Before Richard moved to the outskirts with his wife, they’d lived in an apartment, a mere two hundred yards as the crow flies from West Berlin. And they lived there almost as peacefully as they later lived in the countryside. The Wall had turned their street into a cul-de-sac where children roller-skated. Then in 1990 the Wall was cleared away piece by piece, and each time a new crossing point was opened, a crowd of emotional West Berliners punctually gathered, eager to bid a warm welcome to their brothers and sisters from the East. One morning, he himself became the object of these tearful welcomes: the East Berliner who’d lived on this street that had been cut in half for twenty-nine years, crossing over on his way to freedom. But he hadn’t been on his way to freedom that morning, he was only trying to get to the University, punctually taking advantage of the S-Bahn station at the western end of his newly opened street. Unemotional and in a hurry, he’d used his elbows to fight his way through this weeping crowd — one of the disappointed liberators shouted an insult at his back — but for the very first time, Richard got to school in under twenty minutes.
Just a year ago, the park bench he’s now sitting on was just a perfectly normal bench in a Kreuzberg park. People out for walks would sit down here to rest their legs and relax. In the 1920s, the canal that had existed here in Lenné’s time was filled in by the city government because it stank so badly. Is the water still flowing down there somewhere among the grains of sand?
In any case, no one sits here these days out of a desire to relax. If Richard doesn’t get right back up again, it’s only because he isn’t here for recreational purposes. The ordinary activity of sitting on a park bench has lost its ordinariness because of the refugees camping on the grass behind the benches. Berliners who’ve known since Lenné’s time how to comport themselves in this park while seated on a bench are no longer certain: there’s no old lady feeding the sparrows, no mother rocking her baby carriage gently back and forth, no student reading, no trio of drinkers conducting their morning meeting, no office worker eating his midday snack, no lovers holding hands. “The Transformation of Sitting” might be a good title for an essay. Richard remains seated, remaining in spite of. Whenever an “in spite of” occurs, in his experience, things get interesting. “The Birth of In Spite Of” would make a good title for an essay too.
The only person with white skin who seems to be just as much at home in this square as the refugees is a rawboned woman in her early forties. She’s just showing a Turkish man where he can leave the flatbreads he’s brought as a contribution. Somewhat later she accepts a bicycle from a man with a beard, passing it on to one of the refugees, and both watch the refugee as he happily pedals off. He’s got shrapnel in his lung, by the way, she says, and the bearded man nods. Libya, she says, he nods, then both are silent for a moment. The man says, I guess I’ll be on my way. A young woman with a microphone in her hand approaches.
I’m not doing any interviews just now, the rawboned woman says.
But it’s important that the Berliners —
Maybe you’ve heard that negotiations are underway for winter lodgings.
That’s why I’m here, the interviewer says.
Has he already started looking like a bum, is that why the two women seem unfazed that he’s sitting here just a few feet away from them, listening?
Then you might also know that the Senate’s only offering eighteen euros a night per man from now until April.
Yes, I’ve —
Well, the rawboned woman says, the only one who’s willing to offer housing to these men is already asking for twice as much. So if you write in your newspaper that there are rats here and only four toilets left, and sometimes nothing warm to eat for three days, and if you write that last winter tents collapsed under the weight of the snow, then I promise you: the only person who’ll be happy about your article is this investor.
Oh, the young woman says, I see. She lowers her microphone.
Once again Richard thinks — as so often in recent years — that the effects of a person’s actions are almost always impossible to predict and often prove to be the exact opposite of what the person originally intended. And if the same principle holds true in this case, he thinks, it’s possibly because the Berlin Senate’s negotiations with the refugees all have to do with borders, and a border is a place where, at least in mathematics, signs often change their value. No wonder, he thinks, the word dealings refers not just to actions but also business and trade.
Now not switching on her microphone, the young interviewer asks the rawboned woman:
What do the men do here all day long if they’re not allowed to work?
Nothing, the woman says. And as she turns away, she adds: When doing nothing gets to be too much for them, we organize a demonstration.
I understand, the interviewer says, nodding, and now the rawboned woman walks away.
Then she packs up her microphone again, still standing in front of the bench he’s sitting on with her back to him, not noticing that all this time she’s had a silent observer. Meanwhile the rawboned woman walks over to the open tent that appears to be the kitchen, pausing on the way to pick up a wooden signboard that’s fallen over and ripped a hole in a tent nearby.
Richard sees one black man walking over to another and shaking his hand in greeting. He sees a group of five men standing together talking, one of them is on the phone. He sees the man who was given the bicycle riding in a circle around the square, sometimes even weaving riskily among others on the gravel paths. He sees three of the refugees in an open tent sitting behind a table, in front of them a cardboard box labeled “Donations.” He sees an older man sitting alone on the back of a bench — there’s something wrong with his eye — and a man with a blue tattoo on his face thumping another on the shoulder in parting. He sees one man chatting with a female sympathizer, and another in a tent with an open flap, he’s sitting on a cot, typing something into a phone. There’s someone lying on the next cot, but only the feet are visible. He sees two men having an argument in a language incomprehensible to him, when one of them raises his voice and shoves the other away with a hand to his chest, making him stumble backward, the man on the bicycle has to swerve to avoid them. He sees the rawboned woman speaking with a man in the kitchen holding a cooking pot, and he sees the elegant corner building that furnishes the backdrop for all of this, probably dating back to around the period when there was still a canal where he is sitting. It looks like a former department store, but now there’s a bank on the ground floor. Back when there was a canal here, Germany still had colonies. The word Kolonialwaren was still visible in weathered script on some East Berlin facades as recently as twenty years ago, until the West started renovating everything, including the last vestiges of these ancient grocer’s shops with their imported wares. Kolonialwaren and WWII bullet holes might adorn the very same storefront. (The dusty shop window of such a building — its tenants evicted to prepare for renovation — might also display a Socialist cardboard sign reading Obst Gemüse Speisekartoffeln (OGS) to advertise the “fruit, vegetables, and potatoes” that gave East German greengrocers their acronym.) You can still find “German East Africa” on the globe in his study. The paper covering the sphere is peeling a little over the Mariana Trench, but the globe is still nice to look at. Richard has no idea what German East Africa is called today. He wonders whether, back when there was still a canal right where he’s sitting now, slaves were sold at that department store. Might black servants have carried the sacks of coal up to the fifth-floor apartments of Lenné’s contemporaries? The idea makes him grin. An old man sitting alone on a park bench grinning to himself might raise eyebrows. Anyhow, what’s he waiting for? Does he really think that after a year of these men camping out on this square, something unforeseen might happen today of all days, just when he’s decided to come visiting from the suburbs? Nothing happens, and after two and a half hours he starts to feel chilly, so he gets up from the bench and goes home.
Often when he was starting a new project, he didn’t know what was driving him, as if his thoughts had developed an independent life and a will of their own, as if they were merely waiting for him to finally think them, as if an investigation he was about to begin already existed before he had started working on it, and the path leading through everything he knew and saw, everything he encountered and experienced, already lay there waiting for him to venture down it. And probably that’s just how it was, given that you could only ever find what was already there. Because everything is always already there. In the afternoon, he rakes leaves for the first time. In the evening, the newscaster says it’s just a matter of time before a solution is found for the untenable situation of the refugees on Oranienplatz. Richard’s heard sentences like this many instances before, referring to all sorts of untenable situations. Other things too — the leaves becoming earth again, the drowned man washing up on shore or dissolving in the lake — are basically just a matter of time. But what does that mean? He doesn’t even know yet if time exists for the purpose of making various layers and paths overlap, or if it’s to keep things separate — maybe the newscaster knows. Richard feels irritated without knowing why. Later, already lying in bed, he remembers something the rawboned woman said: When doing nothing gets to be too much for them, we organize a demonstration. And suddenly he knows why he spent two hours today sitting on Oranienplatz. It’s something he already knew back in August when he first heard about the hunger strikers — the men who refused to give their names — and he knew it when he walked into the black schoolyard yesterday, but only now, in this moment, does he know it fully. Speaking about the actual nature of time is something he can probably do best in conversation with those who have fallen out of it. Or been locked up in it, if you prefer. Next to him, on the half of the bed still covered with the bedspread — the half where his wife used to sleep — lie a few of his sweaters, slacks, and shirts that he’s worn over the last few days and hasn’t yet cleared away.
——————
Richard spends the next two weeks reading several books on the subject of the refugees and drawing up a catalog of questions for the conversations he wants to have with them. After breakfast he goes to work, at one p.m. he has lunch and naps for an hour, then he sits down at his desk again or reads until eight or nine p.m. It’s important he ask the right questions. And the right questions aren’t always the ones you put into words.
To investigate how one makes the transition from a full, readily comprehensible existence to the life of a refugee, which is open in all directions — drafty, as it were — he has to know what was at the beginning, what was in the middle, and what is now. At the border between a person’s life and the other life lived by that same person, the transition has to be visible — a transition that, if you look closely enough, is nothing at all.
Where did you grow up? What’s your native language? What’s your religious affiliation? How many people are in your family? What did the apartment or house you grew up in look like? How did your parents meet? Was there a TV? Where did you sleep? What did you eat? What was your favorite hiding place when you were a child? Did you go to school? What sort of clothing did you wear? Did you have pets? Did you learn a trade? Do you have a family of your own? When did you leave the country of your birth? Why? Are you still in contact with your family? What was your goal when you left home? How did you say your goodbyes? What did you take with you when you left? What did you think Europe would be like? What’s different? How do you spend your days? What do you miss most? What do you wish for? If you had children who were growing up here, what would you tell them about your homeland? Can you imagine growing old here? Where do you want to be buried?
