Lena arrives back late. Julia is still up – she can’t sleep. Sitting in the kitchen, holding an all-night vigil, checking every now and again to see how Matt is doing. Lena keeps her company and they drink camomile tea in buckets while Julia talks about her son, how she will have to bring him up to Hamburg, a new school, a new start. His other mother is a doctor and will get him into some kind of drug rehabilitation programme.
Lena tells Julia that she went to meet Armin.
I wanted to give him something, Lena says. A small gift, just to thank him for returning my book. A lot of people would not have bothered even picking it up, or maybe would have brought it to some antiquarian bookseller and sold it. I’m sure it’s worth a few euros, though it’s missing a page.
What did you give him?
It was hard to decide, Lena says. A gift voucher would have been too much like something your aunt would give you. I found a lovely brown scarf with a houndstooth pattern, but that’s more like a birthday present, she says. I’m going to keep that for Mike when he comes over. He’s planning a walking trip to Romania for us both. He’s been growing a beard, by the way, it’s quite impressive, makes him look rugged. Like a pioneer. He wants to go hunting, that’s his thing.
Lena says she thought of giving Armin two tickets for a Nick Cave concert, but that might have implied going together. If he doesn’t have a partner, that is.
In the end I went for the obvious – a book.
That makes sense, Julia agrees.
He brings me a book, so I bring him a book, right?
What book?
Took me ages to decide, Lena says. I can’t read them in German. The woman in the shop recommended a novel written by a Bosnian man who came to Germany to escape from the conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
Ah yes, Julia says, good choice.
After I gave it to him, Lena says, I had second thoughts. I felt a bit stupid. Like, hang on, what do you give a migrant, obvious: a book written by another migrant. With a couple thousand titles to choose from, nothing comes to mind, only a book that basically tells his own story. How dumb is that?
No, Julia says, it’s an uplifting story.
Like, here, Armin, have a good look at yourself.
Believe me, Julia says, he’ll love it. There’s a great scene in the book about the writer’s grandfather accidentally stepping on his grandmother’s foot while they were dancing. It could have changed the course of history and the author might never have been born.
Armin is a good reader, Lena says.
It’s thoughtful of you to give it to him, Julia says. He’ll appreciate that.
He doesn’t have a whole lot in the line of memories, Lena says. There’s no home to remember back there in Chechnya. He doesn’t have much to say about Grozny, apart from the smell of diesel fumes. The engines of armoured vehicles spewing out dirty black smoke. And gunfire. He used to play with empty shells. He can remember queues for food aid. He can remember the curfew where nobody was allowed onto the streets and a group of mothers stayed up all night in the house talking and talking, sometimes all laughing together, until there was an explosion heard in the distance and one of the women said – that’s one that missed us.
He lost his parents in that war, Lena says. He still carries injuries from the explosion at the market. He’s got some shrapnel fragments in his body. He has a sister who lost her leg in that bombing. There’s a piece of newsreel footage of them both in a hospital, he told me, though he’s never seen it himself. They were brought to Germany by an aunt when they were young, with the help of traffickers.
He had nothing much to say about that journey either, Lena says, apart from being on the train for hours. It took days, to him and his sister it seemed like months.
He’s working with a group of city planners. Goes around measuring, you know, those tripods you sometimes see on the street, don’t ask me what they’re for.
It was mostly his adoptive German family we talked about. That’s a happy story for him to tell. He and his sister grew up in a large family that was full of chaos. A huge apartment in Frankfurt where they could wave at each other through the windows across the courtyard. It was a great place to play hide-and-seek, he told me. Rooms off rooms off rooms – you could get lost. They used to cycle around on bikes.
His adoptive parents were hippies. New Age, neo-hippies. His mother was from the former East, from a place near the Polish border. She was a nurse by profession. She liked to wear those long flowing cheesecloth dresses and went out in the summer with a floppy, wide-rimmed sun hat. She had long red hair. She never shaved her underarms, so they looked like red nests of hair. The scent of a bakery, that’s how Armin described her. A warm-hearted woman with big breasts, like a power station, he told me.
His adoptive father was from Augsburg. A professor of philosophy at the university in Frankfurt. Over breakfast he would ask the children questions like – what will happen when robots take over the world? He was big into John Lennon. The parents met when the Berlin Wall came down, she says. Armin told me there was a large photo in the living room of her stepping through a gap in the Wall.
Her name is Hendrika, mostly Henny. His name is Thomas, mostly Tom. To Armin and his sister, they were Mama and Papa. The apartment was full of books. They had no car. The entire family went everywhere on foot, like a troupe going through the city, with people staring at Madina on her father’s shoulders missing her leg, Armin told me. In summer they often went walking in the hills and had picnics out in the fields, all of them naked, the entire family.
They had two biological sons of their own, a couple years older than Armin. They were permitted to do anything they wanted. It was basically a house without rules. They got away with murder. They were caught smoking weed in school. They were caught stealing in shops and were brought home in a police car. They used to tell Armin he was not allowed to do anything bad because he was adopted. Now they’re both highly successful, he told me. One of them a producer working in the film industry, the other in genetics, something to do with stem cells.
He started reading a lot, Lena says. That was the only way he could keep up with the older boys, picking up all the books his adoptive mother and father had around the house. It was his way of getting closer to them.
Then they split up, Lena says.
Ah, that’s sad.
I get the impression, Lena says, he’s grateful for getting that wonderful start in life. Only that it made him feel like an orphan all over again.
What caused the break-up?
It was an open marriage, Lena says. They both had lovers. It was no big deal, apparently. That’s what Armin told me. She had this man who used to come to the apartment in the mornings in his tracksuit, like he would stop off during his daily run, then have a shower and continue running. Another man from Ireland would come in the afternoon with his guitar and start singing ballads, he would never leave.
His father had girlfriends at the university. He would bring them cycling in the hills, or hang gliding.
Then he won a big prize for a book he wrote on philosophy in everyday life. She started writing a novel about a hippie family going on a ship to Australia. They seemed to go their own ways after that, claiming back some privacy after all that open living. She went to live in Turkey with their two biological sons. Armin and Madina were looked after by other families around Germany until they were out of school.
As a boy, he told me, he used to tickle his sister’s foot. The amputated one. He would tickle her phantom toes until she pulled it away and begged him to stop.
That’s so sweet, Julia says.
He wants me to meet her, Lena says. Madina. She’s a singer. I looked her up, she does tours of Germany with her band. People love her, she’s begun to build up quite a following. One of the images I’ve seen shows her on stage with long hair and long legs wearing silver shorts, like Beyoncé. Only that she has a prosthetic leg, a lightweight metal design, attached at the knee. There’s a photo of her with a prosthesis made of wire mesh. I’d love to hear her sing. A couple tracks I’ve heard on YouTube. Armin says he’ll get tickets when she’s playing in Berlin next, we might go if you’re free.