“I know how it works,” Tschick finally said. “Fill your mouth and then spit it out. That’ll work for sure.”
“Why me?”
“This wasn’t my idea.”
“I have a better idea. Do you still have the tennis ball?”
“Oh, man,” said Tschick. “I can’t. No way.”
“It’s pitch-black out here. Nobody will see us.”
“I can’t,” Tschick said with a pained look on his face. “You didn’t really believe that, did you? You can’t open a car lock with a tennis ball. Otherwise everybody would steal cars. The Lada was open the whole time. Didn’t you notice? The lock is busted or maybe the owner just never locks it — I mean, who’s going to steal a rust bucket like that anyway. My brother realized it was always open and . . . don’t look at me like that! My brother pulled the same prank on me with the tennis ball. Oh, man. Don’t turn around.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Get your head down. There’s somebody over there. By the Dumpsters.”
I leaned up against the Golf and tried to carefully look over my shoulder.
“They’re gone. There was a shadow over there by the recycling bin.”
“So let’s get out of here.”
“There he is again. I’ll have a smoke.”
“What?”
“Camouflage.”
“Forget camouflage, let’s get out of here.”
Tschick stood up and kicked the container and hose under the Golf. It made a loud scraping noise. I stood up too. Something moved behind the Dumpsters. I saw it out of the corner of my eye.
“Could be goats,” murmured Tschick. He lit up a cigarette in his mouth, standing right next to the gas tank door.
“Why don’t you just throw a match in there while you’re at it.”
He took a few puffs and started stretching. It was the least convincing acting job of all time.
Then we went slowly back to the Lada. As we walked away I nudged the gas tank door of the VW closed with my hip.
“You idiots!” yelled someone behind us.
We looked into the darkness in the direction the voice had come from.
“Screwing around for half an hour without getting a drop. Idiots. Real pros.”
“Maybe you can say it a little louder,” said Tschick.
“And smoking on top of it!”
“Can’t you shout any louder? We want the whole parking lot to know.”
“You guys are too dumb to fuck.”
“True. And now could you please piss off?”
“Don’t you know you have to suck on the hose?”
“What do you think we were doing the whole time? Get out of here!”
“Shhh!” I said.
Tschick and I ducked behind a car. The girl didn’t care. She looked around the parking lot.
“There’s nobody around, you scaredy-cats. Where’s the hose?”
She took our equipment out from under the VW. She stuck one end of the hose into the gas tank and the other — along with a finger — into her mouth. She sucked ten, fifteen times like she was gulping down the air; then she pulled the hose out of her mouth with her finger over the end.
“Right. Where’s the canister?”
I pulled it out from under the car and set it down. She stuck the hose into the mouth of the container and gas rushed out of the tank. All by itself. And it didn’t stop.
“Why didn’t it work for us?” asked Tschick.
“The end of the hose has to be below the level of the gas in the car,” said the girl.
“Aha,” I said.
“Oh,” said Tschick. We watched as the canister filled up. The girl kneeled down, and when the flow of gas stopped, she screwed the gas cap back on and shut the tank door.
“Below what level?” whispered Tschick.
“Ask her, you idiot,” I said.
CHAPTER 32
That’s how we met Isa. With her elbows on the backs of the two front seats she watched closely as Tschick started the Lada. We still had no desire to take her along, but after the whole gasoline thing it would have been tough not to. She wanted to come with us, and when she heard we were from Berlin she said that was exactly where she was heading. And then when we explained that we weren’t going toward Berlin right now, she said that was perfect. She kept trying to find out where we were going, but since she wouldn’t tell us where she was going, we didn’t tell her either. We just said we were heading south, at which point she remembered she had a half-sister in Prague she really needed to go see. And we had to go right past Prague anyway. Plus, like I said, it would have been tough not to take her with us since she was the only reason we had any gas.
Once we were rolling down the autobahn again, we opened all the windows. It still stank, just not as badly. Tschick had adapted to driving on the autobahn by this point. He drove like Hitler in his heyday, and Isa sat in back and jabbered on and on. She was suddenly full of energy and shook the backs of our seats as she talked. Not that it was normal behavior, but it was preferable to the streams of obscenities she’d been screaming earlier. And the things she talked about weren’t entirely uninteresting. I mean, she wasn’t stupid. And even Tschick held his tongue after a while and nodded as he listened to her.
But the two of them still hadn’t entirely settled their differences. When Isa stuck her head between the front seats Tschick motioned to her hair and said, “There’s things living in there.”
Isa sat back immediately and said, “I know.” And a few kilometers later she asked, “Do you guys happen to have a pair of scissors? I need to cut my hair.”
With the help of the exit signs, we tried to figure out where we were. But none of us recognized the names of the towns. I began to suspect we hadn’t gotten far on all those dinky country roads. But it didn’t matter. At least not to me. The autobahn didn’t seem to be heading south anymore, and at some point we exited and started following the sun along country roads again.
Isa asked to hear our lone cassette tape. Then after one song, she asked us to throw it out the window. A ridge of mountains came into view on the horizon — we were heading straight for them. They were really tall, with jagged bare tops. We had no idea what mountain range it could be. There was no sign. Definitely not the Alps. Were we still in Germany? Tschick swore there were no mountains in East Germany. Isa said there were, but the tallest were only a thousand meters high. In geography, we’d just studied Africa. Before that we’d learned about America, and before that the Balkans. We hadn’t gotten any closer to Germany than that. And now, here was a mountain range that wasn’t supposed to be there. At least we all agreed it didn’t belong there. It took about half an hour before we reached the foot of the mountains, and then we began the serpentine climb up them.
We had sought out the dinkiest road we could find, and we had to put the Lada in first gear and fight our way up. To our left and right the fields hung like towels from the steep hillsides. Then came a forest. And when we emerged from the forest we were sitting at the top of a gorge with a crystal clear lake in it. A small lake. Half of it was bordered by pale gray cliffs, with a concrete and metal structure on one side. The rest was ringed by a dike of some sort. And we were the only people around. We drove down and parked the car near the edge of the lake. From the concrete dam you could look down toward the valley below and across at the rest of the mountains. A few hundred meters below the dam was a little village. This was an ideal spot to spend the night.
The lake looked too cold for swimming. I stood on the dam next to Isa and took a deep breath. Tschick went over to the car, grabbed something, and walked back with it casually hidden behind him. We’d apparently both had the same thought. With a nod from Tschick, we picked Isa up and tossed her into the water. A fountain of water shot up as she went under
, and another one shot up as she surfaced with her arms flailing. It was at that moment that I realized we had no idea if she could swim. She screamed and splashed — though she overdid it enough that you could tell she knew how to swim. She also started treading water and wasn’t sinking an inch. She shook her wet hair, swam a little breaststroke, and cursed us out. Tschick threw her the bottle of shower gel he’d gotten from the car. And as I was trying to figure out if that was funny or if I should feel bad for her, I got a poke in the back and fell into the water too. It was colder than cold. I screamed as soon as my head was out of the water. Tschick stood on the side and laughed as Isa alternately laughed and cursed.
The concrete structure was too tall to climb up, so we had to swim across the lake to a part where the bank was at water level. While we swam, Isa let an unending stream of curses fly, kicked me underwater, and said that I was an even bigger moron than my boyfriend. We got into a tussle. As this was going on, Tschick strolled to the car, put on his bathing suit, and came to the lakeside with a cigarette in his mouth and a towel over his shoulder.
“This is how a gentleman goes swimming,” he said, making what was supposed to be an elegant face. Then he dove headfirst into the lake.
We cursed him in tandem.
When we got back on land, Isa immediately took off her shirt and pants and everything else and began to soap herself up. That was just about the last thing I had expected.
“Lovely,” she said. She was standing in knee-deep water, gazing out at the landscape, and washing her hair. I wasn’t sure where to look. I acted like I was looking all around. She really did have a great body and her skin was covered with goose bumps. I had goose bumps too. Tschick swam to the bank freestyle, and oddly enough there was no more chitchat. Nobody said anything, nobody cursed, and nobody made any jokes. We just washed ourselves, shivered from the cold, and dried ourselves off with the same towel.
With a mountain view and fog beginning to creep into the valley below, we ate a package of gummy bears we had left over from our visit to the supermarket. Isa had on one of my T-shirts and shiny Adidas shorts. Her stinky clothes were lying on the edge of the dike — and stayed there, forever.
That night we tried to figure out where she was from and where she was trying to go, but the only thing we could get out of her were crazy stories. It was clear she wouldn’t tell us what she was doing in the dump or what she had in her wooden box even to save her own life. The only thing she told us was her last name, Schmidt. Isa Schmidt. At least, that was the only thing she told us that we believed.
CHAPTER 33
Early the next morning, Tschick set off alone to go buy food in the village down in the valley. I was still half-asleep on the air mattress, looking out over the dimly lit landscape. Isa had the back of the Lada open and asked again if we happened to have scissors and if I would cut her hair.
I did find a little pair of scissors in the first aid kit, but I’d never cut hair before. She didn’t care, and she wanted it all cut off except for a row of bangs in front. She sat down on the side of the dike, took off her T-shirt, and said, “Go ahead.”
After a few seconds she turned to me and said, “Why haven’t you started? I don’t want the T-shirt to get covered in hair.”
So I started cutting. At first I tried not to touch her head too much while I was cutting her hair, but it’s difficult to give someone a haircut with tiny scissors without bracing yourself on their head. And it’s even more difficult not to keep looking at naked breasts when they’re right in front of you.
“Look, he’s jacking off,” said Isa. I looked toward the edge of the woods and saw an old man standing there — not even behind a tree — with his pants around his ankles spanking it.
“Oh, man,” I said, taking the scissors away from her head.
Isa jumped up, picked up some rocks, and, with lightning speed, started running toward the old man. She shot up the hill and started throwing rocks as she ran. She was throwing the rocks fifty meters, easy — and dead straight, like laser beams. And somehow it didn’t surprise me. Anyone who could run like her could obviously throw well too. At first the old man kept stroking, but when Isa got a bit closer he whipped up his pants and staggered into the woods. Isa followed him, yelling and waving her arms wildly. But I could see that she had stopped throwing rocks. When she reached the edge of the woods she stopped. She came back out of breath and sat down in the exact same spot as before.
I must have stood there like a statue for a while because at some point she tapped my thigh and said, “Go on.”
The only thing missing was the bangs. I kneeled in front of Isa to be able to make a straight line. And I gave it everything I had to avoid taking even the tiniest glimpse anywhere except at her forehead. I held the scissors perfectly level and made a tentative initial trim. Then I leaned back and surveyed it like a real artist and cut a bit more. The hair fell past her small eyes and on down.
“It doesn’t have to be perfect,” Isa said. “The rest of it’s a mess anyway.”
“Not at all. It looks great,” I said. And in my mind, You look great.
I didn’t say anything more. When I was done, Isa wiped the hair away and we sat next to each other on the dike, looked out at the view, and waited for Tschick to come back. Isa still hadn’t put her T-shirt back on. In front of us the mountains were still shrouded in a bluish morning mist that also hung in the valleys. I asked myself why it was so beautiful. I wanted to say how beautiful it was, or how beautiful I thought it was and why — or rather, how beautiful it was and that I couldn’t explain why it was so beautiful. But at some point I figured it wasn’t necessary to explain.
“Have you ever had sex?” asked Isa.
“What?”
“You heard me.”
She had put her hand on my knee and my face felt as if someone had thrown boiling water on it.
“No,” I said.
“Well?”
“Well what?”
“Do you want to?”
“Do I want to what?”
“You understand what I’m saying.”
“No,” I said.
My voice was suddenly high and squeaky. After a bit Isa took her hand away and we sat silently for at least ten minutes. There was still no sign of Tschick. Suddenly the mountains and the view seemed totally uninteresting. What had Isa just said? What had I answered? It was only a few words — what did they mean? My mind was racing, and it would take five hundred pages to write down all the thoughts that went through my head in the next five minutes. I’m sure none of it was too fascinating anyway — it’s only fascinating in the moment, when you’re in a situation like that. I kept asking myself whether Isa was serious. And whether I was serious when I said I didn’t want to sleep with her, if that really was what I’d said. Though it was true that I didn’t want to sleep with her. I mean, I thought she was amazing and all, but at that moment, on that misty morning, I thought it was perfect just sitting there next to her with her hand on my knee. And it was incredibly disappointing when she took her hand away. It took an eternity before I was able to form a sentence. I practiced saying it in my head about ten times and then said it aloud in a voice that made it sound as if I were about to have a heart attack. “But I like having your . . . um, uh . . . hand on my knee.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
My God. Why? Another heart attack.
Isa put her arm around my shoulder.
“You’re shivering,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
“You don’t know much.”
“I know.”
“We could kiss. If you’d like.”
And at that exact moment, Tschick came into view carrying two bags from a bakery. There was no kissing.
CHAPTER 34
Instead, we went up the mountain. We had never planned out what we wanted to do, but as we ate breakfast we kept looking around at a mountain that looked like the tallest mountain on earth. At some point it became obvious we had to go up it. The only question was how. Isa wanted to hike up. I agreed. But Tschick thought going on foot was absurd. “If you want to fly, you use an airplane,” he said. “If you want to wash your clothes, you use a washing machine. And if you want to go up a mountain, you use a car. We’re not in Bangladesh.”
We drove through the woods toward the mountain, but it was difficult to figure out which turns to take. Only beyond the mountain did we find a road snaking its way toward the top, and we crept along cliffs until we reached a pass. From there the road went back down again, so we had to walk to the peak after all.
Either we were going up some route the tourists didn’t use, or we were the only ones there that morning. In any event we didn’t come across anyone except a few sheep and cows. It took two hours to reach the very top, but it was worth it. The view looked like a really great postcard. There was a giant wooden cross at the highest point, and below that a little cabin. The entire cabin was covered with carvings. We sat down there and read some of the letters and numbers cut into the wood: CKH 4/23/61, SONNY ’86, HARTMANN 1923.
The oldest one we could find was: ANSELM WAIL 1903. Old letters cut into old, dark wood. And then the view and the warm summer air and the scent of hay wafting up from the valleys below.
Tschick pulled out a pocketknife and started carving. As we talked and basked in the sun and watched Tschick carve, I kept thinking about the fact that in a hundred years we’d all be dead. Like Anselm Wail was dead. His family was all dead too. His parents were dead, his children were dead, everyone who ever knew him was dead. And if he ever made anything or built anything or left anything behind, it was probably dead as well — destroyed, blown away by two world wars — and the only thing left of Anselm Wail was his name carved in a piece of wood. Why had he carved it there? Maybe he’d been on a road trip, like us. Maybe he’d stolen a car or a carriage or a horse or whatever they had back then and rode around having fun. But whatever it was, it would never again be of interest to anyone because there was nothing left of his fun, of his life, of anything. The only people who would ever know anything at all about Anselm Wail were the people who climbed this mountain. And the same thing would be true of us. Suddenly I wished Tschick had carved our full names in the wood. Though it took him almost an hour just for the six letters and two numbers he did carve. He did a nice job, and when he was finished it said: AT MK IS ’10.
Why We Took the Car Page 13