Euphoria

by Heinz Helle

  19

  Drygalski complains the least but we all know he’s the one who is suffering the most. He always used to be the first to get annoyed when we were out together and the others couldn’t decide where to go or what to eat or when to eat, or whether to go at all. Drygalski used to be the fat one. Surprisingly, we never teased him about it. Even at the time I didn’t quite understand why. Other fatsos we encountered weren’t so lucky, at school or at the youth centre, but with him it was different, maybe because he’d always been there, one of us, and he’d always been fat, so his fatness wasn’t a threat to us any more, we accepted his fatness like an annoying habit, and we had annoying habits of our own, and whenever he was the last to make it, wheezing and panting, through the doors of the U-Bahn that we’d had to hold open for him, whenever he couldn’t get to the pass or the striker from the other team got away from him, whenever he would stare at our girlfriends, stealthily and obviously, out of the corner of his eye, or else at our chips, then we would talk about the weather.

  20

  We find an abandoned campfire at the edge of a clearing. We notice the trampled grass from a distance, see the dark black of the burnt branches, the grey of the ashes on the patchy snow and the slush and the soggy dark green field. We can tell that Drygalski is getting nervous by the simple fact that he is controlling himself so much and showing the least emotion of all of us.

  Do you think there’s anything left?

  Fürst can’t control himself as easily. He nervously chews his thin lips. No reply. We move closer. Then we are standing around the ashes and the blackened wood, breathing, not looking each other in the eye, just at the ashes, and we can see that there is nothing at this campsite other than ashes and blackened wood. Half-heartedly Drygalski kicks at a charred branch. Fine flakes fly around our knees.

  21

  Picking up stuff off the ground. Branches. Stones. Stones that are a different shape to other stones and which you think for a moment might have some function other than being stones, when you examine their unexpected shape up close, when they are in your hand, when you’ve stood back up and the pain in your back from bending over all the time has subsided. And then you throw them away again and don’t spare them a second thought. Here and there a plastic bag. Transparent sheaths for goods that are no longer available. Leaves.

  22

  Then Fürst breaks his ankle. There is no hole, no stone, nothing unpredictable, just a drainage channel cut across a country road, and the ditch is lined with metal, and the metal is not so rusty and covered in mud that you could have overlooked it. The snap is no different from the hundreds of snapping steps we took in the forest, but this time it is accompanied by an additional short cry and then panting, and then we see him trying to put pressure on his foot again, his face contorted with pain, and then we see how he shakes his head: no, he can’t do it. He hops along on one leg for a short distance, as if there were a bench somewhere, or an easy chair or a bed. As if he had almost made it. Just a little farther and you can rest and we’ll bandage your foot, and you can stay in bed for a while and rest up. And then he can’t hop on one leg any longer. We’re all weak and haven’t eaten in a long time. And he falls forward onto his hands and knees. He freezes for a moment, and we can’t tell if his back is quivering because his ankle hurts or because he’s sobbing, and then he slowly sinks down onto that thick, wet grass. First his belly, then his chest, then his face.

  He lies there for a couple of minutes, completely still. Gruber goes over to him, bends down, but Fürst just shakes his head. He cries out once more, when Drygalski carefully tries to touch his foot, presumably in order to see how badly he is hurt, but his scream is so full of rage and finality that we all understand. His foot is twisted at an unnatural angle, to one side, and it’s obvious that you can’t walk on a foot like that. The only thing you can do with a foot like that is lie down. We stand. We stare. We don’t say anything.

  Before we move on, we drag him to an oak by the side of the road. We lean him up against the tree, facing the misty peaks of the Wilder Kaiser or the Hahnenkamm or whatever mountain range it is that is slowly emerging from the fog. We turn his head in the direction he was looking when he failed to notice the drainage channel that rendered his foot unusable, and later, once his features, which now are distorted in agony, have relaxed, he will see the very mountains that he saw when he was still in possession of two healthy legs and the only thing that was out of joint was the world. Then we leave. We leave him sitting in the wet grass, and we hope that the night won’t be so cold that he will die in the dark. But cold enough that not long after sunrise it will be over.

  23

  I imagine Fürst, a few weeks ago, waking up before the alarm goes off. He gets up right away, stretches, brushes his teeth, showers, gets dressed. He puts on a clean pair of jeans, a clean shirt, a clean jumper. He blow-dries his hair and combs it. He applies some gel. His hair looks good. His clothes fit perfectly. Fürst is a good architect. I imagine him leaving his spacious, tastefully decorated flat. It’s affordable because it’s not central. Fürst is a man who is careful with money, but who will also buy himself something good from time to time, because he knows what’s good. I imagine him getting into his Audi A4, which he bought second-hand, driving up the ramp of the underground garage and heading into town, and he is glad to have got an early start because today he’s going to ring Dengler’s doorbell before Dengler can call him, because Dengler’s been calling him every day for the past week despite the fact that it’s been dry and no rain has been forecast, and despite the fact that both of them, Dengler and Fürst, have known for a week that Fürst would be coming to see Dengler on this Friday morning, bright and early, at 7.30, and after all they’ve both got other things to do. Dengler works for Siemens and really Fürst is already onto the next project. Dengler has bought himself a flat in a new housing development, which has been finished for ages, but during the last big storm his balcony got flooded, and that won’t do. I imagine that Fürst doesn’t have anything against Dengler, but he doesn’t like it when people who don’t know anything about certain things feel the need to dole out advice about those very things about which they know nothing, particularly when it comes to what looks good and what doesn’t. Sure, tastes differ and you’ve got to respect that, but if people are so sure about how everything is supposed to look then why do they bother hiring an architect? With some people, you can’t even imagine the ideas they have – they want to put a Doric column in the middle of the parking ramp, or an oriel on a flat roof. But a balcony that doesn’t drain properly, that’s obviously a problem. I imagine that in this case Fürst is happy to come and take a look. After all, Dengler paid for high-quality work and that is what he received. In terms of the planning in any case, that much is certain. And it’s not like you can always keep an eye on everything those Hungarian foremen, the Polish supervisor and the Montenegrin cement mixers are doing. They just say, yes, yes, but have no idea what you’re talking about. How many times has Fürst had to make them tear open freshly boarded walls because they simply don’t give a damn that they’re still supposed to put the cables in, or windows, or moulding. I imagine all the things that go through Fürst’s head, at the wheel, on the thoroughfare, on a sunny morning on his way to work. And then the light turns amber, and Fürst begins to accelerate but then sees that he won’t make it. The light turns red, and then he brakes. His phone rings. He brakes harder, presses the clutch. His phone keeps ringing. He brakes even harder, and then his phone slides off the passenger seat and onto the floor, and Fürst shouts, Dengler, you fucker! He overshoots the stop line by at least a metre. And then Fürst retrieves the phone and answers it, and says, Good morning, Herr Dengler.

  24

  We come across a VW Golf II that’s not completely burnt out. We take out the floor mats. We rip off the number plates. We gather together the charred remains of the carpeting into a pile on the ground. We stomp on the bumper till it comes off. We use the number p
lates to cut the wiper blades off the metal arms. We read: Bosch. We put the rubber with the floor mats. We tug on the charred seat belt. The retractor dispenses six feet of intact belt strap. We pull it out as far as possible and then cut the strap, again with the number plates. We remove the headrests from the front seats. The cushion is completely incinerated. We wrench the metal rods apart. We use the rods to pry the seat belt’s melted plastic catch out of the holder. We tug at the soot-covered wheels. We smash the windows.

  Look, I say.

  I’m holding the detached steering wheel. We all stare at it for a while. Then I throw it on the grass, behind the rubber floor mats and the pieces of wiper blade. Then we move on, taking nothing with us.

  25

  The next day brings heavy rain. Through the gloomy film of the falling water we see a gigantic pit by the side of the road, and jutting out of the pit are walls, isolated, disconnected, and growing out of the walls are bridges of steel pipes. A tarpaulin is flapping in the wind, so that sometimes the rain pelts down on it and sometimes not. A rushing sound that comes and goes. I think of the ocean. Steel rebar is jutting out of the tops of the walls. And looking down at this construction site I come to realise for the first time that it’s no simple matter to establish criteria with which to determine whether something is in the process of being built or dismantled. When something is half-finished it is precisely only ever halfway to being finished, and however big or small the distance is to being something, it is the same as the distance to being nothing.

  Let’s go, says Golde.

  26

  Drygalski is holding a headless crow on a stick over a pile of burning leaves that is giving off far too much smoke, and says: Have you heard about these artists in Texas?

  What?

  In a small town called Marfa. They held assessment seminars with their richest and most loyal collectors to pick just seven who would get exclusive access to their new artworks.

  No.

  They’re ultra-radical monists.

  What?

  They believe atoms are of greater value than people.

  OK.

  Which is why they will only give their new artworks to people who have signed a contract pledging to use them on themselves right away.

  OK.

  And only if they leave their entire fortunes to the artists.

  OK.

  The smoke is burning our eyes.

  What kind of artworks are they? asks Golde.

  Phallus-shaped cyanide capsules, says Drygalski.

  Life-size? says Gruber.

  What?

  Never mind. For men or women?

  For both. Radical monists are transsexual, of course.

  Of course, I say.

  The lukewarm, semi-putrid bird tastes lukewarm and semi-putrid.

  Cyanide capsules, Gruber says after a while.

  Yes? Drygalski replies.

  How long does it take for something like that to work?

  27

  A couple of weeks ago we were playing our game. We had always played it when there were enough of us and we were in a cabin and had talked about everything there was to talk about at that moment. Golde got up to get a block of Post-its from his laptop bag. Fürst got some pens from the drawer in the kitchen cabinet. They put the Post-its and the pens in the middle of the table. Our hands reached for them, some faster, some more slowly. Some of us started scribbling right away, others thought long and hard. Some of us thought we had a particularly good idea, others didn’t care how good the rest would think their idea was, or at least pretended not to. It was almost hot in the living room. The condensation in the air we breathed froze on the cold windowpanes. The glass showed distorted reflections of our backs and heads, of old, rustic utensils, pans over the stove, a cupboard full of elegant red wine glasses. The Grubers had good taste.

  On the Post-its we wrote names. The names of great women and men, of murderers, dictators and prophets. Names that every one of us knew, which we stuck to the forehead of whoever seemed most appropriate, or most inappropriate. The name of the game was: Who am I? And it always began with the same question: Am I still alive?

  We sat and drank and laughed and asked the right and the wrong questions, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and outwardly it was just like every other time, and yet something was different. We had lost some part of the unquestioned naturalness with which we used to sit, stand, walk and run together while the world came crashing in all around us and we would all see the same things, smell the same things, hear the same things. Back then we didn’t even need to comment on what was happening. We knew each other and we knew exactly what we were thinking, what the others were thinking. We were here, and out there, in front of us, behind us, below us, were the others, the younger kids, the older kids, parents, girls, teachers, the blackboard, the periodic table of the elements, homework, afternoons – short, colourful and loud in summer; in winter, empty and unending. Physical education, the patchy and uneven field, the running track, the dirty showers in the basement of the football club, the clods of turf in the studs of our football boots, the smell of the box for the jerseys, where, with feigned nonchalance in an unfamiliar changing room, we would look for our number before an away game; the disco at the youth club, the Turks, the Yugos, the unattainable girls who were probably allowing themselves to be kissed by the Turks and the Yugos long before we even knew how to hold hands; the cheap pizza delivery place by the pond in the shopping centre; the joy of being given the end piece of the leberkäse by the butcher across the street from school.

  It was quieter than usual. The snow cannons over on the ski slopes weren’t running.

  28

  We are sitting in the next cold storage locker, in the next supermarket, in the next village. We are thirsty because there is no water, we are full up thanks to a family-sized package of cold microwave fondue, and Drygalski says, It all comes down to the mind. All historical disasters can ultimately be traced back to mental illness. Neuroses, psychoses, hysteria. It starts with the witch trials and ends with the Third Reich. Or rather, as we can see, it doesn’t ever end.

  Hmm.

  Statistics have shown that the use of antidepressants in the Western world over the past ten years has increased by five hundred per cent. Five hundred per cent! Can you imagine?

  Golde nods, as if to say, yes, that’s a lot. The others’ faces are shrouded in darkness. But you can hear that they’re all still awake.

  The latest scourge of mankind is called chronic fatigue syndrome. It’s all too much for everybody, too complicated, too pointless. Most people just want to be left alone to watch TV and sleep. But that’s no way to organise a society.

  I think that’s the only way to organise a society, says Golde. If you’re watching TV, you’re not out committing any crimes.

  I don’t know, says Gruber. He’s not in the mood for a debate.

  It doesn’t matter anyway, says Drygalski. At any rate, I’m convinced we’ve entered a phase of collective depression. After the last, brief manic phase that was the Nazi period, we now have collective depression.

  Why now? And why depression?

  Because we were doing so well. When we were doing badly, we went manic. Now that we’re doing well, we’re getting depressed. That’s how it always goes. Our minds are always at odds with the external world. It’s a defence mechanism. It’s the most normal, most fundamental principle of existence. We’re all just electrons. We all want what we don’t have; become what we’re not; plus, minus; black, white.

  In that case we must all be about to become very, very happy.

  Why? Are you unhappy?

  Are you happy?

  29

  Just this last bend and then we’ll take a break. Around the bend: an overturned tanker. Ribbons of rubber hang off the heavy steel rims, frozen in mid-air, though they look like they are still turning. The wheel nuts are black with soot. I wonder what happened here, how such a large vehicle could simply have keeled over
on a straight stretch of road, and then I notice the logs a short distance away from the tanker, sticking out of the ground at an angle; they have been sharpened and rammed into holes in the tarmac hewn for that purpose. On the right-hand side, by the hard shoulder, I see more logs and rocks that have been used to prop up the sharpened logs that are sticking out of the ground. It must have happened at night, or perhaps during the day. Perhaps there had been more of these ramps. Perhaps they extended all the way across the road. Perhaps the tanker had been unable to swerve, the front wheel coming off the ground, tipping the whole thing over. I imagine it must have happened slowly, as if in slow motion. The front wheel lifts off the road, there is a jolt and a crunch as the cab skids out to the left of the trailer, and then for a brief moment there is silence. At the sight of the traction unit pitched to the left in mid-air, you don’t even notice the sound of the engine. All you notice is that it’s brown and that the paint is starting to peel and that in the background, by the side of the road, there is a thick, dark green conifer forest. And then suddenly there is a loud noise, a hard, deafening boom, out of nowhere, and the noise doesn’t trail off, it begins to fray, segueing into a grinding, a screeching and twisting, a stretching and breaking, and through this tapestry of unhealthy sounds comes another loud noise, more muffled and booming, and a new, steady screeching, and the twisting and breaking is gone, there is only a screeching, lasting an astonishingly long time, before diminishing, and when it all comes to a standstill and finally dies away, the tanker is no longer a tanker, it is no longer the artificial, practical product of human intelligence, assembled by machines, but more like a mortally wounded animal. A coughing and wheezing and a long, final exhalation.