Go, Went, Gone

by Jenny Erpenbeck

Huguenot refugees were the original settlers in the streets surrounding Oranienplatz — lots of gardeners among them, apparently — long before Kreuzberg was part of the city proper.

The sympathizers are young and pale, they dye their hair with henna, they refuse to believe that the world is an idyllic place and want everything to change, for which reason they put rings through their lips, ears, and noses. The refugees, on the other hand, are trying to gain admittance to this world that appears to them convincingly idyllic. Here on the square, these two forms of wishing and hoping cross paths, there’s an overlap between them, but this silent observer doubts that the overlap is large.

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.

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.

Questions follow

book by a historian on the consequences of colonialism. The colonized are smothered in bureaucracy, which is a pretty clever way to keep them from taking political action. Or was it just a matter of protecting the good Germans from the bad Germans, sparing the Land of Poets the indignity of being dubbed the Land of Killers once more?

The refugee crisis is a long term consequence of colonization and exploitation by the west of the third world. We refuse the responsibility of our privilege.

The Africans probably had no idea who Hitler was, but even so: only if they survived Germany now would Hitler truly have lost the war.

By the conclusion, we are still fighting the war. Probably all wars.

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.

For the first time in his life, the thought occurs to him that the borders drawn by Europeans may have no relevance at all for Africans.

How many people are in this haze?

He would see the written characters in the sand before the wind wiped them away overnight, would see them on swords, skins, and rocks in the middle of the desert — the cross, the circle, the triangles and dots — and would have liked to know their meaning. See, saw, seen. But he was an akli, a slave. All he could read was the stars. The seven sisters of night, the warrior of the desert, the mother camel and her child.

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.

Awad opens the door wider to invite him in, he’d like to tell him his story, he says after shutting the door again behind his visitor. Because if you want to arrive somewhere, you can’t hide anything.

He also thinks of how he hid his lover from his wife and at the same time hid the everyday life he shared with his wife from his lover. Does Awad mean that he has never arrived in his own life?

If you’re lucky, you get beaten, if you’re unlucky, you get shot, someone said to console me.

For two days we sat there in the barracks while the European bombs fell on Tripoli.

This was the US and NATO going after Gaddafi

Richard had never really thought that members of the military who turned against the government would still be wearing their country’s uniform.

No one thinks about these things or how people will cope

War destroys everything, Awad says: your family, your friends, the place where you lived, your work, your life. When you become foreign, Awad says, you don’t have a choice. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know anything. I can’t see myself anymore, can’t see the child I used to be. I don’t have a picture of myself anymore. My father is dead, he says. And me — I don’t know who I am anymore. Becoming foreign. To yourself and others. So that’s what a transition looks like. What’s the sense of all of this? he asks, looking back at Richard again.

Isn’t it like this, Awad says: every adult human being — man or woman, rich or poor, if he has work or not, if he lives in a house or is homeless, it doesn’t matter — every human being has his few years to live, and then he dies?

The woman in the travel agency was losing her patience, but that didn’t matter to him, his mind wasn’t there. There it was again: that lovely untranslatability. Was he lost in thought, absent, had he taken leave of his senses, was he beyond it all?

Why aren’t they being asked about their histories and provided for as victims of war?

Too many wars. We've lost our capacity to care

the things you’ve experienced become baggage you can’t get rid of, while others — people with the freedom to choose — get to decide which stories to hold on to. On his way downstairs from Awad’s room he runs into the older woman in the sage-green stairwell and asks her why Awad has been to a psychologist.

Very pretty. At Oranienplatz when she smelled marijuana, she realized something had to be done before these men lost everything. Richard wonders whether she wants a husband and is teaching here for that reason.

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?

Assumptions?

Even now, almost twenty-five years after so-called reunification, you can sometimes still see the interlinked legs of these now out-of-favor wooden or gray-legged chairs poking up out of dumpsters, always in large quantities. His mother would have said: They’re still perfectly good. He hasn’t heard this sentence in a long time. Maybe he should have put on his light-blue shirt today.

???

He’s only just started his interviews, and now obstacles are being strewn in his path. Even at the university there were bureaucrats like this who thought it was more important to get all your travel receipts stamped, renew your health insurance forms, and record the number of hours you spent in the office on some ledger, than it was to have time to do the work you’d been hired for, such as investigating whether there were ratios that determined the beauty of a line of verse just as reliably as they did the stability of a snail shell. Or finding out where in the literature of the Augustan Age Jesus appears as the last Greek god. Certainly you could spend time changing the password for your work email for the eighth time, or you might ask instead how what an author doesn’t know about himself is nonetheless inscribed in his text. And who is the speaker in passages like these?

Bureaucracy

What they want is to be allowed to look for work, to organize their lives like any other person of sound body and mind. But the inhabitants of this territory — which has only been called Germany for around 150 years — are defending their borders with articles of law, they assail these newcomers with their secret weapon called time, poking out their eyes with days and weeks, crushing them with months — and if that weren’t enough to subdue them, they might go so far as to issue them three cooking pots in assorted sizes, a set of bedding, and a document labeled Fiktionsbescheinigung. Tribal wars, you might say.

In 1990 he suddenly found himself a citizen of a different country, from one day to the next, though the view out the window remained the same.

Borders. Artificial lines. Richard is an immigrant. We are all Richard, potentially.

this certificate of fiction was merely a confirmation that this person existed who had not yet been granted the right to call himself a refugee. But the certificate itself didn’t entitle its holder to any rights.

Meanwhile the director is worrying about the delays the outbreak threatens to his construction plans and wonders how grown men can suddenly come down with a childhood illness out of the blue. As a schoolboy in the 1950s, Richard had to help collect potato beetles in the fields — the GDR’s Ministry of Agriculture claimed the Americans were trying to sabotage the harvest by dropping the beetles on the East German fields.

Richard has no idea what's going on

Sounds like we have it pretty good here, Sylvia says.

I saw them die. Many, many people died.

They all have severe ptsd

The designation “central organ” itself was enough to inspire doubt. So the refugees themselves were to publicly dismantle their own camp until it was reduced to a pile of kindling. And what were they getting in return?

One of the themes here is bureaucracy and the arbitrary decisions human beings have been made about the land, ownership, who belongs where

A limit, this much is clear, is nothing more than a border. And a period of time during which cases are processed must eventually end. Eternity is being exchanged here for a finite length of time. An actual and permanent subtraction of tents and demonstrations from an actual place in exchange for a vague notion of hope: aid and assistance in pursuing vocational opportunities. Foreign as the world of lawyers is to him, he sometimes feels akin to them in his obsession with capturing states of affairs in language with maximal precision. So there’s one more thing this text communicates beyond the information contained in its individual sentences: the refugees can’t afford a lawyer, and they barely understand German. Hope is what’s keeping them alive, and hope is cheap.

After her death, he’d packed up the Christmas decorations on his own for the first time ever and brought them down to the basement, but he’d forgotten the wreath, and ever since, it’s been sitting there on the table.

I look in front of me and behind me and I see nothing.

The very plight of the refugee

Yesterday, in an article about German aid to developing nations, he read that as a matter of policy the first thing one aid organization did on beginning work in a new country was to establish standard measures and norms corresponding to the German system. For trade, the article explained, an authoritative scale of this sort was indispensable, but of course Richard knew that a scale like this was also, and above all, an instrument of domination. Well, after all, even domination was a sort of relationship. To be sure, the Treblinka Death Camp Revolt could be planned only after the SS had installed a new camp leadership that strictly adhered to its own rules and therefore was predictable. Anything predictable and rigid can be undermined and broken. Only chaos disrupts and remains. And then it occurs to him that just now he was thinking like his lover.

He who laughs has not yet received the terrible news.

Unpredictably vacillating political-ideological positions. In time of

vacantly for a moment before he realizes what he’s doing. Could this grinning, which he’s been noticing himself doing more and more often in recent weeks, be a sign of senility? Or perhaps of serenity?

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?

What span of time should you consider if you want to know what qualifies as progress?

he thinks at precisely this moment that these four people here, including him, are like the parts of a single body: hand, knee, nose, mouth, feet, eyes, brain, ribs, heart, and teeth, each of them some part or other. What will happen when Sylvia — who sometimes picks up the phone out of the blue and calls him or Thomas or a few other of their Berlin friends — is no longer here?

The body politic?

When one day, perhaps quite soon, the Sahara Railway is a reality and the steam-snorting iron horse takes its place upon the desert sands as a rival to the nimble camel, these sons of the desert will no doubt experience distress. The Tuareg will do their best to arrest the course of Culture, but their attacks will be countered with well-aimed peloton fire and brandy until, like the Indians in America, they cede their land to the Civilized.

The men know what happened along the way. When? Always. Everything that ever happened?

Do the migrating birds know this too?

without memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet’s surface.

How would life be different if we spent more time remembering? This is passé now. Would Alzheimer's be less prevalent? Would social alienation diminish?

These days, the difference between the refugees who drown somewhere between Africa and Europe and those who don’t is just a matter of happenstance. In this sense, every one of the African refugees here, Richard thinks, is simultaneously alive and dead.

If you eat more, you become like an infant. Like an infant? Too spoiled. I see. You can never know what is coming. It’s possible that you’ll have to go hungry again or that you’ll have nothing to drink, and you have to be able to endure that.

Why they eat so little. To be prepared for famine.

the men feel more at home in these wireless networks than in any of the countries in which they await their future. This system of numbers and passwords extending clear across continents is all the compensation they have for everything they’ve lost forever. What belongs to them is invisible and made of air.

Richard still remembers how it felt when he took his first work trip to America. When

His own to-do list would look something like this: Schedule repairman for dishwasher Urologist appointment Meter reading The to-do list for Karon, on the other hand, would be more like this: Eradicate corruption, cronyism, and child labor in Ghana Or for Apollo: File lawsuit against the Areva Group (France) Install a new government in Niger that can’t be bribed or blackmailed by foreign investors Establish the independent Tuareg state Azawad (discuss with Yussuf) And for Rashid the list would read: Broker a reconciliation between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria Persuade Boko Haram to lay down their arms Finally Hermes, the illiterate with golden shoes, and Ali, the future nurse, would have to join forces to complete these two tasks: Prohibit the sale of weapons to Chad (from the U.S. and China) Prohibit U.S. and China drilling for oil in Chad and exporting it

Sins of the west