The Pen, the Paper, and the Prostitute

Horst Schmidt entered the staff room looking thoroughly depressed. His bloodshot eyes and uncharacteristically unkempt appearance startled his colleagues. One of them, laughing, said, “Where did you spend the night, in a knocking shop?”

“You fucking bastard!” snarled Horst. Suddenly he leapt across the room and smashed his fist into Wolfgang’s face, knocking him clean out of his chair.

This sudden move took everyone by surprise. Before they realized what was happening, Horst had pummelled the man’s face into a bloody mess.

“I’ll kill you, you bastard!” Horst was screaming as they dragged him off the injured man. The atmosphere in the room was electric: two of the men were struggling to restrain Horst; some of them were helping the injured man to get up; and the others were on their feet trying to conceal their shock and horror at the savagery of the attack they had just witnessed.

Only Mustapha Ali, the Turk, remained seated. In fact, he hadn’t moved throughout the entire incident.

The door opened and in stormed the foreman. “What the hell is going on?” he demanded, looking at the injured man and the men still struggling with Horst. “You,” he shouted, pointing at Horst, “sit down there! The rest of you get out, and take him to the medical centre.”

Mustapha Ali put away his sandwiches and followed the other men outside. Naturally they were all worked up. In all the years Horst had worked there, no one had ever seen him throw a punch. He had often threatened to, but they all took his threats as the empty words of an armchair hardman. That had suddenly changed.

“They can’t be fighting over Horst’s wife, that’s for sure,” said Jorg as he opened a bottle of beer. “Not unless Wolfgang is kinky. Have any of you seen her?” His enormous beer gut bounced as he laughed at his observation.

“I didn’t think Horst actually had it in him,” said Ralf, a scrawny old man who had survived seven years in a Siberian labour camp after the war. “Wolfgang must have done something to upset him. Listen, he’s still ranting and raving now.”

They stood around outside the door, trying to catch what Horst was screaming to the foreman. They heard words like “wife” and “whore”, and someone came up with the idea that Wolfgang had called Horst’s wife a whore. Ali listened to their erratic guesses and almost burst our laughing at their conclusion, but he kept quiet. Nobody asked him for his opinion, so he said nothing.

The opportunity for revenge had come so quickly that Ali could hardly believe his luck. The previous day he had gone into the staff-room for his afternoon break and seen Horst’s open briefcase on the table. Inside was the BZ, Horst’s daily newspaper held open at the crossword page with his pen. And, though it was just a scurrilous tabloid featuring bare breasts and football rather than genuine news, Horst never let anyone else touch his precious newspaper, as Ali had learnt the hard way.

After checking to make sure that no one was following him in, Ali quickly moved over to the table, grabbed the newspaper and turned to one of the many pages advertising sexual services. Then, with Horst’s own pen, Ali drew a circle round an advertisement offering the services of Jasmin from Thailand. The advertisement claimed that she was young, super slim and very active—everything that, according to what Ali had been told, Horst’s wife was not. Ali put the newspaper and pen back in the briefcase and moved casually to his place, which was at the far end of the table.

The plan might not have worked if Horst had gone straight home, but luck was with Ali. After work, Horst went with three of his colleagues to the Small Lantern, a pub near the factory, to play dice and drink away the afternoon.

Ali could imagine the big mouth staggering home to his domineering wife, unsteady on his feet and stinking of alcohol four or five hours after finishing work. It was common knowledge that she didn’t like Horst to go drinking on his way home. But that would have been the least of Horst’s worries. Ali could just picture the blood rushing to her head when she saw the circle round the advertisement for the prostitute.

Of course, Ali did not know exactly what had happened, but there had certainly been trouble. The events that had just taken place were proof that she had not been at all pleased to discover her drunken husband had popped into a brothel on his way home. Now, while the others speculated on Horst’s behaviour, Ali took silent and secret pleasure in the knowledge that he had got his revenge for the bullying he had suffered.

The bullying had started on Ali’s first day. The foreman led him into the canteen and made a general introduction, just before the morning Shift started. Some of the men were eating sandwiches or drinking coffee, others were reading newspapers.

Ali went round the room, greeting each individual and shaking hands with them as was the custom in Germany. He came to Horst, who was reading a newspaper and eating a sandwich. Ali offered his hand. Horst rebuffed him saying, “No thanks, I’ve already washed my hands.”

Ali froze for a moment. It was happening again. It happened every day: in the subway; on the buses; on the street; and, now, it was happening at his new place of work. What was wrong with these people, he asked himself. Why couldn’t they just accept him as a human being? But he knew why. He was a poor Turk in the land of plenty. One of these days his patience would break, and somebody would pay for it in blood. But it would not happen today. He shrugged his shoulders, smiled weakly and walked over to the seat he had been allocated.

The next incident occurred at the breakfast break. Ali was the last one into the staff-room. He sat down and took a sandwich from his lunch box.

“What’s that smell?” asked Horst looking across at Ali and wrinkling his nose. “Has anyone stood in dog shit?”

Everyone laughed. Ali flushed, but did not look up.

“Oh, sorry,” Said Horst sarcastically, “I didn’t realize it was your sandwich causing the smell. What is it, a shit kebab?”

Ali felt the anger welling up inside him again, but he did nothing. As he was leaving the staff-room, one of the men came up to Ali and said, “My name’s Novak, Willi Novak. Don’t pay any attention to Horst, he’s got to let off steam somewhere. His wife’s a real bitch. She gives him a hard time, so when a new man starts he likes to act the big shot. He’ll leave you alone in a few days.”

But Horst didn’t leave Ali alone. It got worse. Ali inadvertently picked up Horst’s newspaper one morning. “Get your filthy paws off my newspaper,” Horst bellowed at him. “You buggers don’t use paper to wipe your arse, do you? Well, I don’t want shit on my newspaper.”

Ali left the staff-room without eating breakfast, but Horst started again at lunch time. “Hey, Allah or whatever your name is, what were you going to do with my newspaper this morning? Don’t tell me you were going to read it. You can’t even speak German, so how the hell can you read it? Did you want to see some tits, eh? You fellows like looking at tits, don’t you? White tits, that is. You never see tits in your own country, do you? Covered up from eyebrow to ankle, the birds in your country are, aren’t they? That’s why you like looking at German tits. Well, you can buy your own newspaper if you want to look at tits. Don’t look at mine!”

There was the usual laughter from Horst’s cronies, but one man spoke against Horst. It was Novak. “Why don’t you leave him alone, Horst? He hasn’t done you any harm. Why make all this fuss about a newspaper?”

“I’ll tell you why,” said Horst. “Because it’s mine. I paid for it with money I earned. I read it first, then I take it home and my wife reads it. After that we throw it out. Nobody else ever touches it, especially if they have filthy habits like wiping their arse with their bare hands.”

Ali clenched his fists under the table and silently swore that he would get even. This cretin didn’t know who he was dealing with. Mustapha Ali was no lowbrow from the working class tenements of Istanbul, nor was he an ignorant peasant from Central Anatolia. Mustapha Ali was a Doctor of Philosophy who had taught history at Istanbul University. Politically to the left, and well known for a series of articles denouncing the right wing leanings of the generals, Ali had fled his country when the military had seized power.

A cousin who had lived in Berlin for more than ten years had invited Ali to stay with him until he could establish himself. He had applied for and been granted asylum soon after arriving in Berlin, and then he had found work in the factory. His German was pretty basic, but he was a quick learner and confident that he would soon be able to hold his own with his colleagues, one of whom was determined to make his life as miserable as possible.

Over the next few weeks Ali had put up with the taunts of Horst, but he was always waiting for his chance to pay him back. Now that he had obviously succeeded, Ali felt a quiet satisfaction as he left work that Thursday afternoon.

The following morning Ali arrived twenty minutes early, as usual. Jorg, his left eye blackened and his bottom lip bruised, looked up from the sports pages and greeted him. Ali drank a coffee while he changed into his overalls and waited with anticipation to see how Horst would behave this morning.

It was approaching six o’clock, when the shifts were about to change, that someone commented on Horst’s absence.

“I wish the bastard had been late yesterday,” said Jorg. “I’m going to look good at the christening of my niece on Sunday. Everyone is going to want to know what I’ve been up to. And when I tell them that a colleague flipped his lid and whacked me for a harmless joke, they’re not going to believe me.”

The bell went and they all trooped out to their positions. Ali was on the weighbridge, working with Klaus, who drank eight bottles of beer every day, one for every hour he worked. Klaus raised his bottle in a toast as Ali approached. “It should be quiet here today with Horst away. I wonder what the problem is. He’s never been absent in all the time I’ve worked here. Anyway, enjoy yourself while he’s away!”

The next two hours went by in monotonous regularity. Horst sorted and weighed bales of tobacco and Ali covered the bales with canvas sacks for the steaming process. At precisely eight o’clock, Horst emptied his second bottle of beer and gestured for Ali to follow him to the break room.

Ali sat down, took out his sandwiches and his copy of Hürriyet—since his run in with Horst, Ali had not touched a German newspaper—and began to read about the latest political crisis in his homeland. He had not even finished the first paragraph when Jorg broke the silence of the breakfast break.

“Christ! Look at this,” he screamed,” and threw his copy of the BZ into the middle of the table.

Ali was the only one who did not respond; initially, that is. But when he heard Horst’s name over and over again in the hysteria surrounding the newspaper on the table, he stood up to see what the excitement was all about. On the second page was Horst’s photo underneath the headline: Slaughtered by his enraged wife when she discovered that he had dropped into a brothel on his way home.