7
Even the floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall couldn’t brighten the dark wood-paneled interior of the room. On the bar stood a vase with lilies. The wall to the right sported a flat-screen TV that showed CNN on mute. During lunch hour the bar was always crowded with bankers who spoke English with European accents, loosened their ties, and ordered sandwiches.
Cem stared at the TV. The cafe had only opened half an hour ago. The waiter stood listlessly behind the bar and polished glasses with a checkered dish towel. His jaw-length hair fell into his face.
“You look pale,” Cem said.
The top buttons of his shirt were open, a golden crescent glistened on his chest. Cem had an uneven growth of beard, with a hairless patch on his right cheek.
I sat down across from him. He was the first person in his family to go to university and speak better Turkish than his parents. Cem had been born in Frankfurt and raised bilingually. At least that’s what he thought. It wasn’t until a vacation in Istanbul that he realized that he had a strong dialect. He often had to search for words. And so he spent a year at Istanbul’s best university and acquired the refined accent of the city’s upper class. With his relatives he kept speaking in the dialect of the village they came from before moving to Germany. We spoke German with each other—two perfectly integrated model foreigners. As Azerbaijani and Turkish are similar enough that we could understand each other, I told him in my language of the practical jokes we played as kids, and he imitated his parents’ or aunts’ Turkish. Sometimes he laughed about the archaic terms that I used, deducing them from Azerbaijani.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
“Whiskey.”
“Isn’t it a little early for that?”
“?üs.”
“When’s your exam?”
“In four days, but we’re partying tonight.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Of course you want to. You’ve been in the hospital all day. Tonight you’re going out with me. Come on, you need it just as much as I do.” He grinned and downed his drink. “But first, take a look at my translation.”
The waiter put two glasses and a bowl of peanuts on our table. Cem shot a longing glance at his unopened pack of cigarettes. The package warned of death. I knew that Cem was imagining the crackling noise of the plastic wrap, the tearing of the silver paper, the taste of the filter in his mouth, the click of the lighter, and the first inhale. But maybe he was just thinking of the waiter.
“How is he?” asked Cem.
“Elisha? Crappy. He’s in a lot of pain. I try to distract him, but it doesn’t work.”
“Does he get on your nerves?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Well, does he?”
I took a peanut, felt the salty taste on my tongue, and chewed it up.
“I’m sorry,” said Cem.
CNN was reporting on the Middle East. A demonstration with angry men wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags marched through Gaza. Interspersed were sequences with destroyed houses and Israeli tanks. Cem shook his head and took a sip.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He inhaled through his nose and answered: “War.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. Cem looked at me, amused. I added: “We won’t know if there’ll be war until there’s a long talk with a correspondent.”
“Looks like there will be. My father already talked about donating for refugees.”
“Doesn’t he say that every time?” My voice sounded more aggressive than I had intended.
“Exactly.” Cem stretched his back, turned his head left and right. His neck cracked loudly. He glanced at the TV, yawned. “Exactly,” he repeated. “In the end, Dad prefers to spend the money on lottery tickets anyway.” Cem laughed joylessly.
“They always show the same thing,” I said. “Just look at it. Pictures of victims and aggressors in a quick sequence. First the text: the Israeli actions are aggressive and disproportionate. And they go deep into Palestinian territory. Then pictures of victims: maltreated mothers crying for their martyrs on the sunbaked ground, blazing fires and Israeli tanks and checkpoints off in the distance.”
“And you? You think all of that isn’t real? Don’t be so naive,” he said. CNN showed a blond American journalist gesticulating with concern into the camera.
“The journalists aren’t even allowed to enter the territory. They stand on the hill in front of it.”
“And write whatever the Israeli military dictates,” came Cem’s cynical response.
“If they don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic—”
“Well, they should take you, then, shouldn’t they?” he interrupted.
“A*shole.”
“Don’t get so worked up over it. Not everybody’s underqualified just because they don’t have a double major.”
I got up and went to the bathroom. I held my hands under the warm water and tried to localize my anger. I felt like I had to defend something that under different circumstances I would criticize.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. Cem poked his head in and looked around carefully. His eyes were large and green, like a deep lake early in the morning. He said he didn’t want to come in, because it was the women’s bathroom. His voice was shaky. I said I didn’t care if he came in or not. He asked if other women were in the bathroom. I said that I cared even less. He came in.
“Come on.” Cem said. “Let’s go back. There are plenty of other wars on TV.” He put his arms around me. “I have an orange. Do you want it? Please stop. Did you know that there are tunnels underneath all of Gaza and that there are more Mercedes than here? Seriously, Gaza will soon get its own Goethestrasse.”
I buried my face in his shirt. Cem smelled like good intentions and expensive cologne. He held me tight and whispered, “It’s going to be OK. He’ll be back soon.”
The walls were covered in silk tapestries, white flowers on scarlet red fabric, interwoven with gold strands. I stood in a former brothel in the area close to the central station and looked around. Heavy, artfully cast golden frames decorated the walls, couches and chairs were covered with red velvet. A bartender wore rouge and a tiara, another a nylon stocking on his head. Both served with demonstrative disinterest. Gorgeous girls with shiny mouths and sweet perfume danced to the beat of aggressive house music. The young beauties knew how to accessorize a fetish. Many wore masks and feathers. The men were scantily clad and tried to look like catamites. Everyone smiled, danced, flirted.
I adjusted my dress in front of a mirror. Sami casually leaned on a column. He wore dark jeans and a black leather jacket and was giving the girl next to him a light. The girl was very blond and the contours of her small breasts showed against the thin fabric of her tight dress.
I approached Sami from behind and placed my hand on his broad back. The gesture was both instinctive and surprising, and I stood there with my hand on his back, unsure what to do next. When he turned and smiled at me, I heard myself say, “I didn’t know you were in Frankfurt.”
The hug was friendly and when we came apart he rested his hand on my arm for a moment. I didn’t move until he let go.
“For a month now,” said Sami.
“How long are you staying?”
The girl in Sami’s company made a show of yawning. I looked at her condescendingly, trying to place all my hatred into this glance, but she ignored me.
“Not longer than necessary,” said Sami. “My student visa ran out and I’m waiting for it to get renewed. I’m crashing with my parents and visiting old friends.”
Both of us took an awkward sip of our beers. The other girl whispered something into Sami’s ear, ran her tongue across her teeth, and finally left.
“Masha, I wanted to call you, but I didn’t quite know …”
Sami came closer, so that his mouth was close to mine. I stood up on the tips of my toes, stroked his hair out of his face, and kissed his forehead.
“I missed you.” Sami breathed into my ear as he had done in the past when we made love. We breathed heavily and almost in the same rhythm. Sami looked like someone who knew exactly what constituted a good life, where to get it, how to hold on to it, and, in the end, how to cast it out before it got too boring. In short: he had the air of something dangerous without being daunting. His gaze was always a little too serious. I found his nose very erotic. It had a little bump that he’d acquired in a fight in a rural disco that he had started himself.
Even though it had been a long time since we broke up, from time to time I reflexively reached out for him. Sometimes when I felt his body close or when I looked at him for too long, everything was back: love and lust and hunger and greed. Besides, we’d hurt each other so deeply that there was no going back.
In the line in front of the bathroom I spotted Daniel, who looked like a famished, offended rabbit. Daniel called himself anti-German, by which he meant Judeophile, pro-American, and somehow radical left. He was of the type who constantly wanted to save the world through one project or another. First it was nuclear energy, then the rain forest, organic food, and finally the Jews. He especially had a thing for them.
Every time I saw Daniel he laid out his plans—unprompted—for his magnificent future as a gentlemen’s tailor in London. Herzl said that if only we wanted to want, it wasn’t just a dream, and Daniel wanted and wanted and in the meantime sewed tighter and tighter briefs. I already had three Aperol Spritzes down and tried to avoid him. I looked for Cem, but he was talking on his cellphone in a corner. He was probably talking with his boyfriend, a cook who’d been working in France for three weeks. I didn’t understand why Cem was so insistent on attending parties. He hated loud music and people who went to parties. For him, every bash was a battle he fought against himself for every minute he made himself stay.
Daniel had stupidly waved at me. I ignored him, but he started to shout my name across the room, which over time got embarrassing. He made his way toward me hastily, taking large, awkward steps, his hand reaching out for mine, without me extending it. He fidgeted with my sleeve, his breath smelled of beer and bad digestion.
“I’m backing you guys all the way,” he said.
“Backing whom?”
“Well, you guys.”
Daniel licked his chops and I got angry that he had a clear point of view and all I had was doubts.
“Which you guys?” I was practically yelling, and a few people turned their heads.
“Israel, of course.”
“Good save.”
“You’re mean. So, what do you make of the situation? I mean you, as a Jew.”
“Daniel, leave me alone with this crap. What do you want from me? I live in Germany. I have a German passport. I’m not Israel. I don’t even live there. I don’t vote there and I don’t feel any particular connection to the Israeli government.”
Daniel always reminded me of my great-aunt, who sat in her Israeli living room—which was an exact replica of her former Soviet living room—drinking tea with a splash of lemon and intently studying Westi, the newspaper of the Russian-speaking immigrant population in Israel. Westi reported in detail on attacks carried out by Arabs in Israel, desecration of graves carried out by Arabs in France, and everybody’s publicly broadcast opinion on Jews.
Daniel thought of Sami as an anti-Semite, Sami thought of Daniel as a Judeophile, and both were right. I would have preferred if they’d not bother me. But during a group project at school Daniel had said that my Arab lover was oppressing me and sucking me dry. An Egyptian plague—those were his words. Thereupon I had hit Daniel and knocked out a tooth and would’ve been expelled if Daniel hadn’t taken all the blame. Of course the blame was his. And not just in a third-generation-since-the-Holocaust kind of way. Ever since his missing tooth he treated me like his personal pet Jew. My only flaw was that I didn’t come straight from a German concentration camp.
“I know, I know.” Daniel sighed deeply and pulled my sleeve. “The Jews are protected only by governmental force. You know, back in his day, my grandfather was part of a governmental force too, and if your governmental force had existed back then, the whole thing with our governmental force would never have happened. Just because of your collective trauma—” He took a little break. I’d nearly reached the stall, where I could finally lock the door behind me. “I don’t want to start a totalitarian discourse with broad abstract terms, don’t get me wrong. But it does make sense that many Jews see Israel primarily as a safe haven from genocide. And Auschwitz can happen again anytime. But now you are here, the materialized consequence of the anti-Semitic annihilation fury. Its executive, so to speak. After Auschwitz the Jews have to be able to defend themselves against those who wanted to kill them. My uncle Günther always wanted to kill Jews, but he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t fight, he was a paramedic. Nobody from our family actually fought. We’re from a small island. There you only fight with the levee. But this …”
Daniel took a short deep breath and motioned toward the toilets.
“This is the practical emancipation of the Jews from the permanent threat of destruction. You defend your hard-fought, functioning state with your life. The Israeli army is not an object of discussion, it’s not an object at all, but made out of flesh and blood. It’s you, your arms and legs, your feet and toes and fingers and hair and night-vision goggles and—”
“Daniel, I am not Israel.”
He ran his tongue across his thin lips, looking at me, dumbfounded. “I can’t win with you! But you’re lucky that I’m well-tempered and go along with everything if I’m into someone.” He smiled to himself and sighed. “I’m going to Israel. I booked my ticket today.”
“What do you want there?”
He looked at me, shocked, as if he hadn’t considered this until now.
“Sunshine.”
“What?”
“I spent ten years studying the country. Does that count for nothing?”
The urge to hit him welled up in me again and I had already made a fist when Cem dragged me away. “Come on, let’s go. I’ve had enough. Shit party.”
The Main River lay black and calm in front of us. It was almost windless. On the other riverside somebody was fishing in the dark.
“I swear, it was the first porn film we got. In Holland. We’d been looking forward to that vacation for months and the first thing my brother and I did was go into a coffee shop and then search for a porn film. We wanted hard-core and didn’t understand a word. We took a tape from the very back, top shelf, of course. Real hard. And then, finally, we put the tape into the VCR and the only thing we saw was feet. A woman was walking alongside a creek, but we only saw up to her knees. We fast-forwarded, but nothing aside from the feet and the creek. There we were in Holland, liberal country and all; our father had warned us, as had the mullah. We were really horny. And then that. Feet. My brother lost his shit, set the tape on fire and threw it out of the hostel window. He was already doing pretty poorly. Half a year later he died. Did I ever tell you how my brother died? How it took him half a year to kick the bucket?” Cem threw his empty beer bottle into the river and for a moment covered his face with his fingers.
He had told neither Sami nor me how his brother had died. We only knew that it had been a long time ago and that it had been cancer. Often, when Cem was drunk, he cursingly and threateningly promised to tell us how his brother had died. But he never did and we didn’t ask, because we, too, had our secrets.
Sami rolled a joint. I reached out for Cem. Cem took my hand and pulled me closer. He said, “Masha, I don’t know how to tell you, but all evening I’ve been getting texts from my cousin telling me not to shop at Aldi over the next few days. Supposedly the profits will go straight to buying arms for the Israeli air force.”
“Me too,” said Sami.
“You got them too?” Cem asked.
“Yeah. No idea who they’re from. I don’t even know the numbers.”
“And you were afraid of Masha as well?”
“Totally, man. I thought, now she’s going to kill me.” Sami laughed.
“If you knew what a scene she made today. In the ladies’ room.”
I placed my head in Sami’s lap and Cem leaned over me and said that it’s a shame we’re no longer together. His best friends.
Sami was hungry, and Cem and I trudged after him. Most shops on the Kaiserstrasse were already closed. A few older women with bleached, stringy hair were still out and about. We passed a twenty-four-hour Laundromat. Inside sat an older couple. Both looked like junkies. He was doing a crossword puzzle, she was clutching a plastic cup, fixated on the swirling laundry with an empty gaze. Their bodies didn’t touch.
It had become difficult to go anywhere at night. In the area around the train station everything slowly morphed into grocery stores and fish shops. Granted, it was hard to get cheaper and fresher groceries anywhere, and at noon long lines formed, populated by tired women in tight dresses or ample hijabs, guarded by pimps or other male watchdogs. Sami pulled us into a kebab place and he and Cem ordered. The floor was sticky. A rat skittered across the room. The rotating skewered meat glistened. I ate baklava while everything spun around me. The air was sweet and my body melted into the honey.