“I’m ready,” Kevin repeated proudly. I nodded: this time he had jeans on. They were cut off just below the knee and a fringe hung playfully down.
I grabbed two bags, Kevin the other three. Dirk, whom I’d forgotten in the staircase, mumbled something about making himself useful. Kevin had just closed the door when he suddenly screamed shrilly.
“What now?!?” I shouted.
“I forgot,” he moaned, “I forgot about Kongo.”
He pulled a key, hanging on a cord around his neck, out from under his T-shirt, bent over, and unlocked the door without taking the cord off this neck. He raced inside; I followed him yelling threateningly. Kevin ran into the kitchen, snapped up from the floor a bowl filled with sticky jam-filled cookies, and emptied it into a waiting bag that was already half-full of the same cookies. Then he shook fresh ones into the bowl from a box and stood up smiling.
“Kongo smashes everything to bits if he doesn’t get fed.”
“Is Kongo a cat?” I asked weakly.
Kevin shook his head.
“A dog?”
Again he shook his head. I decided I didn’t really want to know.
“One last question, what’s that stuff?” I pointed to the bag where he’d just dumped the cookies that had already been in the bowl.
“Oh that,” said Kevin. “Kongo already ate that.”
At that point I just shut down.
The only ones who’d been accompanied to the station by their parents were Janne and Friedrich. Janne’s mother was talking to the guru. Even at a distance I could see that the guru was sweating. Instead of his usual hat he had on a baseball cap that out of nervousness he kept taking off. He was probably hoping right to the end that none of us would show up.
Friedrich’s father towered over everyone. His gray hair gleamed like a helmet on his head, and with his crest and his graying mustache he looked like an aged Hitler Youth member. I would never have taken this man for Friedrich’s father if Friedrich hadn’t fought his way over to me and introduced me to the Hitler-grandpa, whom he addressed as Papa.
Friedrich’s papa looked at me and not a single muscle moved in his ruggedly creased face. He shook my hand with a very firm grip but unlike Friedrich didn’t say much. Actually nothing at all. Together with Janne he was the second person in a short period of time who didn’t deem me worthy of a second glance. Maybe he used to work at a clinic for burn victims or as a military doctor. But then he would have done something about the basal cell carcinoma spreading across the left side of his forehead. Though maybe he wanted a natural death rather than having medications screw around with things.
The guru stood on his tiptoes and counted us. In an attack of generosity I had allowed Dirk to come with me to the platform after we’d dug Kevin out from under all his bags in the backseat. First and foremost because Dirk also wheeled my suitcase. He was also carrying some of Kevin’s luggage and it made him look unbearably gay to me. Kevin stumbled along behind with a smile on his face that seemed directed at nothing concrete and at the same time at everything.
Dirk’s gaze went from one person to the next, taking in the prosthetic, skipping over Friedrich, and paused quizzically on Marlon. And then it arrived at Janne. I saw how Dirk exhaled and I suddenly felt jealous. The way he gawked at her bothered me.
“Thanks a lot and auf wiedersehen,” I shook his hand stiffly before he hit on the idea to hug me.
“My pleasure,” he said. Suddenly I felt bad for him.
“Take good care of Claudia and feed my fish, Dirk,” I said.
He nodded, turned quickly, and left.
During boarding there was some confusion concerning Janne. The guru had informed the rail authority about the guest with limited mobility. Now two beefy men in uniform had assembled in front of her, and Janne looked at them in such a way that left them afraid to do anything. Janne’s mother stood next to her and red splotches appeared on her cheeks.
“We’ve never traveled by train before,” she said as I went over to her.
Janne’s face twisted into a grimace. I was afraid she would start to cry. As supremely self-assured as she normally was, that’s how shatteringly helpless she now seemed. And before I knew what to do, Richard shoved past me. He squatted in front of Janne and asked her something quietly. She nodded and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. Richard planted his feet, bent down, and effortlessly lifted Janne. She reclined in his arms like Snow White being taken out of her glass coffin. Friedrich’s father fiddled with the wheelchair in the meantime. It clicked and then the wheelchair was suddenly totally flat and looked quite light.
“Here,” said Hitler-grandpa, shoving it into my hands.
Nope, it wasn’t as light as it looked. I had a tough time holding it with one hand. I looked at my suitcase. Janne’s mother pulled it to the door for me. Janne’s voice came from up above us. She waved happily out of the open train window.
“Hurry, hurry,” the guru urged, and I got the wheelchair into the train and jumped back down to grab my suitcase.
With nothing to do, the uniformed station attendants carried Kevin’s bags aboard. I turned around. Marlon was standing on the platform as impassive as a Coke machine. Nobody seemed to have thought of the fact that he might also need help. His duffel bag lay at his feet.
For a second the thought shot through my mind that we could depart without him and he wouldn’t say a word, he’d just be left standing there. I reached for my suitcase with one hand and for Marlon’s elbow with the other. “Here’s the door,” I said.
He put his arm out and his fingers clenched my shoulder. His grip was strong and for a moment I panicked, thinking he might break my collarbone. The guru yelled from the railcar and Janne’s mother hurried over and grabbed my suitcase again.
“Quickly, quickly,” she said. I wondered whether she was really worried about us or only about Janne. Maybe she had realized what wonderful young people she had entrusted her precious daughter to.
I took my suitcase from her and climbed onto the train with Marlon in tow. “Watch it, steps,” I said too late, when Marlon was already cursing and had let go of me for a second. Janne’s mother hoisted Marlon’s fallen duffel bag. I turned around: apparently she was trying to decide whether she dared to give Marlon a push from behind. Luckily she decided against it.
We stood panting in the railcar and the door snapped shut in our faces. I waved to Janne’s mother. Her smile was pained and relieved at the same time. She crumpled a tissue in her hand. Friedrich’s Hitler-grandpa went over to her quickly, taking broad strides, and patted her elbow. Then the platform disappeared from view.
I pushed open the door to the compartment. It was already full. Janne was sitting next to Richard. Friedrich and Kevin had taken the seats opposite her. The last free seats had luggage on them. Janne looked at us and I could see in her eyes that she would like to have swapped us for some of the people sitting near her. But maybe it was only Marlon she wanted to swap in.
He was lucky he hadn’t seen how easily Richard had lifted Janne on the platform. After I had such difficulty handling the wheelchair, I looked at Richard differently. And it was clear that Janne must have as well. There’s no way I could have lifted a girl up and into a train with my own two legs. I looked skeptically at Richard’s upper arm, but there wasn’t much to see under his loose-fitting checkered sleeves.
She probably didn’t weigh much, I decided. Maybe her legs didn’t weigh anything. Legs must make up a significant portion of a person’s weight. I just needed to exercise a bit more and I’d be able to carry her.
The guru waved from the next compartment.
Marlon stood there like a statue that someone had accidently unveiled in the wrong place. His face didn’t show any emotion. I said to him, “It’s full here. The guru is waving to us from the next compartment,” so he wouldn’t wonder why we still hadn’t sat down
and were just standing around like idiots. I wondered how Marlon got around the city and whether he ever went to areas he didn’t know. Maybe a cane or a dog would really have come in handy. I’d had all sorts of impressions of Marlon—but that he was helpless had never occurred to me.
We sat down with the guru after I stowed my suitcase and Marlon’s duffel bag on the luggage rack. It suddenly hit me that I was the least impaired person in the group. Though I was still the ugliest.
The guru had put his cap in his lap and was flipping through a stack of documents. Between nondescript slips of paper were ticket printouts and entire sheets of handwritten notes. I craned my neck because I thought I recognized Claudia’s handwriting on one of the sheets.
The guru had two deep lines running across his forehead. His face was flushed.
“Problem?” I asked. Marlon sat casually next to me, facing the window as if watching the landscape fly past.
The guru shrugged his shoulders. “Depends on how you see it.”
“Where’s the camera?” I asked.
“What camera? Oh.” He pointed to a blue bag in the luggage rack.
“May I?”
He obviously didn’t have the slightest desire to give me his camera, but he stood up anyway and reached for the bag and pulled the camera out with both hands and handed it to me. I turned it all around. It looked cheap.
“Can you really work with something like this?” I asked. “Can you make a real movie on it?”
“Of course,” said the guru without looking up at me. “Should I show you how it works?”
“I can figure it out,” I said, testing a few buttons.
Marlon still hadn’t moved. I turned on the camera, started recording, and pointed the lens at Marlon. No idea what he picked up on but all of a sudden he said, “I’m going to punch you in the face.” He’ll have to find my face first, I thought, somewhere in his perpetual darkness, but I didn’t say it. I also didn’t say that I could have left him standing there on the platform earlier. I took the camera out into the hall and started shooting the little gardens passing by.
They were laughing in the other compartment. I couldn’t understand it. In our compartment the atmosphere was like a funeral and here they were laughing like they were on a school field trip. I pointed the camera at the door to the compartment. They had drawn the curtain. No chance to get a candid shot. I felt locked out and knocked on the door.
The laughing stopped. I pushed open the door and pulled the curtain aside. Friedrich’s chuckles were the last to die down. They looked at me as if I was the ghost of their dead aunt. I looked at them through the viewfinder. They were playing cards. A bag of gummi bears was being passed around.
I pointed the camera at Janne. She was shuffling the cards and looking at her hands as she did. I had the impression that she was trembling slightly. Maybe it was just the vibrations of the old train. Her wheelchair was folded up and propped between the seat bench and the door.
“You guys are having fun, eh?” I asked in a funereal tone and filmed as guilty looks spread across their faces.
There were fewer and fewer buildings and people outside. I stood in the corridor and filmed the birch trees racing past and the long lakes. The guru turned up next to me and took the camera away.
“The battery doesn’t last forever,” he said.
He stood next to me and leaned on the handrail exactly the same way I was. I didn’t look at him. I felt like getting out at the next station and hopping on the next train back to Berlin. These local trains stopped in the most godforsaken places. The isolated figures who got on at those places looked somehow deformed. As if I of all people could complain about that. Behind me bubbled Janne’s laughter. I would really like to have taken a machine gun to the whole scene, and I wasn’t even embarrassed by that thought. I should have learned a lesson from Marlon: disgraced down to the last bone in his body and yet still cool.
“This week is going to change lives,” said the guru from next to me.
To be honest I wasn’t the slightest bit interested what the guru hoped to gain from this week. But I still asked, “Yours or ours?”
“Both,” he said.
I tried not to smile too broadly. “Inflated expectations have never helped anyone.”
“I’m a little bit scared,” said the guru.
“Of what?” I stifled a yawn. “Of us? It’s too late for that.”
He exhaled loudly and looked really depressed as he did.
“It could still end up being some interesting footage,” I said with a sudden flash of sympathy.
He nodded again. His face betrayed the fact that he was assuming the opposite would be true.
Getting off the train, unlike getting on it, went pretty smoothly. Taking a cue from Richard, we had formed a line in the corridor in advance. Everyone listened to him, and the guru seemed grateful that somebody who was up to the job was taking over the steering wheel. Friedrich carried Janne’s wheelchair and looked really proud. The guru shouldered Friedrich and Marlon’s luggage in addition to his own.
Marlon’s hand was on my upper arm again. I could barely stand it. I hated being touched. The sudden solidarity of our disabled troop made me want to escape. All for one and one for all. I didn’t want that. Not with these people or anyone else. I was already sick of it.
In no time at all we had lined up on one of the two platforms of the tiny little station. The only thing missing was for us to be put into pairs and told to hold our line buddy’s hand. The guru counted heads. Sweat dripped from his forehead. Friedrich opened the wheelchair as if he had been doing it his entire life. Janne smiled down at us from Richard’s arms. The sun shone.
It turned out we had about a twenty minute walk to our lodgings. The guru had arranged transportation for the luggage but he didn’t seem to believe that it would come. We were waiting outside, sitting on our suitcases, when a tractor rattled into the parking lot pulling a trailer. At the giant steering wheel was a boy who couldn’t have been older than twelve and next to him was a shaggy bear-sized dog. The two parties looked at each other curiously for a while until the guru realized this was the transportation to the farm.
We threw our bags into the trailer and the tractor chugged off. We walked around the station building and found a paved path that curled into the woods. The guru compared something on one of his sheets of paper with the sign at the start of the path and turned on the navigation function of his phone.
“I can take a turn,” I said to Richard, who had stationed himself behind Janne’s wheelchair. He nodded indifferently and stood aside for me.
“Did you ask me?” asked Janne with an unpleasantly high-pitched voice.
“May I, Janne?”
She ground her teeth together. I took this as a yes. After the first few meters I was already bathed in sweat and began to suspect that Janne’s mother didn’t need to go to the gym to keep herself so fit.
The promised twenty minutes stretched on for an eternity. The paved path gave way to a gravel path and then a dirt path. At some point I realized we’d been walking for nearly an hour. Nobody said a word, Kevin just hummed a tune. He moved like a stork on his stilt-like heels, swinging his bag back and forth, and he didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered that the ends of his heels kept sticking in the sandy soil. The guru was a few meters ahead and had been on the phone for the last ten minutes.
“I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” Friedrich repeated as if in a trance.
“Then eat some grass,” said Marlon.
Those must have been the first word I’d heard from him all day. He had finally let go of me and was walking with light, tentative steps in the middle of the group. I kept waiting for him to bump into someone but it didn’t happen. Now and then he made a strange clicking noise with his tongue.
“I saw somebody do that on TV but I couldn’t figure out how they di
d it,” said Friedrich enthusiastically.
Marlon didn’t think to enlighten him.
When I was sure that we were lost the guru suddenly put his phone in his pocket, and gestured with his arms.
“We’re here!” he yelled. From where we were there was still nothing to see but trees. The guru waited until we caught up. And when we did, I wasn’t the only one who stood there with my mouth wide open.
I was prepared for all sorts of things. That we would be staying in a horse stall or in a yurt or in dilapidated tents. The last thing I expected was a forest villa with towers that reached up to the clouds. A yard spread out in front of the house, and behind it was some kind of shed with a grill and a nicely stacked pile of wood. Our bags were stacked at the base of the stairs that led to the entrance.
“There must be another way here,” said Friedrich profoundly, fishing out his suitcase and backpack.
I just stood there, still gripping the handles of Janne’s wheelchair. Even she had turned her face up to look at the towers. The guru climbed the stairs and reached under the doormat.
“By the way, there’s a ramp!” he called to us and then stood up again. He raised his hand proudly into the air; in it gleamed a key.
I sat down on the bed and untied my sneakers. Against the opposite wall was a second bed. Marlon was lying in it with his arms crossed on his chest. He still had his sunglasses on so I couldn’t say whether he was sleeping. His breathing was soft and steady.
We were so close that there I was listening to his breathing. I didn’t like it. This handicapped accessible villa was certainly big enough for each of us to have a separate room. I got the feeling that the sleeping arrangements were part of the plan, and I was an opponent of such a plan.
The room was spacious, with a huge antique chandelier hanging from a ceiling that must have been three meters high. There was a giant window that Marlon found immediately and threw open. The light white curtains fluttered in the breeze and I felt like I was in an Impressionist painting. The chest looked antique. Near the window stood a secretary, and I looked to no avail for a inkwell on it. It was a giant, fantastic room, but stuck in there with Marlon I felt confined.
Just Call Me Superhero Page 6
