Left, a slender gold-haired goddess -
she didn't deign to notice me.
I brushed it off: since 9/11
there hasn't been much call
for Arabs. Right,
a couple: her, outsized, pockmarked face,
a purple velvet evening dress - it had a certain
charm. So when the boyfriend went off somewhere,
we got to talking; she worked, she said,
in casting; she'd spent the afternoon
on a new Dutch mini-series,
casting local Nazis.
Ah, my Jewish fiancée and I,
you can see us growing older and fatter together,
delighting more and more in eating and
in sleeping. When the boyfriend came back,
he kissed her naked shoulder while staring hard
at me. The slim blonde on my left,
as I now noticed, had a tattoo
right across the back of her neck:
Anton*
it said,
in calligraphy,
between two hearts.

Translated by David Colmer