Axolotl Roadkill

by Helene Hegemann

  I refuse to let this two-bit whore turn me into a lobotomy case.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I consider you the most immoral person I’ve ever come across, and I insist right now, at this very moment, regardless of whether a huge stone just fell on your head two seconds ago or not, I insist that you get right on a train this instant and appear in my office in less than two hours from now.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Frau Pegler, you know perfectly well I’m not capable of making it easy for you to build up any form of trust in me.’

  Herr Kroschinske brushes a bushel of hair out of his face with an unnaturally unstrained gesture, looking elsewhere and then kind of back at me again after all. While he’s still resisting the impulse not to take the side of a totally and utterly neurotic head teacher this time around, instead taking that of a problem child pretending to be fully reflective of herself and therefore unassailable, I hang up. I hand him back his mobile phone, imparting five different impressions through a single cool gesture: I am expected to get on my bike a.s.a.p., Frau Pegler is an insecure cunt whose misguided educational methods are inappropriate but understandable, you’re a really cool teacher and I totally like you, your hair’s pretty cool as well, I’ll fill in that really interesting worksheet you put together and handed out before we arrived at the concentration camp at home and present it to the whole class the year after next as part of the presentation I’ll have to give to make up for missing three hundred days of school in the months to come. Thank you for being pleased to see me.

  The train I find myself on twenty minutes later is named after the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

  I attempt to elevate my basic mood to that of the past year. A state of such productive sentimentality that I had no other option but to dance to techno mixes of violin passages in front of the mirror with lead weights around my ankles. Every track was a personal challenge. I’d have swallowed electricity if it had enabled me to spend longer than forty-eight hours leaping ecstatically around a puke-encrusted dance floor. A period when strangers on trains whispered, ‘Crazy choreography’, rather than ignoring me, a period dominated by an idea raised above any will to survive: the idea that Alice and I had of one another – an answer to all questions, which lay in the absolute intensity of my desire, a desire impossible to translate into a specific demand.

  It doesn’t work. Nor does looking out of the window. Nor does imagining you’re driving a Vespa across the ground floor of a mid-range department store, whacked on a weekday afternoon and categorizing the soft golden flashes of the watch display cases as an adequate replacement for everything you’ve had taken away from you over the past two years: dreams, desires, sexuality, faith. An underworld in a land that’s menstruating, turning to shit day after day and plunging all the existences patched together out of fantasies to their doom with its relentless putrefaction: they all die.

  They play, eat, fuck, sleep, wake up, forget to be in when the gas man comes, they order inflatable gymnastic balls to strengthen their back muscles, download Iggy Pop’s discography for free, finish their vocational training as landscape gardeners, make a wrong decision, book a package holiday, spend a year on an exchange living with Mormons in Las Vegas, decorate their flat to go with the season, get themselves a four-legged friend whose excrements have to be stored temporarily in plastic bags and then thrown away, split up, call their school band ‘Planet Palin’, become grandparents, are severely impressed, have bad skin, get stabbed, lose their left leg in a car accident, buy buttermilk, respond to the question of their star sign with the word, ‘Arsehole’, set up the website www.live-rapes.com, and have been wondering for years why mattress stores are always on street corners.

  Frau Pegler holds up a piece of paper in front of my face, on which her secretary has written in her best handwriting: ‘Mifti will be ten minutes late.’

  She waves it around under my nose in all seriousness for thirty seconds. I start to suspect my head teacher might be mentally disabled.

  ‘I just found this on my desk.’

  ‘I called to say the train was running late.’

  ‘The fact is that you didn’t do everything in your capacity to get here on time.’

  I smile at Frau Pegler and allow her to place me on a dark blue upholstered chair, which would be reason enough in my sister’s view to leave the office instantly. With the aid of a final spark of self-discipline and the thought of a serene green meadow, I manage to keep my aggression in check and my gob modestly shut.

  ‘Mifti, I have a hundred and fifty per cent instinct for good and evil. And you are definitively evil.’

  ‘Are your thirteen years of experience with psychologically unstable adolescents not enough to tell you that that statement’s going to push me over the edge into a big fat identity crisis?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you really mean that seriously? Do we really have to have this conversation on this level?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Frau Pegler, somebody’s just trying to criticize the hell out of you in a stylish and appropriate manner, and all you can do is say yes and no.’

  No answer from Frau Pegler.

  ‘Someone’s criticizing you to hell in a stylish and appropriate manner, and what do you do? You don’t say ANYTHING. What a crock of shit!’

  I wish someone would ask me how my day went at school.

  I got the elation, hesitation, dissipation, coagulatin’, relaxation, angxation, emancipation, propagation, moppin’, soppin’, talkin’ ‘bout your coppin’ blues

  (The Charlatans)

  Funnily enough, it’s pretty simple. The incredible paean to a well-planned lighting concept, which only a few seconds ago consisted of nothing more than two misplaced floor lamps. A kebab shop turning more and more into the desired techno palace with every blink. The question of whether a life spent sober can ever have any point.

  Edmond, having stuffed a Turkish börek in his mouth while mumbling that he really ought to get more poetic, provides the answer to this all-important question: ‘And at last it’s all over, our hearts are really pretty fucked, but suddenly they’re not scared any more of turning into historical documents!’

  Yeah, right. I’m wearing a dark blue parka, and the present day is still burning through the material into my back muscles. The world is melting. When I glance at my wrist, three stamps remind me that Berlin belongs to me. Varnished wooden furniture with unacceptably patterned upholstery, the walls decorated with enlarged passport photos of the children of the man currently standing behind a glass counter, with a daily habit of processing salmonella-infected meat using high-quality kebab slicing equipment.

  I say, ‘You guys have got it so good, you’ve got siblings.’

  Instead of diverting her attention to me, Annika leans over the back of her chair, her eyes closed. I’m vulnerable in this respect.

  She says, ‘Don’t talk such a load of crap, you’ve got siblings too. You’ve got us – we’re incompetent and crap, but we’re your brother and sister.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean – you grew up together and everything.’

  ‘We shared bunk beds.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘That was completely shit, it’s nothing to envy.’

  ‘But what you said the other day sounded so awesome, when you were staying in that holiday home with Dad in Zurich and you decided you wanted to eat fish, but then his girlfriend wanted to buy this cheap salmon at the supermarket and you said, “No, we’re getting proper fish!” And then the stupid cunt dragged Dad down to the basement and shrieked, “I can’t take it, this whole luxury crap and all the whole crap and they’re so spoilt and all that – they get it from their mother.”’

  ‘Jesus, I’d almost repressed that memory.’

  ‘And then you looked at Edmond and asked if you ought to call up the car-sharing agency and get a lift home, and Edmond like pursed his lips and nodded.’

  Edm
ond, ‘Did you tell her that, Annika? That I pursed my lips and nodded?’

  ‘Anyway, I thought it was so great that you weren’t alone. Imagine if it’d been me sitting there, I couldn’t have looked at anyone to make sure it wasn’t me that was the problem, it was that stupid cunt’s inadequate reaction that was the problem.’

  ‘Please stop saying stupid cunt, I’ll pick it up and if those words come out of my mouth at the agency tomorrow morning, some intern in snakeskin boots will ask if I have Tourette’s syndrome.’

  ‘But don’t you understand what I mean?’

  ‘The thing is though, while you were at the concentration camp yesterday, Edmond admitted that he fed my hazelnut-brown mouse to the cat.’

  Edmond sniggers.

  ‘I went crazy, Mifti.’

  ‘What hazelnut-brown mouse?’

  ‘We used to have two mice each, I had two girl mice and Edmond had two boys. And at some point we thought it’d be like really cool to swap one of them over, and suddenly we both had twenty mice each, and they were all black or white or kind of spotted. But I had a tiny hazelnut-brown mouse in my litter, and it was the total freak in the family and it always did different stuff. It was just a really cool mouse, and one day it just disappeared.’

  ‘It always did different stuff?’

  ‘Yeah, really, like if the others were digging like tunnels inside their little hutch, she’d sit down on the roof and do nothing.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘All of a sudden she disappeared. I looked for her everywhere. In the garden, everywhere, in the fridge, I swear, and then at first I thought she’d just run away, but she really couldn’t have got out of the little hutch, you’d never have managed it as a mouse. I checked everywhere, but the bastard mouse just wasn’t there any more. And while you were at the concentration camp yester day Edmond suddenly piped up, “Annika, I have to tell you something, no actually, oh God, maybe I’ll wait another year.” And I’m like, “Hey, come on, just tell me right now,” and he’s like, “I fed your hazelnut-brown mouse to the cat.”’ Annika lets out a deep breath, as if she expected a compliment for not killing Edmond.

  ‘Man, Annika, I’m really sorry, Jesus.’

  I’m like, ‘Why didn’t you kill him when he admitted it?’

  ‘I was just sad. And then he told me in all this detail how the cat played around with the mouse, and then I thought, maybe at the beginning the mouse was still – oh no, really, that can’t be true.’

  Edmond, ‘It was no fun for the mouse, Annika.’

  ‘No, I don’t think it was.’

  ‘Me neither, Mifti.’

  ‘And what else happened back then?’

  ‘Edmond always slept on the top bunk, and this one afternoon he was sitting up there in the middle of some hyperactive phase, our mother wasn’t in, and suddenly he goes, “Hey, Annika, I’m gonna pretend I’m a figurehead.” And I’m like, “You’re so disturbed, kid!” And then he went right ahead and leaned right over and then he fell out of the top bunk on his head, and guess what I did next, Mifti.’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘I wrapped all this toilet paper round his head because it was bleeding like crazy.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Dunno, six and nine or something?’

  Naturally enough, none of the three of us want to come into contact with any kind of unsettling everyday life ever again.

  Text from Ophelia to Mifti, who is standing in front of a mirror looking at herself as if she had to make out not herself but a huge crowd of people: ‘Mifti, I maltreated my lower arms dispassionately with a bread knife and now I wish I could run away. I wish I could run away. I can’t take it any more.’

  While I look at myself in this disappointing way for minutes on end, I think I can feel the beginning of a smile. My hair is stuck to my forehead, my skin is more semi-gloss than ever for some inexplicable reason, and I count my eyelashes. The effect of my reflected self hits me directly with the suddenness of an arrow, beginning to bore through me in my most distant memories: a pain that’s none other than my own.

  The only thing still visible is the unbounded weakness and the resulting innocence. Not taking my eyes off myself, I try to remind myself that the skin above the backs of my knees, the scar tissue between my shoulders and the field of freckles on one thigh are all part of me.

  I squeeze through a small window into the dark backyard, from which the Rammstein album echoing out of the kebab shop is driving out a leap of leopards. My brother and sister won’t think to investigate my whereabouts, they’re too busy distinguishing effects and side effects from one another. All I know is that I love myself and that I love every one of my steps, I’m trembling so much, no idea why, that I can only walk about five yards, and then I sit down on the kerb to flag down a taxi at some point.

  I say, ‘OK, I have absolutely no idea where I want to go.’

  ‘Are you excited?’

  ‘Why are you asking me that?’

  ‘You look like you’re just about to meet someone you’re in love with.’

  ‘But I just said I have no idea where I want to go.’

  The taxi driver drives off, watching me in the mirror as I take off my parka. I write my name on the steamed-up window with one finger, and the words, ‘Yesterday I had the most terrible dream. I dreamed I was a plastic bag.’

  ‘So what does that mean – you’ve got no idea where you want to go?’

  ‘OK, let’s go home.’

  ‘You’ve just been smoking, haven’t you?’

  ‘Is that some kind of problem?’

  ‘No, I’m not one of those militant anti-smokers. But I gave up before you were even born, I should think. I’ve been a non-smoking taxi ever since.’

  ‘So you’ve been a non-smoking taxi ever since.’

  ‘I even threw someone out the other day.’

  ‘For smoking?’

  ‘No, he got in and he’d especially ordered a nonsmoking taxi, and then he wanted to look in the ashtray to make absolutely sure there was no smoking in here. And I said, “No, get out. That’s beyond the pale, really.”’

  ‘Funny.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve only ever let one passenger smoke in here. He was standing there and he’d just lit up a Havana. I pulled up and he says, “Oh, I forgot to order a smoking taxi.” And I said, “Herr Müller, no problem, go ahead and get in.” Then we wound down all the windows and we drove down Oranienburger Strasse at five miles an hour at the most, and whenever someone gave us a look, we waved at them like that sheikh, what’s his name again?’

  ‘That was very nice of you.’

  ‘Yes, I mean, Heiner Müller, you’ve probably never heard of him, but in a situation like that you just have to—’

  ‘The Heiner Müller? The playwright?’

  ‘Heiner Müller.’

  We drive through Mitte by night. When he stops the car I realize I haven’t got any money left and I ask if he wants me to leave my ID card but he answers, ‘No, I trust you,’ and I run upstairs to the darkened flat, where all I can find is a 500 euro note that he can’t change, so we drive to a cashpoint, I give him his stupid thirteen euro fare, and he says, ‘Get back in again, at the front, I’ll drive you back.’

  He doesn’t give me a second glance until he stops the car in the empty car park of an exhibition space for designer furniture reached via a spiral ramp, and gets out. I wind down the window to give him my half-smoked cigarette, cold hitting me with an above average unpleasant bite. Disgust, pure lechery, egoism, a farewell to all intellectual fads and to the romantic idea of a life-affirming night out.

  He tugs my head up, I can’t remember how I got rid of my underwear, I have a dark red, wrinkly penis in my face and I’m watching its owner as the beastly bastard fucks his way rhythmically through the situation, lunging with his extenuated hairy balls all over all the body parts I made out as my own less than an hour ago. He sticks his index finger in my mouth and attempts to look like Enriqu
e Iglesias in the video for Hero. His dribbling tongue licks my rib cage in such an uncivilized manner that his saliva gland secretions seem to drip off my skin by the litre on to the beige leather seats. I prop myself up to arch my back, thereby pressing my torso into his face, which by now is twitching uncontrollably out of lechery. Somehow, the two of us entirely independently existing individuals continue along this road as if we were a single entity, until we stop, and at this point of pause for thought he says, completely out of breath after trying to stick something or other down my throat again, I don’t know whether it was membrane-enclosed muscle or his shin or his dick, ‘Are you an actress?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m a radio presenter. You have such clean diction, you have that characteristic actor’s style, I knew all along you were an actress.’

  ‘Why are you driving a taxi then?’

  ‘They took my show off the air.’

  So then I decide out of the blue not to make any appearance any more. I know he’s fucking my brains out – I don’t want this indecent knowledge, it means losing my language; I have no language in this world of pure sex. Nothing about it is disgusting or interspersed with explosions of ecstasy or revolting. The most unsavoury thing is that my body comes several times over, shaken by multiple orgasms during the course of these three rounds of strenuous procedure. No sexual tension released via involuntary muscle contractions, no high and no liberation. Just a seemingly never-ending spiral of overpowerment through piles and piles of feelings, dominated by pity and the contours finally traceable again after my traumatic odyssey through the world of psychedelic mind expansion. The sobriety returning. The thought of my grandmother calling to tell me that dandelions were her daughter’s favourite flowers – her dead daughter, even though children aren’t supposed to die before their parents. Anyway, children dying, that’s crazy.