Euphoria

by Heinz Helle

  The rest of us reach into our trouser pockets and feel the familiar piece of plastic, with or without chrome plating, safe in our hands. Just knowing that it is there, with the hundreds of numbers, names, addresses and appointments, the personalised ringtones, the photos, the movies. We are each carrying scale models of our lives in our pockets, and even if we will never be able to return to those lives it is reassuring to have something to remember them by, something we can touch and hold and look at. The displays are black. Gruber looks serious and methodical as he pulls the charger out of his pocket as well. He looks down; the plug is stuck. He uses both hands. Between his eyes a small, vertical crease appears. He is not angry, he is concentrating. Then, with a sudden jerk of his hand, the charging cable traces an elliptical trajectory through the air. Like a helicopter that is about to crash, I think. The rubber-coated wire orbits the two prongs and the converter, until the whole thing lands not far from where the phone disappeared below the surface just a few seconds before. Gruber looks satisfied. He is standing slightly hunched over, hands in his jacket pockets, his chin thrust forward, his shoulders sagging. Like someone who would really like to be a little bit taller, just not right now. From the spot where his Samsung smartphone with SVoice and ChatOn and all that has vanished into the water, a series of concentric circles are spreading.

  10

  We walk through leaves. We walk on gravel. We walk on shiny tarmac, on broken glass, shreds of rubber, metal, leather, fabric, plastic. We walk on oil. We walk on water. The puddles look like tar on the tarmac in the low evening sun. We are five different bodies, all with different legs, arms, brains, but our communal progress along this street, this meadow, this forest floor shot through with roots, connects us. It is a stable physical connection. We are soldered together like the electrons in an atom, by spin and gravitation. We are all moving in the same direction.

  For the most part Golde walks in front. Just so. Golde, who always used to say, Just so, when you said something he agreed with, with his broad nose and his no-longer-quite-so-closely-cropped hair. His tall, heavy frame moves across the left-hand lane of the A12 with the same self-confidence as when he used to skip the queue at the P1 club. Only occasionally, when a familiar name appears on a sign – Wörgl, St Johann, Jochberg, Kufstein – he seems to flinch slightly, although his gait does not change in the slightest. He keeps walking like before, but if you know a person you can tell even from behind how they feel. A tiny movement, a glance at the sky, a sigh, something so inconspicuous and normal that you realise: of course he has no idea if we’re on the right track either.

  Kufstein, says Golde.

  The pine trees beyond the crash barrier are oddly far apart. Usually it’s a single blurry, green wall. We press on. How far apart the lane markings are. How raw the tarmac.

  11

  The cabin was on a steep slope. It was as remote as it was old. An alpine hut from the eighteenth century. The bathroom had been added at a later date, but the living room was still heated by a wood-burning stove. The snow lay heavy on the pitched roof and on the railing at the edge of the terrace that jutted far out into the void between the slope and the mountain opposite. We rounded the final bend in the road. Huffing and puffing, we approached. We had walked on foot, made the ascent, as they say in the mountains, even though the road wasn’t steep; it was a snow-covered serpentine road, through forests and fields, passable by car only in the summer months. We thought we would probably drink a lot, get drunk that is, definitely, that’s how it is when you get a group of men together, and so it’s not a bad thing if we get a little exercise beforehand. The key was in the shed – a draughty affair full of tools and firewood, old skis and sleds with rusty runners. The wood was piled up to the roof, against the wall, chopped to size, dry and old, waiting to be transformed into ash and smoke. We brushed the snow off our boots and trousers and went inside. Groaning, we deposited the boxes of supplies in the corridor, the backpacks full of beer a little closer to the boiler in the pantry, lest it freeze. We stood there in our thick coats and hats and scarves, stood there in a semicircle around the old stove and waited. We were still warm from the walk up, so at first we didn’t notice how cold it was inside the cabin. Gruber lit the fire immediately. The room took a long time to warm up, but our sweat-soaked bodies quickly grew cold. Bloody freezing, one of us said. Gruber blew on the fire and put another log through the bright square opening. Once it was finally going, he closed the stove door, went into the pantry and switched on the electricity. With the lights on, the room looked warmer already. We put our boots, coats, hats and scarves out in the corridor and then swarmed out, our woolly-socked feet running up the slippery wooden stairs. Men with big backpacks tripping each other up, holding onto each other, jostling each other, swearing, yelling. The beds were assigned, and such and such didn’t want to share with so and so. Later we were sitting at the heavy dining table. In front of us: beer. No one said a word. Outside the window nothing but a gentle, boring grey, and I thought, perhaps a snowdrift would be good, a wall of innumerable tiny reminders of nature’s hostility to life. Of the possibility of closeness between people in a safe place.

  12

  Galaxy. The dome looks almost intact, not like a galaxy so much as a UFO, but the fact that this thing with its vaulted roof, the flat-roofed annexes, the car park and the takeaway stands used to be called Galaxy is impossible to miss: the skeletons of gigantic letters jut out from the roof into the surrounding area, visible from far away, charred, but still typographically sound. We don’t know why we’re going there. It seems obvious that if anything there will only be unpleasant things to see, in there, but a nightclub always exerts a strange pull, however rural and big and provincial it may be, and we know now that it isn’t the peculiar and unique combination of smells – liquor, energy drinks, beer, cigarettes, sweat and perfume – that creates that gravitational pull. This place only smells burnt. It’s strange. You know instantly from the smell that something burned here, even though this is not the usual burnt smell. We’ve never smelt anything like this, and yet we know: there was a fire here. The outer walls are intact. No windows on a club like this, of course, so we can’t peer inside. Instead we form an orderly queue, one after the other. Of course we move on after a moment’s hesitation, but the brass stanchions beside us, which were once connected by ropes, the wooden fence behind them, the little window in the heavy steel door – all of this still creates the impression of having to wait to be let in, for someone you don’t know and can’t see to decide that you are ready for the world on the other side of that door. The red carpet is black. The door has been barred from the outside: a bar stool has been wedged into the handles of both double doors. It is bent grotesquely out of shape, and the screws holding the door handles are loose, as if the doors had been pounded repeatedly with something heavy, or by many bodies all pushing together. I can feel the others behind me pushing. We want to get inside, and right now it’s up to me. I can’t open the door. My eyes scan the desolate forecourt. It’s surreally empty, surreally bright, surreally quiet. I picture the two thousand people who would have fitted into this dome, the hard, monotonous beats coming out of the expensive, crystal clear speakers, the carefully carefree dancing of the provincial youth, finding the technical means to make up for their distance from the nearest city, with their subwoofers and their dancing and their fucking. I picture the beautiful bodies of the farmers’ daughters, who stood to inherit the organic farm with an outbuilding for husband and child, and for whom happiness right then was some MDMA and a BMW and unprotected sex on the back seat. I picture the white skin of their faces, quivering in the lacerated beams of the strobe light, their lips and eyebrows pierced, just like their tongues, nipples and belly buttons, and for a split second I expect to see that which a moment later I never could have imagined, never would have thought possible, but am seeing all the same through the tiny window in the door, in the faint light of the cracked dome: hundreds of blackened bodies.

&nbs
p; What do you see?

  Nothing. Let’s go.

  13

  That evening we sit huddled together. We don’t make a fire, because we don’t have any paper, but it’s also not that cold, and in any case we’re not really in the mood for fire.

  Do you remember when we stole that fire extinguisher from the youth club, says Gruber.

  We had been drinking Gorbatschow vodka and orange juice in the car park, and then we got loud and silly and hyped up, and when we saw the huge bouncers and the even huger members of the local biker gang we got quiet and small again.

  We behaved ourselves and kept our mouths shut and waited for them to check us and give us our stamps. We stood there in the queue with the adorably made-up provincial girls, behind the wooden fences, and the girls had on figure-hugging outfits and their hair pulled back and a bit too much eyeliner. And the bouncers wore bomber jackets and earpieces and that street in Forstinning felt like Sunset Boulevard, and the youth club was the Viper Room, back then. And then we were inside and we rushed to the bar and ordered more screwdrivers, all except for Fürst, he wanted a Coke, he was on antibiotics. And then we’d already run out of money, so we took our half-empty plastic cups out onto the dance floor and stood there, not daring to dance. In front of us the girls, behind us the fire extinguisher. We didn’t notice it until Fürst pushed Drygalski into it. It didn’t hurt, because our coats were heaped on top of it. And he just held on. To the fire extinguisher and the coats. And just for fun, just to show how strong and clever he was, he picked it up, with the coats, and wrapped the coats around it, and then he bent over, holding the fire extinguisher in both arms like a baby, and then he shouted, I’m gonna be sick! I’m gonna be sick! Look out! Get out of the way! And the girls stopped dancing and parted like the Red Sea, then the bouncers, who parted the crowd outside, escorting us, professionally and seriously, out of the club, the one of us with the ball of coats who needed to throw up and his four-man team of chaperones, and we were still shouting, He’s gonna be sick!, long after we’d made it outside, and then we ran into the car park laughing at the stupid bouncers and we ran and laughed and threw the fire extinguisher onto the tarmac, again and again, as hard as we could, from greater and greater heights. Finally Gruber climbed up on the shed for the rubbish bins, and we handed him the heavy metal cylinder, and he held it above his head like Moses with the Ten Commandments, and then the thing made amazingly little noise when it hit the ground, and it didn’t even crack the smooth surface of the car park, and we came out of hiding and stood in a circle around the barely scratched fire extinguisher, and the excitement we had felt at our audacity and the anticipation of the foam quickly evaporated.

  Do you remember?

  Yes, we remember.

  14

  The next day we search the charred ruins of a petrol station for paper. Because of the extreme heat of a petrol fire, the little scraps don’t burn but rather dance around high up in the smoke, and they don’t fall back to earth until the fire has gone out.

  A frozen section is pretty impressive, Drygalski is saying. Twenty-five micrometres. Can you imagine how many slices you can get out of a mouse tumour?

  I find a scrap of paper and try to undo the knot in the plastic bag hanging from my belt. I can’t do it with one hand, so I put the paper in my mouth and give Drygalski a look.

  It’s crazy. You’ve got people lying there in the cancer ward waiting for someone like me to find the right ratio of fixative to tissue. Just lying there, waiting, wondering which will be finished sooner, my specimen or their lives.

  If they think it’s taking too long the hospital will just order it from another lab, I say.

  Yes, that’s true, he says, turning a charred body over onto its back with his foot and checking to see if it’s still got a wallet. In the cracked leather he finds the remains of a five-euro note. Good. Unburnt paper.

  15

  Whenever we pass through scrubland, we hold the branches to one side for each other. We touch the hard, sharp branches carefully until we find a handhold, and then we close our fingers around it, slowly, so we can pull back if we encounter thorns, and once our grip has closed around the branch, we push it ahead of ourselves, circling around its point of origin until the path is clear. Whoever is holding the branch remains standing until the others have gone past, and then he lets go. The branch snaps back into place, trying to grab hold of whoever was holding it, but by then we are no longer there.

  16

  Today we find a woman. She is covered by branches, by wet, rotting branches, probably not for warmth. We see her anyway. We see her accidentally: one of us is peeing on the bush next to her. It’s a sparse bush, strange that only the lower third should have branches and leaves and hair and hands. The one who was just pissing leaves his fly open and stands there for a while. He watches her in silence, we come closer because we can see from behind that he is looking at something. When we have formed a semi-circle behind him, he kneels down and touches her hair, and she doesn’t scream, doesn’t sob, doesn’t flinch, she doesn’t even close her eyes. She stares straight ahead without saying a word, without seeing what is right in front of her, she is staring intently at a space that we cannot access. Her clothes or what is left of them are tattered and torn. Openings everywhere, giving access to the openings in her body. She starts breathing faster. We can see her white, delicate hands on the shoulders of the first one of us when he is on top of her; we see her fingers, at first weirdly splayed out, then after a while buried in the fabric of the clothes covering the man on top of her; we see her head turned to the side, her eyes, which she has now closed after all, and then we hear her voice, a single note, again and again and again, and all of that makes it impossible not to think: you know you want this too.

  When it’s my turn, she doesn’t even raise her arms, and I am only able to finish because I can remember her hands, her hands on the back of the three men before me, and I move faster, I close my eyes and imagine her fingers clutching at a strip of cloth because that’s exactly what they want, what her fingers want, to hold on, that cloth, and then I finish.

  After me, it’s Drygalski’s turn, but he breaks it off, unsatisfied. She isn’t moving at all any more. Before we move on, Fürst bends down to her once more and asks her gently if she wants to come along. She doesn’t respond. We all stand around helplessly beside her motionless body in the bed of leaves. Then he rummages in his jacket pocket and pulls out a piece of bread, breaks off a corner and lays it on her stomach. On the way from the piece of bread back to his trouser pocket his hand briefly moves in the direction of her head. Perhaps he wanted to stroke her cheek one last time. Or her hair.

  17

  Gruber is doing press-ups. One, two. Then he stops.

  Tired, eh, says Drygalski, and Gruber looks at him blankly, as if he had remarked on the Earth’s gravitational pull today, or said how we weren’t getting any younger, or oh, how time goes by.

  Time goes by. I don’t know how that happens. I have no idea how it works, what physical process it is that causes that tilt, that teetering and falling from soon into now and then and then and then.

  And then Golde says: We have to go north. And what will we do there, I think. All you see are clouds and trees. For a moment all we hear is our breathing and wet snow falling from the trees.

  Golde starts walking. He steps confidently over the muddy ground covered in roots and slush. We hesitate. His steps seem a little too quick, too determined. We aren’t that convinced. He didn’t even look up at the sky, probably he just wants to waste time until it clears up or gets dark, and his eyes didn’t look into ours for very long. He wasn’t trying to convince us, he just wants to convince himself, and in order to do that he has to walk on now. Of course we follow him. When he hears our steps behind him he relaxes, the tension in his shoulders melts away, and at some point he turns around.

  Come on then.

  The hint of a smile crosses his sunken cheeks and dry lips. He is glad we’
re following him. So am I.

  We get to a railway crossing. The boom is down and instinctively we stop. Drygalski takes his last cigarette out of the red box of Gauloises and lights it. His heavy, powerful hands are resting on the red-and-white steel. With no cars or drivers who need to be able to see it from a distance, the boom seems excessively colourful. One by one we come and stand beside him. He smokes, we stand, the tracks gleam with rainwater. The smoke curls upwards, and intermittently it comes streaming out of Drygalski’s nose and then dissipates to nothing. We rest. It’s a good last cigarette. There’s no hard decision, no goodbye, no one has died. We are just standing at a railway crossing. Drygalski smokes. We wait. When he’s finished, we walk around the barrier. Even though I don’t expect there to be any trains using these tracks any more, I feel relieved when we’re safely on the other side.

  18

  Fürst stops at a wooden cross at the edge of the road and looks at the candles full of rainwater. His brown hair is plastered in strands across his forehead, like ropes that have been cut.

  I can’t go on.

  Then stay here.

  One by one we walk past Fürst. Drygalski stops and stands next to him. He turns and looks at him. Fürst looks down at the ground. The rain runs down their foreheads and noses. With his right fist Drygalski wipes the water from his eyes. Then Fürst bends down and unties the laces on his heavy hiking boots. They are tightly knotted, and he has to pull hard to get them open, first the left one, then the right, and then he ties them again, first the left one, then the right, and meanwhile Drygalski stands there looking at him and when Fürst gets back up he nods and then Fürst nods too and wipes the brown strands of hair from his face. They go on.