One of the perks the membership affords him is a prized right-of-way. He has a key to a modest gate nearly invisible in its plainness, set as it is among the puddled iron entrances to the manses of Am Sandwerder. Through it, he may walk along the narrow path between two towering residences and, climbing down the hill, reach the little marina where, of late, he sits more often than he sails. He comes now a few evenings a week.
He’d heard of the place through a friend of a friend, who knew that he’d grown up “sailing.” Farid had laughed out loud at the word.
What he’d grown up doing, he’d said, was surviving.
He’d been born into a formerly landlocked and land-loving Ramla family, refugees who’d been driven to Gaza by the Naqba. First his grandfather and then his father had eked out a living working other people’s fishing boats, learning the craft, before they’d squirreled away enough to buy a broken-down boat of their own.
It was on that boat that Farid and his brother had learned to haul the nets, mend the nets, how to pilot the boat and fix an engine, which, more often than not, meant knowing where to hit it with a wrench to start it up again when it conked out.
He also learned where to find fish when the Israeli Navy declared a blockade or a high alert, when they moved the accepted mile marker back to where the trawling was harder and where you could—with the Palestinian fishermen anchored side by side—practically skip from the deck of one boat to another all the way back to the beach.
It was from that family boat, nearly a decade prior, that Farid had been willingly plucked up and hauled over the bow onto another, larger ship while out at sea. While the Egyptian smugglers reached out their hands, it was his brother who steadied the boat, who made sure Farid did not fall into the sea. It was his brother who’d said to him, “The big fight is yet to come. We will need money, we will need strategy. We will need distant bases, manned by those who look good in a suit.” Farid had laughed at his brother, who smiled back, sad. “You could never take a punch,” his brother said. “I will do the warring, and you can fight the fight from afar.” Then the Egyptian smugglers who’d taken him on, and taken the money he’d saved for years toward that purpose, gunned their engines and aimed the bow toward Spain, from where—no thanks to those pariahs—he’d eventually made his way here, to Berlin.
Farid didn’t have two pennies to rub together back when he’d been mistaken for a yachtsman. The night it had been said, his stomach was grumbling from hunger, and his back hurt from the grunt work he’d been doing, but he was wearing the suit he’d just bought—for he understood that his brother was right. He had a look to him that would work in his favor, if ever he got the clothes to match.
“Not sailing, but surviving,” he’d said in response, and his friend’s friend had laughed and given him a happy shove. From then on, Farid dreamed of the day he could call himself a sailor, and he was driven toward that day by the dreaming itself.
He knew then he would find a way to make enough money, beyond what he needed to live, and beyond what he needed to send home, and beyond the great sums he’d need to provide for the cause, if he’d wanted to guiltlessly join his friend’s friend—as there was an invitation involved—at the “little yacht club, not even yachts, really. A rinky-dink operation, a few boats barely bigger than Sunfish.” This oasis (which was anything but “rinky-dink”) was out on the edge of the city, along the necklace of lakes that curled up to the forest, with the airport and the autobahn—the empty stands from the AVUS’s racetrack days—just on the other side of the trees.
Farid made a name for himself in business, importing and exporting his way into the upper economy if not the upper class. He moved what needed moving to make money. And moved what he might to help his fellow Gazans in their plight. And so that his money might make money on its own, he’d invested in the markets and exchanges of the world. He bought stocks. He bought real estate. He owned part of a bowling alley in Manhattan, and a grocery store in Blantyre, which took in almost as much on a Saturday as the government of Malawi itself.
Farid finally wore those fine suits and got himself expensive haircuts that other rich people might note. And, despite a drink now and then, and a woman, when a woman would have him, he still went around with the welt of the faithful man marking the center of his forehead and, aside from his brotherly commitments, paid his own personal zakat many times over each year.
When he’d felt secure in Germany and German, as well as with his wealth, he pushed his way through that gate and walked down to the lake and the boathouse. With great confidence, he’d told the Japanese man who ran the place that he’d grown up on the water.
Dressed, once again, for the part he wished to have, he lied about his proficiency, twisting his wrist to show off the weight of his fancy watch, as if this might hypnotize Takumi, who actually didn’t seem to care at all, amiable man that he was.
All Takumi said was, “Take me out for a sail.”
The pair set out in a quick twenty-six-foot Soling, the lone vessel that belonged to the club itself. Farid failed miserably at his certification run. As he did, Takumi just smiled and cheered him on, and helped him raise the spinnaker and helped him not get killed by the swing of the boom, and did not allow him to drown them both, when it seemed, with barely any wind to push them, that he still might upend them. It was the perfect mix of Japanese politeness and fault-finding German unspokenness, so different from the frank, no-nonsense ways of Farid’s rough-and-tumble youth.
It made Farid love this man, who allowed him, in a dignified manner, to come clean and admit everything he had said was false. That’s when Takumi said, “Even better! I love to teach.”
It was as vulnerable a moment as Farid had had since leaving home.
Other than the fact that Takumi, without irony, referred to himself as “The Commodore” when addressing yacht club–related matters, Farid found him to be an excellent teacher and an easygoing and generous man.
After that, the two of them went out twice a week, sometimes three. Takumi told Farid he was a quick study. Farid had never been happier than at that time, fully engaged in the moment, and at complete peace, cutting through the water with this magical fellow, in this magical place, with one man speaking in Japanese-accented German, teaching another with his Arabic-accented German, how to sail from what was the American International Yacht Club based on a lake in Berlin.
Four years later, Farid felt as comfortable, and knowledgeable, as anyone else who belonged.
Comfortable enough to come while away the evening as if it were his own stretch of waterfront, as if the mansion up the hill behind him were his own. And as he once had pictured himself occupying the spot where he now sat, he now pictured a day where a house like the one looming high at his back might also be his.