Читать книгу Berlin Notebook - Joshua Weiner - Страница 11

I WAS BORN IN A REFUGEE CAMP

Monday, October 5, 2015

A typical Berlin night, my friend Susanne says with a short laugh when I tell her about my escapade. But we don’t do it anymore—we are too much in our routines, we make arrangements now to meet each other at precise times. So, she adds, nothing ever happens. We are on our way down to the Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales (Lageso), the first place of registration in Berlin for all the refugees; in a way we are retracing the route I had taken from Tegel International through Moabit the previous week. It’s another beautiful fall day in Berlin, leaves starting to turn, quite warm in the sun, a little cool in the shade. As we walk up Kirchstrasse, just a few blocks from the Lageso complex of buildings, midday diners sit at sidewalk tables eating Vietnamese, Italian, or traditional German fare, such as Maultaschen (a kind of filled dumpling, like ravioli, a specialty of the south). Cafés are full, people are buying books in a local store. It’s difficult to imagine what we will find at Lageso given the happy promenade here. We try cutting through a construction site and are promptly scolded by a hardhat perched on cinder, drinking from a thermos. As we turn round a fenced-off corner, Susanne says, you know, I was born in a refugee camp. What? Ja, she say, (the vowel sound floats away like a bubble), I was born in a refugee camp.

Susanne Gerber, a Berlin-based artist, was born in 1949. Her mother was German, her father Czech; but his German family roots made him one of a minority in Czechoslavakia. It was therefore not a stretch, with the advent of World War II, for him to join Germany’s mobilization. He made his way into the SS. After the war, many Germans outside of Germany were being sentenced to prison; Susanne’s parents were forced to flee Czechoslovakia. They reentered Germany as refugees and settled into a camp in Kornwestheim, near Stuttgart. Susanne was too young to develop many memories stronger than impressions; but she remembers the men who, with no work, whittled away the time talking, smoking, and playing chess. The idle talking was an important influence on her, as the men, confronted with the vast emptiness of idle hours, often talked to little Susanne on the way to losing themselves in the wandering exchanges of those with too much time on their hands. She thereby learned to speak early. The general feeling she had in the camp was of not being quite properly looked after; she was often left on her own. Remarkably, she says, in Stuttgart she never felt marginalized as a refugee; she never internalized that perspective herself. But being a refugee is a strong part of my identity, she says, being a stranger in the world is completely clear to me. When later I saw Büchner’s Woyzeck, or the first production of Peter Weiss’ Marat/Sade, she continues, I found myself in there, the origins of my story. I still feel that I am never a local person, but someone from everywhere, from somewhere else.

Once we hit Turmstrasse, the Lageso street, the scene changes. Bourgeois diners and shoppers disappear, replaced by bands of four to six single men, clearly refugees by their worn dress and stressed postures, walking down the street talking to each other with urgency, or on their phones. Refugee families with small children in strollers pass by. Everyone’s eyes are focused somewhere in the distance, everyone’s gait has an urban quickness and conveys a 360-degree alertness. There is nothing but immediate purpose, immediate need. We know we are getting closer. Soon low-price stores disappear, and set back from the street, behind a set of fences, two very large white convention type tents, with separate free-standing toilet facilities between them, provide shelter in bad weather. They stand with the same proximity to the sidewalk as any storefront and abut the first set of official buildings. These buildings along the street mark the beginning of the Lageso complex; soon we enter its mouth with dozens of others. Buildings shadow us on both sides of a small avenue into the opening of the courtyard belly. In this Lageso courtyard, we pass a food tent in which volunteers are ladling hot minestrone soup and handing out Brötchen. Nearby, an elderly volunteer wearing plastic gloves spryly fills plastic cups with water from from the taps on a cooler cabinet. Boys climb on top of a flat-roofed shed next to a Röntgenmobil (for x-rays) and a truck from the Zentrum für Tuberkulosekranke parked beneath chestnut trees. The food tent and trucks stand opposite a set of official buildings, further defining the waiting area. At one end, hundreds of people, mostly men, stand in a mass that grows denser towards the front, where a digital console on a tall pole displays a set of nine brightly lit amber numbers. Women and children sit on blankets to the side, eating, sleeping. Children draw or play a game their parents grabbed for them in quick preparation to flee. A boy with a cane makes his painstaking way along the perimeter. Another passes in the opposite direction in a wheelchair. A jacketed man in his thirties sits sleeping in a bassinet stroller, his legs splayed on either side, heels digging in to keep him propped up—even in a dead sleep his body bound in effort. Some wear hospital face masks. A few guys in their twenties stand around an iPad, laughing and knocking each other’s shoulders. Boys chase each other through a slalom course of standing adults, kick soccer balls, or try to catch falling chestnuts. Having been fed, they are doing what they live to do, exerting themselves in play, improvising the day within its terribly narrow confines. A dozen voices shout in excited cheering—someone’s number has appeared on the console. Susanne and I move slowly and freely through the grounds, stopping here and there to listen and observe. No one stops us, no one asks us what we’re doing there. We are obvious in our privilege. Security in red fleece mill about or stand in fixed positions. Green vests spear trash. A long line snakes outside an office. A woman in a lilac head-covering and dressed in pinstripes emerges with a thick set of files in her arms. She walks over to where we are standing near an exterior wall and leans against it to rest. Susanne begins a conversation in German.

Ishan Wahbi, a Lebanese woman in her mid-40s, came to Germany over thirty years ago. She volunteers as an appointed legal representative for those too compromised to navigate the registration process on their own. She’s currently representing a single mother from Yemen who crossed the Mediterranean with four small children and a newborn. Are all those files for them? Frau Wahbi nods, yes. Several hundred people are waiting in line, about two thousand are on the grounds, with 500-600 arriving daily. She is waiting for the mother to meet her there, having recently been released from the hospital.

Talking about the refugee situation has created some kind of tension in her that is now an uneasy barrier; we don’t know what it is, but we sense it. Susanne and I thank her and move off. A man wearing a backpack is arguing with a security guy in front of the office entrance. Voices spike, hands gesture with agitation. Susanne becomes a little nervous, so we walk to a more open area under some yellowing lindens, where the people waiting there on the lawn, on blankets, on benches, could be, in another context, picnicking or hanging out at a festival. They have relaxed into the interminable boredom of waiting for their number, waiting to take the next step in the process of being granted asylum. And today is a nice day. There are pockets of rest to settle into momentarily before the next push. We head out. I’ll come back tomorrow.