“You should cover yourself,” cried heavy Selim, spreading his arms like a basketball player blocking a shot.
“Let me pass; I do not bother you,” Nur urged. His long coat looked frayed.
“Nur goes bare because she is a slut,” mocked another youth wearing Nike high-tops.
“Leave me alone, Mehmet,” she cried.
The second boy snatched her beret and tossed it to Selim, who flung it away. A third boy grabbed it, dancing around her and dangling it.
“Stop it, Hamid,” she begged.
He shouted down the street in his thick German: “Nur’s not a good Moslem girl!”
He threw her beret in a puddle, and a plumber’s van crushed it. She ran for Number 10, shedding tears, and a grizzled man cackled from his window in the grey apartment block.
“I saw what you did,” cried a heavyset woman stepping out of Number 12 in a flowered headscarf.
Laughing, Selim and Mehmet loped away.
Slender Hamid stood his ground: “We were just having fun after school.”
“What you did was shameful, boy.”
A green car marked “POLIZEI” slowed in front of the Social Housing complex, two blond officers eying the boy with the woman.
“Come home with me, Hamid,” Amineh pleaded. She wore no makeup. The corners of her chapped mouth drooped, and her eyes looked pouchy. “Your homework is waiting.”
Selim popped from behind a dumpster as the patrol car pulled away and saluted it, clicking his heels.
“I did my homework already, Mother.”
Hamid flashed her his even-toothed grin, which made him look like her brother who died fighting the Russians in Herat.
“Son, I do not believe you.” Pulling jars and bottles from her bag, she pushed them into streetside recycling domes, and he helped her sort the brown, the green and clear. When she tugged him towards Number 12, Mehmet and Selim snickered and Hamid’s tawny face darkened.
“I do not like those Turkish boys,” she told him in Pashto in the elevator. Its doors bore graffiti in three alphabets.
“Mother, they are my friends.”

Hamid got a cramp running for the Number 7 tram, whose side displayed a woman’s torso with lace bra and panties on sale at Karstadt Department Store downtown. Through the grove of backpacks and raised arms on the tram, he spied his Russian girlfriend.
Selim poked him in his cramp: “Go to her; she’s so hot.”
Olga-from-the-Volga had unbuttoned her jacket, disclosing her belly’s pale curve over her low-slung jeans. Hamid prodded his way to where she waited with her plainer girlfriend.
“Hello, darling,” Olga raised her hand for him to peck. “Look how they stare at us—the cows.” Two bifocalled Germans dropped their gaze.
“Nichevo,” she said airily, addressing the nearest. “You know what that means? I don’t care what you think.”
Hamid grinned, and Olga’s girlfriend applauded, which brought pinched looks from the Germans around them. One, with white hair coiffed stiff, muttered behind her liver-spotted hand: “Always these insolent foreigners.”
“Tickets please,” cried a swarthy man in jeans, flashing his ID, and Selim leaped off the tram.
“He’ll just sneak back on,” the coiffed old lady told her puckered neighbor.
“Foreign scum,” he retorted; and the plainclothes ticket checker winced. He could have been a Turk or an Italian.
The Number 7 rattled tram down Goethe Avenue, where lamps held placards: “Foreigners get out!” Next came the old bunker sheathed in ivy, the length of a soccer pitch, and finally the Heinrich Heine School. The black Eternit scales on this low building resist the nine-month North German winter, never requiring maintenance till their graffiti turns obscene. Someone paints out the swastikas at once, however, leaving neat grey squares.

Amineh mopped the dull green floors of the Forest-Corner Home. I’m glad to have this job, a legal job, she repeated in her mind like a prayer, and swabbed under the naked mattress in the room across from the General’s. Soon I will buy Hamid a rug; his floor’s always cold.
A nurse had collected Frau Zwiebel’s possessions to send to her family in Hamburg—all but the snowflakes Amineh had helped the 90-year-old woman tape to the window. Nurses would take these down after Christmas, as bare windows make a bad impression. Most residents displayed a string of colored lights or a wooden frame with electric candles; “I’m still here,” these told the street. Poor Frau Zwiebel, who was not.
Did her relatives---they’d never visited---attend her funeral? Amineh pressed out her mop and dunked it in disinfectant again. The lemony smell made her nostrils tingle, like the dusty, golden mountains of home.
She cracked the General’s door open. Eagle-beaked and gaunt, he lay on his back—as he usually did, when not running away in his velvet slippers. Yesterday, he’d made it to the terminus of the Number 7 tram before a ticket-checker called police.
She pushed open the door and found a visitor peering out the window, the back of his broad-shouldered head tattooed with the words “Live Your Dream” in English. When her cart squeaked, he wheeled and stared at her headscarf, and then lowered himself into the only chair. Gingerly, she started mopping this floor, always scrubbed-plate clean.
She always mopped it anyway, and the General never dropped a word, a grunt, or sigh. His heavy-lidded eyes studied the rambling crack in his ceiling. Already plotting his next escape?
Grunting, his visitor stuck his booted feet on the windowsill, so she’d mop under his chair. “Danke schön,” she said, but he did not answer “Bitte.”
Now Nurse Lederer waddled in and placed the General’s breakfast on his rolling table. She clucked at him, when he didn’t stir, wobbling her several chins.
“Dad, eat your breakfast,” the young man urged. “You pay for every bite.” Gazing up at the ceiling’s crack the General groaned like an animal in pain.
“Does he ever answer you?” his son asked the nurse, who wore a lone earring.
“Sometimes your daddy says Guten Morgen. He’s tired from his adventure yesterday.”
“I heard about that.” They chuckled and Amineh pressed out her mop. “I don’t get up here often to visit. I live in Lower Bavaria.”
“My husband’s from Bavarian Regensburg,” Nurse Lederer replied, and Amineh rolled her cart out and shut the door.
Later she told the obese nurse: “General Haken should have a roommate.”
“And how do you know, my dear?”
Amineh nodded vaguely, smiled. The nurse’s earring read, “Merry Christmas.”
When the nurses finished eating lunch in their room, Amineh ate her sandwich there, standing up and gazing out at the empty parking lot.

Hamid pulled open his mother’s loose purse and chose a 20-euro note from her wallet. She was snoring, curled on her side, dreaming about Afghanistan.
If she noticed the money was missing, he’d say he didn’t want to wake her on her day off. If she didn’t, later he’d help himself to another ten.
He left a note on her chipped plate (she’d set his place with the unchipped one): “I went downtown to Karstadt Department Store, to buy a book.”

“It’s a beautiful present.” Olga kissed Hamid’s little flask, and posed it on their tea-shop table. “Johann bought me a bigger one.”
“Show me,” cried Hamid; and from her mock snakeskin bag she promptly produced, like the proof of love, a fancy bottle twice the size.
He examined it, scowling: “His is fake. Mine’s the real Poison!”
Playing with her black-rooted, flat, white hair Olga laughed at the peeling ceiling. Three boys whispering together studied her. In a corner, an old black man in a knitted kufi shook his head.
Olga tested some drops from Hamid’s bottle on her wrist; and then some from Johann’s. “The same,” she announced, and the old man rolled his eyes. Her skirt barely covered her private parts. Her black-ribbed stockings displayed a pattern of rips. The Pakistani boys cast admiring glances. Confidently she recrossed her legs.
“So where do you come from, on the Volga?” asked Hamid, almost forgiving her cruelty.
“Gorodets. It was nothing, and now it’s shrinking. Everything got trashed in the war.”
“Your family settled here as Russian-Germans?”
“My old man doesn’t know ja from nein. He’s German from his family though and looks the part.” She fondled her flat, white hair.
“My dad brought us here as refugees. He got death-threats at home in Afghanistan.”
“Really?” Olga stirred her tea and smiled at the best-looking Paki boy.
“As soon as the Germans let us out of our Asylanten-Heim he died of a heart attack. Like that.” Hamid snapped his fingers.
“You’re lucky you’ve got a mommy. Mine is buried in Gorodets. My dad’s a drunk who feeds us off the dole.”
“You’re lucky you have a father, Olga.”
“Nichevo.”
“Would you like some more tea?”
“No, let’s walk. It’s too hot in here and I can’t breathe.” As she buttoned up her long, plush coat somebody muttered that the show was over.
Tumbling outside into the cloudy cold, the friends strolled past a sex-shop and Olga guffawed. A bosomy mannequin in a black mask held three kneeling male ones on leashes. They wore doggy collars and thongs; blushing, Hamid looked away.
In a posher boutique, a shop girl was buttoning a headless mannequin into an evening gown. “Now all she needs is her head,” said Olga.
“No, she is nice like that.”
Giggling, Olga pulled him towards Karstadt’s Christmas windows, where stuffed animals energetically sanded and painted a new sleigh, Santa Claus waving his hands to urge them on.
“They are so cute,” Olga crooned.
“You too.” Hamid kissed her ear’s pink edge.
“No, I am a pig.” Peering at her own reflection in the glass, she tugged at her bare white hair with both hands, and then stuck out her moist red tongue.

Hamid’s clown nose kept falling off; he put it in his pocket. A girl had thrown her shirt away and was bouncing under the strobes in a halter top and a skirt of plastic grass. Mehmet stood beside him, wearing the karate uniform he’d borrowed.
“Where’s Selim?” asked Hamid.
“He won’t come tonight, now he’s wearing the kufi. If you ask me he will follow the jihadis.”
“I didn’t ask you.” Hamid caught sight of Olga with two boys---one a skeleton. The other, a skinhead in steel-tipped boots, had dressed as himself for New Year’s Eve. His t-shirt read in German: “I Belong Here. Do you?”
A tall African in camouflage gear shook Mehmet’s shoulder and muttered in English: “Brother, I’m ready for your deal.”
Mehmet winked. “Wait a minute, my man.” First, he asked Hamid in German: “Do you need my back-up, brother?”
“No. This I’ll do by myself.”
Hamid nudged and slid his way to where Olga—tossing a yellowed bridal veil—danced wildly with both her friends. Her gown was torn, and her bra’s black lace showed at the roots of her arms.
“Join us,” she teased, and her breath reeked of wine. “Guys, this is Hamid; he goes to my school.”
“You were supposed to meet me outside!” he bawled.
“Happy New Year, everybody!” the DJ shouted, his skin tone café au lait, his features Asian. Dreadlocks dangled from the wimple of his starched, black-and-white nun’s habit.
“So I came a little late.” Olga danced away from Hamid.
“Two hours!”
“Stop bothering her,” the skinhead warned. Hamid tugged her arm.
“He’s always bothering me...” she complained.
“Clear out, Arab,” spat the hard-faced boy. “Go back to driving camels.” Hamid punched wildly, grazing his chin.
“You idiot,” the German spluttered and turned his back with contempt. Something flashed in the skeleton’s hand. Stumbling backwards, his side on fire, Hamid crashed into the DJ’s station, knocking aside a turntable. The music throbbed on as the youth in the nun’s habit held him: “Man, you’re bleeding.”
“It hurts,” he moaned.
“Somebody call an ambulance!”
Hamid gaped down at his own streaming blood and fainted.

“Can you identify the other boy?” the blond policewoman asked, bending over his bed.
“On the back of his head’s a tattoo,” said Hamid. “‘Live Your Dream,’ in English.”
“Was he the one who stabbed you?”
“No. He tried to help me stop.”
“Then why did you punch him?”
“He called me a swine. It was his friend the skeleton who stabbed me.”
Amineh lurched in, crying out in Pashto. “Ma’am, we’re pretty busy,” the policewoman’s brawny partner grumbled. He spoke German with a Turkish lilt. “We need to take down the protocol now. Can you wait outside for a minute?”
“Oh, let her sit,” Hamid groaned. “She is just my mother.” Standing up, the big-boned policeman offered her the room’s only chair. “Akmet, let’s get some coffee in the canteen,” the petite policewoman suggested. “We’re overdue for our break.” She warned Hamid, “We’ll be back in exactly 20 minutes.”
“Danke schön,” Amineh said softly as they left. She pulled the chair to the bed, sat down and clasped Hamid’s chilly hand.
“Mother, it is nothing,” he told her in Pashto sheepishly. “They have sewed me up.”
“I always think of your father in this cursed place—may he rest in Paradise!”
“It’s pure chance the Germans brought me here. Mother, I will not die.”
“Why did you take my money?” Her tears dropped on his spotted sheet, and he reached up to pat her headscarfed head. “Fifty euros this time---missing from my jar in the kitchen.”
“I borrowed it---to pay back Mehmet for my books for school.”
“That bad Turkish boy!” she wailed, letting go of Hamid’s hand as a big-bellied nurse barged in.
“Please, Mrs. Aryanzai. The police interrupted us before.”
“Why does he not have a full IV?” she burst out. “And a room with a window, like everybody else? Just because we are foreigners here.”
Hamid rolled his eyes at the peeling ceiling. “Hush, Mother...”
“Every bed in this ward is full tonight, madam, and we’re short-staffed for the holidays.”
“I was a doctor in Afghanistan! Look at this bed—stained with his blood.”
“We’re going to change his bed now, madam. Won’t you let us do our work?”
“Leave us, Mother,” Hamid ordered, shamed by her tears and her battered shoes.
Shaking her head, Amineh staggered from the room. Oh she’d lost Rashid in this same ward; she recognized the print of awful, spiky sunflowers...

Doors hissed open, and Amineh wiped her tears with her hands as she boarded the elevator, which bumped and sank. She found herself back on the main floor, whose wall clock read almost 3 AM.
She saw a sign for the canteen and hurried in the opposite direction. A door opened into a large, dim space, where twin candles flickered on a shelf. A giant in black came gliding out, a silver cross swinging from his neck.
“Can I go in?” she choked.
“Certainly. All are welcome,” he rumbled in a Russian accent, hurrying away. Chairs were arranged for a show inside, and she sank into the nearest one and closed her eyes. Tears leaked from behind her lids.
This double shift at the Home, with the bitter nurses working on New Year’s Eve. Nurse Lederer gloating how the police had her boy, in the hospital... And Hamid, who was hurt, was lying to her again, about the money...
Amineh opened her eyes and found a third candle glowing on the shelf to her left. Why did I hear no steps, she wondered. When it is quiet as the tomb. Maybe Rashid wants to tell me not to feel afraid.
She saw a table in front with an empty cross, an open book---and a scroll-shaped package for the Jews. Then, with a shock, she made out the mihrab niche to her right. So all the religions were supposed to inhabit this room? Just like Social Housing.
Three panels hung on the wall beyond the table. The middle one showed a sunny building, with windows of flower-like faces smiling: a happy place to live. The left panel held a green landscape, animals browsing beside a clear, blue river. Such a peaceful scene. No people at all...
No life gleamed from the right-hand panel’s monumental rocks pressed by a leaden sky that had forgotten the sun, the moon and the stars. Are these pictures supposed to show us the garden, Paradise and Hell? she mused. Or nature, human life and death? Can anyone agree about such things?
She heard a hesitant tapping then, and a skinny woman like one of the Home’s “Rubble-Women”---who boast how they cleared the war’s debris, brick by brick and stone by stone when their menfolk were all dead or crippled or starving in Russia as prisoners of war---came shaking in on a metal crutch.
This woman (she’d make a fine mate for the General) pulled a bit of lace from her leather purse and placed it on her almost hairless head. With a nod to Amineh, she knelt on a cushion between the rows of chairs, a cushion waiting to warm and soften the polished floor---and for a few, slow-breathing minutes, the two women shared this room for sharing.
Then the German crossed herself and struggled back to her feet. As she limped away, rapping her crutch like the ticking of an enormous clock, shyly she smiled at Amineh, who nodded.
Slowly, Amineh untied her flowered headscarf. She dug out her brush, and brushed her still-thick, long black hair, and let it breathe. It smelled of the Home’s disinfectant; but in this dim chamber, where incense had burned, the lemon seemed almost like perfume.
I will march back upstairs like a German, she resolved, and bundled her scarf into her purse. I will tell those heartless nurses what I think of their dirty room! Maybe they will listen, if I look them in the eye. We have our right to live in this country, Hamid---oh my son.