Stinging Nettles

I spent the morning pulling weeds. Back garden first. Then the front.

The smell changes when you pull them out. Dry leaves on top, then damp earth, roots, something green and slightly bitter released when stems break in your hands.

Two small children from the house opposite came over to help.

Their mother started talking to me in English. A neighbour drove past, slowed down, caught my eye, winked and smiled.

For a few minutes the street felt unexpectedly friendly.

Then my next-door neighbour appeared.

He stood close.

And started talking about Muslims.

How much he hated them.

How dangerous they were.

What they were doing to Europe.

He kept going.

Ten minutes.

Twenty.

Half an hour.

I tried to leave, but he kept talking.

The strange thing was that there were no Muslims there.

There were weeds.

Two children.

A British man with dirty hands.

A Polish neighbour.

And, from my kitchen, chicken and garlic beginning to cook.

But the absent Muslim was somehow the most powerful presence in the street.

There is a moment in Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah that has stayed with me.

A man remembers his prewar Jewish neighbours by their smell.

It sounds immediately like metaphor. The old language of contamination. The Other who smells different. Dirty. Too close.

But the man insists on something literal.

They were tanners, he explains.

They worked with hides.

Leather.

Chemicals.

Bodies.

They smelled.

Perhaps memory does not distinguish very well between the material and the symbolic.

A smell attaches itself to a person.

A person to a category.

A category to a fear.

Eventually the fear seems to have a smell of its own.

Smell is unlike sight. You can look at something from a distance. To smell it, something from outside has already entered you.

Particles cross the border.

And why fear so often has the language of contamination.

They are coming.

They are getting closer.

They will change the neighbourhood.

The feared object becomes unbearable because it is imagined as too close.

My neighbour was too close too.

I could smell him.

I could smell myself.

Sweat.

Soil.

Chicken.

Garlic.

Summer.

And somewhere inside this ordinary suburban afternoon, an enormous imaginary threat was circulating between us.

I eventually got away.

Went inside.

The chicken was ready.

The garlic smelled wonderful.

The Muslims were still nowhere to be seen.