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I am cycling
home on a windy autumn night, leaves blowing across my path, seen patchily and
scrappily in occasional lamplight that seems to thread through the branches
like the wind itself. I am carried in and out of darkness, and now as it gets
later there nothing and no-one on the roads but me. The wind rustles and groans
in the trees around me, but otherwise it is silent except for the regular
revolve of the bike chain and the squeak of the pedals.
I am approaching the border.
Just to my right was once forbidden territory, East Germany running alongside West
Berlin. The last houses veer off to my left, their lights extinguished. I am
thinking of home, not far now, a freewheel through a few more streets at the
edge of Berlin, then warmth and light and bed.
Suddenly, a hundred yards ahead
of me, where the road turns to cobbles and horses sleep in their stalls in the
dark, a wild boar gallops across the road. Silently, out of the shadows,
through the yellow light of a streetlamp, hedged round with darkness, and into
the shadows again. Its silhouette is a single furious mass of direction and
speed as it swerves across the street, and I can't see the gleam of its eye,
just the shape of its tusks, its heavy head, its short, fast legs, the
intensity of its whole body leaning into its speed as it runs alone into the
woods and is gone, gone into a blackness that I nearly cycled into a few
minutes before, before a sense of danger told me to go the other way.
I have stopped short, waiting,
holding my breath. Now I let my bike roll on down the incline of the road, at
first slowly, then I speed it up. I pass the entrance to the boar's territory
to my right, looking into the dark to try to see it, but I don't slow down in
case it comes back. The thought of the boar stays with me, that night and the
next day and the days thereafter, the image of its desperate shape, hurtling
into the night as I waited motionless on the dark road. Each of us alone, and
separate, and scared, but also intent on home, going somewhere the other had no
idea of.
A few days later, I am chatting
to someone, quite casually, and as we talk, I realise that she knows things I don't
know about this city. She was talking about a bus trip she'd taken to get to
somewhere or other, a totally unimportant conversation, but I realised I'd
never taken that bus to get to that particular place. "And then we went
past..." My friend named a theatre I'd never heard of, a shop I'd never seen.
And I realised that we live in completely different cities. Not metaphorically, but
actually. Her city is different to mine, although there are points where they
intersect, names they share, buses that go through both of them. So, I thought,
does that mean there are three and a half million different Berlins, not just
the one? And I thought of how no-one, not one single person in Berlin was there
when the wild boar ran past. No-one saw it but me.
We live in different cities,
millions of us living alongside each other, each of us alone. But from one
city, you could find a way into another, perhaps. Unless something stops you. A wall built by people who think that everyone lives in fixed,
determined groups, in a single city bounded by unchanging beliefs, that one person,
one group, cannot possibly cross into the city of another. Or belief itself; a
belief that colour, race, politics somehow puts certain people on one side of
this wall, while certain people are on the other. But everyone around you, everyone
you think is sharing your city, is in fact in a city of their own, intent on a
home no-one else can see, no-one else can even know; intent on a journey
through streets, voices, conversations, loves and hates, that they alone can
inhabit.
It's not lonely. It's a gift.
My world is not the only world. There are millions more, just beyond my
thinking, just out there in the dark.
