m floors were vomit green. No evidence of habitation except for a single fake plant and several bright posters of Chinese pop stars. Cheap, by-the-number-imitations of Western sexual edginess, the posters featured scowling teenagers in Western clothing. One pictured a Han Chinese man with bleached hair holding a baseball bat, the other had a girl holding a rose and an umbrella, looking upward.
“Excuse me please.” Yusup says to me. “Maybe I pray now.”
He took off his shoes and prostrated himself on his bed, facing Mecca.
Yusup deeply wanted to be a man of letters, a professional writer, he told me after praying.
“What shall you write? Novels, poetry, journalism?”
“I don’t know,” he says with a shrug.
He would never be a writer.
“How you become writer?” He asks suspiciously. “I don’t know. I just kind of did it and it felt right. You don’t choose writing, it chooses you.” I had heard Charles Bukowski say that and liked it.
“I want to write books,” he says.
“Who do you read?”
He shrugged again.
“You gotta read to be a writer. That’s how you find out what’s good or not.”
“I like to read about the Jewish peoples,” he said suddenly. “I always looking, how they become so rich,” he continued with a swirl of anger.
He had read poison; I wondered how deep it went.
“You have to be careful about these books sometimes bad people write them. Sometimes they are not good books,” I explained. “Sometimes they tell lies.”
“Yes, maybe I think. Yes,” he said nodding at the wall.
Suddenly he burst out again; “I want to write about God. How each person must believe in God, love God.” I turn my head away so he doesn’t see me roll my eyes.
“To be a writer, good writer you have to write about new things. Many people write what you are saying,” I tell him. “It’s not so simple. Maybe if you want to write for fun, you can write about these things, but not if you want to make money or be published. Writng requires great thought.”
He looked hard at the ground, disappointed.
Looking up at me he asks, “What your religion?”
“I’m Jewish. But not really…I mean, I’m not really very religious. Like a Jewish-Atheist, kind of.”
“But you must believe. You must say yourself, who is making the tree, the car, the person? Your shoe,” he says, pointing at my Converse. “Human can make shoe but who can make human to make shoe?”
“Thats a dumb argument,” I said.
“Only God make, he droned without missing a beat. “You must agree,” Yusup lectured, wagging his finger at me.
“No, I don’t have to agree. I believe in other things.”
I hated this. I hated these “conversations.”
“Why are all Jewish hate the Moslems?” he asks, throwing up his skinny hands. “Why all Jewish afraid the Moslems?”
“There is no ‘all Jewish’ anything.”
I was losing patience. “Jewish people think lots of different things. Some don’t like Moslems, but lots of people do not like Moslims. Many Jewish people defend the human rights of Moslems. I had a girlfriend who I loved who was a Moslem. Jewish people are not afraid of Moslems.”
There was silence.
“Do you love Hitler?”
I looked at him. I wanted to punch him in the face.
“No.”
“I think some Moslems like Hitler”
“So then you shouldn’t ask me why some Jews don’t like Muslims.”
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