Abel Nema flees from a war raging in an Eastern European country to a large German city, where he is forced to make ends meet as an illegal immigrant wandering in the underworld. He is surrounded by dubious existences: homeless people camping in a park, the regular audience of a half-world entertainment venue frequented by gays, gypsy kids who also immigrated from the east, band members and wandering musicians, who for a while share their chaotic residence and lifestyle with Abel.
The man's life slowly straightens out when he meets Mercedes, whose partner gets him a scholarship. It turns out that Abel has a brilliant sense of language. He already speaks the tenth language flawlessly, when he enters into a marriage of convenience with the widowed Mercedes in order to obtain citizenship, and the possibility of a university career also looms large. But fate has something else in store for him - the underworld is after Abel.
Terézia Mora's first novel is a picaresque tableau of the bustling, modern metropolis, in which the bilingual author focuses on the issues of speaking and listening, the ability to talk and the ability to remain silent in an exciting, novel way.

"Supposedly, the man also looked somehow like a bird, or like a bat, but something huge, as he hung there, the wings of his black coat twitched in the wind. At first they thought, the women later testified, that someone had just left their coat on that carpet duster or something, climbing frame. But then they saw hands sticking out of it below, two white hands, the tips of the bent fingers almost touching the ground.
On an early autumn Saturday morning, three female workers found translator and interpreter Abel Nema swinging upside down on a climbing frame in the neglected playground of the railway station district. Silver-colored adhesive tape