Day 3: Hannover – Osnabrück
A chai is sipped and art is admired at Café Bredero — a street fight bids farewell from Hannover — arrival to Osnabrück — a walk by lake Rubbenbruch
In the morning I came across a couple of Nordic walkers, made a greeting as if I was at the woods by a little village and not in a big city's park. Needless to say, I was not greeted back. Around 8:00 I began folding up my fort. I was almost done when the rain intensified and it was my turn for a sluggish flight: I hanged the open umbrella on a tree outside the crate and moved myself and my belongings in batches under it. I watched the abandoned fort, mattress & net, under the rain. On the other side of the crate people walked dogs, one at a time, along the path.
I reasoned that it might be hours before the rain relented. Am not made out of sugar, I told and pushed myself to finish what I had started. I moved the rest under the tree, the mattress still inflated, leaving behind only the two wooden tripods as a lasting memory of my overnighting.
∗
Folded up, I started towards the city, first going out of my way to visit a park's point of interest marked on the map. It was a bronze statue raised on a concrete pedestal tall enough to elude the bosom burnishing hands of passersby, Die Fabeltier of Ludwig Vierthaler, a woman sitting nude sideways on a large goat, it seemed to me then. I was not disappointed. The animal was not at all as fabulous as the name suggested, and if anything looked like a poor execution, a drop in the valley between an ibex and a horse. At a sculpting class in elementary school we were tasked each with making a relatively big clay animal. That was quite a leap from all we had made previously. After referring to library books per instructions, I began molding a rhinoceros. At a point when it was mere legs and belly, it was moved. I vaguely remember it being somebody else, perhaps the teacher, who moved it. Or at least the demand for relocation was some third party's. The rhinoceros leaned and, not having real joints, fell forward and broke its legs. So I decided it will be a hippopotamus submerged in water. The emerging neck was not quite true to nature, I had not consulted the books for this new direction, and I resigned myself to the idea that it was after all to be a vacuum-cleaner. A Fabelgerät. I never finished it. The Vacuum-Cleaner of Samothrace.
On foot I drank my milked coffee from Magdeburg. When I threw it into one of those orange trash bin, it fell from below like a coin unaccepted by a vending machine. The next bin I found was in the same condition. I was in no state to be more considerate, the Buddha doesn't show its face twice. I let the bottle and my trash bag fall down next to the pole on which the bin hanged, supposing that whenever trash service resumed it would be picked up.
∗
I to the central station. Everyone in Hannover had pretty umbrellas. To get dry and while until the train to Osnabrück, I stopped at a café, chosen for its overwhelmingly good reviews on Google Maps, walking back to it for I had missed its narrow facade. The owner stood outside the door, busy arranging, moving furniture or constructing something, coming and going, I don't remember. Café Bredero was evidently soulless and I wasn't sure if it was open. I was welcomed, coming in dripping dirty. It was a narrow long café, its one side a half wall half window that looked to a roofed walkway of sorts. I ordered a chai —my request prolix for having been served in Berlin once a few years earlier a coffee from “chai beans” or something scandalous like that— before proceeding to take a seat on a long table at the end, my back to the entrance. The cul de sac walls were crowded frame-to-frame with paintings. Their uniqueness (or my ignorance) had already suggested it, but then I spotted a small easel in the corner, a canvas in the works mounted on it. Twas the proprietor, my first thought, perhaps something in his features was reminiscent of my great uncle Lev. But it might be more complicated, my second thought was, the artist may be a regular patron. I recalled, or I do now, my once groundless imagined prospects that I might while away my military service as a behind the desk medic, writing novels during the doldrums and humdrums that in my then vision were vast, yellow and endless.
There were many marine paintings, of ships on stormy waters just off the shore, mostly age of exploration ships; one viking ship; one painting had the stormy shore but not ship; another a modern ship in the middle of the ocean, its hinds sinking, the density of people on it, all in orange vests, suggesting refugees, upon which sunlight was breaking. One urban landscape, bikes lining a short wall, the white-on-blue U sign advertising a metro station. One head of a rosy flower. Two nudes, similar in style: one blond figure painted flat style in 3/4 perspective, the rounded rouged mouth, half-open and full-lipped, which reminded me coquettishly of Yami's sister, was the only depicted facial feature. Sharp tan-lines bottom and top, small breasts with thick bottle-cap nipples — which I later discovered was a copy of Tom Wesselmann's Great American Nude #57, yet later saw its precedent, Great American Nude #1, in Madrid, but which at the time I thought was the fruit of a local luminary.
I took off my shoes and socks, wishing them dry. The café was too stuffy for my peculiar sensibilities, still warm from all the preceding days and lacking a breeze. My chai was brought, the owner apologized for the delay. When I came there was a big kid behind the counter, since came another man, getting busy with whatever was going on. Perhaps an espresso machine needed a fixing. I was the only customer.
A reporting of an event, a calm political discussion, involving America, Turkish borders, Iraqi Kurds, where Erdoğan was right (‘despite not being an Erdoğan person’) and where Israel was at one point the antagonist, behind my back. I don't know what it was about and can't say if it was for the German being too beyond my clear earshot or out of context or whether I was too out of the news loop. Indeed, that Israel was the antagonist might be a presumption of either the sitter or the recollector; be as it may, and by whatever channels, I had gotten the sense that the occupants had originated in the Middle East and were not of the Jewish kind. I felt indifferent to the whole matter. Vaguely came a notion into my head of some stupid, as Žižek calls them, movie about Palestinian and Israeli emigrés meeting in America where the past, geographically speaking, no longer mattered, and recalled an odd incident:
Years earlier I was visiting my then girlfriend, Efthalia, who, for that matter, was half Austrian half Greek, with a parent and a partial growing-up in each respective country. We were staying at her maternal grandmother's apartment, who herself was away —perhaps in Greece, otherwise I'm seeking classical unity, more exactly duality, of place— but whose presence was felt in the exquisiteness of her home which emanated from care and taste. One evening Efthalia and I entered on the way home a local pizzeria. She invited me to it, penurious as I was and gracious as she. I must have done some of the talking at the counter for I was asked where I was from.
The pizzeria was a single but ample space, with ovens that stood rather far from the counter that crossed in the middle. Maybe there was music in the air on top of the chatter of one table, the only diners other than ourselves, adolescent girls, and we gossiped without restraint — in English, not the tongue of a lost Amazonian tribe but nonetheless not Viennese. It was then known to us, I can't remember if because I had counter-asked or otherwise, perhaps based on the restaurant's name, that the owners were Arabs, Levantine, maybe as much as Palestinians. Taking our seat at the corner, Efthalia suggested that there was a shift in attitude after I said I was from Israel. I disagreed. Sooner or later I sensed that she had not thought that she was about to say anything controversial, &, as we were arguing, the premises rearranged. That is, I felt as if her initial remark was pointfactual, an affirmation about what had transpired at the counter, and if anything was sympathetic towards me; as we disagreed, and perhaps because of it, as if she was put at the other corner of the ring, I felt she implied, though she had never said as much, that I should have felt ashamed, vis-à-vis pizzaman, for being an Israeli. When we were called to the counter for the hot pizzas, I searched for a sign of animosity. As far as I could see, their smiles had never for a moment budged. And there was not the slimmest real shady touch in the onion rings. Efthalia and I continued to argue about it for a while later. The Russisraeli-Grekaustrian conflict.
∗
Putting on my shoes and leaving my table at Café Bredero, I tried to mitigate with TP whatever dirtiness I had brought in with me. At eleven o'clock I was at the Hannover station, waiting at the end of the platform. It was a grey day. On a parallel platform, across the tracks, two girls propped a phone on a ledge and filmed a short dance, for TikTok I thought. On my own platform a scene unravelled: a man was chased along, then up to the edge by a group, a big guy right at his footsteps. With a swing his backpack was lost, either it was pulled and shed away or was used to buffer himself from direct contact. What insanity, even in movies I seldom see chases, but perhaps I'm watching the wrong kind. The persecuted received a kick, hopped down to the railtracks and up the other platform, where the girls had been, and continued his running. The persecutors, after a momentary hesitation, hopped down, picked up palm-sized stones off the ballast and hurled them thereafter, missing twice before he had gone out of view. They returned up and walked away, presumably to catch him via the station proper. A while later the persecuted returned the way he had fled, picked up a few stones on the way, offered a napkin to a man who pressed it to his face. Police officers had arrived before my train did, and when they interviewed the latter I saw his nose was bloody. That's Hannover for you, or its central station in any case.
All these men were, too, middle-eastern. “Turkish” I thought at the time, but I suppose they were more likely more recent arrivals, maybe Syrian. What do I know. I guess out-groups have been often indistinguishably lumped together. For the Hungarians all Germans were Saxons, for the French Alemanni. For such a classification I feel like I must defend myself from such accusations of “racism” as are thrown around freely and somewhat irresponsibly these days. I think “racism” should strictly denote systems of thought that (1) see the human species as divided into populations whose genetic and therefore biological properties distinguish them and (2) ascribe these rights and obligations. General hostility towards out-groups is, I'd say, “xenophobia” (or “misoxeny”, but who is going to pick that up). Treating any distinction —discrimination in the general sense of the word1— based on ethnicity2 as the absolutely malignant “racism” gags the potential to address these two issues to whose difference a blind eye should not be turned if we are to figure out and negotiate how to live peacefully together.3 First is that, the great variety of shapes snowflakes are taking notwithstanding, ethnic groups vary not just by their pedigree but by their culture, an enacted adopted behaviour that merits discussion, and, second, in any given society these groups differ in their historical and present circumstances, leading to differences in language and the ability to communicate with society at large, in familiarity with the law and their rights, in demographic composition (sex, age), in economical and financial circumstances, and in access to institutions to name just a few. Whatever we might strive for and however open our heart is, it's either detached or disingenuous to deny one has different expectations from people based on the previously experienced behaviour of the recognized group's members (to say nothing of expectations based on within group distinctions: how they dress, speak, their age) or to hold that all social problems that are attached to ethnic groups stem from figments of the bigotry of the more powerful group.4 You can't expect an arriver to Rome to already know how to do as the Romans.
∗ ❦ ∗
Harp strums and wavelets on the screenface: eight years earlier, lonely & horny, I took heed of my friend and then university benchmate's pitch of Ok-Cupid. At the time it was a fantastic match-making platform, acquired since by the on the stock exchange traded company Match Group who slowly but steadily turned it from serving its users to serving its share holders. When Match Group aligned Ok-Cupid with the other disservices it was the owner of, gave it its current slot-machine à la Tinder (which for me had only ever kindled nausea) form, when it let the online dating site usher itself into the business of the spectacle, it destroyed an important institution. I don't care about the piece of rubbish it turned into, a hybrid between a plotless & dishonest flicks provider and an online casino —and do feel sorry for those caught in its trap— but lament greatly that which it destroyed. I do not joke about the ‘important institution’ part; I cannot say how many people had used it, but this one of a kind, now bygone, platform, I expect, would have become even more prominent, what with people getting married & having children at an older age, further away from school days. Isn't it the case that we all stumble around, come together and separate, and get committed with whomever we are with at that point of time when the time is right? The steady lucky ones not withstanding.
For those unfamiliar, OK-Cupid was a platform, if not in the physical sense of the word then its online analogous. Users' profile pages offered room to be filled with text, but, importantly, these were not mirages like those offered by the dessert of Tinder, but permanently locatable loci into which others could return like to a café or gallery with a steady address on a known street. The spatial analogy does not end there; what distinguished OK-Cupid was its questionnaire, of whose seemingly endless variety of multiple-choice questions users could answer as many or as little as they wished, providing not only their own answer but the desired answers of others. On the basis of these answers a “match score,” a geometric mean, was computed vis-à-vis every other user. The word "metric" for this score would be apt since it created a topology around the users, a space that was not Euclidean but symmetric (A's score of B equaled B's score of A) and thus, while not replacing the physical world, was as good a substitution of it as could be created online. The profiles of other local users could be browsed, accessible via a thumbnail list sorted in descending order by score, running from 99% at the top, and messaged ad libitum (and of course blocked, for that matter). Consider that people have for centuries neither coupled up with “their best match in the world," even less so with “the nicest thumbnail in the block,” but with somebody in their actual vicinity, yet not with the person who was simply the closest: most often it had been something in between, somebody from school, from a club, a friend of a friend. OK-Cupid's metric captured it, rendering a measured distance between users which, like a crowd in school or a club, was not random but a function of who the persons, with their values and interests, were.
I had profited from Ok-Cupid: I met my once girlfriend Efthalia through it; met a lasting friend; and met a few other persons who came and went. It assisted me during my Berlin school days; my master's program was tiny, a dozen students altogether, secluded in its own little proper building in campus with little academic interaction with others and lingually isolated from the enveloping university. I prey, if not for me then for the younger generation, that someone would remake a platform in the image of the good old Ok-Cupid.
Lonely & horny again. A couple of years before my trip, more than two years post-graduation into the search, I got a job and with it got money to meet the world with, but as my hiring coincided with the plague, suddenly it was the world who was coy. Could it get any worse? OK-Cupid had been already at its narid. Willing to try new ways, I turned to Reddit. In the beginning of January, at the foothills, as it would turn out, of the biggest surge of covid cases in Berlin, I posted a personals ad, M4F, on the message board. I discovered a generous yet frustrating character limit for posts, and even a stricter limit for comments which I used to append the excessive rest of my text. I had hoped for quick replies but rested assured that given some properties of the subreddit, which I won't belabour here, my posting might be discovered long term. And, indeed, two months later I was written to by Shrabani, the first responder and by the time of this here trip still the last, who lived not in Berlin but in Osnabrück. From the getgo she wrote me that she was not looking for a relationship but for conversation. We texted some, phone called some, telling each other who we were and what we thought about this and that.
Shrabani grew up, an only child, in India. Her father was a civil servant working at the telecommunication sector. Due to his job supervising infrastructure installation the family relocated every few years. While her own native tongue was Odiya, the languages in the five schools she had gone to, class and recess, was English admixed with the respective local language, and Hindi? I remember her having the “wrong bachelor's degree” , either psychology or physics, for the master's program in cognitive science she came to Osnabrück for, and that she had gotten hard time from Indian rather than German administration as she was applying.
When I saw that Osnabrück was right on the line between Berlin and Utrecht I asked her if she would like to meet; underway I put the more forward question of whether she could host me, assuring her I was coming with my own mattress and needed little, otherwise could use a shower — followed by two embarrassingly sweating emojis. She said yes.
∗
I arrived to the central station of Osnabrück, a 160 thousand residents city in Lower Saxony, early arvo. Per Shrabani's instructions, I took the bus. I was reminded of riding the bus alone in Bonn, listening to the the mysterious language announcing the stop street names, during an “exchange” on my final year of high-school, really a school trip where we the Israeli delegation were hosted by the families of students of one Clara Schumann Gymnasium. I was the only boy who was accommodated at a girl's house, making me feel proud as if a special trust was put in me. I sat through one ordinary literature class of hers that discussed Das Parfum, where I picked out of the sonic hodgepodge a single word, ‘Mischmasch,’ also used in Hebrew.
From the stop to the green panelled building was one road to cross, narrow, straight and clear until the horizon. A blond girl, who must have alighted from the same bus, waited instead for the red to turn green, then walked into the building as I searched my host's name on the buzzboard.
Having misunderstood Shrabani's instructions, I was lost inside until she picked me up. I had found her picture on the website of the research group where she interned, but it was the first time I saw her proper, leading me to her place. I had known that she resided in some sort of subsidized apartment, graced as a student, but it was only there, walking the long green corridor, that I realized that it was, put plainly, a dormitory. Though she was a master student, I associated dorms, due to my own history, with bachelor's students and I felt as if my presence was inappropriate, like a wolf who had sneaked into a flock of sheep.
I spent a long time in the bathroom showering, washing my mattress, the famous bag, the net, cleaning the foliagy mess clogging the drain and covering the tiles. I can't say whether it was the case, but I perceived what I thought to be signs of warm hospitality: full fancier looking bottles standing on the hanging rack before discount shampoos the kinds of which a student would, which I did, buy. Accessing the fire-escape by stepping out of Shrabani's first floor window and sidling on a ledge, I spread the mattress, the famous bag, over it, hanged the net phantom bridal dress like from its banister. I must have washed my flipflops too: the ragged metal of the landing was uncomfortable to stand barefooted on. After the racing simulation room, this design was clear to me: it gives grip that prevents people from slipping as they rushed in a hurry during an emergency. Hopefully not too rush to leave their footwear behind.
There were such many uncanny trivial commonalities between us that I momentarily suspected that she was repeating to me things I had told her about myself but attributing them to herself. But others were things I had not related but were observed by me: on her desk I had spotted that she used books as props. I'm sure it is not a very uncommon practice, but I had never seen anybody else, beside me, who had done so.
After a nap on her bed, during which she went out to have a call, we left on a walk: towards, along and around lake Rubbenbruch. It was sunny, pleasant, and as the area was at the outskirts, quiet. We did not lack by way of conversation. Propped against the trunk of a tree on which it evidently once hung, on the side of the path running along the lake, was a metal sign. At the top it identified itself as information provided by the ‘Heger Laischaft’ —a Westphalian medieval “self administration organization”— in its capacity as the ‘forest owner,’ its coat of arm on the corner. ‘WARNING // Danger of allergy!’. The general warning symbol: a large red triangle with white inground and a black exclamation mark, raised to make room for an illustration of a hirsute caterpillar. A nuclear radiation hazard roundel rolled on the right edge of the triangle, a variation thereof: instead of yellow it was light blue, perhaps sunfaded, and its inner dot was replaced by what looked like a six-spoked dharma wheel, god knows what it meant to signify. Beneath the triangle, the German 24 letter word, as long as its bottom edge: Eichenprozessionsspinner ‘oak processionary.’ Named thus, I now learn, for these wanted poster caterpillars form long and wide processions, which I'm sorry for not having seen there but only on YouTube footage. And, at the very bottom of the sign: ‘Avoid contact with the caterpillars and their nests.’
A spot by the lake prompted her to begin a story about it, but as a few men were sitting nearby she continued only after we had moved on. A friend of hers wanted to go camping; Shrabani was not game. They did venture out and ended up at that spot, in the late evening, having a bonfire. A man arrived and sat at some distance. He began crying, then or later. At some point his presence was no longer ignorable, and they offered him food. And so he told them his story. He, like them, was from somewhere around the Indian subcontinent, I don't remember exactly, I think it was Pakistan. He resided as a refugee in the Landesaufnahmebehörde Niedersachsen Standort Osnabrück which Shrabani and I had passed on our way to the lake. He was due deportation, and expressed mixed feelings towards it. On the one hand, having been somehow aggrieved by Germany, he hated it. On the other, as if wanting to prove himself, in spite, he wanted to stay and work here. Shrabani's friend, an energetic kind of person, got into arms, enjoined Shrabani to take an active role —I don't remember why, perhaps she herself was no longer living in Osnabrück— some lawyers were contacted. I believe Shrabani had difficulties reaching him, she didn't have any contact whatsoever and had difficulties accessing the refugee camp as it was closed to outsiders. The story ended, unfortunately I can't remember how, perhaps it was still unsettled, as we reached, on the way out of the lake, the first of a series of manifestations of Osnabrück's renown for matters equestrian: a deserted, stomped white muddy dressage field with jumping obstacles; a grassy paddock with two dark horses in eyeless executioner's like caparisons and one pure white naked horse; equanimous horse heads popping out of a stable that looked like, or so in my memory, a regular home, as if they were washing dishes beneath the windows.
∗
I wanted to take Shrabani out, if only to express my thanks for the accommodation. Of the few restaurants in the area which she listed to me, I chose the Asian, but it didn't matter: it was closed when we arrived, around ten o'clock, as would have been any of the others. I had not been minding the time and the late sunset, half an hour earlier, was a poor reminder. Shrabani made a comment comparing Osnabrück and Berlin; frankly I had no idea when restaurants were closing in Berlin either, I suppose it would have been borderline there as well. It was Friday night and awfully quiet, but then again, it was not even the city center. We returned to the dorm. There we made two pieces of salmon and some side dish. After they were taken out of the freezer but before we started eating, she said that she was not hungry enough for the salmon, and offered it for me to eat, that is, both pieces. I doubt it really was the case and not again her generosity. I, anyhow, accepted the offer and ate both with much gusto.
The one room of Shrabani's apartment served as bedroom, kitchen, dining-room, study: a bed, a counter with stovetop, sink, cupboards, dinner-table and desk. I set my mattress on the parquet floor and was furnished with a bedsheet, blanket and a real pillow. For the night, Shrabani set down the rollable blind over the room's big windows, reminding me of a childhood night I had spent over at my friend Ron's place. It corresponded with my own preference for darkness during sleep, but differed from mine for light by the morning and for fresh air throughout. And differed from my preference, in those hard summer days, for the Roman strategy: open windows during the night to cool and closed windows during the day to stay cool. But when in Rome... I slept like a king.
∗ ❦ ∗
Day 4: Osnabrück
Saturday walk through Osnabrück's startup hub — a botanical garden is not infiltrated — a meal is taken at KFC — exhibition & mass at St. Marien Church — a meeting with the library's censor
Without any light I woke up spontaneously at a usual time. After Shrabani got up we set out, before 9 o'clock, for a walk. On the way we passed an area around an oblong square, the Nelson Mandela Platz, which had been recently developed to house accelerators for a startup scene. I don't know whether it was something that Shrabani had told me then or merely the fact that it was quiet and desolate, it was after all a Saturday, that left me with the impression that the project was more hope than success and brought to mind the offices I had worked at. These were new spaces at Berlin's Bertolt Brecht Platz whose occupation had been delayed, or so the rumor, because it was inaugurated without wifi available. And since the year or so I had been working there, it was dwindling rather than gaining force. For the first months I was the only sign of the promised bright future on our wing of the floor, constructed to serve four teams each on a cluster of four desks. In the middle of the room was a square lot of sliding screen doored chambers to take calls in, each slightly different by way of their chair and desk/bar accommodation, but all back walled and windowless, bringing at least to my deviant mind the idea of viewing booths in a porno cinema. Built presumably with full office capacity in mind, it was hardly in use as one could always secrete oneself to one of the empty clusters, though one colleague of mine occasionally took advantage of them for calls with other clients he did freelance work for. I, too, skulked into it once, though I was alone at the wing (perhaps during my colleagues' early lunch break), to call a clinic hush-hush about spermiogram results during their reception hours.
Once or twice a week the rest of my team would congregate at that space that felt like my monastic working environment. Otherwise one Irish David, who had brought me into the folds of that enterprise, had an occasional presence there, his absences bridged by tea boxes and notes on his desk; an American Daniel, from Ohio(?), who was meant to doctor that which was not going too well, would appear for a shrot specials epidose; and two members from a complete team of three on the desk cluster diagonal from ours, obfuscated by the booths, whose managerial part would leave the project due to the great working atmosphere rendered by the higher echelon and whose tech part would be picked up by us as a contractor, though sooner or later he worked mostly remotely, came and went. The only regular presence in the wing, beside my own, was the young cleaning woman's, whose ‘Putzraum’ was one of three rooms at the back end of the wing, next to the ‘Technikerraum’ of the panelboard, and the wheelchair accessible toilet that was as big as the two other rooms combined. I suppose she was contracted, as it were, to keep clean the two or more floors of the establishment, but desolate as it was her rounds must have been more perfunctory than necessary, and she spent a great time sitting behind the closed doors of her windowless closet room.
Before the wing was the foyer and kitchen where I had taken my lunch alone; the two rooms of the accelerator's coordinators: I don't know what their respective specific duties were, but I saw them as the mother and father of the project, with differing parenting styles. The father with a chummy attitude; the mother, whose second or third designation was the ironic (in her case) “community builder,” was a crazed fuss; beyond was another wing for two teams, where I had only ever seen one person, for a short period, a serial start-upper and spin-outer who was always dressed officially in a suit, maybe even a tie, even though he worked there alone, like the Businessman whose planet the Little Prince visited, on his renal histological project; next a poster-filled working space for a large team and one curvingly big monitor, which I had seen devoid of people more than I saw it populated, though when it was the latter they worked so quietly I wouldn't have known so many people were there had I not happen to pass through.
The cleaning woman was not a native German speaker though I never managed to figure out where she was from; a single time when her phone blurted, accidentally, a couple seconds of audio in French was the only revelation of her culture, making me think about my mother, an architect, who worked cleaning when we first immigrated to Israel, and to construe her accent I had only had three or so insufficient exchanges: when I asked about trash separation and the bins — I closed my eyes to concentrate on my conjugation and it was she who switched to English; when, in the rainy season, I suggested that a mat could be placed at the entrance to mitigate floor inbrought dirtiness (such a mat indeed materialized); when I put my tote bag not softly enough on the elevator's floor and one of my green tea filled milk bottles shuttered and teaed over, I asked her for supplies to clean my mess up and she said she would take care of it. I'll take the opportunity to vent out, crank that I am, about another, the late wifi notwithstanding, imbecile architectural design choice. Since the door to the stairwell was an emergency exit that could be opened from the outside only by way of a rare and exclusive mechanical key, the way in was only by way of a card-key accessible and intercom operational elevators only hall. It had been frustrating enough, and yet merely so, to ascend two floors with an elevator, all the more so when both elevators (yet more imbecility) happened to display “7” on their floor monitor on my arrival, until the foremorning of my ‘I told you so/ I hate to be right’ moment when both elevators displayed a Bartlebyesque "X" and I had to ring the intercom where who was it if not the cleaning lady —it couldn't have been anybody else— who came down the stairs to open me the door. She vanished quickly in, not holding the second door immediately before the stairwell itself, and thinking hers being a premeditated distancing I held back my small talk.
She left every day, after having changed in her room from the pink uniform to her civilians, at five to 10:00. I never found out when she arrived; I had an undeclared competition with her, and the earliest that I had ever arrived to the office, before 5 o'clock, spending the first hours of the day writing, she was already there. If only because she was constantly there at an almost immediate vicinity while nobody else by way of society was, in addition to having read The Human Stain a few months earlier which led me to name her in my mind “Faunia,” I had unseriously entertained the idle fantasy of a local affair, further tantalizing as an idea of the blatantly illicit that can yet be gotten away with. I'd come to recognize her wake in the pleasant aroma left in the elevator, in the bathroom. I'd feel a kind of tension when she emptied the paper bin behind me, an excited embarrassment when she wiped the desks around mine with gaze turned down, wondering, on the one hand, whether by being there I hindered her work, feeling on the other a premonition of a master/slave dynamics if I stepped back in order to let her wipe mine. I knew it was a coincidence, but when after my summer absence I found her gone, later replaced by another cleaner who came at later hours, the idea crossed my mind that I had something to do with it. It was a temporary arrangement —perhaps she was sick or on vacation— she returned after a while, though she has vanished completely by now, coincidentally with my own virtual disappearance.
∗
The desk cluster assigned to our project was on the inner half of the wing, windows to the patio where people occasionally smoked and talked on the phone, across curtained hotel windows and their Edward Hopperian sights. Once or twice I caught a glimpse, over the corner of the patio, of Faunia wiping tables on the third floor which I had never seen nor would see anybody ever using. My window, open even at the heart of winter to the great pleasure of my chancing colleagues, brought in midmorning, before the sushi place opened, a smell I recognized as rice vinegar's.
I grew jealous of the empty desks on the bright side of the wing, facing southeasterly Bertolt Brecht square and the Spree just beyond it. I had first asked permission from the accelerator papa before moving my setup towards the light, whither, naturally, the rest of my team followed. And so for a while until a first whiff came through of the team entitled to that lot. I referred to them as the “mutants” for their project had to do with rare genetic variations. I felt sound indignation against this great injustice; had seniority counted I'd have been a lieutenant general deferring to recruits. At first it was only as much as one person who came for a couple of hours for a couple of days, like a dog peeing on a lightpole (or an abandoned bag..) to claim a territory, which banished us back to our former corner that seemed grimmer than ever. Their team eventually materialized, though merely in spurts of activity and never as a constant presence. Twice or thrice they all appeared like the dwarves summoned by Gandalf into helpless Bilbo Baggins' house: Thorin, Fili, Kili, Balin, Dwalin, Oin, Gloin, Dori, Nori, Ori, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur; the four desks of their corner could hardly contain them.
Relentless, after recuperating in the darkness, I moved, and the rest followed, into the other corner, where we coexisted a while with the two members, one tech one management, of the already mentioned team, until it disbanded. I popped out of the building to awkwardly clean the rain stains from the glass, visible under the sun. Throughout I worked mostly alone. Now that my back was no longer to the wall, it was exposed to new threats. Given the mama's Poisson distribution of visits to my handicapped bathroom (whose low frequency did not preclude her from demanding a toilet seat position that would accomodate her sedentary usage, prioritized over the demands of my 3.5L of tea a working day) I suspected these were thinly veiled acts of reconnaissance, though she might have avoided the company that sporadically worked at the other reach of the floor where the toilets for upright people were. Regardless, on her retreat she would detect my censure-worthy feet. We were a hospital, technically, I was told, since the oragnization belonged to the Charité, and therefore per regulations everyone should wear shoes. On the fourth reproach —my visual obstacles having been out of position or being too engaged I lapsed jumping into my shoes (my socks were always hidden in a cabinet drawer; during less brave than trustful in Faunia ventures into the bathroom I shoved my shoes, too, for shoes without a person were as incriminating as a person without shoes, as a one time unforgetable lesson by the inquisition had taught me)— on the fourth repraoch, as if to summon higher authorities to her side, she reinforced her demand with the what-if of inspectors coming for a visit. Aha.
Well, sonner or later I, too, vanished with the rest: I had my nose full, as the Germans say, with accelerator mama's never ending and multifaceted carping; the straw that broke the camel's back was finally laid. Anyhow my contract was later stretched out, my hours halved while the period doubled, possible in virtue of (or rather vice) my legally gray employment arrangement, making my constant presence further less sensical. I believe that piece of straw had to do with my computer screen. Though the standing-desk accomodating inverted paper bin pedestal of my screen never received a remark, one day I apparently felt audacious enough to upgrade it, I think by way of a cardboard box. I could now rotate the wide arrivals/departures height monitor screen back to its normal horizontal orientation. The setup felt precarious, but it stood my perturbation test (though no certificate was issued). I breathed ten times until doubt dissipated, and let it be. Being the tallest figure in the room, however, it was not many days before it was noticed.
∗ ❦ ∗
Shrabani led me towards her university. There were two in Osnabrück, the spread of red– and blue-marked buildings of the one and the other on a you are here map adjacent and overlapping. The university's botanical garden was closed. It was she who brought up the idea of jumping the fence in, which she had done before; I was up for it. She sniffed around the fence before taking us to another entrance, making an unnecessary round path which affirmed her assertion of having a worse sense of geospatial orientation than mine, a very low limbo stick to hurdle under. By the other fence gate, certainly more surmountable, we simply stood. The gardens were opening within a few hours. She wasn't up for breaking in.
We passed and whiled by a rather austere, recently built and never used building that was meant, if I am not mistaken, for the math department. She said that it had no permission to operate, not adhering to fire safety regulations. Through a dusty window I looked at the empty should have been reception office. I'd have hardly believed the story had I not known that the same case was a part of the debacle of the Berlin Brandenburg Airport's opening 9 years and a a day overdue, the construction time totalling 14 years. And that after 15 years of planning before any actual work, what the hell?
∗
I still wanted to take Shrabani to eat. I can't remember why we didn't go to the Asian restaurant, perhaps it was not yet open. The eventual visit of KFC, situated US-style on a wide gray asphalted parking lot enclosed by wide highways on two sides and train tracks on a third, was a combination of a desperate ‘I'd take whatever is available’ and a kind of curiosity, the breaking up of arbitrary rules at circumstances that were not usual. At the establishment I met for the first time, indeed became aware of, that technological development where one orders via a bus-stop-poster-size touch screen rather than at the counter. Having the imagined ultimate KFC experience in mind, I was aiming for a bucket, but Shrabani made a warning to me; I had heard a ‘you're not going to be able to finish eating this’ at least once before, which was proven, and not for any effort or need for debunking, wrong, but her addition of ‘for someone who is not used to fast food’ decisively tipped my decision away, though I hardly imagine there was any real danger there, towards a more modest meal. KFC did not disappoint but likely I won't do it again.
∗
We took the bus to the old city. Outside bars along Bierstraße, “Beer Street,” people sat drinking from luminous orange glass goblets of Spritz, a cocktail I had recently learned about and been evoked an appetite for from the Arte YouTube channel Karambolage which treated cultural topics at the interface between Germany and France. As Karambolage tells it, at the beginning of the 19th century Venice was occupied by the Hapsburgs whose forces were felled right and left by the strong Italian wine. They mitigated the problem, as Germanophones do, by the addition of brisk water, creating the Gespritzter —“splashed”— or Spritzter for short. In 1866 the Austrians left but the cocktail stayed. At the beginning of the 20th century the arrival of soda siphons led to experimentation with alcohol drinks, and at 1919 rose the Aperol at the horizon — and therefrom Spritz, which spread around Europe, being snatched from stands like hot-cakes in winter. Voilà.
We entered St. Marien Church. By the time we finished going through an exhibition of paintings, A3 or so in size and inspired by a line of text, excerpts from where I can't remember, hanging along the ambulatory, an aggregation of people was taking place at the peals in preparation of mass. At my bequest we took our seat, not too far but not too close. It was the first ever mass I had attended; I'd have had an interest anyhow, but in addition I wanted to compare the oration to the ones in the magnificent 2019 Polish film Corpus Christi. If I had caught at all any of the sermon, echoing through the space, it was nothing impressive. The organ started, and with it singing by the parishioners. The two of us, independently, figured out that the boards hanging in sight with big Roman numerals on them, to which the audience occasionally referred to before looking back down at their hymnals, set the order of stanzas to be sung, allowing for combinatorically endless number of chantings. We sidled quietly out and away. At the door, outwards, was a sign bidding sightseers not to enter lest they disturb the service. We had inadvertently slipped in in time. I suppose we had reached a place where we were not supposed to be after all.
Thence across the cobbled square into the Osnabrück library. We stopped at the mid-landing of the stairs, speculating about a hanging board, when down came a young woman —I forget her name— a friend of Shrabani who worked there. I couldn't help but recall the likewise magnificent 2017 Columbus which had a scene where a visitor meets a librarian friend and makes an introduction between him and an acquaintance who chanced at the library. Shrabani asked her whether she was coming to a friends' get-together the next day. We were led in after Shrabani asked about boardgames that could be borrowed. The librarian was a voracious reader. She said she hated when she hadn't read yet a book somebody asked about. She acted as a censor, to put it simply, proofreading books in the children's section and nominating their exclusion. I asked her about the criteria she used. She mentioned a book in which the protagonist hadn't had a single nice relationship, where all was rotten to the core, a book full of violence and bloodshed. I was reminded of how in the library in Omanuyot, my elementary/middle school, at a late point in my time there, the Goosebumps series books in stock were banned. My understanding at the time was that it was because it was not good literature, but giving a gander now to the corresponding Wikipedia page I see that, in the US, the series was the 15th ‘most challenged’ of books on the last decade of the last century, apparently for being too frightening and for dealing with occult and demonic themes. Ha. Just like the moral outcry towards Dungeon & Dragons. Others, so continues the paragraph, on the other hand, felt that what was scarier was a situation where boys didn't read at all, and any books that attracted them to do so were praiseworthy. It occurs to me only now that, though for a long time I considered "Danny, the Champion of the World", which my childhood friend Alex had given me as a birthday present, as the first book I have ever read, really it must have been few of the Goosebumps books — and that without leading me to read anything else. Neither had Harry Potter, which the Osnabrück library held many translations of, the pride of the librarian, led me to further reading.
Writing this now recalls to me another piece of media from my youth, “Rurouni Kenshin: Trust & Betrayal,” an animated four episode mini-series that served as a prequel of the much longer series about the eponymous protagonist. Rurouni Kenshin's fictional character was based on the four hitokiri —literally "man-slayers"— of the pre Meiji Era upheaval period in Japan. Naturally, these were not assassins that sniped from afar, nor some black-clad ninjas who popped out of the closet and strangled their unsuspecting victims. Rather, they ambushed their targets and whatever retinue was with them on the street, their advantage being, beside an element of surprise, their highly superior swordsmanship. Though the so called action scenes in the mini-series did feature overthetopness the likes of a person jumping from the street to the roof of a one storey house or swords cutting through skeleton, as well as some flair, but if it deviated from realism then it was in the other direction than most works of the medium. Fights were short and brutal: the belligerents didn't waste time nor energy making speeches (too late for that, really), movements were economical and being hit by a sword was no joke, it was the end. The scenes were explicit: the swords were seen displaced rather than being rendered as flashing crescents, and when they met flesh or fabric they cut through. It was probably the most explicitly violent movie, albeit animated, I had watched in my youth.
In one books podcast I heard a quote from an article capturing a conversation between Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman called Let's talk about genre: ‘there are books about dragons, and there are books with dragons.’ I wouldn't have put it quite this way, but the point is that narrative art pieces have elements to them that are there for their own sake, like flourish in visual art, or still life and landscape paintings as a whole, and others whose relationship with the environment they are embedded in is treated seriously. We seem to be attracted to the dynamic, to judge by the selection of the endless stream of YouTube shorts: a street vendor cuts a watermelon into a cube, then turns its pulp to slices of ice-cream; an amputee puts on and dresses an artificial leg; a man smashes a phone's screen with a hammer, smears a slice of orange against it ‘to make it acidic,’ covers it with toothpaste, closes it inside a jar of rice, adds lemon juice, shakes it, takes it out and wipes it off to reveal a blemishless screen; a lip-jobbed woman in a red kimono manipulates variously a watermelon to create popsicles she then distributes to children of a rural and impoverished area; a father uses stencils to spraypaint Disney's animated Little Mermaid on the tiled wall of a bathroom. Many action movies are ballet for men, where nobody gets killed or even repercussionably hurt but extras, where violence is enacted lavishly and unceremoniously. Not so in this mini-series, where the effects of the violence on the psychology of the enactor and on his relationship with others is explored, telling the story of how he turned from a killer to the person in the series which it prequels, still a highly skilled swordsman but one who shuns inflicting harm on others.
One day my father mentioned that he had seen those scenes. It must have been at a period when we both shared the same computer, though I'm not entirely sure. As far as I remember, it was the first and last time that I was made aware that my father might check out my files. I vaguely remember my mom coming into my room another time, as I was watching that series, at the heat of a battle, bringing me sliced apples or something of that sort, and me pausing — as I would always do during an interruption, but also being aware that it seemed like an inappropriate thing for me to watch. Perhaps she saw it and told my father about it, leading him to check it out? Who knows. That he mentioned what he had seen piqued me enough to remember that moment after so many years, but I don't remember the conversation we had, if we had any. He said it without anger or admonition, and no repercussions followed. Anyway, my entire youth was rife with represented violence: in first-person shooter and real time strategy video games, in cartoon, in movies and in toys, whether toy soldiers, superhero action figures or toy weapons. Conflicts that were resolved through violence. It strikes me now as somewhat off, a child carrying a plastic rifle, nonetheless my experience suggest it to be innocuous. All of that has not turned me into a violent person by any means. Nor has, to touch on another thread of polemics, pornography affected negatively how I saw women or sex. I wouldn't claim that there are no people out there (age seems to me to play little role in this regard) who cannot recognize and thus make a distinction between the fictional and the real, or who adopt observed practices without thought or judgment, but to bar media categorically because of a class of idiots seems unjust to me. If we did make such a move, I would have, together with Plato's Socrates, ban half of Hollywood's productions and anything that has “romcom” in its description, for a far graver misrepresentation of how people behave and interact with each other in reality.
Though I've never read any, with minor exceptions, I liked that the Osnabrück library had comic books, that it made no discrimination against. Beside books and boardgames it also had a section with music CDs to borrow —an artefact nowadays even more antiquated than books— as well as video games. The two storied library was big and spacious; one long section had a floor to ceiling glass wall from which the small cobblestoned square and the church we had just been in could be observed. Nonetheless, the non-German literature section, secluded at one end, was a rather small dimly lit room with a few narrow windows. I saw nothing noteworthy there, except for a García Marquez (or was it Borges?) in Spanish. When I emerged I found Shrabani who had lost me. Though(?) we had already been in the library for a while, I had to negotiate the minutes for my pseudo-nap, which I took on a lush sofa in the deserted children/ young-adults' section.
Shrabani and I left the old town, crossed the thin Hasse river and turned to walk along it at the Haarmann Well where a bare-chested bronze man, sculpted by an A. Graef, stood facing a wet niche in a mound of shale with a mallet in one hand, a bull point chisel in the other. Supposedly the first German monument dedicated to workers. We circled the old town from the outside, returned to where we entered, reaching now the buildings that had attracted my eyes at the beginning. The agenda was returning home, but I tentatively raised the idea of sitting down for a Spritz. Shrabani agreed to it, but merely so; she did not respond to it enthusiastically. After debating the matter, really just me with myself, for the short duration that the expected next bus allowed, we turned to the stop.
I had already asked her about staying for another night. We went down to the laundry machines at the basement, requiring two or three attempts until we found a washing machine that was not astirring, in between which we sat and talked at the back courtyard.
∗ ❦ ∗
I cannot fail to note now that “crimination” is contained within the word discrimination, and that coincidentally.
Especially when unfavourable, though when otherwise it also provokes accusations of “idealisation”, purportedly as despicable.
This is not a matter of degree, either, as if the so called “implicit racism” or even “institutional/ systemic racism” is merely an attenuated version of, yet inherently of the same kind as, the much more extreme Nazi credo. Xenophobia can be directed at a class of people distinguished by nothing biological, such as people of a certain occupation or social standing, people who speak a certain language, with a certain accent or manner of speaking, people who dress a certain way, who indulge in certain hobbies &c — as well as directed at people who are distinguished “biologically” but not along ethnic lines, such as people with a congenital disability or who are transsexual. These distinction are more or less apparent, i.e. perceived by the senses. Racism, however, can but does not necessarily rely on the apparent. What made the Jews so pernicious in the minds of the Nazis is this, according to them, parasitic race's pernicious ability to masquerade and assimilate. That the mug of Werner Goldberg, who would have been denoted as a “half-Jew” by the Nuremberg Laws had the state been omniscient, appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper as der ideale deutsche Soldat, “the ideal German soldier,” and would later serve in recruitment posters, though might seem ironic to us, was more or less congruent with the Nazi ideology. This is exactly why Jews were required by law to wear the yellow badge.
The difference between racism and xenophobia is also evident when taking a look at their respective opponents. Many, though not all, of those who take offense at what they perceive to be expressions of xenophobia —more often than not, it seems to me, at their most subtle occurrences— respond with racist arguments; they explicitly divide society into races and deny the rights of the members of one group to represent, speak about or criticise those of another. On the other hand, of course, a person advocating for a society and institutions that equally treat all of its members might be wary of people from outside what he perceives to be his “in group.”
Or, on the other hand, that any enchantment with a group is a product of idealization. Generalization, yes, but we can scarcely have any language without generalizations.