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The Date

It’s a Steven. Again. Yasira is sitting at the Hard Rock Cafe on Ku’damm on a rainy autumn evening and sitting across from her is a Steven.

Her date. Tinder, obviously. A date on Wednesday.

And why shouldn’t it be? Why should she cram her entire private life into the weekend?

Only to hear again that she has to work on Saturday after all.

When Steven suggested the Hard Rock Cafe on the phone, Yasira had to restrain herself from bursting into laughter. So she teased him a bit.

“The burgers are really awesome!” Steven defended himself.

So here they are at the Hard Rock Cafe and the burgers are indeed awesome.

There’s even live music, and of course it’s too loud even for Steven.

The preferred volume seems to make a U-curve over the course of life and in your early forties you’re very close to the vertex.

Yasira probably owes such strange trains of thought to her father.

A math professor who had to toil on construction sites in this country.

Steven works for the online edition of some Berlin newspaper.

Yasira is briefly inattentive and misses which one.

She sizes him up as he talks. Brown curls, stylish glasses and a Berlin-typical seven-day beard that’s starting to turn gray.

But it suits him quite well. All in all, he’s a bit better looking than the last Steven.

Yasira has not yet told him that she works for the BKA.1 That’s always a risk. Some men immediately get horny at the thought of hooking up with a policewoman. Others suffer from erectile dysfunction due to overwhelming feelings of being powerless. Both of which are unpleasant.

“I think we haven’t really made much progress with gender equality,” says Steven. “Did you know, for instance, that in the UK, there are fewer hedge funds managed by women than by guys named David?”

“Is that so?” Yasira asks, taking a bite of her veggie burger.

Steven’s share of the conversation that evening, she estimates, is a strong eighty percent.

Perhaps, she thinks, there are also more departments in her agency managed by Stevens than by women.

Her boss, at least, is also a Steven. Among the criminal investigators at the BKA, she recently read, the ratio is two to one.

In other words, for every two Stevens, there is one Katja.

“So don’t worry, I’m not anti-Semitic or anything,” says Steven. Yasira is somewhat puzzled, not immediately understanding the connection.

“I mean, David is a Jewish name,” explains Steven, “but it’s not just Jews who are called David.

I have nothing against Jews or Israel, although I don’t approve of everything happening in the Middle East. You people probably have a completely different view on it.

I mean . . .” Steven stops. “I shouldn’t say ‘you people,’ should I? ”

Yasira shakes her head in amusement.

“I’m really talking myself into a corner here,” Steven realizes. “I always do that when I’m excited. May I ask where you come from?”

“From Wilmersdorf2,” replies Yasira. Steven makes a pretty silly face. The old joke is always funny. “With the subway,” she adds.

Steven blushes. Kind of cute.

“Sorry about that! I didn’t mean to . . .”

“You wanted to know where my parents originally came from? From Lebanon. Beirut. Or, if you want to know it exactly, I can tell you that my father was born in Houla, a small place in the very south. They both fled the civil war in the early ’80s. By that time, my mother was already pregnant.”

Steven just stares. He seems a little overwhelmed by the information he asked for. Yasira smiles. “Where did your parents originally come from?”

“My parents? Well, from Bavaria . . .”

Poor Steven is completely insecure.

“Cheer up,” Yasira says. “I know you didn’t mean anything bad.”

Steven’s face relaxes a little.

“My great-grandparents came from East Prussia,” he says, before correcting himself immediately. “I mean from Poland.”

“I see.”

“And I come from Friedrichshain,” Steven says, exhaling slightly. “By city train.”

Yasira laughs. Maybe this will work out after all, once he overcomes his insecurity.

Steven points at her wine. “But you’re not religious?”

Oh, how cleverly and seemingly casually he placed the question that has probably been burning under his nails since the beginning of the date, perhaps even since he swiped her picture to the right.

“No,” says Yasira.

She can almost physically feel Steven’s relief. Which arouses a kind of defiance in her, which is why she adds: “But my parents are devout believers.”

“Really?”

“But they belong to a sect that is constantly losing followers. Although they once ruled half the world.”

Steven just stares.

“They’re communists,” Yasira explains.

At first Steven doesn’t know how to react, then he smiles uncertainly. It doesn’t look bad on him.

“But not you?”

“Me?” asks Yasira. “No. I’m . . . well, if you were to ask my daughter . . .” Oh, how cleverly and seemingly casually she placed this piece of information, which shouldn’t be dropped too early nor too late during a date, “. . . she would probably say that I’m a cynic.”

“You have a daughter?” Steven asks, surprised. “How nice.” He quickly added the last two words. His voice was a semitone higher.

“Yes, she’s at home with my husband. But don’t worry.

We have an open relationship.” Yasira takes a beat.

“Well, from my side anyway.” She takes a sip of wine.

“Mehmet gets quite jealous. He once caught me on a date and beat the other guy to a pulp. He didn’t mean any harm.

You know how Arabs are. Lots of temper, little self-control. He was sorry later.”

Steven’s face is absolutely hilarious. The fries he just shoved into his mouth almost fall out again.

Yasira grins. “That was a joke. Patrick and I have been divorced for ten years. Our daughter, Zara, is already sixteen.”

Steven laughs, relieved.

“That was a good one,” he says. “I’ll have to tell my wife when I get home.”

Yasira raises an eyebrow.

“Divorced for six years,” Steven reports. “Two children.”

No problem, Yasira thinks. At her age, everyone comes with baggage.

The two musicians take a break and immediately the place becomes significantly more pleasant. Steven also breathes a sigh of relief.

“Maybe next time we should meet at the Soft Rock Cafe,” he says.

“Or at the Cuddle Rock Cafe,” replies Yasira. Oops. Did she really just say that? Steven immediately looks all cuddly. She laughs. “If you’d said something that suggestive, I’d probably have gotten up and left straight away.”

She pushes the last bite of her Moving Mountains burger into her mouth.

Since Zara forced her to become a vegetarian, choosing food in restaurants has become much easier.

Yasira really sees this as an advantage.

She used to have a hard time deciding. Now it’s always the veggie burger.

Sometimes, when she’s eating out without her daughter, she secretly orders something with fish.

Omega 3 and all. But as long as she doesn’t know whether this Steven could be someone she might introduce to her daughter, she prefers not to take any risks.

She wouldn’t want him to potentially embarrass her at home.

There would be trouble if he reported that Yasira had, as Zara puts it, “sank her teeth into a dead animal.” She can thankfully do without that discussion.

After dinner, Yasira briefly disappears to the restroom.

She’s quite content. Certainly not a guy for the long haul.

But also not a total disaster like the last two.

One kept talking about his ex the whole time.

The other still seriously lived with his mother.

But with this Steven, she might be able to stave off loneliness for a while.

She looks at herself in the mirror. She wears her black hair down for once, not in a tight ponytail as usual.

Not bad for early forties. Early forties!

Damn. A few years ago, when Zara was researching for a history presentation on the Middle Ages, she looked up from the book, utterly astonished, and said to her: “Mom! In the Middle Ages, you would be dead already!” Yasira can’t help but grin at the thought.

Her reflection grins back. Really not bad for a nearly dead woman.

This could be a nice evening. Soon they would talk about their hobbies.

Bouldering, she’d say, and he’d go “What’s that?

” and she’d say “It’s a fancy word for climbing.

” And he’d say “Oh, really? You like climbing? I’ve been wanting to try that for ages.

Maybe we could go climbing together sometime. Blah blah blah.”

And afterwards? His place or hers? Rather to his.

It’s always a bit strange to have to introduce a new lover to your daughter.

But it’s almost worse to be introduced to someone else’s children.

“Hello kids! This is Yasira. For probably the next two to six months, she will occasionally sleep where mom used to sleep.” Ew.

But maybe she’s lucky. Maybe Steven shares custody with his ex and has this week off.

Always stay positive. In a good mood, she leaves the restroom.

But when she returns to the table, Steven is staring at his cell phone with a look on his face like it was September 11, 2001 and he had just turned on the news.

“What happened?” asks Yasira.

Steven looks up. He apparently needs a moment to remind himself that he is on a date.

“Nothing,” he says.

“Nothing?”

Steven shakes his head. “Nothing . . . important.”

“Then why are you looking like you’ve just read the announcement of doomsday?”

“It was stupid of me to even look at my phone.”

“Spit it out,” Yasira demands.

“Well . . .” Steven sighs. “Have you heard about the girl who disappeared without a trace a few days ago? Somewhere in Saxony-Anhalt? It was in the news this morning.”

Yasira nods. She remembers the report, but didn’t read it.

Partly because she already deals with enough crime at work, partly because missing girls are her Achilles’ heel.

Since she has a daughter herself, she finds it even harder to maintain the necessary distance when it comes to crimes involving minors.

They touch too closely on the primal fear that something might happen to her own child.

“Her name is Lena,” Steven continues.

“Lena,” Yasira repeats. After a short pause, she asks: “What happened? Has she turned up again?”

Steven makes a crumpled face. “Sort of.”

“Sort of?”

“Well, there’s this . . . this video that’s going viral right now. It’s terrible and . . .” Steven hesitates briefly, probably searching for the right words. “. . . and it’s explosive.”

1 Bundeskriminalamt: Federal Criminal Police Office. —Trans.

2 District of Berlin. —Trans.