Go, Went, Gone

On Monday Richard returns to the German class. The teacher tells Richard that he could take over her advanced classes, if he likes, and he says he will think about it. The next day when he visits, he sees the teacher trying to hang a poster in the kitchen. He hands her thumbtacks and tries to help as she hangs colorful pictures for the refugees to look at. Richard remembers holidays with his wife. Now that she has died, holidays arrive and pass before he realizes they are coming. The teacher says she must leave because she is not allowed to be in the area with the men’s rooms. She has been told it will disturb the peace. 

When he is leaving, Richard sees a man, Karon, sweeping on the second floor, and they begin to talk. It is the longest conversation he has had with a refugee yet. He tells Richard that as a 19-year-old, he had been working on a farm when his father died. At the ceremony performed for his father’s death, a sacrificial goat was required. The boy had to take a live goat in several buses and taxis to reach the place of the ceremony, which makes Richard laugh. In Accra, he had started a small business selling shoes. He helps his mother work, but realizes that she is desperate for more money, as are many people in Ghana. Many of them commit suicide. Karon moved to Tripoli for eight months and worked until the war broke out. He then moved from country to country, unable to find work, until he arrived in Germany: “I looked in front of me and behind me and saw nothing” (115). 

On Friday Richard goes to pick up Osarobo so that he can come play the piano. The boy has forgotten, which annoys Richard, who would like him to show more gratitude. Richard thinks about his lover while Osarobo gets ready. He used to ask her to do certain things, like call him at five o'clock each night, or to wear a skirt he liked. Over time she began calling later than usual, and she gave the skirt away, breaking the rules slightly: “She was seeing what remained of their relationship, what was really there in the first place once the rituals he kept trying to bind her to were suspended” (117).

Richard waits outside for Osarobo and is annoyed that he has not brought a book with him. As they walk towards Richard’s house, Richard tries to explain the situation that led to the Berlin Wall—which is no longer in place—and the difficulties in blending the two cities into one in the aftermath. He also tells him about Hitler, a name that Osarobo has never heard.

At his house, Richard leaves Osarobo in the piano room and shuts the door. It is soon clear that the boy has never touched a piano before: “Richard can hear Osarobo’s own listening, and this listening turns these crooked, lopsided, harsh, stumbling, impure notes into something that, for all its arbitrariness, still is beautiful” (121). Richard realizes that he is tired of a home life where the only sounds he hears are the ones he makes. He takes Osarobo a glass of water and shows him how to position his hand over middle C on the piano. Three hours later, he walks Osarobo back to the home. 

Richard practices more advanced German with two men—Ali and Yussuf—in class while the teacher helps the students who are illiterate. Ali wants to be a nurse and Yussuf would like to be an engineer. In the front of the classroom, the teacher is trying to explain verbs in the present tense and describe the first-person conjugation. She tries to help the students understand that first person conjugations are done alone, focusing on the solitary word “I” (126). She uses a man named Rufu as an example of someone who is alone and rarely speaks to anyone. Rufu is uncomfortable and the rest of the class does not know what she is trying to express. It appears that she is calling attention to Rufu and his relative friendlessness.

Apollo bursts into the room and begins speaking to the men in their various languages. They all leave with him. On his way out, Awad tells Richard that they were all going to move to a facility called Spandau the next day, but that move has also been postponed by chickenpox. The teacher tells Richard that she is sorry about what happened with Rufu, and “it pleases him that she’s dissatisfied with herself” (127). He knows that people who reproach themselves harshly are usually the ones least deserving of harsh criticism. 

Richard is buying onions at a market when he realizes that he has forgotten his wallet. Rufu is behind him in line and pays for his groceries, despite Richard’s protests. They return to the home and find Richard’s wallet lying on the ground in a hallway. Rufu will only take a 10 euro bill, even though he paid 20 euros for Richard’s onions. He has lunch with Rufu at his home and gives him a book of Dante to read. He asks him if he knows the man who was sweeping on the second floor, earlier. Rufu does not know him. That evening Richard looks up Spandau on a map: “It’s far. Even by car it would take at least three-quarters of an hour” (131). 

Since 3:30 a.m., Awad has been suffering from a headache. He meets with Richard that morning, but has a hard time concentrating. A staff member arrives and tells Awad that he wants to take a blood sample to see if he has been infected with chickenpox in the past. Awad does not want to. He wonders if he will ever have a son, and whether he would tell his son to take the blood test. He does not understand why his father was beaten to death and why Richard is still alive. Richard convinces him to go give a blood sample. 

Richard talks with a group of social workers who have a six-month contract at the home under the Oranienplatz agreement. One of their jobs is to go with the refugees to their appointments at places like the Foreigners Office and the Social Welfare Office. One of them says that the refugees pay full transit price because they are not receiving benefits under the Asylum Seekers’ Law. Richard does some calculations and estimates that, for the refugees who keep all their appointments, after paying for transit, they have less than 5 euros per day to live on.

That evening Richard looks at himself after undressing. He wonders if he could ever be with a woman again and thinks of the Ethiopian teacher: “Learning to stop wanting things is probably one of the most difficult lessons of getting old. But if you don’t learn to do that, it seems to him, your desires will be like a bellyful of stones dragging you down into your grave” (140). 

Richard reads Herodotus—who writes about the ancestors of the Tuareg, the lineage from which many of the refugees come—and learns that “[t]he regions now known as Libya, Tunisia, Algeria were, in antiquity, understood to be the territory just before the end of the world” (141). He is a specialist in the Greek pantheon of gods and now imagines his Greek gods living on the deserts from which the refugees had come. His experience at the home with the displaced men in changing his perspective on both time and geography. He wonders how many times someone must learn the same thing again before finally understanding it completely: “Is a human lifetime long enough? His lifetime, or anyone else’s?” (142).

He reads about the roots of the people of Libya and knows that they have no time to focus on their own roots, given the chaos that Omar Gaddafi’s reign has inflicted on their lives. All their efforts go towards survival.

Richard goes for a walk with Detlef, Sylvia, and Chubby Thomas, a former economics professor. Richard tells them about his research into the Tuareg people. As they walk, Richard imagines the four of them as being the parts of a single body. He wonders if one day there will be no one calling to invite him on walks, and what will happen to him then. 

Apollo visits Richard’s home. He tells Richard he was born in 1991. Richard asks him if he knows the region of Arlit, and Apollo says that is where he came from. He began traveling with caravans in the desert at age 10, on long trips to sell camels. Apollo tells Richard that he learned to read the stars in the desert and never felt lost. Around the campfires, the men would tell each other stories about where they had been, which also helped them find their way through the desert by landmarks and the memories of others. Richard thinks, “without memory, man is nothing more than a bit of flesh on the planet’s surface” (151). Richard and Apollo rake Richard’s yard, and he pays the refugee 50 euros.