Haibun | Under a Grey Sky

It is a cold morning down by the river, on one of those days when it doesn’t really get light. If there is activity here, it is to be found inside. In the red-brick workshop where, behind high windows, a blonde woman with paint beneath her fingernails hammers at a lump of stone. In the library where, among the shelves, staff move with soft footsteps as tandem partners trade languages in low voices across circular tables and children search for stories they can read, listen to or play. In the apartments that look down on the river, the library and the workshop, and the spaces in between.

Outside, the football pitch is empty. The playground too, and the benches where drinkers gather on warmer days than this. They are part of the strange community down by the river, with their dogs and their brown bottles, and the arguments which can be heard over the laughter of kids on the playground or the shouted appeals to fair play in the direction of non-existent referees. They are all someplace else today. As are the young people who follow desire paths down the embankment to smoke and drink in the sanctuary of the bushes.

But there is life and movement beneath the sullen skies. A grey heron stalks the shallows, stepping elegantly over the latest shopping trolley to have been dumped from the embankment. A woodpecker scurries around the truck of one of the older trees. Wait until dusk, and a family of foxes can be spotted trotting along the embankment where, last summer, tents were pitched, tucked beneath overhanging branches of trees. The encampment moved on when the winter winds began to blow. A presence by the river for months, they left no trace when they departed, except a sodden blanket, curled at the water’s edge, waiting to be swallowed by the brambles in spring.

At the window she
stands, staring at the river
and recalls his face

Words & Picture: Paul Scraton

The year starts slowly. Around the back of the boathouse, the vessels have been lifted up out of the water and tied to the chain fence in preparation for the winter freeze that can come at any moment. The road runs down the back of the properties that line the western shore of Plötzensee, this lake that has been here since the retreat of the glaciers and is now flanked by a children’s home and a youth hostel, the facilities of the swimming beach, football pitches and tennis courts, and a stonemason’s where they’ll keep your name alive for as long as someone has paid the cemetery fees.

Christmas decorations still hang and flags advertising ice cream flap in what breeze there is, but beneath dull Berlin skies it feels as if the weather too is taking its time to get going this early in the year. The wooded paths around the lake are filled with joggers and strollers, but what action there is takes places on solid land. The playground is empty and there is little to encourage anyone to linger on the empty park benches. There is a need to keep moving.

In the summer the water will be alive with swimmers from the beach and those too tight to pay the bathing fees and who have jumped the lake’s perimeter fence, as the rowers strike out from the boathouse in varying degrees of expertise. Later in the winter a different type of action will come to the lake, after the snow and the temperatures have fallen and a rink can be cleared just offshore from the nudist section of the beach and the air will be filled with the sound of sticks on pucks and skates on ice.

Somewhere, in the apartments and houses of the city, ice hockey players wait for the cold to come, so that the lake freezes and the games can commence. Today, it feels like they might be waiting a while. On the Plötzensee there are no swimmers and there are no hockey players, just a cormorant flying low across the lake, wings beating down towards the water, a black bullet moving fast until that too is just a memory. The lake is still once more.

Beneath the jetty
Swans paddle without fear of
Divers from above

Words & Picture: Paul Scraton