As you enter, the TV is above your head, and you come straight from the intersection where it happened: A main street that intersects a side street, with a traffic light, and the truck supposedly had a green light, but that could never be established. There are thousands of corners like this in a big city, you could even say thousands upon thousands, except that the entrance to the Turkish diner is positioned at a forty-five degree angle to both of the streets, but maybe there are thousands upon thousands of these caddy-corner buildings on street corners, too. So, you come straight from the intersection, walk in under the TV, and right away you turn your head, your eyes automatically looking for Cem, who must be somewhere behind the bar that runs the length of the room, but even when you’re not watching them the images moving on the screen make their presence known by the sound droning on in the background, and finally you have to look: it’s soccer today. Good, Turkish soccer, you stare for a minute: athletic and technically demanding.
      Further back, the bar is busy. Cigarette smoke, crowds of men, poor wretches. And there in the middle is Cem, with the ever-present rag in hand, and a good mood occupying the space where others house their political convictions. “Hello neighbor, be right there.” With a hand gesture you tell him: no rush.
      Cem: “Have a seat, Herr Professor. Or to go?”
      You say no, sit down, lay your newspaper on the table and open it, but then you turn to face the TV that is still babbling on, halfway behind you. A pre-recorded game with no clock on the screen, as if it weren’t true that everything in a game turns on the fact that it lasts exactly ninety minutes, and therefore is entirely different from life.
      “Today delicious döner plate, my friend?”
      Cem’s broad face – assuming the name of the diner is his name, too – is an anchor in your day. With quick movements, as concerted as they are light, he cleans from back to front, the rag in his right hand while his left picks up ashtrays, ketchup bottles, and tea glasses and sets them back down. “Today very delicious döner plate.” Cem waits for an answer.
      You turn away from the TV to face him: “The usual.”
      “But today very especially delicious for very special neighbor.”
      You nod, leaf through the paper, glancing half-heartedly, to be honest, at the business section.
      “I turn down TV, wait.”
      He stands for a second with the remote control in his right hand, his left hand braced on his back, another second, you look for an article in the business section but can’t find anything new, even though it’s only recently that such beautiful numbers have come along for the years, 2000, 2002, or, with the unrivaled beauty of its casual asymmetry: 2003. Now that’ll be a year, you thought at first. But soon you’re done with the business pages and you’ve moved on to sports, soccer, where a fat-looking Brazilian is running backwards, pointing with both thumbs back over his shoulders to his shoulder-blades, where his name is written above his number – a funny scene.
      “Hello neighbor,” Cem looks at the fifty-ish man who has just walked under the TV into the well-lit room. “Be right there.”
      The man walks along the bar, holds out his hand to Cem, who wipes his own on the back of his shirt and offers his wrist, as you’ve seen people do before, when you were working at the construction site: “How it going?” The man nods. “Have a seat.” The man looks at the tables, one after another. “Oh, can sit by neighbor. Is very nice neighbor, no problem.” The man doesn’t nod to you so much as he lifts his head and walks over, pulls his scarf out from under the collar of his coat, takes the coat off, tucks the scarf into the right sleeve, and hangs it all on a hook on the wall, next to the table. A Hungarian, you read, said after the game that his goal was good for his name. Soccer: You just started to follow it again a few years ago, and it was actually just because of your son, because kids don’t like silence, and it was easier for your child to fall asleep when the TV was left on at a moderate volume during the evening, with his door open just a crack. That’s how it was for the first five years, or was it six? The last year-and-a-half he slept better. Crime shows weren’t really an option – just close your eyes and listen – but as you flipped through the channels, you generally stopped on soccer, soccer was better, and soccer reminded you of your own youth, which was fun at first, or exotic, like silently pulling a child’s wagon through the city park on a Sunday morning, where old images would materialize out of thin air, like a through ball, and suddenly you thought of Olaf. So Olaf.
      In first grade Olaf brought moldy bread for lunch and ate it to everyone’s disgust, he was proud of it. For second grade he had to go to a special school, where the mothers all agreed he would be able to receive the attention he needed. He was your friend. You don’t remember much about him being slower than the other kids, nothing specific, but you do remember playing soccer on the fenced-in lot next to the schoolyard, which was locked in the afternoons. The fence was high, and Olaf didn’t play soccer at all.
      Sometimes, when no one was there to play, you’d run around the houses: Blumen Strasse, Helmholtz Strasse, Mühlen Strasse, Mühlen Weg. You’d break twigs off of hedges as you ran by, trample the flowers in someone’s front yard just for fun, or, for a change, you’d crouch by the curb next to a parked car and purse your young lips to make a sound like you were letting the air out of the tires, until the afternoon was over and you could go home, or someone caught you and started yelling at you, and you laughed that unashamed children’s laugh that comes from ignorance, until he threatened to call the police or realized you were just making a fool of him.
      Often you would sit on the couch in Olaf’s mother’s kitchen eating thick white bread with no butter, just an equally thick layer of Nutella, smearing the Nutella on your cheeks and then wiping it off and into your mouth with your finger. She loved you so.
      One time she seemed annoyed when you rang the doorbell, her hair was tousled as if by some mystery illness, she let you in, prepared the bread without a word after she straightened her blouse, and disappeared again into the living room, pulling the door shut behind her in a way that bothered you. “There’s a man in there,” Olaf explained.
      Then you went out again, you with the ball under your arm, it felt so big, and this time there were other kids at the lot who wanted to play and didn’t have their own ball. Olaf sat off to the side, and in the game the goalie drop-kicked the ball, you were right up front of course, and it hit you in the face from two meters away: Half unconscious, your head suddenly felt big too, a break in the film, then isolated pictures, children’s heads in front of the sky, treetops, your own fault. Olaf’s big, worried eyes between the others standing around you, as far as you could see, and of course a bloody nose, but this time at least you had a good excuse for coming home bloody.
      Another time there was no one there. You were sitting at the edge of the field with Olaf, caddy-corner from the entrance, killing time, when two Turks turned up, each a head taller than the two of you, outside the fence, much closer to the entrance than you. They were grinning! And not out of ignorance. “Shit,” said Olaf.
      You didn’t join a soccer team until much later, in the suburb where your parents had moved by the time you came out of the hospital. Olaf was too far away, you should try to forget about him, they told you, but the soccer team, that was important. If you weren’t on the soccer team, you didn’t belong. So you got used to the soccer team, and all the fields next to your new school had two gates in the fence.
      The time began to pass, slowly at first, then faster, then even faster, then so fast that you couldn’t process it anymore, almost lost your senses, and only now it was finally standing still again:
      “With all salad, döner?”
      “The usual,” you say.
      “And garlic.”
      You nod: “But tell me, what’s going on with your soccer team?”
      “Oh, we want Germany becomes European champion, you know.” He grins broadly: “Is our tactic.”
      “For what?”
      “For 2006. I go with neighbor to final game,” he nods to the man at your table: “Germany – Turkey.”
      You look at the man. He nods.
      “We make like Sparwasser in the final game,” Cem says, “with German trainer.”
      “Ah, were you around back then?”
      “Kreuzberg.”
      You wave your hand: “Kreuzberg no good.”
      “Like Turkey,” Cem says, grinning.
      “I lived there until the reunification.”
      “Lot of fighting in the bar after Sparwasser do that.”
      “Who were you for?”
      “For Germany of course,” he looks at you cautiously as he comes around the bar and stands next to you, puts the small döner plate on the table, it doesn’t look so small.
      “You could do like Neeskens in the final game,” you say, still thinking of Olaf and the new apartment, which Olaf never saw, which would have meant just as little to him as the old one, which he also never saw, where he wouldn’t have cared if your father mixed champagne with his beer or put his feet on the living room table and picked his ear while he watched the soccer match and his friends made noise and polluted the air and the women made pained faces.
      By the time your son started sleeping better, you had learned the names of the players, the trainers, the managers, even the scouts, you knew the most important games in recent years, Schalke’s heartbreaking loss, Manchester United’s two goals, and so on, you always thought Ballack’s own goal in Unterhaching was intentional: the big company that sponsored the team wanted to give itself an underdog image. You remembered that the strangest soccer game in your life was the first one you really paid attention to: Germany vs. Germany, 1974, probably because the adults’ faces all looked different that day. Back then, as you sat between them, being careful not to get an excited adult elbow in the face, your small child head wondered, how stupid can a country be?
      Now, as your son slept in his last year, you watched whole games instead of looking at him, you looked forward to the games for days. Your son caught this enthusiasm from you, and on weeknights he was allowed to watch the first half in his pajamas next to you on the sofa, his legs too short to bend over the edge. In the fall you would check every few minutes to see if his feet were too cold, they fit easily in your hand, in the winter you brought out his blanket, he would raise hell to avoid going to sleep, because sleep was a sign of weakness. The woman in your life didn’t approve of such a late bedtime, but she loved you both so. And you firmly repeated that the second half was out of the question, and the next morning when he woke up in his loft bed, with the rail that came up to your chin so that he was right in front of your face, he’d ask, “How’d they do?” There was such a light in his eyes that the woman in your life had to turn her own eyes away. Harsh words from her now: “Up and out of bed, breakfast is waiting in kindergarten.”
      Once you watched the final game, Netherlands – Germany, without commentary, Germany had lost to the other Germany, which won them an easier ride in the second round, and everyone thought it was a repeat of that first game against Hungary in Switzerland, ’54, an intentional loss: myths grow faster in soccer than anywhere else. And then the scoreless second half in ’74, your father was accidentally wearing an orange shirt, and his friends angrily ripped it off five minutes before the whistle, so there he sat in his undershirt, happy, drunk, his hair a mess and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. After the final whistle your friends your age rode victory laps around the red dirt soccer field with flags on their bicycles, one of them fell off and broke his hand in the excitement. You were alone for the first time.
      Even before your son was gone, you had started watching the interviews before the games, only occasionally at first, but after your son was gone you surprised your friends by saying that the game is nothing without the interviews: “The truth is in the interviews.”
      Your voice was firm and decisive, your son only made it to seven, in spite of the soccer on TV, and now you just had one thing on your mind: soccer. Game plans, lineups, injuries, kickoff times, when friends called to say, “We’re in the Luna Bar, want to come?” you’d say no, there’s a game on. You left the child’s room as it was, even now you haven’t managed to clean it out, and a friend had to come to at least straighten up, she put the toys back on the shelves, washed the clothes and put them away in the dresser, because otherwise no one else could take it, the way you still haven’t managed to move to another country, away from it all.
      Cem grins when you say, “In the next round we’ll give you what we gave Hungary.”
      “But you go with us,” Cem affirms.
      “No question.” And really: 2006 is your goal. Then you can finally leave, get out, who knows where.
      “Was a good time back then with Sparwasser.” Cem, assuming his name is the same as the diner’s, rubs the thumb and first finger of his right hand together.
      “All on credit,” you say, and your wife left just after that, to take care of her mother, a mother who needs care is certainly better than a silent man in front of the TV. How lucky for her that her mother has gotten old.
      “Was good credit,” Cem says, “made Germany good country.”
      You look at the man at your table. “Did you see it too?”
      “Seventy-four?” He says no, he isn’t interested in soccer.
      “But that’s history.”
      “Certainly not,” he says, by now his plate has come and you both eat for a while, maybe ten minutes, before you take the napkin, fold it, lay it on the plate, nod to him, stand up, take your jacket, walk to the bar, and take out your wallet.
      “Four,” says Cem, because you insisted on paying last time, even though he resisted: “Don’t be silly.”
      The register dings, one euro back, Cem smiles: “My friend, no one to blame, you know, you come over.” He manages to reach over the bar and put his short arm around your shoulders, as you have to wipe your eyes again. “We’re always here, my friend, can always come here, please, can always sit here at counter, life goes on here, here is always good place for you, yes?”
      Then you turn, walk under the TV playing silently overhead, out to the intersection, look left down Danziger Strasse, which is still called Dimitroff Strasse on your map, as you always used to tell your guests, and then you turn right, onto your street. Even though you weren’t there, you can see all the pictures clearly, how the truck rolled through the intersection, supposedly it had a green light, even if that could never be established, no one heard a sound, just the driver’s scream, Cem saw the red bicycle, only half of it was smashed and it didn’t look so bad, but it doesn’t take much and the game’s over, it’s over, and then the accusations start, a child of seven out on his own, but he was wearing a helmet, and so on.
      You look at your watch, tonight is the European Cup, you’re in luck. Because you love soccer. For its meaninglessness.