We go in off the street through the courtyard. The sound of drumming can be heard coming from one of the apartments, followed by the explosive rip of an electric guitar and the howl of a mouth organ. A shuffle of notes blowing through the staircase in the house at the rear. On his way up, Armin is spoken to by an old man who says – this has got to stop, this noise. I have an underlying lung condition. Look, I work on a capacity of forty per cent, you probably have eighty per cent. I wear this oxygen generator all day. See this fucking tube, the old man says, if I didn’t have this under my nostrils I would collapse.
They’re going on tour very soon, Armin says. They’re only in Berlin until Monday week.
I can’t eat while this is going on.
Why not?
It’s too unsettling.
The old man with his pulmonary condition is right. Music gets into the lungs. He’s got his own harmonica solo keeping him company day and night with a run of howling notes. I have the incessant wheezing of a barrel organ coming from inside my chest.
Armin opens a door and the full volume bursts out like a physical assault. The musicians carry on playing while he goes over to kiss his sister, Madina. She is playing the guitar and doesn’t even stop for a second, talking to him without losing a beat. Keeping the rhythm going like two separate rooms in her head, one for music, one for language.
The harmonica player has the lungs of a whale. He submerges himself into a recurring riff with his eyes closed. He seems to have no need to refill his lungs. He has the power of a dozen oxygen generators. He is like a diver who is able to reach inhuman depths underwater. Nowhere can you detect where he breathes in, as if his respiratory system replenishes the oxygen from an unknown source. In a further insult to the pulmonarily challenged man downstairs, he’s a smoker. And it’s clear why the old man with the tube in his nostrils is so upset. It’s lung envy. He wishes he could squander a breath, even one puff.
The music stops. The musicians lay down their instruments like a ceasefire and go out for something to eat, leaving Madina alone with Armin. The man downstairs must be breathing like a whale. The silence spreads like clean, unused air down the staircase, out into the courtyard.
I met him, Armin says to his sister.
Uli?
I paid him.
Jesus. You should have ignored him.
He follows me around.
How much?
It’s nothing, Armin says. All done now, you don’t have to worry.
Madina sits down behind the drum set. She picks up the drumsticks and unleashes a sudden rage, lashing out in all directions, right to left and back again.
The money has nothing to do with it, she says. He’s getting his revenge for me bringing this fucked-up relationship with him to an end. Like I’ve taken something from him that he owned. And you know what, this is the funny part, Armin. He’s married. I only found that out recently. He’s married with two kids. What does that tell you?
She gives the bass drum a solid kick.
He even got me to go for counselling, she says. I had to attend a group therapist, like it was my problem that his affair was not going well.
Armin sits down on one of the speakers.
It’s alright, he says. He’s been paid off.
That’s what kills me, she says. I’ve already paid him back. I booked his flight to Warsaw. His hotel cost me a fortune, well over what he ever spent on that guitar.
You owe him nothing, Madi.
I don’t know who he met in Poland, she says, or what they put into his head. When he came back, his language was altered. Spouting all this stuff about white Europe, closing borders and not letting any more in. Migrants are only good for wiping the asses of an ageing population. I had to remind him that his own father was Russian – Bogdanov.
That’s his pressure point.
He started calling me his Chechen girlfriend. Chechnya. Where is that? We hardly know where it is, right. It’s irrelevant where I come from. He calls me his little migrant girl. His Muslim chick. Have you ever seen me pray, Armin? Have you ever seen me wearing a veil? We don’t know a word of the Koran, right?
The drumsticks are threatening to go again. She does the initial click-click to signal another number coming up, then she holds back.
He made me feel accepted, she says. Like some kind of endorsement. He was validating me, as an artist. As a human being. Made me feel I belonged here like everyone else. He was good at saying there was nothing wrong with me. Good at telling me that he loved me the way I was, you don’t notice anything missing when you’re in bed. You know what that is, Armin – controlling. Passive aggression. Humiliation by praise. Every time he overlooked my disability, every time he watched me getting dressed and said I was beautiful regardless, it was a punch in the stomach.
Used to put on that song – ‘Perfect’. Like a joke.
Then he wants a refund, she says. And now I find out he’s married. I got his phone one night when he was drunk. I had to check out who his new friends were.
Madina drops the drumsticks and walks across the room to embrace her brother.
I’ll pay you back.
She picks up the guitar and begins to strum a steady rhythm. A single power chord over and over. Along with the beat, like a spoken lyric, she talks about their adoptive father in Frankfurt and how he used to tell her to put her anger into her art.