An unknown person

What can we say, life is like a movie.

Before he died, he had set aside money for the plane tickets of all the children, daughters-in-law and sons-in-law and grandchildren and entrusted them to someone in the family so that they could all fly to his funeral. When he died, the plane tickets for all of them were bought with this money, and he was buried in this way with his own money. He always had enough money in his wallet, that was important to him, it was always full. He was very thrifty, some of us say "stingy". And at the same time he was generous. As if he never wanted to feel deprived again. When he said goodbye to his wife to go to Germany, he said: "I'm going and when I've earned 100,000 lira, I'll come back." He only returned for good at his own funeral.

When he was still alive, we were all together, we visited each other, celebrated together, lived together. Today, we all live our own lives. He was important to us, perhaps he was the most important of all, but we couldn't get close to him. He didn't want to hug us. We said: "That's enough, we want to hug you now." But he didn't want to. As a child, he had never known love. There was no mother and certainly no father. His father didn't even exist. His mother was gone. He saw her maybe once a year. He showed his feelings so rarely that we remember exactly those few moments when he did. Once there was a big spider in our room, we were scared and cried. We were allowed to spend the night in his bed, he hugged us and we fell asleep in his arms. Shortly before he died, he was lying on the sofa and suddenly said: "Thank you. I was happy with you!" We said in amazement that we were surprised. He said, "Me too." We laughed and said, "God bless you."

We never saw him in jeans. They did exist, but he always wore cloth pants. He was always neatly and elegantly dressed. He loved to dress well. He loved ties and suits. He loved taking care of himself. He also loved his non-existent hair. He really loved his non-existent hair. There's even a photo of it.

His hair was longer on one side. He washed his hair, combed it to the other side and sprayed it. He sprayed it again and again throughout the day. He combed his thinning hair and pulled the individual hairs apart to make it look like more. He must have cut the hair on the other side every day, because there were always these little hairs in the bathroom. He took great care of himself. He was a very well-groomed man.

At night he wore a kind of turban or headscarf made of a yellow fabric. We can't say for sure whether he did this to keep from getting cold or whether he didn't want us to see his bald patches. He was probably worried that his hair would otherwise shift. He didn't want his bald head to be seen at any price.

He was very sensitive about that. We never saw him with stubble. He was always perfectly shaven.

He was very careful with his clothes. After he died, we counted almost 20 suits in Turkey and here. He always went out in a suit, to a café, to a concert, to the movies. He also sat at home in a suit.

He loved clothes and old things, especially old furniture. We often complained about his stinginess. But it wasn't just thriftiness, because he also bought expensive things. He collected things at markets and antique stores and brought them home. The things always had a soul.

He liked dark colors. You could see that in the things he bought from antique dealers. They were always very dark. Shades of green, brown, black... Dark blue... They were always so dark. In all the photos you can see the green armchair, the green chairs, the old brown wooden table. In the summer he might sometimes wear a shirt with a pattern ... but he rarely wore brighter colors.

As far as he was concerned, he was always fine. We always asked: How are you? And he would say: I'm fine. We never heard that he was unwell.

He was six months old when his father died. His mother had been married at 15 and was now a widow as a teenager. She had several sisters and one of these sisters had died at the same time. The family married his mother off to her deceased sister's fiancé. But the family wanted to keep the baby because he was a male offspring. His mother cried and screamed: "I'm not leaving without my child!", but she had to leave him and his aunt took him to another village that day so that he wouldn't find out. His mother now lived a few villages away, but she was not allowed to see him. Once a day he was taken to a place in the middle between the villages so that she could breastfeed him, then he was taken away from her again.

Shortly before he died, he told us that this was where he had caught his lung disease. He often had to sleep in the shed, on the cold concrete floor. It was not the cancer, but this that was to blame for his suffering. Sometimes, when he told us about this time, he would curse: "Now I have money, but they only love me because I have money. Before, I didn't even have shoes on my feet. They had two pairs, but they didn't give me any. I often had to stay outside and they treated me like dirt." He was beaten by the aunts and their children, there was hardly anything to eat, it was a bleak childhood.

When he died, we found receipts, he had kept them all since 1949. From the time he started working, he sent money to his aunts until they died. There were lots of receipts.

One day, when he was six years old, he was able to go back to his mother, because his mother's husband was a good man. He came riding into the village on a horse and took him with him. We can still hear his voice as he talks about it: "What can I say, we were happy. I recognized my mother immediately, I hugged her and we cried."

Life is an old apartment in Berlin with high walls, green chairs, a hexagonal green clock and a carefully laid breakfast table. Everything was always very orderly. He insisted on it because he had fixed working hours. He never skipped breakfast, even when he was on the early shift. Tea was always made at home in the morning and the breakfast table was set. How long had it been like that? Always. It had always been like that, such images have no beginning.

If we think about him, we can come up with a hypothesis: there are individuals who are well suited to alcohol. He was someone like that. He was just waiting to be able to drink and be happy. When he had a drink, he became so cheerful, had so much fun and played with us. His house was an open house. We met just like that, came and went. Without cause, without reason, just to be together. He had two cassettes. Metin Türk. Zühtü, whenever we hear it, we think of him. He was a good dancer. He would stand on the table and tap his foot. His hobby was to meet up with his family at the weekend and sit together in one of the apartments, that was it.

He loved animal documentaries and movies and went to the cinema at weekends. Do the musicians at a concert come from Turkey? Then we got dressed up and went. Türkan Soray, Ibrahim Tatlıses, Nuri Sesi Güzel. He loved entertainment. He bought us a cassette by Nuri Selçuk Güzel. Hakkı Bulut.

He didn't like it when his wife prayed. He didn't like it when she covered her head. He incited us to pull the scarf off her head during prayer. He promised us five marks for it. Five marks is a lot ... We did it and he really enjoyed it. He just laughed.

He wanted the triangular "little ears" manti from time to time. Apart from that, he had no particular preferences. Three weeks before he died, he said on the phone: "Prepare a barbecue, I'm coming over." We said, "OK, Baba, come on, we've prepared it." That evening, he sat on the balcony next to the barbecue, all proud and content. He hardly ate anything. It wasn't about the food. He probably just wanted to be with us and was looking for an original reason. He always came up with excuses to come to us.

He often wanted to watch old videos with us: Family celebrations, weddings, vacations, that kind of thing. He'd say: "Get everyone together and put on a tape." They all collected videos like that back then.

When he was 13-14 years old, his childhood was declared over. He worked as a shepherd in the village. The village was in Central Anatolia, two and a half hours' drive east of Ankara. The word hours by car didn't exist back then when he went to Ankara at the age of 16-17. Today we say "we're going to Ankara or New York or Germany". But he really did walk, maybe a truck took him a few kilometers. How long was he on the road? Maybe a day? We don't know. In the big city, he worked as a porter at the Ankara bus station. He didn't have any money for the bus home. He carried the travelers' luggage on his back. He couldn't afford accommodation. He slept under bridges on a spread-out newspaper.

He was married off to a girl from the neighborhood. They didn't know each other. She was 15 and he was perhaps 16 or 17? Her parents hesitated: "She is still a child and he? He's a child of misery, an orphan!" He worked hard to save money for the wedding. Soon after, he had to join the army. His wife waited for him for two years. But even after that they hardly saw each other, because after the army he had to go back to work at the bus station in Ankara to earn money.

In the mid-sixties, there were "Germany lists". You could register here if you wanted to work in Germany. He signed up. The papers said that you had to come to Istanbul for a kind of entrance exam. He went to Istanbul twice and said that they had looked at his backside and "everything else" and that everything was fine. So we sent him away to Germany. God, it hurt. He left his wife behind, she was 22 at the time, and his two children, they were 6 and 2 years old. Shortly before he died, he actually wanted to go back to Turkey. But we couldn't allow him to, he wouldn't have been able to make the trip.

The asbestos looks like cement. As long as it is bound, it is not dangerous. But it breaks down over time and pulverizes. You have to magnify it two hundred thousand times with a microscope. It is a kind of dust that is inhaled. The particles have small edges, like barbs. When we inhale normal dust, it is expelled again through coughing. But asbestos dust gets stuck and stays inside. Once it gets into the diaphragm, the body cannot expel it by coughing or the pressure of the diaphragm. Then it stays there. It is a tiny dust that is invisible to the eye, but it stays there like a splinter. Depending on how resistant the body is, it stays there for 10, 20 or 25 years. It starts with the membrane. Then it causes inability to breathe and water accumulates in the body. The asbestos has blown up its bronchial tubes at the end. The particles look like a harpoon. And the body can no longer get rid of it. The bronchial tubes stick together from the dust. The stronger you are, the longer you live. But as soon as you are weakened, you die from it. He came alone, lived alone and died alone.

Between 1950 and 1987, 4.4 million tons of asbestos were used in Germany. In 1993, the manufacture and processing of asbestos was banned in Germany.

He came to Germany and was never to return. He was called a guest worker. The word contains a promise: that you can return when the work is over. But this generation was cheated out of it. They worked hard, but only a few of them were able to enjoy what they had earned in retirement. Most of them came to return rich at some point, but they died before they were sixty or sixty-five years old. Hardly any of his colleagues are still alive. They have all died. But there are no statistics on that. Of course there aren't. They are the ones who have suffered the most. But there is nothing to remember their work.

When he came to Germany, he immediately started working at Eternit in Rudow. He rented a dilapidated attic for 80 marks, nobody rented apartments to migrants back then. We know almost nothing about his work. Everyone who could tell us something died before him, his colleagues, his friends. Eternit was an economic miracle. The German home with Eternit shingles, Eternit roofs, Eternit flower pots in front of the house. A material for the miracle of prosperity: cheap, easy to work with, durable. And best of all: incombustible.

He worked in two layers. They made panels from asbestos cement. This mixture arrived on the conveyor belt and he cut it. He used his hands and his stick to cut the finished panels. They were required to wear masks at work, but he never wore one. Nobody wore a mask back then. There were no checks. In the end, they closed the factory and paid him a disability pension.

He brought his wife to Germany. She left the children behind in Turkey. She worked as a cleaner in an office. He took her there by bus every morning. It wasn't until the end of the 1970s that his children were able to come to Berlin. In all that time, he only saw them on vacation.

He sent us all to sleep before he died.

We stayed with him on his last day. His feet got cold. Many people came and went. We washed him and put lotion on him. He stretched out his feet, pulled them back. We said, "Baba, shall we give you a foot massage?" "No," he said at first. But after a second, he changed his mind.... He said, "All right, then." He stretched out his feet. They were cold. The doctor said we should be there until 9 or 10pm that day. The doctor told me that death had already begun.

But we didn't stay.

We were very sad, he didn't say anything to us. We didn't say anything either. We couldn't bear it. He looked at us as if to say: save me.

He was short of breath and said he was burning hot. He was short of breath and he was sweating profusely when we left. "I'm burning up inside." He told us to leave and come back in the morning. He sent us all away. We said, "Baba, we are leaving now, but we will come back in the morning,okay?" He said, "Come at seven o'clock." He waved to us. He waved goodbye to us. It was ten o'clock when we arrived home. When he died, we were all in bed, fast asleep. Everyone was asleep. His wife was also in hospital and asleep. He died looking into her face. When she woke up, she told us, he was looking at her. He woke up. A few minutes before he died, he woke up again. He said, "Let me drink some of your famous yogurt soup." He drank the soup and fell asleep, less than 10 minutes passed.

The phone rang shrilly. We picked up and heard a groan in the distance.

He died alone, there was no one there. He was always alone. He came to Germany when he was 27 or 28. He came and worked. He didn't go anywhere. He only visited his friends and neighbors.

He left us a list of names and numbers: People he gave money to, loans he helped, reasons why he hadn't gotten it back yet. It was a lot. He never got most of it back. He gave us the list and said with a smile: Look, this is how much I have. He didn't owe anyone anything.

He never had a car or a motorcycle. He didn't even have a bicycle. He didn't have a driver's license. He said, "If anything, I'll save up until I can buy a helicopter."

He was a good person. Unfortunately, good people die far too quickly. You work, you work. You're retired. You think, now you're comfortable, now you can rest. Then an illness strikes. He didn't live long. He saved the money for later. In the end he said to us: "Come on, bring me the money. Take it. No amount of money can bring back my health."

Photo: Jonas Grundner-Culemann