Go, Went, Gone

The director takes him to the third floor of the red-brick building where the men are staying. Richard enters a room filled with cots where some men are watching TV. The director introduces Richard as a professor who wants to do interviews for a research project. A massive man who is watching TV looks at Richard and then offers him a seat on a cot. His name is Rashid. Richard takes out his list of questions. Soon afterwards, he has learned that the men in the room are from different regions of Nigeria. They speak languages like Yoruba and Hausa that Richard has never heard of. Most of them are Muslim.

The boat that Rashid and Zair—another man sitting nearby—had traveled in the same boat. It had capsized and 550 of the 800 on board had died. They had found each other again in Hamburg. A man named Abdusalam begins to sing a song from “the Eyo festival on the island of Lagos” (48). A man named Ithemba shows Richard a picture on his phone; the picture is of people at the festival, dancing and jumping in white robes.

Rashid says they all want to work but can’t receive working papers. Every day feels the same to them. Richard is exhausted after listening for an hour. He leaves but says he will be back because he has nothing but time. When he leaves, he notes that they were in room 2017 so that he can find it again. 

The next day a staff member takes Richard upstairs again. The men in 2017 are asleep. The man who was riding the bicycle in the square is in room 2019 and agrees to speak with Richard. There are two young men asleep in cots nearby in the room: “For a moment it horrifies him that these young men are suddenly being forced to be so old here: Waiting and sleeping” (50). The young man tells Richard that he is from the desert and does not answer when Richard asks if he has any parents. He wonders why he should tell Richard, “a stranger, the scars left on his head and arms by beatings given him by his so-called family. They tried to beat him to death […] his only friends were the animals” (52). He had worked as a slave for as long as he could remember. He does not know if his parents abandoned him or sold him to be a slave.

He tells Richard that he and two other men could build a hut in the desert within a day, and then live in it for a few months before moving on. Richard realizes that their stop in Oranienplatz has merely been another “temporary place, leading to the next temporary place” (55). Richard thinks to himself that one vantage point is as valid as another, and that this conversation is enlarging his perspective. A boy named Awad knocks on the door and says he would like to talk to Richard next time. Richard, exhausted again, leaves. 

On Friday Richard goes to room 2020 to speak with Awad. Awad says he wants to tell his story because “if you want to arrive somewhere, you can’t hide anything” (57). Awad says that he has also explained everything to his psychologist, and Richard can call her if he needs to verify Awad’s story. Richard says that isn’t necessary, but Awad looks for the psychologist’s business card. He is agitated when he can’t find it but gives up and tells Richard his story.

Awad was born in Ghana. His mother died during his birth and he lived with his grandmother until he was 7, when his father took him to live in Libya. His father was a driver for an oil company and often took Awad on vacations to Egypt. Awad began to work as an auto mechanic. He says he had friends and his life was good before “[his] father was shot” (60). One of Awad’s father’s friends had called Awad to tell him that some men had been in the office at work, and that Awad should run home as fast as possible.

When he got home, the door had been ripped off and the windows were broken. His father did not answer when Awad called his number, so he sat on the porch and waited. That evening a military vehicle stopped and men took him to a barracks camp with hundreds of other people. The soldiers robbed the people and hit Awad with a rifle. He shows Richard a scar on his scalp.

On the third day they had taken the people to the harbor and forced them onto a boat. They tell the people on the boat that if they come back, they will be shot, and the boat goes out to sea. Awad says they were in the boat for four days: “When people died, we threw them in the water” (62). Awad tells Richard that war destroys everything: “When you become foreign, you don’t have a choice. You don’t know where to go. You don’t know anything. I can’t see myself anymore, can’t see the child I used to be. I don’t have a picture of myself anymore” (63).

He tells Richard about roaming Italian refugee camps, unsure of how he will find food to eat: “Richard has read Foucault and Baudrillard, and also Hegel and Nietzsche, but he doesn’t know what you can eat when you have no money to buy food” (64). After managing to work in a kitchen for three days, Awad had bought a plane ticket to Berlin. He had found the tents at Oranienplatz and had begun to cry: “That’s where he was supposed to live?” (65). Then he heard a voice speaking in Arabic, a Libyan dialect. Awad says that he will never forget Oranienplatz, and then stops speaking. 

Richard eats breakfast the next morning and wonders why the men are not allowed to work “in a country where even the right to a place in heaven is predicated on work” (66). He studies the regulation known as Dublin II and sees that the legislation concerning refugees does not raise the question of whether the men are victims of war, in which case they would be guaranteed legal protection. And different countries have different rules regarding their borders. He sees the experiences of people like Awad as unremovable baggage that allows people at the borders to decide whether they will listen to the stories of the refugees or not.

A strict border like a fence, or barbed wire, shows Richard the intentions of the two countries on either side of the border: “But the moment these borders are defined only by laws, ambiguity takes over, with each country responding, as it were, to questions its neighbor hasn’t asked” (68).

That evening Richard attends a birthday party for his friend Detlef. He knows most of the people there and has known them for most of his life. But he finds their conversations about work, their children, and the inconveniences in their lives as boring and intolerable. 

On Monday, Richard joins the refugees for a German class taught by a young woman from Ethiopia. He has come to think of the boy who had the bicycle as Apollo, given that he looks the way Richard always imagined that Apollo would look. He has also begun thinking of Awad as Tristan, a character from a poem by Gottfried von Strassburg. The name Tristan also means sadness. After the lesson, Richard tells the Ethiopian woman that she is a good teacher. She tells him that her degree is in agriculture and explains why the men are struggling to learn the language: “It’s difficult to learn a language when you don’t know what it’s for” (75). Richard has a hard time focusing on what she is saying because she is attractive. He wonders how long it has been since he slept with a woman. 

When Richard visits room 2017 the next day, Rashid and three other men rush out and run down the stairwell. Then 12 other men follow them. A guard tells Richard that the next day the men are being moved to a facility in the middle of the woods, outside of Buckow. The guard tells him that there is an assembly that day at two to discuss the move. He is furious: “People wouldn’t throw rulings like this around, he thinks, if they understood what it means to do serious research” (78).

At the assembly, a man from the Berlin Senate tries to explain to the agitated refugees that the move will be a good thing for them: “You’re not the only ones here in Berlin and the surrounding area who need housing, and if you want to stay together as a group, there aren’t so many options” (80). Rashid says that they want to remain visible until the situation can be resolved, and they will not be visible in the woods, an hour outside of town. The refugees list other demands, such as showers with doors—they claim that not having showers with doors is against their religion—but Richard realizes that above all, they want to work.

The director of the home appears and announces that there are two cases of chicken pox on site. This requires that the move to another facility be postponed during the pox’s incubation period. Richard makes arrangements to speak with Rashid the next day. 

Rashid tells Richard about the five pillars of Islam: “[F]irst, trust in God, second, prayer, third, sharing with the poor, fourth, fasting during Ramadan, and fifth, if you can afford it, a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in your life” (84). He tells Richard about Eid Mubarak, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan: “It’s the most important holiday for us; you have to eat a lot, you’re celebrating the end of a month of fasting” (87). Richard asks him to describe the songs his family sang as a child on the holiday and the dishes the women prepared for the family.

One year when Rashid was a child, they were preparing the feast when he and his family were attacked by men with clubs and machetes. They took Rashid’s father and he never saw him again: “At the edge of town they burned him in his car” (88). That night, the men burned houses and lynched people. Rashid and his male cousins had run home to warn the women of the attack. Rashid says he can no longer stand the sight of blood: “Our life was cut off from us that night, as if with a knife” (90).

Richard leaves. He remembers that the night before, he awoke to urinate and then walked through his house without a goal. He seated himself in the kitchen and sobbed like a child. Tonight, he sits in the garden and writes on a piece of paper: “There was childhood. There was day-to-day life. There was adolescence” (91). Below that he writes the line: “(Rashid = the Olympian = the Thunderbolt hurler” (91). 

Richard visits his friend Detlef after running into Sylvia, Detlef’s wife, in a grocery store. Richard tells him about his work with the refugees. If they cannot get work in Germany, they will be sent back to Italy in a few months, where there is also no work. Richard, Sylvia, and Detlef each think of their grandfathers, who fought in wars: “The great achievement of their forebears was, if you will, destruction” (94). They wonder what the achievements of their own generation are, if there are any. They are prosperous because of decisions made by older generations: “But if this prosperity couldn’t be attributed to their own personal merit, then by the same token the refugees weren’t to blame for their reduced circumstances” (95). Sylvia says she is worried that one day they will have to flee, as the refugees have, and that no one will help them. 

When Richard visits the home on Friday, the men are not there. Friday afternoon is when they go to pray. Only the Christian refugees remain. Richard goes to a boy from room 2020 who offers to speak with him. The boy’s name is Osarobo and he is from Niger. He says he has no friends left because he saw them all die. “Life is crazy. Life is crazy” (99), he says several times. He teaches Richard several words in his language but has little else to say. When they return to the home, he asks Richard if he believes in God. Richard says no. Osarobo says he doesn’t understand how someone can’t believe in God. Richard notices that something is wrong with the boy’s left eye.

Richard asks him what he would like to do, if he could have any opportunity. Osarobo says he wants to learn to play the piano. Richard has a piano and tells him that he can come play anytime.