The tribe

Ilse arrived at nine the next morning, which was six in the evening in New York, which tells you how she'd travelled.

She stood in the lobby in her coat with a cold coffee she had brought from another continent and looked at the plaque, and the sticky note, and the coffee machine, and the green thing with the elbows, which looked back at her and did not stop eating.

"I have no name for this," she said.

"It's Oasis, Ilse," said XO. "It's been Oasis the whole time."

She left.

She came back at eleven. That was day one of the furious week; there would be nine days of it, and on the fourth she would say the sentence that made all of it survivable. That comes later. I want to do the tribe first, because the tribe is the part that cost somebody something.

···

"Kralle," said Kappa, on the second morning, in the room off the lobby, with the file open in front of him. "Why is it called that?"

Everybody had been braced for the enormous questions and had prepared answers with dates in them, and Kappa had sat down with a coffee and asked about a word.

"It's German for claw," said Ricky.

"I know what it's German for. I'm German." He turned the file round. "But it's not a German word here, is it. It's in this file two hundred times and it's never once used like a German word. It's used like a surname."

Marguerite, by the door, put her tray down very slowly.

"Ah," said XO.

"Say it."

"It's a family," said XO. "A line. Older than the department. We needed people who could stand near an oasis without being ruined by it, and there was exactly one line of people in the world who had ever done it, and after a while everyone just called the job by their name." He looked at Kappa steadily. "Kralle isn't what we do. It's who did it. And they're yours. Your grandmother's line, not your grandfather's. Her daughter married a man whose name is on your email, and the other name is on a form in a drawer in a hospital in Wedding."

The room was very quiet.

"So the department," said Kappa slowly. "The famous people. The whole thing. Is named after my family."

"Yes."

"And what my family did was stand next to people like me."

"Yes."

"And where are they now?"

And XO, who was by then transparent enough that you could read the spines of the files through his cardigan, said the only completely straight thing he said in four days:

"I don't know. I've never known. That's the thing I was going to spend this century finding out, and I've run out of century, and I'm handing it to you, which is unforgivable, and I'm doing it anyway."

···

His parents came up that afternoon, and I want to be careful here, because it is his and I only have the shape of it.

What he'd been told, aged six, was: they couldn't stay. That was the whole sentence, said by a woman who did not lie and did not elaborate, and a six-year-old had built the rest of his life on top of it. He'd worked through the ordinary meanings in order over twenty-two years: they left, they couldn't cope, they were taken, they died, and finally, in his twenties, two people who had made a decision he was not required to forgive.

What Leni had meant, with a word so exact it was still true and still useless, was: they could not stay.

Not couldn't stay with him. Couldn't stay here. In the room the house had gone from.

"His mother is a Kralle," said Marguerite, quietly, in the corridor, to Ricky, out of Kappa's hearing, because she knew exactly how much a person can take in one afternoon. "The whole line is. And what a Kralle can do, the family thing, not the poster thing, is stand next to something enormous and stay themselves. It's the rarest talent there is and it has one price: it doesn't work at close range for very long. You can guard an oasis. You cannot raise one. It burns through you." She looked at the door. "The old woman is not his grandmother by talent. She's the other thing entirely. That's how she managed twenty-eight years. His mother and father stood next to that child for four months, and at the end of it they could no longer be in the same world as him without coming apart."

"So they left."

"So they went somewhere he wasn't," said Marguerite. "Which is not the same as leaving, and is exactly the same from the floor of a bedroom when you're six."

···

Ana found out on the Thursday, the way real things happen, which is by walking in.

She had a key. She'd had it four years, since the bad winter, and used it about twice a year and always shouted from the hall, and on Thursday afternoon she let herself into the flat in Neukölln with a bag of his post and a speech about the rent, how she was going to pay it and he was going to shut up about it. And found a kobold in the kitchen, in a bathrobe, making tea.

To her enormous and permanent credit, Ana did not scream.

She put the post down on top of two Mahnungen. She looked at Bob for about four seconds.

"You're the reason he's been weird. And don't tell me that video's fake, I know that car park."

"I'm one of about nine reasons."

"Is he in trouble?"

"Yes."

"Is it the police?"

"No."

"Is it drugs?"

"It is marginally drugs."

Ana sat down. She looked at the kettle. She said, in the flat voice of a woman revising a year of her own behaviour in real time: "I kept telling him it was stress."

"He said."

"He told me the floor felt wrong and I told him to see somebody." She put her hands over her face. "Oh, I told him to see somebody."

"You told your frightened friend to get help," said Bob. "That is the correct thing to say nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, and you got the thousandth. I've been alive eight hundred years and I'd have said the same." He put a cup in front of her. "Drink that. Then I'll tell you what he is, and you'll say something rude, and then you'll ask what you can do, because you're the sort who does. And the answer is going to be: keep having the key."

Ana stayed. She's still in this, and she is one of the three people in it who has never once wanted anything from him.

···

Abu found out on the Wednesday, and Abu is the reason I have had to rewrite this chapter three times.

They met because Abu delivered him weed. Neither of them has ever dressed it up. Four years ago, a Tuesday, half ten at night: Kappa ordered from a number a colleague had given him, and what arrived was a man his own age in a delivery jacket with the bag still on, out of breath, a tin in one hand and a phone in the other with a game paused on it.

Kappa, who had been looking at a screen for eleven hours and had spoken to nobody, said: "Is that FIFA?"

And Abu said, "It's a terrible team," and came in.

They played until four. Abu was three deliveries behind by midnight and had stopped caring by one, and at some point they ordered food from a competitor, which Abu still describes as the single funniest thing he has ever done. He came back the following Tuesday without being asked and without a tin.

Abu came to Berlin from Damascus at seventeen with an uncle and a rucksack. He delivers food on an electric bike eleven hours a day for an app that owes him money, and he sings.

That's the part everyone leaves out, and it's the wrong way round. The bike pays, barely. The singing is what he is. Two Fridays a month in a bar on Weichselstraße that holds forty people, and one Sunday a month in a room above a shop with eleven old men who are extremely serious about maqam and have argued with him about the same four notes since 2019. Kappa has been at most of them. He does not understand a word and has cried at three.

On the Monday, while everybody else was sending links and worry, Abu sent one message:

which clinic. i finish at 11

And he came, at ten past midnight, in the jacket with the company's name on the back and the bag still on it, and sat in a corridor for two hours and was told he was not family, and went away and came back at seven with clean clothes, because that is what he worked out at seventeen that you do.

···

There is one subject those two do not do well, and I am going to do it quickly and once.

Abu has a younger brother. Sami is twenty-three, came four years after he did, has never in his life listened to anybody, and is Prima Bella. Not the top of it, not near the top, just in it, the way a young man with a scooter and no papers gets to be in a thing that pays weekly.

Abu did that job for eleven months when he arrived, because it was the job that existed, and got out.

Sami takes his money.

All of it, most weeks. Not by asking. He comes to the flat on the day the app pays, and he is charming for about four minutes, and then he isn't, and there is a particular sound a person's shoulder makes against a plasterboard wall that Kappa has heard through his own floor eleven times and has counted every one.

I am not going to do the details and Abu would not want them done. Here is the whole of it: a man rides a bike eleven hours a day for an app that owes him money, and on Fridays a person he loves takes what is left, and he has not once called anybody about it, for reasons obvious to anyone who has ever had a family and an uncertain piece of paper in a drawer.

Which is how Kappa came to be a weed dealer, and it is a stupider story than anyone expects.

Abu had been doing the occasional run again, four or five nights a month, because a man whose wages go on Fridays has to make the number up somewhere, and there is exactly one job in this city that pays a person like him cash the same night. He hated it. He did it anyway.

In March he got a chest thing that put him in bed for nine days, and on the second night he coughed his way through a phone call and asked whether Kappa could take the bag round for him. Four addresses. An hour. Keep something out of it.

Kappa said yes because his friend was ill and because he had eleven euros.

He did four nights. He was, to everybody's astonishment including his own, extremely good at it: he turned up when he said he would, he did not talk, he was a man in a coat with a laptop bag who looked exactly like nobody, and by the fourth night two of the addresses had asked whether it could be him from now on.

Then Abu got better and Kappa did not stop.

That is the whole crossing, and there was no moment in it. The letter about the benefit had come. The rent had gone to two notices. And there was the other thing, the one he did not say to anybody for a year and eventually said to a dragon on a staircase: if there was cash in his flat on a Friday, he could get to the door before his friend did.

It did not work. It never works. Sami takes what is in the flat and then goes upstairs anyway, and all Kappa achieved in four months of doing something stupid was that on two Fridays out of sixteen Abu kept his wages.

Abu, who is nobody's fool, worked out why by the third week and said nothing for nine days. Then he came upstairs with a controller and one sentence, "you are not fixing my brother with a tin, and if you get arrested for it I will not visit you", and sat down, and they played until two. He has kept a count in his head ever since that Kappa is aware of and has never asked about.

So when I say that Abu answered a message at midnight on the worst night of that man's life, understand that he was, at the time, extremely angry with him, and went anyway, and brought clean clothes.

···

So on the Wednesday Kappa took him to a döner place on Hermannstraße, the same one, which was becoming a habit, and told him.

He did it in the wrong order again. He is not good at this. Dragon first, then the singer from the posters, then the office that is on fire, then a knee-high creature called Bob who was at that moment sitting outside on a bollard in a bathrobe, pretending to be a statue, extremely badly.

Abu listened all the way through without once saying are you okay.

Then he said: "Is that him, on the bollard?"

"That's him."

"He has been out there for twenty minutes and a woman gave him a euro."

"He'll have kept it."

"Yes," said Abu. "He seems the type." He turned his cup around on the table. "Okay. So. What do you need?"

Kappa had prepared four hours for the questions and nothing at all for that one. It took him a while. When it came, the answer was: "I need one person to not have their face change."

"My face isn't going to change."

"Everybody's face changes."

"Kappa." Abu put both hands flat on the table, which is a thing they have both always done and neither of them has ever noticed. "I have been told, by good people, kind people, people who meant well, that things I saw with my own eyes did not happen the way I say they happened. For years. It is a specific feeling and I know it from the inside and I would not do it to a dog." He shrugged. "So. There's a dragon. Fine. There's a small one in a shoebox. Fine. Ask me for something."

"I don't have anywhere to live from Friday."

"Obviously you're staying with me," said Abu, in the voice of a man explaining that water is wet. "That was decided on Monday when they took your door off. Ask me for a hard thing."

"I'm out. Prima Bella. As of Monday. And I want you to move."

Abu put his cup down.

"Say the second one again."

"Move. Out of the building. There are people who can do that this week, actual people, I've met them. One of them does a singer's calendar and I have watched her make a hospital do something it did not want to do in under four minutes." Kappa was not looking at him. "You've got a brother who knows your door and your payday, and I've got, as of about Tuesday, a small number of extremely strange friends, and I would like to spend one of them on you."

The döner place had a television on with the sound off.

"He is still my brother," said Abu.

"Yes."

"You are asking me to be somewhere he can't find."

"Yes."

"I'll think about it," said Abu, which was a no, and which by the end of that autumn was not.

And then, because he does not do this, he reached across a plastic table and took hold of the back of his friend's neck for about two seconds. A thing Ricky's grandfather does to exactly one person, and which neither of them knew anything about.

···

Two more things about him and then I'll get back to the plot, and I'd like it recorded that I am aware I am overrunning.

The first is that he met Rose four days later, in a corridor at the theatre, and did not know who she was.

He knew the poster. Everybody in that city knew the poster. What he does not have is the machinery that makes a person go strange in front of a famous face, so he shook her hand, said his name, and asked whether the room was always that cold, and Rose looked at him a second too long and said, in the flat voice she uses about twice a year:

"Say that again."

"...Whether the room is always that cold?"

"No. Your name."

"Abu."

"Right," said Rose. "Sing something."

"No."

That, according to four witnesses, is the first time in eleven years anybody had said no to that question, and Bob says the temperature in the corridor changed. Rose laughed, properly, out of nowhere, the first time since Toronto anybody had heard it, said "fair enough", walked off, and came back nine minutes later with Kira. Kira did not ask. Kira leaned on the wall and started something very quietly, four notes, and waited.

And Abu, who is not sentimental and does not perform for strangers, sang the answer to it, because a siren had put a question in front of him and it would have been rude.

I was there in a jacket. I have felt a hall go right and I have felt a floor come back to a whole planet, and I am telling you that thirty seconds in a cold corridor with a plasterer's radio going somewhere is on the list.

Here is the part nobody said out loud.

Ricky had his hand on the wall, because he always does, and what he felt when Abu sang was not old and was not new and was not the board. It was the floor going quiet. Not stopping. Listening. The way a room goes when somebody at the back says something true: a hundred years of theatre and plaster and rain stood still for thirty seconds to hear it out, and then picked up again exactly where it had been, as if nothing had happened.

He has felt three things do that. His grandfather, once, in a kitchen. A woman in a hospital bed in Wedding. And a delivery rider from Damascus in a cold corridor who thought he was doing somebody a favour.

"That's not a trick," Abu said afterwards, to Kira, with an edge on it. "What you did. That's a trick."

"Yes," said Kira, delighted. "Yours isn't. That's why I did it."

And Bob, who had come in for the last four notes and had taken his hat off, which I have seen him do twice, said to Ricky in the doorway: "You felt that."

"Yes."

"What is it?"

"I don't know."

"Well," said Bob. "It isn't nothing."

Ilse Varga offered him a place that night, which she does perhaps once a decade, and again in the spring, which she has never done. Both times he said no, politely, and went to work. She has not asked a third time and she has not stopped watching, and Marguerite has a file with his name on it that contains, at present, one line and no conclusions.

And Kappa knows. That's the part I want on the record. He worked it out in the corridor the same second Ricky did, and he has decided, so far, not to say. Not because the Alliance told him to. Because a friend of his once sat in a döner place and asked for one person whose face wouldn't change, and got one, and Kappa would quite like to be able to give that back.

He'll have to eventually. Everyone does. But not yet, and not in this book.

The second thing is that he has never once asked to be involved. He is the only person in this book who found out what was happening, understood all of it, and did not ask for a job. He made up a bed. He came to the funeral. He is the reason there was food in that flat during the nine days I was in a box.

"Somebody has to be the outside," Abu told Ricky, on the stairs, at the end of all of it. "You can't all be inside. Where would he come back to?"

···

Jonas found out on the Friday, and that went differently.

Kappa told him. Against advice: Ilse's, which was tell nobody, and Rose's, which was more complicated and amounted to tell nobody yet. He told him because he'd spent eight months being the one who was told things three days late, and there is a particular kind of dignity you can only get by refusing to do the thing that was done to you.

They met in a bar on Weserstraße. He said it badly, in the wrong order, starting with the dragon.

And Jonas listened, with his head slightly on one side, the way that had made Kappa feel like the only thing in the room for eight months, and at the end of it he said, kindly:

"Kappa. Have you talked to anyone?"

"I'm talking to you."

"I mean a doctor."

"I know what you mean."

"Because you've been in a bad place since the job, and this is—" Jonas turned his glass around. "This is a lot. This is a really lot. And I'm not the person, you know that, we've never— I've never been the person you—" He stopped, and started again, and the second version was worse because it was honest. "I can't do this one. I'm sorry. I don't have it in me. You need people who can do this one."

"I've got them," said Kappa.

"Then that's good," said Jonas, with obvious relief.

And that was the end of it, and there was no scene, and eight months ended in a bar on a Friday with a man being relieved.

Kappa walked home the long way, past the ambulance bay in Wedding where a dragon had gone down on his hands and knees on the tarmac and shouted that he only wanted to talk.

Then he rang the hospital, and was told visiting hours were over, and rang the hotel instead, and said to whoever picked up: "Tell them I'm ready. Tell them I want to know tomorrow, all of it, whatever it is."

It was me who picked up. I was in a shoebox on a desk. I've never been prouder of anything in my life.