She smiles suddenly, it’s a sad smile. She says that’s all, and to your ears it sounds almost as if she’s sorry not to want anything more from you. Wishful thinking, Mirko, just wishful thinking.
“When can I collect the stuff?”
“Tonight?”
“Is that a question?”
“A suggestion.”
“Tonight, then.”
“Seven?”
“Seven’s fine. You can take me out for ice cream.”
“Ice cream?”
She points at your phone.
“My number’s stored in it, call me if you know where there’s good ice cream.”
With those words she puts her sunglasses back on her nose, straightens the bag over her shoulder, and walks past you. Tonight at seven, you think and watch after her until she’s disappeared around the corner, and only then do you think about what she said last. You nervously look through the contacts on your phone. The name leaps out at you: Stink.
What? What the hell sort of name is Stink?
She answers after the second ring.
“Did you forget something?”
She doesn’t ask who’s calling, she knows it must be you.
“The ice cream parlor on Krumme Strasse,” you say.
“Fine, I’ll be there.”
“Are you really called Stink?”
“Are you really called Mirko?”
“But why Stink?”
“Because I smell so good.”
You don’t know what she smells like. You wish she were standing in front of you so you could bury your nose in the crook of her neck.
“Anything else?”
“Who are the drugs for?”
She is silent, you hear her breathing, the silence stretches out.
“For my friend, she’s not in great shape and we’re worried she’s going to die,” she says at last and cuts you off.
You stand at the side of the street and are incredibly pleased with yourself. Stink. You kiss your phone, you really kiss your phone. That girl has such a hold over you that you nearly disappear. You don’t mind disappearing. You’d do anything for her, you wouldn’t even mind becoming nothing at all. See, that’s how it goes. A martyr is born.
As if from nowhere a hand rests on your forehead and cools you down. As if from nowhere you hear words, and the words are meant only for you.
“Taja, hey, Taja, can you hear me?”
As if out of nowhere you float up and are set down gently as if you were a breathing, quivering soap bubble that would burst immediately if touched too hard. You feel a glass being put to your lips, you drink and cough. There’s the hand again, reassuring. There’s breathing by your ear.
“Taja, wake up.”
I am awake, you want to answer, but you know it’s a lie. Being awake means being there, it means being in reality. Reality is a whore who hates you because you’ve pissed her off. I don’t exist anymore, you want to say, but your mouth’s on strike, your whole head is …
“Hey, not so hard.”
“That’s not hard.”
“If I slapped your face as hard as that you’d burst into tears.”
“Schnappi, shut up.”
“Just saying.”
You open your eyes, your friends give a start.
They’re real, you think, they’re really there, they—
“Hi, sweetie,” says Nessi.
“What’s up with her eyes?” Ruth asks, as if you couldn’t hear her. You want to raise your hand and rub your eyes. What about my eyes? You can’t move.
“Stay calm, now.”
Stink puts a hand on your chest as if she has to keep you calm. You want to tell her you are calm, but your teeth click together, your body is all quiver and shake. You tip over sideways and Schnappi already has a bucket ready. You throw up and throw up, and when it’s over, when you feel at last that it’s finally over, there’s a rumble in your gut and you shit yourself helplessly.
When you wake up the second time, you’re lying on your side and the balcony door is open. A warm breeze cools your sweat and banishes the stench from the first floor. You hear voices and laughter, then you smell perfume and know that Stink’s outside.
“Feeling better?”
You turn around; Nessi is sitting on the other side of the bed. You try to smile at her and pull a face, your lips are brittle and cracked. Nessi hands you a glass of water. You drink greedily and lick your dry lips.
“How …”
Your voice is a croak, but it doesn’t matter, Nessi knows what you’re trying to say. She tells you everyone came straight here after you sent your text. They rang and rang the bell for a while and then came in through the terrace. You nod, you haven’t closed the door to the terrace for ages. The smell was too bad.
“What day is it?” you ask, as if time mattered.
“Wednesday. Just after six, the sun’s just risen. We found you downstairs on the sofa and carried you up. We’re all exhausted.”
You nod, you feel the tears welling up.
“I’m sorry, I …”
“Calm down. We’re here. The important thing is that you’re better now, you don’t need to worry about anything else. We’d have called a doctor, but Stink said that was a lousy idea.”
“Ruth didn’t like it either.”
You look up, Stink is standing in the door to the terrace, grinning at you. Ruth and Schnappi appear beside her, and suddenly you’re enveloped by your girls, you feel their warmth and concern and you realize that you’ve never felt so secure. Whatever happens next, you’re no longer alone.
They help you into the bathroom. Your legs are rubber, as soon as you tense a muscle it goes into spasm. You meet your eyes in the mirror for a second. Bloodshot and dull as a scratched spoon. The bathtub is full, the foam crackles, they leave you alone. For a while you just sit there in the water letting the warmth lull you. It’s embarrassing. They washed the shit off you, changed your bedclothes, and scrubbed the vomit off the floor. You’re not fit for anything. It feels as if your protective shell has been destroyed and your skin is nothing but a paper-thin membrane. How much weight have you lost? Ten or twelve pounds? You don’t want to think about it. Even your hair looks lifeless and your cheekbones are sticking out as if you were incurably ill. Your stomach is on fire and every cell in your body craves the drug. Your nose itches, your tongue is vibrating, the thought of the powder makes your mouth water. You’re swallowing your own saliva. Your salvation is in the living room, in a plastic bag.
I could ask the girls if they’d …
Forget it, your party’s over.
But …
You shut your eyes and listen to the crackling of the foam.
Nessi said it was Wednesday, you think, and don’t want to look back at TuesdayMondaySundaySaturdayFridayThursdayWednesday.
No.
You want to start over with this Wednesday. It’s the summer when you’re all going to leave school. It’s a new start. Think of something like that. You manage it for a minute or two, then your body craves the drug again and you plunge slowly under the water as if you could hide. And hold your breath. And hold your breath.
Nessi is waiting for you when you leave the bathroom. She picked out a few clothes. You’re grateful, because you couldn’t make your mind up what to wear. Nessi helps you dress and finally she brushes the hair off your forehead, pushes it behind your ears, and admits that you look very, very bad.
“Thanks.”
She puts her arm around your hips and guides you to the door. She hesitates there for a moment.
“I have to tell you something, but you’re not to get excited.”
“Nothing excites me at the moment,” you reply, and know it’s a lie. Deep inside you there lives a hungry animal and it is running wild, tearing at your stomach walls, dashing from your legs to your arms and leaving unpleasant goose bumps all over your body, itching and wanting to be scratched.
Nothing can surprise
me.
At least that’s what you think.
“I’m pregnant,” says Nessi.
Your girls are waiting on the terrace. They are sitting around the same table that four men will gather around in two days’ time, before they launch the hunt after you. You can’t know that at this time; everything would turn out differently if you knew it right now.
Ruth puts a blanket around your shoulders. Your chair is in the sun. You’re freezing, even though it’s warm. The air smells sweet of flowers. You’re dazzled by the morning light and want to shut your eyes and sleep till summer is over.
“Here.”
Schnappi hands you a cup of tea. You’d rather have coffee.
“I’d rather have coffee.”
“There’s ginger in it. It’ll give you strength. I crushed it myself. Here, look at this, I nearly broke a nail and the garlic press is fallen to pieces. Either you drink my tea or I’m going home.”
You drink the tea, the heat of the ginger numbs your mouth and makes you sweat, you drink down the cup and can only hope that Schnappi hasn’t made a whole pot. Your body yearns for a kick, any kind of kick. Ginger tea doesn’t cut it. You set down the empty cup. Schnappi is content, and pushes her coffee toward you.
“Good girl, this one’s on the house.”
You sip greedily, and feel as if you’re going to throw up again. Calm now, breathe, calm now. Your girls are waiting. They have seen the living room and the kitchen. They want to know what this all means and why their best friend disappeared from their lives without a trace for a week. And of course they’re also interested in why you got so completely fucked up on drugs. They’ve got so many questions that they say nothing and just wait.
If only you knew, you think, and look around and look around and realize at that moment what your eyes are doing.
They’re looking for the plastic bag.
It isn’t on the table in the living room anymore. It isn’t on the sofa. Where is it? Your lungs clench spasmodically. You feel betrayed, your vision blurs. Pull yourself together. You’ve shed enough tears in the last days. It’s time to accept reality again.
Fuck reality.
You take a deep breath, hold the coffee cup tightly with both hands and want to tell your girls what happened, but not a word comes out. You stare into the coffee. Tears flow down your face. You feel your whole self draining away. You hate yourself for this weakness and want to run off to the sofa and press the plastic bag to your chest.
Where the hell is it …?
Stink leans over the table and slaps you in the face. You look up startled. Everyone looks at Stink, and Stink says: I had to do this. You nod. She’s right. She had to do that. It does you good, it hurts and does you good.
More, you think, but nothing more comes.
So you get up.
So you walk straight ahead.
So they follow you.
Downstairs to the basement. You hold on to the banisters a few times, leaning your shoulder against the wall to keep from falling. Weak, how can I be so weak? The basement is divided into two vaults. You step inside the pantry, which is as big as the kitchen above it. The smell of stored apples is perfume against the stench in the house. Shelves, filled with wine bottles and drinks, cans, boxes, and bags. The things are arranged as they would be in a supermarket. It was always important for your father to be independent. He called the room his bunker. It’s so cold that you’re shivering. As a child you slept down here on summer nights, as soon as the heat in the house became unbearable. Your father set up a couch, there was a little table and a reading lamp. And if you got really bored, you brought your dolls downstairs, made them a new home among the boxes and imagined bombs raining down on Berlin while you were in safety.
“What are we doing here?” Ruth asks behind you.
You give a start, you’d completely forgotten your girls. Concentrate.
You stop by the chest freezer and rest your hand on the lid. When you speak, your voice is a whisper.
“I didn’t know what else to do with him.”
Everything begins and ends with death. That’s not a special piece of wisdom, it’s a fact. Your first life was short and ended with your mother’s death. You were two years old, the car came off the road, somersaulted and landed in a ditch. Your mother died in the crash, your father got a scar on his forehead, nothing happened to you. You went on sleeping on the backseat. It was a miracle, people said. Ever since then you’ve hated miracles.
Your father didn’t want to stay in Norway after the accident, so he packed everything up and went to Germany. Berlin was the destination because your father’s brother lived there. Uncle Ragnar.
The family came together again.
Your second life began.
Your memories of the first few years in Berlin are relatively vague. You lived in Friedenau for a while. You can still see the courtyard in front of your eyes, the tall trees, all the people in the streets. You remember what the girl next door was called, Tina. Nothing more from those days has stayed with you. The memories of your mother overlap with those first years in Berlin, as if she’d been there.
Shortly after your sixth birthday your father bought the house in Frohnau, and you went to school. That autumn your real life began, and your father found his way too. Music had always been his weakness, he composed his first pieces and his passion became a profession. Seen from outside everything looked good and right. But whatever your father did, whoever he met, the loss of his great love surrounded him like a negative aura and was transferred to you. Suspicion became your closest playmate. It could all come to an end at any moment. Nothing was safe. That’s how we are. We learn from our parents. Even if your father assumed both roles, he couldn’t replace your mother. And you made life hard for him too. Without really understanding why, most of the time you felt insignificant. As if your mother had died on purpose and left you alone. As if that were the truth and you were worthless.
Until high school you heaped presents on every girl who befriended you. In kindergarten, at school, next door. You gave them everything that was close to you—dolls, books, CDs, toys. You thought you could bind the girls to you like that. The opposite was the case. You hugged them so tightly they could hardly breathe, and soon looked for other friends. And you didn’t get your presents back either. There was a deep pain in your soul. You had read that he who gives always gets back twofold. Your father informed you that such sayings were inventions of the Bible and meaningless in real life. He said: If your heart is bound to something, you cannot give it away, for whatever it is, your heart will miss it. You were sure that he was talking about your mother. But you didn’t understand exactly what he meant, because she was taken from him after all, he hadn’t given her away.
Your father’s career was unstoppable, and his brother played an important part in making the necessary contacts with television and radio stations. Uncle Ragnar was your father’s hero, never yours. He didn’t really like you, and made no attempt to hide the fact from you.
Long before you were in secondary school, your father was earning more money than he had ever dreamed of. He was highly regarded as a composer in the world of advertising. Everything he touched turned to gold. But it was never enough. Contentment was not a part of his philosophy of life. A broken heart is a broken heart, there’s nothing you can do about it, he said over and over, which was in the end only an excuse for the drug excesses and the constant stream of women who came and went and never stayed. And in the middle there was always you—the girl who had lost her mother, the girl who was lonely and could find no place in the world.
Your ego was a disaster, you stumbled from one melancholy to the next, you listened to the appropriate music and wrote poems about loneliness and death. You would inevitably have ended up on a couch with piercings in your face and cuts on your arms, if luck had not been on your side when you went to secondary school, putting you in the right class.
You found your girls.
Fir
st of all there was Stink, who leaned over to you in the introductory assembly in the hall and asked if by any chance you had a fucking tampon, she was running out and her underwear was brand-new. Ruth and Schnappi joined you at break on the playground, Nessi switched to your class six months later, and your set was complete.
Your girls accepted you from the start. As far as they’re concerned you’re interesting and exciting, they love your melancholy and the way your voice trembles when you sing about the end of the world. You’re the counterweight to their follies and bring them back down to earth if they float too high in the air. And you’re their star, because it helps a bit that your father writes stupid jingles that everybody knows. And then of course there’s the Darian connection. Even though you don’t like your cousin any more than you like his father, there are advantages to the relationship. Darian ignores you just as his father does, you’re the little cousin who gets a present at Christmas, but that’s about it. Still the blood bond exists and it gets you and your girls into any club. The bouncers never cause problems once they know who your cousin is.
If you were to claim right now that you get along with your father, it would be a lie. You’ve more or less lived next to each other in one house. He gave you every freedom so that he could be free himself, and that’s the only thing you think highly of him for. Even though it sometimes bothered you that no boundaries were set, you were happy with your arrangement. Until his phones rang a week ago. You hesitate, you look at your girls, watching you, listening to you. Then you cross an invisible boundary and tell them about last Wednesday. And you don’t leave out a single detail.
It was early in the morning, you didn’t have to get to school until later, your father was in his studio in the attic, you could hear the music all the way downstairs. The house is big enough, you could easily stay out of each other’s way all day. You buttered some rolls and sat down in the living room with a map of Europe. At the end of August you planned to take off along those highways and byways, busking in the streets every now and then and getting to know the different cultures. You were curious and had a feeling that the world was at your feet. You’d marked out a route for yourself and sought out youth hostels. You knew what you wanted to see, and you really hoped your girls would come too. You’d been working on them for a year. Even though they claimed that InterRail sounded exciting, none of them really took your plans very seriously. Or as Schnappi said: I’d rather sleep in my own bed. So the way things looked at the moment, you’d have to go on your own, but that was okay too. The adventure awaited.
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