It is half past eight in the evening. Soon I will put on rubber gloves to help Alparslan, the owner, scrub the gunk off the spit roasts. I will then sweep the floors, wipe the counters and cycle home to call it a day. Suddenly I feel my phone vibrate. It is Hasan calling. I met him at a coffeehouse in Neuhof some weeks back and ran across him there on and off since. He tells me he and Numan are going to Karlsruhe. I remember Numan from the same coffeehouse. A Turkish man in his mid-twenties who came to Strasbourg after marrying a woman of Turkish origin born in France.
They call men like him ithal damatlar [imported grooms] here, a pejorative particularly poignant for men yet to father a child, as they are expected to remain subservient to their wives and in-laws to retain residency. I know these trips to Karlsruhe.
They always end up at what is commonly known as the Volkswagen Garage. That is the Red-Light Street on Brunnenstrasse. I came here to write an ethnography on burial practices in the diaspora by focusing on a recently opened Muslim-only cemetery. They mentioned the return home as a goal, but few seemed to have managed to pull it off. Instead, they were joined in France by their kin and wives who brought their children along and gave birth to others.
He was born in the early s. I could have stayed in mosques, talked to men about the past and written my dissertation on it.
I thought I was getting a ride home. Instead he drove me to the German town next door, Kehl. The first stop was a coffeehouse packed with men smoking and playing cards. We then headed off to a tobacco shop on the autobahn. After buying cigarettes, he took me upstairs to a casino. Following a quick stroll, we got back in the car, where he took me to another one.
