Yesterday my mother called me on Skype to let me know, that while my grandma was sitting herself down in her apartment to write me a letter, she stumbled on the chair, bumped her head against the wall and cut-open her forehead. When her son (my uncle) came over to her place, he said, and I quote: “It looked like a bloodbath”. “But don’t worry”, said mum hurriedly, “she’s back home and she’s fine. You better give her a call”.

So I did. She said it was odd: “I fell in my apartment before and I always remembered every second of it, even when I was in the air, like a… like a scene from a 3D movie. But this time I don’t know how it happened”.

After I asked her a few questions to make sure she was alright (what year is it? who’s your favorite grandson?) she went on to tell me the following story, to demonstrate that at least her short-term memory was still intact: “A nice young fellow called me on the phone just before I fell; he said he was conducting a survey about politics and asked if I was willing to answer a few questions. Said it wouldn’t last more than 3 minutes. Well, what do you think? of course it lasted 5 minutes, but I didn’t mind. At the end he was supposed to ask for my age but instead he said: ‘Ma’am, excuse me for saying, but you sound like a 60 year old woman, and yet your accent gives away that you’re far older than that’ “.
Granny wasn’t insulted because the young man guessed her age, of course. She was bothered by the fact that after 71 years in Israel, she still had a “Jecke (German Jew) accent”.

However, this is not the part of her story which drew my attention. I thought that if both I, at 30, and my nana, soon turning 30 for the third time in her life, are aware of this old-new 3D technology, which recently penetrated our life, so to say, then it’s probably worth a discussion. Plus, I realized that I wasn’t spending enough time speaking with my grandma if she had to result to strangers conducting a telephonic survey about politics.

I hereby present you with the conclusion of that late night discussion. It’s not a film critic about the last (and only) three films I watched in 3D: Avatar, Alice and Monsters vs. Aliens (the latter I watched on my laptop, wearing those ridiculous shades, which made that jelly-blob monster literally dance on my lap).

3D is exactly like the German verb beeinträchtigen; at first you’re speechless, really; then you start playing with it – Beeinträchtigung? Beeinträchtigkeit? – then you start to conjugate it – ich beeinträchtige, du beeinträchtigest, er/sie beeinträchtiget – and suddenly, before you notice, you start saying things like: Ich hätte nie beeinträchtigen sollen.

Filmmakers are now at the playing with it period, a little pass speechless. It may still sound strange, but eventually they’ll get it right. Isn’t it a natural process, like with Talkies or color films? not because we should embrace technology, but simply because all it’s trying to do is mimic the way we perceive our reality and after all, we see things in 3D in our day-to-day life – with the help of our 2 eyes.

Now I agree: films are not a reflection of our reality, but merely a representation of it. And yet, it seems that in order to represent reality or to reflect it, or even on it, they try to make it as believable as possible, even when the plot is completely absurd; even when the protagonist steps through a Looking-Glass into the “opposite world” – we define it as opposite to the things we define as “straight” in our “normal” world. In the same way we define color (as oppose to b&w); silent (talkie); and 2D (3D).

The next step – 3D without the glasses – is already around the corner. Alarming, even if you are a fan of this technology. Imagine: in Kill Bill II the wedding scenes were shot in black&white, relying on our common knowledge that b&w films are a thing of the past and therefore, these scenes must have taken place prior to the color scenes, which are taking place “now”. Will Kill Bill IX (in 3D) shoot the flashback scenes simply in 2D?

3D home cameras are also already being produced, so your average film student (or average dad) could shoot any film in 3D – starring Na’vis or not. Will other directors, less majestic than “the king of the world”, also start using these cameras? will we be sucked into the colorful sensual world of Pedro Almodóvar? join a witty philosophical discussion about life with Woody Allen? will any producer be crazy enough to lay one of those cameras in Lars von Trier’s hands? and what about porn?

These are all questions for the future. In the meantime we are stuck, as mentioned, in the playing with it period: gimmick to say the least; cool to say the most. This brings me back to the thing which bothered my grandma when speaking with the young fellow; he said: “you sound like a 60 year old woman, and yet your accent gives away that you’re far older than that”, meaning: although technology – the modern-day wireless phone – transmits your voice in a way which makes it sound younger and fresher than you really are – I recognize your real voice and thus I know your real age. Or in other words: 3D makes things look better than they are, but we are still one step ahead of it. It seems that even my nana already figured it out. I’m just glad she’s alright.

Some things can only be said in a group of two. I mean, of course you can say them also in a group of three, but only in a group of two do you know for sure, that what was said, was meant solely for you and if what you heard was disturbing, you can’t pretend it was meant for the other guy.

A few days ago I attended an important meeting. I can’t give away exactly where and whom with, but I can say it was in a prominent Israeli organization here in Berlin and that the purpose of the meeting was to see, whether the two women I was meeting with could help me publish a manuscript in Germany.

One of them, we’ll call her Lisa, I had known from a previous engagement. In fact, she was the one who suggested to hook me up with the other woman; this one was precisely that – a “hook”. I think Casandra would be a suitable name for her.

I was sitting (or was I seated?) opposite Casandra, Lisa watching us from aside, not intervening, but in a position to come to my rescue if I was to swallow Casandra’s hook. She introduced herself as the oldest woman working in the building and went on and on about all the writers she knew: “David Grossmann? – I read him even before he was so Gross…he was a shy public-speaker at the beginning, but we brought it out of him, didn’t we?; Golan? – she’s a ‘cradle-snatcher’… it means she sleeps with younger men”, she explained in light of our silence. Not a very polite thing to say, I thought, but still, quite poetic, wasn’t it? “Am I young enough to fit the description?”, I asked, but received no answer. Worse as that – her silence approved that I wasn’t. And then she went on about another ‘favorite’ female-writer of hers: “Her?! she’s a Cholera!” (I could try and translate this word, but do I really need to? let it slip through your mouth a couple of times; what does it taste like?). Eventually, Lisa said she had to leave us, and then – it was whispered in the air – there were two.

“Are you an admirer of men or women?”, asked Casandra, again with the poetics. “Women”, I said. “Good, now you listen to me: everyone who has attempted to bury themselves in the Holocaust archives, doing the kind of research you do, has gone mad. Go get yourself a nice Israeli girl FROM ISRAEL, with both feet planted in the ground – OUR ground – and then come back and continue with your research”.

Now what was I supposed to say to that? Even with Casandra’s frantic (mis)demeanor, her squeaky voice and all those moments when you weren’t even sure if she realizes you’re sitting there in front of her – I still really liked her. It was exactly this uncertainty which I liked. But now I was wishing I knew for certain if she was being serious or not. I couldn’t help but feeling like the protagonist in a Polanski film, who has just been warned about his inevitable fate – rendering the warning irrelevant. “Anyway, I think I can help you with your manuscript”, she said and left the room.

This was a strange thing to do. In the kind of place I was having the meeting, it was customary to escort the guest all the way to the exit. But there I was, alone in the room, a party of one. Maybe she left me alone so I could think about what she had just said; maybe it was her way of letting me know that this wasn’t another poetic joke. Or maybe, it was simply a countdown to the inevitable: three-two-one.

It is an odd experience, no doubt, listening to Arabic while reading the subtitles in German, realizing you can understand everything you are reading, when, in fact, you should be understanding this spoken language, the second spoken language of your homeland.

No one could believe that an Israeli audience will stand in line to see an Arab-spoken film. But we do, even here in Germany. So it was yesterday in Ajami’s premiere in Berlin – Israel’s third Oscar nominated film in a row. Maybe this one, developed as a collaboration between two friends, an Israeli and a Palestinian, will take the coveted statue home, to the streets of Jaffa. It would be ideal wouldn’t it? plus – it’s a damn fine film.

It’s not an easy film to watch – but what’s there to be seen is visible without any 3D glasses. All you have to do is open your eyes.

Suicide is a taboo. As much forbidden to write about it as it is to act on it. An uninvited guest in any blog. Researching the Spielberg Holocaust Archives, home to some 52,000 survivors’ testimonies, doesn’t only put you face to face with their miraculous tales of survival of the Nazi beast, but also their survival of themselves – for this archive is perhaps the largest accumulation of suicide-survivors ever assembled. The percentage of suicide survivors within Holocaust survivors may have never been questioned, perhaps because the answer would be too alarming. It’s a sad topic, no doubt, but there’s something beautiful in listening to it told from the lips of those people – for they are still alive:

Decisions regarding suicide

This all happened a long time ago. Today you can analyze it and try and come up with an explanation, but I’m trying to be authentic, that is, I’m trying to put myself back in my old shoes – or non-shoes for that matter – and what I can clearly say, is that the humiliation and our way of existence – if you could call it that – was so unbearable, that I simply didn’t want to go on with it. It wasn’t a moment of fear or a moment of bravery, but simply a moment of I’ve had enough. No matter what – I’m going for the electrified fence. So I jumped out of all that formation and went for the wire, which was rather close to me, but I was noticed, captured, put back in line. I managed to get as close as one centimeter from the fence; if the photo-finish camera existed then, the referee would have definitely ruled to my favor – let her fry – but it didn’t, and inside this centimeter lay six more years of hell and sixty of life.

As soon as we reentered the block I got a hell of a beating. Twenty five whippings. Five and twenty. In German you count the ones before the tens. When speaking about whipping, that’s definitely the right way to count; first you feel the ones – one, two, three, four, five – and then the remaining twenty are like a single blow. However, that didn’t seem to be enough, so they had me standing on my knees opposite the oven, holding bricks in my raised arms and if I was to lower them, I would get beat up again, naturally. The only thing I realized then, is that not only did I lose my will to live, I was also not allowed to die. Life in the camp was put on hold, like the menstruation which suddenly stopped in all of us, after the first cup of coffee.

Suddenly a theatrical figure stormed into the block, like a Roman conqueror; wrapped in a white sheet, hair of fire and a torch, jumped on the oven and said:
Von hier ist kein Weg
Von hier ist nur ein Weg
Himmel-Kommando!
And then she disappeared like a bad dream. I’m sure I wasn’t dreaming, I have no fantasy-problems. Later on someone told me she was the Kappo; a young woman, horribly vicious, with a tragedy of her own. Needless to say, my hands remained aloft long after that episode.

The very next day a polish girl who had cancer asked me to get her some poison. All of the sudden I had an assignment. It was always difficult to determine who was superior to whom, who had the right to keep on living and who didn’t. But when it came to dying it was rather easy: you’re suffering more than I, you should commit suicide before me, so I will help you.
She had the poison already in her mouth, when her folks came out of nowhere, believe it or not, and said: Mira’le, by Jews you don’t do that… Parents remain parents, even if they are mere scraps of humans. So she spat it out. There’s always more time to commit suicide.

My parents, however, weren’t around anymore and in the far corner of the room I spotted the poison she spat out. I said to myself: why bother living? Suicide seemed like a nice way out; becoming a nun seemed appealing; becoming a selfish person seemed interesting – I mean, after all, so many of those survived and went on to lead a nice life. Maybe that’s the way to go, live for pleasure. I just didn’t know anymore. But if I didn’t take the poison, I wanted to live, probably.

I thought back of the time when I had parents, when suicide was a decision to be made within the family-unit: the task was given to my mother, a nurse. She had to inject it into our veins, otherwise it wouldn’t be effective. So she prepared a little metal tray with enough syringes to go around and beside every syringe she put a little cotton ball soaked with alcohol, to disinfect the skin before the injection. I pointed out that this was not necessary for the last injection and everybody laughed, but she was kind of offended and simply said: what do I know? I’ve been doing it like that all my life.

Now I see that this entire liberation was pointless. A delayed understanding which sneaked in only recently, three months after it was all over. Every person I meet on the street asks me: you’re still alive? as if the fact that I’m standing there right in front of him still needs to be reinforced by the pronunciation of the words: yes, I am still alive, I’m standing right here in front of you. At least you survived, is the common reply. So what – I came out alone.

Three months after it was all over was also when I got to see my first dinosaur-film; the dinosaurs were still quite clumsy – certainly not the accomplished creatures Steven Spielberg created – with men inside of them, working their limbs, and a mechanic head, smiling. Unlike Spielberg’s film, the villain of the story was not the most vicious lizard among them, but a man, who, for some reason, wanted to make sure that the extinction of the last remaining dinosaurs – male, female and their descendant, discovered in the Amazon jungle – was final. He shot the two adults without as much as a blink and then he turned to the little lizard, looked her peacefully in the eye – she was no longer smiling – and said: now you are truly one of your kind.

52,000 video testimonies – where do I start researching? They say that it would take one man approximately 12 years to view them all, and I’ve already “wasted” about 30 of mine… The following story is an example for a research-method I use; I enter “cigarettes” in the Stichwort-katalog and a title comes up “The importance of cigarettes”, followed by a couple hundred nice grandpas and grandmas, Holocaust survivors, recalling the role that cigarettes played in their day to day life, in their survival – the two things being one of the same. Instead of listening to the testimonies from start to end, I allow myself to listen only to the “cigarette-memory” – like a person reading an online article and clicking on a link before reaching the end of the article – I research it horizontally and not vertically – and little by little a story unfolds:

The importance of cigarettes

You’d think that after everything I’d gone through I wouldn’t even be able to spell the word, cigarette, but you’re wrong: I tore off the filter and started sucking on it; it tasted of a thousand cigarettes and with one breath my teeth turn yellow and the lips wrinkle like a tight fist. That day I became addicted. No, it wasn’t addiction – I simply got bored of plain air. I would breath constantly through a yellowing filter, If I could.

You’ll see: the Mark will give way to the Euro, the Yen will be cast to the bottom of darkened wells and a day will come when even the Israeli Shekel will lose its religion – but the cigarettes will never convert. The unfortunate man will be inclined to cast any given coin to the famous fountain in Rome, but not even one cigarette – he will smoke it for consolation.

He used to take one out to smoke and leave the rest of the pack on the table, but more often than not, he’d forget it when he got up to leave. If it contained four, six – sometimes only two – cigarettes, that was my possession for the day, cause in those days people were willing to exchange their daily bread ration for a cigarette.

If you had thrown them away, he told me, I would have killed you on the spot. But you had the nerve to keep them, so I’m giving you your life back. But remember: next time I catch you with a cigarette – it’s your life. I wouldn’t give it back to you.
I didn’t tear off the filter, I didn’t suck on it, I controlled myself. You reckon it’s hard to fight the hunger and thirst? try fighting off the need for a smoke. I became a businessman; unlike a physician or a judge, a businessman doesn’t need a hammer or a statoscope; a good businessman only needs the right opportunity and then anyone sitting to his left or to his right, even those sitting right in front of him – could become his victim. Even if the devil himself would sit in front of him, he’d be able to cut him a deal.

And so, one day I found myself in the following situation: your soup for a cigarette, said the man sitting in front of me, as if it was a done deal, no bargaining required. Two cigarettes, I said and kept on eating the soup. No, one, he said and put it to my nose, but I kept on eating. Give me two or I keep on eating – and suddenly every spoonful became a Schluck of the cigarette. He grabbed me by the hand – no, stop eating – and gave me two cigarettes. If anyone ever bothered to pile up all the cigarette butts we smoked back then, it would amount to a monstrous heap which would stink up the heavens. But there were no butts, of course, and if there ever were – we’d smoke them too. Later on they caught him with a cigarette and he was sent to one year of forced labor. One year for six and a half minutes with the cigarette. Was worth every second.

Köscher, du bist ein Jude? he asked, as if he didn’t know. He emphasized the ‘ö’ as if to differentiate it from the jewish Koscher.
Leider, I replied.
Warum hast du es mich nicht gesagt dann, dass du ein Jude bist?
Wenn ich es dir sagte, machtest du mich schon lang kaputt. Also, mach mich kaputt jetzt.
I was being so rude to him, that he simply said: Nein, ich will dich nicht kaputt machen. Komm her.
Here comes the cap-victim, murmured the others, cause they were sniping into our caps: hit – they would remove your body and tomorrow morning another guy would fill up your cap; miss – they would keep on sniping into our caps, cause we were all made to wear them. Just an example of how a cap can be deadlier than a cigarette.

I could care less if I would live another moment or two. Sit down, he said and turned the bank over to its dry side and I was thinking: if he’s ordering me to sit he’s not gonna kill me just yet. Maybe later. He lit up a cigarette and I remember wondering: what’s the matter, a murderer like him lighting up a cigarette? He gave it to me but I didn’t smoke it, instead I asked – had quite the nerve – whether I could share it with some of the others – one Schluck. The cigarette is being passed through twenty bony hands and with every Schluck they take it’s disappearing on me. I walk back to him with my arms spread, I don’t have as much as a butt left to spare, and then he takes out the rest and gives them all to me. I knew then: I’m not gonna die today.

Cigarettes, you see, were the fourth Reich; it was their way of making sure we would keep on dying even after they’d already be gone. Every cigarette I smoked reminded me of him, but I couldn’t give them up, they had become a major food group – my blood demanded it. Sixty years later, as I was visiting Dachau with my father, he suddenly had to have a cigarette. I gathered some dried leaves, rolled them into a piece of newspaper and gave it to him. What a difference it made.

If instead of suitcases filled with clothes you’d be carrying suitcases filled with newspapers, you could have been a millionaire, because we had no paper for smoking. So the few books which were available were gradually torn, page by page, for smoking. When they burned the books in that square they didn’t merely kill the finest jewish minds, they also extinguished endless loafs of bread which could have saved endless starving jews. If you think there’s a different between smoking a cigarette which was rolled on a poem by Goethe to one which was rolled on a poem by Heine, you’re dead wrong. It didn’t matter if it was a genuine cigarette, as long as it looked like one; a newspaper with some dried leaves and here’s to your health..

30.1.10

This is dedicated to Amir Kerten.

Today I received a phone call from Israel; it was a friend of mine who had already called me once before during this week. I asked him what’s wrong and he said: if I’m calling you for the second time this week, what can it be? I guess I was just trying to postpone hearing the news which I knew were coming: Amir had passed away during the night.

What can I say about someone who fits the cliché so perfectly – one of the good guys? Maybe the fact that his wife is now pregnant with their second child is proof to that he wasn’t making any “plans” to die, or wasn’t aware of his coming demise, and that is a good thing, though I’m sure some would argue the opposite.

I find it so horribly ironic that his children will never get to know him, as he never got to know his mother and sister, who had died of cancer when he was too young to remember. This cancer had challenged him to a duel too, when he was 18 or so, and he fought it like a lion. That time he had won; death looked him in the eye and said: you’re a brave bastard aren’t you? here’s your life back, for now. Second time around the lion was defeated. A cancer in Hebrew is a crab, but who would have thought that a crab could beat a lion.

I think of him now and I can’t imagine him more alive if I had to; his smile is what I remember: a beautiful guy with a beautiful smile. I asked him last time I saw him, if he realizes that he’s as much a father to his son now as his father is to him. He said that he can’t imagine it; fatherhood was still fresh and his own adulthood hasn’t quite arrived yet.

Being in Berlin I cannot properly mourn him; death is nowhere to be seen here; my German friends have no recollection of Amir and I don’t have any means to translate to them who this young man was. I remain in a state of grieve-delay and perhaps that’s why I found it more suitable to go out for a drink tonight instead of staying at home and waiting for a skype-consolation call.

A few months ago I was looking for a Michael Jackson video I haven’t seen in a long time; I googled his name and amongst all the results I noticed one which read: Michael Jackson is dead. I knew it had to be false, since if he was really dead, I would have gotten more than one result. I watched the video and when I googled his name again suddenly five results claiming his death appeared, and then ten, twenty and a hundred. I realized then that I was witnessing his death online and therefore, experiencing it in some way. It was a sad night for me, saying goodbye to my childhood idol.

But how am I supposed to say goodbye to Amir via the internet? I enter his name on Facebook and though we were friends in life, I realize we were never Facebook friends. I know it’s too late to befriend him now, but I want to do it anyway. I look for him, but his profile is no longer there.

First time I arrived in Berlin I went to visit the famous art-house Tacheles. I was especially taken with an exhibition titled “Global Warning”, but it’s not the exhibition itself I want to talk about here, but rather, the way it was portrayed in Tacheles; the massive drawings, which could have easily decorated the walls of a museum, were scattered on the floor or “sat” on chairs leaning against the walls; the place was not tidy nor clean and the guy standing at the entrance, who looked like a homeless person, was actually the artist. I spent a long hour talking with him about his works, his masterpieces, actually.

I find in Tacheles a good metaphor for my research method in Berlin. Before I clarify this comparison, I ought to say a few words about the research itself: I was granted a DAAD Kunststipendium to conduct research at the Visual History Archives (VHA) of the Freie Universität, hosting the Steven Spielberg Holocaust Foundation Institute.
Inspired by his experience making Schindler’s List, Mr. Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah (Holocaust) Visual History Foundation which, within several years, held some 52,000 video testimonies in 32 languages representing 56 countries; it is the largest archive of its kind in the world.

My interest in the archives has to do with a script I’m writing. What I’m looking for there is the evasive thing called: human subjectivity. I can only presume that some of the survivors give inaccurate information in their testimonies. After all, they are asked to recall events which happened over 60 years ago; in some cases when they themselves were quite young or too young to remember; and especially so when dealing with a traumatic ordeal, which has its own ways to play with your mind.
But the way the memory is told – even if no place could be found for it within the pages of a history book – is exactly what defines those who tell it. It’s what makes it subjective.

Back to my comparison: a museum is like a history book; there they would treat the memory with silk gloves, hang it on the wall in a room with a humid-meter and beside it you would find a few selected words about the artist himself. It would be forbidden to take any pictures of the memory, let alone to touch it. There would be no one doubting its authenticity there. And that’s a good thing; so it should be.

But we should also be allowed to visit other “exhibitions” of memory; ones like in Tacheles, where you could meet it in “eye-level”, where you could touch it, have a cigarette with it, confront it with difficult questions. A museum and an art-house (like Tacheles) together give a more complete picture of art, if such a thing as a complete picture of art actually exists; history books and personal testimonies together give a more complete picture of history – a truly complete one probably doesn’t exist.

I will give some examples of my research method during the following weeks in the form of short stories which are inspired by the testimonies I view; I will also try and explain a little about the original testimonies vs. my adaptation of it.
I often try to identify common narratives within several testimonies and then combine them into a single story of a single protagonist. I try to write them plain, honest, straightforward – Tacheles.

First Act

When I was six years old I spent two weeks at my grandparents house, my parents being away on vacation with my two older brothers. I used to cry every night before falling asleep. This wasn’t because I didn’t enjoy my time there, but simply because I had realized for the first time in my life, that no matter what I do, I too will die in the end. This realization was probably the result of living with this old couple, whereas up until then my visits to their house only lasted an hour or two. Since then I constantly think about death, or rather, about growing old. My grandma, closing in on her 90th birthday, is slowly realizing that I was right to cry, and my grandpa already knows it for sure.

Second Act

After his death, my mother complained that she wasn’t able to dream about him. She wanted desperately to see him again, you see, perhaps some unfinished business, or probably because that with his death she felt like daddy’s little girl again. I wasn’t the closest family member to my grandfather, that’s for sure, but for some reason I was granted first “visitation rights”. I find it very difficult to put this dream into words, especially because only two words had been uttered throughout it, though the scene itself must have lasted a good minute or two:

I saw him as I was walking down the street from my folks’ house towards the local shopping center; he was stepping out of the front doors, wearing a bright yellow sweater and not looking any younger than he was in death, but somewhat healthier; the skin of his face tighter, more tanned, as if in the last six weeks of his artificially-prolonged life the ceiling of the hospital room didn’t see his face more than the sun did. Another mental note I made, was that he wasn’t using his walking-cane. But all of that didn’t matter anyway – this man was obviously not my dead grandpa.

Nevertheless, what can you do when you see something that cannot be? I reckon you don’t believe that a man can fly any more than I do, but if one simply did it in front of your eyes, for real – could you not believe what you see? could you stop knowing what you already know? this would be like not knowing that the sun will rise tomorrow.
And so, as I was approaching him, noticing all the details I just mentioned – his clothes, his face, his walk – I realized I was actually walking towards my deceased grandfather. he, apparently, was conscious of the situation, so he didn’t share my absolute shock and as I passed him, shoulder to shoulder, he suddenly grabbed mine, turned me around and said: tell grandma… and then he put two fingers to his lips and blew out a kiss.

I was stunned; for me this was really happening and I reacted as I probably would have, if I’d seen a man fly, or worse – my dead grandpa walking down the street. I started gasping, fell down to my knees and started weeping and at that point woke up in my bed, which was then in Philadelphia.
I had all the symptoms you could easily guess: cold sweat, speeding heart-rate and a full, detailed memory of the dream. I then immediately called my mother, halfway across the globe, to tell her about the dream she so longed to have and more importantly, to tell her to forward the kiss to her mother.

She answered the phone by saying: good timing, I’m at grandma’s, before I even had the chance to tell her about the dream. Admittedly, I knew she was visiting her mother once a week on the same day, so theoretically my brain could have staged this dream on that specific day, only today wasn’t it, it was supposed to be tomorrow, but my mother had switched days due to an engagement. I told her about the dream and she told it to my grandma and although neither of them believed in flying men, they had no doubt that the kiss was real.

To be continued next week…

I was looking for the Stadtmuseum when I found him; he was sitting on his wheelchair in front of the entrance to a local restaurant where I was headed to ask for directions. A blob of a man, seemingly with no legs whatsoever, which made him look like one of those balance toys for kids – a clown sitting on a ball which you could push around as much as you like and it would never tip over. His lower bottom was so perfectly round, trousers-sleeves so empty, that I had to wonder whether he was, in fact, what you would call a half of a man.

Granted, this depiction is cruel, but politically correcting it will no doubt damage its accuracy and I should avoid that at all costs, especially when trying to tell a true story. He was well dressed: a warm winter coat and an elegant shirt and he was well shaved too; plus, on his winter coat there was this pin which could have been from WWI or WWII, except he wasn’t old enough to fight in neither; his left hand was kind of stretched out and the palm slightly curved, where one could drop a coin. So I couldn’t really make up my mind whether he was lurking for ingoing-outgoing restaurant clients who might spare him some change or a doggy-bag, or whether he was in fact one of those clients himself, who had just finished a gourmet meal, waiting outside of the restaurant for his long-legged wife, who was fixing her face in the toilettes; or perhaps he was just a man sitting there who happened to have no legs, whereas had he had them, I probably wouldn’t have made a point noticing him.

I had already stalled too long in front of him and stared too evidently at his crotch to simply continue along into the restaurant, so without losing my manners I immediately asked him if he could direct me to the much-desired Stadtmuseum. Why not? Surely they have ramps for disabled people there, so he must have visited it himself. For a while he didn’t say a word, long enough for me to feel how my bent back was becoming a burden on the muscles, and then he said: ”ich hätt’ gern deine Beine”.
This was a strange sentence. What struck me immediately, as I am not a native German, was the combination between the first half of the sentence, which was seemingly polite ”ich hätte gern”, meaning ”I would like to have”, and the second half, which was not impolite by itself, but was constructed in the second person ”deine” – your, instead of the polite German third person – ”Ihre”. Other than that, the sentence had an odd ring to it – ”deine Beine” – an awful rhyme which got me thinking: does he mean to say ”I wish I had your legs” – or any legs for that matter – or does he actually mean that he would like to have the pair which are attached to my waist, as one could say: ”I would like to have your trousers”.
That’s ridiculous! Even if such medical procedure existed and I had consented – it is impossible to imagine his penguin shaped torso balancing on my chicken sticks. Impossible as it was, the man was now grabbing my right leg with a strong grip of his stretched arm, his fingers closing tight on my thigh, so if ever the thought that he might be interested in my trousers crossed my mind, it was now crystal clear: it was my legs he was after.

Who could have imagined that in the far corner of Fischer Strasse in the middle of Berlin such a horror-film scene was reserved just for me? I took a step backwards with my left leg, only to realize that the length to which I stretched it was too optimistic – my right leg, anchored by the steel-grip of the nolegsman, would prevent my left foot from ever touching ground. I looked worryingly into the restaurant window in search of his wife, but no long-legged woman was there, nor could she save me now.
I realized at that moment, as I was standing there, that an escape would be impossible. It was either him or me and since I don’t have what it takes to take down a man, I guess it was bound to be him. But the slowness in which our struggle had been fought up until now gave me the chills; was I really doomed to wait so long for my inevitable end? why does he have to be ever-so-slow? I would rather have the bullet in the head than the knife in the belly, though I doubt that my wishes – even if uttered – would reach empathetic ears. I think I noticed a hearing-aid device too.

I have to report this to Henry, I thought, only he could believe it, if ever I get to have another coffee with him. Ach, Henry, if only you were here! you would undoubtedly free yourself from his grip with a sharp swoosh of your manly arm and send him rolling down the street until his speeding wheelchair, stopped by a local bench, will send him flying into the Spree, where his blob-of-a-torso will float downstream. And then you would also date his wife. You wouldn’t stop even for a second to think about me; you would act as if out of instinct and have it all over with in an Augenblick, as they say here; whereas I am wasting precious last seconds thinking about you, my friend.

I kept hoping for a brave waiter, a doorman even, to emerge from the restaurant and give nolegsman a coin, or whatever it is that he wants, shrug with his shoulders, send half a smile my way and wish me a pleasant evening. Then I would go back to my apartment, shaking off the frost-residue of the event from my winter-coat as I walk on down the street. I would enter my apartment, turn on the heating and throw my coat on the sofa, brush my teeth and go to bed.
That night I would have a dream: I’d dream I am a disabled man, with no legs, who is dreaming, as disabled people often do, that I have legs again and I would enjoy this comfort reserved for the disabled who can rid of their disability in their dreams. I would walk, run, jump and dance with a long-legged woman. Then I would wake up in cold sweat and though I would still have my real legs, for a second there I would feel like a nolegsman, waking up from his sweet dream.