Farid is alone at the marina but for an old man, puttering around in the cockpit of his boat, tinkering and polishing and drinking a bottle of wine. He offers Farid a glass, which Farid declines, though the gesture takes him away from thoughts of war and returns him to a peaceful state of mind.
He sits in his preferred spot, at the far edge of the dock, beneath one of the linden trees that overhang it. He has settled in to admire the lake, his back against the retaining wall.
No matter how long Farid lives in Berlin, he’s still amazed by how late the sun sets in summer. Twilight seems to stretch on forever, as the blue of the water deepens and the orange haze lining the sky above the forests on the far shore glows.
It’s not long after the other man leaves that Farid—relishing his solitude—gets up to go. As he brushes off the back of his trousers and takes one last look at the lake, he sees the club’s Soling, tacking jaggedly toward the marina’s last open slip.
He knows who it is, for he has been watching this terrible sailor for a week. It pains Farid every time, though he can’t help but watch, sometimes from between the fingers of his own hand.
Farid stays as the captain poorly trims the sails and poorly steers his craft. As the boat closes in, Farid isn’t sure if the ineptitude hasn’t now turned into a controlled assault. The man seems to regain the most minimal control, which is then promptly lost. If not for the bumpers he remembers to toss over the sides, and a final adjustment as he steers his way in, Farid expected to watch him go down with his ship.
When the man moors the boat, he tangles his lines and ties them sloppily.
Fully pained, Farid finds himself approaching.
He says, in German, “Can I help?”
When the man doesn’t answer, Farid tries English, at which the hapless sailor brightens up.
“I know I’m a mess,” the man says.
Farid does not disagree. He only nods and unties the bow line, before slowly, didactically, leading him through the motions.
“First, you always start under the . . . horn?”
“Cleat,” the man offers, happily. “In this case, with boats, that’s a cleat.”
“Then, always, first, it’s under the cleat.”
When the man nods, Farid makes his figure eights, ending with a slow, obvious underhand loop.
“You always want to finish like this. Then you pull the free end tight-tight and coil it so it looks neat. No loose ends,” he says, to show that he knows some good phrases, and that his English is more than up to par. “Not in Germany, and not with boats. Everything, always, nice and tight and clean.”
Farid is about to make a joke about American ease and American indifference when the man moves toward the next cleat to refasten the line as he’d been shown. It’s then Farid sees the insignia woven into the man’s jacket.
“You’re a Canadian!”
“How’d you figure that?” the man says, surprised. “Everyone here calls me American, even after I tell them where I’m from.”
“The Bluenose,” Farid says. “On your jacket. Pretty much every Canadian who passes through here to sail is wearing a Bluenose jacket or shirt, or wears a Bluenose hat on his head.”
“We’re a proud people,” the man says, as he tries and fails to cleat the stern line properly. Clearly thinking better of another attempt, he hands the rope to Farid. “But not too proud to recognize when we’re outclassed.”
Though the Canadian did not exactly grow up poor in Gaza, neither did he grow up rich, as did nearly everyone else who ends up trodding that dock. He’d been a regular kid, the son of a dentist, who’d flitted around the lake in a friend’s fiberglass fourteen-foot dinghy, while growing up in Montreal. He’d crewed in some races over a couple of summers half a lifetime ago. Now, doing a stint in Germany for work, and with no friends, and no language, and some time to spare, he is suddenly back to the boats.
He says he’s renting a house on the lake, which can only mean that he—or his enterprise—is very wealthy. He says he saw the yacht club through his telescope, and thought, with time on his hands and sweet memories of sailing, he’d give it a try.
All this he shares between observing Farid retying the stern line and coiling the tail. They walk the path together, up between the mansions, and out onto Am Sandwerder.
“So, which house is yours?”
The man points back out across an expanse of water that they can no longer see. “If you walk down the street until you get to the Saudi Arabian embassy,” he says, “I think mine is, more or less, directly opposite.”
The man then clicks a key, and a car beeps somewhere down in that direction.
Farid says his good nights and turns to go. He starts walking for the train station and doesn’t make it two steps before thinking of Takumi, and all the kindnesses shown to him when he was new in town.
It is also, he knows, the right thing to do. He thinks back to his schooldays and recalls the story of Abu Talha and Umm Sulaim feeding what little they had to their guest in darkness, so that they might pretend they too ate by his side.
The Canadian is already walking off, and Farid calls to him awkwardly, speaking at a clip.
“I’m not sure if you want to travel into the city now when you’re already so close to your bed,” Farid says, “but I was going to get something to eat. If you want to join.”
In an instant, the man is at his side.
“If you thought you were going to get away with being polite and then disappearing, you messed up good.” The man claps Farid on the back, as if they’re already familiar. “I’ve been surviving on doner kebabs from outside the train station, and any fruit I can eat without peeling. A decent meal would be an absolute joy.”
“There’s no kitchen at your house?”
“There’s a kitchen about the size of a football stadium. But it holds a mean little troll of a chef who is offended by my palate and who’s convinced I shave off my taste buds every morning after brushing my teeth. It’s classic German, all cream and meat and gastronomic foams. If I ate that stuff every night, I’d either have a heart attack or explode. I miss my neighborhood in Toronto. I miss having a good quiet place on the corner where I can eat a green salad and have a drink.”
“So what are you hungry for?”
“Honestly?”
“Of course.”
“Anything ethnic—but not German ethnic. Mexican. Italian. Thai.”
“How about Chinese food?”
“I would pretty much die for some Chinese.”
“Good Friends,” Farid says—which he understands, by the man’s expression, sounds more like a proclamation than the name of a restaurant. “It’s in Charlottenburg, right down from the Paris Bar.”
When his guest shows no sign of recognition, Farid says, “You really are new here.”
“I am. And I’m in your hands,” the Canadian says. Then, looking a touch embarrassed, “I’m a good businessman, I promise. But I’d make a terrible politician. I already know you too well not to know your name.”
“Farid,” Farid says.
The Canadian’s name is Joshua—“Call me Josh.” When Farid asks if he wants to join him on the train, the Canadian holds up his keys and says, “You’re going to shit when you see the car they got me.”