Taja laughs weakly.
“That’s stupid, I’m not a junkie.”
You all just look at her. Even though you have barely any experience of hard drugs, it was the only topic at school that you really listened to. Pure self-defense, because you can never know what’s going to cross your path.
Schnappi suddenly wakes up and sits upright on the deck chair as if she’s been struck by lightning. She looks confusedly around and says, “Girls, I thought I was in a war.”
“What sort of war?” you ask.
“I don’t know. War is war. We were all trapped. We were in this run-down house, pretty much of a dump, and we couldn’t get out.”
She points at Nessi and you.
“You and you. We were standing in an ancient kitchen and there was this zombie or something. But not the kind that bites you, it wanted something. And there was blood flowing down one of the walls, it was really steaming, it was so hot. And you …”
She points at Taja.
“… hid yourself. Why did you hide? In the dream it drove me half nuts not knowing where you were. Do you have any idea why it should be me dreaming that kind of shit?”
She points at the water.
“And I’m thirsty.”
Nessi passes her the bottle. Schnappi drinks and notices Taja’s chalk-white face and asks if she’s missed anything. Ruth gives it to her straight.
“Taja’s a junkie.”
“Crap, I’m not a junkie!”
“How full was that bag before you got going on it?”
“I don’t know.”
Schnappi looks around, confused.
“What’s the problem? Her father’s dead, let her be a junkie for a few days.”
“Thanks,” says Taja, and seriously believes she is off the hook. That means she doesn’t know Schnappi very well. Miss Saigon nods contentedly and performs one of those elegant lane changes that you’ll never quite get used to.
“Be honest, what’s up with your mother?”
Taja looks at you, appealing for help, as if one of you could put the brakes on Schnappi. No one can.
“What … What do you mean? What should be up with my mother?”
“She’s alive, she’s in Norway. Aren’t you going to phone her and say hello? I’m sure she’ll want you to live with her. It’s better than moving to the Ruhr. Norway’s fantastic. People up there are financially very well-off, even though their country has the highest suicide rate. But so what, you can’t have everything. I mean, if I were you and not me, the last thing I would want to do would be to pack my gear and move to Dortmund. Seriously! Why on earth would you go there? So give your mother a call, I’m sure she’ll be delighted.”
“Dream on,” says Ruth.
“Why?”
“Think about it. Taja has no memory of her mother, she wouldn’t recognize her if she were standing in an elevator with her. It’s not one of those TV series where everyone cries and hugs at the end. Taja can’t just call her and start chatting. Forget it. And anyway, who says her mother even wants to see her?”
“A mother is always a mother,” Schnappi explains.
“Like your mother?” you can’t help saying.
Schnappi keeps her cool.
“No one’s as fucked up as my mother,” she says and turns back to Taja, eyes wide. “She might even come here.”
“Why would she do that?” Taja asks, startled.
“Perhaps because you’re her daughter? Like if you were my daughter and somebody’d kidnapped you and you’d been missing for fourteen years, I’d be on the next plane out to see you.”
Taja’s face melts, her fear has gone, her voice softens.
“Thanks.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
Ruth, sensitive as ever, ruins the moment.
“But your mother could have done that at any time in the last fourteen years.”
“She could have, but she didn’t,” Schnappi says poisonously, as if it were a pearl of wisdom.
Nessi sighs.
“Christ, Schnappi, I wish you’d go back to sleep. I’ve been listening to you for over five minutes, and you’re giving me a headache.”
“But you woke me up, or who was that?” asks Schnappi and looks around, bats a fly away, and wants to know if this is a talk show and whether there’s anything to be done about these bloody insects.
End of discussion.
Nessi says the smell is too much for her. Schnappi says she can’t stand flies. Well, you’re a lot of help, you think, and leave the two of them sitting on the terrace. You follow Ruth into the kitchen. Taja insists on coming too. Pale and trembling, she follows you and won’t let you shake her off.
The stench is overwhelming. The packets of meat from the freezer are all over the pantry, some of them have leaked and left smeary pools of blood on the floor, others have fallen on it and burst.
“So why didn’t you put them in the fridge?” you ask.
“I was going to, but I …”
She shrugs.
“… must have forgotten.”
You count the packs and stop at thirty. Rotten meat, rotten fish, the kitchen is buzzing with flies. You wave them away, they get caught in your hair and try to creep into your nostrils. It reminds you of holidays in Crete, when your aunt wanted to barbecue cutlets in the evening. Often you would go out to eat and forget to put the cutlets away. The window was open, it was scorching high summer. In the morning the kitchen was full of flies and the first maggots were moving in the meat.
“The flies must have laid eggs,” you say. “We need to get rid of this shit before we puke all over ourselves.”
Taja fetches garbage bags and rubber gloves. You pick up all the packages while you breathe through your mouths. The flies rage and cover you as if you were made of light.
After you and Taja have carried out the last garbage bag, you stay outside as Ruth wipes down the walls and cleans the floor. Taja asks you for a cigarette. You lean against her, shoulder to shoulder, and give her a light. The burning tobacco smells better than anything you’ve smelled recently. How nice it would be now to stand on the playground and have a teacher ream you out, telling you that you can’t smoke on the playground. That and no other problems. You sigh. You don’t feel as if you’re sixteen anymore, you both feel old and tired, you stand beside the garbage cans and look up at the open kitchen window as if it were a painting and you were visiting the most boring exhibition ever. Flies fly in, flies fly out. Taja’s hands tremble. You wonder how you’d feel if you’d been wasted for that long. You get a hangover after two glasses of wine. Taja rests her head on your shoulder.
“I feel terrible.”
“You should have called.”
“I know.”
Silence for a moment, you both smoke, you ask, “Where does that stuff come from anyway? I mean, nobody just has a pound of smack in their pantry.”
“My father was looking after it.”
“Why did he—”
“I don’t know, Stink.”
She takes her head off your shoulder. You’ve entered forbidden territory. She drops her cigarette and rubs the ember onto the stone slabs with the tip of her shoe. You shut up and wait to see if she’s got anything more to say. She does.
“I once heard him talking about it on the phone. You know, he’s always loved that gangster shit. And it wasn’t about the money, he had enough of that for four, it was about people trusting him. And he loved stockpiling stuff. You’ve seen the basement.”
For a moment she’s your Taja again. Fire in her eyes. Chin jutting. Her pageboy cut reaches her ears and frames her pale face. Not for the first time you’re envious of her bravery in having her hair cut. You could kiss her. My Taja, you think, when she goes on to ask if you’d like to take a look at his stash.
The hiding place is in her father’s studio in a corner between the keyboards and a mixing desk. It’s an old metal case with deep scratches in the top. You thought if some
one was storing drugs, then in a safe, please. The metal case is ridiculous. It’s full to the brim with gear and has a false bottom. You take out nine bags of the white powder. You also find two bags full of pills, six slabs of hash, and several little bottles containing a brown liquid.
“Wow!” you say, surprised.
Of course you’d worked out what was going on here ages ago. Taja is trying to shake off her guilt by showing you everything. You’re her witness, and in the end you’ll be able to say: God, there was nothing Taja could have done about it, there was so much stuff, no one could have resisted it. That’s fine by you, you’re happy to do that for her. Anything is better than a Taja wandering around the streets with gloomy eyes and feeling guilty. The sight of the drugs has left her wide awake. Maybe she’s waiting for you to look away for a moment so that she can have a noseful.
In that case she’ll have a long wait.
Taja claps the lid shut and says, “You haven’t seen the basement yet.”
The second half of the basement is a huge vault that reminds you of those movies where sexy women lie in wait for mean-looking guys to finish them off with a few karate blows. Of course the women are wearing bikinis and they’re all oiled up, because there’s a swimming pool in the middle of the room. You can see the edge of the pool in the light of the open door. The air conditioning is working, but however well it’s working, you’d recognize that smell anywhere.
You take a deep breath as Taja feels her way along the wall and flicks a switch. A blue glow rises from the pool, and from above, spotlights cast soft beams on the floor. Taja stops by the edge of the pool, the blue light flows around her like mist.
“I was never allowed to talk about it, I swore on my life. I had my secrets, he had his. But now …”
She falls silent; you know what she wanted to say.
Now that he’s gone.
You join her and look into the pool. Your mouth drops open.
“Is that actually real?”
“It’s realer than real. He’s been working on it for years.”
“But in a swimming pool?”
You learn that the swimming pool was a present for an athlete who won some sort of medal for breaststroke at an Olympic Games six years ago. The relationship didn’t last long, and when they split up Taja’s father didn’t know what to do with the pool.
“So he turned it into this.”
The bottom of the swimming pool is covered with dark, rich soil. Sodium lamps hang level with the edge of the pool. You see an irrigation system, fans, and floating above it all is the aeration system. You guess that the pool is twenty feet wide and fifty feet long. The plants grow in neat rows.
“He grew the seedlings himself. It was his hobby.”
You all smoked your first joint when you were thirteen. Taja never told you where the grass came from, but every time you asked her for more, she brought some along. That mystery’s been solved now too.
“We were looking for you everywhere.”
You turn around; Ruth and Nessi are standing in the doorway.
“I told you they were still in the house,” says Schnappi, and pushes her way past the others, looks around, and declares, “This is pure luxury!”
You point behind you with your thumb.
“Then take a look at that.”
The girls come closer. You watch them, their reaction is like yours. Mouth open, eyes wide.
“Is that what I think it is?” asks Nessi.
“It is,” you say.
When you come out of the basement, you’re all a bit rattled. A marijuana field in a swimming pool has that effect on people. The flies have vanished from the house. It still smells horrible, the stench is probably clinging to the carpet and covering the walls with a thin film. The draft helps a little.
You’ve taken Taja’s father’s drug supply out of its hiding place and put it on the table in front of you. Surprisingly, the pills look the most menacing to you. Ruth shakes one of the bottles but doesn’t open it.
“What do you think it is?”
None of you has the faintest idea.
“And the pills?”
“Probably a bit of everything,” says Taja.
You pick up a bag and weigh the powder in your hand.
“If every bag weighs half a kilo, that’s a good five kilos.”
“Five kilos,” Nessi echoes.
“Five kilos is a lot!” Schnappi suddenly explodes and bursts out laughing, and then Nessi and you laugh, and Ruth hesitates for a moment because she’s always thinking, but then she laughs too and in the end Taja agrees, and you only stop laughing when your diaphragms hurt and the first tears flow.
Let’s say we’ve got five kilos of heroin, let’s say about three hundred pills including uppers and downers, ecstasy and speed, PCP and LSD, let’s say, about eight hundred grams of Moroccan hash in slabs and six 200-milliliter bottles of opium tincture. So let’s say, given the exclusiveness and quality of the goods, the whole thing has a real market value of about three million euros.
Let’s say that’s it.
You obviously have no idea of the value of the drugs, although at the moment that isn’t important because once again you’re the five girls you always wanted to stay. And those five girls laugh about the irony of fate that has dropped five kilos of heavy drugs in your lap. If someone were now to claim that it’s the last time and you will never feel like this again, you’d throw him out the door. You don’t believe in a tomorrow because you’re the now. What counts in the now are your jokes and those sayings that you never seem to run out of. You push the drugs aside and talk, drink orange juice, and eat chips as if Taja’s father was still alive, as if getting six lottery numbers right was easy and Nessi wasn’t pregnant. You can do that because for the moment you’re yourselves again, and that feels good, it feels so damned good.
It would be nice if the story could end there. Like a television series, like the last episode of a television series, and no one knows what happens next. Finale. But chaos awaits, it peels itself out of the background and puts its arms around your shoulders like a good friend who’s only popped outside for a quick cigarette in the fresh air, and who’s now delighted to be back by your side again.
For another hour things are fine, then Taja topples over. First she starts shivering, then she starts dry-retching. Her muscles are cramping and she can’t breathe. You give her water to drink and walk her around the garden. She trembles violently, at the same time she’s drenched in sweat, she wants more water, then she suddenly pulls away and just makes it to the toilet in time. Nessi stays by her side, she says: Shit and vomit don’t bother me. Nessi is your heroine. You stand outside the closed bathroom door and talk about whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to call a doctor. You’re strictly against the idea.
“He’d see right away what’s wrong with Taja. And if he sees that, he’ll call the cops. Forget it.”
“And her father’s still in the freezer,” Schnappi adds.
“What’s that got to do with it?” Stink asks.
“Nothing, but it’ll feel pretty weird if a doctor comes and there’s someone lying dead in the basement.”
“Schnappi, no one knows he’s in there.”
“I know, I’m just saying. Bad karma and everything.”
“What has that got to do with karma?”
You hold her back.
“Hey, girls, what’s up with you?”
“I just can’t believe the stuff that Schnappi keeps coming out with,” Stink says by way of self-defense.
“Believe it, because there’s plenty more where that comes from.”
You take them by the hand like two naughty little girls and pull them back out onto the terrace, where you sit down and put your heads together and ask each other how you’re going to get Taja back on her feet without having to call an ambulance. Schnappi wants to look on the internet, because you can find everything on the internet, there are bound to be tips on withdrawal as well.
> “Why not,” you say.
Schnappi disappears upstairs to Taja’s computer, while you get out your phone and call your mother to tell her you’re going to be spending the weekend at Taja’s. Stink also wants to call home; you give her your cell phone and keep an eye on how Taja is.
The bathroom door is shut. You knock.
“Everything okay in there?”
Nessi lets you in. Taja is lying curled up on the floor, covered with a dressing gown.
“Should we put her to bed?”
Nessi shakes her head. She’s glad that Taja’s asleep at last. So you turn out the bathroom light and leave the door open a crack. In the kitchen you make sandwiches. Nessi goes through the cupboards and discovers a jar of pickled peppers.
When you come back out, Stink is asleep on one of the recliners. Nessi takes the chair beside her and eats the peppers with her fingers. Afterward she sighs contentedly and within a minute has fallen asleep. Oh great, you think, and look at your sleeping girlfriends and the table full of drugs. Even if you’re not the most experienced—two pills, Eric swore they were LSD, a few joints, and a catastrophic attempt to snort speed at a party—you know that a few dreams lie ahead of you, waiting to be dreamed. You lean forward, open the bag that’s already been started, and dip a finger into the white powder. You sniff it and wipe your finger on your jeans.
A small victory is still a victory.
It’s important to keep a clear head. You’re aware that everything’s going to collapse without you here. It’s a good feeling, carrying that burden. You’re a family, somebody has to hold you all together. If not me, who? You listen out for sounds from Taja, and your eyes fall shut. It’s a bit like disappearing into a tub full of warm water.
Ten minutes. Fifteen.
The screams from the guest bathroom make you all jump.
Taja is crashing. Cramps, nausea, shivers. You all get her upstairs to bed and cover her with blankets. As soon as she’s calmed down a little, you think now it’ll get better, the worst is over, and then Taja succumbs once again to a fit of the shivers and it’s worse than before. She throws up every sip of water, there’s no point even thinking about solid food. Her hands claw at her belly as if she could grab the pain and pull it out. She leaves red scratches. She cries and fights you off. She says she’s itching all over. Her elbow catches Stink in the face, knocking her off the bed. You hold Taja tightly, she kicks out and screams at you to leave her alone. She calms down slowly. Her short hair sticks wetly to her head. She’s so exhausted that she falls asleep at last. It’s not real sleep, it’s pure unconsciousness. The sudden silence is scary. You’re all breathing heavily. Stink has a swelling under her eye and asks if it looks bad.
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