This girl whose name I didn’t know let loose a hurricane in me. I began to tremble. My vice returned in full force. I noticed how it drew me to a carpet shop. At the entrance was a gigantic container and, beside it, a heap of yellow and white paper that had been used to wrap carpets. I grabbed some quickly, as much as I could, and ran.
I ended up with what you could call ‘writing diarrhoea’. That night, the dream attacked me again. I wrote as if possessed, and every time I saw a gypsy woman—any gypsy woman — my whole body shook like a bee sucking nectar. I stole paper from almost every carpet shop but didn’t see the girl again. Whenever I passed the house I saw the old lady on her chair — but the girl. .?
I rode the writing dragon for about a week, a very exciting and successful week, given the long bout of writing constipation that preceded it. I wrote a number of poems and I wrote them for all gypsy women. The fiery girl, though — whom I labelled, in my passion, ‘a gypsy priest’s daughter’—had almost an entire collection dedicated to her.
As suddenly as it had arrived, the trembling stopped. No earthquake, no dream, no paper raids. The gypsy muse eluded me too, as a butterfly would the winter frost. I decided to remain in Achaea no longer. I’d saved enough to keep me going for a little while. And so I returned to Patras, from where my journey would continue.
I reached Germany. In Passau — a small town on the border between Germany and Austria, at the foot of the Bavarian Forest mountains, where the Danube becomes two rivers richer — the dream caught up with me.
I discovered many things there, including a totally new ideal of female beauty. Until then, I’d only known what I called ‘the cow beauty’. As you can perhaps guess, the ‘cow beauty’ looks like a well-fed, well-nourished and happy dairy cow living a tranquil life on some grassy meadow. She is as strong and fleshy as the Greek goddess Aphrodite, her role model. To this category belong Arabian, Turkish and Greek women as well as many others of Mediterranean origin. The new ideal I got to know in Passau was ‘the goat beauty’. Such a woman seems emaciated — even famished — to me. As good as no stomach; thin, strung-out legs; firm, little breasts; and a tiny, barely visible arse. Much like a goat back home. This I understood to be the Western ideal of a desirable woman — flaunted, as it was, in every magazine, on every TV channel and on every billboard.
Passau seemed to me a wonderful town with its three rivers, its old town, its narrow streets and — despite their goat-like arses — its beautiful women. I lived in an asylum seekers’ home, not far from the town centre, in a room I shared with three other men. Once a week, I received a food parcel from the state. Funny-smelling sausage, colourful hard-boiled eggs, bread and juices. Sometimes, there were also fish fingers but they didn’t have much to do with fish. I also received sixty marks a month as pocket money from the state or, to be precise, the Foreigners’ Registration Office. From the very first moment, I hated that place. The strangest people worked there, bespectacled ‘Darwin-type’ creatures. They didn’t like me, I didn’t like them. Enemies from the outset. Why? I don’t know. But I do know that they always demanded I obey them. But I didn’t want to. ‘Off you go!’ a female staff member snapped at me once, ‘I don’t have any time for you right now!’
‘Don’t speak to me like that!’ I shouted back. ‘I don’t work for your mother.’
‘How dare you!’ she screeched. ‘You won’t be getting any money from us this month.’
The sixty marks kept me in cigarettes for a week, just about. And I wasn’t permitted to work. So I couldn’t earn my keep, however much I might have liked to.
The worst thing was that, in this town, my temple dream resurfaced. The very first day, that strange trembling came over me again and I felt the urge to write. The streets of this town were full of priest’s daughters and muses, some of whom would stretch out half naked on the riverbanks, in the sun, or dance, light-footed, across the squares. Not short of reasons for my pathological paper raids, I descended, greedily on every waste-paper container I could find, be it in a residential complex or in the municipal recycling depot. The people in this town, like many others in the country, have (as I was later to discover) a variety of bins at their disposal — one for glass, one for plastic, one for residual waste and so on. You’d almost think it was a well-stocked supermarket, not a waste-disposal site.
These paper raids increased when I met Olga. She was twenty-five, a Russian of German descent. During the Third Reich, her Jewish grandparents had fled to Russia and died there. Olga later decided to return to Germany, as a former Russian and, now, a German Jewess. I met her in a cafe in Passau. She appealed to me though she was, if anything, a ‘goat beauty’. The heart ignores beauty ideals and other such conceits. We liked each other right away but, sadly, everything was against us. She was from a Jewish family and I from a Muslim one. To top it all, she was still married to a Russian. An alcoholic. He sometimes hit her so much that I had to deal with her bruises. Nonetheless, she didn’t want to leave him. For their child’s sake. She often said, quietly and sadly, ‘If the Russians ever find out I’m with you, you’re dead.’ This period was so full of paper raids and poems that I’ve lost all measure of where, when and how many I wrote.
I was glad to get a residence permit in the end. To be officially entitled to political asylum. And so I decided to take my leave of Passau, Olga and the town’s half-naked women. I left alone. Saying goodbye to Olga was hard for me. Though, again, it was entirely clear to me that the relationship was in no way possible.
Today I live in Munich, far from my previous towns. This city is so unique that I can hardly bear it sometimes. As beautiful as a rose, as a plastic rose. Like a private hospital — totally fucking clean and expensive. I hate the winter here, when the residents’ faces make you think they’ve all just failed an exam. In summer, however, I never want to be away for very long. Suddenly, the town dresses differently. Or, rather, undresses. Like the women along the Isar. And it flirts with you. Like the women with their miniskirts and tender flesh, the colour of milk. And though the Foreigners’ Registration Office and the police in this town have, honestly, never allowed me to lead a calm life — the police used to harass me the minute they’d spot my black hair and brown face out and about in the street — I’ve experienced my temple dream here again, in all its intensity. Because this town is so full of shapely Bavarian ladies with incredibly round breasts and curvy arses — and this, in the land of the ‘goat beauties’. And so my paper raids continue here too.
I’d noticed right away the unusual newspaper boxes — on legs — located on many a street corner. You can take a paper and simply put the required amount of money in the slot. If I’d had the money, I could just as well have bought a proper notebook. Given, however, that my financial means were, as ever, more than just ‘limited’, I had no choice but to succumb to my urge and steal the newspapers and use the narrow margins to write on. I even dipped into the briefcase of my new Bavarian girlfriend. But barely had I opened it when. .