Crime (13 page)

The Ethiopian

The pale man was sitting right in the middle of the lawn. He had a strangely lopsided face with protruding ears, and his hair was red. His legs stuck out in front of him and his hands were clutching a bundle of banknotes in his lap. The man was staring at a rotting apple lying next to him, watching the ants biting minuscule fragments out of it and carrying them away.

It was shortly after midday on one of those hellishly hot days of high summer in Berlin when no sensible person would willingly set foot out-of-doors at noon. The narrow square had been artificially conjured between the tall buildings by the city planners; their glass and steel construction reflected the sun, and the heat hovered in a trapped layer above the ground. The lawn sprinklers were broken and the grass would be burned by nightfall.

No one paid attention to the man, not even when alarm sirens started to howl at the bank across the street. The three radio patrol cars that arrived very shortly afterward raced past him. Police ran into the bank, others blocked off the square, and reinforcements poured in.

A woman in a suit came out of the bank with several policemen. Putting a hand over her brow to protect herself from the sun, she searched the lawn with her eyes and finally pointed to the pale man. A stream of green-and-blue uniforms formed itself immediately in the direction of her outstretched hand. The policemen screamed at the man; one of them drew his service weapon and roared at him to put his hands in the air.

The man didn’t react. A police captain, who’d spent the whole day in the precinct house writing up reports and being bored, ran at him, wanting to be the first. He threw himself at the man and yanked his right arm up behind his back. Banknotes flew through the air, orders were yelled, only to be ignored, and then they were all standing around him in a circle, gathering up the money. The man was lying on his stomach while the policeman drilled his knee into his back and pressed his face into the grass. The earth was warm. Looking between all the boots, the man could see the apple again. The ants, unimpressed, were keeping right on with their work. He breathed in the smell of the grass, the earth, and the rotting apple, closed his eyes, and was in Ethiopia again.

His life began the way lives begin in a terrible fairy tale. He was abandoned. A luminously green plastic tub stood on the steps of a vicarage near Giessen. The newborn was lying on a matted coverlet and was suffering from hypothermia. Whoever had put him down there had left him with nothing—no letter, no picture, no memory. That kind of tub was sold in every supermarket; the coverlet was army-issue.

The vicar immediately notified the police, but the mother was never found. The baby was taken to an orphanage, and after three months the authorities put him up for adoption. The Michalkas, who had no children of their own, took him in and baptized him with the name of Frank Xaver. They were taciturn, hard people, hop growers from a quiet region of Upper Franconia; they had no experience with children. His adoptive father would say, “Life isn’t a bowl of cherries,” and then stick out his bluish tongue and lick his lips. He handled human stock, livestock, and hop-root stock with equal respect and equal strictness. He got angry with his wife when she was too soft with the child. “You’re spoiling him for me,” he said, thinking of shepherds, who never stroke their dogs.

The boy was teased in kindergarten; he started school when he was six. Nothing went well for him. He was ugly, he was too tall, and, above all, he was too rebellious. School was hard for him. His spelling was a catastrophe, and he got the lowest marks in almost every class. The girls were frightened of him, or repelled by the way he looked. He was insecure, which made him a loudmouth. His hair made him an outsider. Most people thought he was stupid; only his German teacher said he had other gifts. She sometimes had him make small repairs around the house, and she gave him his first pocketknife. Michalka carved her a wooden windmill for Christmas. The sails turned when you blew on them. The teacher married a man from Nürnberg and left the village during the summer vacation. She hadn’t told the boy, and the next time he went to see her, he found the windmill in front of the house in a dumpster.

Michalka had to repeat a year of classes twice. When junior high school was over, he left and became an apprentice to a carpenter in the next-biggest town. No one teased him anymore; he was almost six foot six. He passed his qualifying exam to become an apprentice only because he was outstanding in the practical section. He did his military service in a unit of the signal corps near Nürnberg. He picked a fight with his superiors and spent a day in the brig.

After his discharge, he hitchhiked to Hamburg. He’d seen a film that took place in the city. It had beautiful women, broad streets, a port, and real nightlife. Everything had to be better there. “Freedom lives in Hamburg,” he’d read somewhere.

The owner of a construction carpentry firm in Fuhlsbüttel took him on and gave him a room at the top of the factory building. The room was clean. Michalka was skilled and they were pleased with him. Although he often didn’t know the technical terms, he understood the technical drawings, corrected them, and could implement them. When money was stolen from a locker, the firm dismissed him. He was the last person to have been hired, and there had never been a theft at the company before. The police found the cash box in the apartment of a drug addict two weeks later—Michalka had had nothing to do with it.

On the Reeperbahn, he ran into an old buddy from the army, who got him a job as janitor in a brothel. Michalka became the gofer. He got to know those on the margins of society—pimps, moneylenders, prostitutes, addicts, thugs. He kept himself out of it as best he could. He lived for two years in a dark room in the basement of the brothel, and then he began to drink, unable to bear the misery that surrounded him. The girls in the brothel liked him and told him their stories. He couldn’t cope. He got into debt with the wrong people. He couldn’t pay them back, and so the interest kept rising. He was beaten up, left lying in a doorway, and then picked up by the police. Michalka knew that any more of this would be the death of him.

He decided to try things abroad; he didn’t care which country he landed in. He didn’t spend a lot of time thinking it over. He took a stocking from one of the girls in the brothel. Entering the savings bank, he stretched it over his face, the way he’d seen it done in a movie, threatened the cashier with a plastic pistol, and made off with twelve thousand deutschmarks. The police blocked off the streets and checked everyone who was on foot, but Michalka, in a kind of trance, had gotten on a bus headed to the airport. He bought an economy ticket to Addis Ababa because he thought the city was in Asia, or at least far away. Nobody stopped him. Four hours after the holdup, he was sitting in the plane, his only luggage a plastic bag. When the plane took off, he was afraid.

After a ten-hour flight, the first plane trip in his life, he landed in the capital of Ethiopia. He bought a visa for six months at the airport.

Five million inhabitants, sixty thousand children on the streets, prostitution, petty crime, poverty, innumerable beggars, cripples by the sides of the roads showing off their deformities to arouse pity—after three weeks, Michalka knew that there was nothing to choose between the misery in Hamburg and the misery in Addis Ababa. He came across a few Germans, a colony of human wrecks. The state of hygiene was catastrophic. Michalka came down with typhus. He ran a fever, his skin broke out in a rash, and he had dysentery, until finally an acquaintance found a doctor, who gave him antibiotics. Once again, he’d reached the end.

Michalka was now convinced that the world was a garbage dump. He had no friends, no prospects, nothing that could hold him. After six months in Addis Ababa, he decided to end his life, suicide as a form of reckoning. But he didn’t want to die in the dirt. There were still about five thousand marks of the money left over. He took the train toward Djibouti. A few kilometers beyond Dire Dawa, he began his wanderings through the pastureland. He slept on the ground or in tiny cheap hostels; he was bitten by a mosquito, which infected him with malaria. He took a bus up into the highlands. The malaria broke out along the way and he started to shake. He got out at some point, sick and confused, and lost his way in the coffee plantations as the world swam in a haze before his eyes. He stumbled and fell to the ground between the rows of coffee bushes. Before he lost consciousness, his last thought was, It is all such shit.

Between two bouts of fever, Michalka woke up again. He realized that he was in a bed, and a doctor and a lot of strange people were gathered around him. They were all black. He understood that the people were helping him, and he sank back into his fevered nightmares. The malaria was brutal. Here in the highlands, there were no mosquitoes, but people were familiar with the illness and knew how to treat it. The peculiar stranger they’d found in the plantation would survive.

The fever slowly ebbed, and Michalka slept for almost twenty-four hours. When he awoke, he was lying alone in a whitewashed room. His jacket and trousers had been washed and arranged neatly on the only stool in the room, and his rucksack was standing next to it. When he tried to get up, his legs buckled and everything turned black before his eyes. He sat on the bed and stayed like that for fifteen minutes. Then he tried again. He desperately needed to go to the toilet. He opened the door and stepped out into the hall. A woman came at him, gesticulating wildly and shaking her head: no, no, no. She linked her arm into his and forced him back into the room. He made his need clear to her. She nodded and pointed to a bucket under the bed. He found her beautiful, and went back to sleep.

When he woke up next time, he felt better. He looked in his rucksack; all the money was still there. He could leave the room. He was alone in the tiny house, which consisted of two rooms and a kitchen. Everything was clean and orderly. He went out of the house and into a little village square. The air was fresh and pleasantly cool. Children came storming up to him, laughing and wanting to take hold of his red hair. Once he understood this, he sat down on a stone and let them do it. The children had their fun. Then at some point, the beautiful woman in whose house he was staying arrived. She scolded and pulled at him, got him back inside the house, and gave him corn cakes. He ate them all. She smiled at him.

Slowly, he got to know the coffee farmers’ village. They had found him in the plantation, carried him up the hill, and fetched a doctor from the town. They were friendly to him. After he’d regained his strength, he wanted to help. The farmers were astonished; then they accepted.

Six months later, he was still living with the woman, slowly learning her language. First her name: Ayana. He wrote words down phonetically in a notebook. They laughed when he pronounced things wrong. Sometimes she ran her fingers through his red hair. At some point, they kissed. Ayana was twenty-one. Her husband had died two years before in an accident in the provincial capital.

Michalka thought about coffee growing. The harvest was laborious; it was performed by hand between October and March. He quickly grasped the problem: The village was the last link in the chain of trade. The man who collected the dried coffee beans earned more and had less work. But the man owned an old truck, and nobody in the village knew how to drive. For fourteen hundred dollars Michalka bought a better vehicle and drove the crop to the factory himself. He obtained nine times the price and divided the earnings among the farmers. Then he taught Dereje, one of the young men in the village, how to drive. Dereje and he now collected beans from the neighboring villages as well, and paid the farmers three times what they’d been getting before. Soon they were able to buy a second truck.

Michalka wondered how it might be possible to make the work easier. He drove to the provincial capital, acquired an ancient diesel generator, and used old wheel rims and steel cables to build a cable rail from the plantation to the village. For containers he carpentered together big wooden chests. The rail broke down twice before he worked out the right distance between the wooden supporting beams and reinforced them with steel braces. The village elder observed his experiments with suspicion, but when the cable railway started to run properly, he was the first to clap Michalka on the back. The coffee beans could now be transported faster, and the farmers no longer had to haul them to the village on their backs. They could harvest more quickly and the work was less exhausting. The children loved the cable railway; they painted the wooden chests with faces and animals and a man with red hair.

Michalka wanted to keep improving the yield. The farmers spread the beans out on racks and turned them for five weeks, until they were almost dry. The racks stood outside the huts or on their roofs. The beans spoiled if they got wet and the spread layers had to be thin to prevent rot from setting in. It was demanding work, which each farmer had to do for himself. Michalka bought cement and mixed concrete. He made a flat surface at the edge of the village, which could be used by all the farmers for their crops. He constructed large rakes, and now the farmers could turn the beans together. They stretched clear sheets of plastic above the platform to keep off the rain, and the beans under it dried quicker. The farmers were happy. It was less work and nothing rotted anymore.

Michalka realized the quality of the coffee could be improved if the beans weren’t just dried. The village lay close to a small river that ran clear from its source. He washed fresh-picked coffee beans by hand and sorted them into three water tanks. With a little money, he hired a dealer to buy a machine that separated the flesh of the fruit from the beans. The first experiments went wrong; the beans thus stripped of the fruit pulp fermented too long and went bad. He learned it was a matter of keeping the equipment absolutely clean; even a single leftover bean could spoil the whole process. Finally, it worked. He washed the coffee that had been prepared with fresh water and got rid of the remains of the parchmentlike skin of the beans. He bordered off a little area on the concrete slab and dried them. When he took a sack of these beans to the dealer, he received three times the usual price. Michalka explained the process to the farmers; using the cable railway, they could bring in the harvest so quickly that the beans would be going through their water bath within twelve hours. After two years, the village was producing the best coffee beans for miles around.