A pear in the face of Lump Lumpy Lump I want to tell you a little story about the German Orient-Institute in Beirut back in the day. It was a place of party and posturing like there is no tomorrow. On a hot night in August 1997, someone whom I lost track of threw his farewell party. We were dancing and clapping to Oriental and non-Oriental tunes. One guy freaked out when a song from Boney M. or of similar quality was playing, he jumped around and shouted: This is good bad music. We want good bad music! His father was a famous Iraqi writer, the author of a book about Saudi-Arabia called Cities of Salt. It is one of the few books in Arabic which I kept in my shelf after I last moved, but one of the many Arabic books I haven´t read. There was a Polish girl called Dagmara in a nice black dress, an Archaelogist who on a later visit asked me how a country like Germany which produced Johann Sebastian Bach could end up so unlike Bach and destroy everything he stood for, namely grace and beauty (my words). I wanted to impress her, so when I had finished eating that pear I took what was left of it, threw it in the air and kicked it hard, so it would end up in neighbours garden, an Armenian school now closed. This is how male primates calculate: Words don´t mean much to females, it´s actions. Now this piece of pear headed in the wrong direction, though, bad technique on my side. It ended up in the face of the Institute´s librarian, a man called Lemke who often complained about the hard work he had to do, but which in my view didn´t really exist. Books bought years ago were piling up in his study. Listening to Snoop Doggy Dog now and then, I called the librarian Lump Lumpy Lump behind his back (a lump being a scoundrel in German). He took the pain like a movie star, I have to say. He couldn´t otherwise: He was just boasting to this other charming woman about how gunmen had tried to kidnap him but were outsmarted (he ran away or something). Later on, we were tumbling by now, one of the neighbours hurled a big onion at us, using as cover the dark of the night. Too much good bad music, I guess. Those were the days when Beirut was recovering from years of pain and the German Institute was run by Angelika Neuwirth, one of the most excentric yet lovable persons I have met. P.S. I also learned what pear means in Polish: grushka. Reinoud Leenders Eva Goes Larissa Bender Ahmad Hissou
Posted on: Sun, 24 Aug 2014 13:43:34 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015