Circle Around the Sun

by M. D. Johnson

  “React differently?” exclaimed Rose, “He damn near marked you up for life!”

  “Oh, Oh. Here it comes Osita. It’s your song,” interrupted Mike, “Sixty Minute Man!”

  “Come on, Osita, dance with me,” Emily laughed, grabbing her fruit juice and taking a very big ‘schlug’ as she pushed him onto the tiny dance floor under the spotlight.

  The crowd was singing along with the chorus, “I dig my body...I’m a Sixty Minute Man!” they chanted and clapped in rhythm. Emily’s slightly pregnant form was swaying to the pounding rhythm and Osita smiled broadly. “You know woman, you dance like an African.”

  “Not bloody surprising considering my dad’s a Berber,” she answered with a grin, thickening her accent in imitation of his.

  “You know, sometimes you sound Nigerian.”

  “Actually, Osita, if I was Nigerian my English would probably be better,” she quipped. The crowd made a circle around the couple, all assuming that they were celebrating the advent of their child as a result of a ‘Sixty Minute Man’ marathon.

  It was at this point of the merrymaking that Emily spun around and saw Mustafa. He grinned menacingly and pointed two fingers, then gestured slitting her throat.

  No veiled threat there, she thought to herself, now convinced that she had conceivably the worst timing in the world.

  Osita and Emily left ‘The Cave’ and walked back down the Hauptstrasse. “Feel like some coffee?” she asked nervously, “How about Mustafa’s hangout, Café Straub?”

  They walked into what looked like a student ‘lokale’. Unlike the trendy upscale coffee houses and bars Emily usually frequented, Café Straub had no international flavor. It was almost entirely filled with German students. There were a few dark skinned young people there, perhaps Arabic or East Asian, but no Americans or Africans. The air was hostile with revolution. There were two men there she recognized. One of them actually waved his hand in mock salute while the other glared.

  A skinny, long haired, blonde woman with a penetrating stare spoke to an eager crowd. “You are the slaves of the Capitalists. Look at yourselves. They own you. Can’t you understand what’s happening to your country? The Amerikaners own us. We are under their control. They have bastardized our language, stolen our culture and still we sit back and let them. I told the bastards when they put me in their flea-infested prison that I’m not interested in burning mattresses I’m interested in the children being burned in Viet Nam. We will serve the people. We will educate the people, but we have to represent them first. Alle macht dem volk!”

  “Power to the people? Christ, that’s funny. Here they are ranting about Americans while stealing their student slogans. That’s pretty bloody original. Who is this chick, Osita?” whispered Emily.

  “If I’m not mistaken, her name is Gudrun Ensslin. She’s just finished serving time with her boyfriend Andreas Baader, who is now very much in league with the Meinhof woman. You remember her, she was at your flat before you and whatshisname split up,” Osita added sarcastically.

  ‘I thought Baader was in jail for firebombing some warehouses in Frankfurt a few years ago. I remember Mustafa talking about them like they were gods or something. He calls them the proletariat nightmare, or something.”

  “Hey Armee, if you can’t listen, get the fuck out!” A young woman glared at the couple.

  “Easy, woman .We’re not American, we’re students like you,” Osita replied in German

  “Then shut up and you might learn something,” the girl answered nastily.

  ”Hoehr doch auf,” yelled someone else.

  “Maybe we should go back to my place. This is a little too left for my blood.”

  “Can’t imagine why. After all, she has some viable points I suppose. the Americans and the British have impressed themselves upon the Bundes Republik. Their presence is everywhere. I understand why they should feel colonized. I can relate. In fact, Nigeria had the same atmosphere not too long ago. Actually Ensslin’s a bit of a moralist really. She was born in Schwabia, her father is a minister. She won a scholarship, I hear she’s very, very bright, reads English and Philosophy and I think was a teacher before she became a fulltime upstart, or should I say revolutionary. She has a child as well, that’s how I know her. I was in residency when she went into delivery. I understand the father committed suicide and now she’s the love interest of Andreas Baader. Baader is not an intellectual. He’s just a thug. He just likes to hang around with brainy women. Do you remember an artist named Ellinor Michel? A very lovely woman, sort of a Bohemian-Existentialist, you know the type, very nineteen fifties, early sixties, dresses in black. A cross between the French sex symbol Bridgette Bardot and Juliet Greco, the actress singer. Very artsy. Anyway, Ellinor Michel was just that type, so now she’s an ex-lover too. That Baader gets around. They have a little girl, although I think at the time she was married to someone else. He lived with her for a while. Treated her abominably, so I hear. He’s like that. He lives in a fantasy. A sort of James Dean in German. Women just love him. I’ve seen him walk into a room and take complete control. It’s not that he’s charming, he’s just intense. I imagine that Byron was like that, but at least Byron was a blueblood and the superfluousness was expected. Andreas Baader, on the other hand, simply emanates power. He doesn’t have a brain! You have to see the man in person.” Osita signaled the waiter and paid the bill. “Christ, the anarchy is thick in here,” he said laughingly, motioning to the door. They took a final sip of tea and left.

  On the way home it began to register to Emily that Osita probably knew more about politics and radical student groups in Germany than anyone else she’d ever met. In fact, the three of them, Rose, Mike and Osita were more than aware of everything that went on within the student ‘politikale’. Emily began to wonder why. They were, after all from Nigeria, a place with its own set of problems. Why the interest in Germany anyway? They were former medical students not sociologists. All of them had been educated in England. Rose and Mike at Oxford, and Osita had studied Tropical Medicine in Liverpool, and done his post graduate work in Berlin. Rose and Mike had been Emily's friends for years. Even their parents knew each other. It wasn’t a question of trusting the three of them. She did. But there was something that just didn’t have the right feel to it.

  It seemed to her that they frequently knew the answers before she asked the questions. Maybe it was her imagination. They were always one or two steps ahead of her questions. It was almost as though they anticipated her thoughts. Ghulam had never liked them. Not because they were African, but because they all seemed so phony to him. ”Plastic,” he used to say. “The Americans have it right, Plastic People.”

  Christ, she thought to herself, I’m so bloody confused. I miss you Ghulam. I miss your smile. What the hell has gone wrong? How could something like this happen? I love you. I dance with someone at our wedding and you have a shit fit and drop off the planet. It’s obscene. She thought back to the first time they had ever made love. He’d waited for her in his one room apartment, over a store on Rohrbacherstr, near where they both worked in the summer. The room, although tiny had a fantastic view of the River Neckar. At night when the buildings were lit it was pure magic. Ghulam had brought wine even though he didn’t drink and had made hors d’oevres. He’d even covered the bathroom sink with large tray on which he placed a gigantic red silk scarf and on top he’d filled the tray with food and drink. He had lit red candles and drawn an oil scented bath for her. She luxuriated in the perfume while drinking the rare Westhofener Steingrube he’d found as he fed her smoked salmon, cream cheese and caviar. Afterwards they made love on the plump goose down duvet listening to Brahms, and perhaps the most beautiful music she had ever heard by the Iranian composer Javad Marufi. Her heart had almost burst with the love and tenderness that he had shown her. She was a virgin, and perhaps he had been too. She had never asked. It had been inconsequential. He had taken her carefully, gently, worshipping her with his every gesture. He had been her first man an
d she would never forget that.

  “Hey, Emily where are you?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I was away with the fairies, as they say at home. Got a little lost in thought.”

  Letting herself out of the car as they reached the house, she was aware of a tingling, scary feeling in her back and shoulders. Her father had told her that he had always known when he was being watched in the old days in Egypt and Palestine during ‘the troubles’ as he called it. He’d get a peculiar feeling in his back and he believed he could actually sense someone watching him from behind.

  She turned and looked around quickly trying to catch someone, but saw not even a shadow. The parkplatz in front of her three story building on Peterstaler Strasse was well lit but empty.

  “Osita, there’s someone else out here watching us, I can feel it,” she said as she took out her key to open the door.

  “I don’t see a soul, Em. You’re just upset after seeing Mustafa. Come on, let’s get you inside. Hot milk and honey and you’ll be fine.”

  “Just what the doctor ordered, right?” she said feeling calmer.

  “Right,” he replied as they climbed the stone stairway to her luxury apartment one flight up.

  ‘I’ll fix some hot milk,” he said, heading to the kitchen with its Italian tiled floor and elaborate kitchen furnishing and appliances. “This place is fantastic Emily. How in the hell did you find it?”

  “I literally put an ad in “The Rhein-Neckar Zeitung” which said, ‘Foreign female executive of substantial means looking for luxury six room apartment with a five year lease with option.’ That way there were no surprises when I showed up with a flashy smile and a big bank roll. The owners are great. Their son got married last year and he lives downstairs. Although on his wedding night an alarm kept going off every half hour. His dad and brother built the house and put this thing into the wall. It had a timer. The brother is a student at the University as well. I think he may have even been at Café Straub tonight. Wait a minute, the other chap was Axel Stadler, he was here as well with his wife and the Meinhof woman. Good grief, that means my landlord’s son Rainer Mayerhofer was the short bespectacled man with Stadler!” He had recognized her, she thought to herself. Christ, I hope he doesn’t think I’ve anything to do with that lot.

  Osita made himself at home, lounging on the plush amber velvet couch Emily had purchased especially for Ghulam. The place looked very Middle Eastern and had lots of Afghani cushions scattered around, with spectacular carpets brought back by friends, and large camel saddle bags for decoration. In front of the stone fireplace hung a large reproduction of the Victorian painting, ‘Arab at Prayer’, by Charles Theodore Friere which Ghulam had bought for her in light of her Berber ancestors. She loved the painting. It’s sky almost beckoned the subject in a call to prayer. It was, she had always felt, a gentle reminder of her ancestry, the very thing that made her different from everyone else.

  “Osita,” she asked seriously, “how is it that you and the Otus know so much about German radicals?”

  “I suppose,” he said, not taken as off guard as she expected, “You could call it simple observation, my dear Emily.”

  “Rubbish!” she said snottily, “You are a veritable encyclopedia on these people and so is Rose. Oh shit, don’t tell me all three of you work for MI6 or the CIA.”

  “Emily, my dear, I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you. It’s getting late anyway and I have to make rounds at seven in the morning.”

  “Fair enough, Osita, thanks for being there for me,” she replied, noticing how he had effectively ignored her question and not realizing until several months later just how important any answer would have been.

  She let him out and hearing the front door close quietly downstairs went into the bathroom and turned on the shower, releasing the cold water and adjusting the temperature as she undressed to step inside. She thought she heard something, perhaps an angry shout and then nothing. “Must have been water in the pipes,” she thought aloud. Then came the pounding on her apartment door.

  “Emily, Let me in!” It was Osita, and he was covered in blood.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Emily opened the door and Osita fell in, clutching his stomach as blood from his nose seeped onto the beige hall carpet. She ran to the bathroom and quickly soaked towels to use as compresses. Grabbing cushions from the living room she raced back to him. Placing the cushions under the small of his back against the wall she propped him up and left him with the compresses on his nose as she went into the kitchen looking for anything that would pass for an ice pack. Finding two packages of frozen peas she returned.

  “What the hell happened to you?” she asked as she strategically placed the ice cold bags on both sides of his nose and cheeks, mopping up the blood with a wash cloth.

  “I was jumped outside.”

  “You mean attacked or robbed?”

  “Attacked. If you think I look bad, you should see him.”

  “Did you see who it was?”

  “Not really well but I think it was Mustafa!”

  “Let me call the Polizei.”

  “No. Don’t do that. There are other ways and he’s in much worse shape than I am.”

  “There’s nothing broken,” he said, examining his nose and cheekbones, “and I warded off his kick with a few of my own. Karate does come in handy I suppose,” he said spitting blood into the towel. The other one had to help him back into their car. They drove off.”

  “The other one?” she exclaimed. “Oh Jesus, Osita, what have I gotten you into. All you have done is try to help me.”

  “What really pisses me off is that he fucked up my tape deck and,” reaching into his pocket and taking out the broken plastic remains, “totally destroyed these,” holding up the Rufus Thomas and War eight track cartridges. “Fucking bastards!”

  A short while later Emily poured hot cups of sweet, strong Earl Grey tea as Osita lay propped up on the settee.

  “Do you know, when World War II was declared my English granny rang the bell for tea? It’s the cure for all evils. Drink up. I’ll make some toast to go with it if you’re up to it.”

  “Typical,” he replied, trying not to laugh.

  “So now tell me exactly what happened.”

  “When I left your apartment and went downstairs into the parking lot, I found that my car door was unlocked. I heard something, turned around and saw headlights behind me, close enough to make my eyes water as they were very bright. Then somebody pushed me from behind and I fell and hit the car. He was standing over me. As I got up I kicked him a couple of times in the gut and he fell. Someone else dragged him into the car and they drove off. It took maybe three or four minutes at the most.”

  “This is getting to be really scary, but what made you think it was Mustafa?”

  “The coat. I recognized the embroidery on the coat.”

  “Ah yes. It does stand out a bit. winter, summer, all year long. He has a thing about it. It reminds him of the time he and Ghulam went to Afghanistan and Morocco a few years ago. He bought the coat on the Iranian border and wore it on the trip home. The fur lining was stuffed with hashish.”

  “You’re kidding! Ghulam is a doper?”

  “Actually no. Ghulam had no idea until they were actually back in Frankfurt that Mustafa came back equipped with sufficient blond hashish to fill a small trunk.”

  “How the hell did they get back in to Germany without getting caught by Customs?"

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Ghulam’s father is a Diplomat. The baggage sailed through the “Zollamt” with Mustafa in tow.”

  “Does he go often?” he inquired.

  “Every two or three months. He also visits Turkey frequently too. Why?”

  ‘Just interested. Do you mind if I spend the night on the couch. I feel totally rotten.”

  “Not at all, Osita. There is a guest room, so you don’t have to sleep on the couch. Help yourself.”

  “If it’s all right with you, I ne
ed to make a few calls to the hospital. I’m going to schedule a few X-rays tomorrow morning just in case.”

  “I’m turning in, Osita, if you don’t need anything else.”

  “Go ahead. I’m alright, really. Just a bit groggy and sore.”

  She picked up the blood soaked towels as she left the living room and turned toward the bathroom where her washer and dryer occupied a small makeshift laundry room close by. The door was open and she heard Osita’s voice. He was speaking in his native Ibo, in a dialect that he reserved only for the Otus.

  That’s odd, she thought to herself. Why would he call the hospital and speak in Ibo when they don’t work there? She closed the door softly and drew her bath; pouring in the green Badedas bath oil and watching thick, luxuriant bubbles fill the tub. The room was full of the aroma of horse chestnut and pine and it didn’t take long for the fragrance to increase her drowsiness. She added her French sea salt to the water, remembering her grandmother’s advice that salt was restorative and stepped into the bathtub. Lying there massaging her pregnant belly and trying to calm down she could still hear Osita’s voice. This time, however, he was speaking in English. She could her him quite clearly through the wall of the bathroom which was on the other side of the guestroom.

  “Tony,” Osita said, “I do believe this is worth looking into. He is the only hope we have and I will see you tomorrow to give you more information. No. She has no idea and yes, it is a long shot, ok?”

  Who in the hell was he talking to at this hour of the night, she wondered. It certainly can’t be the hospital and it didn’t sound like he was making arrangements for x-rays. The entire conversation with this person was in English yet the one previously had been in Ibo, his native tongue.

  “Osita, who are you talking to? Is there someone here?” she called from the bathroom.

  “Just filling Rose and Mike in. It’s alright. Nothing going on,” he replied, somewhat overconfidently.

  Pure bullshit, Osita, she thought to herself. You must think I’m really stupid. Damn right you were talking the Otus or perhaps some other Ibo at first but who the hell is Tony and what is so interesting that you may be looking further into it. Keep your own counsel Emily, she reminded herself. No doubt it will all unfold itself at the right time.