The dealers stand around in the park addressing their customers with soft voices in the dark – everything OK? Need anything? They pick up their stash from under a bush and do their deals by the overfilled rubbish bin. What do they care for a book about an invalid? They come from countries where they’ve had enough war and missing limbs. Countries where boys step on landmines and play football without the kicking leg.
Beside me, the Vietnamese takeaway has little more to offer the world. Its contents have already been digested and converted into clubbing energy, followed by sexual energy, followed by sleep, followed by more clubbing energy in a wonderful sea of bodies before it is eventually turned back into soil.
A rat comes running across my face. The tip of his rubbery tail lies on my author’s name – Joseph Roth. His pink illiterate eyes are on the Vietnamese takeaway as he urinates and sniffs, prevented from getting at the remains inside the single-use plastic container. The rat shows signs of pulmonary dysfunction. Some poison, perhaps. Blood thinners. What is good for humans can be bad for rats.
A man, a bottle collector, forces the rat to retreat into the shadows while he roots through the overfilled bin. He takes an interest in Lena’s discarded shoulder bag and tries it on. It has the stolen look, so he puts it aside and takes out two bottles of Beck’s Gold, which he adds to his expanding nightly collection of clinking glass.
Would he not be interested in taking a discarded book back to his shelter for the night? An antique bookseller would give him a couple of euros. But he has other priorities and walks away with his blue Ikea bag full of spent fun.
Hey – his story is not unlike the man working the streets with his barrel organ. Joseph Roth was a champion of the homeless. As a reporter, he wrote about men sleeping rough. That homeless shelter in Berlin where they ran a cinema for the guests every morning at nine thirty. He wrote about the women on the streets, the prostitute with the golden smile, the woman accused in court of giving poison to her men to steal from them. He stood by the beggars, the unemployed, the missing, the murdered. Dead faces with no names. A dead man released from prison after serving a sentence of fifty years, staring in wonder at the traffic on Potsdamer Platz.
He wrote about a man collecting cigarette butts. How the weekend yielded a better crop. He asked his name and invited him back to the hotel where he was staying, but the cigarette butt collector never came. He got into the habit from that point on of throwing away his cigarettes with a longer butt, in the hope that everybody else would feel generous too and leave something for others to find after dark.
And the disabled war veteran who found a nail file on the street. What use could that instrument be to a man so badly damaged? Filing his nails as though that’s all he needed to restore him.
He wrote about the migrants. Women arriving in Berlin carrying children like sacks of laundry on their backs. Followed by a child crawling on crooked legs, nibbling on a crust of bread. A young man with his hands in his pockets dreaming about getting away on a ship from Hamburg to New York. And the family arriving with scissors, ruler, a needle and a spool of thread, ready to set up in business.
In public discourse they became known as the Threat From the East. Which is where my itinerant author was from. He understood the need to keep moving. He never had a birth certificate. Never had a father. His place of origin in Galicia (now Ukraine) was twenty per cent Jewish, a community that would soon disappear from the map.
The rain has stopped, but the night is cold.
A book doesn’t want pity. Literature is a long game. There is no shame in living among the discarded. Obscurity can have its vivifying air, one of my author’s successors liked to say.
My patience finally wins out. A young man wipes the rain from my face with his sleeve. I am held up to the light coming from the street. And you know what, it becomes instantly clear that this man is a reader. Some intuitive affection spreads to my damp heart as he begins leafing through the pages. It’s an emotional thing. A refugee book in the hands of a person who gulps in the first sentences before he places me into the pocket of his jacket for later.
What luck!
We reach an apartment. We enter a kitchen where there is music playing. A female voice singing about walking on water. My new custodian is greeted by two men and a woman who invite him to drink whiskey with them and I hear his name for the first time – Armin. They offer him a joint, but he decides to go to his room.
He lies on his bed and enters the story.
Andreas Pum, the invalided soldier. The dampness in the air causes pain in the stump. His missing leg continues to send messages of distress from a desolate landscape where it lies buried among thousands of other severed body parts calling for their owners to come back and bring them home. Whenever the clouds build up and the rain comes in, the missing leg feels the pain and the stump begins to mourn.
On a good day, playing his barrel organ in one of the courtyards, a woman asks him to play his saddest tune for her. She has just lost her husband. He gives her the song of the sirens luring men to their death along the Rhine. A sorrowful melody which he renders with great feeling while she stands leaning out of the open window listening. Katharina Blumich is her name. The woman of his dreams. She invites him inside when it rains and gives him food to eat. They fall in love. They get married. She provides him a warm home and buys him a donkey so that he no longer needs to carry the barrel organ on his back. People love his music and the money comes raining down from the windows.