Kirmizi_ada

Yesterday, Thursday, was bright. I went up to the border between Wedding and Mitte and walked along where the Wall used to be. I don’t really prepare for my teaching anymore. I just think about my students, one by one, and wonder about them. If I forget one of their names, I wrack my brain for details about them—their sister at university in Ankara, their father’s bakery in Warsaw, how they’ve been trying to lose weight, why they want to go to LA when they turn 18, how often they go to mosque, what they got on their last test about Native Americans, what their favorite Eminem album is, why they hate Israel, whether they saw Freedom Riders or The 300 or Rocky 6 yet, whether they can pronounce “clothes” or “three”, whether they’ve ever had a boyfriend, what color their iPod is. Somewhere in there, the name comes back. Backwards, letter by letter.

I went into the school at 3:00 and we sat down at those trapezoid-shaped tables to talk about passive vs. active sentences. The other class had convinced their teacher to take them out for ice cream, so I felt bad. After some back-and-forth, I said, all right, if you guys only speak English the whole time, you can show me around your neighborhood. “Dave, can we speak Turkish?” asked one of my favorite popular-&-mean-girls. I wanted to say yes or no, but stuck with maybe.

They took me up to this park where there were tulips and daisies and couples making out everywhere on benches. I tried to get them to smell the flowers—(so amazing!)—but no luck. Something about bending down to look at colorful things was anathema. We started up this hill, where you could look out over the Gesundbrunnen shopping center. People were looking at us a bit askance—a gaggle of brown kids with big gold necklaces yelling back and forth in English to a bald white guy wearing fake diamond earrings.

Yasin had a question about the present progressive, Jarrah wanted to talk about Hitler, Deniz wanted to tell me that Jarrah hates Jews and George Bush. Krystian asked if I was Catholic, and I said no. I told them my family left Germany in 1848. Thinking I had said 1948, Jarrah said “I hate that year.” Why, I said. “That’s when the Jews took over my country,” and then he pulled Krystian’s Yankee’s hat off his head and told him he had to buy it back for a Euro. Deniz, who had been thinking about this all for a while, explained how Jews and Israel are different things, just like Americans aren’t all creepy war-mongerers like their President.

“I read the Bible,” said Jarrah later, “but in it there’s so many—was heißt Widersprüche?” “Contradictions,” I said. I told them about my dad, how he never really read the Bible, but was still a devout Catholic and was really good at it. Of course, when they found that out, they wanted to know why I wasn’t one. “I guess I never believed that one guy could make all of these things—tulips, traintracks, graffiti. Yeah, I just never believed in it. It takes something else to make a world.” I try to not use big Latinate words with them—like “spiritual"—because they lose interest quickly if they don’t understand.

They know I’m gay, but I haven’t figured out how to talk to them about it, about my boyfriend, about being in love. Just yesterday, I was watching this documentary called Rainbow’s End. One Lebanese gay activist was interviewed who said “In the course of organizing an event, I always have to talk to Hesbollah at some point. I have to talk to clerics, imams. That’s not the problem. The problem is the state. They’re the ones that make everything so impossible.” I thought about that when I was walking with these Muslim teenagers flopping and swinging around me in the park. I thought, these are the people the new European Right (and Left) think I should be afraid of. I thought about how liberal sociologists, political journalists, and pop feminists are happy as all-get-out if I, as a gay man, attribute contemporary European homophobia to Muslim immigrants. Happy if I fear individuals more than states and their armies, happy if I am more alarmed by (straight?) Turkish twelve-year-olds taunting well-to-do gay couples in Schöneberg than by another plan to erect a Wall through Gaza.

We only had fifteen minutes left, and they wanted to go get ice cream at Eis Henri. We went through all the flavors and translated them into English. Some of them had started to speak Turkish, so I asked Jarrah and Krystian if they had ever learned any Turkish. I asked the Turkish kids if they had learned any Polish or Arabic. What ensued was a whole multilingual rhapsody of cusses and disses and insults to absent mothers. I remembered that was the stuff I first learned in Spanish, so they must be somehow on the right track.

Walking back down toward the subway—back into old East Berlin—I was in a pretty rapturous state. I get to teach a bunch of students that the German press and government has no clue about, no access to, and only a wistful interest in. I get to see this next century happening long before the G8 does. I sat down by where the Wall was and dug into my bag for the Tupperware thing with my experimental green spelt and eggplant casserole. I poured a little Greek Bergsteiger tea, and put on my headphones. I wanted to hear this one song by Loney Dear called “Sinister in a State of Hope,” but I couldn’t find it on my shuffle, so I just sang it to myself between bites and swigs.

sinister,
in a state of hope,
summer night couldn’t keep me cold
some way I let it happen,
in a flash, in a flash.
When all I want, all I want,
is a state of hope,
with all I want

This city totally kicks my ass sometimes. But yesterday, Thursday, was bright.