Alabama

Always great fun to have dinner at the Kater. Tonight, we were sitting beneath a tiny clock that looked like a cat – it was ever so sweet – and we saw the U-Bahn rushing by and we counted the time. The Kater is deemed to vanish, and huge sterile luxury flats with whirlpools overlooking the Spree will take his place. Gone are the days – long gone – when we were sitting at the riverside with our feet dangling over the muddy water while a wizard behind the decks chased the morning hours in a steady four-four with an invisible whip.

And as we were sitting below this timey cat, I thought of my late great-aunt Jolanda who was born in Ticino, Switzerland, what seems like eons ago and then moved to Australia with her husband and her kids and from there to California where she got high with Jimi Hendrix and Grace Slick and sat on a hill beneath a tree getting stung by thousands of mosquitos. Later, she went to Morocco and bought carpets and sold them in California again, filled with grass. When I went to see her once in her tiny home south of San Francisco at the Pacific coast, one of her cats was unwell, it seemed to suffer and it hid in the backyard under an old worn-out fig tree and wouldn’t move. Jolanda couldn’t bear it, she felt so sorry for the cat. “To kill or not to kill Alabama, that is the question”, she kept saying. One day Alabama was gone, but I never asked what had happened.