For example, you could stand in the middle of the Bahnhof Am Zoo in the centre of Berlin and imagine that it was simply a railway station β warm light, the smell of food, trains clattering in from all over Europe. Indeed, you might think it was positively a comforting place, even for the old men with broken teeth, who shelter there and fish for titbits in the wastebins.
You have to look closer to see what is special here. From time to time, as the trains rattle in to the platforms, an adolescent boy will appear. Sometimes he has come from one of the provincial towns of the former East Germany like Meck vor Pommern or Brandenburg, old farming communities now ravaged by poverty. Sometimes he has come from much further afield, stumbling into the light from all parts of the desperate upheaval in the old Soviet bloc.
Always, he has about him the mark of the refugee β the sagging bag of belongings and the deep fatigue β and he slips through the crowd, quite unnoticed by all of those around him.
And yet, to a few of those here, he is instantly of consuming interest, and so he finds himself entangled in a subtle ritual. He will be approached by a man who will offer him help. More than that, this man will offer him the stuff of his dreams β a room to stay in, warmth and clothing, food and drink, alcohol if he would like it, cannabis if he would be interested, cocaine perhaps, computer games, all kinds of games. Sometimes the boy will sense the danger and refuse the dream, but other times he will be diverted.
Every day, this invisible game is played, the watchful men hovering outside the Teehaus in amongst all the ordinary people, spotting their target like an owl on a mouse, making their move, and then the boy slipping away beside them with a shrug. Such a gentle abduction. It was a social worker who made this visible to me, a young man with a battered beard named Wolfgang who works for an organisation called Subway which specialises in trying to help young people on the streets of Berlin.
