Last night I walked home from the Italian bakery in Akazienstraße. I bought a fresh loaf of bed and a slice of radicchio and salsiccia pizza that the woman cut into sixths. I was finishing the last square when Alison called from New York. The cherry trees I passed were fluffy with blossom. Over 10,000 dead here, she told me...
1) A length of twine is looped around our balcony doors’ brass latch. One end is tied to a cloth bag I bought at the Sir John Soane's Museum two summers ago when my eleven-year-old daughter and I went to London for a summer holiday. Last week, my friend James cycled over from Schöneberg. His wife wanted something easy to read. He had loaned me a copy of Sally Rooney’s ‘Conversations with Friends’ and wondered if he could have it back. I mentally debated how the transfer might work. Could I wedge it in the post-box and buzz him in? Could I leave it on the pavement ping-pong table and cross my fingers that no-one would take it before he came? ‘Too bad we don’t have a basket to lower it down in’, I laughed as we spoke. My daughter’s ears pricked up.
My husband pooh-poohed the idea, thought we were mad. But my daughter found a ball of yarn, then the length of twine. I took the cloth bag from the cupboard. We stood in the blinding April sunshine keeping watch. No, that was just a neighbour. Yes, that was James, on his neon-pink frame, swinging off his bike, lifting up his helmet. From three stories up, we could just make out his bearded face squinting at the sky. My daughter fed out the line, breathless with giggles, as I watched. The bag went down one story, two stories, three, and hovered above the cobblestones just as the twine came to an end. James took out Sally Rooney and the surprise paper bag of chocolate cookies. ‘Thank you!’
When we brought the bag back up, it held a copy of Han Kang’s ‘The Vegetarian’. So far I’ve left it on the window ledge in the study, in quarantine.
2) Last year, like this year, tiny florescent-green blossoms litter the pavements off the trees. (What trees? I would like to know.) This year, unlike last year, they feel sacred. The flower shops have closed and the only elements of spring in my life are those I find on my late-afternoon walks. I kneel and photograph the scattered patterns to take the colour home. Most flowers are tender, uncrushed, their transparent sides billowed out like miniscule lanterns. Not many people are walking just now.
3) That first night, when the lockdown had been announced but hadn’t yet begun, I walked to the supermarket and browsed the aisles. Pasta was gone; beans and pulses were gone; rice was gone; flour was gone; potatoes were decimated; only the niche milks were left. ‘I’ve already reached a point of satiety’, I told a friend later and felt glad. When I looked at the ash-covered goat’s cheese I wondered if one could buy such foodstuffs as a sort of valediction, knowing they might not be there to buy again for months or years? Could you savour as you mourned? I thought not.
I left the store seized by an atavistic need. I went to the Asian supermarket, and bought a ten-kilogram bag of rice, urid dal, toor dal, moong dal. I decided what I needed was the diet that had sustained my ancestors with very little for generations.
4) Last night I walked home from the Italian bakery in Akazienstraße. I bought a fresh loaf of bed and a slice of radicchio and salsiccia pizza that the woman cut into sixths. I was finishing the last square when Alison called from New York. The cherry trees I passed were fluffy with blossom. Over 10,000 dead here, she told me, and the other day I had to wait over 40 minutes to get into the local C-Town. The price of eggs has tripled. Two close friends are seriously ill. The sunlight was so piercing I could hardly see.
5) Five hundred puzzle pieces are scattered across my daughter’s bedroom floor. In a bid to limit the amount of time she spends on devices, we have agreed on a solution whereby she can press play on a podcast on the tablet in the kitchen, connect the Bluetooth speaker, then bring the speaker through to her room to listen. We have been wary of opening the floodgates to screens and devices, even as we found it hard to argue when she reasoned that she had to access her assignments on the Google Classroom her teachers had set up, or organize video chats with her classmates to coordinate who was going to complete which quadrant of their joint science poster on the circulatory system. I frown when I walk into rooms and see her bent over a screen. Yet we had to concede defeat after she watched a TikTok video and whipped up the most delicious ricotta gnocchi and a lemony pesto dish from scratch.
Lucinda Tesseme is an artist and writer.
