Go, Went, Gone

There’d been two rowboats nearby, but none of the people seated in them had the impression there was anything amiss. They saw the man waving his arm and thought it was a joke, they rowed off, leaving him behind — or so he’s heard. But no one knows who was in the rowboats. A few strong young men, apparently, who might have saved the day. But no one knows who they are. Or maybe they were afraid the man would pull them down with him, who knows.

Six people just like that man still at the bottom of the lake. We become visible. Why didn’t Richard see these men at Alexanderplatz?

Just as he’s thinking this, an earsplitting bang is heard suddenly coming from the stairwell, something like an explosion that immediately eradicates all thinking, leaving behind only instinct. Instinctually, the relief worker knows: they are on the third floor. The man from Ghana knows the door to the other stairwell is locked. The neighbor: Don’t they know there are white people here? Another neighbor asks herself, what’ll happen to my son? Many of the refugees think: So in the end I just came here to die. Even Richard knows something: This is it.

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.

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.

On one of the days Richard spends at his desk and in his reading chair, the tents and shacks on Oranienplatz are torn down and the refugees divided among facilities run by various charitable organizations throughout the city and on the outskirts, facilities that have declared themselves willing—now that the temperatures have started to drop below fifty degrees at night—to take in refugees. Richard doesn’t hear about this, since he’s spending the day reading about the acquisition of territory on the southwest coast of Africa by a trader named Lüderitz.

The director knocks on one of the doors and opens it without waiting for a response, like a doctor or nurse in a hospital ward.

He lays the sheet of paper, already covered from top to bottom with German vocabulary words, on the bed beside him; above his head, a list of irregular verbs hangs on the wall, Gehen, ging, gegangen: go, went, gone.

Now, too, he is experiencing such a moment; he is reminded that one person’s vantage point is just as valid as another’s, and in seeing, there is no right, no wrong.

Then he saw the tents.

I stood alone. The man went away. Never in my life had I slept in a tent.

That’s where he was supposed to live?

In a tent?

He stood in the middle of the tents, crying.

But then he heard someone speaking Arabic, a Libyan dialect.

At Oranienplatz, they gave him something to eat and a place to sleep.

Oranienplatz provided for him, as his father had provided for him in Libya.

He will never forget his father, he will always revere his memory.

And in just this way he will never forget Oranienplatz. He will always revere its memory.

This is what Awad says in conclusion, and after that there is truly nothing left to say.

To understand what a person means or says, it’s basically necessary to already know what that person means or is saying. So is every successful dialogue just an act of recognition? And is understanding not a path, but a condition?

But if this prosperity couldn’t be attributed to their own personal merit, then by the same token the refugees weren’t to blame for their reduced circumstances. Things might have turned out the other way around. For a moment, this thought opens its jaws wide, displaying its frightening teeth.

I want to go back to my friends, he says.

Richard doesn’t know if Osarobo means his friends in the nursing home or the ones who are dead. With this boy, Richard has run aground. But his failure isn’t what matters here. He’s not what matters.

He feels irritated, but why is he so annoyed? Because this African isn’t as happy and grateful as he expected? Because he was so easily able to forget him, the only German from outside the home who voluntarily sets foot here? Or maybe because this African isn’t desperate enough to understand that Richard is offering him an opportunity? Or is it more that Osarobo’s carelessness has casually made clear to Richard that his offer to let Osarobo play his piano isn’t really an opportunity at all but at best a way to pass the time, only marginally more attractive than sleeping?

Listen, he says, I’ve done things like that too — perfectly normal sentences come out sounding completely different here.

They’re funny about blood sometimes, says the third staff member, who’s been sitting half in shadow beneath the slope of the roof and hasn’t said anything until now.

How many times, he wonders, must a person relearn everything he knows, rediscovering it over and over, and how many coverings must be torn away before he’s finally able to truly grasp things, to understand them to the bone? Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else’s?

They tell the stories in the evening.

They find their way by these stories?

Yes.

They find it by remembering?

Yes.

For much of his life, he’s hoped in a tiny back corner of his soul that people from Africa mourn their dead less. Death there has been a mass phenomenon for so long now. Now, this back corner of his soul is occupied instead by shame: shame that for most of his lifetime he’s taken the easy way out.

When my best friend and I arrived in Europe, he says, we decided to go our separate ways, in the hope that one of us might get lucky and then that person could help the other one. Richard thinks of Grimm’s fairy tales, which he so loved reading as a child, he thinks of the brothers sent out into the world by their father to make their fortune, to find a beautiful princess, solve riddles, and earn their inheritance. […] In these tales, the world is always something that begins at a crossroads, a forking of paths: from there, the story takes you to the north, south, east, or west. In these tales, salvation always comes. When the blade of the sword turns rusty, you’ll know I need your help. A prince needs no passport.

The Polish health-care aide returns to Berlin and her job taking care of Anne’s mother before New Year’s arrives. She would have liked to spend a few more days with her family in Poland, Anne says, but you understand. . . .

What a shame, Richard says.

Richard knows he’s one of very few people in this world who are in a position to take their pick of realities.

Rufu had spent Christmas confined to a psychiatric ward of a Berlin hospital and, after his release, was prescribed medication that — as Richard sees it — nearly killed him, and now it turns out the reason for all of this may have been just a hole in a tooth.

As so often, this examination has revealed that everything depends on asking the right questions.

Where can a person go when he doesn’t know where to go?

I think that’s when I realized, says Richard, that the things I can endure are only just the surface of what I can’t possibly endure.

Like the surface of the sea? asks Khalil.

Actually, yes, exactly like the surface of the sea.