Ten minutes after departure the conductor passes and you buy a ticket. After the conductor has left the coach, you shut your eyes and concentrate as if to store your thoughts for the lean times when thoughts are in short supply. A woman walks past you twice to go to the toilet. You hear the rustle of her leggings. Minutes later the smell of her perfume still lingers in the air. A man coughs, then there’s a crackle and an announcement. The train can’t stop in Spandau today because of work on the line. Someone curses, then everything’s quiet again. You take a deep breath, open your eyes, and get up.
A train, eight carriages, fifty-six passengers, a conductor, a driver, and a railwayman. Sitting in your coach are the woman with the weak bladder and three men. They keep their distance from one another; no one willingly seeks the company of a stranger late in the evening. The woman doesn’t even wake up. One of the men glances up and shuts his eyes again as you walk past him. You pick up his jacket and suffocate him. You break the other two men’s necks. You stand behind their seats and grip their heads. One jerk and it’s over. Time and again you’re surprised at how easy it can be. Easy and quiet.
The second coach takes more effort. You leave a couple sleeping. A man is reading and looks up briefly, you nod to him, he goes back to his book. You walk past him and strangle him with your belt. You spend the most time on an old woman who’s stretched out over two seats. When your hand closes around her neck she looks at you with horror. She looks straight at you for two whole minutes while her eyes bulge and her feet scrape on the seat. Then you return to the couple. You don’t even think of leaving anyone behind. Something is different. Something isn’t right.
In the third coach there are nine passengers. It takes you a quarter of an hour. At the end of it your shirt is soaked, and your jacket is sticking to your back. In the fourth coach there’s a problem. A man’s on the phone as you sit next to him. He looks up with surprise and asks what’s going on. You take his phone out of his hand as if you were taking a toy away from a naughty child, then you strike.
“What are you doing there?”
You overlooked the woman. You walked past her seat and overlooked her. She must have been asleep. Small, curly hair, thin lips. You thought she was just a jacket lying there. When you stand up she notices the blood on your face.
“We need a doctor,” you say, “otherwise he’ll bleed to death.”
“My goodness.”
The woman comes along the corridor. She’s in her leggings, with her shoes in one hand, the other hand pressed to her mouth. She reminds you of your mother and her startled face when she learned that Robbie was dead. This woman’s eyes are different, they’re probing lights. She leans forward and looks at the dead man. You grab her by the back of the neck and pull her to you so that she falls over him. Her shoes clatter on the floor. Before she can cry out, you press her face into the seat padding.
Coach five has six passengers. You leave no survivors.
Coach six has four passengers. You leave no survivors.
In the last second-class coach a man sits at a table. He has a book in front of him and he’s reading with his fingertips. You sit down opposite him and relax.
“Who’s there?”
You don’t reply, you look at him and look at him. You’re reflected in the lenses of his sunglasses and wonder what color his dead eyes are.
“There’s no one here,” you say.
“Is that supposed to be funny?”
“Not really.”
The blind man snaps the book shut and leans forward. He reaches out an arm as if to grab you. His fingers move like leaves in the wind. You interlace your fingers with his. Intimate. He tries to pull his arm back, but you hold him tightly.
“Please,” says the blind man.
You let go of his hand and take off his sunglasses. You see his dead eyes. Blue. They have no depth, they have no darkness. They are dull and blue with nothing behind them. So that’s what it’s like, you think and get up and go into the restaurant.
When the Intercity pulls into the Berlin Zoologischer Garten shortly after midnight and comes to a standstill with one last jolt, only a single door in the rear first-class coach opens and a man gets out. He carries no luggage, and no one is waiting for him. The man walks down the steps and leaves the station. He washed his hands and face on the train. One pink stain on his shirt is still damp, the knuckles of his right fist are swollen. The man doesn’t notice what else is happening on the platform—that no one else gets out of the Intercity and the people on the platform are getting impatient, that they try to look through the windows into the train and get in after a brief hesitation, that they find the corpses and in one of the coaches a blind man with his hands on the table, asking over and over again if there’s anybody there.
One of the surveillance cameras on the platform captured you. You’re a blurry patch walking purposefully toward the stairs. The police tried to enlarge the footage and failed. They showed the picture on television anyway. You didn’t look up once, and your movements are quick. A shadow moving through the light. Over forty callers told the police they knew exactly who the pictures showed. The suspects were questioned over the weeks that followed, they all had alibis.
The second shot wasn’t shown on television. A camera by the station exit captured and filmed you from behind as you threw something into one of the rubbish bins in passing. They found the sunglasses that belonged to the blind man, and on the lenses were your fingerprints. Now the police knew for certain that the Traveler was on the road again, and that he was in Berlin. They didn’t know how disappointed you were with yourself. For eleven years you had climbed out of the depth again and again and opened countless doors for the darkness, but nothing happened. Perhaps your grandmother was mistaken, and there is no demon. Perhaps there’s only you on an endless quest, lonely and alone. You can’t find something if there’s nothing to find. No matter where your journey takes you. It’s a terrifying thought.
On that day in Berlin you grew tired of yourself for the first time. Opposite the station you turned and looked back, like someone checking that the door has shut behind him. A ghost train with fifty-seven corpses remained behind, and you didn’t once think about killing.
If it weren’t for the wind, you could be anywhere. At home on the balcony with your feet on the railing or on the shore of the Lietzensee with your hands in the thick grass and the smell of the city in your nose.
Anywhere, just not here.
The wind exposes everything. Salt-harsh and tangy. You open your eyes and you’re miles from Berlin. Your hands grip the railing, the North Sea foams below you, above you the seagulls float like escaped thoughts. You wish you could grab them and put them in your head. Maybe then everything would be back as it should be, and there would still be five of you.
You breathe the wind in deeply, feel it all the way to the tips of your toes and especially in your back. As a child you always slept on your stomach, because you thought your shoulder blades were the beginnings of wings, and needed a lot of room in case they spread in the middle of the night. If you had wings right now, and if time were a landscape, you would fly back and save Ruth. She would be by your side again, and everything would be as it always was.
Footsteps approach and for a moment it’s almost true, Ruth joins you at the railing, her arm rests around your hip. You smile, and if your smile had a taste it would be salt-harsh and tangy like the wind. You don’t need to look, you know who’s standing beside you.
“I could be a madman who’s going to throw you overboard.”
“No madman smells so good,” you say.
Stink leans against you, you look out over the water and feel lost and empty. The murmur of voices around you, music, shouting children, laughing women, the bellow of drunks, and again and again the sigh of the seagulls that never come closer and never disappear.
“What on earth are we doing here?” you ask.
“I have no idea, but we’ll manage. If we stick together,
we’ll manage just fine. Don’t worry about it.”
She doesn’t know how much you’d love to worry, but there’s nothing in your head, it’s just a vacuum. Every thought fizzles out, nothing makes sense anymore.
“It’s just that I don’t know what’s what anymore, and I’m scared, really scared.”
And as you say that, you can no longer tell whether you’re scared for yourself or for your girls. Your fears all run together. The day won’t end, and that scares you. You don’t know what will happen at your destination, and that scares you too. It’s the sober realization that nothing is as it was, that there’s no going back.
“We can’t go back, right?”
Stink presses herself closer to you, that’s an answer too. And so you stand there and look across the water as if it were still Tuesday and you were back at the cinema and something was about to happen, the movie was about to take you on a journey. But the movie is just the monotonous surge of the waves against the ferry and nothing else happens. You girls can’t even cry anymore. And the day still refuses to come to an end, it claws onto every second, like an exhausted mountain climber who knows very well that if he loosens his grip even once, he will fall to his death. And that’s how you all feel too—you’re tense and concentrating on not losing each other. So you cling to one another and stand by the railing and breathe grief.
What you really wanted to do was take the ferry from Kiel to Oslo, but just before Kiel Schnappi told one of the cashiers at the filling station about your plan, and he said you would never get a seat on the ferry because it was booked weeks in advance. He advised you to go on to Hirtshals and take the ferry from there to Kristiansand. There’s hardly any business out of Hirtshals, he said.
“And where is Hirtshals?” Schnappi wanted to know.
You looked at it on the map. Hirtshals is at the northern tip of Denmark, and directly opposite is the Norwegian port of Kristiansand. It’s a short-cut, because on the ferry from Kiel it would have taken you nineteen hours to get to Oslo, while the journey from Hirtshals across Skagerrak to Kristiansand takes just four hours. And Kristiansand is closer to your destination, and that settled it.
After three hours you’d crossed Denmark and reached the completely congested port of Hirtshals. The cashier had neglected to tell you that there’s always a big pop festival in Kristiansand this time of year, attracting two hundred thousand visitors. Stink cursed the guy at some length, while Taja said it was the best thing that could have happened to you.
“Take a look. At least no one will notice us.”
And that was how it was. No one wanted to check your papers, you were just another four girls in a pretentious Range Rover, who listened to pop music. After only an hour’s wait you were able to get onto the ferry.
As soon as you’ve crossed to Kristiansand, according to your navigation system it’s eight and a half hours to Ulvtannen. The plan is very simple. You want to surprise Taja’s mother and then move into the beach hotel. Two stories, a room with a view of the fjord, a life in freedom. Even though Taja only knows the hotel from photographs, she’s described it so vividly that you can see it in front of you.
Stink pats your belly.
“You’re going to have your baby exactly where Taja was born. That would be great.”
“I’d rather not imagine it.”
“Fresh air and everything.”
“Stink, shut up.”
You spit on the water and wait for Norway to come closer. You still don’t know if you want to keep the child. You see yourself sitting down to breakfast one morning, and looking at your girls and telling them what you’ve decided. One morning.
An excitable Italian woman joins you and says in English how great it is that you’re there too, she comes to the festival every year, only last year was a flop because not enough tickets were sold, but that was last year, this time it’s going to be on fire, right? Then a group of guys from Belgium buzz around you, wanting to know what you think of Volbeat, and because you have no idea who Volbeat are they write you off as lesbians. Stink laughs and wants to show off and asks you if you’d like to kiss, tongues and everything. You blush and say: Rather not. The Belgians move on. Stink calls you a nun. You kiss her quickly on the lips and tell her to be careful what she wishes for. After that an incredibly thin woman with a basket full of fish sandwiches comes round. When she hears you talking German she reveals herself as born and bred in Leipzig. She’s doing odd jobs for her studies and she’s on her way to the Quart Festival to sell T-shirts.
“First fish sandwiches, then T-shirts. I’ll give you a good price if you’re interested. My uncle prints the shirts at home in the basement. That’s his car over there. I’ve got everything, from Manson to the Peas. And if you like I can get you two tickets for next Friday, if you want to see Chris Cornell, and who doesn’t? Hahaha.”
A quarter of an hour later you buy two fish sandwiches from the woman, and at last she leaves you alone.
“Who’s Chris Cornell?” you ask.
“Never mind that, who’s going to eat these fish sandwiches?”
The sandwiches are soaking, mayonnaise spills out from the sides of them as if they have had a panic attack and were sweating their souls out.
“No wonder this girl is so thin,” you say. You’d really like to throw the sandwiches overboard. But you’ve never been able to do things like that, so you give them to a woman with four children, who looks at you as if you were handing her a full diaper. But she takes them and puts them in her stroller. Stink has had enough of people talking to you just because you’re standing at the railing. So you push your way through the crowd and get back to the car deck. Taja is asleep on the backseat. Schnappi is sitting in the passenger seat, playing with Neil’s phone. Her foot is braced against the glove compartment, her black painted toenails are as tiny as raisins, and dart back and forth to the music. Some summer hit is blaring from the radio.
“You haven’t called someone, have you,” says Stink.
Schnappi rolls her eyes.
“How would I do that? I don’t know a single number by heart. Why did we have to give that guy all the phones? And my gun, too. I’d earned it. I mean, really.”
“Schnappi, that gun was bigger than your head and you could hardly hold it.”
“Of course I could hold it. Have I got a child’s hands or something?”
She holds out her children hands.
“You know how many idiots have asked me over the last two hours if I play in a band? One thought I was Björk. How dumb is that? Am I really that small? It’s really sad. A girl without a gun is completely lost in this world.”
You’re glad that Schnappi handed over the weapon. You urged her to, Taja was in favor of it as well. You couldn’t be armed. And that business with the cell phones made sense, because Taja’s uncle must have traced you somehow or other. And Neil didn’t exactly look like the sort of guy to pull a fast one on you. He gave you his own phone in return, with instructions—you were to use the phone only in an emergency, he’d call as soon as everything was sorted out. But in the event of an emergency, he’d also given you the number of his new prepaid phone and stressed that it had to be really urgent for you to call him.
Something about Neil felt right to you. You couldn’t explain it otherwise. As if he knew what he was doing, without really understanding it.
Like us?
Yes, like you.
“Don’t break that phone,” you say.
Schnappi ignores you and goes on studying the screen.
“This is expensive crap. There’s as much storage space on it as there is on my fingernail. Let’s take a look in his address book. Aha, nothing but slags. We’ve got Gabi and Uschi and Franka and Klara. I mean, who’s called Franka?”
“Franka Potente,” you say.
“Never heard of her,” Schnappi lies and goes on reading. “We’ve got two Clarissas, one Debo, a Mascha, and three Nicoles. There’s hardly a single guy. Either he has no male fr
iends or he never calls them.”
“Any music?” Stink asks.
“Not a single song.”
You have to ask.
“Do you know Chris Cornell?”
“Never heard of him,” says Schnappi.
You yawn and look at the water and see the coast of Norway getting bigger and bigger. Schnappi sets the phone aside and asks how long it’s going to take.
“I’m so incredibly hungry.”
“There’s a girl over there selling fish sandwiches,” you say.
“Just because I have slitty eyes, it doesn’t mean I have to eat fish every day.”
You look at Schnappi in surprise. You have to say it.
“I thought you had slitty eyes because you ate fish every day.”
Stink explodes with laughter, Taja says wearily from the backseat that she’d always thought so too. It’s your first joke since Ruth died. It’s like coming home. All the furniture’s in the right place and there’s food waiting in the kitchen, but it still hurts because the walls are missing and the floor is full of holes. How can I make jokes if Ruth isn’t here with us anymore? I should grieve for a year and wear black and not say another word. And while you’re thinking that, you become aware that it’s the last thing Ruth would have wanted. Grief.
Schnappi gives you the finger and fiddles around with the radio until she’s found the right station. She turns the volume up full.
“Who’s laughing now?” she yells at you as a string orchestra fills the car with easy listening, and a few guys from the next car boo you.
You’re all standing at a stall eating fries with weird burgers that taste of fish and meat at the same time. It’s crowded, it’s noisy. The ferry landed half an hour ago, and you still can’t believe that you’ve gotten to Norway just like that.
Clouds tower and dusk already covers half the sky as if the day were exhausted and pulling a blanket over its head. That’s exactly what you feel like. Last night still fills your bones, and the memory of the morning in Hamburg is like a razor blade wandering about under your skin. You don’t think about the unborn child inside you. There’s plenty of time for that later on. There are worse things than having your baby in Norway, you think, and wonder if abortion is even legal here. You never wanted to have a child out of stupidity. It was supposed to be a child born of love. Whatever’s growing in your belly, there was no love during those five minutes.
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