Otto Malik

Otto Malik is the name of a character I've been thinking about for roughly a decade. In the beginning, his name was Otto Oderberger, after my then-favorite street in Berlin, then Otto Ödemann, because Otto was öde. Since then, he's probably had a few other names as well, but I don't remember now. Malik I got from the Russian word for boy, "malchik," which is what strangers called me on the streets of St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1992, 1993 and 1996-97, when I was 18, 19, and 22, respectively. "Mal" being the root meaning "small," the diminutive "malchik" means "little small." Malchik became Malik to sound less Slavic, like it came from a part of the world where names shift as readily as the political borders, somewhere between Hungary and Slovakia, for example. It was partly the ambiguity of the name that inspired the rumor that Otto's father, having been sent as an Austrian soldier during WWII to the Russian front, stayed in search of his roots, leaving Otto fatherless. Fatherless is how I first imagined Otto. Little did I know that "Malik" is actually an Arabic word meaning King, who almost by definition is fatherless.