Wagenbach nodded seriously and said, “You don’t wish to say where you’re from?”
“No,” said Tschick. “Who cares?”
“Fine. In that case I will tell the class a bit about you, Andrej. Out of politeness, I would like to introduce you to the class.”
He looked at Tschick. Tschick looked at the class.
“I take your silence as consent,” said Wagenbach. He said it with an ironic tone the way all teachers do when they say something like that.
Tschick didn’t answer.
“Or do you have something against it?” asked Wagenbach.
“Go right ahead,” said Tschick with a wave of the hand.
Somewhere a couple of girls started to giggle. Go right ahead! Insane. He pronounced each syllable distinctly, with a strange accent. And he was still just staring at the back wall of the classroom. His eyes might even have been closed. It was tough to tell. Wagenbach gave the class a look. And it was absolutely silent again.
“Right,” he said. “Andrej Tschicha . . . schoff is the name of our new classmate, and as you can no doubt discern from his name, our guest has come from far away. The boundless Russian expanses, which Napoleon conquered in 1812 and, as we’ll see, was soon expelled from again. Just as Charles XII had been before him and Hitler would be after him.”
Wagenbach inhaled through his nostrils. The introduction had no impact on Tschick. He didn’t move.
“In any event, Andrej came to Germany four years ago with his brother, and . . . Wouldn’t you rather explain this yourself?”
The Russian made some sort of sound.
“Andrej, I’m talking to you,” said Wagenbach.
“No,” said Tschick. “And by no I mean, No, I would not rather tell it myself.”
Suppressed laughter. Wagenbach nodded awkwardly.
“Fine, then I will do it, if you have no objection. But this is most unorthodox.”
Tschick shook his head.
“It’s not unorthodox?”
“No.”
“Well, I find it unorthodox,” insisted Wagenbach. “I think it’s admirable to introduce oneself. But in the interest of time, we’ll keep this short. Our friend Andrej is from a family of German origin, but his native language is Russian. He’s a great communicator, as we can see, but he first learned German when he arrived here in Germany, and as result should be granted understanding in certain . . . in certain areas. Four years ago he started in a special education program. Then he transferred because his grades permitted him to enter a standard school. But he didn’t stay there long either — next up was a year at a vocational school and now he’s joining us. And all of this in just four years. Is that right so far?”
Tschick rubbed the back of his hand across his nose, then looked at his hand. “Ninety percent,” he said.
Wagenbach paused to see if Tschick was going to say anything more. But he didn’t. The ten percent discrepancy remained unexplained.
“Alright,” said Wagenbach in a surprisingly friendly tone. “No doubt we’re all interested to hear the rest of the story, but unfortunately you can’t stand up here forever, as enjoyable as it is talking with you. I would like to suggest that you sit at the free desk in the back there, since it’s the only one available. Yes?”
Tschick lumbered down the aisle like a robot. Everyone stared at him. Tatiana and Natalie put their heads together, whispering.
“Napoleon!” said Wagenbach. Then he paused dramatically to pull a pack of tissues out of his briefcase and blow his nose at length.
Tschick arrived in the back of class in the meantime, and down the aisle where he had walked wafted a scent that almost knocked me over. A vapor trail of alcohol. I was three seats from the aisle and I could have put together a list of the drinks he’d had in the last twenty-four hours. That was how my mother smelled when she had a bad day. Maybe that was the reason Tschick hadn’t faced Wagenbach or opened his mouth — he was worried about the booze on his breath. But Wagenbach had a cold. He couldn’t smell anything anyway.
Tschick sat at the free desk in the back row. Kallenbach, the class clown, had started the year there, but he’d been moved to the front row before the end of the first day of school so the teachers could keep him under control. And now, instead, this Russian was sitting in the back row, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking that it hadn’t been such a great idea to move Kallenbach now that the Russian was going to end up back there. He was on a totally different level from Kallenbach — that was obvious. And that’s why everyone kept turning around to look at him. After his performance with Wagenbach you just knew something was going to happen. This was going to be interesting.
But then nothing happened the rest of the day. Each new teacher who came in greeted Tschick and he had to spell his name at the beginning of every period. But everything went smoothly. The next day was quiet too. It was a major disappointment. He always wore the same ratty shirt to school, didn’t participate in class, said “Yes,” “No,” or “Don’t know” whenever he was asked anything, and didn’t disturb things. He didn’t become friends with anyone. He didn’t even try to make friends with anyone. He didn’t reek of alcohol the second day, but you still got the impression when you looked at him in the back row that he was somehow out of it. The way he slumped in his chair with his eyes barely open, you never knew whether he was asleep, wasted, or just really laid-back.
But about once a week he would smell like booze again. Not as bad as on that first day, but still obvious. There were some kids in class — myself not included — who had already gotten drunk or high, but for somebody to show up to school in the morning drunk? That was new. Tschick chewed really strong-smelling mint gum whenever he was drunk, so everyone figured out how to tell what state he was in.
But otherwise nobody knew much about him. It was absurd enough that someone would transfer from a special ed program to a school like ours. And then there were his clothes. But there were people who defended him, saying he actually wasn’t stupid at all. “At least not as stupid as Kallenbach,” I said one time — I was one of the people who defended him. But the only reason I defended him, to be honest, was because Kallenbach was standing next to me and he always got on my nerves. From the things Tschick said, you really couldn’t tell whether he was smart or stupid or somewhere in between.
Of course there were also rumors about him and his background. Chechnya, Siberia, and Moscow all came up. Kevin said Tschick and his brother lived in a camping trailer on the outskirts of the city, and that his brother was a weapons dealer. Somebody else said he knew for a fact the brother was a pimp and there was talk of a forty-room mansion where the Russian mafia had orgies. Another kid said Tschick lived in one of the old high-rise apartment buildings out toward the big lake, Mueggelsee. The truth was that all of it was a load of crap. And the only reason he generated so many rumors was because Tschick himself never talked to anyone. But for the same reason, he was slowly forgotten. Or at least forgotten as much as someone who comes to school in the same awful shirt and cheap jeans everyday and sits in the class clown’s seat can be forgotten. At least the dead animal shoes were replaced by a pair of white Adidas, which, of course, somebody knew had just been stolen. And maybe he had stolen them. But the number of rumors surrounding him kept dwindling. The last thing was a nickname for him, which was Tschick. And for those who thought that was too simple, there was also “special ed.” And with that, the topic of the Russian was pretty much exhausted. Inside our classroom, at least.
Out in the parking lot he remained a topic of conversation a bit longer. In the morning, kids from the adjacent high school hung out in the parking lot. Some of them already had cars. And they found the Mongolian incredibly interesting. Guys who’d been held back five times and liked to stand in the open doors of their cars, just so everybody could see they were the owners — owners of car
s that were hunks of junk, but which were tuned and modified. They made fun of Tschick. “Wasted again, Ivan?” Every morning. Especially one guy with a yellow Ford Fiesta. I didn’t know for a long time whether Tschick realized they were making fun of him, but one day he stopped in his tracks at the edge of the parking lot. I was locking up my bike and heard them all loudly taking bets on whether Tschick would manage to make it through the door to the school the way he was staggering. Or as they put it, the way the fucking Mongolian was staggering. And Tschick stopped and went back toward the parking lot and up to the guys doing the talking. They were all a head taller than he was and several years older, and they grinned as the Russian walked up to them — and then past most of them. He went straight up to the Ford Fiesta guy, who was the loudest of all, put his hand on the car door and said something to him so quietly that nobody was able to hear what it was. The grin on the Ford guy’s face slowly disappeared and Tschick turned around and went into our school building. After that, nobody made any comments when he walked past.
I wasn’t the only one who saw this happen, and from that point on there was no stopping the rumors about his family being in the Russian mafia. Nobody could imagine any other way he could have managed to silence the idiot with the Ford with a couple of sentences. But of course that was baloney. Mafia. Bunch of baloney. That’s what I thought, anyway.
CHAPTER 10
Two weeks later we got our first math assignments back. First, Mr. Strahl put the results on the board to scare us. This time there was one A, which was unusual. Strahl’s favorite sentence was: “As are reserved for God.” Horrifying. But Strahl was a math teacher, after all, meaning he was a madman. There were two Bs, loads of Cs and Ds, no Es. And one F. I had a slight hope that I’d earned the A — math was the only subject I ever managed to score an A in once in a while. But it turned out I had a B−. Still, not bad. In Strahl’s class a B− was practically an A. I looked around discreetly to see who was celebrating having gotten an A as the papers were passed back. But nobody showed any sign of celebrating. Not Lukas or Kevin or any of the other math wizards. Instead, Strahl held on to one assignment, walked it personally to the back row, and handed it to Tschichatschow. Tschick was sitting there chewing intently on strong peppermint gum. He didn’t look at Strahl. He just stopped chewing and breathing. Strahl bent down, wet his lips, and said, “Andrej.”
There was practically no reaction. His head turned ever so slightly — like in a gangster film when somebody hears the click of the hammer when a gun is put to his head.
“Your assignment. I don’t know what it is,” said Strahl, leaning a hand on Tschick’s desk. “I mean, if you didn’t have this at your old school, you’ll have to repeat math class. You didn’t even . . . you don’t seem to have even attempted to solve the problems. All the stuff written here” — Strahl leafed through the pages of Tschick’s assignment and lowered his voice, though you could still hear him fine — “these jokes. I mean, if you haven’t studied it before, I’ll take that into account, of course. I had to give you an F, but the grade is, shall we say, not written in stone. I would suggest that you turn to Kevin or Lukas. Have a look at their assignments. Go over their notes from the last two months. Ask them any questions you have. Because the way things are going now, there’s just no point.”
Tschick nodded. He nodded in a very understanding kind of way, and then it happened. He fell off his chair, right at Strahl’s feet. Strahl flinched and Patrick and Julia jumped up. Tschick lay on the floor as if he were dead.
We all figured the Russian was capable of a lot of things, but passing out because he was so sensitive about getting an F on his math homework was not one of them. But as it turned out, it had nothing to do with any sensitivity on his part. He hadn’t eaten anything all morning and had obviously drunk a lot of alcohol. In the school nurse’s office he filled the sink with puke and then was sent home.
Still, it didn’t help his reputation much. Nobody ever found out what the jokes were that he put in his notebook instead of the math problems, and I can’t remember who ended up having the A. But what I do know and will probably never forget, is the look on Strahl’s face when the Russian keeled over at his feet. Holy crap.
The annoying thing about the whole story, however, wasn’t that Tschick fell out of his seat or that he got an F. The annoying thing was that two weeks later he got a B. And then an E after that. And then another B. Strahl was going bananas. He said things like, “Your studying paid off,” and “Don’t let up now,” but even a blind person could see that his Bs had nothing to do with whether he was studying or not. All it had to do with was whether he was drunk or not.
This slowly dawned on the teachers as well, and Tschick was reprimanded and sent home a few times. There were discussions with him behind closed doors too, but the school didn’t do much about it at first. Tschick had had a difficult time in life or whatever, and in the wake of recent education system scandals everyone wanted to prove that even a low-class, drunken Russian would be given a fair shake in the German school system. So there were no real consequences. And after a while, the situation got calmer. Nobody knew what had been bothering Tschick, but after a while he got by okay in most subjects. He chewed less and less peppermint gum in class. And he didn’t create any disturbances. If it wasn’t for his occasional bender, you might even have forgotten he was there.
CHAPTER 11
“A man who has not seen Herr K. in a long time greeted him with the words, ‘You haven’t changed at all.’ ‘Oh,’ said Herr K., turning pale. Now that was an agreeably short story.”
Mr. Kaltwasser took off his jacket as he walked in and threw it over the back of his chair. Kaltwasser was our German teacher, and he always entered the class without saying hello. Or at least, you never heard a greeting because he started the lesson before he even walked in the door. I have to admit that I didn’t really know what to make of Kaltwasser. Besides Wagenbach, Kaltwasser was the only other staff member who actually did a decent job of teaching. But while Wagenbach was an asshole — as a person — you couldn’t really tell what Kaltwasser was like. I couldn’t, anyway. He came in like a machine and just started talking. That went on for precisely forty-five minutes. And then Kaltwasser left again. You never had any idea what to think of him. I couldn’t say what he was like as a person. I couldn’t even say whether I thought he was nice or not. Everyone else seemed to think he was about as nice as a frozen turd, but I’m not so sure. I could imagine that, outside school, he might be okay in his own way.
“Agreeably short,” Kaltwasser repeated. “And I’m sure some of you thought you could keep an interpretation of the story just as brief. But of course it’s not that simple. Or did someone here find it that simple? Who would like to begin? Volunteers? Come on, people. The back row seems to be catching my eye.”
We turned and followed Kaltwasser’s glance to the back row. Tschick had his head on the desk and you couldn’t tell whether he was looking at his book or sleeping. It was sixth period.
“May I be so bold as to disturb you, Mr. Tschichatschow?”
“What?” Tschick’s head rose slowly. The ironic formality of Kaltwasser’s question set off alarm bells.
“Are you there, Mr. Tschichatschow?”
“On the job.”
“Did you do your homework assignment?”
“Of course.”
“Would you be so kind as to read it to us?”
“Uh, okay.” Tschick looked quickly around, spotted his bag on the floor, plunked it down on his desk, and began looking for his notebook. As always, he hadn’t unpacked his things at the beginning of the period. He kept pulling more and more notebooks out and seemed to be putting real effort into finding the right one.
“If you didn’t do the assignment, just say so.”
“I have the assignment — where is it? Where is it?” He put a notebook down on his desk, shov
ed the rest back into his bag, and started paging through the one on his desk. “Here it is. Shall I read it?”
“I insist.”
“Right, I’ll get started. The assignment was the Stories of Herr K. Here we go. Interpretation of the Stories of Herr K. The first question you have, of course, when you read Precht’s stories . . .”
“Brecht,” said Kaltwasser. “Bertolt Brecht.”
“Aha.” Tschick fished a ballpoint pen out of his bag and scribbled in his notebook. He put the pen back in the bag.
“Interpretation of the Stories of Herr K. The first question you have, of course, is who this mysterious person behind the letter K might be. Without overstating things, it’s possible to say that it is a man who avoids the spotlight. He hides behind a letter — the letter K. It is the eleventh letter of the alphabet. Why is he hiding? Because in actuality, Herr K. is a weapons dealer. Along with other murky figures (Herr L. and Herr F.), he founded a criminal organization that considers the Geneva Convention a joke. He’s sold tanks and fighter jets and made billions, but nowadays avoids getting involved in the actual dirty work. Instead, he cruises the Mediterranean on his yacht, where the CIA came after him. So Herr K. fled to South America and had his face altered by the renowned plastic surgeon Dr. M. And now he is taken aback that someone has recognized him and thus turns pale. It goes without saying that both the man who has recognized him on the street and the renowned plastic surgeon will soon find themselves in very deep water wearing cement shoes. That’s it.”
I looked at Tatiana. Her brow was furrowed and she had a pencil in her mouth. Then I looked at Kaltwasser. There was nothing to read in his face. Kaltwasser seemed to be tense, but more the kind of tension you show when you’re interested in something. Nothing more. He didn’t give Tschick a grade. Next Anja read the proper interpretation, the one that Google gives. Then there was a long discussion about whether Brecht was a communist. And then the period was over. All this happened shortly before summer break.
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