You all walk down to the Lietzensee. The guys want to go to the park because they think that if the moon’s shining and you’re all sitting by the water it’ll be romantic and they might cop a feel. You let them believe that, because then they’ll shut their traps and try to behave properly.
By the shore you make a dip in the grass, scrunch up some paper, and lay dry twigs over it. Indi rolls the second joint of the evening, and then you are sitting there, blowing smoke at the mosquitoes and talking quietly as if you didn’t want to disturb the night. Jasper is playing some kind of racket through his phone, a dog barks from the opposite bank, and now it would be good if you could shut your eyes and go off on one of your blanks, because you don’t really want what’s going to happen next.
One of the guys spots it first.
“What’s up with Nessi?”
You look around. Nessi isn’t sitting with the rest of you anymore, she’s squatting down by the shore. And as you are looking, she slides silently into the water. Fully dressed, of course. The guys burst out laughing. You try to get up. Eric holds you back and asks if you’re about to go for a swim too, or what.
“Nessi!”
Stink runs to the shore, suddenly everybody’s at the shore and you’re alone sitting in the grass like a parcel that someone’s forgotten to send, and when you catch up with your girls at last, you see Nessi drifting in the middle of the lake with her arms spread. She’s just lying there playing dead, and the guys are calling out and calling her Loch Nessi, and you call her to come back, even from the hotel opposite someone calls out of a window, but Nessi doesn’t react.
“She’ll come back,” says Stink and points into the grass where Nessi has left her wallet and phone. “Someone who doesn’t want her phone to get wet is always going to come back.”
“I’m not going to collect her,” says Indi and spits into the water.
“I’d have been surprised,” says Stink.
The guys are sitting around the fire again. They’re only interested in whatever’s actually happening, and nothing’s happening on the Lietzensee right now. You girls keep standing by the shore and Ruth says Nessi must have had a row with Henrik, and you say Henrik’s an idiot, and Stink says what else is new, and adds, “The way Nessi’s behaving, she must be knocked up.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Your girls look at you in surprise.
“I really didn’t say that,” you add quickly.
“Oh, shit,” says Ruth.
“Oh, shit,” says Stink.
No one needs to point out that you’re one of the worst secret-keepers in the world.
“I really didn’t say that,” you repeat, and it sounds so lame that you can’t think of anything else to say for a while. You just stare at the Lietzensee and hope that Nessi will stay in the water for a bit longer.
II
so you lost your trust,
and you never should have
Coldplay
SEE YOU SOON
The country heard nothing more about you for two years. You hadn’t disappeared, and you hadn’t gone into hiding. You’re not one of those people who have a second identity. Jekyll and Hyde are a nonsense as far as you’re concerned. You’ve returned to your life. Silently. There were eight hours omitted, eight hours when no one missed you.
Your life took its course.
In the morning you woke up and had breakfast. You were reliable at work. You had lunch with your colleagues and chatted. No shadow haunted your thoughts. You were you. On the weekends you did your family duties and visited your six-year-old son for a few hours. Your wife made lunch for you both and then tacitly handed you the bills. You parted in peace, no one mentioned divorce because no one wanted to take the last step. So every weekend you put the bills in your pocket, kissed the boy goodbye on the top of his head, and then drove back to your three-room apartment.
Some evenings you met friends or sat alone in front of the television and watched the world spinning increasingly out of control. You went on vacation, you set money aside and had two operations on your knee. You never thought about the winter two years ago and the traffic jam on the A4. You saw the reports and listened to the features on the radio. When there was a report on TV, you switched channels uninterested. You know what you’ve done. There’s no reason to go on worrying about it. You’re you. And after two years the Traveler is coming back.
It is October.
It is 1997.
It is night.
We’re in mid-autumn, and you can’t shake off the feeling that summer is refusing to go. The weather is mild. Storms rage on the weekend and it’s only at night that the temperature falls to below ten degrees. It feels like the last exhalation of summer.
You’ve been on the road for four hours and you want to stop at a rest area, but all the parking lots are full of semi-trailers so you drive on and turn on the indicator at the next gas station. Here again there’s hardly a free space. The semis with their trailers remind you of abandoned houses rolling across the country, never coming to rest. It’s still a hundred and twenty miles to your apartment. You aren’t one of those people who go to the edge and then collapse with exhaustion. Not you.
After you’ve driven past the gas pumps, you park in the shade of a trailer, get out and stretch. For a few minutes you stand motionless in the darkness listening to the ticking of the engine. In the distance there are footsteps, the click of nozzles, engines are started, the rushing sound of the highway. Then there’s a croak. You look around. On the other side of the parking lot a row of bare trees looms up into the night sky. A crow sits on one of the branches. It bobs up and down as if to draw attention to itself. At that moment you become aware that you’ve never seen a crow at night before. Seagulls, owls, sometimes even a hawk on a road sign, but never a crow. You tilt your head. The crow does the same and then looks to the side. You follow its gaze. Three hundred yards from the gas station there’s a motel. A red neon sign hangs over the entrance. A woman steps out. She walks to her car, gets in, and drives off.
You remember exactly what you were thinking.
You were thinking: Now there’s a free space.
Seven cameras at the gas station and about eight hundred cars that fit the time frame. The police checked all the number plates. A special commission was set up, and over the years that followed it was dealing only with this case. Overtime, frustration, suspicions, and a lot of idiots claiming it was them. The papers went mad, all other news paled. And they had nothing to offer the reader. Except the dead.
You walk over to the motel and step inside the foyer. You aren’t surprised that there is no one at reception. It’s late. Above the reception there is a black sign with a white arrow pointing to a bell. On the sign it says: Please ring.
You don’t ring.
A television flickers from a back room. You go into the room. A woman is sleeping on a fold-out sofa. She is covered to the neck by a woolen blanket. On the table in front of her there’s a plastic bowl containing a ready meal. The remains of peas and mashed potato. A bit of meat. And beside it a half-empty bottle of Fanta and an empty glass. You sit down in the armchair opposite the woman and relax. The murmur from the television, the sleep of the woman, the silence of the night. As you leave the room, you don’t turn the television off. The blanket has slipped; you lay it carefully around the woman’s body and tuck it in at the ends.
The motel has two upper floors, each with sixteen rooms; there are ten rooms on the first floor. You look at the plan. Under the counter at reception you find a box. There are three skeleton keys in the box.
You go up the stairs.
On the second floor you open the first door and go in. You stop in the anteroom and go back out again. You leave the second room after a few seconds as well. Children. The smell of children. After you’ve gone into the third room, you take a deep breath, a single breath replies. You pull the door closed. The darkness embraces you.
This is the right place.
If you dr
ove past the gas station today, you’d see a closed-down motel. The sight of it would remind you of the night twelve years ago—no light in the windows, motionless curtains, stillness. The flickering neon sign above the entrance is broken. And even though the rest area is always full, nobody parks in front of the motel. Cursed, they say. Weeds have fought their way through the cracks, they press against the building as though to support the façade. No one lays flowers outside anymore. The grave candles have disappeared. There’s only an ugly yellow graffito on the front door: Forever Yang.
Almost two years after the A4 you’ve set off on your travels again, and everyone recognized your signature. The papers called you The Avenging Angel. On the internet you were The Traveler, sometimes The German Nightmare or The Big Bad Wolf. Fanatics called you The Scourge of God. By now the police knew you were acting alone. The clues were everywhere, and the clues didn’t lie. You were aware of that. Clues mean you’ve been there. Honesty is important to you. There’s nothing you want to hide. Everyone should know you exist. Of course your fingerprints were no help to the police. No previous convictions. You exist only in your own world.
Your myth grew beyond the borders of Germany, you made waves all around Europe. In England a bank cashier ran amok, in the Czech Republic it was a customer in a supermarket and in Italy a woman who said she couldn’t stand the pressure anymore. Events began to accumulate. In Sweden a man killed his family and wandered through his apartment block with bloody hands until a Doberman went for his throat. In the Netherlands a boy put explosives in a McDonald’s, joined the queue, and set off the explosives when his turn came. A television evangelist spoke of the Day of Judgment, studies were produced, prognoses filled the commercial breaks. Humanity seemed to be walking toward self-destruction with its arms spread wide open. None of it had anything to do with you.
Not rage, not despair, not self-destruction or revenge.
Not hate, not love, not religion or politics.
You’re in no hurry. You go into the rooms one after the other and sit down on the edge of the bed. You watch them sleeping, the way you would watch a patient who has a fever and needs a cooling hand. You wonder what’s happening to you. The Here, the Now, and you on the edge of a stranger’s bed. With your hands around their neck and your fists in their face. You. Not hesitating for a moment. And they. Defending themselves and then giving up. And there’s always this feeling of sympathy. As if they knew why you’re doing it. As if at that brief moment of dying they understood. At least that’s how it feels to you. As if they understood: that you’re on a quest, that you have to explore the darkness. Because the darkness is always there. And in the darkness there’s nothing to find.
That night you go into forty-two rooms and leave thirty-six corpses. After that you put the skeleton key back in the box and step out into the night like someone who has rested and can now continue on his journey.
The crow has vanished from the tree, the neon sign above the entrance still flickers. Three hours have passed. The traffic moves tirelessly in both directions. The world outside the motel has hardly changed.
On the journey home you look at your hands on the wheel. This time you didn’t wear gloves. Your hands are bruised, the knuckles bloody, the pain feels good. I am, I exist. You’re aware that you’ve left lots of clues. It feels right and good.
Oskar isn’t the first corpse you’ve found yourself sitting opposite. If you’re not careful, someone might think this is a family tradition. Even if you don’t think that’s funny at the moment, a few hours later you’ll make a joke about it and once again you’ll be the only one laughing.
Your first corpse was a lunatic who behaved normally during the day and came home in the evening and went totally nuts. You’ve read a lot about mental illnesses and schizophrenia. You’ve engaged intensively with the mental effects of wars, because you wanted to understand your father. But how are you supposed to understand the paranoia of a man who’s never been to war?
You found out that one of your uncles suffered from similar delusions. Perhaps it was a genetic defect. Everything’s possible, but not everything’s excusable. Everyone is responsible for his own life, and excuses are for cowards. Your father was definitely one of those.
He worked as one of eight bricklayers with a construction company and met your mother in Oslo in the early 1960s. He proposed and brought her to Germany. The first years of marriage ran smoothly, and it was only when Oskar and you appeared on the scene that everything changed. Your father started training you boys when you were six and Oskar was three. Outside of your apartment he was the most normal person you could imagine. But once the door closed, silence fell. The television was turned off, conversations lingered only as an echo in the rooms, sometimes you even held your breath. As soon as your father entered the room, a different life began for you.
Two decades later you asked your mother how she could have allowed it all to happen, and whether she’d never had any doubts about her husband’s mental state. She didn’t understand you. She wanted to know why you felt the need to drag your father’s memory through the dirt.
After he had stepped inside the apartment, he took his shoes off and disappeared into the bathroom. Meanwhile your mother put the chain on and bolted the front door with extra locks. With your help she took the metal plate out from behind the wardrobe and pushed it against the door. Two clamps were placed around it and the door was secure. For you it was the other way round. You were trapped.
Once you made the mistake of opening the bathroom door, even though your father had forbidden it. You were curious, and in those days your father’s madness seemed to be only a slight drizzle that would eventually pass. You were seven years old and just needed to find out what he did in the bathroom after work every day. You waited till your mother took Oskar into the kitchen to get the food ready, then you pushed the handle down.
Your father was standing naked in front of the wash basin, washing himself with a sponge. There was nothing else to be seen. You were so relieved that you nearly burst out laughing. It was all you had wanted to know. Your relief lasted only seconds. Your father told you to come in and shut the door behind you. He didn’t look at you as he spoke, he didn’t need to look at you. You obeyed. He set the sponge aside and told you to turn the light off. You obeyed. Your father pulled the curtain over the narrow bathroom window. It grew dark, really dark. Your father asked you if you knew what fear was. You nodded. Your father wanted to hear an answer. So you said: Yes, I know what fear is. Silence. You sensed him standing right in front of you. The smell of his naked body. He must have leaned forward, because his breath wiped over your face like a flame. You have no idea what fear is, he explained. Then you heard water running, and a moment later a wet towel was wrapped around your head. The towel was a shock. Suffocating and cold. You couldn’t see at all, and he used a towel anyway. Your father asked you again if you knew what fear was. He also said: I’ll teach you fear. I’ll teach you everything about fear, so that you venerate and respect it. Because you can’t live without fear. Fear is air, fear is water, fear is everything. You reacted instinctively, the towel was just too much for you, you couldn’t breathe, so you started to swing your fists around.
That was all you could remember.
Later your mother picked you up from the floor and carried you to bed. At six o’clock in the morning she woke you again. You had to wipe up the filth in the bathroom. You caught your breath when you saw what you’d done. There was vomit on the tiles, there was urine and two bloody handprints on the whitewashed wall, which you rubbed away at with a cloth and soapsuds until two gleaming white patches remained. Never again did you make the mistake of surprising your father in the bathroom. You learned to respect fear.
As soon as your father was out of the bathroom, the preparations began. He checked all the windows, examined the front door, and the balcony door had to be secure as well before your mother was allowed to lower the shutters. You remember how she secretly reassured yo
u, over and over again, that things would soon be back to normal, your father was going through a difficult phase. She was wrong. The drizzle was about to become a storm.
Your father had plans.
He took out library books about the conduct of war and taught you how to survive in the wilderness. Once he came home and told you and your brother to take a bullet out of his arm. He removed his shirt. There were his sinewy arms, there were the knotty muscles and no wound. Oskar knew what lay ahead. He burst into tears at the sight of the sinewy arms. Your father pointed at the box.
The box was a battered metal trunk that had belonged to your grandfather. If anyone didn’t obey or burst into tears, he ended up in the trunk. You remember the smell, shoe polish and linseed oil. Your mother shut Oskar inside. No word of protest ever passed her lips. Oskar’s whimpering emerged from the suitcase like the sound of a trapped insect.
Here, your father tapped you on the shoulder, here’s the bloody bullet. Get it out, Ragnar, get it out of there.
You did everything right. You heated the knife over a Bunsen burner. You handed your father a bottle of schnapps and told him to drink it. Your mother held the bandage ready. You didn’t hesitate for a second and cut into your father’s flesh as if it were a slice of smoked pork on a plate. The picture is still very clear in front of your eyes—the way the blade sinks in and splits the skin, the way the blood runs down his arm, first hesitantly, then violently, and your father smiles at you and says: Well done, you’ve saved my life.
Throughout the years your father didn’t let you and your brother go to bed before midnight. There were always shadows under your eyes. There was so much to do, so much to learn. He showed you war documentaries and taught you how to look after a gun. At the age of nine you could take a Luger apart and put it back together. You could tell the ammunition of different calibers apart and say which was best suited to which situation. You studied the human body for its most vulnerable spots.
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