Sometimes you expect too much
The last time I saw Brigitte was in Paris just over a year ago, the first time since the Immigration doors closed behind her at Tullamarine. That was in 2006. We had been close then, but in Paris we read contentedly from Plato.
Sometimes I am as frustrated by her enquiring tenacity as much as I adore it. That's how I know I still love her. In Paris, whenever we visited a museum just after lunch we were always escorted out by attendants who wanted their dinner.
On the day she taught me to drink wine from ceramic yoghurt pots on the Champ-de-Mars, she asked why I was in a bad mood:
‘What did you expect?’
‘Something more. Enlightenment maybe.’
‘Sometimes you expect too much. Today we saw the city from Sacre Coeur. We went to a nice little church and saw some beautiful light through the windows. We saw where Picasso lived. ... It’s a very nice day. There is blue sky everywhere and we are drinking wine by the Tower and eating fresh bread and cheese. You shouldn’t spoil it by getting grumpy and being in a mad mood.’
It started in a Norman restaurant on the Rue des Abessess in Montmartre, where we saw a old man dreaming in the mirror.
The crepe I ordered was pasted with indescribably putrid smelling pig meat – a Norman speciality I later discovered inside Rouen sausages – which even semi-sweet cider could not defeat. The steam twisted itself olfactorily into my brain. The flavour stuck to the roof of my mouth. Instinctively my jowls stretched disgust across my face. And I got into to trouble for not sending it back.
‘It’s not off. The woman next to me has the same and she's eating it. It just smells very bad.’
‘You should tell them.’
‘I won’t leave a tip.’
‘Then the restaurants just say “Bloody Tourists” and they won’t want you to come in.’
Suits me. I ate half, ordered more cider, did not leave a tip. We spent time apart that afternoon and met outside the Musee D’Orsay before we made our picnic near the Eifel Tower.
That afternoon, in the simple way she waited to see if I was still sore from lunch, I saw the love that inhabited some of my days in Melbourne. Brigitte reminds me from afar that the divine is as brief as autumn Sun through stained glass and that immutable love exists in the ever forming and reforming amalgam of patience and trust and the gentle and assured courage to ask why.
***
Where am I sleeping?
She lives in Cottbus now, a small industrial German city near the Polish border about two hours by train from Berlin. I arrive in the early evening of a dark late autumn Friday.
It is cold and my lips are cracked from the wind. But every German city has a Christmas Market to warm and sweeten your lips in December, with red and orange lights, candles and sugar-roasted nuts, and pork steaks and sausages and mulled wine.
Sometimes warmth is written into words: light bulbs are Glühbirnen – glowing pears – and mulled wine is Glühwein, which we drink with rum, keeping our gloveless fingers on the cups.
Her flat is on the third floor of a drab building on a busy corner that turns the traffic in and out of town. It has five rooms branching off a long corridor that runs left and right of the front door. It’s mostly a student house and all the rooms are taken. Having a lounge room would just up the rent – now €150 a month, including bills (about $A200) – by a quarter. The only common area is a small kitchen.
‘Where am I sleeping?’
‘In my bed.’ … ‘I’m staying at Rudi’s.’
She only told me she had a boyfriend about a week ago, and when I ask she tells me they have been together about a year. It is easy to calculate that it started soon after our week in Paris. She told me then that whenever she met gorgeous and generous men, she had no feelings. Now she seems settled.
For some reason I am too. The clean sheets on the bed? The matter of fact way she tells me the arrangements without being too clinical? Or that in Melbourne we were never haunted by desperate longing when we spent time apart, or together?
Her room is cavernous and uncomplicated. It is softly lit with a pointed red star Christmas light that hangs from a thick curtain rod, just inside a huge window.
'You can leave it on. It's nice to have in the winter.'
She would never have said that in Melbourne. Now some aesthetics are worth enjoying in spite of the planet.
Underneath is an architect’s trellis table with music and candles, a computer and miscellaneous papers. Her clothes hang from a rack just inside the door. There are books in German and English and Spanish, some photography and travel guides, and a comfy chair by the bed to read in. Above is a 14-foot ceiling with space to pencil my thoughts on, but when I lie down all I want to know is why I didn't pull the plug on the light.
There is a photo of Rudi on the bookshelf she took somewhere in the mountains. His broad smile pops his dimples in to his cheeks and softens his five-day stubble. By the way he looks at the lens, she can only be happy. Brigitte tells me about their vague plans to go to South America for six months in about a year.
‘A year ago I would have left for South America easily,’ she says. ‘This flat is not so nice, and there is no real camaraderie here. But I have stayed because it is cheap, and I always thought I would just leave. It’s been three years now.
‘And I feel quite at home in Cottbus. I never thought I would. I have finished my studies. I have a job. Everything is close by. There are coal mines and power stations near the city and it can be a bit polluted, but Rudi and I go running and to yoga every week and it's not so bad. We sing in two choirs. The life is very nice here actually.
‘I don’t need to go to go away anymore. But it will be good for Rudi to travel a bit. He hasn’t much. He’s a bit younger, still finishing his studies.’
Each time she leaves her flat in those few days she stands at the front door, smiling, waiting for me to disappear from the corridor into her bedroom, as though she wants a picture to remember. That was the way she left Melbourne too, but in Melbourne she had a plane to catch, and it was me who watched her disappear.
***
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