Jakob Arjouni: More Beer

I pushed the front door and turned on the light in the entrance hall. Almost instantly the greengrocer popped out of his ground-floor apartment. In his corduroy slippers, turned-up jeans, and green nylon pullover, he barred my way, his shiny blond hair combed severely to the right. He was waving an empty cigarette pack excitedly.

“What is this? Tell me, what is this?”

His head bounced forward and back, as if pummeled from behind by an invisible fist.

One more time. “What is this?”

I unlocked my mailbox.

“I have no idea.”

“It is an empty cigarette pack and I found it this morning, on the landing! Because I sweep my landing! Do you hear me? I sweep my landing! Here in Germany, we sweep our landings! We’re not in the Balkans here, and you better get used to it, or else go back there! You terrorize the whole building with your garbage … the whole building! He jabbed the pack with his index finger as if to punch holes in it. “All the other tenants have confirmed that this is the brand you smoke. Well, what do you have to say to that? Well?”

He raised his eyebrows and went on ranting.

“Ha! That strikes you dumb, doesn’t it! But let me tell you something-if ever again I find one of these on the landing, I’ll get the owner and show him the mess. Your mess! Then you’ll have to deal with him. Do you understand?”

I felt like pasting him.

“Come on, say something! You’re always such a smartass, how come you don’t know what to say?”

I took the mail out of my box, locked it again, and advanced. We were still two meters apart when he began to stammer.

“If you do anything to me … if you dare … I’ll, I’ll call the police … and they, they’ll arrest you, and there’ll be some peace in this building, at long last … They’ll put you in jail, and we’ll be rid of you!”

He fluttered his hands in front of me like a man shooing off pigeons.

“Now, now … I’m warning you … if you touch me, I’ll … I’ll call for help …”

He was out of breath. I pushed past him and climbed the stairs to my apartment. Once inside, I pulled off my damp clothes and took a hot shower. I had an unpleasant prickling sensation in my feet. Drying myself off, I thought about Carla Reedermann. Then I put on a pair of wool pants and two pullovers and a pair of hiking boots. The kitchen smelled of burnt onions. I poured myself a tumbler of Chivas and went to the phone. I dialed the number of my garage and listened to the phone ring for a while.

“Riebl Auto Repair.”

“Kayankaya. Is my car ready?”

“I’m just working on it.”

“It’s been three weeks since you told me you’d have it ready for me in a week.”

“Not to worry, I’ll have it fixed the day after tomorrow at the latest.”

“I’m not worried. I need a car today, and if you can’t do it, I’ll take your limo.”

He giggled. Riebl was one of those people who seem to be drunk all the time while never touching a drop of the stuff. He was just a little goofy.

“That’s no joke. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

He kept on giggling and mumbled something. I hung up.

“Be right there.”

Riebl was lying under the hood of my green Opel Kadett. The place smelled of gasoline and lubricant. A radio in a corner was screeching tunes of the German homeland. Then he surfaced.

“Oh, it’s you, Mr.…”

“Kayankaya.”

“Right.”

“What’s with my car?”

He scratched his neck and stared absently at the floor, as if he had just heard an immoral proposition.

“We-ell …”

“Well, what?”

“You know, it’s so easy to make a wrong estimate. At first it just seems to be the sparks, but then it turns out the whole engine is screwy. You know what I mean?”

“Give me the keys to your car. I’ll be back tonight, at half past seven.”

He shook his pinched head.

“Tch, tch, tch, I don’t know …”

“Come on.”

Hesitantly he produced a bunch of keys out of a pocket of his overalls.

“But really … I don’t …”

“See you tonight.”

I left him standing next to my Kadett. Twenty kilometers past Darmstadt, I took the Doppenburg exit.

I first heard it from a guy with red hair in the Zum Grossen Schiff tavern in Sachsenhausen: He insisted on calling the place Dopeyburg, not Doppenburg. However, since he also pronounced “cider” “soyder,” I didn’t pay much attention, but later I noticed that other people of more cultivated speech habits also referred to the place by that pejorative name. Well, I thought, just another instance of that rather less than brilliant sense of humor that turns a professor into a perfesser. Only now, years later and on site in Doppenburg, did I realize how appropriate it was.

Doppenburg was a small town centered around an ugly pedestrian mall. Supermarkets were interspersed with third-rate fashion shops staffed by saleswomen who resembled the sausages in the butcher’s window. Flower planters, round light fixtures, and empty benches adorned the street. Retired people pulled their shopping bags on carts across the pavement, probably attracted by some advertised sale in spite of the wet and the cold. In sheltered corners, housewives discussed the problems of noodle casseroles, children, and varicose veins. At one end of this parody of an urban environment stood the inevitable Italian ice-cream cafe frequented by Coke-guzzling teenagers perched on their motorbikes, cradling helmets under one arm and cracking bad jokes about their girls.

I parked the car on the main street and strolled uphill into the old part of town, with its rows of half-timbered houses that looked as if children had modeled them out of clay, then baked and neatly painted them. Immaculate streets. Not even the smallest pile of dog shit to offend German cleanliness. Except for a couple of shiny pink tea and health shops, the streets were dead. A young man stood at a deserted intersection waiting for the traffic light to turn green. When he saw me cross against the red, his lips tightened disapprovingly. I think he would have liked to follow me in order to punch me in the face, for the sake of law and Fatherland, but the light didn’t change.

At a refreshment kiosk I asked for directions to the Bollig plant. Two guys stood there in the rain, drinking their dinner.

They grinned.

“Bollisch? With his broken pipe?”

He slapped his companion’s shoulder.

“Our pipes are broken too. Right, Ennst? What does the Mrs. say to that? Hey, Ennst! Broken pipe!”

“How do I get there?”

“Bollisch … Hey, Ennst! How does he get there? Ennst!”

Ernst squinted at me slyly and said, almost choking with mirth, “And how do I get to the opera?”

“Practice. A lot of practice,” I said, and walked away.

“Har, har. That was a good one. The old ones are the best ones.”

The baker’s wife gave me directions. I walked back to the car and followed the flow of traffic down the main street toward Weinheim. After a kilometer or so, tall brick walls appeared by the side of the road, their tops covered with barbed wire: Ruhenbrunn Private Clinic. Just past those walls was the paved entry road to the Bollig plant.

The factory stood on a hillside, with the notorious lake to its right. The dirty yellow water lapped gently against the bright gravel on the shore.

I stumbled across the little wet rocks to the demolished waste pipe. Such concrete pipes did not require major amounts of explosives for their destruction. The action must have been about as exciting as a flat tire in a no-parking zone. I contemplated the shoreline. Where the gravel ended, small clumps of reeds separated the moldering soil from the water. It seemed an unlikely site to choose for a camping trip. I turned around. The factory was a pile of corrugated iron. Out of it, at seemingly random intervals, rose three mighty smokestacks. On top of one of them, a thin flame flickered. On the side of a warehouse, a row of faded red letters proclaimed that this was BOLLIG DRUGS-FOR LIFE, FOR THE FUTURE, FOR OUR CHILDREN. Chemical enterprises have a weakness for hyperbolic publicity.