OUTRAGE
Yasira wakes up before the alarm. She had been battling nightmares all night.
Someone was chasing her and Zara through a forest. For a long time she thought it was the rapists from the video, but then it turned out to be Patrick, her ex who told her he didn’t want to pay child support any more. Strange.
Yasira sits up. Her bedroom is spartanly furnished: a bed, a closet, a bedside table.
Above the headboard hangs a reproduction of René Magritte’s masterpiece The Lovers.
Yasira bought it in the MoMA museum shop on a vacation trip to New York with Patrick.
And that’s why she thinks every day anew about whether she should take the picture down.
But a relationship shouldn’t only be looked at from the end.
They had also had good years. Besides, if she took it down, there would be a lighter-colored rectangle on the wall where the picture had been.
And this empty rectangle would still remind her of Patrick. But no longer of New York.
In the painting, a man and a woman are kissing, but their heads are completely wrapped in two white cloths.
Even in their kiss, they are not touching each other.
It’s just cloth on cloth. Yasira was immediately fascinated by the picture.
Much later, she found it almost prophetic for the last years of her marriage.
She decides to leave the picture hanging for another day and goes to the bathroom.
While sitting on the toilet, she checks the news on her phone.
Brave new world, Yasira thinks. Not even on the toilet does one have peace.
Of course, no one forced her to take her phone to the bathroom.
Just curiosity, just her addiction to the latest scraps of information.
Is this already—what does Zara call it? Ah yes—doom scrolling? Whatever.
She skims through what she’s missed in the few hours of sleep.
Lena’s father, Frank Palmer reported his daughter missing four days ago.
The family lives in Halberstadt in the Harz region.
The girl is sixteen years old. Just like Zara.
Yasira imagines what it must be like to see such a video and recognize one’s own daughter in it.
It is unimaginable. Horrifying. She interrupts her own thoughts so that she doesn’t start crying in the bathroom in the morning and continues reading.
The video has already triggered a wave of outrage.
The reaction and backlash are predictable yet Yasira is shocked by how extreme some of the comments are and how quiet the voices of reason remain.
Some politicians loudly demand: “We must finally!” Others whisper: “Well, yes. But.” The tabloid press is pouncing on the case, seeing it as their patriotic duty to report on it—while quietly counting on boosting their circulation at the same time.
The well-known right-wing channels are seething with rage.
True, in the heat of the moment, there may be one or two calls for a return to the methods of .
. . well . . . back then. But most people generously ignore this.
Who among all those who have seen the video is not furious about it?
Public figures who dare to differentiate are overwhelmed by the outrage.
YouTube and Facebook have started to delete the video and its countless copies.
Too late, of course. It has long since infected the entire web like a virus.
The head of X even felt compelled to share the video on his platform himself. #FreedomOfSpeech #ShareTheTruth
It will be another day before new election polls are out, but they will come too, and their results are guaranteed to be frightening.
Yasira’s butt is already cold when she finally gets up from the toilet. How stupid of me, she thinks. Just stupid. Tomorrow she won’t be taking her phone to the bathroom.
Zara is already sitting at the kitchen table, having breakfast. To be more precise, what she calls breakfast—a crispbread with nothing on it—lies untouched on the plate in front of her and she is also staring at her phone.
As so often. But any reprimand would feel hypocritical, so Yasira says nothing.
The kitchen is quite large and in many ways replaces the missing living room. On the wall behind Zara hangs the photo calendar with glimpses into the happy family life of Yasira’s sister Dalia. It shows July. But it’s already October. Yasira turns the pages.
“Have you seen it yet?” asks Zara, without looking up from her cell phone. “This video, I mean.”
Yasira nods. “Last night. But why do you know about it? You shouldn’t be watching something like that.”
“Mom, everyone saw it! You can’t be on the internet without coming across the video or comments about it.”
Yasira sighs.
“It’s so . . .” Zara begins, but then doesn’t know how to continue. “It’s just . . . fuck.”
When did it actually start that young people all curse in English? Probably with Netflix. And Zara has put on makeup like a . . . No. Yasira interrupts her thought. That’s what her mother would have thought. Not her.
Instead, she just says: “Yes. Fuck.”
She knows what the video means for her daughter.
A new wave of stupid looks and racist remarks on the train, at school, wherever she goes.
Even though Zara has absolutely nothing to do with this damn video.
She’s just not as white as a sheet. Sometimes Yasira wonders whether Patrick contributed any genes to his daughter at all.
Maybe he was already stingy back then. It also doesn’t help much that Yasira has named her daughter Zara.
A name that she hoped would be German enough for her fellow citizens and Arabic enough for her parents.
“It will pass,” says Yasira.
“As if,” is all Zara says. Two words that reliably drive her mother up the wall. But not today.
“Yes,” Yasira confirms. “As if.”
She stares out of the window. It’s raining.
Yearningly, she gazes at the car keys lying in a little dish on the kitchen table.
But of course she will be taking the city train from Hohenzollerndamm to the BKA headquarters in Treptow again today.
She has been doing this for years now. It’s a leftover from the time when Zara was involved with Fridays for Future.
Eventually, Yasira got fed up with hearing daily lectures about the CO2 emissions of her Volkswagen Golf and got herself a public transit pass.
There’s only so many news reports and pictures of dried-up rivers and dead polar bears a person can take before giving in.
At least that was the case with Yasira. Other people seem to be more resistant.
Meanwhile, Yasira wishes her daughter’s dedicated phase in life was back.
It had definitely been better than this new resignation.
Zara’s hopelessness grieves her. Shouldn’t a sixteen-year-old still believe that they can change the world?
And at least Zara succeeded with Yasira, didn’t she?
A bit of rain never killed anyone. So she takes an umbrella instead of her car keys.
“Mom,” says Zara, when Yasira is already at the door.
“Yes, my child?”
“Take care of yourself.”
Strange. She never says that. But Yasira understands. It feels right. Something is coming apart at the seams. You can feel it in the air.
“You too, sweetheart,” she therefore replies. “You too.”