“I’m okay,” you say and can’t see what Nessi sees—the dark puddle spreading under your chair and drenching the dry wood.
“You’re bleeding.”
“I’m okay, Nessi, it feels … good.”
“That can’t feel good. You’ve lost a ton of blood.”
She lays her hand on your forehead. Clammy and wet. You’re in shock, your body’s slowly running down, the system’s saying goodbye. Nessi grips your arm.
“You’ve got to stand up, we’ll get you to a hospital.”
“Nessi, don’t!”
A firmness in your tone startles Nessi.
“I’m staying here.”
“But—”
“There’s no but. I’m staying here. It’s fine. Really.”
“But, sweetie—”
Nessi starts crying. You’re finding it difficult to keep her in focus. Your eyes flicker like reflections of light on the water, now bright, now dark, you could just go to sleep like that with the sun covering you slowly, and Nessi by your side. Her tears do you good. She’s grieving over me. You want to tell her to grab another deck chair and—
“Taja, do you hear me?”
She shakes your shoulder, your head slips to one side, your cheek touches her hand.
Peace.
“… exactly did he hit you?”
“What?”
Nessi touches your injury, you cry out, Nessi pulls her hand away as if she’d burnt herself, her fingers are red. You look at each other, and there’s suddenly a terrifying clarity in your eyes, that stops Nessi crying for a moment.
“I can’t leave you behind, Taja, please, I can’t do it.”
“Nessi, I’m going to jail, you know that.”
“But if no one knows that you—”
“I’m going to jail whether anyone knows or not. My father is dead and I’m going to jail. Can you imagine that? Me and jail?”
“You’re underage.”
“My uncle will see to it that I’m punished. Or else he’ll kill me himself. I’d rather stay here.”
“But—”
“It’s okay, really. I’m glad to be here.”
“But you’re bleeding to death.”
“It’s just a scratch, Nessi. It looks worse than it is. I swear.”
Nessi knows you’re lying, you know you’re lying. You need that, otherwise you’ll never part. And the parting has to be.
“And call him, promise me that.”
Nessi knows immediately who you mean; she promises.
“And tell the girls I love them and that I’m sorry. Please don’t forget, I really love you all.”
Nessi strokes your head, she squats down next to you and you lean against each other, forehead to forehead. It’s warm and safe, and it would be nice if Nessi stayed with you like that forever, because this way you can endure everything, cold, heat, loneliness. You fade away, come to again, thirsty and tired, the sun scratches your thighs and tries to get at your lap like an excited puppy, you sit up, you’d like to drink from the fjord.
Just one sip.
“Give me a farewell kiss,” you say.
Nessi kisses you, her breath enters your mouth, a warm, long kiss. Longing, I’m dying of longing, you think, and hear your father’s voice saying in the distance: If your heart is bound to something, you cannot give it away, for whatever it is, your heart will miss it. He was wrong. You listened to him, you wanted to keep him with you, and chaos broke out. He misunderstood. It’s real love when you let go of something that’s close to your heart.
“It’d be nice if there were a few more chairs here,” says a voice on your left, and Stink sits down on the floor, saying that her sweet little ass won’t stand it for long.
“You don’t look, you don’t find,” says Schnappi from the terrace door. She has three brand-new chairs wedged under her arms, and she winks at you. A moment later your girls are sitting next to you, their legs outstretched, and sighing because the view is so beautiful, and you’re glad your girls are sharing this place with you. It’s quiet, nobody’s talking about guilt, there’s no past, just four girlfriends in the here and now. Everything is as it was always supposed to be. And sometimes you hear your father speaking as if from far away, sometimes you hear the gentle rolling of wheels as your mother begins the next circuit and pushes the stroller through the night, even though it’s day. Time is good to you and your girls are by your side, and it can stay that way. Maybe somebody will bring tea and biscuits, a few blankets wouldn’t be bad for the cold times, then you’d sit here forever and look at the fjord, and there would be no better life than this one.
She can’t hear you, she hasn’t been able to hear you for a while now, all the promises and all the forgivings in the world are pointless if she can’t hear you. Her head leans against your head. You still have her taste on your lips, as if with her kiss she had passed part of herself to you. You stroke her cheek, feel her neck for a pulse. You don’t shake her, even though everything within you cries out to shake her and bring her back to life, you let her go.
Enough’s enough.
You lay her head back gently, take your jacket off, and cover her up with it. The sun has reached her hands now, they look bare and unprotected. You can’t stand up yet. You take her hands in yours and protect them. Her eyes are open a crack, she looks down at the fjord, and that’s how you’re going to leave her.
At peace with herself, in a place that now belongs to her alone.
You let go of her hands, stand up, and kiss her on the forehead before you leave.
They’re waiting outside the hotel.
“Girl, what took you so long?” asks Stink.
“Imagine if Darian had come back,” Schnappi whines, then she sees your face, frowns, and wants to know what’s happened.
“Nothing, I didn’t find her.”
“You’ve been in that dump for an hour and you didn’t find her?”
“Stink, the hotel is big.”
“So’s my ass, if I’m lying. And where’s your jacket?”
Stink shuts up, Schnappi says quietly, “And why do you have blood on your hand?”
You look at your hand with surprise, you’re really a rotten liar. Without giving your girls an answer, you walk past them. They don’t follow you. After a few steps you turn around.
“Are you coming now or are you not?”
“And Taja?”
Stink sounds as if she’s about to burst into tears.
“Taja’s okay,” you say and swallow the tears down and summon all your courage and go on talking: “Taja doesn’t want to come. She’s up to her eyeballs in guilt, and I’m to tell you that she loves you, and you’re to know that she never wanted to be fake, but it’s happened and she regrets it and hopes you can forgive her, but you don’t have to, because as I’ve said, she has to forgive herself, that’s all that’s important.”
“What … what are you saying?” stammers Schnappi, and when Schnappi stammers it means there’s a good chance the world’s about to end. She looks back at the hotel, she looks at you almost pleadingly.
“Nessi, what happened in there?”
“Nothing. I want you girls to turn around, okay? We’re going, and if we don’t go now I’m going to get hysterical and scream so loud they’ll hear me in Berlin. Please, let’s get going.”
They’ve never seen you like this, you don’t know yourself, you stand there and wait, you want to be you again, soft and tender and not hard and resolute. At last your girls get moving.
“Relax,” says Schnappi and takes your hand.
“We’re coming,” says Stink and takes your other hand.
The way down the winding road to the car is a sluggish dream in reverse. You can’t feel your footsteps. Sometimes Stink says something, sometimes Schnappi does, you keep quiet and try not to think, not to feel. You get into the car, the doors close, you take a deep breath and start the engine and then you just sit there without putting the car in gear, hands on the steering wh
eel and leaning slightly forward as if waiting for a signal to go. Schnappi asks if everything’s all right, and you almost burst out laughing, because everything’s never going to be all right ever again, but you don’t tell your girls that, you just turn to Stink and ask for the phone. She hands it to you and you take your hands off the wheel and keep the promise you made to Taja.
We’ve got to let you go too now. You were our very special guest, stolen from another story, thrown into this chaos. Without you everything would have gone quite differently, without us no one would know how much you’ve changed. We’ve seen you grow and now it’s time to say goodbye. The beginning is like the ending. You’re sitting in the car, you’re on the road again. Your mother sleeps throughout the whole journey as if she knew what lay ahead, and that she needed strength for it. She didn’t believe you for a second when you said you wanted to take her for a quick drive into the countryside. And here you are now.
You drive, she sleeps, the landscape passes by.
Three hours later you stop on a side street off the Schlesisches Tor U-Bahn station and have lunch in an Indian restaurant. You talk about everything except what’s happening right now.
The apartment block is old, and the façade is under restoration. Your mother follows you up the stairs. Just once, she holds you tightly by the arm. You wait. She isn’t out of breath, she’s thinking.
“We can go on now,” she says.
You go on.
There’s no nameplate on the door, the wood around the lock is scratched and the letter box dented.
“It’s all exactly as I imagined,” says your mother.
“Okay?” you ask.
She nods.
You ring.
You wait.
The sound of footsteps.
The door opens.
You turn away and go downstairs.
“Richard,” you hear your mother say.
“Oh, Kristin,” you hear your father say, not surprised or disappointed; he says it like someone who’s been carrying around a chest full of thoughts on his shoulders and now at last he can set the chest down.
You leave them alone.
Outside the building you blink into the sunlight as if you’d only just woken up. You’re in Friedrichshain, the whole of Berlin is at your feet, and you don’t know what to do with yourself. Last time you were here, you ran into Stink. It feels like a decade ago, it’s like yesterday, it’s exactly four days ago. Nessi has left deep traces in your memory.
As if she’d been there forever and I’d never noticed her.
The previous evening you tried to get through to the girls twice, but the phone was switched off. Who knows, maybe they’ve thrown it away, that would be better anyway. You also hope they were clever enough to get rid of the car.
You walk toward Alexanderplatz, buy yourself an ice cream, and take a look at the shop windows. You mingle among the people and wait for your mother’s phone call. What will your parents decide? Will they continue their lives together or not? You don’t really want to think about it, you’ve done what you could.
Two hours become three and then your phone rings. It isn’t your mother. On the display you see your old phone number. You cautiously take the call.
“Neil?”
“Yes.”
“It’s me, Nessi.”
You stop, people push past you, you just stand there.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you.”
“I … I just wanted to say we’re on the way back.”
“Good. That’s good. Are you okay?”
“We … I just wanted to ask if you … Can you … Will you be there?”
You say nothing, you know what she means, sometimes a few words can mean so much. Will you be there? And for a moment you’re sure that when she touched her hand to say goodbye that morning, she read your thoughts: Stay here and I’ll look after you and the child, if you save my soul in return. Your soul still wants to be saved. Now you just need to be there.
“I will be there,” you say.
“Thank you. That’s …”
She breaks off, you hear rustling, then Stink’s on the line and she says, “Holy fuck, she’s crying again now. I hope you said something nice?”
“It was nice.”
“Lucky for you, otherwise you’d have to deal with me.”
“I’d never do that.”
“Glad we’ve sorted that one out.”
You laugh, you’re standing in the middle of Berlin on the footpath and you burst out laughing. The people look at you crossly and push you aside like a leper. It feels as if your life has only just begun, and anyone who isn’t laughing doesn’t know what it means. You put your phone away and look into the sky, stretch your back, and feel four inches taller. Being a leper has never felt so good.
Two minutes later.
“What did you do?” Schnappi asks.
“I kept a promise, that’s all,” Nessi replies, wipes the tears away, and puts the car in gear. You speak up from the back. Your voice is quiet because you actually don’t want to hear what exactly happened in the hotel, but what must be must be. So speak louder, “And when are you going to tell us everything?”
“First let me drive a bit, please.”
You breathe out with relief. The car rolls down the road. It’s pleasantly quiet. Only the engine and the tires. Only your heads and the thoughts locked inside them.
“Sweetie, don’t cry again.”
Schnappi hands Nessi a tissue, she drops it, Schnappi picks it up again, leans over, and starts dabbing away the tears from Nessi’s right eye. Nessi laughs. You offer to do her left eye. Nessi warns you that she’s going to crash into the next tree if you don’t stop treating her like a baby. Schnappi decides it’s been quiet long enough and puts on a CD. You hear a guitar that sounds like waves coming closer and receding again, coming closer and receding again. Then Damien Rice sings tiredness fuels empty thoughts, and Ulvtannen disappears in the rearview mirror, and you know that Nessi will tell you everything after the song. You think the same during the next song and the one after that. You wait for her words. Words that don’t hurt. Words that will make everything better. Words that no one has yet pronounced.
You’re lying on a barren piece of land that was once dense with fir trees, where wolf packs once gathered on winter nights, before your forefathers cleared the land to build a beach hotel without a beach. You feel nothing of the old times, and soon you will be part of this damned land if the sun goes on burning down on you like this. If you get heatstroke on top of your concussion, we’ll soon be able to leave you to the seagulls. But it’s looking good, something’s happening. There’s a shaking in your leg, and your fingers are twitching too. Your body’s waking up as if it had been frozen.
Like Oskar.
Your world has gotten out of joint. Your son denied you, two of your best friends are dead in the trunk of the car, and you’re seething with rage. It is diverted from your head to your belly, because you’re going to need all your wits about you to get out of this wretched situation. Whatever you do now, you should gather your strength for the finale, because you’re going to need a lot of strength.
The pain has faded, the nausea has gone, your stomach has calmed down. You’re slipping away into a healing unconsciousness, and for a while you disappear into a café in Bregenz with a view of Lake Constance that you visited years ago when one of your customers flew you in for the opening of the festival. You’re sitting by the window with Oskar and Tanner, the sun is shining in, everything is dazzlingly bright. Tanner raises his glass to you, you look up, Leo walks past outside, but he’s in a hurry and just waves at you in passing. You drink cold lemonade, Oskar eats his third piece of cake, and you’re amazed that he hasn’t put on an ounce over the years. Tanner pats his stomach. He’s almost always on a diet. And what good did that do? I’m not even breathing anymore, he says. Oskar nods, he knows the feeling. You look into your lemonade and can’t move. Now yo
u know how I felt, says Oskar, nothing’s working anymore, the body is down. The waitress brings a plate with even more pieces of cake and says: These are from the boss. You look over at the bar; the boss is a boy in an apron with a hole in his forehead. You nod your thanks. He nods back. You don’t want to say it. Tanner says it: Isn’t that Mirko? Oskar says: At least he has a job. You take a sip of your lemonade and try not to laugh. The dead are all around you, and if you look up right now Ruth will come in and she’ll be holding hands with Marten, but that’s something you don’t really want to see at the moment. The darkness saves you. The sun disappears behind the night as if the night were a curtain. It becomes pleasantly cool, and when you open your eyes you’re no longer alone. A man is leaning over you, the sun lurks behind his shoulder, you can’t make his face out. The man asks, “Do you remember me?”
“What?”
“Do you remember who I am?”
You swallow, your tongue feels as if it’s three times its usual size. Your eyes have gotten used to the light. The man’s face is hovering clearly and distinctly above you. You can hardly hear yourself, your voice is so faint.
“I have no idea who you are.”
The man nods, he expected this.
“It’s on its way.”
“What is?”
“The memory. It sometimes gets lost.”
You try to keep him in focus. He’s wearing a T-shirt with a cross on it. He’s the same age as you. He says, “But I know who you are. You’re the man who gets his son to kill people. Because of you my son lay with his face in the dirt.”
You feel a quiver in your right hand and clench it. Wake up, you stupid fucking body, wake up and do something before this guy does me in! A muscle in your thigh twitches, your heel scrapes over the ground.
“Marten,” you say.
“Right, his name was Marten.”
Of course you could lie to him, but that wouldn’t be you. Ragnar Desche doesn’t lie. Ragnar Desche is honest and says, “It was his fault.”
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