It was too late to go to a restaurant and there is no food at home. I know I need to go shopping in order to have something to eat, but in this regard I will stay a dependet child. Psychoanalysis couldn’t solve everything.
So I went to “Mustafas Gemüse Kebab”, it’s this ridiculous place where people are queuing day and night and they sell vegetable sandwiches. I always tell people who come visit that it’s a fraud that tourist guides invented and that they shouldn’t go.
But today I went; there was barely a queue. So I stood in line, going through my phone reading Hakan’s Text he wrote about me for 60pages. It’s in German and I need to translate it or maybe Georg will.
I was flattered by his words since I couldn’t pay real attention to it earlier. He says something about me being a “Weltbürger” which could be translated as a world citizen. And that I’m not the slightest German, which made me laugh. My political mission was always running around telling everyone who asked (and they ask all the time) that I’m German and that I want to be seen like this, that I grew up here and I have never been to Iran (which is not true I was born there) and that decades of migration and a German passport and so on and all this blah.
Anyway I was standing in line and in front of me was an older lady speaking English with (and I heard it immediately) an Israeli accent. It felt like home. I needed to suppress my impulse to drop a line in Hebrew, which would have been terribly embarrassing. So I just stared into her direction with a stupid smile on my face. Suddenly I heard two older men behind me and I didn’t realize it at first but they were speaking Farsi. They discussed every single thing on the menu, even though there were only three options. It would still take ages until it would be their turn but the two men already started doing their Tarouf. Tarouf is a form of behavior and there is no translation to another language. It’s basically discussing who pays, but discussing is a huge understatement. It’s a friendly fight. And if the other person pays you loose. I started literally laughing out loud, touched by this familiar situation. The two men realized instantly that I understood them. They gave me some advice to keep my Farsi alive and I thought to myself if I will have children I won’t ever be able to talk to them in Farsi and that it will die with me. I didn’t tell them that of course. I said some polite formalities. Finally it was the turn of the older lady in front of me and she ordered with this incomparable mixture of demand, rudeness and charm that only people who grew up in Israel bring to perfection. It was finally my turn I ordered and walked away with my sandwich. A guy who looked like an undercover cop wished me a Guten Apetit in a strong Berlin dialect, when I thanked him I heard him say to his friend, look how these people always eat Döner in the streets. I shouted back: “This is not a Döner.”
Identity is fragmented, nationality bullshit.