Suddenly I got furious. “ ‘So no one can find you’-what a great idea! Larsson has collected his money, you haven’t told anyone who you were going to meet, and the cops are glad that you’re gone.” I spread out my hands and barked: “We’ll all die of suffocation here, most likely!”
Now the other two kids were crying, too, and a palpable atmosphere of fear spread in the room. Even the kid in jeans looked troubled. The dream of a life outside the hells of Beirut, Teheran, Colombo, or Istanbul seemed to vanish into thin air. The military, murdered relatives, torture, and hunger were suddenly present. Someone screamed. The old man closed his eyes.
They had fled. They had traveled halfway around the world with two suitcases. They had filled out applications, they had been rejected, they had applied again and had been rejected again, they had sought shelter in barns or shared a room with nine others. They had gone into hiding and lived without papers, and now they wanted to get at least these forged ones. Out of the void they had conjured up three thousand marks-they had tried everything just to be able to say, one day: tomorrow I’ll sleep late, or I’ll save up for a video recorder, I should be able to get one next year, or this weekend I’ll get so smashed I’ll crawl home, and if a cop shows up, I’ll just stand up and pull out my wallet. But they never had a chance. Those who were rejected would remain so: the refugee “in whose native culture torture is a common and traditional method of interrogation:” the refugee “who, if he had not become politically active, need not have feared reprisals-and who was fully conscious of the risks of his activity;” and the “economic asylum seeker” who is labeled a parasite in the world of German supermarkets, as if hunger and poverty were a kind of “human right” for three quarters of the planet’s population. He or she was merely the ghost of the “at our expense” notion, never mind the fact that we have lived for centuries at his expense, and that he is trying to go where “our” pedestrian malls, “our” air force and “our” opera houses have been built-at his expense. He is a “parasite,” never mind that coffee, rubber heels, and metal ores do not grow in the forests of Bavaria. Sooner or later these people would be caught and put on the next plane out. But now they had been cheated out of even that fate. While I lit another smoke, most of the others tried to calm down the screaming guy. The kids’ mother uttered an excited burst of Arabic. Then she started scolding me.
“Why are you putting such bad thoughts into our heads?” And, pointing at the weeping children: “See what you’ve done!”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. In the meantime, they had made the man lie down on a bench. Staring up at the ceiling he talked, in a breathless, monotonous blend of English and Tamil, about his native village. As far as I could understand, that village no longer existed, and he had been forced to do something to his daughter. The daughter did no longer exist, either. He was the only survivor of his family.
I sat down next to the old man who had erected an invisible wall around himself. Arms crossed over his chest, his gaze fixed on his patent leather shoes, he whispered:
“You shouldn’t have said that. This is a room full of very many people. There’s no room for fear.” And, after a pause: “You think we are stupid, but we have no choice in the matter.” Then he got up, walked across the circle of people who looked as if they were at their wits’ end, reached the man from the village, and put his hand on the man’s forehead.
I clenched my teeth. Was it my fault that we were cooped up in this room? And wouldn’t I be a victim, too, when we ran out of air? They could all go fuck themselves, for all I cared. I closed my eyes, chain-smoked, and hoped that someone would come over and tell me to stop polluting the air, giving me an excuse to punch them in the nose. But no one came. Or at least, no one came the way I had imagined.
After my fourth cigarette I heard the first siren. Then the second, the third, finally a whole concert. They approached rapidly, emitted one final howl, and fell silent. Then there was engine noise; there were commands and voices through megaphones, barking dogs and footsteps. A key turned in the lock, the door opened. I tossed the butt and listened to a whole bag of pennies dropping in my head.
The first man to enter was less than five feet tall, thin as a board and just as stiff. His uniform fit him like a second skin. A neat oval of facial hair framed his mouth; otherwise he was clean-shaven and exuded one of those masculine fragrances that make the air taste like soap. Legs far apart, he stood in the doorframe, holding a pistol in his right, a radio transmitter in his left hand. When he spoke it sounded as if he was chewing on ice cubes. “On your feet, chop chop, get in line. Need to check your papers.” Two men in uniform armed with submachine guns took up positions to the right and the left of the door. I was one of those who remained seated.
“Come on, I told you, chop chop!”
“Good afternoon. Rank and serial number, please, or I won’t comply.”
The submachine guns swiveled quickly to point at my chest. The faces above them, adolescent and pimply, looked as if they thought they had to save the world, at the very least, and were pretty damn scared by the prospect. Trigger fingers jerked nervously back and forth.
“And tell your kids to put their toys down. We don’t want them to pull the trigger by mistake.”
The commanding officer dissected me with his eyes. Then he moved his chin in my direction, and his cohorts rushed forward. In no time at all they pulled me off the bench, made me stand between them, and patted me down. I no longer had my Beretta, and my wallet was gone, too. My I.D. was in the wallet. With short, abrupt steps, the commanding officer came up and stopped right in front of me. I could feel his breath on my face; it smelled of peppermint. Old Spice and peppermint. It was a knockout.
“Your I.D.”
“Your serial number.”
“One one two eight one eight. Inspector Hagebrecht. Your I.D.”
“Someone stole it.”
“Under arrest.”
“Just a minute!” I resisted. I stopped when they were about to break my arms. “I’m a German citizen.”
A thin smile appeared on his face.
“A likely story. Take him away.”
“When your boss hears about this, he’ll take your head off. Then you’ll be just four feet-ouch! I bet you’re supposed to take care of this business as discreetly as possible. Good luck with telling your boss that Kemal Kayankaya is one of your refugees! Better start practicing …”
Minutes later I had been handcuffed and put on the bus, next to a guard, and watched through the barred windows how people were escorted out of the bunker, one by one. Some had to be punched to make them move, others were carried, many were weeping. The children came last. Separated from their mother, they were dragged into a car. They were screaming. Their marbles scattered onto the muddy ground and lay there, blinking. I turned to my guard.
“Who sent you here?”
Staring straight ahead, his chin rigid, his cap pulled down low over his forehead, he mumbled: “Official secret.”
“Doesn’t it seem strange to you that your strike force leader had a key to that bunker?”
“Not within the parameters of my task to find that strange.”
After Hagebrecht had latched the bunker door and given marching orders, the vehicle column took off. We drove along the road through the woods back to the Gellersheim soccer field. I saw my Opel and through its back window the party angel. She was still fast asleep. We drove through Gellersheim and on to the autobahn. The driver turned on the radio, and the officers nodded their heads to the rhythms of Bavarian brass band music. It was raining. At the Frankfurt intersection we turned off in the direction of the airport.
12
“… and I was going to Mannheim today. Haven’t missed a game this year, not one minute. Even in Dortmund, I was there to the very end. And what an end it was. They scored six goals against us-six! Just imagine … After that I was quite fed up, but then-well, I just felt I couldn’t leave the guys in the lurch, just like that. So I kept on going, every Saturday, and now we’ve got the worst behind us. With Bein and Falkenmayer on board, we may even make it to the UEFA Cup next year, or we get the championship, and then we’ll be back on the international scene, and then-” He stopped and looked at the iron bars. Behind them lay an empty landing with green walls and three yellow light fixtures. The shadows cast by the bars divided our cell into narrow segments. Again, no windows. A faucet stuck out of one wall, and next to it there was a dirty white plastic toilet. Seventeen of us were sitting there on iron bedsteads, gray blankets wrapped around our shoulders. People smoked in silence. The women had been locked up in another cell down the hall. Once in a while one of them would call out, and one of the men would answer. It sounded like a conversation between people who were drowning. We had been there for four hours. A female officer had brought us some bread.