The jeans guy gave him a contemptuous look.
“Just like your patent leather pumps, Grandpa. Haven’t seen a pair of those since we had to leave Iran ten years ago. You’re totally retro, Gramps, totally retro-what do you want a German passport for? Go back to Oogah- Boogah and pick bananas.”
The old man smiled.
“We’re all here for the same reason.”
“Sure.…” The guy looked around. “Only I’m not as scared as you are. This Larsson is on the level. I had a word with him yesterday, I told him that I am Ramin Ben Alam, so don’t even dream about fucking us over. He heard me. Then we talked about movies, Eddie Murphy and so on.”
“You’ve been locked in here since yesterday?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
“And before that, you were downstairs in the villa?”
He nodded.
“Did Larsson explain why you had to move?”
“Because of that neighbor. The old bag called the cops.”
I forgot my demolished skull and leaned forward. “Really?”
“Right. I told you, we’re here for our own protection.”
Suddenly it dawned on me why the immigration office had no file on Rakdee when I visited them. And that wasn’t the only thing that dawned on me. But the question remained: what was going to happen now? I leaned back slowly and carefully.
“When will you receive your papers?”
“Tonight.” He beamed. “Then we’ll party. First a great dinner with my girlfriend, and then we’ll disco down at the Marilyn.” He took a couple of dance steps, wiggled his hips and croaked, in English, “I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m bad- yeah.…”
People observed him with pity. He tossed his head back. “Yeah, with my girlfriend Gabi, Gabi Schmittke!”
I extinguished my cigarette butt. “This Larsson, did he have tattoos on his arms?”
The old man sitting next to me nodded.
“And what does the guy look like who brought me in?”
Two girls in headscarves giggled. A little fellow with a goatee got up and raised his arms to indicate something as wide as a wardrobe. “Much meat, much beard, and much, much smell.”
I sighed. Then I looked around. “I don’t suppose he brought you anything to eat or drink?”
No response. The goateed fellow sat down again.
“And what if he won’t bring you anything tonight, either? What if he won’t be back, ever?”
People stared at the floor. I got up, swayed to the door and checked if it could be dealt with. One might as well have tried to kick the concrete wall in. When I turned back, the children were clinging to their voluminous mother. One of them was crying, her face smeared with bunker dust and tears. The other two watched me with wide-open eyes.
Suddenly I got furious. “ ‘So no one can find you’-what a great idea! Larsson has collected his money, you haven’t told anyone who you were going to meet, and the cops are glad that you’re gone.” I spread out my hands and barked: “We’ll all die of suffocation here, most likely!”
Now the other two kids were crying, too, and a palpable atmosphere of fear spread in the room. Even the kid in jeans looked troubled. The dream of a life outside the hells of Beirut, Teheran, Colombo, or Istanbul seemed to vanish into thin air. The military, murdered relatives, torture, and hunger were suddenly present. Someone screamed. The old man closed his eyes.
They had fled. They had traveled halfway around the world with two suitcases. They had filled out applications, they had been rejected, they had applied again and had been rejected again, they had sought shelter in barns or shared a room with nine others. They had gone into hiding and lived without papers, and now they wanted to get at least these forged ones. Out of the void they had conjured up three thousand marks-they had tried everything just to be able to say, one day: tomorrow I’ll sleep late, or I’ll save up for a video recorder, I should be able to get one next year, or this weekend I’ll get so smashed I’ll crawl home, and if a cop shows up, I’ll just stand up and pull out my wallet. But they never had a chance. Those who were rejected would remain so: the refugee “in whose native culture torture is a common and traditional method of interrogation:” the refugee “who, if he had not become politically active, need not have feared reprisals-and who was fully conscious of the risks of his activity;” and the “economic asylum seeker” who is labeled a parasite in the world of German supermarkets, as if hunger and poverty were a kind of “human right” for three quarters of the planet’s population. He or she was merely the ghost of the “at our expense” notion, never mind the fact that we have lived for centuries at his expense, and that he is trying to go where “our” pedestrian malls, “our” air force and “our” opera houses have been built-at his expense. He is a “parasite,” never mind that coffee, rubber heels, and metal ores do not grow in the forests of Bavaria. Sooner or later these people would be caught and put on the next plane out. But now they had been cheated out of even that fate. While I lit another smoke, most of the others tried to calm down the screaming guy. The kids’ mother uttered an excited burst of Arabic. Then she started scolding me.
“Why are you putting such bad thoughts into our heads?” And, pointing at the weeping children: “See what you’ve done!”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. In the meantime, they had made the man lie down on a bench. Staring up at the ceiling he talked, in a breathless, monotonous blend of English and Tamil, about his native village. As far as I could understand, that village no longer existed, and he had been forced to do something to his daughter. The daughter did no longer exist, either. He was the only survivor of his family.
I sat down next to the old man who had erected an invisible wall around himself. Arms crossed over his chest, his gaze fixed on his patent leather shoes, he whispered:
“You shouldn’t have said that. This is a room full of very many people. There’s no room for fear.” And, after a pause: “You think we are stupid, but we have no choice in the matter.” Then he got up, walked across the circle of people who looked as if they were at their wits’ end, reached the man from the village, and put his hand on the man’s forehead.
I clenched my teeth. Was it my fault that we were cooped up in this room? And wouldn’t I be a victim, too, when we ran out of air? They could all go fuck themselves, for all I cared. I closed my eyes, chain-smoked, and hoped that someone would come over and tell me to stop polluting the air, giving me an excuse to punch them in the nose. But no one came. Or at least, no one came the way I had imagined.
After my fourth cigarette I heard the first siren. Then the second, the third, finally a whole concert. They approached rapidly, emitted one final howl, and fell silent. Then there was engine noise; there were commands and voices through megaphones, barking dogs and footsteps. A key turned in the lock, the door opened. I tossed the butt and listened to a whole bag of pennies dropping in my head.
The first man to enter was less than five feet tall, thin as a board and just as stiff. His uniform fit him like a second skin. A neat oval of facial hair framed his mouth; otherwise he was clean-shaven and exuded one of those masculine fragrances that make the air taste like soap. Legs far apart, he stood in the doorframe, holding a pistol in his right, a radio transmitter in his left hand. When he spoke it sounded as if he was chewing on ice cubes. “On your feet, chop chop, get in line. Need to check your papers.” Two men in uniform armed with submachine guns took up positions to the right and the left of the door. I was one of those who remained seated.
“Come on, I told you, chop chop!”
“Good afternoon. Rank and serial number, please, or I won’t comply.”
The submachine guns swiveled quickly to point at my chest. The faces above them, adolescent and pimply, looked as if they thought they had to save the world, at the very least, and were pretty damn scared by the prospect. Trigger fingers jerked nervously back and forth.
“And tell your kids to put their toys down. We don’t want them to pull the trigger by mistake.”
The commanding officer dissected me with his eyes. Then he moved his chin in my direction, and his cohorts rushed forward. In no time at all they pulled me off the bench, made me stand between them, and patted me down. I no longer had my Beretta, and my wallet was gone, too. My I.D. was in the wallet. With short, abrupt steps, the commanding officer came up and stopped right in front of me. I could feel his breath on my face; it smelled of peppermint. Old Spice and peppermint. It was a knockout.
