. Some photos show the proper village and we recognized a few things which we could still remember, though they disappeared during the last decades. Other pictures show the old fishermen sitting together on a bench in front of a shed, smoking their pipes and looking over the bay. Other pictures show them mending the nets or processing their catches in a small smokehouse. 

When we stroll through the village, occasionally times are merging. We ‘see’ how it looked a few decades ago and how things are today. It’s like walking in the same place simultaneously at two different times. And whenever I approach the village on the old avenue lined with mighty oaks on both sides and negotiate the narrow curves and the ups and downs of the road, when I pass the neolithic grave-mound to the right and the manor house and the wide view over the great lagoon to the left, I’m the boy once more on the day we discovered the village. 

***
Holger Klein is a retired oceanographer who spends a lot of time exploring the coasts of the Nordic Seas and isles, and is a regular hiker in Lapland. 

Passages: on the Rue des Thermopyles

“It was a beautiful street. The street of homeless cats, she often thought. She never came into it without seeing several of them, prowling, thin vagabonds, furtive, aloof, but strangely proud. Sympathetic creatures, after all.” – Jean Rhys, Quartet

By Anna Evans:

In the fourteenth arrondissement of Paris, starting from Metro Denfert-Rochereau. On the trail of passages and impasses, courtyards and gardens. With a scattering of notes and addresses to guide us through our route. Wide streets branch off in different directions from the centre, where the great lion looks out. We walk along the Avenue d’Orléans, renamed Avenue General Leclerc after the liberation of Paris. The old street name has been retained only crossed out. Strikethrough: a line drawn through, as though to keep the name still present. 

Along Rue Daguerre, past the pink house that was Agnes Varda’s, there are patterns of white cloud where the sun is starting to break through, to dazzle. The elegant white facades of the buildings appear lighter, so that the street seems to open to us, as we absorb the decorated iron balconies, shutters and flowers in window boxes, pavement cafés, and glimpses in shop windows. We like to spot the launderettes and tabacs, the neighbourhood shops and bakeries.

In Place Jacques Demy, in a square shaded by trees, we sit and drink coffee. In the park there are basketball courts and ping pong tables. An old merry go round and tables with chess squares painted over them, a few old books left there for the taking. The sun makes patterns through the trees.

In photographs taken along the way are glimpses in passing of buildings and streets. Compositions of a moment in time. Walking along the Rue des Plantes in search of an impasse. Impasses, the streets that come to a dead end, a cul-de-sac, that most evocative of Parisian place names: a passage with no way through. 

The Impasse du Moulin Vert. An enclosed passage, a cobbled street with the feel of a village. There are houses and buildings of different styles, statues and carvings, hidden entrances. Gates conceal gardens and terraces, trees growing tantalizingly across the walls. At the end of the passage, a courtyard with old style lamps and green shutters on the windows. There are pots of flowering plants, pink roses, geraniums, and begonias. An elegant pink and white building with iron balconies and ivy growing up its side. Shadows of trees make patterns on the walls.

The streets of this area, Pernety, have the feel of another time. Narrow streets and smaller houses, shutters and chimneys mingle with Haussmann-style facades. Enclosed gardens tucked away behind trees and railings, with enticing corners to sit and read among grass and sunlight, green and shaded. The village meets the city as people gather with friends or pause to eat their lunch, making use of the space, scattered sounds of music.

A mural with flowers and bold lettering along the wall, the words of Louise Michel, a revolutionary of the Paris Commune: La révolution sera la floraison de l’humanité comme l’amour est la floraison du coeur[1]. 

Turning the corner to find a passage, the Rue des Thermopyles, a narrow street paved with cobblestones that feels quiet and secluded. There are low-rise houses linked by leafy arches, blue shutters, and red flowering roses. Some of the buildings seem like artists’ studios, the sense of Montparnasse in another time. Climbing vines and wisteria grow across the passage and trail between the houses and branches cover windows. Window boxes and planters, pots of different shapes and sizes, imperfect, unexpected, like a story opening outwards.

On the corner is a yellow house with a black painted door, creepers grow across the building and pots of plants and flowers. We hear music, the sound of a piano through the open window and a voice singing, soaring like a moment in a film. Each day, a reel of moments. 

Looking back along the cobbled lane there is a sense of green everywhere, hushed voices from the shared garden. The shade of trees and dappled sunlight, rooftops, and blue sky. Each glimpse is like framing a different fall of shadow and sunlight and sometimes the street seems to lengthen depending on the angle I look, as figures emerge and fade into the space of the passage and around corners. I want to notice every detail, to know the story behind every door.

Cats emerge from behind windows, unobtrusively free, and stroll along the cobbled alleyway looking for a patch of sunlight to sprawl under. I think of the city as viewed by its cats, who prowl its spaces, its hidden courtyards, and enclosed places. For the cats there are escape routes in every dead end, and no forbidden entrances. 

We take our time, absorbing every angle, torn between the wish to linger here, and the draw of the blue sky ahead and what comes next; of what other hidden places we might find. The city becomes an endless series of movements, experienced in passing. A passage is made to be followed.

***

Notes: [1] The revolution will be the flowering of humanity as love is the flowering of the heart.

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Film: Surprise View by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

By Sarah Alwin:

When I come here it is not the quiet of the landscape that I experience but the residual resonances of the city which unsettle my head and my heart. It is a place of outlandishness and of natural and stinging beauty. Its impertinence is overwhelming. This space is full of busyness and clarity and colour. 

My friend Patrick Wray made the music for this piece, knowing that there was noise and strangeness in this. His music glues this work together.

I took these photographs from the end of 2019 to the start of 2023 at Surprise View, a ten minute drive from my home in Sheffield. I filtered the digital images with my printer and scanner and by stitching into them. What used to be a source of frustration (my beleaguered printer running out of ink) has become, for me, a new way of seeing this beloved place.

***

Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

Statue in Bronze and Andesite

By Fiona M Jones:

The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours. 

History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away. 

You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win. 

St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals. 

And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago. 

***

Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.