TE16 Turkish Delight

A Long-Awaited Arrival could cover some of my debt to the market. Local businesses also had to thrive. When the station chief blew his whistle—when the hell had he woken up? – I had just jumped over to the darker cargo wagon side. It was already a hell of a night… The man was sitting on the unpainted bench where I left him, holding tight to the suitcase on his lap. He was fine-white-paper pale. For a second, the idea of him being sick like the young Jew I’d known frightened me, and the next thing I was thinking if all Jews were prone to sickness! Hah, what a habit I was making of these generalizations… Harsher winds had begun swiping through the station. Would my guest eat sausage, I wondered. You can’t have your guest starving. The young Jew was used to the cooking around here, but I was worried about upsetting the fedora guy’s stomach. Still, I bought some sausage in bread loaf around the corner and packed up the sandwich with my story rolls. When I returned to the bench, the fedora quickly rose up. “I must havedozed off,” he said. “Let’s get you toyour shed, you’ll feel better after some sleep. But I should introduce you to the station chief first.” Not a leaf fell in this godforsaken place without him knowing about it, but I didn’t want to tell that to the fedora man. He was, after all, a stranger – and we didn’t trust strangers. We? I was generalizing again. My god, I was haphazardly landing on the weirdest thoughts. Maybe that’s why my stories weren’t any good. They too were confused, like me, left alone to wander for so long. Sometimes, deep down, I understood why the passengers in the sleeper nitpicked about everything – but on the outside, I would fiercely defend everyword I wrote. You had to stand by yourwork,

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