Go, Went, Gone

by Jenny Erpenbeck

He doesn’t know how long it’ll take him to get used to having time. In any case, his head still works just the same as before. What’s he going to do with the thoughts still thinking away inside his head?

Who are you, they’re asked by police officers and various city employees who’ve been called in. We won’t say, the men reply. But you have to say, they’re told, otherwise how do we know whether the law applies to you and you’re allowed to stay here and work? We won’t say who we are, the men say. If you were in our shoes, the others respond, would you take in a guest you don’t know? The men say nothing. We have to verify that you’re truly in need of assistance. The men say nothing. You might be criminals, we have to check. They say nothing. Or just freeloaders. The men are silent. We’re running short ourselves, the others say, there are rules here, and you have to abide by them if you want to stay. And finally they say: You can’t blackmail us.

This isn’t the first time he’s felt ashamed to be eating dinner in front of a TV screen displaying the bodies of people felled by gunfire or killed by earthquakes or plane crashes, someone’s shoe left behind after a suicide bombing, or plastic-wrapped corpses lying side by side in a mass grave during an epidemic. Today, too, he feels ashamed, but goes on eating as usual. As a child he learned the meaning of adversity. But that doesn’t mean he has to starve himself just because a desperate man has begun a hunger strike. Or so he tells himself. His going hungry would do nothing to help one of these striking men.

He sticks his fork in the amply filled salad bowl, telling himself it would be a logical fallacy to just stop eating one day out of solidarity with this or that poor, desperate person somewhere in the world. He’d still be trapped in his cage of free agency, imprisoned by the luxury of free choice. For him, refusing to eat would be just as capricious as gluttony.

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.

What’s happened is that during the explosion or the darkness that followed, someone stole his laptop from under his pillow. What’s a refugee doing with a laptop? the neighbor thinks. He must be one of the men who sell drugs in the park around the corner, thinks the woman from down the block.

goes into the stairwell, which is still filled with swirling clouds from the firecrackers set off by some Berlin provocateur wanting to take a stand against the administration of the district office, or some youngster with dark skin who has nothing better to do than scare people to death, or a neo-fascist who hates the refugees and their sympathizers, or else some poor refugee who wanted to steal a laptop from some other poor refugee in a moment of panic.

The sympathizers have white skin, but their clothing is black and torn, their pants, their t-shirts, and sweaters. 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.

The colonized are smothered in bureaucracy, which is a pretty clever way to keep them from taking political action.

Why in the world are the men being denied the right to hold a job in a country where even the right to a place in heaven is predicated on work? Why aren’t they being asked about their histories and provided for as victims of war?

There are so many disruptions in their lives that there’s no room in their heads for new vocabulary. They don’t know what’s going to happen to them. They’re afraid. It’s difficult to learn a language if you don’t know what it’s for.

What these men urgently need to be able to calm down is some peace, she says. That’s something he’s never thought of: since these men aren’t being permitted to arrive, what looks to him like peacetime here is for them basically still war.

Do you think about your future sometimes? Future? he says.

I looked in front of me and behind me and saw nothing.

Richard considers what to say as a resident of a country that has seventy thousand vacant apprentice positions with no one to fill them, a country that suffers from a shortage of trained workers but is nonetheless unwilling to accept these dark-skinned refugees; these people can’t just fly over Italy, Greece, or Turkey like birds in springtime without setting foot on the wrong soil — they can’t be accepted as applicants for asylum, much less taken in, educated, and given work.

eyes. People concerned about their failings are always the wrong ones, he thinks, the ones with the least to reproach themselves for, but they torture themselves all the same.

What will the kitchen look like where he’ll cook for his son? What will the bathroom look like where he’ll show him how to dry his back with a towel, where he’ll later show him how to shave? What city will this be in, what country? Italy? Germany? France? Sweden? Holland? Switzerland? Or Libya, where he was at home? Where there’s still war? In wartime, it’s only the war you see.

The day they hear on the news that holding refugees in custody pending deportation has been abolished, they are beside themselves. Ithemba, the cook, is waving his arms around. Zair and Tristan are arguing, but Rashid (the thunderbolt-hurler) is eerily silent as he sits at the table, a mute colossus. When Richard asks what’s wrong, Rashid replies: So they won’t lock people up before deporting them, but they’ve confirmed that the deportations themselves will continue. They really don’t want us here, he says. They really don’t want us. He shakes his head.

They think I’m a criminal. Every black man. Surely not. It’s true. It doesn’t matter if we’re criminals or not.

If I can’t stay in Germany after the interview, Karon says, where can I go? Where can I find a job in Italy? How can I feed my mother and siblings? Where in the world is the place where I can lie down to sleep in peace? The problem is very big, Karon says. I have no wife and no children, he says — I am small. But the problem is very big, it has a wife and many, many children.

The Africans have to solve their problems in Africa, Richard’s heard people saying many times in recent weeks. He’s heard them say: It’s incredibly generous of Germany to be taking in so many war refugees, in the same breath they say: But we can’t feed all of Africa from here. Then they add: Economic refugees and asylum fraud are using up resources that ought to be going to the actual refugees. It would be better to solve the problems in Africa there. For a moment, Richard imagines what a to-do list would look like for the men he’s gotten to know over the past few months. 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

What would you say if I were to buy a piece of land for your family? Richard is now expecting to see the African at first incredulous, perhaps, then speechless with excitement, and finally overjoyed, jumping into the air with relief and pleasure, throwing his arms around Richard or at least bursting into tears. Nothing of the sort happens. Karon is calm and very solemn and looks as if he is thinking very hard.

Karon’s worries have ground him down to such an extent that he’s even afraid to hope.

Richard asks himself whether forty heavily armed men are really necessary to remove twelve African refugees from a residential facility, not to mention the other 150 or so police officers waiting in the squad cars for their signal. Tomorrow — this is already clear to him — the newspaper will report on the high cost of this deployment, and this country of bookkeepers will be aghast and blame the objects of the transport for the expense, as used to happen in other periods of German history, with regard to other transports.

So a border, Richard thinks, can suddenly become visible, it can suddenly appear where a border never used to be: battles fought in recent years on the borders of Libya, or of Morocco or Niger, are now taking place in the middle of Berlin-Spandau. Where before there was only a building, a sidewalk, and everyday Berlin life, a border has suddenly sprouted, growing up quickly and going to seed, unforeseen as illness.

Should he assume these police officers have been deployed to defend the interests of those Germans who are so poor that all they can serve up for the holidays is a stolen goose? Probably not, he thinks, otherwise he’d no doubt have seen these twenty squad cars parked in front of various bank branches and officers dressed in riot gear carting away the managers who’ve embezzled so many billions.

They treat us like criminals. But what did we do?

One of the biggest German newspapers publishes on its website a tongue-in-cheek article about the refugees on the roof: Never a dull moment in Berlin. Richard reads: Where does protest stop and blackmail begin? For a brief moment he misunderstands and thinks that “blackmail” is meant to refer to the police tactic of forcing the occupiers to leave the building by turning off the electricity and water. But then he quickly realizes his mistake: it’s the ones putting their own lives in jeopardy who are described here as blackmailers. The newspaper’s readers praise the article in their comments, and their only complaint is why refugees should be the only ones to enjoy the privilege of standing on a roof and threatening suicide. And peeing over the edge.

Have you ever seen the gentlemen from the “refugee scene” or their supporters holding down a proper job or doing anything productive at all? Not me. Denying them permission to work while at the same time reproaching them for idleness is, Richard finds, a conceptually flawed construction.

A doctor can certainly aim to serve humanity in general, but there’s also nothing stopping him if he prefers to reserve his services for a particular sector of humanity.

it doesn’t surprise him that a conversation about a patient from Niger should reveal to him whom he can still count as a friend in today’s Germany and whom he cannot.

When Markus, the son of Detlef and Marion, was fifteen years old, his stepfather would quiz him over dinner about the periodic table. When he was sixteen, Detlef got him an internship in an engineering firm, and when he was taking his graduating exams, Marion made him muesli with freshly grated apples to help him concentrate. Now Markus builds bridges in China. When Osarobo was fifteen, he saw his father and friends being killed. And he’s seen for three years now that the world doesn’t want him.

Must living in peace — so fervently wished for throughout human history and yet enjoyed in only a few parts of the world — inevitably result in refusing to share it with those seeking refuge, defending it instead so aggressively that it almost looks like war?

Various people when asked to help say: We keep hearing that these men are completely traumatized. How do we know they won’t trash our apartment? They say: Even if we help them, the problem still won’t be solved. They say: If we take them in, we won’t be doing them any favors since there are so many Nazis in the neighborhood. And also: Even if we let them sleep here, what will they live on? Say: We could help out if it were just for a short period of time, but it doesn’t look as if things will be getting better any time soon. They say: One person could possibly stay here, but is that even worth it? There are so many of them.

say what they said two years ago when the men first came to Germany from Italy to live in tents on Oranienplatz. They repeat what they said half a year ago when the men dissolved the camp: What’s the point of having a law like Dublin II to determine jurisdiction if we don’t abide by it?

Why were you ashamed of your wife? asks Ali. I think actually I was afraid. What were you afraid of? That she might die, says Richard. Yes, he says, at that moment I hated her because she might die. I can understand that, says Detlef. 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.