About the Book

When a snowstorm halts traffic on a German autobahn, drivers are forced to spend the night in their cars. As day breaks, scores of people are found dead. Theories are rife. Was it an argument? Was it drugs, revenge or madness?

At first everyone agrees that several people must have acted together. No-one could have committed such an atrocity alone.

It is only over time that theories come to focus on an individual perpetrator, and the Traveller is born.

As he makes his way across a country gripped by fear, he’s searching for his next victim…

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

Originally published in German as Du by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin in 2010.

Copyright © Zoran Drvenkar 2010, © 2010 Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH

Translated from Du (German translation) by Shaun Whiteside

This edition published by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

Zoran Drvenkar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007465262

Ebook Edition © August 2014 ISBN: 9780007465286

Version: 2015-04-23

Praise for Zoran Drvenkar:

‘The kind of thriller, the kind of novel, that doesn’t come along every day … Stunning … Sorry thrills, and it thrills immaculately’ New York Times Book Review

‘As dark a novel as I have read in years … for those with quick minds and strong stomachs, Sorry is an impressive debut’ The Times

‘Very dark, very sinister, very original’ Joanne Harris

‘Shocking, compelling, disturbing’ Michael Robotham, author of Say You’re Sorry

‘Taut, tense and terrific’ Sean Black, author of The Innocent

Dedication

for YOU

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Copyright

Praise for Zoran Drvenkar

Dedication

Part One

I

The Traveler

Ragnar

Stink

Ruth

Nessi

Schnappi

Stink

Schnappi

II

The Traveler

Ragnar

Mirko

Taja

Nessi

Schnappi

Ruth

Stink

III

The Traveler

Ragnar

Mirko

Taja

Oskar

Stink

Ruth

Mirko

Darian

Ruth

Stink

Nessi

Schnappi

Oskar

Ragnar

Part Two

I

The Traveler

Neil

Ragnar

Oswald & Bruno

Neil

Darian

Neil

Ragnar

II

The Traveler

Nessi

Tanner

Stink

Marten

III

The Traveler

Darian

Marten

Ragnar

Schnappi

The Traveler

Part Three

The Traveler

Taja

Darian

Nessi

Darian

Schnappi

Ragnar

Stink

Taja

Darian

Schnappi

Darian

The Traveler

Taja

Stink

Darian

Schnappi

Taja

Nessi

Neil

Stink

Ragnar

The Traveler

My Thanks To

A Note About the Author

A Note About the Translator

Read on for an extended extract of Zoran Drvenkar’s chilling début thriller, Sorry

About the Publisher

PART ONE

I

did you ever know

there’s a light inside your bones

Ghinzu BLOW

THE TRAVELER

As much as we strive toward the light, we still want to be embraced by the shadow. The very same yearning that craves harmony, craves in a dark chamber of our heart chaos. We need that chaos in reasonable portions, because we don’t want to turn into barbarians. But barbarians are what we become as soon as our world falls apart. Chaos is only ever a blink away.

Never have thoughts made waves so fast. Stories are no longer passed on orally, they are transmitted to us at breakneck speed in kilobytes, so that we can’t turn our eyes away. And if it gets unbearable, we react as the barbarians did, and turn that chaos into myths.

One of those myths was created in the winter fourteen years ago, on the A4 between Bad Hersfeld and Eisenach. We won’t write down the exact date; anyone can do the research for themselves. And in any case, myths don’t stick to dates; they are timeless and become the Here and Now. We return to the past and make it Now.

It is November.

It is 1995.

It is night.

The traffic jam has been growing for an hour now, thinning into three lanes, then two, and finally one, before it comes to a standstill. The highway is blocked by snow for over twenty miles. You can only see a few yards ahead. The snowplows creep along the secondary roads toward the traffic jam, and get stuck themselves. The skies are raging. The headlights look like lights under water. It isn’t a night to be out and about. No one was prepared for this change in the weather.

People are stuck in their cars. At first they keep the engine running and search optimistically for a radio station to tell them that the traffic jam will soon be over. They search in vain. It’s one o’clock in the morning, there’s no sign for an exit, and if there was one it would be impassable anyway. Standstill. The headlights go out one after the other. Engines fall silent, the only sounds are the wind and the falling snow. Coats are pulled on, seats reclined. There is an inconsistent rhythm—the cars start up, the heating stays on for several minutes, before the engines fall silent once more.

You are one of many. You are alone and waiting. Your navigation system tells you you are an hour and fifty-seven minutes from your house. You can’t believe this is actually happening to you. That this can be happening to anyone in this country. A simple traffic jam and nothing goes.

You’re one of the few people letting their engines run uninterrupted. Not because you’re cold. You know that as soon as the silence envelops you, resignation will set in, and you’re not the kind of person to give up willingly. You even leave the satnav turned on and study the display, as if the distance from your destination might be reduced by some miracle. And the more you look at the screen, the more you wonder how something like this can happen to you.

One thousand one hundred and seventy-eight people are asking themselves the same question tonight. They’re sitting there uncomfortably and cursing their decision to set off so late. In the end they give up and come to terms with the situation. Not you. Your engine runs for two and a half hours before you turn the key and are engulfed in silence. Your gas is running low. The satnav turns off. No light, no radio. Every few minutes you turn on the windshield wiper to sweep away the snow. You want to see what’s going on out there.

And that’s why you see the first snowplow parting the snow on the opposite side of the road. It looks like a weary creature dragging the whole world slowly behind it. At the side of the road the snow makes waves that immediately freeze. If they’re clearing one side, then they’re bound to be working on ours too, you think, and study the snowplow in the side-view mirror until only the glimmer of the taillights can be seen. It’s only then that you close your eyes and take a deep breath.

Years ago, your sister gave you a yoga course as a present, and some of the exercises stayed with you. You go inside yourself and meditate. You become part of the silence and within a few minutes you fall asleep. An hour later your windows are white with snow, and a pale light fills the car, as if you were sitting inside an egg. The cold hurts your head. The windshield wipers have stopped moving. You rub your eyes and decide to get out. You want to free the windshield from snow and see if there’s any sign of a snowplow up ahead.

The disappointment is as keen as the cold. You stand next to your car, and in front of you there’s only darkness and behind you there’s only darkness. I’m a part of it, you think, and wait and hope for a gleam of light and suddenly you burst out laughing. Alone, I’m completely alone. Only the wind keeps you company. The wind, the snow, and the desperate peace of cars that are stuck. The laughter hurts your face; you should move, otherwise you’ll freeze.

You take your coat off the backseat. Needles of ice hammer down on you, snowflakes press against your lips. You put on gloves, take a deep breath, and feel surprisingly whole. As if your existence had been striving for that moment—you, getting out of the car; you, turning around and feeling the falling snow and smiling. It’s a good smile. It hurts less than laughing.

A truck creeps past in the opposite lane and flashes once as if to greet you. Its tailwind reaches you with full force seconds later. You don’t duck; you feel the wetness on your face, stumbling slightly and wondering why you can’t wipe this stupid grin off your face. The truck disappears, and you’re still there looking at the apparently endless snake of vehicles in front of you disappearing into the darkness. You turn around and look at the darkness behind you. Nineteen years, you think, it’s nineteen years since I felt like this. You wonder how so much time could pass, and decide not to wait another nineteen years before continuing your search.

I’m in the Here, and the Here is Now.

You can’t go forward, so you decide to go back.

In the months that follow, there were countless theories about what happened that night. Was it an argument? Was it drugs, revenge, or madness? Some people thought it had something to do with the moon, others quoted from the Bible—but there was no sign of the moon that night, and if there is a God, he was looking the other way. There were all kinds of conjectures, everyone had a theory, and that’s how the myth came about.

At first everyone agreed that several people must have been acting together. No human being could have done all that on his own. It was only over time that theories came to focus on an individual perpetrator, and the Traveler was born.

Some people thought it would never have come to an end if the snowfall hadn’t suddenly stopped. Others suspected there was a system behind it.

Many claimed the Traveler got tired.

Conjectures through and through.

You go to the car behind you and get in on the passenger side. The windows are covered with snow. You don’t have to look. You know what you’re doing and leave the car three minutes later.

You leave the second car after four minutes.

You skip the fourth and fifth cars because there’s more than one person in them. How can you tell when the passenger seat is empty? Perhaps it’s instinct, perhaps it’s luck. Two men are asleep in the fourth car, and in the fifth there’s a family with a dog. The dog is the only one awake, and sees you passing the window like a shadow. It starts whimpering and pees on the seat.

In car number ten you encounter your first problem.

A woman sits wrapped up at the steering wheel. She can’t sleep, she’s absolutely freezing because she’s too stingy to turn on the engine even for a moment. She’s wearing three pullovers and her coat over the top. Her car windows are damp on the inside, the drops of condensation are frozen. The woman’s face is sore with cold. Her hands are claws. She regrets not bringing any drugs along. A sleeping tablet or two and it would all be more bearable.

The woman gives a start when the passenger door opens. For a moment she thinks it’s the emergency services bringing her blankets and a thermos. She’s about to complain because it’s taken so long.

“Don’t panic,” you say and close the door behind you.

You smell her body, the fading deodorant. You smell her weariness and frustration, it is clammy and sour and leaves her mouth with every breath. She asks who you are. She tries to shrink away from you. Her eyes are wide. Her throat feels brittle under your hand. The inside light goes off. You press the woman against the driver’s door, you put your whole weight into the movement—your left arm stretched out as if to keep her at a distance. You don’t take your eyes off her for a second, feeling her blows against your arm, against your shoulder, watching her hands change from claws to panicked, fluttering birds. She gasps, she chokes, then her right hand finds the ignition key and starts the engine. You weren’t expecting that. In car number six the driver tried to climb onto the backseat. In car number eight the driver repeatedly banged his head against the window to draw attention. None of them tried to drive away.

The woman puts her foot on the accelerator; the car’s set to Park. The engine roars and nothing else happens. She hits the horn; the honking sounds like the bleating of a lost sheep. You clench your right hand and strike the woman in the face. Again and again. Her jaw breaks, her face slips to the left and she slumps in on herself. You lower your fist, but you keep the other hand on her throat. You feel her bones shifting under your strength. You feel the life escaping from her. That is the moment you let go of her and turn off the engine. It took less than four minutes.

The Traveler moves on.

In car number seventeen an old man is waiting for you. He’s belted in and sitting upright as if the journey is going to continue at any moment. There’s classical music on the radio.

“I was waiting,” the old man said.

You close the door behind you; the old man goes on talking.

“I saw you. A truck went past. The headlights shone through the windows of the car in front of me. I saw you through the snow. And now you’re here. And I’m not scared.”

“Thank you,” you tell him.

The old man unbuckles his seat belt. He shuts his eyes and lets his head fall onto the steering wheel as if he wants to go to sleep. The back of his neck is exposed. You see a gold chain cutting through his tensed skin like a thin thread. You put your hands around the old man’s head. A jerk, a rough crack, a sigh escapes from the old man. You leave your hands on his head for a while, as if you could catch his fleeing thoughts. It’s a perfect moment of peace.

The next day on the news they talk about an organization. The police were trying to make a connection between the twenty-six victims. The families were grieving, everywhere in the country flags were flown at half mast. They were talking about terrorists and the Russian mafia. They were thinking about a cult; the subject of sects was given prominence once again. Only the gun lobby didn’t get involved, because no guns had been used. Whatever was said, whatever people conjectured, no one dared to use the phrase “mass murder.” It never takes long. Eventually a tabloid newspaper put it in great big letters on the front page.

MASS MURDER ON THE A4.

It was a dark winter for Germany.

The big question on everyone’s mind was what made the Traveler get out of the twenty-sixth car and think, Enough’s enough. Did he really think that? Did he hear a voice, did demons speak to him, or did he get bored? Whatever the answer, it had nothing to do with the snowfall, because the snow went on falling till dawn. No, the truth isn’t complicated, it’s relatively simple.

You leave the twenty-sixth car and don’t think anything at all. You feel the wind and you feel the cold and you feel safe and you’re moving to the next car when you notice a glimmer on the horizon. Perhaps the snowfall is reflecting a light in the far distance. Whatever it is, it makes you turn around and set off back to your car. You follow your own overblown track and it is opening up like an old wound. At your car you wipe the windshield free of snow and sit down behind the steering wheel. You take a deep breath, put thumb and index finger around the ignition key, and wait. You wait for the right moment. When you start the engine, the cars in front of you come to life, and the headlights of over a hundred vehicles light the blocked motorway with a pale light. After exactly four hours the traffic jam gets moving again, because the Traveler was waiting for the right moment.

You put the car in gear and you’re very pleased with yourself. The pain and throbbing in your hands are insignificant. Later you will discover that you’ve broken two fingers on your right hand, and in spite of your gloves the knuckles on both hands are swollen and beaten bloody. Your shoulders ache from the uncomfortable posture you assumed in the cars, but none of that matters, because there’s this indescribable contentment within you. There’s also a sweet taste in your mouth that you can’t explain. The taste prompts a memory. The memory is nineteen years old. Glorious, dazzling, sweet. You know what it all means. You thought the search was over, but it had only taken a breather. It’s the start of a new era. Or in other words—the beginning of the end of civilization as you know it.

In retrospect you still like that thought best.

No beginning without an end. A man gets out of his car, a man gets back into his car, and the traffic jam in front of him slowly starts to move. The Traveler travels on.

RAGNAR

This isn’t the end, and a beginning looks different. This is the moment in between, when everything still looks possible. Retreat or attack. We’re in the present. It’s eight o’clock in the morning. The spotlights are turned on you, because this Friday morning you’re making a decision that will change all your lives, as you are standing at the edge of the pool unable to believe your eyes. The light gleams blue and cold up at you. What you are seeing is a soundless nightmare. Not one of you dares to break the silence.

You wish you were far, far away.

Leo has moved back a step; he is waiting for your reaction. His hands are deep in the pockets of his jacket and he’s struggling to stay still. David is standing on the other side of the pool, rubbing the back of his head. He’s only been working for you for three months, and you’re still not sure what to make of him. He’s young, he’s ambitious, and he’s one of Tanner’s many grandchildren. Family means nothing to you. You wanted to give the boy a chance, because Tanner is putting his hand in the fire for him. It’s the only kind of family bond that you respect.

You take a deep breath. The air is warm and clean, the air-conditioning system is working without a sound. Oskar had the arched basement dug out four years ago. Walls and ceiling are new and covered with terra-cotta tiles. They don’t just reflect the light; every breath is clearly audible and echoes in the silence like the panting of dogs. Your hands tingle. You want to hit something, a bag of sand or just the wall. Something.

How could she?

You rub your eyes before you look again. You still don’t believe it. Leo shifts uneasily from one leg to the other; he knows there’s going to be trouble soon. A whole lot of trouble.

“I don’t believe it,” you say.

“Maybe—”

You raise your hand, Leo falls silent, you turn to David.

“What do you think how much is it?”

“Thirty, maybe forty kilos, it’s hard to say.”

Footsteps can be heard from the floor above, none of you is looking up, you are standing motionlessly around the pool. On the surface of the water you can see your elongated reflections quiver slightly. Maybe there’s an underground line nearby, or else one of those massive great trucks is dragging itself along a side street and sending its vibrations far underground. Your faces look like the faces of ghosts that have seen everything and are tired of being ghosts. Tired is exactly the right word, you think, because you’re seriously tired of all this bullshit. You felt something dark coming your way, you should have been prepared, but who expects something like this?

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” says David.

“And you should never have seen anything like this,” you reply and hear Tanner coming downstairs. He stops some distance behind you. Tanner is your right hand; without him you’d only be worth half of what you are. He turns sixty next year and wants to retire slowly. You have no idea what you’ll do without him. He taught you everything you know, and it’s only when he’s no longer there that you’ll find out whether you can cope on your own. One of your customers once said that Tanner scared him because he didn’t emit anything at all. Tanner’s a transmitter who only transmits when he feels like it. Now, for example. He says, “Nothing. It’s gone. She’s taken all of it.”

You don’t react; what should you say to that? “Thanks” would be inappropriate. The quivering on the surface of the water vanishes. You look up from the pool. Your fury and frustration need an outlet. So far you’ve ignored Oskar. You didn’t want to talk to him, you couldn’t even look at him because the mere sight of him would have made you explode. This is all his fault. Correction. His and yours, if you’re honest. You should never have done business together.

Never.

Take a look at him, how peacefully he is sleeping there on that stupid leather armchair as if he hadn’t a care in the world. It’s eight o’clock in the morning, and you wouldn’t be surprised if he was drunk.

“Wake him up.”

Leo bends over Oskar and shakes him. No reaction. Leo slaps him in the face with the palm of his hand. Once, twice, then he steps back. It doesn’t suit him. When Leo takes a step back, it means there’s a problem. You react immediately. Your bodily functions are shutting down. The breathing, the heartbeat. Your blood is flowing slower, your thoughts move like molasses. Reptile, I’m turning into a fucking reptile, you think, when Leo confirms what you were thinking: “He’s gone.”

A few steps and you’re beside Oskar, crouching down in front of him. His skin is pale and shiny in places. It reminds you of dried sushi.

“What’s up with his skin?”

“That’s ice.”

Leo holds his hand out to you; his fingertips are damp.

“He must have frozen to death.”

You want to laugh. It’s over twenty degrees down here, and out there it’s early summer. No one just freezes in the summer, you want to say, but not a word comes out. David comes and stands next to you. You’d rather he kept his distance. It’s your own fault. David is anxious for your acknowledgment, and you aren’t making it easy for him.

“May I?”

You nod, David crouches beside you and taps Oskar’s forehead, there’s a dull tok. David looks for a pulse and then shakes his head.

“Leo’s right. Oskar’s gone.”

You feel Tanner’s and Leo’s eyes on your back, and David is looking at you too. There’s nothing to say, your mind is blank. Oskar deep-frozen on a chair, the vanished merchandise, and then this fucked-up swimming pool. When you can speak again, you say, “I want her to suffer.”

“I’ll see to it,” David replies.

The answer comes too quickly. David wasn’t thinking, even though an order like that doesn’t call for much thinking. He reacted automatically. You hate that. Your men should think and not react.

Both of you get up at the same time; you’re close to one another, so that you can smell his breath.

“David, what did I just say?”

“That she—that she should suffer?”

You grab him between the legs. He tries to move away, thinks better of it and stands still. Only his torso bends slightly forward, that’s all that happens. You press hard.

“What is that, David?”

Sweat appears on his forehead; his answer is a gasp.

“Suffering?”

“No. This isn’t suffering, David. Suffering is when I pull your balls off and let you dive after them in the pool, that would be suffering. Now do you understand what I meant when I said she should suffer?”

“I understand.”

You let go of him. His nostrils are flared, a tear runs down his cheek, his chin is trembling. David is twenty-four, you’re nineteen years older. You understand each other.

“Bring me the boy.”

“But where are we supposed to—”

“Ask Darian,” you interrupt. “He’ll know where you can find him. And David, this is serious. Leave no stone unturned and don’t even think about coming back here without the boy.”

You turn to Tanner.

“Go with him. Leo and I will wait here. You’ve got an hour.”

Tanner nods and leaves with David. You tell Leo to get two chairs. Leo disappears too. At last you’re alone with Oskar, and the tension leaves you and is replaced with a heavy weariness. It should never have come to this, you think, and although you are weary you still want to yell at Oskar and behave like an idiot. He’s gone. Leo couldn’t have put it more appropriately. Once you’re gone, it’s final. It has no beginning, it just has an end. You put your hand on Oskar’s head for a moment. His hair feels greasy; through his scalp you can feel the cold emanating from his body.

What on earth happened to you?

You lift one eyelid as if his gaze might tell you what’s happened here. Come on, talk to me. Nothing. The gaze of a dead man is the gaze of a dead man. It isn’t the first time you’ve seen it. When you let go of the lid again, it closes very slowly.

Leo comes down with the chairs and says, “Christ, it stinks up there.”

You sit down opposite Oskar. Leo’s bulk obscures the chair next to you. Eight years ago, he was still in the ring and it was shaming. As a young man Leo had been national champion twice in a row, then the fire went out, and everyone apart from Leo noticed it. He kept going. When a man turns forty, he can stand wherever he wants, just not in the ring. Leo was one of those stubborn guys whose brain can come trickling out of their ears and they just pull back their shoulders and go on boxing. His second passion almost cost him his life. His gambling debts were in six figures, and if it hadn’t been for Tanner, Leo would have had to go on tour—Thailand and Indonesia loved European flesh. Fights without rules, but the money was good. Tanner bought the aging boxer’s freedom and saved him. Since then Leo’s been working for you and he is at the same time Tanner’s shadow. You don’t know what kind of aftereffects boxing left him with. His face is scarred, most of his nerves don’t work, the hands are deformed paws. He is married to a former model. She treats him like a god. You know you can always rely on Leo. He’s loyal and he can take a beating like no one else. And he hardly misses a thing.

“There’s no TV.”

“So?”

Leo points at Oskar.

“If there’s no TV, then how come Oskar’s holding a TV remote?”

You’re surprised; you hadn’t noticed the remote control. It sticks out from his fingers like a black popsicle. Focus—how could you have overlooked something like that? You bend forward and take Oskar’s hand in yours. For his last birthday you gave him three watches and a watch winder. Oskar was allowed to choose the watches, the watch winder was your department. Its frame is covered with black piano lacquer, and as soon as you touch it, four little lights come on inside. You remember Oskar calling you up after his birthday party and telling you he’d spent an hour sitting in front of the box looking at the watches being rocked to sleep.

There were days when Oskar was like a ten-year-old. What he hadn’t been able to experience as a child, he’d more than made up for as a grown-up. And you were always by his side, like a proud uncle with an overflowing billfold.

The watch on Oskar’s wrist cost you ten grand, but it’s still not cold-resistant. The date tells you that Oskar was deep frozen on Saturday. The watch stopped at twenty to twelve.

Leo asks you if you have any idea what might have happened down here.

“Not a clue,” you answer, and let go of Oskar’s hand. “But if we wait till Oskar’s thawed, I’m sure he’ll tell us.”

Leo doesn’t laugh; even though he knows you were making a joke, laughing would be a mistake. You ignore him, just as you ignore the vaulted basement and the swimming pool and stare with a full focus at your brother’s frozen body, as if it could suddenly give you answers to all your questions.

STINK

Stink you got from your brother. It’s miles better than Isabell. As if you were like from Spain or something. Not normal. Like that girl in 9C, the one with the braids. Like a hippie, except a techno one. Wall. Why Wall? As if there was something wrong with her. No, you’re Stink and you want to stay that way. The name stuck, even though your brother left school four years ago. You thought they’d give it a rest after that, but that was wrong, everyone went on calling you Stink, so you started getting used to it. Stink’s okay. Nobody ever says anything about toilets or whatever. And why should they. You smell nice. Perfume is a protection against the outside world.

Protection against guys like Eric, who turns around two seats in front of you and looks at you as if you’re naked from top to toe. You shut your eyes, you really don’t want to see him. Hairless ass. Of course you don’t mean his ass, just his dumb shaved head. As if he’s a soldier on the way to the front, acting cool and shaving his head twice a week, though he’s only got fluff on his chin anyway, he’ll never have enough for a goatee. He’d need to drink more coffee. At least that’s what your aunt says. Aunt Sissi. Drink a lot of coffee and you’ll grow a beard. Hormones and crap. Thanks a lot, Auntie. That’s exactly what you don’t need. Hair all over the place. The only thing that works is Epolotion or whatever it’s called. You’re sure Schnappi can spell it, Schnappi’s always up-to-date like a radio station without ads that collects all the important information and feeds it back to you.

“That hair thing doesn’t take a second,” she explained to you all, “a hot needle goes in”—she showed you and poked it around in her wrist. “It goes into your pores, you know? Or you do it with wax, but the hot needle lasts longer, right? So it goes in where the hair is and then burns your roots and it hisses and it hurts like fuck.”

“Ouch!” yelled Ruth, blond, almost transparent and with no visible hairs on her legs.

“Stop wriggling,” you told her and asked Schnappi how long it would keep working.

“A few months.”

“A few months?”

“What did you think?”

About a year was what you thought, but it probably isn’t.

“And quanta costa?”

Schnappi rolled her eyes.

“No idea what it costs. You think I own the shop or something? Ask for yourself.”

Epolotion’s out, you’ve checked. Incredibly expensive and incredibly painful. Two incrediblys too many. And anyway you like shaving. It takes a long time, but your legs like the feeling and your skin prickles afterward. You could get Indi to do it. It’ll be like in a movie. Pretty Woman II. Indi sitting on the edge of the tub, your foot in one hand, the razor in the other, desperate to suck your toes. No, Indi, you’ll say, shaving first, then sucking. And Indi will say, Okay. And then he will shave your legs, making you completely nervous with his touches as you doze in the tub and sip your champagne, all queasy and woozy and—

“Hey, are you awake or what?” Ruth wants to know.

“’Course I am.”

“Then take your stupid head off my shoulder.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Slobbermouth.”

You wipe your chin. No dribble, what a bitch! You narrow your eyes to get a better view of the screen. Stupid cinema. Stupid seat. Stupid movie. Come on, who wants to sit at the back? You can hardly see a thing. Stupid eyes and stupid half-price Tuesdays. Next time you’ll pay two euros and watch a DVD. More fun anyway. If you have to pee you don’t miss the whole story.

“Stupid movie,” you mumble.

Schnappi jabs you with her elbow.

“Bitch!”

Nessi sits next to Ruth and bends over and hands you her Coke. At least there is one person thinking about you. You drink and clink the ice cubes. Again Eric turns around and gives you the Look. Zombie.

“You a Nazi or what?” you ask.

“Dyke,” he hisses back and turns away.

“Could you shut the fuck up,” Schnappi whispers, drumming her feet on the floor so people can feel it four rows down. Every time things get exciting Schnappi turns into Speedy Gonzales. An Asian girl on speed, you think, and it makes you laugh and you say, “Speedfreak.”

“Are you having fun?”

“Shut up, Ruth.”

“Come on, if all you want to do is get on our nerves, just go to the can and talk to the toilet,” Ruth tells you without looking at you.

“Or the soap dispenser,” says Schnappi, and they giggle together like two little girls on the way to the candy store.

You look at them. They don’t look like sixteen.

“I’m leaving,” you tell them, mature and grown-up as you are, and then you leave.

The door shuts behind you, and you inhale with relief. The air in there was horrible. As if everyone had farted at the same time and then fanned it around. You fumble your cigarettes out of your jacket, a new pack, fresh out of the machine, you’ve never liked bumming from the others. You take off the cellophane and pull out the silver paper, tap one out and stick it between your lips.

“Oh, come on.”

You hammer your lighter on the palm of your hand. The flint crunches, there’s no spark. Great. Now what? You can’t just go back in there and ask for a light, they’ll lynch you. Go to the counter, they’re bound to have a light.

You’re half the way there when this guy comes from the bottom of the stairs. He was probably in the john, hasn’t missed anything anyway.

“Got a light?”

He takes out this enormous golden flamethrower.

“It’s my dad’s,” he tells you, as if he’d inherited it, as if he had to explain it, as if you’d asked. He probably swiped the lighter when his dad was looking the other way, wanna bet? Guy as tall as a basketball player, much older than you. Mid-twenties. Gives you a light and smiles. Nice.

“Thanks.”

“You don’t like the movie?”

“Boring.”

“That’s the word.”

That smile again; you smile back. It’s better than standing around on your own anyway.

“How about an ice cream?”

You tell him you’re waiting for your friends. You’re not that easy. He looks around, probably checking that he’s not dreaming and he really has met you. Hot mama that you are. Then he winks at you. He really winks. Maybe he’s gay or something.

“We could wait outside and eat our ice cream. My treat. But only if you want to,” he adds, with a big fat question mark at the end. He’s actually really friendly, but let him twitch for a minute or two. Friendly’s only half the battle. You’re not naïve. Don’t trust strangers who offer you candy, Aunt Sissi drummed into you, and if you’ve grown up without parents you listen to your aunt.

“Hm,” you say and pull in your stomach and check the guy out—black T-shirt, jeans, Doc Martens, leather bracelet, ponytail. No, he’s not gay, you’ve never seen a long-haired gay; and if your nose doesn’t deceive you he’s got just as much perfume behind his ears as you do. Smells good. When he glances at his watch, you see gold again. You could bet that when he laughs the sun comes out.

“Why are you laughing?” he asks, and you just grin and he says, “We’ve got an hour, what do you think?” Questions about questions. Come on, Stink, behave yourself, he’s not going to go straight for your shorts, and if he does, you’ve put up with worse. So just be cool, go with it.

“Ice cream sounds great,” you tell him and your heart starts to flutter loudly.

Before you leave the foyer, you buy ice cream from the guy behind the counter. Of course you choose the most expensive one, you want to do this in style. The guy says Go for it and you laugh, and he laughs too, then you’re standing outside nibbling at your ice creams and glancing at each other. These are really flirty looks, they fall like a veil over your eyes and make your vision a little blurry. Leaving the cinema wasn’t such a bad idea after all. From a certain angle the guy looks like Alberto. Alberto wasn’t an Italian, you just wished he was. Alberto came from the East and his real name was Albert, but what sort of a name is that? Alberto sounded miles better. That guy, oh hell, he could really turn you on. He was wild about you. Wanna eatsch you up, he said. Stupid lisp, but at least it made you laugh. And you didn’t want to talk to him anyway. He made out with you wherever you were and nibbled away at your lips as if they were pink chewing gum. And once at the bus stop he shoved his hands down the back of your jeans and grabbed you by the ass. Alberto, what’re you doing? you asked him and he pressed himself closer to you so that you could feel his erection, massaging your ass as if it were an overripe peach and breathing heavily. I’m an ath fetishist, he muttered in your ear, almost blowing your head off. And you weren’t cool at all by then and murmured back: Whatever that is. You had no idea what an ass fetishist was and you didn’t have much time to think about it, because Alberto was pressing and kneading your cheeks till you thought: Help, he’s going to tear me in two! It didn’t come to that, though, because Alberto suddenly went quiet and rigid and stopped breathing at all while having an orgasm pressed against your belly, and that happened all at the bus stop on a lovely day in May.

“… never seen it. I went to Berlin a lot as a child. My father lives in Friedrichshain, my half brother in Zehlendorf. But my mother lives in Hamburg, that’s where I grew up …”

The guy talks and talks and smiles at you and you think: How long’s he been talking? You smile back and lick a bit of ice cream from your wrist and wonder if he’s an ass fetishist as well.

“So you’re just visiting?” you say, picking up the end of his last sentence.

“Right.”

“Cool.”

“What about you? Still at school?”

You show him your wrist. There’s a little tattoo at the spot where they take your pulse. The writing’s tiny, one word, not more.

“Gone?”

“Right, gone.”

“School?”

You nod.

“High school graduation?”

“Nah.”

You roll your eyes and laugh. Be honest, you don’t look like graduation. You look like a wildcat in a petting zoo. But don’t tell him that. And watch out, here comes the next question.

“And what are your plans?”

“We’ll see. Maybe I’ll open a beauty salon. Something like that. You?”

“I don’t know where I want to go.”

Funny answer, you think, and pretend to study the movie posters. Let the guy look at you in peace. Maybe he hasn’t got a girlfriend, you could be with him for a while. But guys like him always have girlfriends. One of those smoothies who never have to go to the bathroom and in the morning they smell like flowers. That’s the kind of girl he would have. He’s much too nice for this world—he speaks nice, he smells nice and seems to have money. Maybe he’ll lend you ten euros, then you’d have to see each other again so that you could give him the money back.

You feel him looking at you. His eye wanders up from your platforms up to your worn bell-bottomed cord jeans, the belt pulled tight, narrow waist, blouse under your velvet jacket, long pause on your breasts—of course he lingers there, he paid for the ice cream, he can linger. Perhaps he’s noticed that your red hair makes you look a bit like the actress Kristen Bell, but he’s probably never even seen Veronica Mars or Heroes.

“How old are you?” he asks and his eyes are on your mouth.

“Seventeen,” you lie, adding a year. “You?”

“Too old.”

“Come on.”

“How about twenty-seven?”

“Definitely too old,” you say and laugh.

He laughs too, takes a breath and tells you his name.

“Nice to meet you, Neil. I’m Stink.”

“Funny name.”

You wave dismissively.

“It’s because of the perfume.”

“You named yourself after a book?”

“What book?”

“You know, the novel.”

“No, it’s because I always smell so nice. Here.”

He bends forward and sniffs your wrist.

“Smells good.”

You look at each other. He knows there is more to this name.

“And because I’m mostly in a bad mood,” you admit. “Mostly always.”

“A real stinker, then.”

“Better believe it.”

He thinks for a moment, he looks to his left, he looks to his right.

“I have an idea,” he tells you. “Will you come with me?”

“Now?”

“Now.”

Now it is your turn to look around. Your girls will be gone for more than an hour. You could die of boredom or you could go on an adventure.

“You lead, I will follow,” you say to Neil.

So he leads you down the street and stops next to a Jaguar, smart and red and with Hamburg plates.

“Wow, where’d you get that?”

“Swiped it off my mother,” says Neil and opens the door for you.

RUTH

Once upon a time there were five girls and I was one of them. The fairy tale could start like that. One of them. That’s exactly how you feel, lying on your back, above you the moss-green ceiling that you painted one afternoon with your girls because the pink was getting on your nerves and you needed a change. You’re living with your parents in an old stylish apartment block they bought when you were born. Your top bunk is six feet up. Every morning it’s like waking up in a forest. Now the green reminds you of the sea that you saw while traveling around the Bahamas with your parents. Of course you had to dive, and it nearly happened there in the water. You lost yourself for a moment. You were part of the deep and you didn’t know what was up and what was down. It was the best experience you’ve ever had, and since then you’ve been wondering what would have happened if you’d made the wrong choice and gone on deeper. How do you lose yourself? Do you disappear or do you become part of the water?

Now you’re lying on your bed, and the moss-green ceiling is within reach of your hands. Even though you’re sure no one can just go missing like that, you’re not so sure what’s happening between your legs. Is it his tongue or is it his finger? You look down, his head is moving, so it must be his tongue. God, he’s taking his time. You’re sorry it has come to this. Why did you just let yourself go like that?

He asked so nicely.

That’s all?

That’s all.

You tug gently on his hair. Eric looks up. His lips glisten. He gives you a quizzical look, and you wish he would make another face.

“What are you doing?”

“What does it feel like?” he asks back and disappears between your legs again.

You wish it was his finger and not his stupid tongue, then you’d definitely be more aware of it. There are boys who don’t know how to kiss. They swap gallons of spit with you and want to hear you gasping with passion. You want to be kissed so that your lights flicker. Flicker and not go out. Boys should learn from girls. Nessi kissed you once. It was New Year’s Eve, you were sitting drunk on Taja’s bed, and suddenly someone suggested making out and your mouth landed on Nessi’s mouth and it was the hottest french kiss you’ve ever had.

Eric definitely doesn’t know how to kiss, and you’re annoyed with yourself for not telling him on the very first day. Now you are in the second week and he goes at it like a heartsick frog. Taja warned you, and this is what you’ve ended up with—a guy who busies himself between your legs as if he is working with his tongue on a scratch card.

You count the books on the shelf, you tense your belly and admire your belly button with its little ring. You wonder which pizza you’ll have afterward and whether the movie will really be as weird as everyone says. Then you say the alphabet backward and at F you’ve had enough and drag Eric up to you by the ears. After a certain point enough’s enough. You kiss him, and he does his frog face again, but it’s better than all that fumbling. You taste yourself on his tongue, and your own arousal arouses you even further, and it’s like something coming full circle. Eric’s leg slips between your thighs, the pressure is good, you push back, your lower body twitches and it happens so fast that you have to grip the back of his neck so that you don’t lose yourself completely. His mouth lands on your neck, you want to warn him that if he gives you a love bite he’s dead, but you can’t warn him, because all your lights have blown out, no flickering, just lights out, as the orgasm glides through you like a red-hot knife through a block of butter, without getting stuck once, and that happens twice in a row.

Eric isn’t aware of any of that, he’s too aroused to notice anything. He kneads your breasts and breathes in your ear. You let go of his neck and sink back. The knife has disappeared, now you’re nothing but melting butter. It would be perfect if you were alone now.

“Oh God,” sighs Eric, as you take him in your hand. He twitches, he presses himself harder against you, full with desire and the constant panic that he might come too quickly.

You look over his shoulder at your watch. You’ve got five minutes.

Your hand opens his zipper, you’re lethargic and lazy, it’s as if you’re moving under water. His knees tremble. You push him off you and onto his back. He’s so helpless, you could do anything you wanted with him. His boxer shorts are damp in two places. You touch him and he shrinks back a little. Eric said your face was too much for him, and you imagined him pleasuring himself while gazing breathlessly at the class photograph. Now his eyes are wide open, as if in terror. This isn’t love, you think, it’s something else. You pull down his boxers without breaking eye contact. You smell his cock before you see it. The scent, the expectation.

“Shut your eyes.”

Eric shuts his eyes, as quickly as if his life depended on it.

You lean down and kiss the head of his dick. His skin is hot to the touch and he tastes bitter. You insisted that he wash beforehand. You have principles. You take him gently into your mouth and feel him twitch and grow and let him fall out of your mouth. He comes in frantic spurts, it’s flowing out of him, onto your hand, his belly, the sheet. He whimpers. Sweet, you think, and put a finger on his bobbing cock and can feel his heartbeat. The twitching subsides, the fever has passed. You look up. Eric stares at the ceiling, he can’t look you in the eye, it’s been less than a minute.

Eric waits downstairs while you adjust your lipstick in the mirror and wonder what you’ll look like in fourteen years’ time. You don’t plan on turning thirty, but neither did you plan to be licked by a frog when you were sixteen. Now you’re sixteen and standing in front of a mirror with a pony sticker in one corner and a black heart in the other and wondering why time has to go by so incredibly fast.

Taja painted the heart three years ago with a felt tip, when your girls were on a sleepover. “Forever,” it says below the heart. You don’t know who it was who came up with that. Nothing is forever, everything has a sell-by date.

And sooner or later I’ll turn thirty.

You’re not a beauty. You’re what lies between beauty and boredom. Your eyes are like cloudy water, your hair is smooth and so pale that it’s almost white. You remind a lot of people of somebody, but no one can say exactly who. If it wasn’t for your friends, you’d probably be invisible.

Your girls are alike in many things, but what fundamentally makes you different is your hunger. None of your girls knows how you feel. There’s a hunger in you that never ends even when you’re full. The hunger makes you start awake at night. You want more. More music, more talks, more time and sex and most of all more life. Your room has fourteen square feet. You lust for more.

Your girlfriends don’t know anything about your plans. They think you’re going to spend the next hundred years moving around Berlin, sharing everything and never parting. You have no illusions. Take a look at yourself; you won’t get very far with your face, your mind will have to take care of the rest. And your mind’s not really bad.

The tattoo on your wrist is barely visible, even though it’s less than a month old. Needle and ink and a bottle of vodka. The writing’s tiny. Gone. If the girls knew you were working hard to erase your tattoo with soap every evening, they would never forgive you. And if they knew you wanted to go to senior class at grammar school after the end of the year, they’d definitely go nuts. Your girls have plans. Stink with her ridiculous beauty salon, as if polishing pensioners’ wrinkles was the crème de la crème. Schnappi just wants to get as far away as possible from her mad mother, who’s been planning for ages to take Schnappi back to Vietnam to find a suitable husband for her. Schnappi in Vietnam is like you behind the register in Aldi. Nessi’s plan is the weirdest of all. She wants to live with the rest of you in the country. Doesn’t matter where. She’s your personal eco-freak and dreams of a commune where you’ll cook together every day and talk and be so contented that the outside world will dissolve. The artist among you is Taja. She inherited the gift from her dad and after school wants to travel with her guitar around Europe, which you find even stupider than opening some dumb beauty salon. Who actually likes those people who strum away on street corners? Or even worse, who likes it when you’re sitting in the U-Bahn and then some entertainer stumbles in?

You wish you could steal a tiny bit of each of your girls—Stink’s rage, Schnappi’s energy, Nessi’s warmth, and you’d especially like to have something from Taja, because she vanished just under a week ago and it doesn’t matter what bit you get, you’ll take it all—the gleam in her eyes, as if a storm was approaching, or her adventurousness, as if life was always dangerous and not just a tedious collection of school lessons.

You last saw Taja six days ago; there’s been radio silence since then. No returned calls, no answers to your texts, nothing. Stink even went up to see her in Frohnau, but nobody answered the door. Schnappi thinks Taja might be traveling somewhere with her dad, like she did at Christmas—packed her things and lay on the beach in Tahiti until New Year’s Eve.

Not this time, especially not just before the end of term.

Never.

You really miss Taja, and you check your phone a hundred times a day to see if she has written. You wish you’d argued, then there would be a reason.

“I wish you were here,” you say quietly to your reflection and touch the black heart and think it’s really time to get out of here. You glance at yourself one last time, weary from hunger, before you go down to Eric, who’s already waiting impatiently for you.

The popcorn tastes like cardboard. The guy behind the popcorn machine says there’s nothing he can do about it. He promises you a fresh portion next time. You ask him which next time that’s going to be. He turns red and Schnappi laughs and bumps you with her shoulder, making you spill half the popcorn over the counter.

Schnappi leads on and you find row 45 and squeeze in. Because you’re late the ads are on already and everyone groans and comments, particularly Jenni, and you give her the finger, tell her to be quiet or she’ll get Sprite on her ugly hairdo. And then at last you’re sitting down and Schnappi says, “We’re late, the ads are over.” And you say, “I’ve noticed that already.” Only Nessi keeps her mouth shut, sits there looking as if she’d rather be somewhere else. The trailers start and at that exact minute Stink comes running in and everybody starts groaning again while Stink squeezes down the row and stands on everyone’s feet, and as soon as she’s sitting down, as soon as everything’s quiet, Schnappi’s phone coughs, which always sounds funny, because Schnappi recorded her cousin coughing as a ringtone, but it’s only funny if you’re not at the cinema, so everyone groans again and Schnappi says, “Sorry, sorry,” and turns her phone off. At last the movie begins and you see a ship in the harbor and everyone on the screen cheers so much that you start yawning.

“Are we in the wrong movie?” asks Stink.

“Shut up.”

Stink slips down in her seat slightly and says she hates half-price Tuesday.

“So why do you come?”

“Why not?”

You drink from your Sprite; Schnappi bends down, takes some of your popcorn, and immediately spits it back out.

“Is this stuff cardboard, or what?”

Stink snorts with laughter and you can’t help it, the Sprite shoots out your nose and drips on your chest.

Well, thanks a lot.

On the screen the people are looking forward to a boat trip, they’re wearing uniforms and they look the way you imagine Americans look on a Sunday. Eric turns around and winks at you, Stink asks him if he wants to take a picture, Schnappi throws popcorn at his head and you say, “That stuff tastes like old feet,” then Jenni kicks your backside from behind and goes Shh and you’re about to turn around, when everything explodes and your heartbeat just stops, flames and more flames, the whole screen is burning up, one explosion after another. It makes your jaws drop so you girls can’t speak anymore. At least you’re a hundred percent sure that this is the right movie.

NESSI

They get up and go outside, they look at their phones, talk, forget their crushed popcorn boxes and empty cardboard cups and call out to each other. They yawn, they grab each other’s butts and have long forgotten what movie they were just watching. They’re as superficial as a puddle at the roadside, looking at their phones as if they were navigational devices without which they wouldn’t know where to go after the movie. They have too much, and because they have too much, they want more and more, because it’s all they know. Greedy, never satisfied and never really hungry, because they get fed constantly before they can even feel the slightest hunger.

You wish you weren’t part of it. They’re so far removed from you that you could call to them and they wouldn’t hear you. Your voice, yes; the words, no. And when they have left, peace settles in as if the cinema is holding its breath. The only sound is the murmuring from the corridors, then the door falls shut and it’s completely still. The cinema breathes out and it sounds like a sigh. The world has been switched off. You are the world and you wish you were someone else. A tear in the curtain is a tear in the screen is a tear in your life. You look at your wrist, the tattoo gleams dully. Gone. You can’t take your eyes off those four letters and wonder what would happen if you saw all the things in your dreams that you didn’t want to see in real life. Things you close your eyes to. Things you don’t want to imagine because they’re so terrible. And what if all those things stepped out of your dreams and suddenly appeared in real life—and it doesn’t matter if you want to see them or not, they’re there and you have to see them. What then? Would you stop living and go on with dreaming?

I don’t know.

“Sorry, I’d like to leave you sitting here, but I can’t, I’ll get into trouble.”

She’s standing at the end of the row, she’s the same age as you. Short hair and those round glasses. You’d never dare go out of the house like that. She looks like she listens to Beethoven and bakes Advent cookies with her family. You’d like to ask her if she just feels like screaming sometimes. You’d also like to smell her skin and let her know she’s definitely as real as you are. Even though it sounds nuts, that’s exactly what you’d like to say to her. You’re sure she doesn’t know what she’ll be one day, but she knows she’ll be something. And who can say that with any certainty? Not you, just for the record.

“Sorry,” she repeats, and you look at each other and you can’t get up, you’re bolted to the seat, however much you might try, right now you can’t budge from the spot. Perhaps she sees that, or perhaps she knows the feeling, because she leaves you alone. Respect. She goes out of the cinema hall, the door shuts and again there’s this silence, for one wonderful moment the world is switched off. You’re sitting in row 45, seat 16. The movie is over, and the things from your dreams crouch growling on your shoulders and want to be real. You lean your head back, because whatever you do, your only option is to cry.

Everything about you is crooked; however you stand it all slips away. Your T-shirt, your jeans, your hair, your earrings, even your mouth is askew. You look as if Picasso’s had a bad day. There’s a pimple beside your nostril, and you know if you try to do anything about it it’ll turn into a war zone. You lick your fingertip and dab crumbs of mascara from your cheek.

It could be worse, you think, when there’s the sound of flushing behind you and one of the stall doors opens.

“I bleed like a pig!”

Schnappi chucks a tampon wrapped in toilet paper in the bin, then joins you at the basin, holds her hands under the tap and meets your gaze in the mirror.

How can her eyes be so beautiful? you think.

Schnappi’s mother is called San and she’s from Vietnam, her father’s called Edgar, and he’s been a subway train driver in Berlin for thirty years. He met Schnappi’s mother on vacation. Schnappi insists on that version. She doesn’t want anyone to think her father ordered her mother from a catalogue.

Schnappi soaps her hands and asks if you understood the movie. You don’t like just her eyes, you like everything about her, particularly the fact that she’s so incredibly energetic. No one in the crowd is more loyal. It would be ideal if she talked less.

“What kind of killer was that guy? I mean, didn’t he play Jesus one time? Can someone who played Jesus suddenly become a killer? Nah, don’t think so. You remember? Jesus had to drag his cross around the place and then he got tortured for two hours? I mean, somebody was trying to make us feel really guilty, right? Fucking church. Stink fell asleep in the middle, she hardly missed anything, we covered our eyes the whole time because it was so disgusting and all the time I was …”

Schnappi can talk as if there were no tomorrow. If you keep your mouth shut for long enough, she automatically starts over again, as if every conversation has to come full circle.

“… mustn’t think I’m not joining in. But I’m not decorating any gym! As soon as school’s over you won’t see me close to this prison, or were you going to the party? Let’s do our own party. Maybe Gero will come, I could eat him up with a spoon. Look at this. I think my hair’s looking tired. Maybe I should dye it. I think I’m getting old. If I end up looking like my mother, chop my head off, promise?”

“I promise.”

“Okay, what’s up now, are you coming to the playground or not? You’ve got nothing on at home, and then we might take a detour to the bar on Savignyplatz, or do you not want to because of Taja? I can see that, but you know what Taja’s like. She’ll come back if she feels like it, and till then none of us will hold our breath. Wait, let me just get rid of this for you.”

She opens her backpack that looks like a weary panda, and takes out a blemish stick. You’re thinking about Taja and all the messages you left for her.

“Stand still.”

Schnappi’s half a head shorter than you, and has to stand on tiptoes. She dabs at your pimple, puts the blemish stick away again and says it’s perfect now. You look in the mirror.

Perfect.

Schnappi takes your arm and steers you out of the ladies’ room and up the stairs and out of the cinema as only she can. She would be a great bodyguard, she always gives you the feeling she knows what she’s doing. There’s no one standing outside the cinema, just a few people sitting outside Café Bleibtreu.

“So did you get that movie or not? Because I didn’t get any of it, nothing at all, cross my heart and die.”

Schnappi laughs and deliberately puts her hand on the wrong side, stops laughing in the middle and looks at you, really looks at you at last, and says, “God, Nessi, stop looking like this.”

You want to tell her that there is no other way to look right now. You have no idea what she wants to hear. Everything is a blur. You remember the movie as if you’d been blind and deaf for the last two hours. Everything that comes toward you flows around you and disappears without a trace, behind your back, lost and gone forever. But then your thinking apparatus clicks back in and you work out that this isn’t really about the movie; Schnappi’s language is a secret language, she says one thing and means another. She’s been asking you the same question all along and just wants to know what’s up with you and why you’re not saying anything, while she goes on talking and talking. And of course she’s right, you have to give her some kind of answer, but you can’t come up with a good one, so you turn the answer into a question and say weakly and quietly, “And what if I’m pregnant?”

SCHNAPPI

Rather a big mouth than no tits, was always your motto, but maybe now’s not the time to announce it. Nessi needs to hear something else. Something like: “Bullshit, you’re not pregnant!”

“Why not?”

“You don’t just get pregnant like that.”

“But—”

“Have you done a test?”

“No.”

“Without a test you’re not pregnant, okay?”

Nessi can’t reply to your logic, so you drag her up Bleibtreustrasse to Kantstrasse and then into the nearest pharmacy to buy her a pregnancy test, as if you were offering her a kebab, except that those tests are really expensive.

“Why are they so expensive?”

The pharmacist shrugs as if she didn’t think that it was expensive. You read the instructions and whisper to Nessi that the pharmacist is one of those people who never get pregnant, that’s why a test like that costs a fortune, and then you turn back to the pharmacist and say with a sugary smile, “Eight euros? Are you sure this really costs eight euros?”

The pharmacist puts the packet through the scanner again.

The price is right.

“We’ve got a double pack,” she says. “It’s 10.95.”

“Well, that’s a bargain, isn’t it?” you say, and look at Nessi. “Do we need two?”

“Two would be good.”

“We’ll take the bargain,” you say to the pharmacist and smile at her as if you’d pulled a brilliant trick on her.

From the pharmacy you go to the nearest café. Before the waiter can move, you tell him you just need to pee. In the bathroom both of you squeeze into one stall. Nessi is pale, it’s all going too quickly for her.

“Come on, girl, take a deep breath.”

Nessi takes a breath.

The sticks are wrapped in foil, you hold them up in front of Nessi.

“Now you pee on it and we’ll know, because as long as you don’t know, you’re not pregnant. It’s like math.”

Nessi looks at you as if you’ve been speaking Vietnamese. It’s a weird moment and you ask yourself for the first time why Nessi’s actually worried. In your eyes she’d be a great mother. You other girls are either too thin or too young or too stupid even to think of being mothers. Nessi seems like someone who’s experienced everything; in your opinion she can master everything if she wants to.

An old soul, you think with envy.

A few days ago your mother took you aside again and told you about the little village she grew up in. You know the stories inside and out and you know there’s no point interrupting her. This time you found out that she can see things that other people can’t. Souls. Your mother is full of surprises. She told you: Some people have young souls and others have old ones, and then there are people without. You asked what “without” means in this context, because your mother can’t feed you any bullshit. Being without a soul is impossible, you know that. That’s like someone coming into the world without a heart. Your mother tapped your forehead with her index finger and you had to promise her that you would never, never get within ten feet of one of those soulless people. You will recognize them anywhere, because they have cold in their eyes, and when they look at you they steal your breath away. Promise me that you won’t let one of those soulless get ten feet near you. Of course you promised, otherwise you’d still be sitting beside her right now. Your mother also told you that your soul is young and inexperienced, and that your life will be a long and joyless journey.

Thanks, Mom.

You would like to know what your mother would say about Nessi, who now stands in front of you, confused and hopefully not pregnant, and asks, “Why is it like math?”

“What?”

“You said it’s like math. Why is it like math?”

“If you think about it for a long time it makes sense,” you tell her, and quickly go on talking: “Don’t think about that right now, just concentrate and pee on this. And don’t hold it the wrong way around. My neighbor held it the wrong way around, but she’s kind of retarded. And don’t pee on your hand, because that’s disgusting. Even though lots of people say urine therapy’s fantastic, I can’t imagine washing my face with my own pee, it would be—”

“Schnappi!”

You raise both hands in apology.

“Okay, I am quiet.”

Nessi tears at the packaging and can’t get it open. You take it from her and peel the test stick out of its foil. You liberate the second stick as well so that it’ll go more quickly. Now you only hope that Nessi can pee, because if she can’t pee …

“It’s working,” you say with all the positivity you have.

Nessi shakes the stick dry and looks at it.

“How long?”

“Two minutes.”

You pass her the second stick.

Afterward you both lean against the wall of the stall, each holding one of the sticks, and wait. Last year you caught your mother in the bathroom. She was sitting on the edge of the tub gnawing at a fingernail. Her skin was almost transparent, like one of those jellyfish you saw when you were at the North Sea coast. Your mother was holding the pregnancy test just as Nessi’s holding it now—vertical and pointing upwards, as if it were important to hold the stick vertical and pointing upwards. You knew your mother didn’t want any more children. She’s in her late thirties, she has her hands full looking after you. You’ve never talked about it, but it’s clear to you that she had an abortion. Since then you’ve been wondering whether it would have been a brother or a sister. You wouldn’t have minded a brother.

“Look,” Nessi says quietly.

You look, then you look at the stick in your hand, then back at Nessi’s.

“I’m not going to cry,” says Nessi, and bursts into tears.

STINK

It feels as if you’re being dragged down the street on your ass. Except that it doesn’t hurt. It is a weird feeling to sit so low. Glance to the right and you could scratch people’s kneecaps. The Jaguar purrs. You don’t say much, that’s a good feeling too, just driving around and not having to say much, understanding each other without words, drifting through the city with an empty head and a cigarette between your lips. Pure luxury.

“Hungry?” asks Neil.

No, you’re not thristy either, you’re just more content than you’ve been for ages. Your heart is still fluttering, as if someone had placed one of those hummingbirds into your chest. Flutterflutter. You give Neil a sideways glance and without thinking you place your hand on his thigh. Neil doesn’t react, doesn’t look at you, doesn’t say anything, goes on driving, hands on the wheel, wind in his face. You just have to ask, “Where are we going?”

“What?”

You are shouting it.

“Dancing,” he replies.

“Good,” you say, and leave your hand on his thigh.

The bouncer doesn’t want to let you in, Neil waves a few banknotes, the bouncer still doesn’t want to let you in, Neil draws him aside. He’s exactly the same height as the bouncer, but only half as wide. He talks in a lowered voice. Very controlled. Then the bouncer looks at you again, rubs his forehead as if someone’s hit him, and waves you in. No problem now. He even smiles at you. The asshole couldn’t get close to you if he was the last guy in the world.

“What did you say to him?” you ask.

Neil makes a gun out of his thumb and forefinger, holds it to your temple and laughs.

“I threatened him.”

You push your way through the crowd, the flickering lights are dazzling, the people are jostling each other, it smells of cigarettes and artificial smoke and very faintly of limes. A gap appears at the bar, you lean against it, shout into each other’s ears, laugh loudly. There’s a mirror hanging above the bar, at least thirty feet long, and for one terribly long moment you can’t see yourself. Your palms are clammy. You see Neil, you see the people around him, light and smoke and fog, but you yourself aren’t there. Like a vampire. Invisible. Then you spot your piled-up hair, your sulky mouth, and you meet your own eye and wonder if you’re really as small and insignificant as the mirror is trying to tell you. You’ve never seen yourself like that before. You’re a sektschbeascht, Alberto used to say. But he said lots of things.

“Do you like it here?” Neil calls to you, and you say yeah even though the music isn’t your thing. Nonetheless, you bob up and down as if you listened to nothing but soul all day long. You’re inches away from singing along. Before it can come to that, Neil hands you a beer with a wedge of lime in the neck of the bottle and you clink drinks and then the beer’s gone too and you dance and touch each other and everything’s as it should be, and a bit better.

You smell Neil among all those smells—his aftershave, the sweat beneath it—and he smells good, he smells so good that you press yourself against him, and he smiles and puts his arms around you and says in your ear, “Restroom?”

You wish he would go on dancing, and yet you take his hand and follow him to the restrooms. You notice that you’re thinking too much. You’re missing the special little moments. You want to stop and say it’s going too fast.

He hasn’t even kissed me. He’s barely touched me. He’s—

Stop thinking, you tell yourself and keep your hand in front of your mouth and hope your breath doesn’t smell bad, and hope your makeup isn’t too smudged with sweat, and try to remember what sort of underwear you’re wearing.

Please, not the red ones with the little blue flowers, please not those.

Neil steps inside the men’s room and pushes past a few guys. He rattles at the doors, finds a free stall and drags you in behind him.

Trapped.

The music is just a murmur now. The ultraviolet light makes Neil’s teeth gleam, his eyeballs are like the magnesium flare you saw in chemistry. Cold and alien. Your nervous trembling is ebbing away in little waves, the hummingbird sinks exhausted to the bottom of your chest. You’ve lost your drive, you’re fearful and shy. You don’t feel the way you did when you got into the car beside Neil. You’re an outstretched hand. Naked and sensitive. It would be nice if you could turn off the voice in your head: If he kisses me now I’ll do anything he likes. It’s the only way. I won’t cause any trouble. I’ll go along with it all, because I think Neil knows what he’s doing. He’s going to—

“I’ve got a problem,” he says, interrupting your thoughts.

“Okay,” you say far too quickly and try to smile.

“No, really,” says Neil and then tells you about that girl, maybe you saw her? On the other side of the dance floor? Just below the DJs’ cabin? Did you notice her? No? Doesn’t matter, anyway it was because of her that Neil has driven from Hamburg to Berlin. Of course he wanted to see his father, too, but he’s really here because of this girl and doesn’t know what to do now. He needs help. Help from you.

“From me?”

“Yes, from you.”

“Why from me?”

He shuts his eyes as if he can’t bear the restroom any longer. When he looks at you again, you have the feeling he’s just woken up. His expression is almost embarrassing, as if he’s about to burst into tears. Stop it, you think, and regret going with him. Guys should solve their girl problems themselves. Is that why he talked to you in the first place? Do you look like Dear Abby or something?

“Do I look like Dear Abby or something?”

“No, you look real,” says Neil and leans against the stall door and shuts his eyes again. “That’s all I know.”

Her name is Kira. Neil met her at a party in Hamburg, and hung out with her. Then he lost sight of her and Kira disappeared, she’d just gone. And Neil started burning, that’s exactly how he puts it.

“I started burning.”

He discovered that Kira was living with the girlfriend of a friend in Berlin, and that is why he borrowed his mother’s car. Kira doesn’t know he’s here. Neil doesn’t know what to do. And you sit between them and feel as if you’re still in the cinema, back row, the picture’s out of focus, the people are too noisy, and the movie’s a dreary mixture of relationship crisis and sex comedy.

Let’s see who laughs first, you think when you’re back at the bar. Neil has organized two new bottles of beer and asks what you think of Kira.

“Look at her,” he pleads.

You look across. Kira’s one of those smoothies, what did you expect? Smooth hair and smooth face, and when she laughs even her teeth are smooth. She reminds you a bit of Taja, one of those girls everybody wants to have as their friend. Except that Taja isn’t really smooth, she has hidden corners and edges, and that makes her especially beautiful. But you don’t want to think about Taja now. Neil is waiting for an answer. What does he want to hear? His Kira looks great, and you wish that she’d get her period or a rash all over her face. But girls like Kira never get rashes, and they only get their periods when no one’s looking.

“And?”

You roll your eyes. What’s wrong with this guy?

“Look for yourself.”

Neil shakes his head: no, he can’t. He stares into the mirror above the bar.

“What are you scared of? She’s just another beautiful bitch, she will definitely remember you. You’re not sixteen anymore, why are you farting around?”

Neil turns the bottle in his hands, then lifts his shoulders as if to say I don’t know and stands there like an idiot with his shoulders lifted. You’ve just got to ask him, “Are you in love?”

The shoulders come back down, his gaze avoids you and carves scratches in the mirror above the bar.

Bull’s-eye.

You laugh.

All this because he’s in love?

“I’m cursed,” he says.

“What?”

“No, really. I’ve been this way for as long as I’ve been able to think. And it never stops. I search and search and I can’t find the right love. I’ve been behaving like an idiot and I can’t even … Have you never been in love?”

“It’s nonsense.”

“What’s nonsense?”

“You know, falling in love. It’s just nonsense. It’s for people who have nothing better to do with their time. That’s why I’m not going to fall in love, right? If I want pain I can pinch myself.”

“It’s not the same.”

“You don’t know how hard I can pinch.”

Neil flinches when you reach for his arm. You take a swig of his beer, even though your bottle is still half full. What a spoilsport.

“So you’ve never had a boyfriend?” he asks.

“You want a list?”

“And you were never in love, not once? I don’t believe it.”

Neil looks away from the mirror and looks you straight in the eye. Real headlights. You feel some beer trickling from the corner of your mouth, and quickly set the bottle back down again.

“I’d fall in love with you in a blink,” he says. “If Kira wasn’t there, I’d be head over heels already, that’s the way I am.”

You cough. It’s like in a slasher movie. Now all you have to do is go over there and cut Kira’s throat and you’ll have a new boyfriend, and one who’s in love with you.

“Okay, I’ll take care of her,” you say and walk over to Kira.

As you shove your way through the dancing crowd, there’s a sentence of Neil’s that you can’t get out of your head. You look real. It could have been intended as an insult. What did he mean? And why did he single you out, of all people?

Because I was standing on my own, because there was no one else around, because …

All nonsense. There’s no such thing as chance, Schnappi said once, everything happens the way it’s supposed to. Why should you doubt that now? Why are you so goddamn insecure? Just wait till your girls hear what’s happened to you. They’ll be green with envy and they won’t believe a word of it.

“Hi.”

You stop in front of Kira, your hands are shoved into your back trouser pockets, your pelvis is sticking out. She smiles at you, she’s in her early twenties, just right for Neil. Kira leans forward and you lean forward too as if you were about to hug each other, then you tell her your name, your real name. She holds out her hand. Fingers cool as marble, green flecks in her irises.

Dammit, she’s pretty.

“Do you know that guy over there? The one standing at the bar?”

Kira looks past you. Neil still has his back turned to you. You’re sure he’s watching both of you in the mirror above the bar.

“The guy who’s looking away. The one with the ponytail. He’s my friend. You met him at a party in Hamburg. He followed you here and he brought me with him. He wanted me to see who you are. You get that? He’s completely confused. He doesn’t know who he wants. You or me. Do you want him?”

“Who?”

Kira is confused, you can tell by her frown that she has no idea who you’re talking about.

“Neil.”

“Neil?”

“Yes, Neil.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Oh.”

“Is he sweet?”

“Very.”

“Sorry.”

“Sorry about what?”

“That he’s confused, but I don’t remember him.”

You nod as if you understand.

“He’ll be devastated,” you say and walk back to Neil.

“So?”

He asks without turning around, eyes on the mirror; you’re sure he’s been watching you all along and at the same time he’s peeled the whole label off his beer bottle, total coward. But that’s okay, even cowards have to exist. You press your lips to his ear and say, “She wants to talk to you,” before you turn away, leaving him at the bar.

And there you are, it’s too early, the night has just begun and you can go and meet your girls at the playground. You can if you want. But what do you want?

It feels as if a whole day has gone by. The time with Neil has stretched, as if someone had taken hold of the minutes and pulled them apart.

He could at least have kissed me.

You imagine what that would have been like. His lips, your lips, and off you go. Nothing happens in your head, you have no imagination, as soon as things get serious the screen goes blank. There’s the taste of beer and lime in your mouth, and it reminds you of the beach and the sea, you think you can hear the rush of waves and there is the salty taste of the water on your lips, but you can’t imagine a simple kiss.

Damn.

You look up at the sky. The stars above Berlin are always a marvel. The city is far too bright, Ruth once explained to you. Because of all the lights you can’t see the sky. Reflections and stuff. That bitch always knows everything. But you wish she was here now. Ruth, and Schnappi, and Nessi. And Taja, of course, Taja too. She would know right away where you went wrong with Neil.

The longing creeps up on you, and you bite your lower lip. Taja, where are you? It’s like a hole in your belly that the wind blows through, and there’s always a cold spot, whatever you do, you can’t keep that spot warm. It’s been six days, and you can hardly remember her face.

What if she’s gone forever?

“What’re you doing up there?”

You look to the right. Neil is standing beside his Jaguar.

“Looking for the stars,” you say, and slip off the car roof.

Neil rubs both hands over his face.

“Have you been crying?”

He brings his hands down. He hasn’t been crying. He’s just completely wasted.

“She doesn’t remember me. She says she was so drunk that she doesn’t even know whose house the party was at.”

You wait to hear if there’s anything else; there isn’t anything else. Of course you can’t leave it there.

“So? Are you still in love?”

He lifts his shoulders again and lets them fall, which could mean anything, then he opens the passenger door and you get in. He walks around the car. You belt yourself in, he belts himself in and starts the engine and drives off. You sense that there’s nothing more to say. So you check your face in the side mirror and you smile at yourself and contentedly fold your hands in your lap.

They’re sitting in the playground like a flock of fat crows, surrounded by pizza boxes and beer cans. Your crowd. Neil doesn’t want to meet them, he doesn’t even get out, he sits in the car and scribbles his number on the cinema ticket, smiles wearily and says, “Just in case.” He probably isn’t even aware of your kiss, but you are aware of the thin film of sweat on his cheek and imagine him driving back to Hamburg now, down the highway, on the road for hours, on his own for hours, even the trucks will overtake him. You know one thing for certain: he’ll forget Kira quickly enough, but he won’t forget you.

SCHNAPPI

Nessi looks down the street and avoids your eye. She doesn’t want to go to the playground, she doesn’t want to see the others, or speak, or do anything. The question is what do you want to do now? Your best friend is pregnant and you can’t just disappear and leave her alone, that’s not an option.

“Don’t tell anyone,” says Nessi.

“I’ll take you home,” you say, avoiding her request, which isn’t all that stupid, because you don’t know if you can keep your mouth shut. You’ve always had problems with secrets. They only exist to be shared.

“Thanks.”

Even though it’s not on your way, you take Nessi to Nollendorfplatz on your bike. It’s a funny image. A dwarf who can hardly reach the pedals with her feet, and behind her a giant, clinging onto the dwarf as if the faintest breeze might separate them.

You cut across the Kurfürstendamm, come off the road at the Gedächtniskirche and onto the sidewalk, getting yelled at by the tourists. On the way you talk about your mother in the bathroom, even though you don’t really know what your mother was doing. Your mouth is a machine gun, it never runs out of ammunition. Twice the word “abortion” slips sharp and jagged from your mouth and you bite your tongue to brake the onrush of words. Nessi doesn’t react. She clings to your hips and rests her head against your back. When you stop at Winterfeldtplatz she doesn’t move and you wait a minute and then another before you say you’ve arrived. Nessi straightens up, rubs her eyes and looks up at her block as if you’d dragged her to a gulag.

“Where are you actually going?”

You give a start. You look over your shoulder. Sorry, girl, but we’re starting to worry about you. Nessi is still sitting on the luggage rack and you’re still sitting on your bike and you feel her left breast warm against your back. Nessi asked you a good question. Where are you actually going? You’re not outside Nessi’s block, you’re not even anywhere near, you’re riding all the way through Charlottenburg in the wrong direction. More precisely you’re on Krumme Strasse; even more precisely than that, you’re on the way to Stuttgarter Platz.

At some point I’m going to be killed, you think, and try to calm the shaking in your arms.

The first time you had a blank, two years ago, it was when you were at school and the bell rang for break. You went outside to get a hot chocolate from the kiosk, and you talked to a guy you’ve always wanted to talk to. Stink brought you back to reality by kicking your chair from behind, and at that moment you were back in class and Stink was asking if you’d give her some chewing gum. You couldn’t work out what had happened. It felt so real you could taste the hot chocolate in your mouth.

The second time was a month later at a party. You spent almost the whole evening playing strip poker, and when that got boring you went downstairs to dance a bit. Two songs later you were sweating and happy and wanted to fetch a drink when Ruth tapped you on the forehead and said she’d like to see if you were bluffing or not, because anybody who sweats bucketloads like you were doing must be bluffing. You looked helplessly at the people around you. You were still playing poker, your cards were rubbish, and there was a memory of dancing and there were drops of sweat on your forehead.

Your girls don’t know anything about it. You’re worried they’ll think you’re crazy and have you put in an asylum right away. Probably you got it from your mother. She calls herself a shaman and says she can sense when dead people are walking past her. She also firmly believes that everyone has to cross an abyss before he becomes a real person. Whatever a real person is, your mother says a lot of things when she has time on her hands, like that she has to die in Vietnam and nowhere else, she won’t be persuaded otherwise. You’ve looked the word up, and you’re sure your mother isn’t a shaman, because she’s never used her abilities for the good of the community. Witch would be better.

Two years have passed since then, and during that time you’ve had blanks at least once a month. It’s your description for those daydreams that aren’t really just daydreams. It’s not a jump cut and it’s not exactly a blackout. Whatever it is, no one writes on the internet about it. It’s your very own illness. So you weren’t surprised for a second when you rode your bike half a mile through the Berlin traffic with Nessi on the luggage rack without getting under a car.

Practice makes perfect, you think, and you’d be grateful if your arms would finally stop shaking.

And there you are now and you wish you weren’t there. You made a mistake, you were supposed to bring Nessi home. Look at her: she’s not really in the now, she’s like one of those zombies who stare stupidly around the place and then go for your throat the minute you’re looking the other way.

Nessi leaves half of her pizza and drinks a whole beer, then takes a drag on a joint and holds her breath until the smoke has disappeared into her and only hot air comes out.

Not good, not good at all.

You wish the boys would clear off, then you could talk. The boys are Indi, Eric, and Jasper. They could equally well be called Karl, Tommi, and Frank. It makes no difference. A year ago it made a big difference. Something has changed. As if your girls had switched off the interest when school ended. Ruth is the only exception. She’s flirting with the three lads, and you could bet that at least one of them has a boner. You slide across to Nessi and can’t help thinking of Taja. Alone you’re nothing, together you’re strong. First Taja disappears, then Stink. Blood sisters never leave each other in the lurch. That’s what you’d love to whisper to Nessi, but Nessi would immediately think she’s the one leaving you in the lurch, so you just shut up.

There are two beeps; Nessi fishes her phone out of her jacket. Let it not be Henrik, you think. Let it be anyone else, just not Henrik. You know a lot of idiots, but Henrik’s right up at the top of the list. No one should be made pregnant by somebody like him. You know what you’re talking about. You hooked up a few times with him and he dumped you when you wouldn’t sleep with him. Henrik is like an advertisement on TV that everybody thinks is funny and then they forget all about it because there are so many advertisements that are just as funny.

Ruth points over your shoulder.

“Look who’s coming!”

You turn around. Stink is getting out of a hot set of wheels. She sticks her hands in her back pockets and comes strolling over to you. The relief floods over you with such force that you explode with stupid laughter.

Now everything’s going to be okay again.

“Hey, where have you been?” Ruth asks.

“Where do you think I was?” Stink asks back and doesn’t even turn around as the red Jaguar drives off. “I took a trip. First Tenerife, then Malibu.”

The crowd whistles and laughs, Nessi looks up from her phone and smiles wearily. Stink says she needs some chow, right now or even sooner. She is like quicksilver, nothing can hold her. Off she goes to the pizza stand. Ruth has the same idea as you and goes running after her. Nessi is forgotten for a moment. You want to know what Stink got up to with the guy in the Jag.

“I can hardly walk,” she says, “it was that hot.”

Ruth and you screech, even though you don’t want to, the screech just slips out of you. You immediately hold your hand in front of your mouth and your eyes glitter with envy. If you rubbed them now, it would probably rain stardust.

“No way!” says Ruth.

“Yes way.”

“Tell us it’s not true!” you demand.

“But it is true.”

“So what would you like?”

The pizza guy grins at you. He’s in his mid-forties, he’s wearing a stupid T-shirt, and his hair’s so greasy he looks as if his head has spent all week in the food fryer. Stink ignores him and studies the menu, even though she always orders the same pizza.

“Who is he?” asks Ruth.

“Who’s who?”

“The guy with the Jag.”

“Oh …”

Stink pulls a face as if she’s got a toothache.

“What’s up?” you want to know.

“Hey, hot mama, what’s up?” asks Ruth.

Even the pizza guy leans in curiously as if he knows what you’re talking about.

“I forgot to ask him his name,” Stink says, making the sort of big innocent eyes that people can only make if they know that innocence is a load of lies that would drop its pants for a measly slice of pizza.

You all walk down to the Lietzensee. The guys want to go to the park because they think that if the moon’s shining and you’re all sitting by the water it’ll be romantic and they might cop a feel. You let them believe that, because then they’ll shut their traps and try to behave properly.

By the shore you make a dip in the grass, scrunch up some paper, and lay dry twigs over it. Indi rolls the second joint of the evening, and then you are sitting there, blowing smoke at the mosquitoes and talking quietly as if you didn’t want to disturb the night. Jasper is playing some kind of racket through his phone, a dog barks from the opposite bank, and now it would be good if you could shut your eyes and go off on one of your blanks, because you don’t really want what’s going to happen next.

One of the guys spots it first.

“What’s up with Nessi?”

You look around. Nessi isn’t sitting with the rest of you anymore, she’s squatting down by the shore. And as you are looking, she slides silently into the water. Fully dressed, of course. The guys burst out laughing. You try to get up. Eric holds you back and asks if you’re about to go for a swim too, or what.

“Nessi!”

Stink runs to the shore, suddenly everybody’s at the shore and you’re alone sitting in the grass like a parcel that someone’s forgotten to send, and when you catch up with your girls at last, you see Nessi drifting in the middle of the lake with her arms spread. She’s just lying there playing dead, and the guys are calling out and calling her Loch Nessi, and you call her to come back, even from the hotel opposite someone calls out of a window, but Nessi doesn’t react.

“She’ll come back,” says Stink and points into the grass where Nessi has left her wallet and phone. “Someone who doesn’t want her phone to get wet is always going to come back.”

“I’m not going to collect her,” says Indi and spits into the water.

“I’d have been surprised,” says Stink.

The guys are sitting around the fire again. They’re only interested in whatever’s actually happening, and nothing’s happening on the Lietzensee right now. You girls keep standing by the shore and Ruth says Nessi must have had a row with Henrik, and you say Henrik’s an idiot, and Stink says what else is new, and adds, “The way Nessi’s behaving, she must be knocked up.”

“I didn’t say that.”

Your girls look at you in surprise.

“I really didn’t say that,” you add quickly.

“Oh, shit,” says Ruth.

“Oh, shit,” says Stink.

No one needs to point out that you’re one of the worst secret-keepers in the world.

“I really didn’t say that,” you repeat, and it sounds so lame that you can’t think of anything else to say for a while. You just stare at the Lietzensee and hope that Nessi will stay in the water for a bit longer.

II

so you lost your trust,

and you never should have

Coldplay SEE YOU SOON

THE TRAVELER

The country heard nothing more about you for two years. You hadn’t disappeared, and you hadn’t gone into hiding. You’re not one of those people who have a second identity. Jekyll and Hyde are a nonsense as far as you’re concerned. You’ve returned to your life. Silently. There were eight hours omitted, eight hours when no one missed you.

Your life took its course.

In the morning you woke up and had breakfast. You were reliable at work. You had lunch with your colleagues and chatted. No shadow haunted your thoughts. You were you. On the weekends you did your family duties and visited your six-year-old son for a few hours. Your wife made lunch for you both and then tacitly handed you the bills. You parted in peace, no one mentioned divorce because no one wanted to take the last step. So every weekend you put the bills in your pocket, kissed the boy goodbye on the top of his head, and then drove back to your three-room apartment.

Some evenings you met friends or sat alone in front of the television and watched the world spinning increasingly out of control. You went on vacation, you set money aside and had two operations on your knee. You never thought about the winter two years ago and the traffic jam on the A4. You saw the reports and listened to the features on the radio. When there was a report on TV, you switched channels uninterested. You know what you’ve done. There’s no reason to go on worrying about it. You’re you. And after two years the Traveler is coming back.

It is October.

It is 1997.

It is night.

We’re in mid-autumn, and you can’t shake off the feeling that summer is refusing to go. The weather is mild. Storms rage on the weekend and it’s only at night that the temperature falls to below ten degrees. It feels like the last exhalation of summer.

You’ve been on the road for four hours and you want to stop at a rest area, but all the parking lots are full of semi-trailers so you drive on and turn on the indicator at the next gas station. Here again there’s hardly a free space. The semis with their trailers remind you of abandoned houses rolling across the country, never coming to rest. It’s still a hundred and twenty miles to your apartment. You aren’t one of those people who go to the edge and then collapse with exhaustion. Not you.

After you’ve driven past the gas pumps, you park in the shade of a trailer, get out and stretch. For a few minutes you stand motionless in the darkness listening to the ticking of the engine. In the distance there are footsteps, the click of nozzles, engines are started, the rushing sound of the highway. Then there’s a croak. You look around. On the other side of the parking lot a row of bare trees looms up into the night sky. A crow sits on one of the branches. It bobs up and down as if to draw attention to itself. At that moment you become aware that you’ve never seen a crow at night before. Seagulls, owls, sometimes even a hawk on a road sign, but never a crow. You tilt your head. The crow does the same and then looks to the side. You follow its gaze. Three hundred yards from the gas station there’s a motel. A red neon sign hangs over the entrance. A woman steps out. She walks to her car, gets in, and drives off.

You remember exactly what you were thinking.

You were thinking: Now there’s a free space.

Seven cameras at the gas station and about eight hundred cars that fit the time frame. The police checked all the number plates. A special commission was set up, and over the years that followed it was dealing only with this case. Overtime, frustration, suspicions, and a lot of idiots claiming it was them. The papers went mad, all other news paled. And they had nothing to offer the reader. Except the dead.

You walk over to the motel and step inside the foyer. You aren’t surprised that there is no one at reception. It’s late. Above the reception there is a black sign with a white arrow pointing to a bell. On the sign it says: Please ring.

You don’t ring.

A television flickers from a back room. You go into the room. A woman is sleeping on a fold-out sofa. She is covered to the neck by a woolen blanket. On the table in front of her there’s a plastic bowl containing a ready meal. The remains of peas and mashed potato. A bit of meat. And beside it a half-empty bottle of Fanta and an empty glass. You sit down in the armchair opposite the woman and relax. The murmur from the television, the sleep of the woman, the silence of the night. As you leave the room, you don’t turn the television off. The blanket has slipped; you lay it carefully around the woman’s body and tuck it in at the ends.

The motel has two upper floors, each with sixteen rooms; there are ten rooms on the first floor. You look at the plan. Under the counter at reception you find a box. There are three skeleton keys in the box.

You go up the stairs.

On the second floor you open the first door and go in. You stop in the anteroom and go back out again. You leave the second room after a few seconds as well. Children. The smell of children. After you’ve gone into the third room, you take a deep breath, a single breath replies. You pull the door closed. The darkness embraces you.

This is the right place.

If you drove past the gas station today, you’d see a closed-down motel. The sight of it would remind you of the night twelve years ago—no light in the windows, motionless curtains, stillness. The flickering neon sign above the entrance is broken. And even though the rest area is always full, nobody parks in front of the motel. Cursed, they say. Weeds have fought their way through the cracks, they press against the building as though to support the façade. No one lays flowers outside anymore. The grave candles have disappeared. There’s only an ugly yellow graffito on the front door: Forever Yang.

Almost two years after the A4 you’ve set off on your travels again, and everyone recognized your signature. The papers called you The Avenging Angel. On the internet you were The Traveler, sometimes The German Nightmare or The Big Bad Wolf. Fanatics called you The Scourge of God. By now the police knew you were acting alone. The clues were everywhere, and the clues didn’t lie. You were aware of that. Clues mean you’ve been there. Honesty is important to you. There’s nothing you want to hide. Everyone should know you exist. Of course your fingerprints were no help to the police. No previous convictions. You exist only in your own world.

Your myth grew beyond the borders of Germany, you made waves all around Europe. In England a bank cashier ran amok, in the Czech Republic it was a customer in a supermarket and in Italy a woman who said she couldn’t stand the pressure anymore. Events began to accumulate. In Sweden a man killed his family and wandered through his apartment block with bloody hands until a Doberman went for his throat. In the Netherlands a boy put explosives in a McDonald’s, joined the queue, and set off the explosives when his turn came. A television evangelist spoke of the Day of Judgment, studies were produced, prognoses filled the commercial breaks. Humanity seemed to be walking toward self-destruction with its arms spread wide open. None of it had anything to do with you.

Not rage, not despair, not self-destruction or revenge.

Not hate, not love, not religion or politics.

You’re in no hurry. You go into the rooms one after the other and sit down on the edge of the bed. You watch them sleeping, the way you would watch a patient who has a fever and needs a cooling hand. You wonder what’s happening to you. The Here, the Now, and you on the edge of a stranger’s bed. With your hands around their neck and your fists in their face. You. Not hesitating for a moment. And they. Defending themselves and then giving up. And there’s always this feeling of sympathy. As if they knew why you’re doing it. As if at that brief moment of dying they understood. At least that’s how it feels to you. As if they understood: that you’re on a quest, that you have to explore the darkness. Because the darkness is always there. And in the darkness there’s nothing to find.

That night you go into forty-two rooms and leave thirty-six corpses. After that you put the skeleton key back in the box and step out into the night like someone who has rested and can now continue on his journey.

The crow has vanished from the tree, the neon sign above the entrance still flickers. Three hours have passed. The traffic moves tirelessly in both directions. The world outside the motel has hardly changed.

On the journey home you look at your hands on the wheel. This time you didn’t wear gloves. Your hands are bruised, the knuckles bloody, the pain feels good. I am, I exist. You’re aware that you’ve left lots of clues. It feels right and good.

RAGNAR

Oskar isn’t the first corpse you’ve found yourself sitting opposite. If you’re not careful, someone might think this is a family tradition. Even if you don’t think that’s funny at the moment, a few hours later you’ll make a joke about it and once again you’ll be the only one laughing.

Your first corpse was a lunatic who behaved normally during the day and came home in the evening and went totally nuts. You’ve read a lot about mental illnesses and schizophrenia. You’ve engaged intensively with the mental effects of wars, because you wanted to understand your father. But how are you supposed to understand the paranoia of a man who’s never been to war?

You found out that one of your uncles suffered from similar delusions. Perhaps it was a genetic defect. Everything’s possible, but not everything’s excusable. Everyone is responsible for his own life, and excuses are for cowards. Your father was definitely one of those.

He worked as one of eight bricklayers with a construction company and met your mother in Oslo in the early 1960s. He proposed and brought her to Germany. The first years of marriage ran smoothly, and it was only when Oskar and you appeared on the scene that everything changed. Your father started training you boys when you were six and Oskar was three. Outside of your apartment he was the most normal person you could imagine. But once the door closed, silence fell. The television was turned off, conversations lingered only as an echo in the rooms, sometimes you even held your breath. As soon as your father entered the room, a different life began for you.

Two decades later you asked your mother how she could have allowed it all to happen, and whether she’d never had any doubts about her husband’s mental state. She didn’t understand you. She wanted to know why you felt the need to drag your father’s memory through the dirt.

After he had stepped inside the apartment, he took his shoes off and disappeared into the bathroom. Meanwhile your mother put the chain on and bolted the front door with extra locks. With your help she took the metal plate out from behind the wardrobe and pushed it against the door. Two clamps were placed around it and the door was secure. For you it was the other way round. You were trapped.

Once you made the mistake of opening the bathroom door, even though your father had forbidden it. You were curious, and in those days your father’s madness seemed to be only a slight drizzle that would eventually pass. You were seven years old and just needed to find out what he did in the bathroom after work every day. You waited till your mother took Oskar into the kitchen to get the food ready, then you pushed the handle down.

Your father was standing naked in front of the wash basin, washing himself with a sponge. There was nothing else to be seen. You were so relieved that you nearly burst out laughing. It was all you had wanted to know. Your relief lasted only seconds. Your father told you to come in and shut the door behind you. He didn’t look at you as he spoke, he didn’t need to look at you. You obeyed. He set the sponge aside and told you to turn the light off. You obeyed. Your father pulled the curtain over the narrow bathroom window. It grew dark, really dark. Your father asked you if you knew what fear was. You nodded. Your father wanted to hear an answer. So you said: Yes, I know what fear is. Silence. You sensed him standing right in front of you. The smell of his naked body. He must have leaned forward, because his breath wiped over your face like a flame. You have no idea what fear is, he explained. Then you heard water running, and a moment later a wet towel was wrapped around your head. The towel was a shock. Suffocating and cold. You couldn’t see at all, and he used a towel anyway. Your father asked you again if you knew what fear was. He also said: I’ll teach you fear. I’ll teach you everything about fear, so that you venerate and respect it. Because you can’t live without fear. Fear is air, fear is water, fear is everything. You reacted instinctively, the towel was just too much for you, you couldn’t breathe, so you started to swing your fists around.

That was all you could remember.

Later your mother picked you up from the floor and carried you to bed. At six o’clock in the morning she woke you again. You had to wipe up the filth in the bathroom. You caught your breath when you saw what you’d done. There was vomit on the tiles, there was urine and two bloody handprints on the whitewashed wall, which you rubbed away at with a cloth and soapsuds until two gleaming white patches remained. Never again did you make the mistake of surprising your father in the bathroom. You learned to respect fear.

As soon as your father was out of the bathroom, the preparations began. He checked all the windows, examined the front door, and the balcony door had to be secure as well before your mother was allowed to lower the shutters. You remember how she secretly reassured you, over and over again, that things would soon be back to normal, your father was going through a difficult phase. She was wrong. The drizzle was about to become a storm.

Your father had plans.

He took out library books about the conduct of war and taught you how to survive in the wilderness. Once he came home and told you and your brother to take a bullet out of his arm. He removed his shirt. There were his sinewy arms, there were the knotty muscles and no wound. Oskar knew what lay ahead. He burst into tears at the sight of the sinewy arms. Your father pointed at the box.

The box was a battered metal trunk that had belonged to your grandfather. If anyone didn’t obey or burst into tears, he ended up in the trunk. You remember the smell, shoe polish and linseed oil. Your mother shut Oskar inside. No word of protest ever passed her lips. Oskar’s whimpering emerged from the suitcase like the sound of a trapped insect.

Here, your father tapped you on the shoulder, here’s the bloody bullet. Get it out, Ragnar, get it out of there.

You did everything right. You heated the knife over a Bunsen burner. You handed your father a bottle of schnapps and told him to drink it. Your mother held the bandage ready. You didn’t hesitate for a second and cut into your father’s flesh as if it were a slice of smoked pork on a plate. The picture is still very clear in front of your eyes—the way the blade sinks in and splits the skin, the way the blood runs down his arm, first hesitantly, then violently, and your father smiles at you and says: Well done, you’ve saved my life.

Throughout the years your father didn’t let you and your brother go to bed before midnight. There were always shadows under your eyes. There was so much to do, so much to learn. He showed you war documentaries and taught you how to look after a gun. At the age of nine you could take a Luger apart and put it back together. You could tell the ammunition of different calibers apart and say which was best suited to which situation. You studied the human body for its most vulnerable spots.

Even though your father never killed anyone himself, you learned from him and became his tool, while Oskar stumbled after you and couldn’t work out what was going on. He was simply too young. He was frightened, and you protected him. It worked. Your father focused his attention more and more on you, and Oskar was spared.

You gave your brother that protection until today.

From Monday evening till Friday night your family led a different life. Even though your father went to work during the day and you were able to resume normal life in the meantime, it was only on the weekends that you really had time to breathe. On Saturday and Sunday your father disappeared without a trace and no one mentioned it. For two days he stopped existing for you. You boys assumed he was carrying out secret missions or perhaps working for the army. Eight years passed before you penetrated his secret. Even now you don’t know if your mother was completely unaware of what was going on. How could she not have known? She wasn’t a weak woman, or a stupid one. But she had fallen for your father, which can turn any strong woman into a pitiful creature.

Worst of all were the days of discipline. Your father was testing Oskar and you to see if you could keep your mouths shut. He wanted to know how far you would go to protect each other. He thought up games for it. Tell your brother a secret, he said to you. And so you bent down to Oskar and whispered in his ear. What secret did your big brother tell you? your father then asked Oskar, who immediately widened his eyes, held his breath, and shook his head. Sometimes your father ordered him to lie on the floor and then pressed Oskar’s little face into the carpet with one hand. Or else he pulled him up by his hair, until the tips of Oskar’s toes scrabbled above the floor. What secret did your big brother tell you? The same question, over and over again. Tears flowed down Oskar’s cheeks, he didn’t want to disappoint his father, he wanted to be big and strong and show what he had learned. Your father grabbed him by the throat. I can feel the secret, he said, it’s hidden in here, I can feel it, I can feel it really clearly. That was too much for Oskar, he slumped unconscious to the ground. Your father turned to you. Your brother was brave, he didn’t say anything. Now there’s just you. What’s your secret? What am I not supposed to find out? He threatened you with a lot of things, and you were the brave soldier and stood stiffly and looked past him, because eye contact was forbidden. He hit your mother to make you speak. Nothing. He asked you if you wanted him to rape her in front of your eyes. You shook your head and held your tongue. That was a mistake. You’re saying no to me? He took you into the bathroom, and there in the dark and with a wet towel over your head you cracked. It was too much. It was memory and it was the madness of a man who was your father and always found a way into your head. The secret came stammering over your lips. It was over. Your father led you in silence from the bathroom. He waited till your brother was conscious again, then he spat in your face and said, You’re a traitor and you would have gambled away your whole family’s lives. Your brother had to spit on you too and your mother wasn’t allowed to look at you for the rest of the evening.

It was all a matter of discipline.

Since that day more than thirty years ago you have known exactly what silence is worth. Today your father could do what he liked to you, he wouldn’t have a chance. You’ve learned from him.

It takes Tanner and David forty minutes to find the boy. They bring him down to the swimming pool. David tries to tell you all the places they’ve been looking. You wave him away, you don’t want to hear it. They leave you alone.

He looks like he’s about twelve, but you’re sure he’s older, otherwise he wouldn’t be in your son’s crowd and they wouldn’t be friends. You wait for him to meet your eye before you say, “Do you know who I am?”

He shakes his head. He doesn’t know your face, but he knows your name.

“My name is Ragnar Desche.”

He ducks down, he actually ducks down. Good. His eyes flicker from left to right, he gradually realizes how much trouble he’s in.

“Your girlfriend stood us up, that’s why you’re here, do you get that?”

He nods, even though you’re sure he doesn’t know what you’re talking about. You let it go, you want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

“As I’m sure you’ll have noticed, I have a small problem here. You see the man in the armchair?”

The boy turns his head.

“His name is Oskar. He was my brother. Now do you understand why I brought you here?”

The boy looks at you for a moment, then turns his head away. You can see the dark fluff trembling on his top lip. You should ask more questions, make him feel he has something to say.

“Where do you come from?”

“From here.”

“And your parents?”

“Slovenia.”

“Do the Slovenians get on with the Serbs?”

The boy’s eyes wander nervously around the room.

If he bursts into tears right now, you think, I will go crazy.

“I asked you a question.”

“I … I don’t know.”

“You’re Slovenian and you don’t know if the Slovenians get on with the Serbs?”

“I’m from Berlin.”

Two steps and you’re standing beside him, he’s a head shorter than you, your face looms above his. You smell fear and the chewing-gum he has in his mouth.

“Spit out the chewing-gum.”

He spits it on the floor, ducks down again; your voice is a hiss.

“Listen carefully, you little shit, I can rip your asshole open until your parents can’t tell whether you’re a human being or a sewer. I can rip open your parents’ assholes too, if you like. I need clear answers from you, that’s all I want to hear, you understand?”

He understands, you wait another few seconds, then you turn away. It is time for some calm words. You take one of the chairs and put it by the pool.

“Sit down.”

The boy hesitates, then he sits down and looks at the pool.

“Sad sight, right?”

The boy doesn’t know if he should answer. You stand behind him and put your hands on his shoulders. Like father, like son. You’re sorry your son isn’t there. He might learn something.

“What do you know about the girl?”

The boy flinches as if you’d stabbed him in the back of the neck. Your hands stay where they are. His collarbones feel as if they’re made of chicken bones.

“Tell me everything. What her name is, where I can find her. Everything.”

The boy’s body is rigid, you take your hands off his shoulders. One blow and his neck would be broken.

“You know what she’s done.”

The boy says he doesn’t know anything. He has to say it twice, his voice is so weak. Suddenly you sound friendly.

“My son told me lots about you. He says you’re good, you’ll go a long way some day. He also told me there’s more between you and the girl. He said you’re an item.”

Silence, his face turns red, he stares into the pool; that’s an answer too. He’s probably one of those late developers who jerk off six times a day and bore girls senseless with stupid pickup lines.

“Do you know Taja?”

The boy shakes his head.

“Do you know Taja’s father?”

He shakes his head again. You tell him that’s Taja’s father right there. He follows your outstretched arm, looks again at your dead brother and slowly grasps the connection. His eyes widen. It’s time for him to understand you completely.

“A daughter kills her father, a man loses his brother, five kilos of heroin disappear, and a boy sits on a chair and doesn’t reply. That’s how things are.”

You look at your watch.

“I’m going to leave the house in exactly half an hour. If I don’t get an answer from you by then, you’re staying here. Now look at me.”

The boy looks up, he has tears in his eyes. He stinks of hormones and sweat and a little bit of shit.

“What’s your name?”

“M-M-Mirko.”

“Hi, Mirko, you’ve got half an hour to save your life.”

MIRKO

A wood louse hides under a stone. That’s exactly how it is. You’re the wood louse, the stone’s a car that you’ve squashed yourself under as if the sky was about to cave in on you. If someone tells you right now that Darian’s father will be standing beside you in three days’ time, giving you half an hour to save your life, you’d probably never come out from under that car. You’ve not met Ragnar Desche until then. He’s a legend, he’s a ghost and the father of your best friend. Nobody talks about Ragnar Desche. Never. Even thinking about him is taboo. Or as Darian once said: If my father wants, I’m dead within a second.

There’s a nasty taste in your mouth, sweet and metallic, as if you’d bitten off some chocolate without taking off the silver paper. You spit, see the red stain on the tarmac and swallow down your own blood.

You ran away. That’s it. The end.

I know.

How could you run away? Only an idiot would run away. You’re the idiot. And what are you going to do now? You can’t just stay under the car hiding. You just can’t do that. Somebody will find out. These things always come out.

The wood louse rolls aside and pulls itself up by the door handle, it crouches beside the car, back to the driver’s door, head thrown back so the blood doesn’t drip from its nose. You know if the car alarm goes off the wood louse will have a heart attack and piss its jeans.

It’s staying quiet.

You breathe out and look at the other side of the street.

It’s staying quiet.

The derelict house makes you think of a rabid dog that’s just waiting for you to make a false move. Lurking and rigid. Five lamps from the building site are flashing orange lights and illuminating the façade with a flickering light. It’s one of those ruins that you loved as a child. Graffiti on the walls, not a soul to be seen and hidden treasures everywhere. You’re not a child anymore, you don’t find ruins exciting anymore. It’s eleven at night and the city is a greedy hand hovering over you, wanting to stuff you into the darkest hole of the building site.

You rub the blood from your nose and wonder why no one’s followed you. Things don’t get sadder than this. No one’s interested in you. They wanted Darian. They’ve got Darian.

Shit.

“What am I …”

Your voice is a croak. You’re not great at talking to yourself. In horror movies the victims eventually start talking to themselves so that the viewer knows things are turning serious. Nothing serious is happening here, you’re miles away from serious.

How could I have run away?

Your tongue checks if you’ve got a loose tooth. You’re relieved, all your teeth are in place. And your nose isn’t even broken. You banged it when you crawled under that car. A wood louse through and through. You shake your head to get your brain back in gear. You have to do something, doesn’t matter what, you have to do something, otherwise you won’t be able to look at yourself in the mirror again for the rest of the year.

Think.

A few bicycles are parked beside the church, you start tugging away at one of them, kicking the pedals. The chain snaps with a crack, your hands are bruised but hey, you’ve got the fucking chain.

“Okay, okay, okay …”

You wrap one end firmly around your fist and let the chain dangle against your thigh, then you pull yourself together and cross the street.

Whatever happens, one thing is certain, no one’s going to be expecting you.

Darian sits in the ruins on an upside-down plastic barrel, staring into the distance. Elbows on his knees, hands slack. He reminds you a bit of a drawing in a book. Hercules sitting on a rock after a great battle, taking a break. Darian doesn’t look up when you approach, and for a moment you’re sure he’s crying.

“Everything all right?”

Darian raises his head. There’s a bloody scratch above his left eye, and his lower lip looks as if he’s had a collagen injection. There’s a second scratch on his upper arm, the muscles stand out angry, his T-shirt is a tight fit. It’s a mystery to you how anyone would dare to mess with Darian.

“What’s with the bike chain?” he asks, and his words sound as if he’s got a pillow in his mouth.

“Sorry,” you say and drop the chain.

And then there you stand, and there lies the chain at your feet, and there sits Darian who looks at you and says, “You ran away, right?”

You lower your head, you turn red.

“These jerks,” says Darian, and lets you off the hook. “Look at my face, you see that?”

You lean forward and look at his face. Yes, you see it.

“I’m gonna kill them for that,” he says. “And now …”

Darian holds his hand out to you. He doesn’t have to say anything, you open your belt and take off your jeans. It’s the least you can do for him. You’re lucky he doesn’t hit you. It would have been okay, he could even have whipped you with the bike chain, no problem, wood lice can cope with that kind of stuff.

Your jeans are too short, they stick to Darian’s legs like a second skin, he can’t fasten the top button, abs of titanium, thighs of steel. Since he filled the basement with dumbbells and an exercise machine, you’d been down there with the guys two times, but you’d had enough very quickly. Your body is your body, and that’s how it’s going to stay. Even if you wouldn’t have objected to an extra pound of muscle. Training is everything is Darian’s motto. No wonder he fucks the girls left and right.

“First they kick the shit out of me, then they steal my pants. You think that scares me?”

No, you don’t think anything scares Darian. Apart from his training, he goes to the gym on Adenauer Platz twice a week, takes protein supplements, and looks as if he’s in his mid-twenties when in fact he’s only seventeen.

“That doesn’t worry me, because I know exactly who did it.”

Darian thinks it was the Turks, you mumble something about how yeah, it definitely was the Turks. You both know the Turks had nothing to do with it. Not the Turks, not the Yugos, not the gang from Spandau, not even those idiots who have taken over the Westend and nobody knows if they come from Poland or Romania.

Darian goes on.

“You should have heard them. They laughed. I swear, they’re never going to laugh like that again. Just wait. I’m going to turn them inside out. I’ll get them, just you wait.”

“Perhaps you should—”

“Don’t say it,” he cuts in.

“I’m just thinking.”

“Mirko, shut your trap!”

You shut your trap. Darian’s very sensitive about his old man. He’s the only boy in the whole of Berlin who’s regularly made a target because of his old man. Like last night. Not for the Turks, not for the Yugos, but for six guys from the neighborhood. Darian’s a challenge. How far can you go before the gods get furious?

“What are you going to tell him if he asks?”

“My father won’t even notice.”

“But what’ll you say if he does?”

“That I had trouble with a few idiots, that’s all.”

You nod; one word to Darian’s dad and those guys would vanish from the city never to be seen again. That’s what they say.

Darian spits.

“I have my pride, you understand? I have my own pride. I don’t need my father to wipe my ass. So they can work me over, they can drop by every day. It’s called learning the hard way, get me? They want a mean dog, I will be a mean dog. I memorized their faces. One day I’ll be ready for them and then they’ll pay. Mirko, I tell you, they’ll pay.”

Today was your first official appearance. Darian went with you to the Columbiadamm to meet Bebe and his people. Bebe has twenty-four gambling places scattered around Berlin, which he inherited from his family. Darian’s incredibly envious of Bebe. You spent two hours listening to them trying to outdo each other’s successes. In the end Bebe said he was going to send a few girls onto the street while there was still a bit of summer left. Darian couldn’t match that one, and mumbled that he’d better be going. It was just after ten, and during that time you hadn’t learned anything new. Except if you have a dick you have to swing it around. You like learning new stuff.

When Darian and you left the subway, they were waiting. They came up to you, two in the middle, two on the left and two on the right. Darian didn’t hesitate for a second, he shouldered the two guys in the middle aside and made a run. You were right behind him. Through the streets, through the backyards to the ruin, because Darian knows his way around the ruin. How was he supposed to know that the ruin wasn’t exactly undiscovered territory for these six guys?

You wait at the traffic lights for a moment and jump a red. You’re glad it’s late. It wouldn’t be funny if anyone saw you in your stupid underpants. Trainers, white socks and blue underpants with white clocks on them. A Christmas present from your mother.

Darian asks for the fourth time why you always have to wear jeans. Tracksuit bottoms would be a lot more comfortable. You don’t know what to say. In a tracksuit you look like a guy who wants to play football.

“Jeans give you cancer,” says Darian.

It’s a typical Tuesday evening, there’s nothing going on on your street, the usual two drunks are standing outside the falafel shop and whistle after you. The falafel shop is open until two, and until two they won’t budge from the spot. Whatever the weather, those two drunks are always there.

Outside your front door Darian whacks you on the back of the head.

“Hey, pal, still there?”

“Yeah yeah.”

“You’ll get your pants back tomorrow. And keep your mouth shut.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

He doesn’t want to go, he still wants something from you. You feel the tension in your shoulders, as if you are going to have to dodge another blow.

“Is everything okay between us?”

“Of course.”

“We stand up for each other, Mirko.”

“I know.”

He makes a fist, you make a fist, when your fists meet you look at each other and Darian says, “Glad we’ve sorted that out.”

“We did.”

“And think about tracksuit bottoms.”

“If I wear tracksuit bottoms I look like I’m on my way to play football.”

“You have a point there.”

“Thanks.”

“Say hi to your mom.”

“I will.”

“See you tomorrow, then.”

“See you tomorrow.”

After you’ve crept into the apartment, you creep on into the bathroom and wash your face. You turn on the shower and sit motionlessly on the edge of the tub, as if someone had removed your batteries. Every now and again you pass your hand through the running water. Your head is absolutely empty, the pain in your nose a dull thumping. The hiss of the shower calms you down. It’s like a movie that you can watch as often as you want. And if you stretch your hand out, it gets wet and you’re part of the movie.

You get into the shower. You scrub the panic off yourself and enjoy the water on your back. The hammering on the bathroom wall tears you from your thoughts. You turn the water off, rub yourself dry, and wrap the towel around your hips.

“Why do you have to shower so late?”

Your mother is lying on the sofa in the living room, romantic novel in her lap, cigarette in her left hand, right hand where her heart should be. Her question is one of those questions that don’t need an answer. You say hi from Darian and go into your room. You shut the door behind you, let the towel fall to the floor, and get dressed as if the day had only just begun. You are still disappointed in yourself. It was wrong to run away. Darian will never forget that. Lucky nobody else was there. Imagine one of the guys witnessing your cowardice. Whichever way you look at it, you know you have to make it good again.

Somehow.

The smell of falafel and cigarette smoke drifts in through the window, the voices of the two drunks are clearly distinguishable from each other and sound hoarse. Some nights your mother goes down and complains. You live on the second floor, you’re the only ones who complain. The drunks laugh at you.

You button your shirt; your hands are still dirty from the oil on the chain, it’ll take a few days to come off. It looks as if the cops have taken your fingerprints. You check your watch. Uncle Runa will kill you. If you don’t show up at the pizza stand before midnight, you might as well stay home. Your uncle was expecting you an hour and sixteen minutes ago. You wish you were Darian. The kind of person who doesn’t get bossed around. Apart from tonight, tonight he sure got bossed around, you think, and are immediately ashamed of the thought.

There are no customers about. Not even an exhausted taxi driver taking a break and giving his hemorrhoids a rest. The night buzzes with insects. On the other side of the street people are sitting outside the cafés. Laughter every now and again, the scrape of chairs when someone stands up. You wish you were on that side. The telephone booth next to the café is like a yellow eye that flickers irregularly, blinking nonsensical messages at you.

Uncle Runa leans against the battered freezer and stares across at the cafés as if they were his very private enemies. He doesn’t understand how four cafés can open up on one corner. There are lots of things your uncle doesn’t understand. He wears a white apron and a red T-shirt with a silver Cadillac on the front. The T-shirt is tucked into his trousers, his belly hangs over the belt. You have no idea why he can’t wear normal clothes. He isn’t twenty years old anymore, he’s in his mid-forties and acts like he knows what’s cool. He should ask you. You know what’s cool, because you’re the opposite of cool.

“What are you doing here?” your uncle asks and spits between his front teeth. When you were six he wanted to teach you how to do it. The brilliant art of spitting. You never got the hang of it, so he called you a loser. Uncle Runa likes to say that he feels guilty about your father, and that’s why you’re allowed to work for him. He’s doing you a favor. Which doesn’t stop him paying you only six euros an hour. From ten in the evening until four in the morning you take charge of the pizza stand, and then you fall into bed or you’re so wired that you stay up all night and fall asleep in class. It’s been going on for three months. You’d rather be roaming the clubs with Darian, selling grass and pills. But no one respects you yet. You’re still no one.

“Tell me, shitface, what are you doing here?”

Uncle Runa goes through the same routine every time you turn up late. There are no variations, always the same pissed-off face as if he’d stood in a pile of dog shit with your name on it. A train goes over the bridge. When it’s quiet again, you mumble, “Sorry I’m late.”

“What happened to your hands?”

You hide your filthy fingers behind your back.

“Your mother’s a good woman, you know that?”

“I know.”

Suddenly Uncle Runa explodes, as if you’d claimed the opposite.

“You never say a word against your mother, you hear me? Your mother’s an angel! Don’t you dare say anything against your mother! Your father is a son of a bitch! You can say whatever you like about him.”

“He’s also your brother—”

“That’s how come I know he is a son of a bitch!”

Uncle Runa falls silent again.

“How else do you think I know, eh?”

He looks over his shoulder at the clock. You know he has a thing going with your mother. The way he touches her and how they kiss when they meet, the way he’s sometimes sitting in your kitchen in the morning as if he’s been there all night. You’re sure your mother doesn’t hit the bathroom wall when Uncle Runa spends too much time in the shower. His dressing gown hangs on the inside of the door.

He’s probably glad my father disappeared.

Your uncle takes a deep breath as if to make an important decision. The Cadillac on his chest stretches. Someone starts a motorbike, a woman laughs.

“What am I to do with you, boy?”

You say nothing. Uncle Runa scratches his head and sighs. You know it’s all fine now.

“Get to work. Just get to work and we won’t mention it again.”

It’s fifteen minutes later and Uncle Runa raps on the back of your head as if someone lives there, and leaves you alone. You imagine him walking down the streets, nodding at the drunks, as if they were his very special guard dogs, climbing the stairs to the second floor and your mother opening the door to him, and then they’re both laughing like the woman earlier on—high and superior—because they know you’re busy for the next few hours, while they have all the time in the world to fuck each other’s brains out. Eventually they’ll pay for it. More than six euros an hour. You’re sure of that. The justice of the world will recognize you one day. You have no idea what kind of justice that will be, you don’t really think seriously about it either, because right now you’re glad to be alone behind the counter at last.

Alone.

It’s half-price Tuesday in the cinemas, the evening screenings will be over in half an hour, and this place’ll fill up. You get ready and pull the drinks to the front of the fridge until they’re lined up neatly, you cut vegetables and mix salad. Music whispers out of the radio, you turn it up, and no one tells you to turn it down. No one wants anything from you. Apart from the customers, but that’s okay, they’re supposed to want something from you.

While your uncle generally rolls the pizza bases out in advance, you prefer to make them fresh. The customer should see that you’re doing something for him. Tomato sauce, a bit of cheese, then the topping, then a bit more cheese. You love the sound when the baking tray slides into the oven. A glance at the customer, asking if he wants anything else. Always a smile, always content. You.

Yes, me.

“Me?”

“Yes, you, what are you staring at?”

It’s two o’clock in the morning, the wave of cinemagoers ebbed away at midnight, and after that you could count the customers on one hand. You’ve stopped counting the drunks a long time ago, because they’re not real customers, they’re alkies, gabbling away at you and loading up on one last drink before they roll onto some park bench and tick off another day in their lives.

“I … I’m not staring.”

You are wondering how long you’ve been staring at her. Her green eyes gleam like distant fires, her hair is such a dark red that it’s almost black. You can’t concentrate on her mouth at the moment, because it moves and says, “Where’s the guy who makes the pizza?”

“I’m the guy who makes the pizza.”

“You’re at best twelve years old.”

You don’t react, you turn sixteen in the spring but you keep it to yourself because you’re worried that she might be older. She must be older, arrogant and loud as she is. You can’t know that she’s playing with you. She knows who you are and that you hang out with Darian, she sees you at school every day and knows you’ve noticed her too. If you’d known all that at that very moment, everything would have been a lot easier for you. As it is you’re just startled and look nervously past her. She’s alone, it’s the first time you’ve seen her alone. Normally she hangs with a group of girls who buzz around her as if she were a source of light. You particularly like the little scar on her chin, it makes her look like she is truly fragile.

She snaps her fingers around in front of your face.

“Well?”

You don’t know what she means.

“How old are you now?”

“Fifteen.”

“Never.”

You shrug and wish the moment would stay like this. Hours, make it days. You wouldn’t even have to speak. You’d make her one pizza after another, give her free drinks and look at her the whole time. Nothing more than that.

It would be nice if she would laugh and say she was sorry that she thought you were twelve, you don’t look twelve at all. That would be really nice. Only now do you notice that her eyes are glassy. She’s either stoned or drunk.

“Your name’s Mirko and you live on Seelingstrasse, right?”

“Above the falafel shop,” you say and feel as if she’s paid you a compliment. But how does she know all this? you wonder, as she says, “I’ve seen you coming out of your house a few times.”

“Ah.”

“Yes, ah.”

You look at each other, and as nothing better comes to your mind you show her your hand.

“I was in a fight today. I defended myself with a bicycle chain.”

She looks at your sore palm, looks at you, she doesn’t seem impressed. But she goes on talking to you. She says she urgently needs a phone. Her forefinger goes up in the air.

“Just one call, I swear.”

You don’t point to the phone booth behind her, you don’t ask what’s wrong with her phone. Girls always have a cell phone. Just don’t ask. Go to the back, reach into your backpack, and come back with your phone.

“Sure.”

You go to the back, reach into your rucksack, and come back with the phone. She doesn’t thank you, she takes two steps backward and taps away. You turn down the radio to hear her better.

“… no, I’m stuck here … Don’t … But I … I’ll give you ten euros, I promise. What? Please, Paul, come and fetch me … What? The what? You know what time it is? There are no buses around here. And I hate them anyway, you know that. What? Aunt Sissi can go and fuck herself.”

Suddenly she looks up, phone still to her ear, looks at you, caught you red-handed, you duck a bit but hold her gaze.

“Fuck this shit!” she says, and you are not sure if she’s talking to you.

She snaps the phone shut. You ask if there’s a problem.

“What do you know about problems?”

“I … I could take you home.”

“How are you going to take me home?”

“I can if I want.”

“But I’m not giving you ten euros.”

“That’s okay.”

You laugh, you really don’t know what you’re doing. Uncle Runa will strangle you if you shut the place for as much as a minute. But you’re making things even worse, because after Uncle Runa has strangled you he’ll cut you into pieces as soon as he finds out you’ve borrowed his old Vespa.

“On that thing?”

She has walked around the pizza stand. You pulled the tarpaulin off the bike like somebody performing a magic trick. She stands there as if she wants to buy the Vespa, then she kicks the back tire so that the bike nearly tips over. You flinch but don’t say anything. Uncle Runa drives around the block once a week to charge the battery. He got the Vespa from scrap and rebuilt it himself. He calls it Dragica.

“But I’m not wearing a helmet, just so we’re clear on that.”

She points to her piled-up hair. You nod: if she doesn’t want a helmet then she doesn’t want one. You untie the string of your apron and for a moment you smell her breath. Definitely drunk. The key to the Vespa hangs on a nail above the radio. You take it as if you do this every day. Perhaps you’ll drive along Seelingstrasse afterward and beep two times. Perhaps Uncle Runa will recognize the rattle of his Dragica and come running after you.

Once you’ve shut up shop you put on your uncle’s helmet. It’s too big, but it doesn’t matter. She stands there and holds out her hand.

“What is it?”

“Did you think I’d let you drive me?”

“But—”

“Come on, make a choice.”

You hand her the key and imagine what it’ll feel like sitting behind her. Her warmth, her presence. You’ll lean into the bends together and be like a single person. Not just you, not her—both of you. And just as you feel your excitement growing into an erection you quickly think of your mother gutting a chicken and at the same time the Vespa springs to life with a cough and bumps over the curbstone and zigzags along the street. A taxi beeps, then the lights of the Vespa come on and it disappears around the next corner.

Without you.

TAJA

You don’t exist anymore. When you move, the air around you is still. Not a breeze. You speak, and silence replies. You’re there, without being there. And even though you don’t believe it right now, it’s a pleasure to meet you at last. You’re always present in the thoughts of your girls, but we’ve learned as little about you so far as if you didn’t really exist.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to talk, you don’t need to think or, for a while, exist, we’ll find out everything about you anyway. Why you became a shadow, why you don’t want to exist anymore. Invisible. We’ll open a window into your life and let the light in, and we’ll shake you awake until you scream with fury. But there’s time for that, that comes later.

The table in front of you is vertical, but nothing’s falling off it. Not the glasses, not the magazines or the ripped bag of powder. Even the hand-knitted tea cozy doesn’t move. Every time you look at it you wonder where the teapot’s gone and how small you have to be to live in a tea cozy. Between sleeping and waking you see your phone vibrating, it quivers from left to right before freezing again. The walls stay horizontal, the light comes, the light goes.

Your nose runs all the time, sometimes it’s blood, but mostly it’s just snot. You smell urine and the acrid smell of vomit. But that’s nothing compared to the stench coming from the kitchen. You shut the door because you thought it would help. Closed doors don’t keep out flies. They come through the cracks, they come from all around and make straight for the kitchen. They’re everywhere. You don’t want to think about it. You take a sip of water, and a few seconds later it’s as if you hadn’t drunk anything. You wish it would rain. Your mouth is so dry that you’re wishing it would rain in the middle of the room. You don’t have the strength to sit up, you can’t even stretch out your arm to reach for the edge of the table. You try, and you think you can hear the sinews in your arm creaking. Your fingertips touch the edge of the table. You give up exhausted, you pull back your arm and fall asleep again.

You believe in time. You pray to time and hope it hears you. Just a bit, go back just a bit, you think and know how absurd the idea is.

Still …

Sometimes you stare at the clock above the fireplace, at your dad’s awards. Platinum—gold—gold—platinum—gold. And in between the clock, like a special prize for …

Nothing?

You concentrate. Sometimes you manage to make the hand of the clock pause. It lingers. That’s all you can do, whatever you try, the hand never moves backward. It’s like arm-wrestling with the world champion arm wrestler. Eventually there’s no juice behind your will, and the hand unfreezes and ticks on a bit.

And another bit.

And another.

And time is time again and laughs at you in seconds and minutes and hours. You hate it for that. At the same time you yearn for it. You can’t be without it, and you want it to disappear forever.

Time is your new religion.

Sleep is traveling inside your head. No packing, no waiting, just being there. And that’s what your There looks like: a house on a cliff, water below you, sky above you. You’re sitting by a fjord. Even though you have no memory of the place, you know: I was born here. It’s a gray day. Snow falls and turns the valley walls into Japanese ink drawings. An icy wind scratches over the water. That’s where you are, that’s where you want to be. On a terrace, wrapped up in several blankets, on your right a table with a cup of tea, in the background the silence of the house. You pick up the cup, you feel the heat of the tea through the china, your palms warm up.

There’s nothing more, nothing more is needed.

You wake with your face buried in the sofa cushion and sneeze twice. Blood drifts down onto the pillow like a fine mist, you feel dizzy and lay your head back so that the blood flows down your throat like a gentle lava flow, feeding and warming you. Everything in your body hurts and throbs. Your thoughts are sore. Your hand claws onto the back of the sofa, you inch your way into a sitting position. The table turns horizontal, the walls vertical and your legs tremble, even though you’re not standing. You set your feet down on the floor and try to get the shaking under control. You stay like that for a while. Your face in your hands, the trembling in your legs. You look between your fingers at the powder and feel the stinging in your nose like far-off longing. You know what will ease the pain and let you sleep again. It’s as simple as that. As if the thought has reached your legs, they stop shaking. You lean forward, pick up the teaspoon, and stick it into the plastic bag. You scatter the powder on the tabletop and use one of the brightly colored straws. It doesn’t take long, it hurts and your senses greet the bitterness of the drug with jubilation, then you feel like retching, you fight it and fight it and sink back, draw your knees up to your chest and become a warm, pulsating ball.

… at last …

Sleep.

This time it’s a different There. You’re not at the fjord, you’re with your friends, time has been merciful and taken you along. In reverse. It’s right after school, you know the day and the year and it’s reassuring, because you also know what’s going to happen. It’s absolutely certain. And right now you would give your soul for a little certainty.

You’re in a freeze-frame. Your girlfriends are frozen in that moment that has already been and will never be again. You’re sitting in Ruth’s room. You know that Coldplay’s first CD is going to play through the speakers at any moment. Ruth has all their albums, but is only allowed to put on this one, because you’ve decided that Parachutes is authentic and everything else is just homespun pop for teenyboppers. Whatever you are, you’ve never been teenyboppers. Or as Nessi once put it: We’re far too old to be young.

You’re lying stretched out on the floor with your head in Schnappi’s lap. Above you is the moss-green ceiling that you painted together; sometimes flakes fall down on your heads because you had to go and apply the paint too thickly. Schnappi looks at you like a photograph that only comes to life when you let it.

Soon.

It’s autumn, it’s a good nine months ago. Your hair was long at the time, then before Christmas you went to the hairdresser and for the next few months your girls called you Frenchie. Yes, your hair has grown since then, but you keep it short because you’ve always thought it ridiculous that you’ve all got the same hairdo. Long, long, long.

Schnappi with her hair that’s like black silk, Ruth and her blond fringe with which she tries in vain to hide the pimples on her forehead, Stink who’s dyed her mane dark red as long as you’ve known her, and Nessi who looks like an angel and makes you sigh every time she piles up her golden hair and shows her neck. It was a good step on your part to change your hairstyle.

In a minute.

Ruth sits cross-legged on the bed with a magazine in her lap, she’s flicking through it, her tongue peeps out between her lips. Stink sits opposite her on the windowsill with a cigarette in her hand, even though smoking’s forbidden at Ruth’s house, but Stink can’t help it. You remember she actually squeezed out a tear when Ruth told her she couldn’t smoke. Stink is no smoker, but on the other hand she doesn’t like anyone telling her she can’t do something.

You know what she’s going to say next. She’s going to ask you what’s so funny about her not wanting to have anything more to do with that guy. You know your reaction, too. All thoughts and words are still frozen. Cigarette smoke floats like a charcoal line in the air.

You breathe out.

Now.

“… so funny about it?” Stink asks defiantly. “Axel’s an idiot, do I look like someone who wants to be with an idiot?”

“For three months now,” says Ruth.

“That was never three months!”

“Then a quarter of a year.”

You laugh, Stink rolls her eyes and asks what’s so funny about it. You think it is incredibly funny, and if Stink wasn’t in such a stinky mood she’d laugh too, but of course that’s not going to work, it would make the joke less funny.

A breeze drifts through the window and scatters the smoke around the room. You inhale the smell deeply and wish you were brave enough to have one too.

“Don’t even think about it,” Ruth says from the bed.

“I’ll think what I like,” you tell her.

Ruth holds up the magazine. You all look at it for a moment and shake your heads. You’re evaluating actresses. You’re cruel. Apart from a few exceptions you think they’re all bitches who make too much money. Nessi’s the only one who knows all their names.

“Cate Blanchett,” she says.

“Show me,” says Stink.

Ruth holds the magazine out toward her.

“That’s not Cate Blanchett.”

“That’s Kate Winslet,” says Schnappi.

Ruth looks at the magazine and reads, “Cate Blanchett.”

“Shit,” says Stink.

Nessi nods contentedly. She’s sitting on one of those idiotic seats that are filled with beans and every time you move it sounds like a drunk jogger running down a pebble beach.

“If you fart into it,” says Schnappi, “we’ll have chili tonight.”

You drink your Fanta. You’re waiting for Ruth to hold up the next photograph when the door flies open. Even though you knew Ruth’s mother was about to breeze in you give a start, just like you gave a start then. The memory is so fresh in your head that you want to call out to your girlfriends: I’ve been here before and want to stay here forever!

“I thought I smelled smoke.”

Ruth’s mother looks around. She’s thrown you out before, because the music was too loud. Stink makes eyes so big that she might as well hang up a sign. Her cigarette has disappeared, but of course Stink had to take one last drag and the smoke’s still in her lungs.

“I don’t understand you lot. You’re girls, aren’t you? What does this place look like?”

Typical Ruth’s mother. Can see perfectly well what it looks like, and asks what it looks like. You take a look around as if you’d only just gotten here. It doesn’t look great. All the scattered clothes and comics and pages from the school presentation that you really wanted to discuss but when that got boring Schnappi just dropped the pages on the floor. There’s the tray of scraped ice cream bowls and a sticky stain on the carpet where one of the spoons was dropped. And then of course the nachos. Ruth’s cat was desperate to get its head in the bag. Then it walked around for a while with the thing on its head, then it shook itself and the nachos flew all over the carpet.

“That was Freddie,” says Schnappi.

“Maybe we should put Freddie to sleep,” says Ruth’s mother.

“God, Mom,” sighs Ruth without looking up from the magazine.

“Don’t ‘God Mom’ me, Ruth, or I’m throwing you all out.”

Ruth pretends not to have heard anything and holds up the magazine. You shake your heads. No points. You’re TV series junkies and you’ve seen all the episodes of Lost at least twice; as far as you’re concerned the women have to look like Kate or nothing at all.

“Milla Jovovich,” says Nessi.

“Julie Delpy,” says Ruth’s mother.

“Minnie Driver,” says Schnappi.

You burst out laughing.

“Why are you laughing?” asks Schnappi.

“You wouldn’t recognize Minnie Driver if she sat on your lap.”

“Would too.”

Ruth looks at the magazine. Of course Nessi’s right. Ruth’s mother curses, she could have sworn that was Julie Delpy. Stink coughs out the smoke.

“What’s the matter with you?” asks Ruth’s mother.

“Cancer,” says Stink and thumps her chest.

“You don’t make jokes about that.”

“Tell that to my doctor.”

You all giggle, Ruth’s mother narrows her eyes slightly. Dangerous.

“Isabell, I don’t want you to smoke in our living room. How many times—”

“God, Mom,” Ruth butts in and lowers the magazine. “Really, that’s enough. Please shut the door behind you. Take a look …”

She points around her, as if her mother hadn’t noticed where she was.

“—this is a girls’ meeting.”

For a moment you think Ruth has gone too far. You’re the only one grinning, because you know how Ruth’s mother will react. My daughter, she will say and smile.

“My daughter,” she says and smiles.

“My mom,” Ruth replies and smiles back and disappears into her magazine again as if her mother had left the room ages ago.

Schnappi strokes your head, you stretch and purr like you were Freddie. Nessi shifts her backside on the beanbag and says: This is going to be a delicious chili. You all snort with laughter, and when you’ve calmed down you notice that Ruth’s mother is still standing in the doorway.

“You’re such a bunch of bitches,” she says.

Stink doesn’t contradict her.

“We might be bitches,” she says, “but we’re sweet bitches.”

Schnappi raises her thumb, Ruth raises her thumb, and you raise your left leg. Nessi just shrugs and says, “When Stink’s right, she’s right.”

Ruth’s mother leans forward, her mouth moves, no words come out, but you’re used to reading her lips. Whether it’s Get out or Shut up. You know the nuances. You’re familiar with this one too. I hate you. It’s meant nicely. No one hates you, you are loved. The door closes, and at that very moment Parachutes comes to an end, the last song fades away, and you know what that means—there’ll be a little pause, followed by the song that Ruth found on the internet. A rarity that doesn’t appear on any Coldplay album. At any moment a guitar will come in and you’ll sing along the way you always do.

You taste the first lines in your mouth and realize why time has dragged you here—this song belongs to what has been, and it belongs to the Taja who will lie nine months later completely wasted on the sofa in her father’s living room and lose her connection with reality.

But your hair’s still long, your girlfriends are still with you, and you’re not yet the loneliest person in the world. The song brings everything together. You wait, the pause ends, the guitar sounds and you take a breath and Stink says, “Don’t imagine it’ll be as easy as that.”

You look at her with surprise. These are the wrong words. You’re singing now, it’s got to happen, but the music has fallen silent, no one’s singing.

Wrong, you think, that’s wrong.

“We’ll sing along later,” says Ruth and lowers the remote control.

“Did you really think you could avoid us?” Schnappi asks.

You sit up and slide away from her on your butt, a few nachos crumble under your hand, the girls look at you.

“We’re waiting,” says Stink.

“For … for what?”

You go quiet, you’re just bluffing, because you know very well what they’re waiting for. Nessi rummages in her jeans and throws you her phone.

“I’ve tried to contact you thirty-six times. Check, if you don’t believe me.”

“And I’ve tried just as many times,” says Schnappi.

“I hate your voicemail more than I hate the fucking Simpsons,” says Ruth.

Stink slips from the windowsill and crouches in front of you.

“Now will you tell us what’s up with you?”

You smell her breath. Cigarettes and lemon ice cream. Stink takes your hand in hers. And the way she’s looking at you, the way all your girls are looking at you, you tell them the truth.

“I’m not really here. I’m from the future.”

Ruth crouches down next to Stink.

“Christ, Taja, we know that already.”

“Do you think we haven’t known that?” Schnappi asks behind you.

“But that doesn’t explain anything,” says Nessi. “Or do you think it does?”

You know it doesn’t explain anything, you curse time and its little games and close your eyes tight as if you were in a dream, and when you open them again you’re lying alone on the sofa in your father’s living room and your mouth is dry as dust and your cheeks are wet with tears. Where are you all? you think longingly and grip the edge of the table and pull it across the carpet until it’s right in front of you. Your hand seeks, your hand finds. You press your phone tightly to your chest and breathe out with relief.

Now everything’s going to be fine.

You push your face back into the sofa cushion until you can’t breathe anymore and that’s a good way to vanish into merciful darkness.

NESSI

Above you hangs the night, below you lies the darkness, and you’re floating between the two and hear your girls calling to you. You imagine it’ll be like this forever. Just floating and not worrying about anything and forgetting that there’s a child growing in you. I could let go and sink, you think and realize it’s nonsense. You’ve never had a high opinion of people who killed themselves because they couldn’t take on life. In books, in movies, in life. But who knows what you’ll think in ten years; who knows what you’ll think when you’re lying in a bed somewhere sick and full of pain or when your heart is broken and the world seems as dark as the lake below you and the night above you. Who knows.

You turn in the water and only now do you feel the full weight of your wet clothes dragging you down. In no particular hurry, you move your arms and swim back to shore.

The boys think it’s sexy, they say you should do it more often. You grin, you have humor, your teeth are chattering. The world is full of idiots, and you’re one of them. Your clothes lie drying on the grass, Ruth has given you her jacket. You’re sitting by the fire, your knees against your chest, your eyes closed. Schnappi said her heart nearly stopped when she saw you in the water, but as her heart stops every time a good-looking guy walks by, that doesn’t mean much. What’s much more noticeable is that Schnappi’s avoiding your eye. You don’t need to ask. Your girls know you’re pregnant. Schnappi’s never been good at keeping secrets.

“Are you cold?” asks Stink.

You shake your head and feel as if you’re six years old again and sitting by the fire with your parents after a long hike, so terribly tired and so terribly excited at being allowed to stay up so late with the grown-ups. Stink puts an arm around you. The boys talk on and on. You are all patient, as girls are only patient when they want to get rid of boys. You are looking into the flames, you are barely talking. One after the other the boys say goodbye. Eric mumbles: Maybe we’ll meet up later in the bar. And then you’re alone at last.

“What did you do that for?” asks Ruth, as if you’d just got out of the water.

“I don’t know, it just felt right.”

“And if we’d been standing in the station, would you have jumped onto the rails?”

“Come on. I wasn’t planning on killing myself.”

They all nod, they hoped you were going to say this.

“Let’s all keep our mouths shut,” says Stink, before Ruth can tear into you again. “If Nessi doesn’t want to talk about it, then how about we don’t talk about it?”

Everyone looks at you, it’s your turn, the ball’s in your court, you say, “Girls, I’m pregnant, and I don’t want to talk about it now.”

They nod again, it’s accepted, and you’re so relieved that you want to talk about it right now, but at the same time you’re exhausted by the day and just want to sleep. Schnappi reads your thoughts and says that’s enough for today. She offers to drive you home.

Ruth hugs you and tells you to keep the jacket. Stink strokes your back and kisses you firmly on the mouth. It’s never been so hard to say goodbye to your friends. You get into your wet jeans. Schnappi takes you by the hand and you walk to her bike. When you’ve cycled two blocks she brakes, turns around to you, and swears she hasn’t told a soul.

“They guessed, Nessi, they really guessed.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

“Thanks.”

Schnappi cycles on, you rest your head against her back and shut your eyes.

It’s just after midnight when you creep into the apartment. Your parents are asleep, any sound would give you away, so you take off your running shoes and walk down the corridor to the bathroom in your wet socks. You close the door gently behind you and lean against it. It takes some minutes before you dare to turn on the light. Your face is pale, your clothes still wet and heavy. You could never have pulled this one off in the winter.

I went into the Lietzensee, you think and flip yourself the bird in the mirror.

In the shower the water’s so hot that you flinch for a moment, but you don’t change the temperature, you put up with the heat and wait until it’s passed through all the layers of cold to your innermost core and makes you glow.

You haven’t been as freezing as that for years.

By the time you leave the shower, the bathroom is a landscape swathed in fog.

You wipe the mirror clear and look at yourself.

Go closer.

You try to see a change. Nothing. You look down at yourself. Everything is as it should be. Breasts, belly, legs. As always. You make a fist and press it against your belly button. You’re furious. You’re so furious with yourself that you want to shove your fist through your stomach.

And then?

You don’t know what then.

But you have a clear vision of where it goes from here. You see your father shaking his head and calling you my little one. Your mother will burst into tears and get a bottle of white wine from the fridge. She won’t understand you. She’ll want to know how you imagine it will all be. On no account must you speak of abortion, bear that in mind. Abortion is taboo, because your mother had an abortion when she was nineteen and has never forgiven herself. The decision hurt both your parents. So no word about abortion, because then you might as well take a corkscrew and jab their eyes out. Your mother with her tears and quivering shoulders, your father leaning forward, hands open, as if to catch you. After the first glass of wine your father will say things will sort themselves out and there’s enough room in the apartment, which is already far too small, but you won’t point that out either. Your mother will hug you and promise to take care of everything, because she is your mother, after all, you should never forget that. She’ll also say she’s glad that you waited until after school, as if you planned to get pregnant. Then she’ll look at your father and say emotionally: I’m going to be a grandma!

Your parents won’t ask who the father is, because they’re scared of the answer.

That’s how it is, that’s how it always will be.

Fear.

And throughout all this your left hand would be clenched into a fist.

Over the next few weeks you’ll start getting fat. Not that you’re skinny now, but your mother looked like a whale when she was pregnant, so you’ll be exactly the same, she’s shown you the future. The months will pass, and the apprenticeship that Aunt Helga promised you will go to another girl. You’ll hardly see your girlfriends, because their lives are their lives and your life is your life and you can’t go in two directions at once. Every now and again Stink will call and you will start crying and Stink will cry too and after two hours your ears will be so hot from gossiping that you’ll hang up reluctantly. You’ll read everything about babies, weigh up the pros and cons of a home birth, and opt for the hospital. You’ll slowly come to terms with the situation. Your seventeenth birthday will be sad. Stink will drop in with Schnappi and stay for fourteen minutes. Ruth will phone in her greetings. And Taja? You’ll never hear a word from Taja, because still no one has any idea where she is. There will be no presents for you, just presents for the baby. Little socks. Little jackets. Toys. People will look at you askance in the supermarket and keep their distance. Everyone will know what kind of girl you are. Mother. Mom. Whale. And sometimes they will ask who the father is. And sometimes you will look at them and smile, as if that was an answer. You know you’re too young to be a mother. You’re too young to be anything at all. But life in reverse only works in the movies.

During the birth you will consist only of pain, and the pain will hollow you out and fill you with fire. Nothing bad can happen to me after this, you will think. And then the child. Red. Noisy. Yours. And everything will be fine.

And everything will be lovely.

It’s the last thing you want. You want to live without responsibilities or obligations, and without parents. You want to be someone who leads a life that is a mystery. Not the life of a girl named after a pop star. Not the life of the many girls who run around like emotional building sites and get pregnant and accept it because they’re just too idiotic to go a different way.

Not one of many, no.

But who knows whether you might not be better off like this after all. Take a look at Stink. Her mother ran off when Stink was still a baby, and after her father had decided that two children was too much work, he dumped Stink and her brother on Aunt Sissi and ran off to Argentina. Stink was nine at the time and until her twelfth birthday she thought her dad was coming back for Christmas. Stink’s brother saw through it all right away, of course. Whenever you ask Stink about it, she shakes her head and says she couldn’t care less. But you know that’s not true. It is like an invisible itch that no amount of scratching helps. A mixture of hatred and resignation. You on the other hand love your parents, but you don’t want them around, there’s no getting past that.

You give a start when the phone in your jacket pocket rings. You seriously went to sleep on the toilet, your hair is dry, and the toilet seat has left two impressions on the underside of your thighs. Your phone beeps twice, then it’s quiet. The text is so short that for a moment you think your phone has got bumped.

cm

Then you see who sent the text, and the thinking stops, your problems are your problems, this is more important. You run out of the bathroom into your room and get dressed. You put on a pair of worn-out running shoes, turn around and see your mother standing in the doorway.

“Vanessa, what’s going on?”

You push past her and run out of the apartment like someone who’s left herself outside and hopes to find herself again as quickly as possible, before it’s too late.

SCHNAPPI

She yells at you. She yells at you through the closed door as if you were a stranger, as if your life were worthless and she had the right to spit on it. In the background you hear your father mumbling. She ignores him and goes on yelling at you. One of the neighbors calls up the stairwell, telling her to shut up. You call down telling him to shut up himself.

A door slams.

It continues.

She calls you a whore. She calls you a bastard. You wait till she is out of breath, then press the doorbell, you press so hard that your thumb turns white, when the ringing suddenly stops. You laugh out loud. She’s seriously switched off the bell. You laugh until the tears come and the tears have nothing more to do with laughter. Your finger slips off the doorbell, you sit down on the doormat, your back against the door.

And I’m only three hours late, what’s three hours?

Some nights you slip into the apartment unnoticed, a few times your father sits waiting in the kitchen, he shakes his head and says he was worried. But he isn’t really bothered, he trusts you and calls you his little sunshine.

If it wasn’t for her …

Your mother must have left the key in the lock. You wouldn’t have credited her with so much imagination. She told you the houses in her village didn’t have any doors, because people trusted each other, and if someone stole something, the whole family was chased from the place. So that’s how things are back home. It’s a mystery to you how someone who grew up without doors could come up with the idea of leaving the key in the lock.

You’re so tired.

Now you’ll wait till she’s asleep, then your father will let you in. Wait for half an hour, an hour at most. The day rushes through your head like the subway train that you’ve been waiting for. You see Nessi in the water, you see yourselves in the cinema and you can taste the stale popcorn. You like looking back on the day. It’s a bit like coming home late in the evening, turning on the television, and there’s a program on that shows only you, going through life, all your mistakes, all your heroic deeds. You want to tell your father about the movie. He likes Denzel Washington. But how surprised will your father be when he opens the door in twenty minutes and sees that you’ve disappeared? And how surprised will you be in retrospect that your life has taken a new turn in a few seconds, and dragged you thousands of miles away from Berlin?

Anything is possible. And it all begins with two short beeps.

You’re sitting in the dark corridor, because you don’t feel like pressing the light switch over and over again. You sit there in the darkness, and there are two beeps. You take your phone out of your jacket and read the text on the blue display and react the way you all react to this message tonight.

You run.

RUTH

You get the message at the same time. You’re lying next to Eric again and your ears are tingling. You were spared the sex this time. You’re both too drunk. Your parents think you’re sleeping over at Stink’s. It’s one lie more or less. You have very different problems, because you couldn’t leave it alone. Four cocktails in the little bar on Savignyplatz, where you only get served because one of the waitresses is Eric’s sister. Schnappi and Stink stopped after the second cocktail, only you couldn’t stop yourself. Now you’re lying beside Eric. In your defense, it would have to be said that there was no real chance of going home in this state. Your mother would have bitten your head off and your father would have pogoed on your corpse.

The mattress is on the floor and smells slightly of mold, and there’s also the acrid smell of a sweaty boy who sprays himself with too much perfume—things you won’t miss. You won’t miss the hand on your shoulder either.

“Go away!”

Eric persists. He shakes you as if you were a fruit machine that had swallowed his last euro. You groan, you could puke, you could just lean out of bed and puke. But you don’t. You’ve still got a bit of self-respect. So you open your eyes, and as if by magic your ears open too.

“… light is driving me mad. Really mad. How do you turn this little fucker off? Tell me how to turn this fucker off.”

“What?”

Eric holds up a green star in front of your eyes, going light and then dark again. You feel spittle dribbling from the corner of your mouth and wipe it away.

“Please,” says Eric.

You recognize your phone. You love that glow, it pulses like a light under water, you set it that way on purpose.

“Take it away,” you say.

“Turn it off, Ruth.”

“Put it under the pillow and let me sleep!”

Eric pulls the covers away.

“The fucker is vibrating and lighting up. Turn it off!”

You would like to strangle him. Too dumb to turn off a phone, you think, and grab it from him. You look at the message that’s just come in and see double and then triple and then double again. You rub your eyes and look again. Your thumb taps in your PIN and the phone stops lighting up. Eric sighs with relief, but his happiness lasts only a few seconds.

“Shit, what are you doing now?”

You pick up your clothes from the floor and are about to clear out when you realize that you’re far too drunk to negotiate a zebra crossing. You look back at the bed. Eric has his arm over his eyes. No, you can’t rely on him.

Maybe it was just an illusion, you think, maybe I’ll turn my phone back on and there’ll be nothing there.

You go into the bathroom, drape yourself over the toilet bowl, and stick your finger down your throat. After that you feel better. You slap water in your face and rummage in your purse. Five euros. That’s never going to be enough. You go back into your room. Eric is asleep, his arm still over his eyes. You take his wallet out of his trousers. Nothing, just a few coins. You drop the wallet, take a deep breath, and look at your phone again.

cm

You knew it wasn’t an illusion. Phones don’t lie. You pull on your boots, and then you run.

STINK

Of course there’s an idiot in every story. Someone who does everything wrong, backs the wrong horse and gets caught in the rain. Someone like you, disappearing on a stolen Vespa and grinning to themselves as if they’d won the jackpot. You’re the idiot, you’re the marked card. At the same time you’re the only one lying contentedly in her bed tonight. Your head is heavy from those two cocktails, the barkeeper probably slipped something into your glass. You hate it when guys flirt and then get nasty when you slap them down. If you said yes to every barman, you’d have died of alcohol poisoning years ago.

Eventually sleep overwhelms you and you dream of Neil going down on one knee in front of you in the disco and saying he isn’t bothered by your flowery underwear. You also dream of Nessi, bobbing away like a water lily and disappearing into the distance, even though you call her name. It’s a good thing you have a brother, otherwise you’d probably have slept through the rest of this story.

“Get up!”

The light goes on and off, on and off.

“Are you deaf or something? Get up!”

You wish you were deaf or something. You roll over. Your brother won’t let go.

“One of your stupid girlfriends has been ringing up a storm, how can’t you hear it?”

That’s enough. You kick the covers away, bickering like a washerwoman. You swing your legs out of bed and a whole universe of stars explodes in front of your eyes. You feel dizzy and you bend down and look at your toes until the explosions subside. You didn’t hear any ringing. Good thing your aunt’s on night shift tonight.

“God, Paul, I didn’t hear it ring,” you murmur.

“Yeah, right.”

Your brother slams the door behind him, you sink back.

Maybe it’s all just a dream? Maybe I can just go back to sleep—

Your bedroom door flies open again.

You raise your head.

Ruth is standing there, and she says, “I hate it when you don’t charge your battery.”

And as she says it you know something has happened.

Something bad.

The clock by the door says ten past three.

Whatever it is, it’s definitely bad.

The realization reaches your brain like a shock wave, your ears pop, you have to rub your nose because it’s suddenly itchy.

“My goodness,” you say, like a grandma whose shopping bag tears on the way home, then you totter to your feet and get dressed while Ruth tells you about the message she got.

Five minutes later you’re sitting on the stolen Vespa, your hair blowing in the wind, Berlin is in a coma, the streets are deserted and the traffic lights have a weary pulse that looks a bit like slow-motion Christmas lights. How you hate Christmas, how you love the city at night.

III

drives up to the next seat and onto the roots

drinking up the village

Portugal. The Man THE DEVIL

THE TRAVELER

And then you disappeared.

Without a trace.

And chaos was left in your wake.

The special crimes unit has been searching tirelessly for you. They said you wanted to be caught after they found your blood on the corpses. They said you were losing your concentration. They were now as familiar with your DNA as they were with your fingerprints.

Did that worry you? Were you even aware of it?

You were aware of it, the way you’re aware of things because people are talking about them. They said the Traveler was getting careless, and would soon fall into the special unit’s clutches. It didn’t occur to anyone that the Traveler didn’t care what he left behind. You were moving forward. The past remained behind like the vague memory of a dream or a smell that gets blown away by the next breeze. Not that you woke up drenched in sweat and wondered what had happened. Things like that are stupid. That’s what psychopaths do. The past was behind you, it wasn’t pursuing you.

You’re like a shark that always has to keep moving or it’ll sink. In a flowing forward motion. There is no going back. And just as a shark has no swim bladder, you have no morals. If you hesitated, you would sink to the bottom of our society in an instant and disappear.

Stasis is corruption, so you stay in calm motion.

For six years no one heard a thing from you. On the internet they wondered if the Traveler had reached his destination. You’re responsible for over sixty corpses. All inquiries have led nowhere, no one saw anything, the investigations washed out and the special unit was called into question. There was no pattern and no connection between the victims, there was no apparent motive. Even though the special unit would never have admitted it, they were waiting for your next step. They wanted mistakes. They looked at psychograms of serial killers, studied the behavior of frenzied attackers, and tried to force you into a category. They really had no idea who they were dealing with.

In 1998 you were offered a better job and moved to a bigger city. Your son turned seven and wrote his first letter, asking you if you couldn’t have him for the summer. You wrote back to say it was a good idea, he should ask Mom. Mom said no. Life took its course.

Your girlfriend split up with you because the long-distance relationship was too uncomfortable. You started spending your evenings in theaters and at concerts. You started reading more books, and built up a collection of documentaries on DVD. You discovered culture and met a woman who shared your passion for architecture. Otherwise hardly anything in your life changed. You weren’t calmer, you didn’t drink to excess or call your existence into question. Your friends didn’t notice any changes either. You were balanced. You traveled a lot throughout those years. Sometimes as a couple or in a group or on your own. And you never left any corpses behind.

When the new millennium was ushered in, your name was a legend. Someone wrote a book about you, someone put up a website that not only offered a forum for discussion but listed all your victims and was regularly checked by the special unit with the agreement of the provider. And of course someone tried to copy you and was promptly overpowered by his first victim. The day the two passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center, people started forgetting about you. The world was heading toward a new chaos. You grieved with the Americans, spent that afternoon in front of the television, and then got on with your life like the rest of us.

Year after year after year.

It was once again winter when you traveled across the country with a lot of snow and a storm at your heels. The papers said: The Avenging Angel strikes again.

Avenging what, is the question.

You keep quiet.

It is November.

It is 2003.

It is night.

Fennried is a tiny village on the river Havel between Ketzin and Brandenburg, so insignificant that there’s no phone booth and no public mailbox there. A main street and a side street, thirty-eight houses, eight run-down farms, two cigarette machines. The bus stop is by the entrance to the village, a van parks outside the bakery twice a week, and once a week a van selling frozen food drives through the streets and honks its horn. It seems like the village is all the time asleep, the tallest building is a dilapidated church with a little cemetery, in which the gravestones have either fallen over or lean wearily against one another. In the run-up to elections the parties don’t bother to put up posters along the two streets. It’s an in-between place. It doesn’t get bigger, it doesn’t get smaller, it stagnates in its insignificance.

One of your fans wrote that the challenge was so great that you couldn’t resist it. He wrote that after lengthy planning you had finally decided to pay Fennried a visit. He made a sketch of your journey through the town, as if he’d prearranged it with you, and published the sketch on his blog. He spent four days in custody for that. He knew too much. The special unit let him go when they found out that he’d got the details from a policeman who’d been part of the investigation in Fennried.

It’s Thursday. After work you get into the car and drive toward Berlin. You had a premonition this time. Like a scratch in your throat. After you woke up you drank coffee and sensed the change. As if the wind had turned. You spent the day in the usual rhythm, you’d even gone jogging for an hour after work, and it was only then that you set off.

Just before Berlin you leave the highway and stop at a gas station. You eat a baguette with smoked salmon standing at a table and talk to the cashier. You learn that her husband doesn’t want to see the children anymore, and that fourteen years after the wall came down hardly anything has gotten better and lots of things have gotten worse. But the cashier smiles when she says that. You like her optimism. She gives you an openness that she hopes will be reciprocated. You smile back and then you laugh together and you drive on.

Only when you’ve passed Fennried do you realize how small the village is. You turn around and drive back. One minute twenty-six seconds from one end to the other. Half the streetlights don’t work. It’s nine in the evening and almost all the windows are in darkness. The light of a television flickers here and there.

You drive through the village a third time. The wind tries to push your car off the road. You lower the driver’s window and enjoy the cold. You stop by a derelict farm and wait. A strange car in a tiny village on a desolate winter’s day. The snow starts enfolding you. The lights in the windows go out. It’s a bit like that night when you were stuck in the traffic jam. Calm. Solitude. And it reminds you a little of the silence of the motel. Both times you surprised yourself. You knew your potential, but be honest, you didn’t know what you were really capable of. Your new knowledge gives you a feeling of certainty now. As if a racing car knew its own strength.

Shortly after one o’clock you get out of the car and walk up to the first house.

What are you looking for? What makes you kill? Is there a medical background to it? A tumor, perhaps, pressing against your cerebral lobe? A sickness that makes you bare your teeth? Did you learn it from somebody? Did somebody take you by the hand and show you that killing is liberating? Is it liberating? Is that why you’re on the road? Are you looking for salvation, purification, absolution? Is it instinct? Is it desire?

Even though the shutters are down over all the windows and terraces, most of the doors are unlocked. You go from house to house. You ring the doorbell if necessary. Sometimes a dog barks at you, and sometimes there’s a chain on the door. You’re always polite and friendly. They let you in, you kill them quickly and efficiently. Most of the people who live here are pensioners. You happen upon two women under fifty. One is a nurse, the other a retired doctor. The doctor’s bell is surrounded by dried flowers and her door is the only one that opens at the first ring.

A village, thirty-eight houses, fifty-nine inhabitants.

You don’t leave a single soul alive.

RAGNAR

The house smells horribly of rotten meat, and you wonder where the stench is coming from. The kitchen is surprisingly clean, even the floor has been mopped, while the living room is a rubbish dump. The sofa is shoved across the floor, there are toppled chairs, broken crockery, and vomit on the floor. The table is scattered with colored straws, drink cans, and plates with dried-on leftover food. There’s white dust in the cracks and you assume it’s heroin. It looks very much as if there’s been a party here.

“Looks like they had a party,” says Leo.

“That’s what I thought,” you say.

Leo points outside.

“I thought we might sit in the fresh air.”

The table on the terrace is laid. Leo has fetched pastries, coffee, and rolls from the bakery. There are napkins beside the plates. Leo knows what you like. Even if the situation doesn’t call for it, you want to maintain a clear line. Your men must not think anything’s different just because your brother is sitting dead in the basement and the merchandise is gone.

Tanner and David are already seated. David has opened his notebook. Leo pours the coffee. If your brother came out right now and asked who wanted freshly squeezed orange juice, everything would be the same as ever.

“Have you got a connection?”

David turns the display to face you. Tanner comes around the table with Leo. The picture is in color. Your brother always loved these electronic toys. The cameras are hidden in various places around the rooms, the picture definition is pin-sharp and vivid. You know some private porn movies have been made with them. Your brother knew no shame. Motion detectors activate the cameras as soon as someone walks through the picture. A two-terabyte hard drive collects the movies. David says he doesn’t know how full the drive is, and how many days back the recordings go, but he’s going to look into it.

“Show us the basement,” says Tanner.

David zaps through the rooms—kitchen, living room, for a moment you see yourselves sitting on the terrace, the downstairs bathroom, the upstairs bathroom, bedroom, loft, garage, and finally the vaulted basement. You see the swimming pool and the boy staring at it as if the pool were an oracle. He hasn’t moved from his chair. This is not going to take long, you think and are about to set the notebook aside so that you can have breakfast in peace, when Tanner jumps in.

“Go back one.”

David clicks back one. You see the garage. Tanner exhales noisily.

“I think we’ve got a new problem.”

You see what he means.

“Where are his cars?” you ask, surprised.

“The Mercedes is in the workshop,” says David. “Oskar dropped it off last week, he said the electronics had gone nuts.”

“And the Range Rover?”

Nobody answers. You stare at the deserted garage.

“People, where’s the fucking Range Rover?”

“I don’t know,” says David.

“Call the workshop and find out.”

David starts to get up, he’s overzealous.

“What are you doing?” Tanner asks him.

“I thought—”

“Sit down and let’s have breakfast. The boy is more important right now.”

David sits down again and pushes the notebook to the end of the table so that he can keep an eye on it. Leo asks if anybody wants the croissant. Tanner shares it with him. You try to concentrate on the food. You can’t get your brother’s face out of your head. His frozen gaze. You know that gaze. You’d recognize it anywhere.

He looked so surprised.

“Any idea why Oskar is sitting frozen in the basement with a stupid remote control in his hand?”

Of course no one knows what’s happened here. It makes you uneasy. If the boy weren’t in the basement, you would immediately check the recordings from the last few days yourself. It’s your job to know everything, to have everything under control. What did you miss? You assumed the girl would listen to you. You should have been able to predict all possible deviations. Right now the boy in the basement is your only hope of shedding some light on this mystery.

You look at your watch.

The boy has only nineteen minutes left.

Time has always been important to you. For years time was a barbed-wire fence put up by your father, which enclosed your family on five days out of seven and separated you from the outside world. The fence opened at weekends, and normal life returned. In this normal life you met your father after eight unsuspecting years.

Do you remember what it was like running through the streets at fifteen? Do you remember how everything felt transient and how you lived with the fear that there would be nothing afterward? That only the Now existed, and everything had to be savored before it was too late?

You lived for the weekends, because those two days meant freedom. No one talked about where your father disappeared to during that time. Oskar asked once, and your mother pressed her forefinger to her lips as if that answered all the questions. You saw the sadness in her eyes and understood that she was no different from you—your mother endured everything too, and didn’t know what was going on around her. Over the years your pity turned into raw rage. A mother has no right to be unsuspecting. She should protect her children. She should know what happened.

On the weekends you disappeared from home without explanation, just like your father. You were fifteen and no longer believed that he was accomplishing secret missions or working for the army. You tried to think about him as little as possible. You spent the night with friends in Bremen and existed in another reality. You drank, you smoked weed, you watched a load of bad videos and just waited to be eighteen so that you could disappear entirely from your old life.

And then he crossed your path.

How surprised you must have been when you were standing in line at the baker’s one Sunday morning after partying all night and you saw your father walking past the window. Your reaction was spontaneous. You charged out of the bakery and stared after him. There was nothing special about your father walking past you. Not even in Bremen, had it not been for the little boy on his right-hand side and the woman on his left. The boy was holding your father’s hand, the woman had linked arms with him.

Not your mother, not your brother.

It was only when they had disappeared around the corner that you set off running, you followed them four streets to an apartment block. You saw them going down the hall to the backyard. The boy ran ahead, the woman followed your father. You stood in the yard and watched their silhouettes moving up the stairs to the third floor.

The following week was like all weeks. The nightmare of your lives didn’t change, although that was exactly what you had expected. You were sure your father would see through you.

Nothing happened.

For five days you gritted your teeth.

On Friday night you left the apartment, on Saturday morning you were on hold, watching the windows of the apartment block.

The boy, the woman, your father.

You just wanted to catch a glimpse of the three of them together. You lied ruthlessly to yourself on this point, but that was okay, because the situation was unfamiliar. If something is unfamiliar you have to observe it, your father taught you. You didn’t know what you wanted, you just knew it would hurt in the end.

When they left the house, you were standing on the opposite side of the street. Your father was so different. You saw him laughing, you saw him stroking the boy’s head, then kissing the woman. Lovingly.

Your father wasn’t your father.

You had to look away.

Outside the cinema and opposite Burger King, outside a bookshop, a flower shop, outside the supermarket and the butcher’s. You followed them everywhere and all the way back to the block. You were starving and thirsty, but you didn’t drink or eat. You knew it would distract you. From your fury and helplessness, which raged inside you like competing forces, sending out waves of darkness.

Hour after hour.

Only when midnight approached and all the lights went out on the third floor did you turn away and run to a friend. You slept fitfully, and took up your post again at seven o’clock on Sunday morning.

The apartment block was waking up.

You knew they would be having breakfast and talking now, that the radio was on and the toaster was spitting out toast. One more Sunday in your life. You were so lonely that you started crying.

At half past twelve the woman left the house with the boy.

You retreated to the street. You didn’t want them to see you in the courtyard. As they walked past you the boy said, “And what if we have the ice cream first?”

The woman laughed and walked on with the boy.

The hall smelled of fresh paint and sisal. On every landing there was a rubber tree, the windows were clean, nothing looked threadbare. You climbed the three flights of stairs and had a choice of two doors.

On the left lived F. Hommer. On the right, in curly letters on a brass plate, was the name Desche. You ran your fingers over your surname and thought: So this is where I live.

It took you ten minutes before you could ring the bell.

He was wearing a white shirt and blue linen trousers. He was barefoot and looked like someone who had just come from the beach. You had never seen your father barefoot before. In one hand he held a newspaper, in the other a ballpoint pen. You couldn’t look him in the eye. You studied him as if he were a headless creature. The way his toes contracted for a moment. The way the newspaper in his hand trembled. You noticed the wedding ring and you imagined him taking his old ring off every time he left you, and swapping it for this one. You wondered how easy it must be for him to switch from one family to the other. And why? That was the question that wouldn’t let you go.

Why?

“Ragnar?”

Even his voice sounded different. Smaller, more insignificant. A voice without threat or danger. Just a voice. And you still couldn’t look him in the eye.

“Christ, boy,” he said, and took a step backward.

Perhaps it was an invitation, perhaps it wasn’t, but anyway you marched past him into the apartment. Shoulders hunched, fists clenched. The door fell shut. The sound of bare feet on the wooden floor. He touched your shoulder. His words were brittle.

“This must come as a bit of a surprise.”

He’s nervous, you thought, and wanted to ask so many questions, wanted to fire so many accusations at him, but you couldn’t do it, because your instincts took over. His hand on your shoulder. Danger. You didn’t even turn around. Your elbow slammed into his side. When your father doubled up, you grabbed him by the hair and threw him down the hallway. He crashed against one of the cupboards. Two of the doors flew open, some games fell out, a yellow tennis ball rolled over the floor. Your father was gasping. Before he could get up again, you twisted his right arm behind his back. You were your father’s son, he had drilled you, you knew what needed to be done. A bit of pressure was all it took and he was standing on tiptoes, his feet squeaked on the floorboards as you pushed him into the living room. Big sofa with matching armchairs, a television set with the sound turned down, a balcony. You wanted to throw him over the balcony. You wanted to hit him with the television. You had so many questions.

You let go of him.

He fell and lay on the floor, he held his arm and didn’t say a word as you stood over him and still couldn’t look him in the eye. Your breathing didn’t quicken, you weren’t even nervous, only one mad question made you uneasy.

What if this is his real life and I don’t really exist?

His eyes tirelessly sought your gaze, while you had been staring at his chest, the way it rose and fell as he breathed heavily in and out. You wanted to reach in and tear out his rotten heart and ask him how he could do that to you all. He knew what you were thinking, he said, “You wouldn’t understand.”

“I don’t want to understand,” you heard yourself saying, and as you said it you knew it was the truth. Sometimes any explanations are unnecessary, you learned that day. Since then the following thought has stayed with you:

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