CHAPTER 12
Now I have to talk about Tatiana’s birthday. Tatiana’s birthday fell during summer break, and there was going to be a huge party. Tatiana had announced the party way in advance. Word was that she was going to celebrate her fourteenth birthday out in Werder, near Potsdam, just southwest of Berlin, and that everyone would be invited to stay overnight and everything. She asked all her best friends about their schedules because she wanted to make sure they’d be able to come. And since Natalie was leaving for the summer on the third day of break, the whole thing had to be pushed forward to the second day of summer break. Which is why all the details came out so early.
The house in Werder belonged to an uncle of Tatiana’s and was right on a lake. The uncle was willing to basically hand it over to Tatiana, and there wouldn’t be any other adults around except for him. The party was going to go all night and everyone was supposed to bring their sleeping bags.
Obviously it was a big topic of conversation in class, for weeks in advance. I kept thinking about the uncle. I’m not sure why I found him so fascinating, but I figured he must have been a pretty interesting guy — I mean, he was willing to hand over his house for a party, not to mention that he was related to Tatiana. Anyway, I was excited to meet him. I pictured myself talking to him in the living room, standing next to the fireplace, having a great conversation. Though I didn’t even know if there was a fireplace in the house. I wasn’t the only one excited about the party. Julia and Natalie had been thinking for ages about what they were going to give Tatiana — you could read that in the notes they passed to each other in class. That is, I could read it because I sat in a chair that was in the direct line between the two of them and had to pass the notes. I was electrified by their gift ideas, and couldn’t think about anything except what I could give Tatiana for her birthday. Julia and Natalie had finally decided to give her the new Beyoncé CD. Natalie had to check something from a list Julia made that looked something like this:
•Beyoncé
•P!nk
•the necklace with the [illegible]
•make a list with more suggestions
Natalie put a check next to the top item. Everybody knew Tatiana loved Beyoncé. Which at first was a bit of a problem for me, because I always thought Beyoncé was shit. At least musically. She looked great, of course, and actually there was definitely some similarity between the way she looked and the way Tatiana looked. So after a while, I didn’t think Beyoncé was so shit after all. On the contrary. I began to like Beyoncé. I even liked her music suddenly. No, wait, that’s not right. I thought her music was fantastic. I bought her last two albums and listened to them nonstop while thinking of Tatiana and wondering what I was going to show up at her party with to give her for her birthday. There was no way I could give her a Beyoncé album. Julia and Natalie and probably thirty others had already come up with that idea — Tatiana was going to get thirty Beyoncé CDs and would have to exchange twenty-nine of them. I wanted to give her something special but couldn’t think of anything. Until that note with the multiple choice question crossed my desk.
I went to the store and bought an expensive fashion magazine with Beyoncé’s face on the cover and started sketching it. Using a ruler, I drew evenly spaced lines vertically and horizontally across the photo until the whole thing was divided up into little squares. Then I took out a huge piece of paper and penciled in a set of squares five times larger than those on the magazine cover. I learned this method from a book. The Old Masters or something like that. You can use the method to make a large picture based on a small one. You just recreate it square by square. You could do it on a copy machine too. But I wanted it to be a drawing. I guess I wanted people to be able to see that I put real effort into it. If you show a lot of effort, people can figure out the rest. I worked on the drawing every day for weeks. I worked really hard. With just a pencil. And I just got more and more worked up while working on the drawing, thinking about Tatiana and her party and the supercool uncle I was going to have such a witty conversation with next to the fireplace.
There may be a lot of things I’m no good at, but drawing isn’t one of them. It’s like the high jump. If drawing Beyoncé and doing the high jump were the most important disciplines in the world, I would be way ahead. Seriously. But unfortunately nobody gives a damn about the high jump, and as for drawing I was beginning to have my doubts. After four weeks of hard work, Beyoncé looked almost like a photo — a giant pencil Beyoncé with Tatiana’s eyes — and I probably would have been the happiest person in the universe, if only I had then gotten an invitation to Tatiana’s party. But I didn’t get one.
It was the last day of school, and I was a little nervous because the classroom was bursting with thoughts of the party. Everyone was talking nonstop about Werder, but no invitations had been passed out. At least I hadn’t seen any. Nobody knew exactly where the party house was, and Werder isn’t so tiny that you couldn’t miss it. I had already memorized the map of Werder. I figured Tatiana would tell everyone the address on the last day of school. But that’s not what happened.
Instead, two rows in front of me, I spotted a small green card in Arndt’s pencil case. It was during math. I saw Arndt show the little card to Kallenbach, who frowned. I could see there was a little map in the middle of the card. And then I looked around and realized everyone had these green cards. Almost everyone. Kallenbach didn’t have one, given the way he was staring at Arndt’s like an idiot. Though he always looked liked an idiot. He was an idiot. That’s probably why he wasn’t invited. Kallenbach bent down to look closely at the writing on the card — he was nearsighted but for whatever reason never wore his glasses. Then Arndt pulled it away from him and shoved it into his bag. As I figured out later, Kallenbach and I weren’t the only ones who didn’t get invitations. The Nazi didn’t get one, Tschichatschow didn’t get one, and neither did one or two others. Of course. Boring kids and losers weren’t invited — Russians, Nazis, and idiots. I didn’t have to think for long to figure out what Tatiana thought of me. Because I wasn’t a Russian or a Nazi.
Otherwise pretty much the entire class was invited, along with people from some of the other classes. Probably a hundred people. But I wasn’t invited.
I kept hoping right until the last period of the day and the distribution of our final report cards. I hoped that it was all a mistake and that when the final bell rang Tatiana would come over to me and say, “Psycho, man, I forgot to give you one of these! Here’s the invite! I hope you can make it — I’d be terribly disappointed if you, of all people, weren’t able to come. Have you thought about what you’re giving me for a present? Of course, I can depend on you! Okay, see you there. I really hope you can make it! My God, I can’t believe I almost forgot to give you one!” Then the bell rang and everyone went home. I packed up my things slowly, to give Tatiana every opportunity to realize her mistake.
Out in the hall, the only people still standing around were the fat kids and nerds, all talking about their grades and crap like that. As I walked out of the building, maybe twenty meters from the door, someone grabbed my shoulder and said, “Awesome jacket.” It was Tschick. His eyes were narrowed even more than usual as he smiled, and I saw both rows of his teeth. “I’ll buy it. The jacket. Hold up a minute.”
I didn’t stop, but I could hear that he was still following me.
“It’s my favorite,” I said. “Not for sale.” I’d found it at a thrift shop and bought it for five Euros, and it really was my favorite jacket. Made in China, with a white dragon printed on the chest. Supercheap-looking, but also supercool. The perfect jacket for a low-class tough. Which is why I liked it so much — at first glance you couldn’t tell that I was exactly the opposite of a low-class tough: a rich scaredy-cat totally unable to defend himself.
“Where can I get one? Hey, wait up! Where are you going?” He shouted across the entire parking lot and thought it was fu
nny. It sounded as if he’d had more than just alcohol. I turned onto a side street.
“Did you get held back?” he continued.
“What are you shouting about?”
“Did you fail?”
“No.”
“You look like you were failed.”
“What do you mean?”
“You look like you just found out you got held back, that you’ll have to repeat.”
What did he want from me? I caught myself thinking that Tatiana had made a good decision not to invite him.
“Bunch of Ds, though, eh?”
“No idea.”
“What do you mean, ‘No idea’? If I’m bothering you, just say the word.”
I was supposed to tell him he was bothering me? And then he’d punch me in the face, or what?
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if I’m bothering you?”
“No, whether I got a bunch of Ds.”
“Seriously?”
“I didn’t look yet.”
“At your report card?”
“Nope.”
“You didn’t look at your report card yet?”
“Nope.”
“Really? You got your report card and didn’t even look at it? How cool is that?” He was gesturing wildly as he talked, and as he walked next to me I realized he wasn’t actually any taller than me. Just more stocky.
“So you won’t sell me the jacket?”
“No.”
“What are you up to now?”
“Going home.”
“And then?”
“Nothing.”
“And after that?”
“None of your damn business.” Now that I realized he wasn’t going to mug me, I felt braver. That’s the way it always is, unfortunately. When somebody is hostile to me, I’m so nervous that I can barely keep my knees from buckling. But if they are even the slightest bit friendly, I immediately start insulting them.
He walked silently beside me for another hundred meters or so, then tugged on my sleeve and said again what a cool jacket he thought it was. Then he slipped through some bushes along the side of the road. I watched him trudge off across the grassy wasteland in the direction of the high-rise apartment blocks, with the plastic grocery bag he used as his school knapsack hanging over his right shoulder.
CHAPTER 13
After a while I stopped and sat down on the curb. I didn’t feel like going home. I didn’t want it to turn into just another day. It was a special day. An especially crappy day. I took forever getting home.
When I opened the door, nobody was there. A note was on the table: Dinner’s in the fridge. I unpacked my things, looked at my report card, put on the Beyoncé CD, and crawled under my blanket. I couldn’t decide whether the music comforted me or made me even more depressed. I think, actually, it depressed me even more.
A few hours later I went back to school to pick up my bike. I’d forgotten it. Seriously. It was about two kilometers to my school, and some days I walked. But I hadn’t walked that day. I’d been so deep in thought when Tschick started talking to me that I had unlocked and then relocked my bike, and then just marched off. It really was a horrible day.
So I followed the route for the third time of the day, past the piles of dirt and the playground at the edge of the wasteland. I climbed up the lookout tower of the play fort and sat down. It was a wooden tower with a fence built partway around it so little kids could play cowboys and Indians. If there’d been any little kids around. But I’d never seen a little kid there. Or even an older kid or adult for that matter. Not even junkies slept there. I was the only one ever there, sitting up in the tower when I felt crappy, where nobody could see me. To the east you could see the high-rises of Hellersdorf. To the north, Weiden Lane wandered off beyond the bushes, and farther on was a colony of little summer cabins. But around the playground was absolutely nothing, just a wide open wasteland that had originally been a construction site. It was supposed to have been the site of a brand-new town house development — you could still see a description of the development on the big weather-beaten sign that had fallen over on the side of the street. coming soon: 96 beautiful new town houses. Below that was something about what lucrative investments they’d make, and somewhere at the bottom it said klingenberg real estate & development.
But one day they’d found three extinct bugs, a frog, and a rare grasshopper, and ever since the environmentalists have been suing the developers and the developers have been suing the environmentalists and the lot has been left empty. The court battle has gone on for ten years now, and if my father is to be believed, it’ll take another ten years to be settled — because there’s no way to beat the environmental fascists. That’s my father’s term: “environmental fascists.” And these days he drops the word “environmental” from the phrase too, because the court battle has ruined him. A quarter of the land in the development site belonged to him, and all the suits and countersuits landed him right in the toilet. If an outsider were to listen to our dinner table conversation sometime, he wouldn’t understand a single word. For years, all my father has talked about is shit, assholes, and fascists. For a long time I wasn’t sure how much he’d lost and how it would affect us. I always thought my father would figure a way to get out of the whole thing with some legal loophole — and maybe he thought so too. At least at first. But then he’d thrown in the towel and sold his share. He took a huge loss, but he figured the loss would be even bigger if he kept going back to court with the rest of the developers. So he sold his share in the project to the assholes. That’s what he calls the people he worked with. The assholes continued to fight in court for the right to build. That was a year and a half ago. And for a year now, it’s been clear: That was the beginning of the end. My father tried to make up for the losses on the Weiden Lane development by playing the stock market, and now we’re broke, our vacation’s off, and the house we own doesn’t belong to us anymore. That’s what my father says. And all because of three caterpillars and a grasshopper.
The only thing left of the development is the playground, which was built at the very beginning to demonstrate how child-friendly the area was. But it was all for nothing.
I’ll also admit there was another reason I hung around that playground. From up there on top of the tower you could see two white apartment buildings. The buildings are behind the colony of summer cabins, somewhere beyond the woods. And Tatiana lives in one of them. I never knew where exactly, but there’s a window at the top of the building on the left where you can see a green light whenever the sun starts to go down. For whatever reason, I just decided that was where she lived. So sometimes I just sit on the lookout tower and wait until I see that green light go on. When I’m on the way from soccer practice or an afterschool class. I peer through the cracks between the boards and carve letters in the wood with my keys — if the green light comes on I get a warm feeling in my heart, and if it doesn’t, it’s always a huge disappointment.
But that day it was much too early, so instead of waiting I headed back toward school. My bike was there, lonely and alone in the bike stand that looked as if it stretched for miles. The flag was hanging limp on the flagpole, and there was nobody left in the building. The only person around was the janitor, who I saw pulling two trash cans out to the street. A convertible blasting Turkish hip-hop steamed past. This is how the place would be for the rest of the summer. No school for six weeks. No Tatiana for six weeks. I pictured myself hanging from the playground lookout tower by a rope.
Back home I didn’t know what to do. I tried to fix the headlight on my bike, which had been broken for a long time. But I didn’t have the replacement part I needed. I put on Survivor by Destiny’s Child and started rearranging the furniture in my room. I pushed the bed to the front of the room and the desk to the back. Then I went back d
ownstairs and fiddled around some more with the bike light. But it was pointless, so I tossed my tools in the flower garden, went back upstairs, threw myself onto the bed, and started screaming. It was the first day of summer vacation and I was already going crazy. At some point I pulled out the drawing of Beyoncé. I looked at it for a long time, then held it up in front of me with two hands and began to tear it in half, very slowly. When I’d ripped it as far as Beyoncé’s forehead, I stopped. That’s when I started to cry. And what happened after that I can no longer remember. All I know is that at some stage I dashed out of the house and into the woods and up a hill, and then I started to run. You couldn’t really say I was going for a run because I was wearing normal clothes, but I did pass about twenty runners per minute on the trails through the woods. I just ran through the trees screaming, and I was incredibly pissed off at everyone else who was running in the woods because they could hear me. When I saw a guy walking with ski poles coming toward me, I could barely keep myself from grabbing his stupid poles and beating his ass with them.
When I got home again I stood in the shower for hours. I felt a bit better afterward — like somebody who’s been floating around the Atlantic in a lifeboat for weeks and finally sights a ship only to have the ship come alongside and toss him a can of Red Bull and keep on going. That’s about how I felt.
Downstairs I heard the front door open.
“What’s all that stuff lying around outside?” yelled my father.
I tried to ignore him, but it was difficult.
“Do you plan on leaving it there?”
Why We Took the Car Page 5