An early morning in a Turkish bakery

by Nadine Fussi (Germany)

Making a local connection Austria

5:29am, 30th of December 2019, Vienna. 'I'll end up on a murder podcast.' That was my first thought standing in front of the locked hostel entrance, realising the reception wouldn't open until 9am. Stranded in cold, dark Vienna with nowhere to go, I started wandering the empty streets, my heavy backpack dragging down my shoulders. After a while of aimlessly strolling through the city, a light caught my attention. A light beaming from inside a Turkish bakery. Relieved, I sprinted towards the light, forgetting about the weight on my shoulders, and entered the shop, surprising the man behind the counter who seemed to have expected anyone but who had just appeared in front of him. My whole body trembling with disorientation, the man's gaze drifted over me, inspecting me like I was a puzzle he needed to solve. "Uhm, do you have Brezen?", I asked him in Bavarian German, the fluorescent lights illuminating my face. "Brezen? No, but I have something better than that. Would you like to try it?" Putting down my freshly brewed cup of coffee and simit on one of the high tables, I made myself comfortable on the floor and took out the book I was reading at the time. All while still being silently watched by the man behind the counter. "Did you just arrive in Vienna?", I heard him talking over the voice of Mary Shelley. Tired, exhausted and not quite in the mood for talking to anyone, I tried to blow him off with a simple "yes", but he wouldn't stop questioning me until our little exchange of words had flourished into a proper conversation. The nightshift was lonely; and who was I to deprive him of a break from his all-nightly isolation. I could tell he hardly ever had the chance to share his story. A story as devastating as it was real. An immigrant's story. A bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in his hands, the man, who never revealed his name, had made his way from his small village in Turkey to the Austrian capital city, excited about what would await him there. After arriving, he was faced with a language barrier bigger than the distance to his homeland. Months had gone by and he still wasn't able to show the university administration office what they wanted to see in order to let him start his master's degree: German CEFR level B2. The reason the unnamed man had decided to leave his home country in the first place was to acquire what was impossible for him to do there. The education system in Turkey, as he told me, was far from the standards many companies required, so in order to succeed, to become one of the best in his field, he had seen no other option as to leave his home and venture into the unknown. It had been years since then and the light at the end of the tunnel seemed to slip away with every day he spent working at the bakery at the Wiener Naschmarkt. Seemingly feeling like he had said too much, had exposed too much of his innermost emotions, he quickly changed the topic and wanted to know more about me. What was I doing in Vienna? How long was I staying? Was I travelling alone? How old was I? Oh, was I really that young? Did I have a boyfriend? Would I like one? He wasn't looking for anything serious, was I? And there we go. With no other place open this early in the morning, I was trapped in the bakery, wondering how I could divert the topic to something else. Anything else. Caught completely off guard, all I could think of was to laugh, hoping he would accompany me. He didn't. The rest of my stay was spent in the most uncomfortable silence I'd ever experienced. "Oh, the next load is finished baking; the green light just turned on." With that he disappeared into the room next door. Realising that the sun had finally come out, I quickly picked up my backpack and left the bakery. In the end, we were all just souls reaching for the light.