You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  Flipper would have had more fun with a glove puppet. You couldn’t speak, you were pumped up with painkillers and weren’t allowed to drink alcohol, but you were able to listen. And Flipper talked without interruption. About his life in Tunisia, about his drug experiences, the women and the various bones in his body that were broken. He showed you a scar on the back of his neck and described the knife that had nearly sawn his head off. He said he’d spent four years in an Italian jail, smuggled thousands of Mexican migrants into America, and if fate had anything left for him, he wanted to move to Alaska one day.

  “Because of the cold, you know?”

  It was the talk of an aging junkie who drank Metaxa and smoked nasty little cigarillos. At the time you had no idea who he really was. At the time you couldn’t know that you’d be standing in tears by his grave three years later. Tears over Flipper, over you and your father, but especially over the feeling of having been abandoned.

  Flipper stayed by your side the whole evening. He kept you supplied with bags of ice and looked away when you spat blood into a plastic cup. The pub started to fill up at midnight, and you decided that a little bit of alcohol might back up the painkillers. It helped you over the next hour. You drank eight lemon vodkas and rinsed out the wound with the alcohol. You sucked on ice cubes and numbed the pain with the cold. After the hour you started feeling sick and dragged yourself outside.

  Berlin was playing war.

  The rain came down like a glittering curtain that was caught by the wind and whipped against the façades. People were standing on the balconies, throwing firecrackers and screaming like banshees. You watched fascinated as a group of drunks tried to pick the firecrackers up and throw them back before they went off. Wiener Strasse was packed. You didn’t know where you wanted to go. After ten yards you staggered and nearly fell. Flipper supported you as you leaned between two parked cars. He held your head, kicked the hissing firecrackers away, and wiped the vomit from your mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. A stray rocket landed in the middle of the street, and for a few seconds you were lit up by a red light. Flipper grinned at you, looking like a devil that’s just climbed out of a bloodbath. He took you to a house doorway, the air around you stank of sulfur and the rain on the pavement splashed up to your knees.

  “Fucking New Year’s Eve,” said Flipper.

  You didn’t want to go back to the bar. You wanted to stand here all night inhaling the stench and the cold of the rain. Flipper smoked and looked down the street as if he weren’t in Berlin but somewhere far away. Tijuana, Cairo, Rabat. His gray hair was woven into a plait, not a strand was out of place. You studied the wrinkles in his face, which, in the light of the flickering rockets, looked like streaks of mascara. And you swore never to look like that when you were forty. Flipper noticed your expression and smiled at you. His teeth were brilliant white.

  “Everything okay?”

  You nodded. You started to like the fact that you couldn’t speak.

  “Do you have a problem with coke?”

  You shrugged; until now alcohol and marijuana had been your only sin, but if Flipper thought coke would do you good now, you’d be the last one to say no. It was a new year, new decisions needed to be made.

  “I’ve got a package.”

  He took a drag on his cigarillo, the smoke puffed from him with every word he said.

  “Could you store it for me?”

  He spat.

  “For a few days?”

  You nodded again, and Flipper tousled your hair as if you were ten years old, and asked where you lived. Arm in arm you walked down Skalitzer Strasse. Your days as a squatter had come to an abrupt end a year before, when you met angel number 11. She was a nurse, the apartment was in her name, three rooms in an old building on Prinzenstrasse with a tiny balcony looking out over a courtyard.

  “Better a view than no view,” said Flipper and left the balcony door open. You heard the city, you heard the rain, and Flipper went on talking until nine in the morning. The pain in your mouth eased after an hour and you managed to speak too. It was your best conversation ever. Flipper was interested, he wanted to know everything about you; and you told him more than you’d ever told anyone. You also spoke about your father, particularly about your father.

  “So you killed him,” Flipper said at last.

  You just looked at him, you didn’t know what to say.

  “It’s fine,” Flipper went on. “It’s good to let it out. If you ask me, I forgive you. You’ll have to do the rest yourself.”

  “There is nothing to forgive,” you replied.

  Flipper nodded as if he hadn’t expected any other reply, then he said something that won’t let go of you even today, something that gives you courage even in your most difficult moments.

  “Your father would have done exactly the same. He would have shown you no mercy. You did the right thing.”

  Angel number 11 came home from emergency service at eight o’clock and made you scrambled eggs, then she said that it was time for sleep and took you to bed. Flipper fetched a blanket and made himself comfortable on the sofa. You slept until the afternoon and then met in the bathroom. Flipper was wearing your dressing gown and bore a strong resemblance to Christopher Lee.

  “I’ve made us coffee,” he said.

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  You took a shower, and then you drank the coffee. Flipper didn’t once mention the package. He made two phone calls and went to the bathroom for half an hour. When the doorbell rang you opened up, but there was nobody there. A paper bag lay on the doormat.

  “Good service.”

  Flipper stood behind you and pulled up the zipper of his trousers. He reached past you and picked the paper bag up off the floor, weighed it in one hand, and handed it to you. Then he took his lighter and the pack of cigarillos off the table, pulled his coat on, and said goodbye with a handshake.

  “I’ve got to go now, be a good man.”

  It was the last time you saw him alive. The stench of his cigarillos lingered for four days in the apartment and clung firmly to the curtains and the sofa.

  The package was in the bag. You didn’t touch it, but put it in your closet and forgot all about it. You knew from the start what had to be done. Instinctively. Six weeks later Flipper called. It was three in the morning. Flipper was making a stopover in Vladivostok and wanted to ask if you could quickly deliver the package to Dahlem.

  “Right now?”

  “If you have nothing better to do.”

  You had nothing better to do, so you got on your bike and rode with the package thirteen kilometers to Dahlem. It was unbearably cold, but you enjoyed cycling through the sleeping city in February. It was wild, it was different, it was life.

  That morning you met your second dealer. Marcel Tanner welcomed you with a cup of tea and a well-stuffed pipe. It was friendship at first sight, and Tanner became your mentor over the next few years, before he gave up dealing and became a partner in your firm. Since then you’ve kept things small, because small means safety, small is manageable. Your efforts paid off. Your company now has three partners, as well as an IT guy, a lab assistant, and two lawyers. You grew into a little family, trusting each other and being closed off to the outside world. And even if you would never admit it, you were already acting along your father’s lines. Everything begins and ends with discipline.

  The boy in front of you knows what discipline is. The barrel is pressed against his head, his head yields slightly, the boy puts up no resistance and doesn’t duck. He reminds you a little of yourself, when you finally stood up to your father and jutted your chin and took the blows and never showed any weakness. Weakness stirred up the fire in your father. Don’t let him break you, don’t bow the knee. Bite, keep biting. Without a bite you’d never have ended up in Berlin, you’d still be sitting in that dump of a house and you’d be one more idiot who was afraid of his father and of life in general.

  Perhaps
it’s the similarity, or perhaps it’s the fact that you’ve already been standing for two minutes beside this boy, holding a gun to his head—eventually the threat loses its effect.

  You lower the gun.

  The boy doesn’t move, he keeps his head at an angle, still suspicious.

  Like Oskar and me.

  You feel a tingle down your spine and have the feeling your brother’s watching you from the chair. He’s dead, he can’t see anything anymore, you say to yourself, and wonder what kind of waves his death will make, and who you’re going to have to inform. There are a lot of people who need to know. What are you going to say to them? How are you going to explain this business here?

  “Everything okay?” asks Tanner.

  You nod, you are so far away in your thoughts that it’s shaming. If your dead brother knew what you were thinking about right now, he’d probably come back from the dead to strangle you. Nothing can be made good. And even though you know that, you wish you could casually take out your phone and call Majgull. You miss hearing her voice. She’d know what needed to be done. She’d be a great help to you.

  Two years after the Wall came down, your business was flourishing and you’d started working with couriers. Whether it was drugs, guns, or antiques, the product itself didn’t matter. You were responsible for the logistics of the operation, and you were one of the best. You’d worked your way up to a position that allowed you to control the market from the background. If someone wanted security for their goods, they didn’t get past you. Even in those days you were consistent and hungry in whatever you did. You dictated the rules, no one broke them. Without consistency and hunger you’d have gone on working in the video store.

  1992 turned out to be a golden year. Your company had established itself, your contacts extended as far as Australia, and the Asian market was waiting to do business with you. Even in private you couldn’t complain. You were with angel number 14. Her name was Helen, she was pregnant, and in the middle of May she would become Darian’s mother. The world seemed full of positive surprises, your brother’s phone call was definitely one of them. Oskar had had enough of the distance between you, and took a step in your direction.

  He invited you to his wedding.

  You knew from your few telephone conversations that he’d met a woman, but you had no idea that he was so serious about it. You hadn’t seen your brother for eleven years. It was mainly your fault. You stayed away from him for purely intuitive reasons. Perhaps you were just afraid of introducing him to the new Ragnar. Who knows. At any rate no one could have known how fatal a meeting between you two would be after such a long time. It was a mistake you should never have made. You were spontaneous.

  Your brother’s invitation came at exactly the right time. The success was stressful. You needed a break. Tanner was the only one who put it quite openly: “No phone calls, no questions, no Berlin. Be a stranger in a strange land, I’ll deal with everything else.”

  You took the car. There were three ferries a day from Rostock to Trelleborg. You stood at the railing and thought about the past few years. The company, your pregnant angel, your successes. Taking stock was very cleansing. I’m going to be a father, you thought and wondered how that was going to work out. When the ferry landed, you crossed Sweden without a break and only stopped beyond the border, to spend the night on Norwegian soil.

  You didn’t know what you’d been expecting on your first night. Perhaps a moment of enlightenment, your long-dead ancestors’ drunken, jovial voices calling to you, something like that.

  It didn’t happen, it was a night like any other. The next morning, though, you were filled with a pleasant feeling of calm that stayed with you all the way to the far north. It was important to you to drive the whole way yourself. It was your own kind of meditation. Being alone. Without anyone else’s thoughts.

  Of course you missed the road to the beach hotel, it would have been too perfect otherwise. You ended up in the little town of Lunnis and asked a boy sitting on the edge of a well with a skinny dog on a leash. The boy jumped down from the well, pulled you around the corner, and pointed to a cliff that looms beside the town like the angry, fist-clenched arm of a giant.

  “Ulvtannen!” said the boy.

  You looked up, and there was nothing but a rough, rocky wall.

  Oskar hadn’t been lying: the hotel could only be glimpsed from the fjord.

  Who knows, perhaps your ancestors had a warped sense of humor and thought the fjord might eventually climb to the edge of the cliff and then the hotel would actually be a beach hotel. Or else they thought the pebble beach at the bottom of the cliff was enough of a lure for tourists. Whatever your ancestors thought, they refused to be deterred and built a beach hotel on top of the cliff that looks like a grand building from colonial times.

  You sat back down in the car and found the right road.

  Like something out of a fairy tale, was your first thought when after the final bend the hotel appeared in front of you. A massive Nordmann fir stood to the left of it, casting a shadow on the façade. It reminded you that once upon a time only fir trees had stood here, a whole forest of them. What a view that must have been—hundreds of fir trees stirring in the wind.

  Home.

  The hotel had gone out of business in the late seventies. The family had scattered around the world and didn’t want to invest any more money in the old building. You only knew the hotel from photographs. Your father had never shown any interest in taking you and your brother to your mother’s birthplace. Oskar had done fantastic work. Since his arrival in Norway four years ago, your brother had been working on saving the hotel. He had painted the façade, put in new pipes and wiring, and replaced the roof.

  It was a new start. The hotel had never looked so good in photographs.

  You parked in the driveway and got out. You were just taking your luggage out of the trunk when the double doors flew open, and there he was. If you’d met him on the street, you wouldn’t have recognized him. Up until that moment the twelve-year-old Oskar had lived on in your head, the little brother who stole your comic books and pressed himself inconspicuously against your side so that you would protect him against the world.

  “Ragnar!”

  It was a good feeling to hug him.

  It was like coming home.

  The beach hotel has twelve rooms spread over the second and third floors. The rooms look out on the water, and a terrace runs around each of the floors like a belt. If you stand on the terrace and look down, the fjord looks up at you.

  Your mother lived on the first floor, your brother had converted the second floor for himself and his fiancée. He had knocked walls through and turned the individual bedrooms into airy spaces. The third floor was almost untouched by renovation. You found the only finished room and stood on the terrace for a while, looking down at the fjord before you went to see your mother.

  She immediately burst into tears and rushed to touch you as if to see whether you were real. She didn’t scold you. She kept repeating over and over how much you looked like your father. It wasn’t a flattering comparison, but you didn’t say anything.

  You couldn’t have known that day that a tumor was already spreading in your mother’s abdomen. She had eight months to live. Your second visit to Ulvtannen was for her funeral.

  After dinner you walked with Oskar down the winding road into Lunnis. You were introduced to friends and acquaintances and understood hardly a word. Your Norwegian was atrophied, and you had to answer in English. You liked the people, they welcomed you like a prodigal son, but you had quite different problems. No one could tell how this idyll depressed you. It was raining, and the fjord was a threatening shadow. Oskar told you he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. He loved the hotel and the morning mist on the water, he even liked the work—four days a week he drove to the hydraulic power station in Vik, where he had met his Majgull.

  “I don’t need anything more to live,” he said.

  Majgull’s ho
me was a farm two miles from Lunnis. The family greeted you warmly, a dog jumped up at you, a little boy hugged your left leg and wouldn’t let go. Everyone gathered around you in a big living room, aquavit was served and you clinked glasses, answered questions, and then, out of nowhere, fire broke out. You’d never have expected it. You knew the situation from movies and books. You felt unprotected and naked. One glance was enough, and you went up in flames like a bundle of twigs.

  Majgull.

  Even today you don’t think anyone noticed. Not your glances, not the horror in your eyes as she stood opposite you, her hair still wet and her skin red from the shower, with an almost invisible film of sweat on her upper lip. As certain as you are even today that no one noticed, you are equally certain that Majgull alone saw through you right away. She sensed the danger. She sensed your hunger.

  “Ragnar,” you introduced yourself.

  “Majgull,” she said and hesitated briefly before leaning in as if to tell you a secret. Her voice was quiet, her words, in English, were meant only for you.

  “So you’re the one who killed his father.”

  It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. You didn’t react, you just looked at her as a clear thought sped like a ricochet through your head: Oskar knows. Majgull let go of your hand and turned to your brother. They laughed, he threw his arms around her, and that was all it took, you lowered your gaze almost blinded by their sight and from that moment on you tried to stay out of Majgull’s way.

  Two days, you thought, then I’ll be gone.

  Oskar didn’t mention your father’s death and you were clever enough to avoid the subject. Everything between you seemed to have been resolved, and that was how you wanted it to stay.