Jakob Arjouni - Kismet

Gina dropped me off at my flat, kissed me on the cheek and invited me to come to dinner some time soon. When the Fiat had disappeared round the corner, I looked up at my windows on the first floor. One of them was open, and I wondered if I’d left it that way.

There was a greengrocer’s shop on the ground floor of the dirty white sixties block. Its owner was also caretaker of the flats. He had stood for election to the council as a Republican a few years ago, and for a while he was mad keen on getting me out of the building. I had only to flush the loo at four in the morning to have him complain that I was disturbing the other tenants. But then German reunification came, and after a euphoria lasting just under two months and consisting mostly of his getting drunk and bawling out the national anthem every other evening, meanwhile complaining of me more than ever, his ideas of the enemy suddenly underwent a change. All at once the Ossies were the enemy. Not that the greengrocer ever saw Ossies anywhere but on TV, but for some reason he began hating them like poison all the same. I’d never forget the morning when he came rushing out of his shop towards me with a half-rotten apple in his hand, shouting, ‘Look at that, will you? Just arrived! Imported from the east! Huh! Living it up on my solidarity tax!’ Staggered to find that for the first time I wasn’t the object of his displeasure, I looked at the apple and said, as if in a trance, ‘Well, fancy that!’ Whereupon he lost no time in putting our relationship on a new footing, leaned towards me with a conspiratorial nod, and warned me, ‘We’re going to get some surprises, you bet your life. Oh yes, we’re going to get some surprises.’

He actually said we! And until now he’d used all forms of the pronouns we and you to me in a way that made it perfectly clear this wasn’t just a case of a caretaker arguing with a tenant, it was a clash between nations if not whole races, it was cultural warfare of worldwide significance over disturbing the neighbours after ten in the evening. And now the two of us were shoulder to shoulder in the little lifeboat of civilisation, so to speak, surrounded by hordes of Ossies! OK, so in his view he was the only one paying solidarity tax. Perhaps he thought I paid my taxes in Istanbul.

Anyway, since that morning we’d exchanged the time of day, and when his wife died a little later and he began taking Russian tarts to his flat in the evenings, his attitude to me became almost warm. Mainly, no doubt, out of shame because in this modern building I could regularly follow the course of his Deutschmark romances through the thin ceiling of his flat. In addition, I thought, his simple view of the world and the existence of a common border between Turkey and Georgia — which still meant Russia to us children of the Cold War — gave him a vague feeling that he had, so to speak, married into my family.

Anyway this afternoon, I entered the greengrocer’s shop calling out a cheerful, ‘Hi!’

‘Oh… hi.’

He quickly put his newspaper down. He’d probably been studying the tarts’ ads. It was Friday, he’d be getting one tomorrow. These days I took care not to come home too early on a Saturday evening. I usually went to see Deborah.

He came out from behind his counter, a weedy little man, patted his thin yellow hair into place and approached me with his now usual expression of inspecting something about me or behind me with interest. Whatever else had changed since that morning with the imported fruit from the east, we never looked in each other’s eyes. Like it or not they were, so to speak, the display windows of our armouries, which were still stuffed full of insults, wariness and mutual distrust. And because we knew or guessed that but didn’t want to think about it, because it really was much pleasanter to exchange a word or so on the stairs than snap at each other, we’d discovered a whole series of attitudes, little habits and manoeuvres that allowed our eyes to keep from meeting.

‘… Everyone already in short sleeves for weeks! And it’s only May!’ said the greengrocer, as he looked at my arms and then glanced over my shoulder and straight at the door, crying, ‘But look at that, there’s a storm coming up! A bit of rain will be good for us!’

So I turned and looked at the doorway too, and we’d done it: we were standing side by side, and there was scarcely anything in the brief conversation that followed to make us look away from the view of parked cars and a pile of empty fruit crates. When it was raining the greengrocer would use his wet shoes as an excuse to look first down and then anywhere else, in late summer he never took his eyes of the wasps zooming around his fruit, and in the morning he had to see precisely how the sugar dissolved in his coffee. All I could usually think of was scratching my lowered head; apart from that, I went along with whatever scenario he set up.

After I’d briefly given him my views on the weather I asked if he’d heard noises of any kind coming from my flat towards dawn.

‘Ho, living it up last night, eh?’ He waved it away. ‘That’s no problem. I was awake anyway.’

‘What makes you think I was living it up?’

‘Well…’ He coughed, amused. ‘If a person can’t get his own key in the lock of his own door, he’s usually been having a good time for the last few hours, right? I mean, it’s obvious. Well, you’d want to be living it up here and now. It’s your kind of climate out there, right?’

‘Hm, yes. Did I manage to get the door open?’

For a moment it seemed he was about to turn his head and look at me in surprise. But then, looking at the fruit crates, he asked, ‘Well, did you wake up in the stairwell?’

‘I woke up with friends. And I’ve been at their place until now.’

‘Really? Well, that’s certainly odd. I’m sure I heard someone at your door around six this morning.’

‘Did you hear whoever it was in the flat too?’

‘Well, now you mention it… that’s right, no footsteps, though normally…’

Of course he was longing to know what it was all about, but he didn’t like to ask. Since he’d taken to bringing tarts home he thought highly of the principle of privacy.

‘I’ll just go and take a look,’ I decided, and before he could reply I’d said goodbye, looking vaguely in the direction of the vegetable display, and I was out of the door.

The lock looked perfectly normal. Whoever had tried breaking into my flat had gone about it without using violence. I put the key in it. Turned the key twice to unlock the door, as usual. I pushed the door open and looked at the small, square entrance hall, with its coat-rack and empty bottles. I stood there for a while in the doorway, listening. Finally I went in, examined the whole place, two rooms, kitchen and bathroom, and remembered leaving the window open because of a smell of sewage coming up through the sink plughole in the kitchen. Would gangsters planning to get into my flat try a couple of keys just in case they happened to fit, and then give up and go away again?

I closed the door, made coffee, and sat down with a cup by the phone. First I tried reaching Slibulsky. For one thing to find out how he was feeling, for another to ask why I was supposed to look at some kind of sweets. But the phone in his office was answered by one of the ice-cream vendors, who said Slibulsky was out stocking up on cardboard beakers. Then I rang the number of Romario’s flat. Perhaps he had a girlfriend, or a visitor from Brazil, or someone else he’d been keeping a secret from us and who was now waiting unsuspectingly at the window, staring at the firewall opposite and starting to get angry. Or who was just being questioned by the police, had no idea what they were talking about, and needed help. Or who knew just what they were talking about and needed help all the more. But no one picked up the phone. I smoked, and wondered who I knew who was so close to Romario that he or she ought to be told about yesterday’s events. I could only think of the cleaning lady who flicked a duster round the restaurant twice a week. A sprightly old Portuguese woman whose name and address I didn’t know.