The Club

by Takis Würger

  The Club

  Takis Würger

  Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins

  Takis Würger, Der Club

  Copyright © 2017 by Kein & Aber AG, Zurich – Berlin

  Cover design “ Daniel Rembert

  Cover photograph “ Jan Philip Welchering

  All rights reserved

  English translation © 2019 by Charlotte Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  The events, characters and incidents depicted in this novel are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual incidents, is purely coincidental.

  First published in German as Der Club by Kein & Aber AG in 2017

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: March 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2896-6

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4681-6

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut in the framework of the “Books First” program.

  For Mili

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Begin Reading

  Back Cover

  Hans

  In the south of Lower Saxony is a forest called the Deister, and in that forest there was a sandstone house where the forest ranger used to live. Through a series of chance events, and with the help of a bank loan, this house came into the possession of a married couple who moved there so the wife could die in peace.

  She had cancer, dozens of little carcinomas lodged in her lungs, as if someone had fired into them with a scattergun. The cancer was inoperable, and the doctors said they didn’t know how much time the wife had left, so the husband left his work as an architect to stay by her side. When the wife became pregnant, the oncologist advised her to have an abortion. The gynecologist said a woman with lung cancer could still bear a child. She gave birth to a small, scrawny infant with delicate limbs and a full head of black hair. The man and the woman planted a cherry tree behind the house and named their son Hans. That was me.

  In my earliest memory my mother is running barefoot through the garden towards me. She is wearing a yellow linen dress and a necklace of red gold.

  When I think back to the earliest years of my life it is always late summer. It seems to me that my parents had lots of parties where they drank beer from brown bottles while we children were given a fizzy drink called Schwip Schwap. On those evenings I would watch the other children playing tag and feel almost like a normal boy, and it was as if the shadow that clouded my mother’s face had vanished, though that may have been the light from the campfire.

  I would usually observe them from a far corner of the garden where our horse used to graze. I was protecting him, because I knew he was afraid of strangers and didn’t like being stroked. He was an English Thoroughbred that had once been a racehorse; my mother had bought him off the knacker. If he saw a saddle, he bucked. When I was small, my mother would sit me on the horse’s back; later I would ride him through the forest, squeezing my thighs to hold on. At night, looking out over the garden from my bedroom, I could hear my mother talking to the horse.

  My mother knew every herb in the forest. If I had a sore throat she would make me a syrup of honey, thyme, and onions, and the pain would vanish. Once I told her I was frightened of the dark; she took me by the hand and we walked into the forest at night. She said she couldn’t live with the thought of me being frightened, which troubled me a little, as I was often afraid. Up on the ridgeway fireflies leapt from the branches and settled on my mother’s arms.

  Every evening, through my bedroom floorboards, I would hear her coughing. The sound helped me to fall asleep. My parents told me the cancer had stopped growing; the radiotherapy she’d had after my birth had worked. I made a mental note of the word “remission,” though I didn’t know what it meant. Judging by my mother’s expression when she said it, it seemed to be something good. She told me she would die, but no one knew when. I believed that as long as I wasn’t afraid, she would live.

  I never played. I spent my time observing the world. In the afternoons I would go into the forest and watch the movement of the leaves touched by the wind. Sometimes I would sit beside my father on the workbench, looking on as he turned pieces of oak, smelling the aroma of fresh sawdust. I hugged my mother while she made white currant jam, and listened to her back when she coughed.

  I didn’t like going to school. I learned the alphabet quickly, and I liked numbers, because they were mysterious, but singing songs and making flowers out of cardboard did not come easily to me.

  When we started writing stories in German class, I realized that school could help me. I wrote essays about the forest and my mother’s visits to the doctor, and these stories made the world a little less strange to me; they allowed me to create an order I couldn’t see around me. I bought a diary with my pocket money and began to write in it every evening. I don’t know if I was a nerd; if I was, I didn’t care.

  There were different groups at school: the girls, the footballers, the handball players, the guitar players, the Russian Germans, the boys who lived in the nice white houses on the edge of the forest. I didn’t like ball games and I didn’t play an instrument; I didn’t live in one of the white houses and I didn’t speak Russian. At break the girls would come over and join me, and when the boys from my class saw this they laughed at me, so at break time I would often go and hide behind a fish tank, where I could be alone.

  On my eighth birthday my mother asked the other parents to bring their children round to our house. I sat quietly in front of the marbled cake; I was excited, and wondered whether the children would become my friends. In the afternoon we played hide-and-seek. I ran into the forest and climbed a chestnut tree. They won’t find me here, I thought happily. I stayed up the tree all day; I only came home in the evening. I was proud that no one had found me, and asked my parents where the other children were. My mother told me my hiding place had been too good, and took me in her arms.

  All my life my hiding place was too good.

  When I was ten, the boys started playing a ball game they’d invented themselves at break, which was so crass and violent that only lunatics or children could have come up with it. The aim was to carry the ball to the other side of the playing field, and you were allowed to use any available means to prevent the other team’s players from doing the same. Once, just before the summer holidays, one of the boys was at home with mumps. They needed another player, and asked me if I wanted to join in. Just thinking about it made me panic, because the c
hildren sweated and I didn’t like other people’s sweat; besides, I knew I was terrible at catching. I said no, but they said they couldn’t play without me. I ran up and down the grass for a few minutes, pleased at how successfully I avoided holding the ball. A fellow pupil yelled at me to make an effort or they’d all lose because of me. A few moments later an opponent came running towards me with the ball. He was already in eighth grade and was stronger than me. I’d always been small; this boy played rugby for the regional team and he was running straight at me. Quickly I tried to assess the weak points of the body rushing in my direction, then threw my full weight against his right knee and shattered his kneecap. I knelt beside the boy and told him I was sorry but he barely heard me, as he was screaming very loudly. Later he was picked up by an ambulance and his friends wanted to beat me up, so I ran away, climbed a poplar tree and perched in the small branches right at the top. I was never afraid of falling. The children gathered at the bottom and threw lumps of clay at me that they got from a nearby field.

  When I came home I saw my father in the workshop, sanding wood. The principal had already called him. I’d been telling myself the whole time that it wasn’t that bad—after all, nothing had happened to me—but when I saw my father and knew that I was safe, I began to cry. He held me in his arms and I scratched the dried earth from my shirt.

  My father was a bit like me; he was often silent, and I have no memory of him playing ball games. In other ways, he was unlike me; he would laugh loud and long, and this laughter had etched lines on his skin. That night, at dinner, he laid two black cowhide boxing gloves beside my plate. He said that things in life were usually gray, not black and white, but sometimes there was only right and wrong, and when stronger people hurt weaker ones, it was wrong. He said he would enroll me in the boxing club the next day. I picked up the gloves and felt the softness of the leather.

  At that time, my parents had a visitor for a few weeks: my mother’s half sister from England, who was sitting at the table with us. She hardly spoke any German, and spent most days going for runs in the forest. I liked her, though I couldn’t really understand her when she talked. My mother explained that her half sister had a thunderstorm in her head and I should be nice to her, so each day I picked a bunch of marsh marigolds for her down by the duck pond and put them on the table by her bed, and once I stole an apple twice as big as my fist from a tree by the church and hid it under her pillow for her to find.

  I hadn’t had an aunt until I was eight. Then my grandfather died and my mother found out that she had an older half sister living in England.

  She had been the result of an affair, and my grandfather had never accepted her as his daughter. After his death, my mother and aunt had somehow managed to become close, even though they were so different, including in their appearance. My mother was tall and her forearms were strong from working in the garden. My aunt was petite, almost delicate, a bit like me, and she had short, buzz cut hair, which back then I thought was cool.

  The evening my father laid the boxing gloves on the table, my aunt went on quietly eating her bread. I was a little ashamed that she had seen me so weak, and surprised by the fact that she didn’t seem weak at all, even though she too was small, and had a little patch of scurf on the back of her neck that never seemed to clear up.

  Sometimes she would come into my bedroom at night and sit on the floor beside my bed. Now, when I can’t sleep, I occasionally look down at the floor and for a moment, if I turn my head very fast, it feels as if she’s still sitting there.

  That particular evening she spent a long time sitting on the bare floorboards, just looking at me. I was a little frightened, because what she was doing seemed strange. She took my hand and held it tight; her hands were like a little girl’s.

  She spoke to me in German, better than I expected; her accent was a bit funny, but I didn’t laugh.

  “When I was your age, it was the same for me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “No father.”

  “Was that a reason?”

  “It was back then,” she said.

  We sat like that for a long time. I imagined how terrible life must be without a father, and stroked my thumb across the back of her hand.

  “Did the others hurt you?” I asked.

  With a sharp intake of breath, she squeezed my hand a little tighter and said something I’d never heard anyone say before:

  “If they touch you, come and find me, and I’ll kill them.”

  Alex

  He was so naïve. And had these fascinating soft eyes, as if he were always worried, and as if there were a black galaxy hidden in each eyeball. I’ll never forget his face that night. He doesn’t know it, but back then Hans was one of the few things that kept me alive.

  On one of the days when the sun didn’t rise I saw him in the garden, sitting on the grass, and I went and sat next to him.

  “How are things?” I asked.

  His black hair was thick, like an animal’s. He sat there beside me, and I sensed in him the same heaviness that numbed me by day and kept me awake at night.

  “I’m sad, Aunt Alex,” he said.

  I would have liked to put my arm around him, but didn’t dare. For a long time I thought that if I got too close to people they might catch my bad thoughts, like Spanish flu.

  He was like the water in the forest, gentle and quiet. I had to look after him. My sister couldn’t; she was raising him with kisses. What good did it do him if she kissed away his tears when the children at school wanted to beat him up?

  Sometimes I would secretly watch him at boxing training. I would stand behind the door to the gym and watch through the yellow-tinted glass. I never wanted children, and I wouldn’t have been a good mother; nonetheless, when I saw this boy standing between the dangling punch bags, trying to find the strength to hit them, I was touched. He would be able to protect himself if someone showed him how.

  Hans

  Evening light slanted across the gym; the punch bags hung on chains suspended from the ceiling. After training I would sit in the car, steam rising from my shirt. My father would have been watching, and we would both sit there in silence. I could see that he was happy; at least that’s what I thought at the time.

  Four times a week he would take me to training and watch. Afterwards my mother would cook us fried potatoes with onions and gherkins, which she called a “farmer’s breakfast.” When I was grown up I made it myself a couple of times, but it didn’t taste the same.

  A few weeks later the boys at school wanted to beat me up again. This time, too, I ran away, but then I thought better of it and stopped. I turned and raised my fists, the way my boxing coach had shown me, the right one beside my chin, the left at eye level in front of my head. No one attacked me.

  I trained until the capsules in my knuckles ached. To me, boxing was different from other sports because no one expected me to enjoy it, and I could be alone with my pain, my strength, my fear. I was closer to other boys when I was boxing than I had ever been before. When we practiced sparring at close range I could smell their sweat and feel the heat coming off them. It bothered me, and to begin with I often felt nauseous, but I got used to it. Now, when I look back at that time, I think I only became able to tolerate other people when I started to fight them. I preferred to box at a distance, from long range, keeping my opponent at arm’s length.

  At thirteen I fought my first match and lost on points. I remember that, though I don’t recall my opponent. My father was at the ringside. In the car he kissed my knuckles and said he’d never been as proud of anything as he was of me. I remember that clearly.

  One November day, when I was fifteen, we were driving to Brandenburg for a tournament. On the way there, on a bridge over the Havel just outside Berlin, there was a sheet of ice on the road. Our car skidded on the bend and slid into the crash barrier. My father got out and walked towards the traffic coming up behind us so no one would plow into the car with his son in it. I stayed in the
passenger seat and was afraid. In the rearview mirror I saw a cement truck with a flashing sign on the windshield that said hansi. The radiator of the truck hit my father and split him in two. The cement truck was slightly dented. I don’t remember the funeral, or the months that followed.

  Six months later I found my mother lying in the garden. She was outside because I’d asked for chives to sprinkle over my scrambled egg that evening. Her movements were slow; there was a glint in the corner of her eyes, and beside her lay a little basket of the fresh chives she had cut for me. She gazed at me. I thought she looked beautiful.

  I called the ambulance, then sat beside her in the grass and listened as the rattle in her lungs grew fainter. Her grip on my hand remained firm even when her breath fell silent. The autopsy found that she had died from a honeybee sting; the venom had triggered anaphylactic shock.

  The coffin was made of cherrywood. My father had built it years earlier in accordance with my mother’s wishes and had carved flowers all over it. People threw earth into the grave with a little trowel. My mother’s half sister was wearing a white dress; she reached down, took some earth in her hand and dropped it onto the coffin. That made an impression on me. I thought of how my mother used to kneel in the garden picking strawberries, and I too took a handful of earth.

  My father had died because I wanted to box in Brandenburg. My mother had died because I wanted chives on my scrambled egg. For a few days I waited to wake up from this nightmare, and when that didn’t happen I became filled with a darkness so overwhelming I’m astonished that I survived.

  After the funeral my aunt spoke to me in English; she was crying, and her left eyelid fluttered with every word. I didn’t understand her. I couldn’t cry; I wanted to scream, though I had never screamed before.

  There was a cross behind the altar in the church. I went to look at it. The Jesus who hung there looked indifferent. I took off my suit jacket and punched the church wall with my fists until my left metacarpal broke at the base of the little finger.