Brother Kemal

Chapter 7

Deborah’s real name was Helga; she had adopted Deborah as a stage name when she was working as a table dancer and prostitute. Deborah was her grandmother’s name. When I asked why she had chosen to work as a stripper under the name of a relative who I knew was close and dear to her, Deborah had answered, ‘Because I loved her very much and she wouldn’t have minded. This way she’s always with me, if you see what I mean. I was nineteen when I came to Frankfurt, and life here wasn’t always easy, so I needed someone.’

Deborah came from Henningbostel, a village of a thousand inhabitants near Bremen, and at the age of eighteen she had followed a young man called Jörn to Klein Bremstedt, fifteen kilometres from her hometown. Jörn expected to take over his father’s pet food factory at some point. After two months in the attic storey of his parents’ guest apartment, Deborah knew that she wanted more from life than the smell of pet food and evenings spent watching TV with her future in-laws, and she packed her rucksack. At first she got less from life, namely a job at a checkout counter at Aldi five kilometres farther in Jösters. After a while she packed her rucksack again and went on, hitchhiking with the goal to reach a university town. She had no high school diploma so she couldn’t hope to study, but she thought a university town would be full of young people and something would turn up. She had considered Bremen, Hamburg or Hannover, but then a couple of teachers and their kids gave her a lift in their motor home from the Oyten service station all the way to Frankfurt; and because on the one hand Deborah expected more of life but on the other she had the modest undemanding north German nature, she was satisfied with her new place of residence, even though she knew nothing about Frankfurt before, except its name. She stayed with the teachers for a while, looking after their two small children, then began working as a waitress, moved into a shared flat and at some point decided to earn enough money to open an espresso and sandwich bar in Henningbostel. She missed her parents, her friends and the flat northern countryside; Frankfurt felt more and more like a huge, cold monster, and espresso — real espresso, not the bitter dishwater that came out of the drinks machines in bars in Jösters or Oyten — was something she got to know and learned to love at Café Wacker on Kornmarkt. In fact she had a natural bent for gastronomy. She found few things in life more fun than eating, and to this day I have found few things in life more fun than watching her at it. She ate like a cow — slowly, with relish, letting nothing disturb her. When she stood at the stove in her wine bar, making bean soup or lamb goulash, you felt she’d like to send the customers away and empty the pan all by herself, with a bottle of cool red wine to go with it.

Her homesickness for Henningbostel wore off over time and Frankfurt became her new home, despite her work in the sex trade. The dream she still cherished of a restaurant of her own helped her through many long and sometimes unpleasant days and nights on the job. In her leisure time she tried out restaurants, went to wine tastings and took cookery courses. We became more and more of a couple, and I was glad when, after a year at Mister Happy, she had got together enough starting capital to leave the sex trade and rent a premises in Bornheim for her bar. Deborah’s Natural Wine Bar, serving simple food and light, fresh wines, quickly became successful. Soon she could afford to bring her elder sister Tine, recently divorced, and Tine’s daughter, Hanna, from Henningbostel to Frankfurt. Tine was now working as a secretary for an insurance company, and she and her daughter lived in the Hausen district of the city. Hanna often came to see us, did jobs in the wine bar during her school holidays and was probably one of the reasons Deborah wished to have children. Two days ago, when we were drinking our aperitif and Deborah had said, ‘Kemal, I want to have a baby,’ I flippantly slipped, with her professional past in mind, ‘Who with?’ Whereupon she had marched off in a furious temper.

But ever since, that remark had kept going through my head, and it was the reason I spent a free afternoon watching two under-fifteen girls’ football teams rather clumsily kicking a ball about. I wanted to find out what it was like to stand with other fathers and mothers on the sidelines, a stale beer in my hand, watching kids stumbling over a football.

‘Hi, what are you doing here?’ asked Hanna when she spotted me after the game among the spectators, some fifteen of us in all. She was a tall, thin girl with a pierced tongue and blond hair irregularly cut with a beard-trimmer to a length of more or less a centimetre. She usually wore boy’s clothes, shabby trainers, cargo pants, baggy T-shirts in washed-out colours, and sometimes a scarf twisted thinly round her forehead. When she did that she looked like a jungle guerrilla fighter; I called her Rambo once, and she asked, ‘Who’s that?’ She had a delicate, pale, beautiful face that easily went unnoticed with the look she affected. For a while I thought she might be a lesbian, but of course I didn’t mention that to anyone. I could do without Deborah’s head-shaking and Tine’s indignant, ‘Oh, of course, just because a girl plays football!’

But then Hanna had her first boyfriend, a very popular character at her school, laid back, a skateboarder with a Leonardo DiCaprio look, and I saw that a girl who to me resembled an undernourished aid worker with a hair problem was obviously attractive to her own generation and in her own surroundings.

‘I was passing by, had some free time and wanted to see how you lot played.’ I gave her a thumbs-up. ‘Terrific!’

‘Oh, come on, don’t pretend. Do you have your car here?’

‘I do.’

‘Can you give me a lift?’

‘Sure. Where to?’

‘I’m ravenous — would you invite me to a meal?’

‘Okay, but in Sachsenhausen. I have to pick up my bike there.’

After she had showered and changed, we drove to Café Klaudia. There was a police car outside the door leading to Abakay’s apartment. We sat on the terrace, and Hanna ordered spaghetti with vegetable sauce and an apple-juice spritzer, and I had a cider. Hanna told me about the other girls on the team, their coach, her school, her plans to go on holiday with Leonardo DiCaprio, and I realised that we were attracting looks from the neighbouring tables — ah, Papa with his lively daughter! — that were not unwelcome to me. Genetics would have had to be in an unusually experimental mood to link my features with such a blonde, fair-skinned outcome as Hanna. However, we obviously gave off such a strong father-daughter aura that our very different outward appearance didn’t matter to those around us. Then I tried imagining that Hanna really was my daughter: a few of my genes, a few of my little habits, maybe a similar way of walking or smiling, her hair dyed and not a genuine blonde, and an Asiatic brownish complexion behind her fashionably pale makeup. But it didn’t work. I still saw Deborah’s sister’s daughter sitting there, and although I was fond of her I felt no impulse to take her hand with its bitten fingernails or to invite her to the cinema or anything like that. All the same: for the first time I was curious what such a feeling would be like.

When the waiter brought the bill, I asked if he happened to have noticed a shashlik skewer missing when he was clearing tables sometime shortly before noon.

‘Happens all the time — people are always going off with cutlery or cups or whatever else,’ replied the waiter, a young man with pearl earrings, a mop of frizzy hair and a dragon tattooed on his upper arm, who clearly couldn’t care less about items like missing cutlery.

‘That’s not what I asked.’

‘Are you from the police too?’

‘No,’ I said, but Hanna said, ‘Yes, he is.’ And to the waiter, who was at the most five or six years older than her, and whom she obviously liked, she added, ‘He’s a private detective — honest, he really is!’ And she grinned as if that was a totally crazy notion.

‘So you are from the police. They’ve been questioning us about that character upstairs all day already.’ He also made no secret of the fact that he didn’t like police officers.

I gave Hanna a look intended to tell her to keep her mouth shut. ‘As she said: a private detective, not a policeman. And I don’t know what character upstairs you mean. I’d simply like to know if you and the rest of the staff found there was a shashlik skewer missing at midday.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I found a skewer like that stuck in my car tire just now, I have a racist neighbour who often plays tricks like that on me, and I found out by chance that he was eating here at midday. I don’t want to see him in jail, I’d just finally like to pin something on him to get him to stop.’

‘Racist neighbour?’ repeated the waiter, looking at me more closely.

‘He’s Turkish,’ explained Hanna, and I wondered if a daughter of my own would say that in just the same way.

The waiter said, in a distinctly more friendly voice, ‘Okay, yes, there was a skewer missing at lunchtime, but I can’t imagine it was your racist neighbour who nicked it.’ He grinned a little uncertainly.

‘Why not? Can you tell that just by looking at someone?’

‘No, nonsense.’ He hesitated. ‘He was a nice guy, that’s all. Left a good tip too — if he’d wanted to sabotage your tire he wouldn’t have nicked the cutlery to do it from the restaurant, I’m sure of that.’

‘Can you describe him?’

The waiter looked at me for a moment. He doesn’t like policemen, I remembered.

‘Well, like I said, a nice guy. Age … sort of around fifty, I’m not so good at judging that kind of thing, comfortable clothes — like a professor or a nice teacher.’

‘Are there any?’ asked Hanna cheekily, and the waiter smiled at her. Then he went on, ‘Anyway, man, we have so many customers in the middle of the day I can’t notice everyone in detail, certainly not for a stupid fifty-cent skewer.’

‘May I ask you something?’ I took one of my business cards out of my jacket pocket. ‘If you see him again, will you call me at this number?’

Taking my card, he glanced at it suspiciously. ‘I thought this was about your neighbour? You can meet him any day, right? And like I said, the character I’m talking about wasn’t the sort to stick skewers in car tires.’

‘You could be wrong. We’ve already agreed that you can’t tell that kind of thing just by looking at people. Anyway, I’d like to confront my neighbour here in your café with the shashlik skewer that was sticking in my tyre. Of course he won’t admit anything, but maybe it would give him a bit of a fright, and he’d leave me alone for a while.’

Then I put my hand in my jacket pocket again and paid for our thirteen-euro-eighty bill with a fifty-euro note. ‘The change is for you so that you won’t forget to call me.’

Surprised, he took the note and looked at my business card again. ‘All this shit with your neighbour must really matter to you.’

‘Any idea how much a new car tire costs?’

He nodded. ‘Okay, I’ll call you. But like I said, I don’t think …’

‘Never mind that. Just call me if you see him.’

When we had risen from our table, Hanna said ‘Byeee’ to him with a shamelessly long stare, and the jaw of the waiter roughly six years her senior dropped for a good moment. Shameless, but entirely innocent. I thought of Marieke and Valerie de Chavannes, and suddenly I understood why you would want to have a calculating old bastard killed if he exploited that mixture of shamelessness and innocence in your own daughter.

As we loaded my bike into the car boot, I said, ‘Hey, suppose we ring your mama and ask if I can invite you to the cinema? There’s a new Leo DiCaprio film.’

‘Oh yes, I’d love that. My classes start late tomorrow morning.’