Many moons ago, when I was a young university student, I spent a summer working in Berlin. This was well before the Berlin Wall came down, back when armed guards in watchtowers were on the lookout for refugees trying to flee to the West. At that time, West Berlin was home to a large number of Turkish workers who’d been granted work permits during periods of labour shortages. This is how I met my friend Ahmed.
Ahmed and I worked side by side in a paper factory. We worked on the packaging line. As we got to know each other, Ahmed expressed a wish to learn English. Well, I wanted to learn Turkish. So we began tutoring each other using our somewhat limited grasp of our only common language—German.
The best time for us to practise was during mealtimes. Whenever our shift broke for lunch we would sit together and talk. We talked about our homes, our families, and our dreams. Ahmed was just as curious about the Great White North as I was about his intriguing and mystical homeland.
Most days at lunch the workers would pass around a little of whatever they’d brought to eat that day. It created a mini-smorgasbord. It was during my second or third week that Ahmed pulled out a container of what looked like tinned tuna gone horribly wrong. Since Ahmed’s proficiency in English was about as well-developed as my Turkish, it took considerable coaxing and a lot of bizarre hand gestures before I finally agreed to try a small piece.
I just about fell off my bench. After a spartan student diet (which back in Canada consisted primarily of beer, Kraft Dinner, and beer), my first taste of halvah was the most sensual food experience I’d had in months.
Over the course of that summer, Ahmed brought in an increasingly delicious parade of halvah that his wife would prepare for him. I would savour every piece as I attempted to make good on my promise to teach him my mother tongue. After a while, I had the idea that I should read to him.
The only English book we had was one that Ahmed had bought at a flea market: a battered copy of John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, a ribald and explicit memoir of a young woman’s introduction to sex and romance in eighteenth-century London. The bookseller had apparently handed it to Ahmed with a nudge and a sly wink, but as far as I figured, Ahmed had bought it thinking it was a run-of-the-mill novel that would—given enough time—allow him to master the intricacies of English. Ahmed was of a religious faith that tends not to discuss racy matters in open company. I felt compelled to choose my words carefully so that I wouldn’t offend him. Whenever I came to a particularly graphic episode, I would incorrectly translate the passage as a detailed description of the room’s furnishings … scrupulously avoiding any mention of the acrobatic activities taking place therein.
Ahmed would methodically chew on his wife’s halvah and listen carefully as I slowly read aloud to him, his eyebrows furrowed in concentration and his rough-skinned fingers slowly combing his thick black beard. It was during these long and rambling passages that I would sometimes see him glancing at me out of the corner of his eye with a puzzled expression. Perhaps he was wondering just what it was about mahogany table legs that was making an eighteen-year-old Canadian blush and squirm. One can only imagine what was going through his mind as I described the “group setting” in the living room.
My time in Berlin eventually drew to a close. As I punched out for the last time, Ahmed came over to say goodbye. He was holding two small packages in his burly arms. The first was a half-kilogram selection of his wife’s finest halvah, given with her best wishes for a safe journey home. The other contained our English “textbook,” for (as Ahmed put it) he hadn’t found it to be anywhere near as interesting as the bookseller had promised. Besides, it seemed to him that I had enjoyed it considerably more than he had. Perhaps, he said— as he shook my hand emotionally in farewell—he would take up Italian instead.
Victoria, British Columbia