He pushed his way through the silence that had instantly descended at his entrance. The back of his neck prickled from imagined stares that were probably not following him at all but made him feel like an outsider, importing foreign weirdness: a samurai perhaps, in a dragon helmet and lizard armor and studded with swords; or a camel with a cage on its hump, a Turkish crescent jingling exotically; or Caesar and Cleopatra driving a yoke of leopards. He felt their glances, believed the sea-blue, blinking eyes of the coastal populace directed toward him, as if sizing up his value as driftwood. He saw it at work behind their high foreheads, beneath their unruly corn-yellow thatches, saw how the worldly wisdom of these port-city inhabitants was piecing together what to make of his strange appearance, saw himself dissected into various exotic elements and then slapped back together at clumsy angles, saw how their sensory equipment palpated those angles, seeing if they hadn’t injured or rubbed themselves raw on something like this before, if open hostility was called for, or at the very least caution, suspicion, basic disapproval . . . He saw reddish-blond wives embarrassed by their gender becoming restless, shifting in their seats, putting themselves on display. . . but no, it was just his imagination, he knew they were paying hardly any attention to him, not even as an interruption of their dribble of conversation. Their silence didn’t mean anything, it was an involuntary reflex of seaport inhabitants who were used to foreigners but had never entirely accepted them. Everyone who came in snapped their brittle sentences in two, and they only grew back together once he had passed. They didn’t need to look up to have him sense that he wasn’t one of them. They weren’t hostile, he felt, or even curious, only forewarned against foreignness. Nevertheless, the few steps to the bar were as far as in a dream, when gravity seems both suspended and multiplied a hundred times, so that lead weights on our feet hurry us toward a goal we will never reach.

Don’t look back, he told himself. It’s like a fairy tale: whoever looks back turns into a stone beside the path. A group of teenage boys blocked his way to the bar, would-be hipsters in what passed for fashion in Germany: blue jeans and cowboy boots, their greasy blond hair combed into Elvis ducktails. One broad back in a leather vest blocked his way. To avoid bumping into it, he loudly cleared his throat. No luck. With more irritation in his voice than intended, he said, “Pardon me!”

That was a mistake. He realized it from the faces that turned toward him, suddenly alert as hunters. “Pardon me” was a foreign affectation no true foreigner would ever use. It placed him pretentiously outside their communality, was intended to create class distance. It wasn’t a foreigner who said something like that, it was a prodigal brother and therefore an enemy. He stood there, waiting, his heart beating. The back in the leather vest turned so minimally to let him pass that he brushed against it. He suppressed the impulse to shove it brutally out of the way. Such temptations befell him all too often. The anger that surged up and then sank back helplessly was his soul’s daily fare. It nourished his hatred.