Euphoria

by Heinz Helle

  I imagine it won’t have taken long before they were there, the people in tattered ski jackets and hiking boots, cautiously emerging from the trees. The tanker slid a little farther, but they had taken it down, that was the main thing. I imagine that they went about their work at a leisurely pace. They were not in any hurry.

  I imagine that the driver in the cab was desperate to get away, but he probably also had a broken leg, and so he had to lie and wait, and he knew what was coming, later, when the silver tanks were empty, holding neither fuel nor alcohol nor milk nor melted snow, holding nothing but air, and then they sucked the last bit of diesel out of the reserve tank and poured it on the cab, which didn’t really catch fire at first, but soon began to burn, emitting terrible amounts of smoke, thick and excessive – a stupid, senseless, ostentatious fire, in which the driver’s broken body slowly disappeared. I imagine that he didn’t even scream.

  Come on.

  Golde is standing next to me. Drygalski and Gruber have gone on ahead.

  30

  That evening, Golde is the first to enter the ramshackle fishing hut we come across by a circular pond, surrounded by tall reeds, and of course he’s the only one to find some dry wood in there, a chair, surprisingly still intact, and of course he immediately smashes it to pieces while the rest of us tear the mouldy tar paper off the broken beams and bend bunches of reeds in half, lay the paper on top of them and then ourselves on top of that. It is wet, and the pond stinks, but this is the softest bedding we’ve had in a long time. We nestle up close to one another, as we always do these days. None of us wants to freeze to death, although we couldn’t say why exactly. We don’t know what we’re waiting for or what we hope to find on our trek through a landscape that is nothing but a constant reminder of the fact that nothing is as it used to be. Luckily, we don’t ask any questions any more either, we just lie there in the pale glow of Golde’s burning chair, and I feel Drygalski in front of me and Gruber behind me, and then I hear Gruber say: Love is a funny old thing.

  It’s your own expectations that are the problem, says Drygalski.

  Nacho is too brutal for my taste, says Gruber. All that blunt violence is just his way of compensating for the length he’s missing compared to Rocco. That silver bracelet. Those tattoos. His whole demeanour says: here’s someone who’s going to fuck you hard. And he does fuck them hard, but that’s all. That’s all that happens. He’s too focused on that. On that one big question, that his excessive roughness and aggression seem to shout out again and again: Am I fucking you hard enough? Which is another way of saying: Does anyone love me?

  I don’t know, I say.

  With Rocco it’s something else entirely. He doesn’t ask himself if he’s fucking them hard. He doesn’t even ask himself if he’s fucking them at all. He grabs those women and the first thing he does is examine them very closely, nice and slowly. He examines them like rare, timid animals: butterflies, lanternfish, Komodo dragons. Like works of art. Like some new, totally alien life form. He feels, smells, tastes every inch of their bodies. Their badly shaved armpits, the soles of their dirty feet, their arseholes.

  Nacho is interested in those as well, says Drygalski.

  But he’s only interested in their arses! And their vaginas, their mouths. To Nacho, everything else is irrelevant. Rocco wants to fuck their brains. Their DNA. It’s plain to see that that man would die of sorrow if there were no more women. That’s love.

  I shake my head. But he fucks them harder than anyone else. He fucks them as if they were pieces of furniture. Who says you can’t love furniture?

  I sit up and look into the fire. You can no longer tell that the thing that is burning there was once a chair.

  31

  The fear of being left behind, feverish and shivering, under a pile of damp leaves, when our legs can no longer carry us, when the path is forever uphill or our bodies’ defences start to fail, is negligible compared to the effort that each individual step costs us. We hate the walking. We hate the ground that our feet must push out behind us and upon which we would have to stand if we were to stop moving. We hate the cool, clean air streaming into our lungs with each of our ever shallower and quicker intakes of breath, because it is the same air that makes us cold in the parts where we sweat. We hate the light that reveals to us just how much ground and forest and hill there is in front and behind and all around us, how much empty space above, how many of us are still here, how many are not, and how emaciated, dishevelled, ugly and stupid we look. All in all, we don’t much care for this world any longer. But still we continue diligently to take one step after another into it.

  32

  The morning after our arrival in the cabin one of us made breakfast while the four others watched. Don’t let the oil get so hot. More bacon with those eggs. Less onion. More eggs. Less bacon.

  We ate. Then we began to wait for our weekend to be over. We looked out over the valley. Somebody smoked a cigarette. We messed around in the snow for a bit. We looked out over the valley. We made a snow bar; for a while the task repositioned us completely anew here on the mountainside, in the Alps, in the universe. Once the bar was finished, we each hurriedly poured ourselves a wheat beer and stood around this white cuboid jutting out of the steep slope. The weather was so-so, but at least it wasn’t snowing so you could stand to be outside. Golde, Fürst, Gruber and I drank our beers or looked at one another, our gazes jumping from face to glass to face, and whenever we weren’t holding our glasses to our mouths, we would smile at one another. Drygalski stood for a long while staring silently over the valley, and then he said: What a view, eh?

  33

  I wake up. The cold and the damp of the ground feel familiar, as does the tarpaulin against my hand and my cheek, and my mouth has been much too dry for too long for any saliva to have dribbled out overnight. Just to stay like this for a while longer. Not because it’s comfortable, but because getting up will have such terrifyingly little effect on my mood, my body temperature, my hunger.

  And then suddenly everything changes once again, all the colours, sounds, smells, from one moment to the next, and the sky makes a noise and fine drops begin to fall, sideways, to the rhythm of the wind that has come up equally suddenly. It is raining. In our situation – wrapped in tattered tarpaulins beneath a leaky roof made of half-heartedly interlaced branches, waiting for a time when we’re finally dry and warm or else dead – this occurrence represents something of a disappointment. But somehow it makes us happy to see how the world continues to do what it does completely without our assistance.

  We eat whatever we find. We eat a dog that’s been beaten to death. We eat two pigs that have been shot in the head. A half-burnt sheep. There is something degrading about eating things that just happen to be dead. Sure, a wiener schnitzel is dead too, but it was killed in order to be eaten. The animals that we consume, against our will, sometimes having to suppress our nausea, sometimes not, are just dead. Independently of us. They would have died one way or the other, regardless of whether we came along, picked them up, ate and digested them. Our ancestors were hunters, farmers, butchers. We are nothing but overgrown bacteria.

  34

  In the distance we see a pylon with several dark spots up at the level of the power lines. We get closer. We see the road leading away to the right, over the ridge, cutting what seems like an unnecessarily wide swathe through the trees on the mountainside. Above the road, eight power lines slice through the grey sky, leading away up the mountain to our left, where in a long, soft arc they disappear into the mist. We get closer. The dots on the pylon become clumps. Like drops of spilled electrical current. Two larger clumps where the cables meet the pylon; six or seven smaller ones farther down. The ground is also littered with bodies of all shapes and sizes. We see now that they are black. The ones hanging from the pylon too. We stop and look up. The clumps are clusters of burnt human bodies, fused together and with the cables and steel. Hard to tell how many. They’re too burnt, contorted, shrivelled. Some of
the smaller clumps have sharp appendages sticking out of them, like the stumps of broken branches.

  Feathers, says Drygalski, prodding a charred bird with his shoe.

  Do you think there’s still electricity in those wires, says Gruber.

  There’s one way to find out, says Golde, looking up.

  We move on. That evening we sit shivering in a bus shelter. Rain drums on the roof. We huddle together, take the four tarpaulins off our four torsos and wrap them around the single communal body that we now are. Below, eight cold legs. I close my eyes. Just before falling asleep, I hear Gruber’s voice: Probably the people got fried by the current first and then the birds came to eat their burnt bodies and that’s when they got fried themselves.

  Maybe, says Golde.

  Or maybe it was the other way around.

  35

  I think there are just too many things, says Gruber the following morning, and Golde emits a noise that sounds like a bad orgasm.

  I mean, all this stuff everywhere. Who is supposed to want it all? Everybody’s already got something, haven’t they? Most people have got something, at any rate. Hardly anyone has really got nothing.

  There have always been a lot of things, I say.

  But not this many, says Gruber.

  Hard to say, says Drygalski, and Gruber says:

  Fuck it. I’m talking about something much more basic than the things themselves. The really uncanny thing about it all is deeper, you know. When I’m standing there, in my warehouse, and the brown boxes full of men’s underwear are stacked all the way up to the ceiling, twenty feet high, that’s a lot of stuff, obviously, but it’s not really the amount that frightens me. Really, it’s something else. And then I think to myself: all these boxes have got to go somewhere, and all of these Y-fronts in all of these boxes come from somewhere. I mean, they’re not from here, they’re just passing through my warehouse. These Y-fronts come from a factory near Izmir, and the packaging comes from Belgrade, and the cardboard boxes that I’m packing them into, they’re from a paper mill outside Bruges. It’s all recycled, but still. All that stuff. And then the DPD lorry arrives and every screw, every floor mat, every fucking pebble under the brake pedal has travelled farther than an ordinary human being a hundred years ago ever went in his whole life. That’s fucking insane, isn’t it?

  Well, I say.

  It is, though, Gruber says. When everyone always wants to go somewhere other than where they are, and are always coming from somewhere other than where they want to go, then how is anyone ever supposed to know where they are?

  Where’s home, you mean?

  No, I mean the movement as such, the constant back and forth, the never-being-able-to-stay-put-for-five-minutes. Let’s assume the world is an organism and all of us and all of our products are the molecules that make it up – then the world would be running a high fever.

  Drygalski shakes his head: Apart from us, nothing else around here is moving very much.

  I can see that. I don’t mean now, obviously. I mean before. I mean, we should have seen this coming. And what would we have done then?

  Later it begins to snow. Flakes of various sizes follow various intersecting trajectories towards the ground, blown, now gently, now not so gently, by the mercurial wind. Twigs, branches and trees take up the movement of the wind, and in the space between, in front of me, I see three backs, with three heads lolling above them, swaying through a gradually whitening forest, six shoulders leaning alternately left and right, in direct correlation to which of the feet below is touching the ground. It doesn’t look like a fever. More like an infinitely slow falling. As if gravity no longer worked along the shortest distance between a body and the centre of the Earth but rather in gigantic, concentric circles forever forcing us onward, farther and farther, around the entire globe, and finally to our knees.

  36

  The last morning in the cabin had had something conciliatory about it. We thought we would soon be returning to our functions in society, we were looking forward to our own beds, with our own televisions or else our own bedtime reading. Some of us were also looking forward to seeing our wives. And so we packed with gusto and were relieved that we weren’t all that hung over. There was a time when we would have had shots, not just beer. One of us would have puked. And the mountain air is pretty good for you, after all. We fastened the straps on our backpacks and placed them by the front door. We made the beds, we rolled up our sleeping bags, did the dishes in ice-cold water, and when our hands went numb one of the others would take over. We made one last pot of coffee, and poured it into five mugs. We washed up the pot right away, took the filter out of the coffee maker, wiped off the countertop, put the radio back on top of the cupboard. We turned off the electricity, and the water. First you closed the main valve, then you let the remaining water run out of the pipes in the kitchen and in the bathroom. One of us swept the floor. One of us tied up the rubbish bags and put them next to our backpacks by the door. Then we stepped out on the terrace with our coffee mugs, to take in the view one more time, and to assure ourselves that we were really here, all of us together.

  We stood there, sipping our coffee, looking down into the valley, not saying anything. We stood there looking down into the valley. Steam rose from our mugs. The shapeless clouds. The snow. Your hand holding the cup, the one in your pocket. In the early morning, when you just step outside for a moment with your cup of coffee, you don’t need a hat. The snow cannons were still off. It had been a nice weekend. But it was also OK that it was over. Perhaps this would be the last snow bar we ever built. Things we had to do on Monday. The cold on our heads. Thick, black smoke over the village in the valley. It was on fire.

  37

  No idea if this was an engine fire or an aerial bomb, says Golde, stepping into a reddish-brown puddle in his hiking boots.

  Why an aerial bomb? There are no aerial bombs any more. The only place you might find one is during an excavation.

  In the puddle around Golde’s foot there is a charred hair clip. Gruber shoves Golde out of that mess. Drygalski pretends to look at the trees by the edge of the road, as he always does whenever things aren’t entirely harmonious, and I stoop to pick up that little piece of metal with the wavy edges.

  Today we’ve got missiles. Surface-to-air missiles, surface-to-surface missiles, air-to-air missiles, air-to-surface missiles.

  Cruise missiles, says Drygalski.

  Exactly, says Gruber.

  Shut up, says Golde.

  Click-clack goes the clip in my hand. The others stop for a moment. They weren’t expecting to hear this sound in the midst of a discussion among grown men about modern weaponry, and it takes their brains a surprisingly long time to associate this sound with the child’s seat in the burnt-out Fiat Multipla. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, I say. Right now they would probably be your best bet.

  38

  That’s my stick, says Golde, pointing to my hand. Drygalski’s eyes go wide.

  I found it, I say. Back there next to that tree with the big patch of lichen, it was lying on the needles with one end sticking up in the air because the other end was lying on a root. I picked it up. I’m holding it in my hand at this very moment. How can you possibly say that it’s your stick?

  Give it to me.

  Get your own, I say, but without any emphasis in my voice, without any real conviction, more like when someone asks you how you are and you say fine. Gruber pricks up his ears. Slowly he turns his head towards me and Golde. There is a glint in his eye, his features remain oddly cold yet tense, he wants something, you can tell, he has an urge, a desire, but it has nothing to do with questions about the nature of ownership – or the ownership of nature. He gets up and walks towards us, towards Golde and me and Drygalski, who is still sitting down, and who, like me, has a dry, brittle stick in his hand. Gruber comes closer. He wants to see what is about to happen. I sense an alertness inside me, a directedness that doesn’t care towards what, a waiting that can suddenly be
come movement, lunge, kick, punch or bite. I think of dogs by the dinner table when a piece of meat is proffered. Then something snaps, and I see Drygalski holding out half of his dry stick to Golde, and Golde looks at it, and then he takes the stick and throws it in a high arc over his shoulder and carries on staring at Drygalski, and Drygalski very quickly looks away, and Golde keeps staring at him, and then he erupts into laughter, and then Gruber starts to laugh as well, and then me, we’re all laughing and Drygalski is scratching his chin and looking up at the tree he’s sitting next to as if he were with the bark beetle commission. He’s forcing his eyes to follow the grooves in the bark: aha, this one swerves to the right. And Golde is clutching his belly, and Gruber is slapping his knee, and I thump my fist on the soft forest floor, ha-ha, it’s so soft, and I give it another thump, harder this time, and we laugh and laugh and wait for something to come and resolve itself the way it always used to when we laughed, but nothing is resolved. Then we stand there panting, like after a fight. Even though I’m exhausted, tonight I can’t sleep. Tonight I keep my eye on Golde.

  39

  A supermarket with a broken glass door is a familiar sight by now. We know how to navigate them safely, and just because we’re hungry that’s no reason to rush. Admittedly, the hole in the glass is low down, you have to duck, really you have to do more than duck, you have to crawl, on your stomach, and Golde doesn’t like to crawl. In any case he crawls very hastily and fitfully, or just awkwardly somehow, impatiently, and as soon as he thinks he’s through he jumps to his feet, but in fact he’s not through, and the long, sharp shard of broken glass in the door frame pierces his jacket, his jumper, his shirt. The shard pierces his skin, the muscles in his lower back, his kidney, and judging by the way he is screaming, probably some of the toxins that his kidney was filtering have seeped directly into some nerve ending or other. He lurches forward, he roars, falls, lies, twitches.