Kismet (8 page)

‘Yes, please. Thanks.’ Slowly and ponderously as an old man, he lowered himself to one of the chairs, his bandaged hand still prominently displayed in what he assumed was the centre of my field of vision. ‘Would you have anything to eat too? I haven’t eaten a thing all day except those salty breadsticks.’

I muttered a yes, put vodka and glasses on the table and slammed down a can of sardines, a can opener, and the packet of crispbread I’d started in front of him. ‘Sorry, but that’s all I have.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ he replied, looking at the sardine can as if he’d seldom thought anything less fine in his life. I poured vodka, we drank, Romario said, ‘Ugh!’ and added, ‘Oh wow, on an empty stomach!’ and then we both relished a couple of full minutes in which he tried to open the can with his elbows and one hand. When I finally reached over and removed the lid for him he thanked me effusively, and I came very close to throwing the can in his face, opener and all.

‘So now what?’

‘Well …’ Romario drizzled the last remains of oil from the can on a piece of crispbread and stuffed it into his
mouth. When he’d finished munching, he said, ‘I’ve been thinking I could go underground until I see how things work out …’

He looked at me expectantly. I looked expressionlessly back.

‘So well, I was thinking, well, it only crossed my mind, and only if you didn’t object, whether … well, whether I could maybe stay with you for a few days.’

I examined him for a while, wondering whether he might for some strange reason enjoy my company, or if he was just so washed up and on his own that he’d put up with any amount of harassment for a place on a sofa. I poured myself more vodka and lit a cigarette. ‘Why on earth didn’t you just fly off for a few weeks in the south, like we agreed …’ It wasn’t a question, it was a sigh. To my surprise I got an answer.

‘But I couldn’t!’ said Romario, and even for this occasion, which wasn’t exactly short on desperation, he made an unusually desperate face.

‘What do you mean, you couldn’t?’

‘I …’ He looked at the floor. ‘I can’t fly anywhere. Except Brazil, but I don’t have the money for that. You’re right, the Saudade wasn’t making much these days, and well, let’s face it, I’m skint. I could just about have paid for a ticket, but then getting there and not even being able to invite the family and my old friends out for a meal – I can’t face that.’

‘Brazil’s not the only place in the world. We could have scraped up a few marks for a package trip to Mallorca.’

He raised his head, his face suddenly twisted with rage. ‘I told you, I can’t fly anywhere, just like that! I’d
need a visa, and a visa takes time, and in the end I guess I wouldn’t get one either!’

‘Hold on … you don’t mean you only have a residence permit, do you?’

‘That’s what I mean, yes.’

‘Oh no. But you were always saying how you’d been to the Côte d’Azur and so on in summer.’

For a moment his gaze bored into me as if he were assessing the chances of suing me for mental cruelty. But then he looked down at the floor again, his shoulders, a moment ago energetically braced, drooped, and he said in an exhausted tone, ‘That’s what I
said
, yup.’

‘And where were you really?’

‘In my flat.’ The words were coming out in robotic tones now. ‘Sometimes I took a tent and went to camp by the artificial lake for a few days.’

‘Tell me,’ I said, grinding out my cigarette and leaning over the table, ‘this isn’t some sob story you’re pitching me, is it?’

Without looking up, he shook his head. ‘Can I have a little more to drink?’

‘Help yourself.’

He poured some more, drank, and put the glass down. Suddenly he seemed curiously calm. As if he were under hypnosis. Hands flat on the arms of the chair, fixed gaze on the table in front of him, he explained, ‘I’ve lived and worked here and everything for over twenty years. Every year I have to go to the Aliens’ Registration Office and get my residence permit extended by the guys there. Some of them haven’t been in this world as long as I’ve been in Frankfurt, and they don’t much mind whether they’re here or in Bielefeld. I do mind. I earned my first money
in Frankfurt, I rented my first flat of my own here, I was really in love for the first time here. There’s not much left of any of that, but the city reminds me you can start up somewhere and succeed. And never mind how things are going, it gives me pride. I’ve learned its language, I can tell Heinninger beer from Binding, I know where to get the cheapest car tyres, and I know more bars than any native of the city.’

He paused, reached for the bottle and poured us some more. Everything about him seemed calm, except that the neck of the bottle clicked against the rims of our glasses a little too often and a little too fast.

‘But like I said, every year I have to go and beg to be allowed to stay another year. Every year I have to prove I have work and a place to live and I’m not costing anyone money. And then I sit in that waiting-room with all the other poor fools who’ve cleaned their shoes and put on clean shirts so as to make a good impression on Herr Müller or Herr Meier, and they’re all sweating and smoking and some of them have to sit on the floor because there’s not enough chairs, and after three or four hours when your turn finally comes you’re just a crumpled, stinking Thing and you’d almost agree with Herr Müller or Herr Meier if he looked at you as if to say, what’s a pathetic creature like you doing in our lovely country?’

He stopped and looked absently at his hands, lying there on the arms of the chair and playing dead.

‘I mean, it’s one day a year when they make it very clear that this is no place for you. Or two days if there’s some piece of paper missing and Herr Müller or Herr Meier wants to harass you. And of course those are the
days when you’re moving house or starting a new job or opening a business or, like I said, you want to go away. But all the other days in the year I’m the kind that gets stopped in the street by people asking me where which underground train goes or where to find the nearest post office. And I’d like you personally, and all of you, everyone to think of me that way.’ He looked up. ‘Other days I’ve managed to complain about the weather in Frankfurt without anyone giving me that stupid line about why don’t I go back to sunny Brazil if I don’t like it here? But would they still have not asked it if they knew how I’ve had to crawl to people with rubber stamps sitting at desks for the last twenty years, and that this is probably never going to end.’

I looked at his grey, unshaven face and slowly shook my head. I’d have been sorry for anyone else. Not because circumstances or the laws were the way they were and gave people problems – any kind of circumstances and laws did that, and at some point I’d realised that sympathy in that context was just a relatively respectable way of folding your hands and doing nothing. But when someone made life-determining rules for himself in secret and stuck to them, never even wanting to know that no one cared in the least whether he kept them or broke them, then I really did feel for him.

Or I normally would, anyway. Obviously Romario had used up any such feelings that I had in reserve for him last night, leaving nothing.

I lit my next cigarette and poured more vodka. ‘I’ve no idea who’d have asked you what. But most people really don’t mind whether you have to crawl or not. Anyway, I could have got you your papers within a week.’

‘What?’ he exclaimed, and at last life returned to Tango Man. His eyes cleared, his gaze was turned on me both hopefully and incredulously, and in a surprisingly sharp tone that wasn’t going to tolerate any trickery, however kindly intended, he added, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I know someone who can do it for you. All official. I’ll call him tomorrow.’

For a moment he seemed to be wondering where the snag was. Then he said, ‘Kemal, that would be really …’ And he looked as if he was going to embrace me.

I hastily dismissed his gratitude. ‘That’s OK. It won’t cost me anything. In fact it’ll be fun.’

‘Fun?’

I nodded, put back the last of my vodka and got to my feet. ‘Nothing to do with you.’ I looked into his wide, shining eyes, and shuddered at the thought of Romario keeping this expression on his face from now until he got his papers. A grateful Romario was almost more unbearable than an ungrateful one. And anyway I knew that as soon as the visa was in his hands the familiar chicken-livered swaggerer would be back. Perhaps he wouldn’t fancy its colour, or he’d have preferred his height to have been given as a couple of centimetres taller.

‘I have to go to bed now. You can sleep on the sofa tonight. And find yourself somewhere else in the morning.’

‘Yes, sure,’ he agreed eagerly, getting to his feet too. ‘Anything you like. I really don’t want to be a burden to you.’

‘Well, that’s great. And where there’s a will, luckily, we all know there’s a way.’

Romario stared at me, then laughed with some difficulty and winked as if to say: I know you, Kayankaya, old fellow, tough outside, soft at heart.

Everything suggested that he would often get lost along the way.

‘When was the car reported stolen?’ I asked.

Höttges’s heavy breathing mingled with the noise of traffic. He was ringing from a phone box. Paper rustled, then he said, ‘Yesterday. But the owner said he’d been away for the last four days, so it could have been stolen as long ago as last Monday.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Dr Michael Ahrens.’

I made a note of it. Coughing and hawking sounds were coming from my bathroom.

‘Addresses: work, private …’

He gave me street names and phone numbers. As I wrote them down under the man’s name, the noises from the bathroom grew louder, more full-bodied, and merged at increasing speed, until you might have thought a herd of elephants had sought out my bathtub especially to throw up in it.

‘OK. What about new Mafia gangs in the station district?’

‘None. Just the usual Albanians and Turks.’

‘How about Röder? Has he gone?’

Röder was the boss of the German gang, and of course he hadn’t gone. But while every Russian pickpocket was instantly regarded as evidence of organised criminality, many people still thought of German gangs which had tight leadership as nothing but a bunch of cartoon
burglars in big peaked caps with sacks full of candlesticks slung over their shoulders. Even a pro like Höttges, who should have known better, avoided linking the terms Mafia and Germans in any but a mutually hostile connection.

‘No. Röder’s still around.’

‘Albanians, Turks and Germans, then.’

Höttges did not reply. Instead I heard the flushing of the toilet from the bathroom, accompanied by something that sounded like a stuttering foghorn.

‘You’ve never heard of an outfit calling itself the Army of Reason?’

‘No. Like I said, only the usual.’

‘OK. Thanks very much. And I have a small request. An acquaintance of mine would like to get German citizenship.’

I briefly explained what he needed to know, made an appointment for Romario, and the phone call finished. The shower was turned on in the bathroom. My shower. My soap. My back-brush. I wondered if it wouldn’t have been a better idea to ask Höttges to cancel Romario’s residence permit today, once and for all. A single poncy black hair in the plughole of my bathtub, and Romario would be sorry! Just as I was thinking that, he began singing in the shower. That well-known folksong
No Fairer Land
. What the hell was his idea? Rehearsing for a thank-you performance when he’d been given his citizenship papers? Or was this simply the stuff he usually warbled under the shower anyway? Perhaps he sang the national anthem while he was washing up, perhaps as a future German citizen he was planning to vote CDU? I imagined him standing outside his new restaurant the
Germania in a year’s time and, when asked what he liked best about Germany, saying, ‘The clean streets.’ And perhaps just then I’d come staggering out of one of the bars opposite and drop an empty cigarette packet on the pavement, and he’d point at me and explain: now there’s an example of unwillingness to integrate, and I think a man who’s lived the life I’ve lived has the right to say we’re not putting up with this kind of thing.

I stood up and marched to the bathroom door.

‘Romario!’

‘Yoo-hoo!’ the happy echo came back. ‘Shut up!’

The splashing died down a bit. ‘What?’

‘Stop singing! Shut up!’

‘Yes, up with singing! I always sing under the shower! When I came to Frankfurt I went to evening classes on German songs, did you know? We like German music a lot in Brazil, and I just love singing.’

I stared at my bathroom door.

‘It gives quite a different feel to the start of the day!’

‘Romario!’

‘Yoo-hoo!’

‘I don’t want you giving quite a different feel to the start of the day here.’

A short pause. ‘Didn’t quite catch that!’

‘Stop singing like that!’

‘Oh, too loud, is it? No problem!’

The volume, I thought as I went back into the kitchen, that’s all our CDU voter understands!

I made a fresh pot of coffee, listened in case any more of the heritage of German song was coming out of the bathroom along with the splashing of the water, finally
closed the door so that I wouldn’t have to hear the water either, lit myself a cigarette and sat down at the table with a cup of coffee. I picked up the racketeer’s mobile and pressed the redial button for the umpteenth time. It was almost a shock when someone actually answered.

‘The Adria Grill, good morning,’ announced a friendly male voice.

‘Good morning … er … did you say the Adria Grill?’

‘Yes, how can I help you?’

‘Er … a friend of mine recommended your restaurant, but he didn’t know the address, and.’

‘Are you applying to join?’

‘To join? Well, perhaps. I was thinking of it. I mean, it all depends on.’

‘To find out details you’ll need to come Tuesday to Thursday about nine.’

‘About nine. Wonderful. If you could give me the address now …’

He gave it to me. A street in Offenbach.

‘Are you open today?’