“But I told you, Koberle kept her passport all that time.”
“Yes, that’s what you told me.”
Hands clasped behind his back, the policeman now leaned into the open window on the driver’s side.
“Just like you told me this morning that a marriage to her was out of the question. Tell me-why?”
While Weidenbusch was busy composing an answer, the policeman’s green hat reappeared, and the head under it scanned all directions in search of the culprit. Setting his hands in motion, he pulled pad and pencil out of his shoulder bag and proceeded to write a friendly note from your fairy godmother.
“… I would have liked to marry her, but when I suggested it to her, she just shook her head. Later, she even got angry with me. It must be something to do with her culture.”
Right. Tribes outside of Central Europe didn’t need reasons for their actions. They had “cultures.” Now the cop was scrubbing dirt off my registration sticker.
“All right. I’ll be in touch when I have news for you.”
“Will you get her back?”
“I will. Don’t worry. Talk to you soon.”
Before he could say anything else I hung up and ran across the street.
“O.K., O.K.! I’m back! You can toss that ticket!”
He looked up, surprised. He had just started lifting a windshield wiper to place the ticket under it.
“I’m leaving. Just had to make a quick phone call.”
“So? It’s illegal to park in a traffic lane.” He snapped the windshield wiper down over the ticket, straightened his back and adjusted his hat. “And let me tell you something, young man. You need to improve your attitude.”
“I don’t need any advice on attitude from my employees.” While he glared at me, uncomprehending, I opened the car door.
“Just think about it for a moment: I’m paying you a salary for writing tickets so the fines can be used to pay others who write me more tickets, and so on. In that sense, and as far as I’m concerned, traffic cops are a total loss. Nevertheless, I keep on paying my taxes every year so that you can have an apartment, buy schoolbooks for your kids, and go to the movies. Now, think about it-would you go on paying someone who keeps kicking you in the ass?”
He looked at me as if I had lost all my marbles, or as if I had never had and was never likely to have any. I pointed my finger at him across the doorframe. “See what I’m saying? But I keep on paying. How about a conciliatory gesture? How about tearing up that ticket?”
No reaction. Unchanged, frowning, one eye slightly narrowed he stood there as if he hadn’t heard or understood my question.
“Oh, forget it!” I got into the car and leaned out the window. “Loitering in the sun, wearing those threads paid for by the state, and bothering people-some would call that ‘workshy’ behavior.”
Ten minutes later I parked across the street from the immigration office, slammed the door, and ripped the ticket from under the windshield wiper.
The offices for names beginning with the letters K to R were on the third floor, in the left-hand hallway, behind the cocoa machine. The hallway was full of people of all pigments, standing, sitting, or lying down, all waiting for their number to come up. There were no benches or chairs. The floor was littered with cigarette butts and botched application forms. Faded posters advertised St. Paul’s and Town Hall-FRANKFURT AM MAIN, CITY OF SIGHTS TO SEE-and above the doors, digital counters showed the current numbers. A video game noise emitted by invisible speakers replaced the old “Next, please”. People weren’t talking much, and only in hushed tones, perhaps because they felt that it was necessary to ration what air remained in the fog of sweat and stale smoke. Due to security regulations, windows could not be opened.
I sat down on the floor and leaned against the wall, between an adolescent disco gigolo to my left who kept himself frantically busy smoking Marlboros and fixing his hairdo and a Polish couple and their son to my right. Dad and Mom were nodding out over the daily paper, the kid whiled away the hours making two plastic cowboys go “bang,” “zong,” and “pow” … I felt like going “pow” on him, myself.
Suddenly two men in uniform plowed through and past all the legs, children, and bags, disappeared in the office for S, and soon thereafter dragged a young black man down the hall and down the stairs while he kept protesting in broken German that he hadn’t known about the deportation order. The people waiting followed him with their eyes as if he were an apparition. There was a moment when it looked like everybody was about to say something, but then they just looked at each other and remained silent.
It occurred to me that the posters advertising Frankfurt were not only in poor taste, but-as far as this office was concerned-completely counter-productive. The interests of the immigration authorities would have been better served by pictures of beaches in Beirut-MARBLE, ROCK, AND BROKEN IRON-or desert landscapes in Ethiopia-THERE’S NOTHING LIKE HOME COOKING. A campaign to further national loyalty to crisis areas. One could even conceive a double-barreled approach, with, let’s say, a picture of a Thai girl flanked by her parents-WELCOME TO THE FAMILY this would not only encourage locals to return home, but would also appeal to the German male on vacation … Although it was true that the latter rarely set foot in this building. The video arcade noise interrupted my train of thought, and my number appeared on the display. I entered a standard office with standard furniture, postcards on the walls, potted palm trees by the window. The fortyish woman behind the desk was eating a cake. She wore a platinum blonde wig, a pink blouse, and a gold chain with an Eiffel Tower pendant. Her face was long and narrow and slightly remorseful, and when she spoke, it sounded as if she were reciting an instruction manual for disposable cigarette lighters. The room smelled of one of those perfumes designed to appeal to several tastes at once.
When she was done chewing and had wiped her mouth thoroughly, she picked up a pen and looked at her pad. “Number one hundred eighty three?”
“Right.”
She made a check mark. “Name?”
“Kemal Kayankaya.”
“Spelling?”
“Pretty good, mostly. I have a little trouble with those foreign words.”
She looked up and pursed her lips in a stepmotherly fashion. After she had scanned me and come to a conclusion, she hissed: “The spelling of your name!”
I spelled it for her. Without lifting her pen, she asked:
“Nationality?”
“FRG.”
“Germany,” she corrected me under her breath. Then she looked up again, quite irritably. “German …?”
“You want me to spell that?”
Her left eyelid twitched. While we glared at each other, she pushed the pad to one side and leaned back in her chair, holding on to the armrests.
“If you are a German citizen, Mr.-”
“Kayankaya, How long have you been doing this?”
She looked startled.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“I was just thinking … If every name that doesn’t sound like Wurst takes you that long to memorize, you may not be cut out for this job.”
Her forehead began to turn pink.
“One more crack out of you, young man, and I’ll call security. If you really are a German-”
“I’m a Turk with a German passport.”
Her eyes flashed briefly. She saw an opening. She said: “You mean you’re a permanent resident? Seems to me you’re a little confused.”
I began to get hot under the collar.
“If I had meant to tell you that I’m a permanent resident, I would have told you so. But that’s not what I told you. I told you something else-remember?”
Instead of replying she held on tighter to the armrests of her chair and looked as if she was visualizing my being drawn, beheaded, and quartered. In an adjacent room, a voice rose to a roar: “… you no understand nothing, I don’t give a shit! Here you speak German, no nigger English!” Then someone banged on a table, then there were footsteps, a door opened, another voice giggled, and this was followed by murmurs and finally silence. The woman in front of me was still hanging on to her chair, her face contorted by fury, and seemed oblivious to all the commotion.