”Saul” they shouted.
And do you know what the game
was called? "Slug Saul".

Samy

The parents at war. The mother. The father. The boogie man, like Talat christened him. The black hole. That makes things disappear. Memories, entire years. Highly-classified material, buried several meters down. Strangely enough, though, they still trigger some pretty strong feelings.
But what it is, I don’t know. Things that make you who you are without knowing them.
Then there are moments, indelible ones. As though everything since then would’ve stood still. Frozen time. In which one can walk around and look at everything, like in an ice labyrinth.
The man with a beard, without a beard. With dark glasses and haircuts that don’t suit him. The man who leaves in a suit and comes back in a greasy corduroy jacket.
When he felt like it, he could make the most extraordinary “bandit’s goulash,” which you were allowed everywhere but at the table. When we last saw each other, I was eight years old. You delivered me to Karlstraße, it was more than ninety degrees in the shade.
And the woman with huge eyes who tried to make up for the many weeks in one single hour. In fits and starts. Who would inundate you. With a carpet bombing of kisses, myriads of strange presents, ones for which one was either a little too young or already too old. Who would hold you tight the whole night so you wouldn’t know in the morning whether it was really you she meant.
Then the certainty: you were an accident, an incident. The consequence of a sexual reaction between “Pocke” and “Saul.”
And then the others, for whom you were just “trash”: you are the “brood.” Of “murderers” and “rabble.”
We never really got to know each other, but who you’re alleged to be or who they take you to be, that’s something I learned the hard way.
“Slug Saul,” that was a popular version of hopscotch. There were certain times, on your way back from the pub mile in the old town, when you were lying there so conveniently that the next day, for starters, you had to sweep up all the shards on the pavement. That produces an intriguing, complicated fury. There were days when a person wanted to throw empty glass containers by the crateful at those assholes. One colors coarse-grained police mug shots with bright crayons. One protects people like you from oneself.
But there’s also the bitterness, the exalted, ruined pride you feel after you decided to not give a shit about half of your own life. And not give a shit about machoism, about tough warriors.
The bitterness when you realize that you’re just repeating things. You’re the one they put in prison, and I built my own. Two maximum security prisons. In your case, they want to protect the outside from you, and I want to protect myself from the outside.

"... scaredy cat, scaredy cat ‘fraida the boogie man!”
And you know what he looks like?
He looks like you, Saul!”

Talat

Je ne les comprends pas, les boches. Je ne les comprenderais jamais.