Bettina Suleiman's Page

It was my third night in Cape Town, and I felt that if I didn’t get out of the hotel now, I would simply explode. Nevermind the robbers and the stabbers and the murderers and the rapists hanging out around the hotel. This city couldn’t be more dangerous than suffocating in the hotel restaurant the whole day, hiding from the city behind a sparkling fountain lulling you into a false sense of security. After hiding from the dangers of everything from a sunburn to a nuclear war in my hotel room, I did the thing I would consider the most dangerous for a young female foreigner in a big city: I stepped into a taxi and drove straight to the suburbs.
Of course, the driver didn’t know his way. In Germany, people are spoiled with taxi drivers who passed an exam of all the streets in, say, Hamburg before they got their license. But I live in Israel, so I have encountered the phenomenon before of a driver explaining to me that it was my job to navigate and not his. In a relaxed fashion, I rode in the back with a map in my bag that I would not take out to help. I enjoyed the tour too much.
At night, the gloomy suburb of Claremont with its deserted streets resembles what you see in Sin City. And I have never actually seen it at daytime, so I can’t even guarantee that it doesn’t resemble it a lot more than I thought. But like a knight in shining armour, John Bauer welcomed me on the street and led me into the hall of his house. There I was introduced to the things on the wall. Like small dolls like the ones that lived in my dollhouse twenty years ago, and little bowls with the faces and bodies of these dolls imprinted on them. This was, John explained, what he used to do in the past.
We talked about the flea markets where those dolls came from, and John even showed me his studio, but it wasn’t until long after that I got to see his actual art of today and the actual kiln that seems to be the center of production now. It took me until the fourth meeting to get John to spend a whole evening with me in his house, sitting on the sofa. There we were, looking into bowls and telling and listening to stories of the bowls and the people in the bowls. Should you ever meet John Bauer, I recommend asking him about the story of how his friend Sebastian ate a mosquito repeller.
That was the same night that I bought my own bowl, the one that quietly sits to my left while I am writing this. It is, so to speak, a more unusual piece of art of John: it ain’t about love. Wandering around his exhibition and picking up a bowl here and there, I had found love themes in almost all of their inscriptions. I never liked love themes in art. I protested that it is the absence of love that makes you creative, not its presence. John disagreed. We delayed discussing the issue to next time, for we had already parked in front of my hotel. We never did.
The inscription in my bowl reads: “Do you find yourself longing for something more?”
It is blue, my bowl. Most of John’s bowls are blue, so if you look at a red one, keep in mind that it was done during times when he was starving and could not afford to buy material. The surface of the bowls, blue or red, is some kind of melted glass. As a writer, I can only imagine the making process to be some kind of alchemy. Either I just did not understand, or this really was as much as John Bauer was prepared to reveal even to someone who has not the least clue about pottery.
My bowl shows three figures, two feminine angels and a man’s face with his eyes closed. It could well be that the flying of the two angels, the one with no eyes, stands for our common friend C. Or for any other of the former lovers in John’s life. Or maybe it is John himself in a symbolic riddle that only he can solve. What matters is that the light-blue face on the underside of the bowl must be me, for I truly do find myself longing for something more! “Yeees!”, said John in his South African accent, raising an eyebrow. Funny he said, how these aphorisms, scribbled in a minute, end up to have a meaning for a complete stranger sometimes.
I owe John a number of improvements in my writing situation. He taught me to go to sleep at ten, wake up at six and feel that I want to create. He allowed me to patiently complete the hours of writing that it needs to be good. But I still find myself longing for something more.
I stopped counting how many evenings we spent together during my two weeks in Cape Town. Enough time, however, for me to get used to drinking hot water with lemon, to quit smoking, and to develop a craving for mashed potatoes. Also, I sometimes feel the urge to hear John explain the world to me from is angle. On my last night in Cape Town, when we had already parked in front of my hotel to say Goodbye, John, who called himself the most ambitious person in the world, announced his intention to change the world – “And one day, I will probably do so.” Encountering John Bauer, whether the artist or the person, can change your life, too. Just look into the bowls and listen to their stories carefully.