Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

‘I didn’t know where to go. I was afraid to go to my flat, I’m in the phone book, and those murderers were probably waiting for me there. And then.’ He raised his head and looked at me as if to say: very well, this is the truth, here you are and I hope it makes you happy, but don’t forget what a great guy I must be to tell you even when it does me no credit. In fact what he said was, ‘And then the fire spread so fast that I had to leave my wallet in the Saudade. My ID, money, credit cards — all gone. I couldn’t even take a hotel room.’

‘Why didn’t you go to the bank?’

‘My branch is just round the corner from the Saudade, and I really didn’t want to show my face there.’

‘All right.’ I pointed to the chairs. ‘Sit down. Want a drink?’

‘Yes, please. Thanks.’ Slowly and ponderously as an old man, he lowered himself to one of the chairs, his bandaged hand still prominently displayed in what he assumed was the centre of my field of vision. ‘Would you have anything to eat too? I haven’t eaten a thing all day except those salty breadsticks.’

I muttered a yes, put vodka and glasses on the table and slammed down a can of sardines, a can opener, and the packet of crispbread I’d started in front of him. ‘Sorry, but that’s all I have.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ he replied, looking at the sardine can as if he’d seldom thought anything less fine in his life. I poured vodka, we drank, Romario said, ‘Ugh!’ and added, ‘Oh wow, on an empty stomach!’ and then we both relished a couple of full minutes in which he tried to open the can with his elbows and one hand. When I finally reached over and removed the lid for him he thanked me effusively, and I came very close to throwing the can in his face, opener and all.

‘So now what?’

‘Well…’ Romario drizzled the last remains of oil from the can on a piece of crispbread and stuffed it into his mouth. When he’d finished munching, he said, ‘I’ve been thinking I could go underground until I see how things work out…’

He looked at me expectantly. I looked expressionlessly back.

‘So well, I was thinking, well, it only crossed my mind, and only if you didn’t object, whether… well, whether I could maybe stay with you for a few days.’

I examined him for a while, wondering whether he might for some strange reason enjoy my company, or if he was just so washed up and on his own that he’d put up with any amount of harassment for a place on a sofa. I poured myself more vodka and lit a cigarette. ‘Why on earth didn’t you just fly off for a few weeks in the south, like we agreed…’ It wasn’t a question, it was a sigh. To my surprise I got an answer.

‘But I couldn’t!’ said Romario, and even for this occasion, which wasn’t exactly short on desperation, he made an unusually desperate face.

‘What do you mean, you couldn’t?’

‘I…’ He looked at the floor. ‘I can’t fly anywhere. Except Brazil, but I don’t have the money for that. You’re right, the Saudade wasn’t making much these days, and well, let’s face it, I’m skint. I could just about have paid for a ticket, but then getting there and not even being able to invite the family and my old friends out for a meal — I can’t face that.’

‘Brazil’s not the only place in the world. We could have scraped up a few marks for a package trip to Mallorca.’

He raised his head, his face suddenly twisted with rage. ‘I told you, I can’t fly anywhere, just like that! I’d need a visa, and a visa takes time, and in the end I guess I wouldn’t get one either!’

‘Hold on… you don’t mean you only have a residence permit, do you?’

‘That’s what I mean, yes.’

‘Oh no. But you were always saying how you’d been to the Cote d’Azur and so on in summer.’

For a moment his gaze bored into me as if he were assessing the chances of suing me for mental cruelty. But then he looked down at the floor again, his shoulders, a moment ago energetically braced, drooped, and he said in an exhausted tone, ‘That’s what I said, yup.’

‘And where were you really?’

‘In my flat.’ The words were coming out in robotic tones now. ‘Sometimes I took a tent and went to camp by the artificial lake for a few days.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, grinding out my cigarette and leaning over the table, ‘this isn’t some sob story you’re pitching me, is it?’

Without looking up, he shook his head. ‘Can I have a little more to drink?’

‘Help yourself.’

He poured some more, drank, and put the glass down. Suddenly he seemed curiously calm. As if he were under hypnosis. Hands flat on the arms of the chair, fixed gaze on the table in front of him, he explained, ‘I’ve lived and worked here and everything for over twenty years. Every year I have to go to the Aliens’ Registration Office and get my residence permit extended by the guys there. Some of them haven’t been in this world as long as I’ve been in Frankfurt, and they don’t much mind whether they’re here or in Bielefeld. I do mind. I earned my first money in Frankfurt, I rented my first flat of my own here, I was really in love for the first time here. There’s not much left of any of that, but the city reminds me you can start up somewhere and succeed. And never mind how things are going, it gives me pride. I’ve learned its language, I can tell Heinninger beer from Binding, I know where to get the cheapest car tyres, and I know more bars than any native of the city.’

He paused, reached for the bottle and poured us some more. Everything about him seemed calm, except that the neck of the bottle clicked against the rims of our glasses a little too often and a little too fast.

‘But like I said, every year I have to go and beg to be allowed to stay another year. Every year I have to prove I have work and a place to live and I’m not costing anyone money. And then I sit in that waiting-room with all the other poor fools who’ve cleaned their shoes and put on clean shirts so as to make a good impression on Herr Muller or Herr Meier, and they’re all sweating and smoking and some of them have to sit on the floor because there’s not enough chairs, and after three or four hours when your turn finally comes you’re just a crumpled, stinking Thing and you’d almost agree with Herr Muller or Herr Meier if he looked at you as if to say, what’s a pathetic creature like you doing in our lovely country?’

He stopped and looked absently at his hands, lying there on the arms of the chair and playing dead.

‘I mean, it’s one day a year when they make it very clear that this is no place for you. Or two days if there’s some piece of paper missing and Herr Muller or Herr Meier wants to harass you. And of course those are the days when you’re moving house or starting a new job or opening a business or, like I said, you want to go away. But all the other days in the year I’m the kind that gets stopped in the street by people asking me where which underground train goes or where to find the nearest post office. And I’d like you personally, and all of you, everyone to think of me that way.’ He looked up. ‘Other days I’ve managed to complain about the weather in Frankfurt without anyone giving me that stupid line about why don’t I go back to sunny Brazil if I don’t like it here? But would they still have not asked it if they knew how I’ve had to crawl to people with rubber stamps sitting at desks for the last twenty years, and that this is probably never going to end.’

I looked at his grey, unshaven face and slowly shook my head. I’d have been sorry for anyone else. Not because circumstances or the laws were the way they were and gave people problems — any kind of circumstances and laws did that, and at some point I’d realised that sympathy in that context was just a relatively respectable way of folding your hands and doing nothing. But when someone made life-determining rules for himself in secret and stuck to them, never even wanting to know that no one cared in the least whether he kept them or broke them, then I really did feel for him.