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Yusuf meandered through Treptow, having visited the supermarket and the local ice cream bar. He’d bought a cone on a whim and the remnants of stracciatella gelato lingered on his taste buds. Cranes littered the sky line, symbols of a city striding into the future, busily building for its citizens.
After a few moments, he picked up the multi-pack of water and continued on his journey back to the residences. His hands hurt where the plastic carry loop dug into his skin. Doris might be as bright as a button, but at sixty-eight years of age, the weekly shop could be a bit much. Yusuf liked to help with heavier items. The weekly ritual brought him pleasure, and he carried it out without pomp or ceremony. He appreciated the constant reassurance she provided, and this was a way of repaying her.
Sometimes Doris would request sparkling water, other times she’d need washing powder or wine. Each time, she insisted on paying him. He never bothered checking the amount. He’d have preferred Doris not to be such a stickler for returning precise money to him; his pride would have benefited had she been more lax. How wonderful to pretend he could afford to be generous about trifling sums. In fact, finances were tight for both of them. The halls of age and twists of fate cared little for dignity.
The laughter of the children playing in the park drifted on the wind, tinkling in his ears like the wind chimes his mother loved. He reached the abandoned Spreepark, where once brightly coloured dodgems, dulled by rust and the elements, waited to be brought to life with a melancholic beauty all of their own.
A rustle reached his ears, louder than the stirring of the wind-blown trees.
Yusuf whipped round.
There, with his arm looped casually around the rod of a dodgem, stood Karl, eating crisps.
His eyes flashed malice. “I’ve been waiting for you, acrobat. I’m a patient man. It doesn’t matter how many people you surround yourself with, where you hide, or which route you take. I’ll find you.”
He scrunched up the crisp packet, tossed it to the floor, and sauntered over to Yusuf until they stood nose to nose. Up close, Karl was all sallow skin and taut angles. Salt granules dotted the corners of his mouth.
“You stuck your neck above the parapet for your friends, and then again at the protest. That wasn’t clever. You’re a marked man.” He prodded Yusuf’s chest with his finger, and Yusuf resisted the urge to cave in submission.
“What have I ever done to you?” This man, with all his posturing and accusations, was so different from Doris and Ellie. Surely Karl could tell just by looking at him that Yusuf wasn’t a threat? Didn’t his attire alone–too short trousers and frayed t-shirt–evoke sympathy? Didn’t his demeanour–the one that marked him out as lonely and grieving–attract compassion? How could he be hated so much by a stranger?
Karl removed his sunglasses and considered him a moment. An aeroplane pinned to the lapel of his leather jacket glinted in the sun. His pouched slate-grey eyes flashed antipathy. “It’s not hard to understand. It’s fun, taunting you like this, seeing your confusion.” His hands looked like meat cleavers. “If you really want to know, this isn’t your home. You can roam the Earth with your belongings on your back, or set up home in a hovel far away from here. I couldn’t care less. As long as it’s not here. Filthy Muslim.” He placed two hands on Yusuf’s chest and shoved hard.
The injection of space between them was a blessed relief. Yusuf became aware of every sound: the grinding of his own teeth, the inhale and exhale of Karl’s breath, the clicking of beetles not far from where he stood. Yusuf scanned the vicinity, wondering how to make his get-away, how to escape without bruises or an injury that would prevent him from taking to the trapeze that night.
“Well, I’m not wrong, am I? I’d know your lot anywhere, turban or no turban,” said Karl.
Yusuf frowned, shaking his head. “Muslims don’t wear turbans.”
“Well, are you one or not?” He fished out a shiny piece of metal from his pocket and slipped it onto his fingers. “I’d like to know.”
Before what? Why did he need to know? Why should his religion make a difference?
“Muslim terrorist,” said Karl.
It was always the same questions, the same suspicions post 9/11. As if the world had been rocked on its axis and in an instant, billions had mutated into zealots and murderers.
In Yusuf’s hands, the water pack weighed heavy. A rush of light-headedness blurred his vision. He thought of Zul the Clown, and how he’d denied his faith. Yusuf wanted to be different. He should have said he believed in Allah; he should have admitted he was a Muslim.
Later, when he replayed the conversation in his mind, he imagined he stood strong and resolute, and ripped the sunglasses from Karl’s face to stare into his eyes, unflinching. “I don’t debate religion with atheists. You have your belief system, and I have mine. You have no patience or understanding for the culture and richness that accompanies my faith.” Or he would say, “Madmen have hijacked my religion. True religion does not sit in the same house as terror.” He would explain to Karl, “There are vast differences between different groups of Muslims in their beliefs and practices, differences that are geographical, historical, cultural, familial,” and then he’d recommit to his faith a thousandfold, comforted by the fact he wouldn’t accelerate his spiritual demise, as Karl had his.
But his mind betrayed him, and so did his runaway tongue.
Inside him, his identity cracked like a splintered bone that would never heal. His relationship with Allah had been complicated by all he’d seen and suffered. It was a small jump to deny his faith. An instinctive understanding kicked in, an outsider’s understanding, of when to speak and when to remain silent.
“I’m not a Muslim.”
The denial lay on his lips like a stone. He’d sinned. His mother sprang to mind, head-scarfed and devout, mumbling as she read the Holy Book, rocking on her prayer mat as dawn came.
Karl snarled, more animal than man. “You think that will save you?”
It happened in an instant.
Nobody waited in the wings to protect Yusuf; nobody needed protecting, either.
Yusuf was free to act or react, to fight or flee.
He chose to fight.
Karl lunged, and this time, Yusuf was ready.
His training kicked in, the limber feet, the agility and the strength. He ducked, avoiding Karl’s metal-enforced fist. He swung the four-pack of water at Karl. The litre bottles thudded against Karl’s side.
Karl’s feet shifted under him, and he flew across the air and landed with a groan.
“Oomph.”
Yusuf sprinted over, and kicked him for Emir. For Zul and Osman. He kicked him for himself and for Allah, who Karl had forced him to disown. When Yusuf finished, he found that his gratitude for Doris had been replaced by shame and wretchedness, but also a sense of power.
Karl lay sprawled on the grass like a rag doll, one hand on his nether regions. His pinched face told of his pain, though he didn’t make a sound. The knuckle duster glinted in the sun a few yards away. He’d recover soon and there would be hell to pay.
Yusuf panted as he bent to scoop up the water, dented from the blow, and ran the remaining stretch back to the residences. He keyed in the password at the main entrance, looking over his shoulder, expecting his attacker to appear at any moment. His heartbeat jumped in his throat as the device buzzed twice, indicating he’d entered the wrong number. Again. His fingers fumbled with the keypad. Finally, the door swung open and he darted through, following the corridor around to Doris’s apartment.
She answered his knock immediately with a grateful smile before relieving him of his burden and pressing coins into his hand.
“Next time bring a pack that isn’t so bedraggled, if you can,” she said, only half-teasing.
“I ran into trouble.”
Only then did she take in his pale complexion, the sweat lining his forehead, the shame in his eyes.
“Whatever’s the matter?” she said, setting down the shopping.
“Karl–from the protest and the break-in–was waiting for me behind the dodgems.”
She grasped him. “You’re not hurt?”
He shook his head, not admitting he’d been the one doing the hurting. “No. I got away. I was quicker than he expected, I think. Being alone made me faster.” His mind flashed back to Emir in the barrel and Zul, running, running through the bandstand in a desperate attempt to evade a beating.
Doris frowned. “You have to stay away from trouble. Your citizenship process depends on it.”
“I know, but what could I do?” His adrenalin surge had subsided, and a tiredness overcame him. “Let him beat me? Run, hoping he wouldn’t catch up? Bring the trouble to our doorstep again?”
“I don’t know, lad. I’m sorry.” She reached for her telephone, her body curved like a bow, weary, defeated. “We should report this.”
“Leave it, please.” He didn’t want to open this can of worms. Not that it had helped last time anyway. In any case, who knew how police would evaluate the events? Maybe he’d be seen as the aggressor. His behaviour hardly marked him out as blameless.
“Yusuf, this man can’t go unpunished. You have a responsibility.”
He snapped, his shame at renouncing his religion morphing into incandescent rage. He didn’t explain to Doris what had happened or why his anger burned like a fire. Instead, he let his emotions loose. “Why? Why do I have a responsibility? Why is the burden on me to do good when others can behave like beasts? Why do I have to jump through loop after loop, scale the heights of acceptable requirements, just to be safe? Why can’t it be someone else’s turn to be the saint for a change?”
Doris listened, and when he’d finished, she reached out her hand and squeezed his.
“I’m tired of being scared. I’m tired of being weak.”
She stroked his hand with her calloused thumb as if she comforted a child. “I know. But from where I’m sitting, he’s the weak one.”
They sat in silence a while, neither knowing what to say but not wanting to end the conversation without comforting words to wash away the residue of his ire. Yusuf’s mind drifted to words scratched into a page that should have remained private.
“You were right, you know,” he said.
The corners of her mouth lifted. Her magnanimity taught him how to be a better human. “About what?”
“Ellie’s journal.” He held her gaze, channelling neutrality, when all the while his heart raced.
“Interesting read, wasn’t it?” said Doris. She nudged him playfully, and in her eyes he discerned the young woman she’d once been. “You saw the drawing of you, then?”
His mouth twitched. “Oh, yes.” He still wasn’t sure what to make of it.
“Good thing she’s coming by tonight then. She retraced her steps and called to ask if I’d seen it. I’ll send her straight to your room and you can return it to her yourself.”
He held up his hands. “No, no, you return it. What would I say?”
A mischievous smile lit up her face. “Whatever you want. You’re a grown man. But after this morning, I dare say you might enjoy it.”
That evening, Yusuf spied Ellie in the circus tent, marvelling at the acts as if she’d never been before. She’d always been objectively beautiful with her inquisitive green eyes above the freckles that fanned her nose and the fiery hair she impatiently brushed from her face. She hung at the edge of her seat, not caring she was there alone, as comfortable in her skin as he was wretched in his.
The magic of the circus took hold. Horses galloped on a bed of clouds and when the girls danced, the tent filled with the scent of dense rainforest, with the musk of exotic blooms and humidity in the air. Zul outdid himself with a comic rendition of a love song while fawning after Esme, who shimmered like an apparition. All the while, Yusuf hid in the wings, as close to Ellie as he dared, watching the shadow play and emotions dart across her face.
She’d inhabited his thoughts these past few days, and he knew pangs of guilt that he’d treated her badly when they last met. He heard her voice in his head in quiet moments, snippets taken from her diary, as if the journal had stripped away any sense of artifice between them. He’d travelled away from his initial instinctive distrust of her, and she’d become a balm to soothe the negative sentiment that swirled around the circus. The irony of her involvement in the headlines was not lost on him, but he still felt drawn to her, and had, after all, been tasked by Doris to return her journal.
He’d hardly been a gentleman the last time they met, and she would be well within her rights to insult him. He worried she’d be angry at his intrusion of her privacy. His heart drummed a raggedy beat, knowing merely holding the journal would arouse suspicion that he’d read it. Perhaps she’d be sanguine about how he’d come to read it, but he couldn’t know how she’d react, or even if he’d feign ignorance of its contents.
The confetti fell at the end of the show, as it always did, and this time the foils warped and wriggled until they became tiny birds which circled above the heads of the crowd, who shrieked in delight at the transformation. When the final guests had filed out and the last throes of Old Sayid’s band had soared through the tent, Yusuf searched for Ellie and found her seat empty. He swept the tent for a sign of her, but she had gone. It disappointed him that she’d left without speaking to him. He’d built up the conversation in his head, playing out different scenarios. In one, she flung her arms around him in gratitude for finding the journal; in the other, she tore it from his hand, deaf to his apology.
At ten o’clock, just as he considered turning in for the night, a knock sounded on his door, a knock so rhythmical it could have been a piece of music. He’d been flicking through the journal once more. He gulped and placed it on his side table, taking care to make sure it looked tidy in case the visitor was Ellie after all. His hand grasped the cool steel of the door handle, but he stopped short, and changed his mind about the placement of the journal. He shifted it to the corner of the room, as if he’d never touched it in the first place and it had lain there, forgotten.
The door reverberated again, this time more tentatively as if the visitor didn’t want to rouse him.
“Just a minute,” he said, smoothing down his t-shirt.
He swung the door open, and there she stood, drenched to the bone, her hair dark with rain and flattened to her skull.
“What happened to you?” he said, surprised, without even a hello.
“I had a meeting with a source.” She shrugged. “It poured and he didn’t even show up. I didn’t even have an umbrella.” A rain drop rolled down her nose to the tip. She wiped her face with the arm of her jacket, but that, too, was sodden with water. “Can I come in?”
He’d been so distracted by the sight of her, he’d blocked the threshold. “Of course.” He moved inside and beckoned for her to follow.
“It’s not too late? I wasn’t expecting to be so long. Doris did tell you to expect me?”
A towel hung on the radiator. He offered it to her.
She accepted it with a smile and began patting herself dry, not knowing where to start. After a few minutes, she became aware of her surroundings, and turned a full circle in the room. “It’s so small in here.”
“I don’t need much,” said Yusuf. After the camps, it struck him as a luxury to have a door to close, to feel safe from thieves and worse, to be clean, to have friends nearby and not worry about head lice and food rations. No bombs fell out of the sky here to turn his nightmares into reality. By any measure he knew, he had much to be grateful for.
She grew sombre. “Yusuf, I’ve been meaning to say sorry to you, for the trouble and hurt my article caused. Those words didn’t reflect what I think, and I didn’t intend for them to be published.”
“You could have refused to write it.” It disappointed him the ink had been hers after all, but it took courage to stand there before him and admit her error, and he found he was willing to give her a chance. Her journal had removed all pretence between them.
“I was worried about my job,” she said, holding his gaze, willing him to understand.
He nodded, pensive, thinking of his father and the war. “We are all at the mercy of people more powerful than us.”
She breathed a sigh of relief, and he realised it meant something to her that they reconcile. He didn’t understand why she cared, but it made him feel valuable.
“I have something for you.” He pointed to her journal in the corner of the room.
“Oh, I’ve been looking for it everywhere.” She made a beeline for it. “I can’t believe you found it!” She hugged it to her chest and he soaked up the sound of her joy. “I’ve squirrelled away my thoughts in it, and the thought of losing it was terrible.”
“You have it back now.”
“Did you read it?” she said.
He paused. The truth lay on the tip of his tongue, waiting to spill out.
She shrugged. “I would have. It’s in my nature always to look under the covers.” She coloured.
The energy between them pulsed. She’d been honest with him, and he didn’t want to lie to her. “Okay then. Yes, I did.”
He ducked as she flung the wet towel his way.
“You rascal.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to be. Makes me feel better about the other thing.” She looked at the journal again, thumbing through its pages. “Well, thanks again.”
She turned to leave, and he wanted to stretch out the moment because with her, he forgot his loneliness.
“Ellie?”
“Yes?”
“Would you like to go out with me tomorrow?”
She stopped, her hand on the door knob, and turned to face him. A hint of colour touched her cheeks. She nodded.
He grew embarrassed. “I don’t know the city very well but maybe we could go for a walk or some food?”
“I’d like that a lot. There’s some really nice places by the river. Berlin is beautiful in the open air at this time of year. Or there are some rooftop bars. I could show you.”
“I’ll meet you at the Ferris Wheel after the show.”
“Okay.” She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear, waved goodbye with an awkwardness that endeared her to him, and closed the door behind her.
