“Your I.D.”
“Your serial number.”
“One one two eight one eight. Inspector Hagebrecht. Your I.D.”
“Someone stole it.”
“Under arrest.”
“Just a minute!” I resisted. I stopped when they were about to break my arms. “I’m a German citizen.”
A thin smile appeared on his face.
“A likely story. Take him away.”
“When your boss hears about this, he’ll take your head off. Then you’ll be just four feet-ouch! I bet you’re supposed to take care of this business as discreetly as possible. Good luck with telling your boss that Kemal Kayankaya is one of your refugees! Better start practicing …”
Minutes later I had been handcuffed and put on the bus, next to a guard, and watched through the barred windows how people were escorted out of the bunker, one by one. Some had to be punched to make them move, others were carried, many were weeping. The children came last. Separated from their mother, they were dragged into a car. They were screaming. Their marbles scattered onto the muddy ground and lay there, blinking. I turned to my guard.
“Who sent you here?”
Staring straight ahead, his chin rigid, his cap pulled down low over his forehead, he mumbled: “Official secret.”
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that your strike force leader had a key to that bunker?”
“Not within the parameters of my task to find that strange.”
After Hagebrecht had latched the bunker door and given marching orders, the vehicle column took off. We drove along the road through the woods back to the Gellersheim soccer field. I saw my Opel and through its back window the party angel. She was still fast asleep. We drove through Gellersheim and on to the autobahn. The driver turned on the radio, and the officers nodded their heads to the rhythms of Bavarian brass band music. It was raining. At the Frankfurt intersection we turned off in the direction of the airport.
12
“… and I was going to Mannheim today. Haven’t missed a game this year, not one minute. Even in Dortmund, I was there to the very end. And what an end it was. They scored six goals against us-six! Just imagine … After that I was quite fed up, but then-well, I just felt I couldn’t leave the guys in the lurch, just like that. So I kept on going, every Saturday, and now we’ve got the worst behind us. With Bein and Falkenmayer on board, we may even make it to the UEFA Cup next year, or we get the championship, and then we’ll be back on the international scene, and then-” He stopped and looked at the iron bars. Behind them lay an empty landing with green walls and three yellow light fixtures. The shadows cast by the bars divided our cell into narrow segments. Again, no windows. A faucet stuck out of one wall, and next to it there was a dirty white plastic toilet. Seventeen of us were sitting there on iron bedsteads, gray blankets wrapped around our shoulders. People smoked in silence. The women had been locked up in another cell down the hall. Once in a while one of them would call out, and one of the men would answer. It sounded like a conversation between people who were drowning. We had been there for four hours. A female officer had brought us some bread.
This was the deportees’ holding tank at Frankfurt airport. The next flight to Beirut left in four hours. It was a little past three.
I huddled next to the young guy with the brushstrokes under his nose and contemplated the glowing end of my cigarette. His name was Abdullah, he came from South Lebanon, and in four hours he would be on his way back there. In front of us, on the floor, lay a fellow Turk murmuring prayers. Now and again he stopped, raised his head, and explained something to me in Turkish.
Abdullah cracked his knuckles.
“But maybe it’s just the way things balance out. The Eintracht team stays on top, and I go down, or the other way round.”
“So, if you shoot yourself in the head, the Eintracht wins the championship?”
His tongue made clicking sounds against his palate. “Fate is our master.” And, after a glance into the hallway: “No, there really is a law that makes things balance out. For instance-after I passed my college entrance exam, my girlfriend took off. Honest to God.”
I nodded and blew smoke rings. I kept thinking about ways to save these people from their flights. Attorneys, newspapers, church people-as long as I was not allowed to make a phone call because the immigration police believed that they had to put me on the evening flight to Istanbul, it was all pretty pointless.
One of my smoke rings floated right onto the praying fellow’s nose. He looked up, waved his arms furiously, and started talking a mile a minute. Maybe he had asthma? I shrugged and smiled apologetically. When he didn’t stop babbling-my smile was set in concrete by then-Abdullah got irritated and intervened.
“Please get it through your thick skull-he doesn’t understand a word you’re saying. He’s a Turk, all right, but he doesn’t speak Turkish.”
“Is that so? But why? Is he too stupid?” The guy’s upper lip curled disdainfully. “Or is he ashamed?”
His German was almost perfect, and I was annoyed with myself for having tried to communicate with him in a kind of sign language.
“I never learned it, that’s all.”
“What is your father’s name?”
“What does that have to do with it?”
“What’s his name?”
“Tarik Kayankaya.”
He waved his hand as if to say, “There you are.” Then he said: “Well, what did I say, you’re a Turk.”
“Amazing. You found that out, just like that?”
“You’re denying your origin!”
“Why don’t you just go on praying a little more? And I’ll stop smoking.”
His index finger shot forward and stopped, trembling, in front of my nose. “Tomorrow night you’ll be back home, and then you won’t be able to pretend you’re German!”
Abdullah spat on the floor. “Yeah, terrific. Then he’ll sit in the joint there, and get punched in the mouth three times a day, but when he gets out after twenty years, he’ll be able to order a cup of coffee in Istanbul in perfect Turkish.”
Abdullah flashed his gold teeth. The pious guy scrutinized him from top to toe, turned up his nose, and hissed: “I won’t be bought. I’d rather be in prison in Turkey than plead for asylum in Germany.”
He had hardly finished when there was some commotion behind us. A Kurd peeled off his blanket, cursing, and crossed two bedsteads to get to the patriot. He looked like a guy who took better care of his fists than of his chin.
“Man, you’re talking shit. You’re talking a bunch of unbelievable shit!”
The Turk replied in Turkish. He must have struck a wrong note: the next moment he was flying through the air, crashing against the wall, and sliding back down to the floor like a wet rag with a nosebleed. A murmur ran through the cell. The Kurd stood in our midst like a commander of armies. His gaze swept the assembly with a “try me” expression. He had to be a body builder or decathlon athlete; in any case, he seemed to enjoy throwing people around, and if the people happened to be Turks, that was even more fun. He just stood there and waited, long enough for the prayer enthusiast to scrape himself off the floor and to reel over to the Kurd again. One might have thought that courageous, but it was undeniably unhealthy, and Abdullah muttered “What a raving idiot!” The Kurd cracked his knuckles and rolled his shoulders, and everyone present realized individually that there would be no joy in intervention. Just as the Kurd got ready for another throw, a door swung open and five cops came marching down the hall. Three men, one woman, and a dog, to be exact. Things got really quiet. The Turk and the Kurd retired into a corner. The patrol of five stopped in front of our cell, and the woman took a piece of paper out of her breast pocket.
