Until October 7th and the narrow-minded shenanigans of others intervened, they met every day. They played chess, Splendor, Azul and on rainy days, when they both had a lot of time, they played Axis and Allies, a game which tries to recreate the Second World War, purely on a strategic level. Most of all they swapped memories. When you are both 93 years old you have 186 years of memories to share and you know neither of you will be forming many new ones.
Now it’s got harder to meet, because Joachim’s sister, Marlene, has mobilized the whole family and the nursing home staff to keep Joachim busy, so he won’t find the time to meet his friend. Joachim is in a wheelchair, so someone needs to push him down the corridors of the nursing home and to the elevator if he wants to visit the friend he’s known for almost 40 years. A friend who’s helped him out countless times and vice versa. Joachim used to work as a welder at shipyards, he was competent enough to weld underwater and made a lot of money back in the day, but now osteoporosis has badly affected his hips and thighs and there is no longer any cartillage in his knees. Samir used to push him around town in his wheelchair, until they both ended up at the same nursing home.
Samir has obstacles of his own to meet up with Joachim. His nieces and nephews have written him a message in their Whatsapp group to please break off all contact with any zionists, including Joachim, however moderate and nuanced his views are. Samir’s sons and daughter, spread out all over the world, did not reply, which indicates that they agree. If Samir doesn’t start ignoring Joachim, they threaten not to visit anymore. Samir knows his family quite well. He knows they are serious. Though they won’t go so far as to cut off the money they send him each month to help with paying for the nursing home – the bill runs up to circa 1,800 euros a month, which is more than his pension – and groceries. Given the choice, he would prefer to keep their occasional visits and not get their financial support, even though the younger ones spend 95 percent of their time staring at their phones whenever they find the immense will-power to pop round.
Technically, Samir can walk over to Joachim’s room. It takes him half an hour with his strenuous, fatigued gait, but he is able to do it. The trouble is that Joachim’s sister, Marlene, quick, alert and nimble at 84, will find a way to stop him in his tracks. She always leaves her door open. Officially to let fresh air in, but really to spy on everyone. She will rush out of her room and tell him how tired Joachim is, or how they have just taken Joachim for his haircut or his rheuma therapy or he is out in the garden with his one surviving daughter discussing something very private. With her walking rack, which she doesn’t really need, she can position herself in such a way she blocks almost the entire corridor. He could theoretically get past her, but he doesn’t have the energy to deal with her bullshit. One of her most efficient tactics is to bore and disgust Samir with talk of her hemorrhoids, which he strongly doubts she even has. He suspects she has a light form of Munchhausen and feigns diseases to get attention from doctors.
It’s absurd, since only four floors and about 500 metres of corridors separate the old friends, but they now only text each other, like two teenagers who are grounded by their parents for causing some mischief. Texting using 93 old fingers and eyes feels like hard labour.
Especially Samir, an engineer by training, is quite tech savvy and they now play chess and Axis & Allies online, but it doesn’t have the same feel as being hunched over a board, sharing tea, brewed from fresh mint out of the nursing home’s garden, hearing each other’s voice, holding elegantly carved figurines between your fingers as you contemplate your strategy, trying to predict the next move your friend will make by studying his face, the face you have seen so often you know every tell, every wince, every grimace, every twitch and every frown it can form.
Samir can tell the difference between a grin that says Joachim is actually losing and a grin that says Joachim is rather pleased with the way things are going on the board, even though to an unfamiliar audience both grins look exactly the same. Joachim knows that Samir starts to casually stuff his mouth with olives, salty sticks or peanuts a lot faster when he has set up a trap for Joachim. Both run their fingers through their hair when they want to pretend they made a mistake and wish to entice the other to make an ill-advised attack.
Both are sore losers, but in different ways. Samir will criticize himself and lament how he wasn’t focused today and made one mistake after the other. Joachim will emphatically congratulate Samir on his victory and make a big show of shaking his hand, as if to convince himself that he is actually not a sore loser at all. He will then nonchalantly ask: ‘Two out of three?’ to try and undo his friend’s win.
There are no winners now. Over text messages they discuss the recent events in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon and all the other ‘players’ in this conflict. Samir thinks October 7th was an inside job, so Israel would have a splendid casus belli to commit genocide in Gaza and to finally go full steam ahead when it comes to the annexation of the West Bank. Joachim, a Jew who survived a 17 month internment at KZ Mauthausen, located near Linz, in Austria and now open to visitors, can’t believe that this was an inside job. He thinks that the Israeli army was caught off guard and out of sheer arrogance and feelings of superiority underestimated its enemy.
There are other differences. Samir thinks not a single rape took place on October 7th. Joachim assumes some rapes took place, but not necessarily by members of Hamas, perhaps by thugs who spilled through the security fence in the wake of Hamas. Joachim doesn’t think it’s genocide. His argument goes as follows: ‘If they wanted to commit genocide they could line everyone up and shoot every single one of them like the Nazi Einsatzgruppen did.’
Samir says that Israel gets a free pass and a lot of leeway on all of its actions, but outright shooting everyone from the get go would finally trigger an international response to call a halt to Israel’s invasion. ‘They are merely pacing themselves’, says Samir. ‘They did the same in 1947 and 1948, they slowly built up their ethnic cleansing actions and meticulously tried to convince the world everything they did was self-defense. The truth is that it was the other way around, the Jews were already expelling Palestinians half a year before the Arab armies came to intervene.’
Joachim agrees with everything Samir has to say about the Naqba. Just like Samir agrees with everything Joachim has to say about the Holocaust.
Samir was a teenager in 1948. His father worked at an oil refinery in Haifa and died when Jewish terrorists threw grenades in a crowd of Arab workers. Before that Jews and Arabs had been colleagues at the refinery and had strived to get better wages and better working conditions for everyone. Samir found his mother sobbing on the floor of their house one day. She lay there in a small ball like a foetus. He instantly knew his father was dead, she didn’t have to tell him. His mother didn’t have the heart to tell his younger sister what had happened and for two years his sister asked when daddy would be coming home from his journey on an oil tanker. Even as a teenager Samir had felt the well-intended lie caused more damage than the plain and simple, but harrowing truth. It was Samir who ended up tellling her. His mum didn’t speak to him for two weeks after that. His father was never spoken of again and his sister eventually erased all memories of her daddy. She died of ALS when she was only 42 and survived their mother by three years. Samir agrees when Canadian-Hungarian physician Gabor Maté asserts that ALS is a disease that strikes down the most easy going, nicest people who can’t say no to any request. Description fit his sister to a T. He thinks that because his sister took such good care of him he had all the time in the world to be a bit of a playboy in his twenties and thirties. Right after the Naqba the family suffered a lot and spent some time in refugee camps in three different countries, eventually ending up in relatively underdeveloped village close to Hebron.
After the death of his mother and his sister Samir managed to emigrate to West-Germany. The original plan was to go together with his mother and sister, but the whole process took five years to complete. It was too late for them.
Samir worked at a Döner Kebab job for 3,5 years and then, once his German was fluent enough, some years as a waiter in fancy restaurants. Saved all his money. Bought up houses in East-Germany right after the wall fell. Flipped them. Sold them to rich West-Germans and foreigners. Made good money. Travelled a lot. Got a family at the ripe age of 51. Slowed down. Devoted himself to his wife and kids. Didn’t really build up a pension though. Joined a chess club and met his best friend Joachim.
They had quite a lot in common. Joachim’s parents, Dutch Jews, had been deported to Auschwitz in 1943. A Catholic German farmer right across the border with the Netherlands had been hiding them for almost two years. They were betrayed by a neighbour, a friend of their benefactor who got angry over some minor dispute concerning the use of a communal barn. After the war he said he wouldn’t have done it if he had known what would happen to the family. He thought they would ‘merely’ be deported to a pioneer settlement in the east. The man was never prosecuted, because he hadn’t done anything unlawful. He offered Joachim a free tractor a small piece of land. Joachim didn’t respond to the offer, he hadn’t returned to the village to confront the man who had condemned him and his family to death, he had wanted to thank the farmer who had hid them for 23 months, never charging anything, even though they were quite a burden to him. Joachim found out the local Nazis had hung him from the church spire for planting a white flag on top of the roof as soon as the western Allies had crossed the Rhine. His execution was the last official act of the local Nazi municipal administration.
Joachim’s parents went straight to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, but three of his sisters had been sent to the camp for women at Ravensbrück, two of them died of typhus, one survived and married a Canadian. The youngest one, Marlene was smuggled out of the crammed, stinky cattle wagon through a hole in the wooden floor boards during a stop because of an allied air raid and given to an eldery woman. They had written her name and date of birth on her back and on her thighs. That’s how after the war Joachim got contacted and was reunited with his youngest sister, who from then on never really left his side and tried to control his life as much as possible. Trauma survivors often become well-meaning control freaks.
Before reaching Auschwitz Joachim was moved on to a different transport to Mauthausen. There he slaved away in a quarry. The day he was liberated he weighed 38 kg. Extremely low for a teenager standing 5 feet 4 inches. He’d seen fellow inmates thrown down the stairs of the quarries with heavy boulders thrown after them, crushing them. He’d seen young men forced to carry rocks as heavy as 50 kg till they collapsed and died from exhaustion. Images he could never shake off.
He emigrated to Israel in 1953, but went back to Germany in 1956. He’d been having doubts about staying in Israel for some time, but then the Kafr Qasim massacre took place. Israeli border police killed 48 Arab civilians who were returning home from work. They had no idea there was a newly imposed curfew and Israeli punished them, gruesomely for violating a rule they weren’t aware of. The trend to dehumanize the Arabs in Israeli society reminded him too much of the build-up to the Holocaust back in The Netherlands and Germany. From his Arab neighbours in Haifa he also learned about the Naqba for the first time. He couldn’t in good conscience stay in a country that was doing similar things like the country that had murdered his own family and would have left his emaciated body to rot in a quarry if the war hadn’t ended. He felt like the Jews did need a country of their own to be safe, but if Israel was that country then something had gone terribly wrong.
When Samir and Joachim met they were both in their fifties. They met around the time of the Sabra and Chatilla massacres. Christinian militias in Lebanon slaughtered Palestinian refugees, women and children, and the Israeli army lit up the night’s sky to make it easier for them to finish their bloody work. Samir was happy to meet a Jew willing to acknowledge and condemn Israel’s atrocities. Joachim was happy to meet a Palestinian who was not an anti-semite at all. He had been taught that all Arabs hated Jews, but this hadn’t been true for his Arab neighbours in Israel and it wasn’t true for this sweet natured, talkative, playful and charming Samir with his dandy like clothes either.
They quickly found out that they had much in common and talked and played and smoked incessantly. They talked about women and bragged about their conquests and from time to time they held a little contest on who had suffered the most. These contests always ended inconclusively. The only vice they didn’t share was a love for beer and red wine. Joachim loved ale and el vino as he liked to call it. Samir was a strict teetotaler. ‘Grape juice is just fine the way Allah created it. No need to mess with it.’ To which Joachim said: ‘All blue zones have wine consumption in common. If you want to live to 100 you need the resveratol in red wine.’ And Samir would counter: ‘Wait and find out who outlives whom.’ From time to time Samir would smell Joachim’s home distilled plum brandy and go: ‘Still smells like rotten fruit to me.’ Both shunned pork though.
These two old friends haven’t been able to meet for several months now. Divided by hatred they rejected their entire life and time is running out.
Lately Joachim can feel that the life is draining from his body. In the morning he wakes up and for a few seconds sees his mother and his father standing in the room next to his bed. They never say a word, they only smile the sweetest smile at him. He knows what kind of an omen that is.
Elsewhere in the building, not all that far away, Samir has been suffering from chest pains. Barred from visiting his old friend by his own family, who having grown up in the west, write to him like he is one of their classmates who needs to be educated. ‘It’s not right to visit someone like Joachim in this day and age. He will only try to manipulate you into seeing things his way. Just look at how much his sister looks down on you.’ They came over more regularly to be sure Joachim wasn’t in his room. Samir wondered where all this hatred was coming from. They showed him horrific images on their phones which filled his tears with eyes. ‘Joachim doesn’t support this’, he said. ‘I bet his sister does’, countered Rashid, a 19 year old nephew studying media and communications at a German university. He wanted to become an influencer. Samir what a typical monthly salary was for an influencer. Rashid said: ‘It doesn’t work like that, amigo.’ Amigo?
One night Samir’s chest pains got worse and worse. He snuck out of his room and slowly made it to Joachim’s room. He had to be careful because Marlene was a notoriously light sleeper and she had her room right across from Joachim’s room.
When he entered the room he asked: ‘Did I wake you?’
‘No, my friend, what took you so long?’
They played a game of chess in the moon light. It was their last and it fittingly ended in a draw.
Joachim asked: ‘Humanity hasn’t learned a thing, has it?’
Samir replied: ‘It doesn’t look like it, no.’
Joachim: ‘But we have to keep trying. The point is not in winning, but in having tried, having given your all for what you know to be right.’
Samir: ‘Couldn’t agree more.’
They signed the papers together. They had contacted a notary weeks ago. He had visited Samir unbeknownst to anyone, except for Joachim.
Samir died of a heart attack eight days later. Joachim enjoyed making his sister’s life impossible for five more months with the most cumbersome requests like a bowl of M&Ms, but only yellow ones. He claimed all the other colors made his tongue swell. Joachim had a blast. Then he developed a fever and died of pneumonia. It was a peaceful death and nobody at the nursery home knew he was now not only smiling at his visiting parents, but also at Samir, who had a mischievous grin and was holding a chess board under one arm.
Their will left both their families with a logistical, bureaucratic and even diplomatic nightmare. They had arranged to be buried next to each other at a cemetry in Haifa. The funerals and the custom designed tombstones cost them every cent they had left. Apart from Joachim’s sole surviving daughter and Samir’s two sons and one daughter, not a single family member attended either funeral, but, curiously, several members of the staff at the nursing home did attend one or even both funerals. Marlene contacted several lawyers to try and have the will annulled, but to no avail.
Their tombstones are a black chess knight and a white chess knight facing each other.
They have identical inscriptions in Hebrew and Arabic:
‘You, youngster, who reads these words, achieving peace should be simple enough. The sooner you realize how little you need to be happy, the better off everyone is. My greatest accomplishment was loving the person in the grave next to mine. Celebrate similarities over differences, find your simple pleasures in this life and be fanatical about enjoying them and if you find people who look forward to spend whole days with you cherish them with all you’ve got and consider yourself fabulously wealthy.
PS.
I was definitely the better chess player though.’
Help me publish a book
€2.00
The Confessor 