Today is the first day of the rest of your Fulbright.
That anyway’s the adage beetling about my brain as my hands address the problem of deploying my umbrella. An operation doubly difficult, now two of the aluminum ribs have cut their threads and twisted, wind-warped, into wicked quills. No €’s spare for tetanus, so care’s the watchword there. An ounce of prevention worth a Visa card of cure.
A morning for maxims, it seems.
Otherwise an ordinary Berlin Morgen, kind you descend to the Bahn-platform bearing bright and light on your back, trundle out of the train again two stops down and a gale’s blowing in the stairwell, cement steps steaming, disaster slick, but the Volk at your elbows undeterred, tugging caps over ears and zipping parkas to the throat as they shoulder up into the city.
And it’s only after I’ve passed through the portal and entered the streets and showers, struggling still to rig up my ruined Regenschirm, that I remember the umbrella’s twin, sibling by point of purchase, swinging from its blue lanyard at Megan’s side. At this memory I stop short, soaked to my socks, a crosswalk Proust, stalled before the idling Autos. Sunk in my own idling.
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In the redeye, fly-over American Midwest, my brother will be sleeping soon.
He’d emailed me after finishing second shift at the CIMCO shipping center, this job the latest in a line of temporary stints he’s cobbled together into a kind of career. His email arrived just before I woke. Why I woke, actually. Ping of the new mail message leaping from the laptop I’d left on and open beside my bed.
A-
Hey it’s all set for tomorrow. Megan called this afternoon. You mentioned where you wanted her to leave the key but I couldn’t remember so I’ll just hold onto it, okay? Had a last-minute thought: why don’t you send me a list of what’s definitely off limits, and I’ll make sure
she doesn’t take any of it. Can’t be too cautious, right? Let me know. Anyway I’ll keep track in my head of what she takes, let you know tonight. Although I work late again, so actually it might not be until tomorrow. Looking forward to having you back in the states soon. Good luck finishing up your paper.
Brett
I opened a reply window and stared at the blinking cursor but didn’t write anything. A tad too cloak-and-dagger, the list bit—better to be told afterward what she’d taken. Although, if it came to it, I did have a catalogue ready: the one she’d emailed me. Lady of the list she always was. Itemized and categorized: furniture, appliances, pictures and picture frames, decorations, dvd’s, books. That last the longest section, and most tendentious. Or it would have been, if I’d contested it.
Megan’s email one half of a two-sided information event. The piece already in place. The ‘remembered’ column in the ledger of possessions set to be divided. Waiting now to see what she selected from the remainder, the items forgotten or overlooked in the interval. I begrudged Brett his eyes.
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At the time of its founding in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany adopted
an unusually liberal, and highly controversial, attitude towards the provision of political asylum. The exact level and register of opposition to this policy has fluctuated over time. Particularly vocal critiques arose in the decade directly proceeding reunification; these objections resulted in considerable constriction of the refugee program, achieved first by legislative statute, and later by constitutional amendment. This paper provides a profile of the asylum seekers entering Germany in the second decade after reunification, from 2000 to 2006. Particular emphasis is given to qualitative aspects of the lives of refugees, such as disposable income levels, likelihood of finding and sustaining employment, and strength and security of family networks. Considerable data constraints were encountered in the course of this study; we document these, and discuss in detail the method we adopted for overcoming them, a nascent statistical technique known as Normalization Mechanics. The paper ends with, a comparative analysis of the standard of living of recent asylum seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan relative to earlier waves of refugees from Turkey, Iran, and the former Yugoslavia. We conclude that [Conclusion………………………….]
Cem Basman
Adam Slough
Berlin, October 2007
The email from Brett, reply field still blank, popped up when I opened my laptop. I leaned in over the edge of the table, as if straining to read fine print. When I looked up again, Cem was staring at the abstract draft I had handed him. His lips rippled as he read.
“This word ‘waves’ must be changed.”
He looked over at the screen, now empty of all applications. I brought up the word file and waited for the document to load.
“You must be more cautious about employing such words belonging to the vocabulary of natural disasters. This kind of rhetoric the politicians here tend to use. And in the United States it is the same, yes?”
I mulled possible replacement terms. Stages of refugees. No. Fronts, no. Cycles, no. Words were hiding behind corners in my brain. I deleted ‘waves’ from the abstract and replaced it with… “Epochs of influx” might work, though it was clummsy. Anyway, we had all day.
“Ok, so for the abstract we still need a concluding sentence. I wanted to get your input on the phrasing.”
Cem picked up the printed draft again. An server came by with coffee. At the bottom of the laptop screen an icon blinked, indicating the wireless had come on.
“For the stylistic question you must consider how you yourself usually read abstracts. Myself, I read the first and last sentences only, and from this decide whether the paper is worth my while. And of course our aim is to convince our readers that indeed, our paper is.”
“Well, I think, and I think we agree on this, that, the numbers we’ve found, they’re fairly damning. So I guess we want to indicate that, here.”
As I spoke the laptop’s screensaver flickered on. I punched the spacebar with my thumb.
“You are of course correct about the content of our findings. However, there is a certain convention which we must, I think, observe here. A certain detachment, dispassionateness is expected.”
Correct, of course. And not only about the conventions of economic journals. However damning our data, they contributed only nominally to a condemnation already wide-reaching. And still there was war, and menacing remarks, and intimations of expanded theaters, assaults elsewhere. War-drums had become war-drone. I put my lips to the rim of my mug.
“We may reserve the question of the conclusion for now. We can first go through the body of the paper and see what changes must be made.”
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The numbers were a nightmare, turned true. Unorthodox sources. Mainly longitudinal studies, undertaken by private interests, at private expense. In other words, unreliable. Requiring correction.
This ought to have been an obstacle. Insurmountable, maybe. And it would have been, just a few years ago. But Cem was as alert to technological as to rhetorical innovations, and so was familiar with Normalization Mechanics before our academic partnership began. I sometimes suspected Cem signed on to my proposal simply for its value as a showcase for NM: probable publication in a high-profile American journal, entailing immediate simultaneous publication in German and Turkish counterparts. Leaving him de facto champion for the new methodology, the impact of which would be enormous, both for the discipline and for our careers. These anyway were the ambitions Cem hinted at, the few times the considerable checks on his ebullience broke down.
I hadn’t had any idea of the impediments to my project ten month’s earlier when I defending it on paper and before the Fulbright committee. Neither, apparently, did the selection board. Only after I arrived in Germany did I find out that the Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales, my designated contact agency, wouldn’t or couldn’t release the numbers I needed, wouldn’t even say whether they were collecting them. These all fairly standard indicators: figures on family size among asylum seekers; the structure and extensiveness of their networks of support; the mobility refugees exhibited, within Germany and without; statistics on consumption and household wealth. All requested, all withheld.
For several weeks I drifted in fellowship limbo: forwarded emails elicited no reply; phone messages went unreturned; professors at the Freie Universität proved unavailable or uninterested in my plight. Then Cem, saving grace in his stiff suit, extended his aid.
The problem, I’d explained from a broken chair in his dim office, was that the statistics I needed, tracked in near-infinitesimal detail within normal populations, simply weren’t on record for the sub-groups I hoped to study. The Auslander menace more malleable, apparently, when kept in carefully maintained inexactitude. The only organizations who did supply the data I required made no effort to conceal their interest in the numbers they offered. So, Pro Asyl—their ideology evident in their very name—presented figures appropriate for an oppressed and impoverished immigrant underclass. Whereas plenty of right-wing groups, and not only the openly extreme ones, portrayed this population differently: a highly-organized community of proficient parasites and free riders, German generosity becoming their great good luck. The only numbers available, incurably corrupt.
The solution Cem held out struck me as sheer wish-fulfillment. I got no sleep the night after our first meeting, too tormented by the idea that in my desperation I’d attributed to the Mechanics powers which the soft-spoken young lecturer had never promised, could not have promised. The exactness with which NM addressed my impasse seemed the surest sign that I’d misunderstood it, had unconsciously cast it as an easy fix for a problem too basic, existential, to be solved. Bias hardly seemed a sediment that could simply be sifted from fact. Although such crises became less frequent as my interaction with Cem increased, they never did completely cease.
Normalization Mechanics, he’d outlined at that first meeting, combined the tools of real analysis with recent models from physics of spontaneous organization. The basic premise, what made it work, was that human parties with some evident interest, even if unconscious themselves of their bias, tended to skew their compilations and interpretations of data in internally-coherent ways. The choice of one particular significance test in place of another, for example, was not just contingent on the immediate need to return a significant (or insignificant) result; instead, such choices corresponded with minor unorthodoxies along a broad swath of other moments in the analysis. Sample sizes straying just outside the limits of well-known rules-of-thumb; geographical coverage just short of comprehending the population of interest; slight deviations from the norm in the definitions of household and family unit employed. Normalization Mechanics identified matrices of such minor compromises and calculated their aggregate threat to project integrity.
NM didn’t stop here, however. Recognizing bias, after all, was something even junior researchers could do, if not so systematically. Instead, it actually corrected the data. Normalized it. Calculating backwards from detected human interference, it erased this interference entirely. The mechanics of the Mechanics I still can’t quite explain; my math is strong, but my exposure to the recent literature in physics almost nil. What I did understand was that the process had developed so fast that the mathematics underpinning hadn’t been fully expounded yet. There was said to be an unusual degree of bridging involved: appropriation by the computers actually running the analyses of decisions normally reserved for human operators. In a certain sense, the Mechanics had developed itself. Empirically, though, the method so far seemed sound: the most routine commercial forecasts, based on simple corporate indicators, increased almost exponentially in accuracy after submitting to the process.
Despite this promise, Cem concluded, the market was waiting for academic recognition of NM’s claims. For researchers, of course, the applications were too many to tell. For my own project, the implications were clear. NM would perform a kind of triangulation of these thoroughly biased data, and would return an accurate portrait of Germany’s asylum seeking and holding population. Reliable figures, far more interesting then the simple yearly influx- exflux numbers which tended to dominate parliamentary debate. The politicians’ favorite smokescreen statistic—the proportion of successful asylum applications to total applications made—would be shoved aside, replaced by exact accounts of exigency and ingenuity among refugees. Media preoccupation with sensationalized stories of illegal immigration from Iraq and Afghanistan would give way to bios of the asylees next door—who, it might turn out, were far more integrated into everyday German society, and communities, than typically portrayed. This at least the sea change our paper sought, the promise Normalization Mechanics held out.
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The data demanded all day of us, and into the evening too. Cem’s appetite sated by a midday pastry, my own, more expansive, commanding two mozzarella sandwiches, an apple, and a third of a liter of beer. Around four traffic into the internet café quickened and kept up until half-past six. At quarter of seven the evening counter-clerk came in with a newspaper under his arm and launched into a debate in Turkish with his daytime counterpart. The language I knew enough to recognize, nothing more. Cem however seemed distracted, at first, and soon, upset, and so when I suggested I might make the final emendations at home and email the clean copy to him he readily agreed. We packed and left and at the door I expected to shake hands and part but Cem said he’d had a second thought, he wanted to invite me over for a drink, maybe dinner, too. I’d never been to his house, nor met his wife, who taught at a local Turkish school. I gratefully accepted the invitation.
Always a bit ridiculous, the umbrella under the arm evenings when the morning storms have quit and cleared in the course of day. Cem nudged his cellphone from his pocket and dialed home, leaving me free for the thoughts I’d managed all day to avoid. One o’clock at home meant Megan and Brett were just meeting outside the apartment she and I had shared. Sublet for the rest of the semester to some masters students, psychology, I think, so not to lose the lease. Our things we’d left locked in a storage room behind the kitchen, untouched since our departure except maybe by midnight coital pawing at the door in the dark.
In Paris, the little flat she’d had, smaller than my Berlin berth, but brighter, with the big bay window, half-hexagon hanging in the void, a hundred feet above the street. She’d often described in emails sitting on the sill with her work arranged around her, piles of papers and books, and I’d pictured something thrilling and dangerous which was disappointed when I visited and saw the little ways she leveraged herself, Reduced the risk. Nothing but an earthquake likely to spill her out.
We bought our matching umbrellas in a shop at the corner of her building and spent the next two drizzling days holding them in our outside hands. She’d forgotten hers afterwards when she visited Berlin and grinned in triumph getting on the train to go back when we realized it hadn’t rained at all between her arrival and departure.
Now Brett would be moving the big cardboard boxes about and tipping the heavier objects back on the hand truck he’d borrowed from work and puzzling at the trunk of her hatchback as to how best to pack her possessions in. An exhibition fit for a fine specimen, which my brother absolutely was. Afterwards they’d get lunch and share stories together in which I would always, in some slight way, remain the lingering central point. Or maybe that was just the wayward speculation of narcissism and distance.
Beside me Cem snapped his cellphone shut. I expected him to report something back about his wife’s availability or the prospect of dinner and I was about to ask what she’d said when I noticed the agitation in his eyes.
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say that Cem was tight-lipped concerning his wife. He’d told me several stories about her family, who had fled to Germany in 1980, just before the coup, in the course of our project. Unprompted, freely offered. But the few times I had asked about Hediye Cem had given no answer, except perhaps a grunt and frown. He kept a picture of her on his desk and I sometimes wondered whether this wasn’t the only kind of communication of her he could allow himself.
For my part, I hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about my relationship with Megan, neither while she and I were together nor in those dreary days after we broke up. Whenever I’d sense an urge to confession creeping up I’d redirected my thoughts until an opportunity arose to make my plea elsewhere, either to Brett or one of the few friends back home who troubled themselves to keep up with me here. At the end of her visit Megan had complained, rightly, that I’d never even offered to introduce her to Cem, whereas she’d immediately taken me on the rounds of her faculty in Paris. Really though this was only a reactive silence, a reflected privacy.
I couldn’t ask him about his wife but I didn’t like to see him silent in his anger either so I brought up the latest bit of news I’d heard on the Blackwater scandal. Allied in outrage, he and I had followed the contractor’s case closely as it unfolded, discussing the implications for Iraqi statehood, the legal structure of the country, and the vanishing hope for peace. I sometimes found myself hoping he would offer up a kind of definitive Turk’s perspective on the situation, synthesizing the accounts offered in the foreign language papers I saw on the news stands but could not read. But if his countrymen had any particularly lucid perspective on the investigation Cem never alluded to it, nor did he let even extended argument over the case overcome his carefully constructed control.
I was surprised, then, by the force of his response to the bit of information I had floated.
Turning towards me, he laid a hand on the bicep beneath which I had wedged my umbrella.
“Look here,” he said. “Your congress has just passed a resolution condemning the Armenian genocide. Do you have any idea what your statesmen’s bumbling will mean?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“They have. At the café, the man we saw—it was this that he was so upset about.”
Coming up was the Checkpoint Charlie shed and the crowd of tourists milling about the median, waiting with their cameras for snapshot clearings or scanning the passing strangers for someone they could trust to photograph them. I fell back as we pressed, single file, through the mass. At the corner, if I remembered Cem’s address correctly, we would turn left past the Checkpoint Museum entrance and follow Friedrichstraße to its end.
My past political arguments with Cem had always ended coolly, if not entirely resolved. He sometimes faulted me for repeating too easily the tired mantras of dissent: outrage at interrogation techniques which were effectively torture; disbelief at the arrogance of the practice of rendition; cynicism towards the propaganda proclaiming that America’s just aim was to spread democracy. Holding such opinions, he warned me, really amounted to nothing; was only a kind of transferred ethics of pessimism.
On my side, I frequently found Cem too tentative in his opinions, too quick to apologize for the privilege which had launched him into his current career: private schooling, then university in America, and even now, a small pension from his parents to supplement the dismal wages paid to German visiting faculty. As though the duty of gratitude obliged him to entertain only the most carefully moderated politics. Then too there was his silence on religion. After receiving hints of his personal atheism I had tried to draw him out on the question of Islam in Turkey, whether it really posed a threat to secularism, but he met such inquiries with silence, and I soon gave them up.
These established topics and taboos provided little guidance on the issue of the genocide. First, I felt uncertain because I didn’t know enough, and was certain it would show if we continued with the topic. Second, because of the simple fact of Cem’s correctness, which, while occasionally an obstacle, also offered the constant possibility of a reconciliation of views. The Armenian issue, towards which Cem’s position was, as yet, opaque, had the potential to expose an extremism in my colleague which I preferred not to encounter until our current collaboration was at end.
At this point anyway the opportunity to further discuss the point was gone. Cem had drawn a scrap of paper from his pocket and was scanning it intently. He was obviously still upset—anger rolled in his shoulders with each step—but his set lips let no further comment escape.
We continued down Friedrichstraße, the first couple blocks occupied by businesses targeting the overflow of tourist traffic: call centers and walk-up email terminals; news- and magazine-stands with their red racks crowding the curb; Thai and Turkish fast-food shops. Further down the district changed, became residential, though it retained an air of cheapness and transcience. This best reflected by the broad display windows of convenience shops, cluttered with marked-down merchandise. Between shops the doors of a school stood closed behind a bolted gate. Ahead several medium-rise apartment buildings broke the low skyline.
Friedrichstraße dead-ended at Hallesches Tor, a lower-income district populated primarily by first generation immigrants—a description I had gleaned, not from our statistics, but rather from changing trains at the subway station there. The platform walls were plastered with posters and advertisements printed entirely in Turkish. Turkish too—or at least no German I knew—the language shrieked by the schoolboys wrestling around the benches and stairwells of the station. The area was poor, but hardly a center of American-style blight. It made sense that Cem, married and maybe expecting children, would choose to live their, rather than in the kind of tumultuous communal residence house in which I was staying. Perhaps too his wife’s family lived nearby.
When I realized I was mentally apologizing for my colleague before even setting foot in his home I felt embarrassed and directed my thoughts elsewhere. Other details I knew about the area. Willy Brandt’s house was nearby. I’d never been there, but big signs at the exits of the subway station indicated with arrows where it lay. The Jewish Museum, too, stood nearby. To which I had been, with Megan. In the courtyard was a tilted garden which was meant to make you nauseous as you talked it. Megan had felt sick and I didn’t, at least not right away, but I told her I had felt something and stood rubbing her knees as she sat on a low wall recovering. Inside the museum was well designed and full of fascinating displays. I gravitated towards the philosophers, Megan towards the artists. We agreed afterwards that the best part was the passages designed for kids. Little arches and doorways connected each of the exhibits, offering children their own, private path, which only occasionally intersected that of the adults.
From the Jewish museum my thoughts, directed by the irresistible force of association, turned again to the Armenian genocide. That little-taught massacre. I really didn’t know much about it at all, except what I’d learned through a few novels and in the context of Pamuk’s winning the Nobel the year before. Mainly the event seemed unique as an example of exquisitely self-conscious repression of historical crime. The contrast with the prevailing German attitude towards the national past couldn’t have been greater. At the same time, I was certain that my ignorance rendered the comparison unjust.
As we came alongside the first of the big apartment buildings Cem gestured to a grocery store on its ground floor and said he had to pick up a few items for dinner. Confirming, at least, that part of his invitation. I took out a pack of cigarettes and looked about for a place to sit.
Friedrichstraße ended here in a kind of promenade, closed on the sides the apartment houses and at the rear by a rail trellis where an underpass took you through to the station on the other side. Cement fir planters, stained brown by the urban rain, formed broken lines at the edges of the square.
I leaned my bag against one of the planters and sat on its rim. Wind chased paper wrappers and empty cups across the concrete, blowing the ash of my cigarette red. This the only corrupting influence of the old world I’d encountered. Megan likewise. At lunch the first day in Paris she’d suprised me by lighting up at the table, and I’d surprised her by joining in.
At ground level the plaza was empty, almost. Across the open expanse of concrete a dark-haired boy kicked a soccer ball against the wall of one the apartment houses. A group of young men stood smoking in a circle a little further down. Occasionally the boy’s ball took a bad bounce and dribbled over to the smoking men, and one of them would scoop it up and lob it back to him.
Empty as it seemed, the square’s air rung with voices, these murmurs and cries drifting down from the balconies of the apartment buildings, where couples chatted in chairs, kids shrieked greetings from floor to floor, and workers, still wearing their colored coveralls, sipped at after-work beer. Above my bench I could see shoulders jutting out over railings, and in one place, several stories up, haunches, three or four tiny figures actually sitting on their ledge, backs to the square. My attention of course was drawn to the domestic scenes, the tableaus of contentment, so perfect at such distance, apparently as repeatable as the day itself. I remembered other times recently when I’d suffered the eyes of every couple I saw, construing in their glances a kind of reproach.
I was brought back from the brink of such a melancholy study by shrill shouts of Hallo! and the flat smack of a ball bounding my way. I had one hand up already at my cigarette and in an easy motion I reached out and mitted the leaping ball with my palm. At the edge of my vision I saw a smile open white onto the face of the boy sprinting towards me.
“Danke,” he burst as I threw the ball back. As it fell he trapped it against his chest and let it roll down his body, never slipping his stride, and when it reached his foot he flicked it forward and began dribbling normally.
“Also, I beamed. “Ausgezeichnet.”
“Amerikaner?” he replied, breaking off his run.
The quickness of the question startled me, though it was one I received, and confirmed, often enough. My ‘scientific’ German had improved immensely in the course of my Fulbright, and my everyday vocabulary too, but my accent appeared ineradicable.
“Hey Lan,” the boy shouted, twisting his neck so he was looking over his shoulder. Across the promenade one of the smoking men looked up immediately, the other two mirroring his movement.
“Hey Lan,” he shouted, his feet passing the ball back and forth, his upper body basically stationary, leaving him looking like some tentacled sea creature, limbs awag.
The young men came slowly across the square. They were about my age, as close as I could tell. A certain fastidiousness revealed itself in their dress—cuffs each three inches rolled at the bottom of their dark jeans, bright track jackets unzipped to the air, t-shirts tucked in at their waists.
They seemed unlikely to maintain the distance we unconsciously expect of strangers. Unwilling to be surrounded where I sat, and fairly certain that I was taller than all but one of them, I made a display of stubbing out my cigarette on the rim of the planter in the same motion swung my leg around and stood up. I tried to keep from looking at the boy, or the grocery where Cem was, apparently, still shopping, or the bag containing my laptop, which lay at my feet. Each of these little responses to the scenario unfolding left me with the impression of less than total control of my body, as though some unthinking kind of physicality was preparing itself.
“You would like a cigarette.”
Lan—if the boy had been using his name, and not some slang I didn’t know—removed his own cigarette from between his lips, and for an instant I had the impression he meant to share it with me. I nodded. He turned to one of the other men and gestured for the pack.
It seemed unwise to trouble myself trying to strike my lighter in the wind and so I was relieved when Lan held up his own and flicked a flame on for me. I was surprised to see a similar relief enter his face as I inhaled from the cigarette, as though by doing so I’d confirmed his right to speech.
“It’s comical we should meet an American when we have just been discussing about Americans. Adel has just said certain interesting things about your Americans. Tell him what you have said.” He nudged the man who held the pack.
“I said—”
“You have said.”
Adel and I looked at Lan.
“You have said. It is the use of the preterite.” As he said it, pray-TEAR-it-UH.
“You speak English like an imbecile,” said Adel. He looked at me. “The preterite!”
“You may just fuck yourself,” Lan retorted. His eyes appealed to me. There was a kind of power to be claimed in adjudicating the dispute.
“Adel is right,” I said, mimicking as best I could the way Lan had pronounced his friend’s name. “You can say, or, one sometimes says, ‘I have said,’ but only to emphasize the fact that one has repeated a thing many times.”
Adel beamed. “I see. So, for example, one might say, ‘Lan, I have said many times, you speak English like an imbecile.”
He looked to the third man and, still grinning, said something very rapidly in Turkish. The third man laughed. Apparently he knew less English than Lan.
“ ‘s British English,” Lan began. Before he could go any further, the ground beneath our feet shattered.
I stumbled back, nearly tripping on the wall of the planter. The three men jumped back too, and threw their arms over their heads. That’s odd, I thought. Then, gradually, I realized it wasn’t the ground that had shattered. Glass fragments glinted on the concrete. Something dropped from above. A bottle. Of course.
As my mind made these adjustments, the man who did not know English began shouting what were probably obscenities into the air. I looked up. The haunches had disappeared from the high balcony, and instead, four tiny faces were staring down.
Aled joined his friend in the altercation, and for the moment Lan and I were as if alone. We met each others eyes. The look of appeal I had seen, had exploited, had hardened into one of violent intention.
“Aled,” Lan said, raising his voice to be heard through the shouting, “has been saying that you Americans always go too far. That you ask too much, and receive too little.” He put his hand on Aled’s shoulder. “Am I repeating you right?” he asked his friend.
Aled, who had not heard what had been said, looked confused, reluctant to have his attention drawn away from the balcony, where the four figures were still shouting and leaning down, waving violently.
“Aled and I have been speculating how ungrateful it appears, when one country asks another country help in supplying its military campaigns abroad, and in securing the borders of the territories it attacks, and when that other country complies, and offers gladly the help that is asked, then that one country, that has asked, incapable of prudence, and little mindful of its own actions, and how these are construed, accuses the country that has helped it of crimes committed, if ever, long ago, by people entirely other than those alive today.”
Aled’s interest had settled squarely on his friends remarks, even as the commotion continued above.
“Yes—”
“And making it even more difficult,” Lan continued, “to answer certain questions one’s brothers and sisters are asking, such as about their country, not of birth, perhaps, but in fact still their home, and where they will travel one day, and possibly live.” He nodded towards the boy, who was chasing down the ball he had booted away in fright at the crash of the bottle.
“And then there is the question,” Adel interjected, “of the European Union, where it is widely perceived that your country may not wish our homeland to enter, and is even willing to act complicitly with those member states which have openly declared their hatred of us in terms of fear aiming at the Turkish exclusion. And so we are not at all convinced that your congress is as foolish as it may wish to look, and may want us, and you, to think, in passing this resolution, placing on us the title of this genocide, which equates us with the event of the last century which symbolizes everything your European world has been raised to hate.”
Too late, I took stock of my options for flight. The trees in planter were too closely spaced to pass easily between, and if I tried to squeeze through and got stuck I would be trapped. There was no going forward, though. Even now, the three men were forming into a loose semicircle. And if I did manage to break through, there was the question of where to go. Run to the grocery, perhaps, but even if I did outrun them, by going into the store I would closing my options off, and I couldn’t be sure that the witnesses or the commercial order of the shop would keep them from following me inside, attacking me there. I didn’t want to draw Cem in, either. For all I knew, these men were strangers to him, too, and wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him, if he tried to help me. My prospects were poor. And from the exchange of glances I observed between Lan and Aped, I could see that a certain suddenness had entered the situation, that soon there would be nothing left to do. I considered whether I could appeal to the onlookers above, on the balcony, still staring down. My imagination failed me.
I’d thought there would be clarity in the impending violence. But there was none. In its place poetry.
Poetry. As Aped and Lan muttered in Turkish to their companion, and began to mass their bodies up, two lines I had read years ago, in translation, and reread recently, in their original, occurred to me. Forming, of themselves, a sort of list, or ledger, I imagined. Though how to arrange this I didn’t know.
First: Only a god can save us now.
Second: You must change your life.
I could only have inferred from their faces the movements preliminary to assault. For before Lan or Adel could decisively approach me, something they saw arrested them. I saw their eyes roll up and track slowly, too slowly, it struck me later, the motion at my back. So that myself, I didn’t see, but only heard the surprisingly little there was to hear of the impact.
After making my statement, as he drove me back from the police station to my apartment, I asked Cem if he had recognized any of the men, either Lan or Adel or their companion, or the three men on the balcony, or the fourth man their jostling, or his own momentary shortfall of athleticism, had caused to fall. He hadn’t looked closely at the dead man, Cem replied, but the rest were strangers to him, and so probably he was too. It was tempting, he continued, growing expansive, to imagine that we had, in some sense, met these men before, encountered them in the columns and rows of figures compiled in the course of our research. But such speculations, he concluded, would have no more validity than fables, the kind which can never be falsified, and which we will never stop telling ourselves.
Of course at the time I had no feeling for Cem’s uncommon combination of grand pronouncement and insistent cynicism. I only kept running through in my mind the second entry in the ledger of revelation I’d received. A single line of code, repeated to infinity:
You must change your life
You must change your life
You must change your life
...