Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

The problem with the town, for anyone who didn’t know it, was that there was almost no means of finding your way anywhere except down the plague-stricken avenue and past the monster building. Once you’d done that Offenbach turned out not much uglier than Darmstadt or Hanau. The usual pedestrian zone, the usual box-like sixties buildings, the usual crimes freely and publicly committed in the name of municipal architecture. But the first impression stuck, affecting everything else. I had once found myself in Offenbach standing outside a perfectly normal little department store and thinking: good heavens, this has to be the ugliest little department store in the world.

So I drove past the monster, left the square behind, stopped by the side of the road and, opening my window, asked a young man who looked local for the street where the Adria Grill stood. He plucked his sparse moustache for a while and frowned all over his retreating forehead before he began to tell me. He took his time about it, and managed to make turning right twice and left once sound a very complicated business, but finally we had it. I thanked him and followed the route he had described.

Ten minutes later I parked the car in a quiet side street. Blocks of flats, bars, a garage, a gay sex shop. I walked a little way until I was outside the glass door with the words Adria Grill on it. The doorway and window were draped inside with crochet wall-hangings. The menu was up in a glass case by the door. It was Yugoslavian and International Specialities cuisine as found chiefly in Germany, so far as I knew: fifteen meat dishes with chips, five salads, two desserts and fifteen varieties of schnapps. The fact that this cuisine was now very seldom called after Yugoslavia, but after one of the tracts of land that had seceded from Yugoslavia over the past few years with strong support from the German Foreign Ministry, was indicated by the cocktail menu with little Croatian and German flags stuck on it: for five marks ninety-five you could drink a Genscher Sunrise.

As I entered the restaurant about fifteen men fell silent and turned their heads my way. They were sitting and standing more or less separately at tables and the bar, but they were all one party taking up the whole room. Most of them were around fifty and looked as if they always had been, as if they’d always been hanging around in bars and only went out now and then to get cheap suits and haircuts. The exceptions were two young men in their mid-twenties sitting in the darkest and most remote corner, with shaved heads and wearing flashy sports jackets. They all had beer glasses in front of them, and as I went up to the bar and wished the landlord ‘Good evening’, they all remained silent. Perhaps the swelling on my face was more impressive than it had seemed to me in the mirror at home. I hoped they’d decide to regard me as someone who’d had bad luck, not a thug.

‘Evening. What’ll it be?’ The landlord, a massive man with a round, comfortable face, looked at me in a free and easy but friendly way.

‘A beer, please.’

He turned to the beer tap, and I looked around the room with an innocent expression, as if I noticed neither the silence nor the glances bent on me.

A few dusty fishing nets and two faded posters of Dubrovnik hung on the walls by way of decoration. Otherwise the place had bare wooden tables, stained beige linoleum on the floor, a jukebox flashing only faintly under layers of dirt, and pale green fabric lampshades in which bulbs too strong for them had burnt an irregular pattern of small, black-rimmed holes. The only relatively new and well-cared-for item was a large photograph in a frame with a removable back; it was enthroned behind the bar on top of the shelves of schnapps bottles. The photo showed a grey-haired man in a white admiral’s uniform with plenty of gold buttons and coloured braid, kissing another man on the cheek. All that could be seen of the other man was the back of his head.

The landlord brought me the beer. ‘Cheers.’

After I had smoked two cigarettes, ordered another beer, and looked ahead of me with determined naivete, the guests got talking again one by one. Five minutes later loud, confused voices filled the room. Some of the men were speaking Croatian, many German, mostly in Hessian dialect. Their subjects of conversation were prices, the weather, sport, women. One of them fed some coins into the jukebox, and soon Bonnie Tyler was drowning them all out with Total Eclipse of the Heart.

I drank my second beer and ordered a third. When the landlord pushed the glass over to me, I beckoned him closer. He propped his round elbows on the bar and turned his ear my way.

‘If you don’t mind a direct question…’

He nodded and winked encouragingly at me. He probably thought, after my looking-like-a-sheep act, I wanted to ask the way to the toilet or something equally delicate.

‘… have you ever heard of the Army of Reason?’

For a moment his eyes seemed to stop looking at me but without actually closing, the way hands can suddenly stop in mid-gesticulation. Then he turned away in a leisurely fashion, as if at the end of a fairly long conversation between two guests about the meaning of life, went back to the tap and continued serving drinks. If he looked my way I was just a piece of furniture. If I’d left without paying he probably wouldn’t even have glanced up.

I stood around for a while, thinking. The first guests began ordering food, and I watched as the landlord leaned through an open hatch beside the bar, passed on orders and received plates. As far as I could see, there were two men working in the kitchen. The chef and a young assistant. I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote, on a beer mat: Two members of the Army of Reason rang this place on Thursday. I want to know who they were. I’m not leaving until I do.

Next time the landlord, loaded down with plates, tried pushing his way past me I got in his way and put the beer mat in his shirt pocket.

‘I’m waiting five minutes. If you still haven’t spoken to me then, you’ll be doing lousy business here this evening.’

He walked on without reacting. But soon after that the chef’s assistant appeared in the room, took over at the tap, and the landlord beckoned me over to the end of the bar.

‘I got no idea what yer talking about. I’m running a bar, I am, not a war.’

‘But you made off fast enough when I mentioned the Army.’

‘Hey, look at you! If a man what got a mug like that talks garbage, am I a shrink?’

I looked at his round face. Nothing about it indicated that he was lying. He was the image of a fat, comfortable man who didn’t like trouble in his life. And he managed to run this scruffy place so that a lot of people felt happy here and the takings were probably in tune. If one of his guests was the member of a gang extorting protection money, he wouldn’t want to know. However, he would take messages on the phone, pass them on, and keep his thoughts to himself. And he would act the simple clown for someone like me trying to worm those thoughts out of him.

I pointed to the framed photograph. ‘Who’s that?’

His gaze followed the direction of my finger, and when he looked at me again I saw something unpleasant in his eyes for the first time. Irritated, he said, ‘’S’our president, innit?’

‘Mine too? Never saw him look like that.’

‘S’posing you ain’t noticed, this here’s a Croatian restaurant. Thass my homeland, is Croatia, thass where my heart beats.’

‘Ah.’

‘So whass your line, eh? Asking questions, like?’ The amiable fat man was increasingly coming to resemble a fat slob with a fanatical light in his eyes.

‘Private eye,’ I said, and went on, without letting him get a word in, ‘You said you’re running a bar here, not a war. And you said your heart beats in Croatia. What’s that funny uniform your President’s wearing?’