You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  “Never,” Nessi says quietly and lowers her head.

  “Especially when the guy finds his dead brother here in the house,” says Ruth and tilts her head on one side to spit blood into the flowerbed next to her. Taja strokes her back and says, “Everything okay with you?”

  “It’s just a nosebleed.”

  Ruth throws her head back and speaks into the night sky: “People, we should disappear.”

  Nessi laughs.

  “Ruth, we’re sixteen. We can’t just disappear.”

  “Who says?”

  “That’s just how it is.”

  “But who says we can’t try?”

  “And where are you going to disappear to?” asks Stink.

  “We’ll think of something.”

  “And what are we going to do with the drugs?” asks Taja.

  Stink holds a key in the air.

  “They’re still in the safe-deposit box, and they can stay there as far as I’m concerned. If anyone hurts us, they’re going to pay for it.”

  You want to tear into Stink. You want to tell her she’s partly to blame for what happened to Ruth. To your great surprise, Taja agrees with her.

  “Stink’s right. My uncle should pay you if he wants the stuff back.”

  You’re all lost for words. You look at her, and at that moment you have the feeling that everything’s going to be fine, that nothing can go wrong, because this pale-skinned girl, who lost her father a week ago and who’s been taking heroin for five days, this girl shows her teeth and beams at you with positivity and says, “I’m in favor of Ruth’s plan. What’s keeping us all here? Let’s disappear.”

  “But where are we supposed to go?” asks Nessi.

  No one has an answer. The question hovers in space. You stretch yourself, raise your arm, and wave it around in the air as if you could grab the question. You look a bit like a little girl who urgently needs to go to the bathroom. They look at you. It’s obvious, you’ve had an idea.

  “Listen,” you say.

  And here comes your last guest appearance. You’re still switched to receiving, even though the reception’s really terrible. You’re increasingly losing contact with yourself, and clinging to memories. The moments fray and pull away as if the past were a train that’s dropped you at some bleak railway station and is now slowly pulling out. You hear it, you see it, but you can’t follow it. Your biggest fear is that it will disappear forever and leave you alone in this state. So you go through names, places, and dates in your head.

  July 1987. Taja. The bower. April 1992. Majgull. Ulvtannen. November 2000. Prenzlauer Berg. Ragnar. Husemannstrasse. April 2005. Gina. Helsinki. March. April? May or …

  No use. Whatever you do, the facts slip away, the train moves tirelessly on and you stand there and try not to lose sight of it.

  Light.

  The freezer opens. Two girls look in at you. You try to remember their names. Nessi and … You don’t recognize the other girl. Asian, she’s Asian. Nessi and … You can’t get there. They look in at you. You hear them thinking. He looks like he did yesterday. Nessi reaches past you, stands up again, says: I can’t do it. Now the Asian girl leans forward. Her hair brushes your face. Her thoughts are a straight line. Quickquickquickquick. When she stands up again you hear a clink. She breathes out and says: And you’re sure you can drive that car? The freezer shuts with a dull thump. Darkness. The girls move away.

  Schnappi, her name is …

  Light.

  Schnappi and Stink. They’re in a hurry. Schnappi says, “Why me?”

  “Do you want Taja to drag her dead father around the place, or what? Come on, get a hold on him.”

  A third voice.

  At last.

  “I can do it.”

  Taja’s there. You wish you could feel her hands. She wants to say goodbye and doesn’t know how. She doesn’t want to leave you alone in the dark and lifts you with Stink’s help out of the freezer. You see her shoulders, her chin. The girls carry you into the next room, into the vaulted basement with the swimming pool. You try to find clarity in your daughter’s chaotic thoughts. Grief, there’s so much grief. My little girl. You lose reception, Taja slips away from you and then there’s silence and suddenly Stink’s thoughts kick off and you can’t filter them and for a second the night spreads out in front of you like a troubled landscape. You see your brother in Lietzensee Park, standing on the football pitch, and you hear his words, you see Ruth lying on the grass like a wounded animal, knees up to her chest, then the connection breaks off again and the girls have put you on a chair, they take a step back and look at you.

  “Take care, Oskar,” says Stink.

  “Take care,” murmurs Schnappi. Only your daughter doesn’t say anything, she’s crying, and suddenly her face is back in your field of vision. Tired, my little one is so tired. Her hand touches your cheek, her guilt is still her guilt and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

  They leave, the lights go out.

  Darkness.

  Light.

  Stink comes running in, like a raging fire that’s out of control.

  What’s she doing?

  She stops at the back wall, by the control panel, twists the buttons, the lights come on. Stink looks and looks before she finds the right button, and then shouts, “Yes!”

  The swimming pool starts filling up. The water hisses, it’s electrically controlled. As soon as the water reaches a particular level, the system switches off. Chlorine, anti-algae treatment, water hardening stabilizer are added automatically. The system costs you a lot of money. It’s a pity, because it’s the end of your plants. You fed and nurtured them and now they’re going to drown and you’re sitting dead on a chair and can’t do anything about it. But you understand why Stink is doing this. And be honest, you like her revenge. For Ruth. It’s good revenge. Ragnar will go crazy.

  The lights go out with a click. The door closes.

  You’re alone again. And you start thawing. Slowly. And then your eyes close. Slowly. And the darkness is everywhere.

  The door to the vaulted basement opens.

  Maybe Taja’s come back, maybe she wants to …

  It isn’t your daughter. You recognize him by his panting breath. Leo. His thoughts are simple and clear.

  What a fucking mess.

  The door shuts again, and you know your brother’s about to enter.

  There he is, and he’s in a bad mood. He thinks the fiasco in the swimming pool is his biggest problem. He’s so irritated that he disregards you. He punishes you with his ignorance, because he thinks you’re drunk and asleep on the chair. Then Tanner comes down, and your brother hears that all the merchandise is gone. He turns to Leo.

  “Wake him up.”

  Leo runs his hand over your face and is confused: What’s up with Oskar? Your brother works it out as soon as Leo’s stood up again. His panicked understanding chases around the room and meets the miserable remains of your intelligence. And then comes a thought that you really don’t understand: Reptile, I’m turning into a fucking reptile.

  “He’s gone,” says Leo.

  Suddenly your brother is close to you. You’re only inches apart. You wish you could see him. One last time. Your eyes stay shut.

  “What’s up with his skin?”

  “That’s ice. He must have frozen to death.”

  Wrong, you think.

  David joins your brother, and taps you seriously on the forehead as if you were a wax dummy. There’s the sound of a dull tok.

  “Leo’s right. Oskar’s gone.”

  Whatever comes next vanishes into a dead zone. The interruptions are coming more and more frequently. It’s only when your brother lifts your left eyelid that you come back one more time and see him—gaunt face, sad expression. Then you hear his thoughts and at last you know for sure. All those years you guessed that Ragnar was responsible for your father’s death. Only your wife knew about your theory, and you never dared to talk to Ragnar about it. The autopsy showed
that your father had suffered a stroke, but no one could say what exactly had happened. Now you can see everything, because your brother’s remembering. His own fury, your father’s fear and the apartment that you never entered, the life you never had to see. You understand and you’re proud of Ragnar. You’re my hero, you want to say. How could you disappear to Berlin because of this? No sooner have you thought that than footsteps ring out and your brother shuts your eye again. Break in transmission.

  Like mineral water in a glass, when the bubbles rise and rise and there are fewer and fewer of them, that’s what you’re like, that’s what your thoughts are like. You’ve just seen your brother, then the darkness came back, and now there’s a new voice.

  “From here.”

  “And your parents?”

  “Slovenia.”

  “Do the Slovenians get on with the Serbs?”

  “…”

  “I asked you a question.”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “You’re Slovenian and you don’t know if the Slovenians get on with the Serbs?”

  “I’m from Berlin.”

  Pause.

  Slowly you are beginning to understand. Your brother is looking for your daughter. He doesn’t just want Taja, he wants the other girls too. Stink in particular. He doesn’t yet know who the girls are. Not their names, and not their relationship to Taja.

  That’s fine.

  The thing with the girls is personal, the rest is business.

  Taja would never steal from you, you want to call out to Ragnar, my daughter isn’t like that. But what do you know? You’re dead, your self is just a vanishing bubble in a glass, what do you know?

  Pause.

  They leave the boy alone. He wants to be a hero and keeps his mouth shut. He’s one of those idiots who think love can do anything, that it accomplishes everything and never fades.

  Hey, look at me, you want to call out to him.

  And your thoughts keep slipping away.

  Pause.

  You come back when your body slumps, the cold lets go of you and the dead tissue shifts. You’re surprised that you can see again. Your left eye opened all by itself. The boy is walking along the pool as if looking for a second exit. Then the idiot actually takes out his phone.

  “What? Hello? Why didn’t you pick up? Of course I tried to warn you, but you’re not … What? No. Darian’s father blew the deal and now I’m in the shit. They’ve got me, you know? They waited for me outside school and now I’m here in some sort of basement. They want to know who you are … What? In a house with a swimming pool and the pool’s full of drowned weed, if you can imagine that! No, they’ll be back in a minute … Darian’s father, yeah … Do you even know who that is?… Then you can imagine the mood he’s in, because his brother is sitting dead on this chair, and the drugs have disappeared. How could you steal his drugs, how could you do that?… What?… Don’t worry, he won’t see through me. He may be a tough guy, but no one messes with me. The way he walks around. Fucking pussy. He can’t do a thing to me. If I tell him he’s gay, he’s gay, get it? Once I’m out of here he’ll be cross-eyed for a week, for messing with me. Where are you now?… No, thought not. Wait a second.”

  He goes quiet, he suddenly looks at you.

  He knows I’m watching him.

  The boy squats down in front of you. He says: That’s really creepy, then he shuts your open eye, and that’s it, that’s the farewell, the bubble bursts, the train disappears around the bend and you can’t see him anymore, you can’t see anything anymore, because it’s finished once and for all.

  Over.

  The year after your father died you lived in various shared houses and didn’t leave Berlin for as much as a day. You were a punk and a revolutionary, you were sixteen years old and deep in your heart hungry for the vile world and yet at the same time you despised it. It took you one year to summon the courage and call home. Oskar picked up after the second ring, as if he’d been waiting for your call. If your mother had come to the phone, you’d have hung up without a word.

  “Hey, little brother, did you miss me?”

  Oskar didn’t think that was funny, he didn’t think any of the things you said to him were funny. Your story sounded lame to his ears—that you were fed up with your father, that Berlin had always been your dream. Being free means being alive. You murmured something about how you were sorry for not calling before. Oskar said in the middle of your excuses, “He’s dead.”

  No name, no title, just he. You knew you had to act surprised. It didn’t work. You were you, there was no getting past it. So you just said good and felt relieved and had just one thought: It’s really true.

  A dog stopped by the phone booth, lifted its back leg, and peed against the glass. You kicked the windowpane, the dog jumped back with a start and left a zigzagging yellow trail on the pavement.

  “How could you leave us alone?” your brother asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What sort of an answer is that?”

  “If no one does anything, nothing happens,” you answered.

  Oskar hung up. Really, what sort of a stupid answer was that? You couldn’t use that kind of revolutionary talk on your little brother, and anyway you’d got the phrase from a calendar. It was hardly original.

  You called back. Oskar asked what you wanted this time. You apologized. He told you to shove your apology. You couldn’t help laughing. Oskar had a big mouth for a thirteen-year-old, that’s exactly what you said to him, even though you knew he turned fourteen a week ago. You wanted to irritate him, so that he’d be your brother again and not some insulted teenager snapping at you.

  “Ragnar, I’m fourteen and you’re an incredible asshole for somebody who’s supposed to be my brother.”

  “Is that so?”

  “That’s so. And if my swearing bothers you, you can go fuck yourself.”

  Silence. You each listened to the other one breathing, then Oskar couldn’t keep it up anymore and burst out laughing and you laughed with him. It was such a relief, it was so liberating, that at that moment you’d have given a lot to be there with him.

  “I hate you.”

  “I know.”

  “How could you just disappear?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  There was that silence again; this time it was you who broke it.

  “Is he really dead?”

  “Heart attack. They found him at another woman’s house.”

  “What sort of woman?”

  “No idea. He had another child. A boy. The bastard had two families, can you imagine that?”

  You nodded and dodged his question.

  “How’s Mom?”

  He told you everything, it was like a dam giving way under the pressure of the last year. You found out how they were living, how everything had changed since your father’s death. About the friends who were allowed to come by. About the laughter that filled the apartment.

  “Aunt Mara and Aunt Joos were there. Half of Norway visited us and you missed it, bro, you miss everything,” said Oskar, and you wanted to yell at him: I’m in fucking Berlin! I’m in the most happening place on the planet, so don’t tell me I’m missing something!

  Oskar wanted to know when you were coming back, you explained that you didn’t know, you had a job, you’d find a way, soon perhaps. It was another lie. You never wanted to see the dump of a place again. Oskar must have sensed as much. He never asked you that question again.

  Over the next nine years the distance between you grew. After Oskar finished school, he and your mother moved to Norway and into the old beach hotel, which was already closed by then and urgently in need of renovation. Ulvtannen, the only beach hotel without a beach. Your mother had always dreamed of going back.

  While your brother was starting a new life in Norway, you put down deep roots in Berlin. The jobs were pretty low-rent—handing out flyers, night shift at gas stations, part-time work on building sites, waiting tables, shelf stacki
ng, delivering drinks and turning bratwursts at sausage stalls. There was no job too low for you, and perhaps it would have gone on like that forever, and one day you’d have got one of your angels pregnant. Family with dog and you, pushing a pram through the park and sitting in the bar with the guys in the evening—the infinitely free life of an unemployed person in Berlin who doesn’t want anything more because he has so little and needs so little. It all ended the day Flipper stepped into your life.

  The eighties were taking their last breath. You were twenty-three, and for a few months you’d been working in a video shop that kept banned movies under the counter and mostly survived on pirate copies. Flipper had just arrived from Vancouver, he was the distant cousin of a good friend, and was stopping off in Berlin for New Year’s. In his early forties, he looked sixty and was so exhausted by life that he could barely keep his eyes open. Or as he put it: God, I’ve seen so much that I have to take a break. Flipper wasn’t just the most exhausted man who ever crossed your path, he was also the very first dealer.

  New Year’s Eve 1989.

  Your father had been under the ground for almost a decade, and the Wall was about to collapse. Berlin was in an ecstasy of freedom, and Germany didn’t yet know that it would one day look at the East as a thing of the past.

  The stream of people was endless. They came from everywhere, as if the whole eastern bloc had been emptied, as if Berlin was a swing door that anybody could go marching in and out of whenever they liked.

  On every other day you thought the city was the most exciting place in the world, but on this particular New Year’s Eve you felt displaced, perhaps not least because you were standing in a smoky pub at Görlitzer station, your mouth was full of blood, and you were listening to an old man who called himself Flipper spreading his life out in front of you.

  You were miserable. That evening a particularly brutal dentist had extracted two of your wisdom teeth in an emergency operation, and your head felt like a blocked toilet that gasped for air every few minutes. Normally you would have been in bed ages ago, but stubbornness kept you on your feet. It was only New Year’s Eve once a year. And you also enjoyed Flipper’s company, even though you could only hear every third word over the noise.