I had once suggested to Deborah, while we were watching a news item on the subject, that we could create our own Israel of sorts. We had quarrelled that afternoon. It began with the chaotic state of the apartment, or one of her girlfriends who got on my nerves, or Deborah’s passion for work — even at the time I couldn’t remember which — and ended as so often with ‘antisocial Kayankaya’ and ‘ambitious Deborah who always has to show everyone what she can do’ (i.e. that she had made it from Henningbostel and Mister Happy to the West End and Deborah’s Natural Wine Bar, and would go much further yet). Anyway, I said, ‘Now, if we had an Israel, when we felt a quarrel coming on we could always say: Hey, that damn Israel, that’s why I never got around to tidying the place up. Or: It’s only because of the bad influence of Israel that your friend Alexa is such a hysterical know-it-all. And even if we were simply tired, or the milk boiled over — it would be great to always have something to blame, and we’d see only each other’s advantages and good points.’
Deborah looked at me as if I had something wrong with my upper storey.
‘You might as well just say the Jews, only I suppose you don’t dare.’
‘I would dare, because it’s a joke, darling. See what I mean? Not meant seriously. I was poking fun at the non-Jewish middle easterners. Only these days no one says it’s the Jews’ fault anymore. No anti-Semite in the world would say that now. He’d say: It’s Israel’s fault. So considering the technique of good jokes — if you believe, like me, that a joke is spicier the closer it comes to the truth — then in that case …’
‘But I don’t think that’s at all funny.’
‘Well, imagine we’re watching news from the Middle East, and I said: Hey, how about we get ourselves a Jew, then we’ll have someone to blame next time the milk boils over? You’d have thought that much less funny.’
‘I don’t think it’s our day.’
Hmm, I thought, but if only we had an Israel …
‘You know perfectly well that my granny …’
‘Good heavens, what’s she got to do with it?’
Deborah’s granny — the real Deborah — had very probably been Jewish. Her grandfather had found her in 1945, starving, sick and ragged in the woods near Henningbostel, took her home with him, nursed her back to health and finally married her. She had never said anything about her origins or what had happened to her before 1945, but she had dropped a few hints, and there were certain questions that met with either an eloquent silence or a surprisingly harsh retort. When Deborah first told me about her granny ten years ago, I’d still been sceptical. What German girl, I thought, didn’t have a Jewish granny these days? But then, in photographs of her, I saw a pale dark-haired beauty who wasn’t typical of the North German countryside. It was from her that my Deborah had inherited her thick eyebrows, dark ringlets and full lips.
‘Well, for me it does have something to do with it. I like jokes, but not on that subject, however funny they might be — and I said might be, get it? There’s always something about them, you’re supposed to think, Oh, how original, a forbidden subject but all the same, anyway. And they’re not casual and effortless. And I think the more casual a joke, the funnier it is. For me, spiciness belongs in the soup. What’s more — do I know how you really tick, deep down inside? Have we ever talked about that? You always say: Religion, no thanks — but I suppose your parents were Muslims, and you lived with your father until you were four, there must be some of that left …’
Oops! For a moment I must have looked taken aback. Having grown up in Frankfurt, never set foot in a mosque, never belonged to a union or a political party, never believed in anything but my own abilities, private detective, drinker, Mönchengladbach fan, and now, at the age of fifty-three, I hear the woman I’ve been having a relationship with for the last ten years come out with a remark like I suppose your parents were Muslims, all on account of my origins and a joke that she didn’t understand.
My mother died in Turkey when I was born and my father took me with him to Germany, where he was run over by a post van four years later. I was put in a home, and two months later adopted by the Holzheims, a schoolmaster and a nursery school teacher. I have a few memories of my birth father. Mostly of the two of us sitting in a café, where he smoked and I drank apple juice. He treated me like an adult, not a small child. A lot of what he said I didn’t understand, but I did realise that he respected me and wanted to be my best friend. Not my teacher. One thing he told me was: I can only teach you how to eat with a knife and fork, and you can teach me to know again whether the food really tastes good or just looks as if it does. That was the general gist of it anyway. My father spoke Turkish with me, a language that I soon forgot while living with the Holzheims. If my father had any religious feelings then they were about me. There were diary entries he had written that I later had translated, describing me as his ‘great little miracle.’ If Deborah was sensitive about her granny, then I was at least as sensitive about my father. It got on my nerves that she classed him with the Muslims you saw on the TV news who hated all Jews.
‘Well, now that you mention it … I’ve been thinking of asking if you can imagine wearing … well, not a veil all over your face, but up to your nose so that no man can see your wickedly tempting lips …’
And it might keep your mouth shut now and then.
Deborah looked at me, and then she suddenly said, in quite a friendly tone, ‘Oh, come on, let’s have a drink!’ and went to the kitchen to get a bottle of wine. Alcohol standing in for the UN blue helmets. But after that we didn’t quite trust ourselves to broach the subject again.
Sheikh Hakim’s answer in his interview to the question of how, as an imam, he felt about alcohol and drugs was interesting: ‘Well, that isn’t really my field. But of course I know that all parts of the world have developed methods of relaxing after work at the end of the day. In South America they chew coca leaves, in Europe and my native land of Turkey they drink alcohol — but why are the means of relaxation used in other parts of the world criminalised here? First and foremost of course hashish, a relatively harmless herb. But smoking opium is a normal way to relax in many places. As a practising Muslim I do not drink alcohol or take any other drugs, but I am not blind. Alcoholism in Europe — just look at Russia — and the USA is an enormous problem. But have you ever heard of smoking hashish in the countries of North Africa or Asia leading to high mortality, a drop in the birth rate, and the devastation of large sections of the population? Do you know what I think? I think it’s in the interests of the producers of alcohol not to allow any other legal alternative on the market, and as alcohol is mainly produced in the West one must, in my opinion, describe this state of affairs as extremely imperialistic.’
At least, it was interesting if Sheikh Hakim really was in the heroin trade. What a cheeky son of a bitch.
However, maybe Octavian and the police were wrong, and Hakim went to the expense of bodyguards and CCTV cameras just to impress his disciples. Anyway, the Internet didn’t seem to show that he was in any particular danger. On the contrary: Hakim appeared to be a rather conservative preacher, and not a genuinely deranged one. I could hardly imagine that he would protect a nephew gone bad who sent underage girls out on the streets. But then again: virgins, they had something with virgins, right? And unbelieving virgins — what about them? Could they be sent out on the streets maybe, as many of them as you liked? Maybe they even ought to be sent out on the streets? That was often the difficulty with religious people: ninety-nine per cent of the time religious people behaved relatively normally, but madness might lurk in the remaining one per cent. I don’t mean like the pope, for instance, appearing in his pink paedo-slippers before the world, overpopulated as it is, to condemn condoms — the madness in that was out in the open. But take Hakim: decades of Western support for criminal despots, fair enough; feelings of humiliation now turning to rage, okay; legalise hashish, why not? But would he go so far as: maybe unbelieving virgins are the last scum of the earth for a righteous God!