The evening before the regatta I weighed 60.4 kilos. I put on two tracksuits and ran seven kilometres along the river. Then I had a hot bath. My mother woke me two hours later. I’d fallen asleep in the water and was cold and feverish. I barely slept.
When I stood on the official scales in the boathouse the following morning, the dial pointed to sixty. They were heavy old doctor’s scales. Ludwig got on after me and they immediately tipped to the left, then stopped with a clack. The referee pushed the counterweight a little to the right and the scales came to a standstill. He pushed a little more and the dial slowly rose. It stopped at sixty-five kilos—or perhaps a touch more. But we qualified for the race.
Perhaps those ten days leading up to the race weren’t our happiest—we hardly talked, and we moved more slowly than usual, one of us weak and the other bloated. But even so I have fond—very fond—memories of those days. It is true that we were moving in different directions, but even that we did in sync, so that it all came right in the end. Any weight that Ludwig put on, I lost. That, I think, can only be described as a higher level of friendship—one of the highest.
I don’t want to dwell on the race. Considering our physical condition, we didn’t do too badly. We led for a long time and weren’t overtaken by the Potsdam twins until just before the finish. It was so close that the referees had to confer at some length. When we got out of the boat, I took Ludwig in my arms. That was unusual for us—almost unheard of, in fact. But I was happy. We’d had a difficult summer, but all in all, we’d got through it pretty well. The few times we’d hugged each other in the past—after winning a race, or when one of us had a birthday—we’d made a mess of it. We both put our heads to the same side and almost bumped noses, or else we got our hands and arms in a twist. Somehow we weren’t good at it. But this hug was a success. We came together effortlessly and then stood nestled against one another on the jetty for a while. Yes, nestled against one another—why shouldn’t I put it like that? It felt as if Ludwig were actually clinging to me—refusing to let go until he was ready. I think of it as one of those long embraces you see in films before one person boards a steamer and leaves the other behind.
We stayed in the showers a long time. I cupped my hands in front of my chest to catch the water and then let it run over my belly or threw it over my back. Ludwig sat opposite me, cross-legged, his head bowed, the jet of water hitting his neck. We said nothing. I hardly noticed when the others joined us, the victors noisy, the losers subdued.
Ludwig didn’t want me to go home with him. He said he had to revise for his driving test. I went to a kiosk, where I ate two currywursts and drank a beer, which made me tipsy. My father, his wife and my mother stood there talking, first about the race and then about the department store. It’s so touching when parents make little victories out of their children’s defeats. I didn’t hang around for long.
In the evening I watched TV with my mother—something I hadn’t done for ages. She’d cooked a stew, which we ate in front of Crime Scene, and I made her very happy by eating three helpings. I went to bed early and then couldn’t get to sleep. I couldn’t stop worrying about Ludwig. He’d been so desperate to win, and now we’d lost. He took such things very much to heart. I imagined him lying in bed, listening to the cars on the bridge and brooding. He could brood endlessly, turning some little thing over and over in his mind until it seemed so big it was overwhelming.
I think I fell asleep eventually, but soon afterwards I was woken by a strange dream. I got up and put on my clothes, slipped out of the flat, fetched my bike from the cellar and set off. I don’t think I ever cycled to Ludwig’s as quickly as I did that night. I hardly looked at the road, looking up at the bridge instead, trying to make out whether there was anything there, but it was a dark night and I couldn’t see a thing.
At Ludwig’s parents’ house, I pushed open the garden gate. All was dark. The door was locked, and I couldn’t get into the house. I looked to see if there was a bundle anywhere nearby—the kind of bundle the farmer had been. There was nothing.
Please, I thought, please, please, don’t jump. It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever imagined: I’m walking through the garden and somebody hits the ground beside me and that somebody is Ludwig. I know now that I was being hysterical, and I should have known it at the time, but you can’t always stop yourself. Isn’t it worth asking, anyway, whether hysteria isn’t one of our higher states of mind? It liberates us, makes us open, shows how much we care. It often looks silly, I admit, but hysterical people are actually humans at their most honest.
I climbed the hill as quickly as I could. There was nobody on the bridge. I was relieved, but continued to the middle all the same. It was a cool night and a light rain was beginning to fall, the first rain for some weeks. When I turned to walk back, I got a shock—someone was coming towards me. But it wasn’t Ludwig—it was Vera.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘Saving your life,’ she said.
That stung me, because as she approached, I’d been thinking about how I could talk her out of jumping off the bridge. I had ignored the light in the workshop three times. That was no kind of reason, of course, but to have that driven home to me so bluntly gave me a jolt all the same. You don’t want anyone committing suicide on your account—nobody does. But at the same time, there’s no greater proof of love. Love is not, after all, diminished by unhappiness—indeed, unhappy love is often greater than the happy kind. I have since seen a lot of people I know make others unhappy to obtain proof of their love. It’s a difficult topic—one I wish I could talk over with Ludwig still.
Vera said she’d seen me standing in the garden and followed me. Ludwig was in bed, she added, and she was sorry we’d lost. We walked arm in arm to the end of the bridge, and I held her hand as we climbed down the slope. I didn’t have sex with her. It was too cold and wet to lie on the grass, and it wouldn’t have felt right just then anyway. Under the shelter where the motorbikes were parked, she hugged me, and I could tell she had missed me. I could tell, too, that I had missed her. I told her I’d talk to my mother—that I was sure she wouldn’t mind Vera staying the night sometimes. I wasn’t sure that was true, but my mother was hardly going to stop me. I also said I would talk to Ludwig.
5
The next morning I was very excited. Ludwig wasn’t at school because he was taking his driving test—car and motorbike. The driving test was the one we were most afraid of—more than our leaving exams, more than all the other tests and exams that lay ahead. Failing was always unpleasant, but failing your driving test was unthinkable. There was a time when it was the most embarrassing thing we could imagine—and at that age we were capable of imagining all kinds of embarrassment. Driving a car, riding a motorbike—those were things you had to be able to do.
I’d spoken to my mother at breakfast and told her I’d be having a girl round soon. She thought it was a nice idea and said she’d been wondering why I’d never brought a girl home—I was almost eighteen, after all. I let her fry me two eggs, and then filled up with toast and muesli and yoghurt.
‘She’ll be staying the night,’ I said.
My mother, who only had coffee for breakfast, looked at me sadly over the rim of her cup, and I suddenly knew how she had looked at my father when he told her he was moving out. She said nothing, and I knew that she hadn’t said anything then, either. I picked up the newspaper and began to read the sports section. I couldn’t see my mother anymore, but I knew what face she was making. It was as if it was burning its way through the paper. She had these little movements she made as she raised the coffee cup to her mouth. Then she held the cup to her lips for a long time and stared over the rim into space.
I skipped my last class and rode over to Ludwig’s. He was crouched by the Triumph, cleaning the tank. Ludwig’s father smiled when I burst in at the door, and I knew Ludwig must have passed. I was almost annoyed, because I’d wanted to hear it from him.
‘Well?’ I cri
ed.
‘A walkover,’ he said.
I pulled him up and hugged him, but it was one of those hugs we made a mess of. We soon moved apart, each looking the other way. But as I said, it didn’t mean a thing—we weren’t good at it, that’s all.
I was happy for Ludwig. I got him to show me his licence and give me a blow-by-blow account of the test. He told me briefly how it had gone.
‘Well, how about it?’ he asked.
‘You bet,’ I said.
The Triumph started up at the first kick. It was no surprise to hear her—we’d often left the engine running when we were fitting the carburettor and the ignition. But it was different hearing her when we knew she’d soon be on the road and that Ludwig and I would be riding her. Her gurgle was like a song we’d composed only for ourselves. She was a beauty, the most beautiful motorbike in the world. The tank was drop-shaped, the saddle flat, the tachometer set into the elongated headlamp, the single cylinder tilted slightly forward—the whole thing black and chrome and scarlet.
I helped Ludwig do up his helmet, then we set off. Right to the end, it was an amazing ride—I can’t deny it. It was late summer—already autumn by the calendar, but at midday the light was still that of a summer evening, a warm, bright light—and I was sitting on our Triumph T20 Tiger Cub with my friend Ludwig, who was now also my brother, riding along narrow, unmarked roads through rolling hills dotted with black-and-white half-timbered houses, past grey-green meadows and fields of stubble, the leaves on the trees green and yellow and brown.
I remember the feeling of being on that motorbike as if it were today. I can still feel every movement, almost as if I were swaying again, the way we swayed on the bends. I hear the engine, feel the forward thrust—second gear, third gear, fourth gear—a small judder as the gears engaged, as if the Triumph were stretching. She roared along, eating up road and countryside—fourth gear, third gear, second gear. The brake gripped, the engine choked—an indignant, throaty gasp—and we slid forwards on the saddle. The motorbike seemed to grow shorter for a moment and we leant into the bend. I can still feel the thrill in my belly, though I haven’t experienced it again since.
We passed through villages where people stood and stared after us, stood and listened to the sound of the engine dying away. I didn’t know where Ludwig was heading—he seemed not to have a goal, but to decide which way to take at every fork. Once we stopped for a cup of coffee in a cafe garden and sat there gazing at our motorbike. I wanted to tell Ludwig about Vera, but I kept quiet—not every moment is the right moment to say something. He thumped me on the shoulder before we set off again, and I think I know what he meant. It was growing cold and I shivered a little, but I wanted to keep going, on and on forever.
I’ve often driven back to the crossroad—I did take my driving test in the end. I park the car on a dirt track, wonder whether to get out, and then get out—I’ve never not got out. The road has no markings. It winds its way down the hill—just thinking about it is enough to make me sway: right, left, right, and then straight for perhaps half a kilometre to the crossroad. There are milestones, reflector posts in serried ranks like little soldiers on parade, and three trees, one on the left, two on the right—trees that I’ve seen in winter, spring, summer and autumn, but that were most beautiful that cold winter a few years ago, when they were covered in ice and glittered in the sun as if behind glass. Trees are usually most beautiful in autumn, of course. These three turn a yellowish red. I don’t know what kind they are. They didn’t obstruct the view, according to the police.
I don’t bring a wreath anymore. That doesn’t mean my grief has faded—it never will. There came a point when the time for wreaths had passed, that’s all. Maybe I thought the crossroad should be given a second chance—that it shouldn’t always be marked by death.
I am, as it happens, unmarried—and not attached in any other way. I confess I have a bit of trouble with relationships. It’s not that I have no luck with women—far from it. There are, after all, few places where you come across more young women than in a department store, and I can claim success even with those strangely stiff but rather beautiful creatures from the perfume department, which earns me the envy of a lot of my colleagues. That’s despite working in groceries, where we don’t always manage to keep our overalls clean. It’s strange, when you think about it, that food and dirt should be so closely related. But I can’t complain—my female colleagues like me and no one realises I limp. I’ve learnt to make it look as if I’m walking normally, so the only person who notices is me. I have to make a few small adjustments when I walk to force my bent bones into position. I’ve got used to it. I never seem to manage more than a few weeks with a woman, though. I don’t know why. But what the hell, I’m all right.
Of course I miss Ludwig, but I don’t want anyone thinking that means I’m always feeling down. Grief is a form of company, after all, so I’m never alone. Not that I’d ever talk to Ludwig or anything—I don’t believe in any of that. It’s just that I often wonder what he would have thought or done or said in a particular situation. At such times I can really be quite cheerful. I’ve often had to smile to myself lately when I’ve come across articles about cloning. I have my doubts whether scientists will ever do as good a job of getting one person to resemble another as Ludwig and I did.
What I can’t get out of my head is that business with the helmet. I was conscious when I hit the road. I felt no pain, not even in my left leg, and I saw everything that went on around me. To begin with, though, I saw only one thing, and that was the helmet. It sailed into view, landed on the asphalt, bounced once, travelled a short distance, landed again, and then rolled down the gently sloping road—a red helmet. It crashed into a reflector post, bounced back onto the road and spun on the spot. A car braked and stopped just short of it. The helmet kept spinning.
Looking back, I feel as if I lay there for hours watching it spin. Why is that helmet spinning over there? I wondered. That’s Ludwig’s helmet—red with a white stripe. He had it on his head just now. I saw it—he was sitting in front of me. And where, I asked myself, is his head? Is it still inside the helmet? Is that possible? Is that Ludwig’s head spinning over there?
Later I was told that I cried. It didn’t embarrass me. There were people around me. A blue light pulsated overhead. As I was carried away, I saw Ludwig lying on the road, his head still attached to his body.
The helmet, and the thought that Ludwig’s head might be inside the helmet—those were my worst memories of our accident. I don’t remember the crash itself. As we approached the crossroad, I saw the truck coming from the left, but then I looked right. There was something there—I’ve forgotten what. I often wonder what it was that caught my eye, but it doesn’t come back to me.
Standing at the crossroad today, I think: Surely it has to come back to you now—but my mind’s a blank. The crossroad is set in lovely countryside, with hills and trees and a black-and-white half-timbered farm a little way off—it’s very pretty. They’re nice people there, too. I sometimes talk to them when I’m here—we chat about the weather and the milk yields. Little encounters like that give me a great deal of pleasure these days.
There ought to be a bench—I’m sure a lot of people would be glad to stop and rest here.
Maybe it was a hot air balloon I saw—there are a lot of hot air balloons round here. Maybe it popped up behind the trees, a big balloon with a basket hanging from it, full of people. Lovely, the lazy way they glide along. The people in the baskets like it when you wave at them, so I always do. I was surprised when Ludwig didn’t brake. The truck was too close, and it had right of way. Maybe Ludwig saw the balloon too and was distracted—it’s a nice, comforting thought that the last thing he ever saw was a balloon. Or perhaps he misjudged things. He hardly had any experience.
6
Vera is coming tomorrow. I haven’t seen her for ages, and I’m looking forward to it, though I’m sure it won’t be entirely easy, given all that’s happened. Af
ter Ludwig died, we were together for another two years—good years, but difficult too. She lives in America now. She told me on the phone that she does something involving computers and has a child. I’m happy for her, I really am.
I’ve been over her for a long time now and have no desire to get back together, but I sometimes wonder whether it was inevitable that we broke up. It was a pretty stupid reason, if you think about it. We were watching the news together and heard about a nasty accident that had taken place because a truck’s brakes had failed—four people dead, six severely injured. For some reason I remembered what Ludwig had said when he was sanding the brake lever of the Triumph—how strange it is that somebody’s life can depend on a stupid bit of metal, on whether you pull it at the wrong moment, or don’t pull it at all. I told Vera about it, and when the news was over she began to ask me funny questions. When exactly had Ludwig said that? Had she and I already been together at that point? And so on. I didn’t understand what she was getting at, but I answered all her questions.
‘He did it on purpose,’ she said later, when I was cleaning my teeth and she was sitting on the toilet.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘The accident,’ she said. ‘The only reason he built the motorbike was to weld the two of you together forever. To unite you once and for all. And to take revenge on us.’
It’s impossible to describe how surprised and horrified I was. An unpleasant exchange followed that I won’t go into here, except to mention something I said to Vera: ‘You’re just jealous of what Ludwig and I had,’ I said. I probably shouted. To this day I can’t bear it when people speak unfairly of Ludwig. The other day, for instance, I spoke harshly to my father, when for some reason he found it necessary to remark that Ludwig had been a pretty withdrawn sort of fellow. ‘You probably didn’t let him get a word in edgewise with all your stories about Tupperware and pressure cookers,’ I said, among other things. That shut my father up.
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