I shrugged my shoulders. ‘It’s all the same to me what you people do to crank up sales. But it’s part of my job to estimate roughly the extent of the danger for the person I am protecting and for myself. I’ll assume even more now that we shall have a peaceful afternoon.’
It took her a moment to overcome herself, and then she said, ‘Glad you are so relaxed about it. I’m sorry, working with authors’ — she hesitated — ‘well; they have their oddities, surprises — if you see what I mean?’
‘Of course — because they think too much.’
She smiled wearily. ‘Then that’s all right.’ And looked at the time. ‘I must get back to the phone now. If you need anything, then as I said, please ask me. See you later.’
Soon after that Rashid sat down at the table in front of me, and Katja Lipschitz’s young assistant, wearing a chic blue trouser suit, served him a cup of stewed coffee and a slice of coconut and banana cake.
‘Thanks, darling.’ He winked at her. ‘Mmm, that smells good. Let’s hope our young colleague writes as well as he bakes.’
‘Oh, he does,’ said the assistant with a friendly smile. ‘A great book, really moving. If you need anything please ask. The man from the Bamberger Allgemeine will be here in five minutes.’
‘What about the Wochenecho interview?’
‘We’re still working on it, Herr Rashid. Katja is doing all she can. The problem is that the journalist who agreed to do the interview had to withdraw at short notice for health reasons. I’m really sorry. As soon as there’s any news I’ll let you know.’
She turned to me. ‘Would you like a piece of cake too?’
‘No thank you, just a glass of water, please.’
As the assistant went to get the glass of water from the hospitality room behind me and a cloudy aroma of Harz cheese and banana enveloped me from the open door, Rashid turned to me, glancing at the hospitality room. ‘Sweet, isn’t she?’ Then he held his cake fork aloft like a little sword. ‘An interview in the Wochenecho! If that comes off then the sales …’ And he drew a line slanting up in the air with his fork.
‘Great,’ I said.
A little later Katja Lipschitz’s assistant brought the journalist from the Bamberger Allgemeine to Rashid’s table. He was a stout, unshaven, uncombed, comfortable-looking man in his mid-forties in trodden-down shoes and a raincoat so crumpled that he might have spent the night in it. He let his apparently heavy shoulder bag drop on the floor and greeted Rashid exuberantly. ‘… A great honour for me … Very glad to … What a brave book … thank you for giving me your time.’
Rashid tried to return the compliments as far as he could. ‘… Very glad to meet you myself … thanks for your time … Bamberger Allgemeine, a great little paper …’
Then the journalist took an old-fashioned tape recorder out of the shoulder bag — ‘Afraid we don’t run to modern technology at the Bamberger Allgemeine yet’ — spent five long minutes getting the recorder to work, and finally began asking questions that he had noted down on a small piece of paper covered with food stains.
It was the first interview of Rashid’s that I had heard, and there were to be another eight that afternoon: with the Rüdesheimer Boten, the Storlitzer Anzeiger, the student journal Randale, with Radio Norderstedt and someone or other — and little as I liked Rashid myself, by at least the third or fourth interview I was feeling sorry for him all the same.
‘My dear Malik Rashid,’ went on the man from Bamberg, after a few trivial questions about Rashid’s place of birth and biography, ‘now let me take the bull by the horns: is your masterly, compelling novel Journey to the End of Days not, above all, the subtle coming-out of a man from North Africa who has lived in Europe long enough to throw off the religious and traditional chains of his native land publicly and, so to speak, on behalf of many … how shall I put it? Like-minded men?’
‘What?’ Rashid’s mouth stayed open. He really did seem taken entirely by surprise. He had certainly expected journalists to broach the subject, but he was obviously not prepared for it to be the kernel, not only of this but of all the following interviews on his first day at the Fair. However much he explained that his central character’s homosexual love for a young hustler was a mixture of sexual frustration, longing for freedom, the desire for forbidden fruit, with at most a very slight amount of natural inclination, and that he as a writer was simply devising a conflict that would help him to describe the present state of Moroccan society — the one thing that interested the mostly unprepared and cheaply dressed men and women of Bamberg and Storlitz was: DOES THE MUSLIM AUTHOR PUBLICLY ADMIT TO HIS HOMOSEXUALITY?
Just after four o’clock, Sheikh Hakim called me on my mobile. I was standing at the wash basins in the gents’ toilet for the third time that afternoon, waiting for Rashid. Maybe it was the scalding coffee that he tipped cup after cup down his throat during the interviews, maybe it was the interviews themselves, but he was suffering from diarrhoea. As I stood next to the room full mainly of men urinating and watched how they carelessly soiled the floor, I gathered from their talk that there were three main topics of conversation at the Book Fair that day. First, Gretchen Love’s future best seller Spermaboarding, or How a Hundred Men Came On Me All at Once, just published by a large and famous firm, a kind of account of a Berlin porn star’s self-exploration. Second, the Wochenecho journalist Lukas Lewandowski, well known to everyone but me, judging by the general interest and all the laughter, who claimed to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in the high-speed train between Hannover and Göttingen on his way to the Book Fair, and thereupon dropped everything worldly, including his work, to devote himself entirely to that experience. Third, a presumably powerful literary critic whose name wasn’t mentioned but who was referred to as Blondi a couple of times — whether after the pop band, Hitler’s German Shepherd or simply his hair colour was not clear to me — who had published a novel entitled Oh, My Heart, My Heart, So Heavy Yet So Light under a pseudonym. That morning his supposedly top-secret pseudonym had been aired in several newspapers, and Blondi had marched up to one of the journalists responsible at the Fair and slapped his face. ‘Or more likely spat and scratched the little queen!’ said someone in the corner. ‘Oh, my heart, my heart, so heavy!’ Everyone laughed.
At that moment my mobile rang.
‘Good afternoon, my brother.’
‘Good afternoon. As far as I know I don’t have a brother. Who’s speaking?’
‘Sheikh Hakim.’
More laughter about something near the urinals.
‘Wait a minute, it’s rather noisy here.’
I went out into the corridor near the entrance to the toilet.
‘Herr Hakim?’
‘Kemal Kayankaya,’ he stated, pleased. He emphasised the Turkish pronunciation of my name.
‘Yes, you have the right number.’
‘Not a very Christian name.’
His speech rhythm had the monotony of an electric kitchen machine, and he had a strong accent, but grammatically his German was perfect. His sentences sounded as if he had learnt them with heart — as if speaking German was for him a job to be carried out perfectly, like a dutiful official or a high-class whore, but that hardly interested him at all.
‘To me it’s just my name.’
He laughed, coughing.
‘Why do you fight the fact that you came into the world a Muslim?’
‘I don’t fight it, but I don’t make a big thing of it either. I didn’t choose it. Is that why you’re calling — for a discussion about the religious traditions of my parents’ native land?’
That coughing laugh again.
‘My secretary tried to arrange a meeting with you.’