“Everyone or no one,” you say.
Nessi groans and gets up.
“I’ll keep your seats,” Marten promises.
You march through the restaurant, down the corridor to the bathrooms and past them.
“We’ve just gone past the toilets,” says Nessi and stops.
“Keep walking,” says Taja.
“But …”
You put your arm around her hips and push her on. You step outside into the wind and the rain, and shove your way past the smokers who reluctantly make room. Once again, Schnappi can’t keep her mouth shut.
“Can someone please tell me what’s going on here? That guy’s okay, so why are we running away?”
“Maybe because we can’t find the tracker,” says Taja.
You reach the front of the restaurant. When you get to the Range Rover, your girls stand behind the car while you duck down and look carefully over the hood. The turmoil in the restaurant is unchanged. You see Marten sitting at the table, he’s got his phone to his ear, he’s looking round, looking over at the restrooms. You’ll have a long wait, you think and duck back down behind the car.
“I don’t understand anything anymore,” says Nessi.
“Catch!” you say and throw her the key.
Nessi catches it and stares at her hand.
“That’s not …”
“… our key,” you finish her sentence. “Correct.”
“They’re driving a new Range Rover.”
“Which one?”
“Guess.”
“The Vogue?”
“Better.”
“Not the Autobiography?”
“Bingo.”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Crazy, right?”
“Take a picture.”
“Why? You know what it looks like.”
“Not a picture of the car, Marten, a picture of your girl.”
“Her name’s Taja and she isn’t my girl. She’s one of four.”
“How do four girls get hold of a car like that?”
“I have no idea.”
“Either they’re rich or they’ve stolen it.”
“No one steals a car like that.”
“You have a point there. Where are they now?”
“In the bathroom. At first I thought they were here for the festival, but they’re heading further north. Taja’s half German and half Norwegian. She inherited a beach hotel from her grandmother. With a view of a fjord.”
“If you like, we could drop by on our trip and pay them a visit.”
“That sounds good.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Did you give her your number?”
“Of course not, what makes you think that?”
You can imagine how pleased your father looks right now. The better you get to know each other, the less he’s like your father, the more he becomes your friend. In your childhood he was a stranger who dropped in on weekends and acted as if he enjoyed playing with you for a few hours. Then you got older, puberty set in, and your father was sympathetic in a manly way, which was just embarrassing because he had no idea about your life. The true change only took place over the last two years. You got closer to one another, and your mother doesn’t like that one bit.
And then he gave you this birthday present.
He suggested driving to Norway. He’s bought a new car and wanted you to test it together. Together. It was supposed to be your first big trip. And now he’s your passenger, he’s making jokes with you about girls and life in general, he treats you like an equal. You expected anything, just not this change.
“Are you sure it’s an Autobiography?”
“Of course, I can see it through the window.”
Your father whistles through his teeth.
“What color?”
“Metallic gray.”
You hear a ringing, your father says he has to get the casserole out of the oven, you’re to think about dessert, and say hi to the girls.
“See you in a minute.”
Your father has rented an apartment outside Kristiansand because he wanted to avoid the hurly-burly of the festival. You’d rather have been right in the middle of it, but you haven’t told him that. It’s your second week in Norway, and the festival begins tomorrow. Your father has only bought tickets for you. The music isn’t to his taste, and he doesn’t want to stand beside you all the time like a guard dog. He thinks you need freedom, so you get freedom. Your mother would go nuts if she knew that. As far as she’s concerned, you won’t be grown up until you’ve finished your studies and you’re pushing a stroller around the place.
Be honest, you feel as if your real life only began when the ferry pulled in at Kristiansand. The people here are friendly, everyone seems to be having fun, and even though it’s raining you can’t see any grumpy faces. Your father made it all possible. It’s a mystery to you why your mother didn’t get on with him.
Perhaps it was the other way round, you think when two women ask if there are seats free at your table. You point to the rockers’ chairs, the women sit down. You look across to the bathrooms, then back outside into the rain. Your reflection grins at you, you’re as transparent as a ghost. Your father’s features, your mother’s dark hair. You wink at yourself, take out your phone, and you’re about to check your mail when you see the girls coming out in single file from behind the Range Rover. All four of them. They have backpacks and bags and they remind you of the time when you used to creep around the area playing cowboys and Indians. What are they doing? you ask as they stop by your father’s car, open the trunk, and throw in their bags and backpacks. Then they go round to the front and get in.
For a dull moment you sit there frozen in the restaurant and can’t believe what’s happening. The car starts, the car leaps forward and then backward a little before the engine stalls. A semi-trailer moves sluggishly past the restaurant, and conceals your dad’s car for a few seconds. You get up, reach into your jacket, and feel the key. Thank God, you think and pull it out. It’s not yours. This key is hanging from a round piece of leather with a monogram—OD. You look outside again. Your dad’s car has turned, and finally your paralysis dissolves. You run from the restaurant and shove the group of smokers aside. You skid over the curb, the rain turns you wet in seconds. You stumble down the street and pause and …
They’re gone.
Full stop.
They’re seriously gone.
You don’t even see the rear lights.
Nothing.
You look around. One of the smokers gives you the finger, another says: Fucking German. You stare at the exit and still can’t believe it. The trembling starts in your hands, wanders downwards, and when you have the feeling that you’re one single great shake, you take your phone out of your jacket and call your father.
He’s going to kill me, he’s never going to talk to me again, he’s going to—
“Say that again.”
You repeat what’s going on. You stand in the rain and you’re the idiot whose father’s brand-new car has just been stolen by four girls. No one’s going to write a poem about it, it isn’t worth a short story, and if it was ever shown in the movies, you can bet a good number of people would walk out.
“And what about the Range Rover?”
“It’s still here.”
You walk around the car, take a look at the registration plate. On the driver’s side you try to peer inside the car, while your father issues instructions. He wants you to stay right there. He’s going to call a taxi and he’ll be with you in ten minutes.
“The door’s open,” you interrupt.
“What?”
“The driver’s door is open.”
You lean into the car, then you look at your left hand, still holding the key. OD.
“I think they’ve deliberately left me the key to the Range Rover.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” your father says.
“Maybe
the car’s stolen,” you say and get in, away from the rain, away from the naked reality of being a complete failure. The door closes with a soft click. The inside light dims down as if a movie was about to begin.
What if it isn’t the key?
You start the car, the engine fires right away, and for a moment you imagine yourself driving to your apartment hotel, beeping your horn, and your father coming toward you and you getting out of the Range Rover while your father is speechless because he can clearly see now that it really is an Autobiography.
“Marten, are you still there?”
You give a start. What am I actually doing here? You completely forgot your father on the phone.
“I’m still here,” you say and you’re about to get out when you’re dazzled by the lights. They’re coming straight at you. You suppress a chuckle. It’s so simple. It was all a big joke. The girls have come back. And that’s exactly what you say to your father.
“They’re here again. I’ll call you right back.”
You turn off the phone. The car stops in front of the Range Rover. Everything’s the way it was before. Nose to nose. You screen your eyes against the headlights and wonder what the girls are going to say to you, when there’s a knock on the driver’s-side window. You flinch. It’s really time for you to calm down. You can see only silhouettes through the tinted glass and so you lower the window. The rustle of the rain fills the inside of the car, droplets splash in your face, and a man looks at you unhappily. He’s wearing a suit, with a turtleneck pullover underneath. His mouth is a thin line, the rain flows down his face in gleaming trails and collects on his chin. You can see he’d anticipated all kinds of things, just not you sitting in this car.
“Who are you?”
“Nobody,” you blurt out and you want to explain why you’re sitting here, and all the ridiculous things that have happened, because he might be the true owner of the Autobiography, and obviously you don’t want to rile him, when the door is pulled open and from then on it all goes very quickly. You fly through the rain and land on the tarmac. You hear a curse, then a second man appears in front of you. He’s wearing a white shirt so drenched with rain that you can clearly see his chest hair through the fabric. He pulls you up from the ground and hammers you against the Range Rover. Once, twice. As if that weren’t enough, you get a slap. Your head flies to the left, your ears ring, you taste blood and are like a puppet that’s just had its strings cut. An arm holds you pressed against the car. Pause. The two men talk to each other as if you weren’t there, their voices are a murmur. The man in the suit appears in front of you again. His mouth moves, you can’t hear anything. Your head is filled with water, you cough. The man grabs your throat, you see the gun in his hand, you are pulled up, your shoulders squeak over the back door of the Range Rover. There’s a liberating crack, a hissing wind chases through your head and blows your ears free.
“Where are they?”
“I … I don’t know, they …”
“Where are those fucking bitches?”
“… they … they’ve stolen … my father’s … my father’s car and …”
The man strikes. It feels as if his fist is wandering through your stomach and shattering your spine. You become a mouth that’s going up and down and waiting to be filled with air. Your lungs are shriveled, your consciousness vanishes.
III
und ich will lichterloh brennen
damit ich leuchte wenn es dunkel ist
(and I want to burn bright)
(I want to glow when it’s dark)
Pascal Finkenauer
VERDAMMT SEIN
(BEING DAMNED)
And this is the finale. Now we’re all in Norway, it’s raining on us, and we see you standing there and you’re completely helpless. It feels as if someone’s pulled the ground out from under your feet. Your posture reveals as much. Your shoulders hang down, your eyes are slits, you’re confused.
What’s going on here?
You totter in the rain and again you’re thirteen years old and just a boy standing by the poolside in the icy wind, goose bumps on his skin; but at the same time you’re a man in his mid-forties who went on tirelessly murdering until he realized the senselessness of his action.
Do you feel the ground shaking?
Do you feel reality shifting?
We lost sight of you for three years and thought you’d disappeared forever. The special commission entirely devoted to you was dissolved. The flowers on your victims’ graves have gone unchanged for ages now, and the memory of the Traveler is only one more episode in a collection of cruelties with a short half-life. Yesterday’s disasters have been replaced by new disasters. It’s a flowing change. Sympathy has a short-term memory. You know how the melody goes: We strive for the light, but want to be embraced by the darkness. We hunger for peace and chaos and we are never satisfied, we want more and more. And that’s where you fall out of the picture, because you’re not a part of us. You’re not a we. You’re an I.
That’s the reason why we stay by your side right now. We want that I. We want your reaction, your helplessness, and we want to see you suffering. Because what could be more charming than a myth that bleeds?
Your chroniclers have wondered what you’ve been up to over the last few years. Some thought you had died, or become weary of yourself. How much cruelty can an individual person endure? they wrote in their blogs but never received an answer. A lot of people thought you’d left the country and resumed your traveling elsewhere. Spain. Africa. Maybe India. None of it is true. You got out of a train in Berlin. That was your last stop.
You are still on the road a lot. Every morning you spend half an hour on the toilet, laugh at good jokes and out of politeness at bad ones, and shake your head when someone dies. You still drink your coffee black and feel uneasy when you have to see the doctor. You make love, you curse, you try not to think ill of other people. On election day you stand in line; you feel your balls in the shower for undesirable swellings. Every Sunday you run one extra time around the park because your doctor says it does you good. It’s a pleasant existence. You looked in the darkness for a long time and didn’t find the demon. You learned to live with that disappointment, because you know everything you wanted to know about yourself. Your life is no longer a mystery to you. Millions of people strive to discover the point of their lives. See the goal, reach the goals. Fail and win. You’ve done all that. You are in a perfect state of consciousness. Your account is filled, your future is secure, the years have been good to you.
The big question is why this had to happen to you right here, right now.
You haven’t riled anybody, you haven’t insulted any gods or been guilty of misconduct. Is fate suddenly spitting back after all that time? Is this the final reckoning?
Whatever the answer, you’re in Norway now, you’re standing in the rain, while people openly gape at you, while the sky falls down on you. You look in all directions. However hard you look, your son has disappeared without a trace.
Since your journey to Berlin on the Intercity train, you’ve deliberately worked at getting closer to your boy. Your wife was very suspicious. You were living in another city, and then you were suddenly back as an alien body in the family, with a reawakened interest in your son. Your wife wanted an explanation. You spoke of change. Your wife laughed at you. You knew your son was the only reason you’d never got divorced. She didn’t love you anymore, she just wanted to give Marten a sense of equilibrium. And at the age of sixteen he sounded so grown-up that it brought tears to your eyes.
You had proper boys’ nights out when you went to the movies together, went to handball games and enjoyed your love of cars. Your son opened up hesitantly, but he opened up and that was what mattered.
You didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of your parents—a neurotic mother and a remote father. No, that wasn’t going to happen to you.
As Marten’s eighteenth birthday approached, while searching the internet you happened upon a
n article about the Quart Festival in Kristiansand. You told Marten about the idea you had of driving the new car to Norway. You saw it in your mind’s eye—wide streets, solitude, and your son at your side. Your first big trip was to be your shared adventure. Eight weeks, four in Kristiansand, four on the west coast. A perfect plan. You and your son.
And now you are soaked to the bone and you enter the restaurant and speak to a waitress in your clumsy English. You say your son was here with four girls, and hold up four fingers. The waitress points around the room. Her English isn’t any better than yours. Too many people, too many talk, she says and turns away. You go from table to table, questioning the people and constantly looking outside as if your son might appear at one of the windows and wave at you. You tried his phone, you left him a message, his voicemail comes on at the sixth ring.
No one has seen him, no one remembers.
You walk back out into the rain. You urgently need to calm down, your throat is tight, the situation makes you sweat. This is new to you.
Say welcome to fear.
“Excuse me …”
The smokers shake their heads, a cleaning woman goes past with a bucket, you barely get half a sentence out and she’s raising her hand. Sorry. She doesn’t speak English. You look in the toilets and run twice through the gas station shop. You ask at the register and stand by the exit again, opposite the restaurant, right beside the Range Rover. Marten was at one of these tables and talked to you, he looked at the Range Rover and said: Of course, I can see it through the window.
You don’t understand, and call his number again. He won’t have run off with the girls. Marten isn’t like that. You press the phone to your ear and look around.
Please answer.
The ringing sound comes to you like a whisper. You follow it around the Range Rover. Your son’s phone has slipped a little way under a trailer and glows green to the rhythm of the ringtone. You pick it up.
You Page 35
