Tschick looked at me for a long time and said it wasn’t true that Tatiana didn’t invite me because I was boring, and it wasn’t true that she didn’t like me for that reason either.
“Girls don’t like you because they’re afraid of you. That’s what I think. Because you don’t pay them attention and because you’re not a kiss-ass like André Langin. You’re not boring, you idiot. Isa liked you right away. Because she’s not as stupid as she looks. She actually has a brain — unlike Tatiana.”
I looked at Tschick. I think my jaw must have been hanging open.
“Yeah, yeah, you’re in love with Tatiana. And she’s good looking, for sure. But seriously, compared to Isa she’s a total moron. And I’m a good judge of that, unlike you. Because — can I tell you a secret?” Tschick gulped, and looked as if he had a cannonball stuck in his throat. He was silent for at least five minutes. Then he said he could judge them because he wasn’t interested in them. Girls. Then he was silent again for a while. He had never told anyone, he said, and now he had told me, but I didn’t need to worry about it. He wasn’t looking for anything from me, he knew I was into girls and all that, but that he just wasn’t that way and there was nothing he could do about it.
You can think what you want about me, but I wasn’t that surprised. I really wasn’t. I didn’t know it for a fact, but I guess I had a feeling. Really. When he talked about his uncle in Moscow the very first time we were in the car, the whole thing about my jacket, the way he treated Isa. I mean, obviously I didn’t know for sure. But in retrospect it seems as if I had some idea.
Tschick rested his head on the dashboard. I put a hand on his back. We sat there and listened to “Ballade pour Adeline,” and I thought for a few minutes about what it would be like to be gay. It could really have been the solution to all my problems. But it wasn’t going to work. I mean, I really liked Tschick, but I knew I liked girls. Then I put the Lada into first gear and started to move. It had been so sad sitting in the hospital all night thinking about the fact that the trip was over. And it was so fantastic to be looking out the windshield again with the steering wheel in my hand. I practiced a little in the parking lot. I was still having trouble shifting, but when Tschick took over that duty, leaving me just to push the clutch, it was okay. So we accelerated onto the on-ramp. Then I pulled into the emergency lane and stopped.
“Take it easy,” said Tschick. “Easy does it. Let’s try it again.”
We waited for another gap in traffic. And by that I mean we waited until there wasn’t another car in sight. Then I stepped on it again and accelerated.
“Shift!” shouted Tschick, and I stepped on the clutch pedal as he put it into second gear.
I was sweating like crazy.
“It’s all clear, merge!” Tschick put it into third gear and then fourth, and I slowly relaxed.
I flinched again when the first fat Audi zoomed by doing five hundred kilometers an hour or whatever, but after a while I got used to it and realized driving on the autobahn was actually easier than on smaller roads where you’re constantly braking and shifting and accelerating. Here I had a lane to myself and just had to go straight. I watched the lane markers racing toward me like in a video game — but it looked totally different in the driver’s seat of a real car. There’s just no way to imitate it with PlayStation graphics. Sweat was still streaming down me, and my back clung to the seat. Tschick stuck a piece of black duct tape on my upper lip, and then we drove and drove.
Clayderman tinkled the ivories, and between him tinkling, the partially collapsed roof of the car, Tschick’s messed-up foot, and the fact that we were doing a hundred in a rolling Dumpster, I was overcome with a strange feeling. It was a feeling of bliss, a feeling of invincibility. No accident, no authority, no law of nature could stop us. We were on the road and we would always be on the road. And we sang along to the music, at least as best as you can sing along to tinkling instrumental music.
CHAPTER 42
We drove until it started to get dark, then turned off the autobahn onto a country road somewhere deep in the middle of nowhere. I drove in third gear, winding along between the fields. Everything was quiet. The evening was quiet and the fields were yellow and green and brown, and the color was seeping from the landscape as the light faded. Tschick had his arm out the window and his head on his arm. I had my arm out the window too, the way you do in a boat when you dip your fingers in the water. I felt tree leaves and plant stalks graze my hand as my other hand guided the Lada through the darkened landscape.
The last beams of light disappeared from the horizon. It was a moonless night, and I remembered the first time I saw what nighttime looked like, or at least the first time I realized what nighttime was. I was eight or nine and I have Herr Klever to thank. He lived in the apartment block across the street. We lived in an apartment block too, and at the end of the street was a big field of barley. I used to play with a girl named Maria in that barley field in the evening. We would crawl through the grain on all fours, making paths, creating a giant maze. And one night Herr Klever, an old man, showed up with his wiener dog and a flashlight. He lived on the third floor and was always shouting at us. He hated kids. He trudged around with his dog, shining his flashlight into the field and shouting that we were ruining the crops. He shouted that we had to come out immediately and that he was going to call the police and have us arrested and that we would have to pay a thousand Euro fine. We were eight or nine, like I said, and didn’t know this was just the typical stupid crap old people say. In a panic we ran out of the field. Maria was smart and ran toward our apartment block. But I went the other way first, and the old man was there with his dog blocking the way. He stood his ground, fiddled with his flashlight, and kept shouting. So I ran in the opposite direction, back into the field.
I ran through the field and into Hogenkamp Road because I thought I might be able to go all the way back around. I knew the way from having done it during the day. But now the Hogenkamp was dark and seemed to be hemmed in by scrub brush. Just beyond was Hogenkamp playground — we never went there because there were older kids there. But at night, of course, it was empty. The giant zip line wasn’t being used. It was a funny feeling. I could have had the whole place to myself, could have done whatever I wanted, but I didn’t stop — I just kept running and running. There wasn’t a single person anywhere around. Lights were on in front of little houses, and I kept running down another street, where there was also not a soul. It was a huge detour, making an arc out around the field of several miles. But back then I could run like a champ. And after a while I actually liked it — running through this dark, empty world. I wasn’t even sure if I was still scared, and I stopped thinking about Herr Klever.
Obviously I’d been out at night other times, earlier in my life. But it hadn’t been the same. That had always been with my parents or in a car on the way home from a relative’s house or whatever. This was a whole new world, a completely different world than it was during the day. It felt as if I’d just discovered America. I didn’t see a single person the entire way. Then suddenly I saw two women. They were sitting on the steps in front of a Chinese restaurant, and I couldn’t figure out what they were doing there. One of them was crying and shouting, “I’m not going in there! I’m not going in there again!” The other one was trying to calm her down, but to no effect. Above them, Chinese characters in yellow and red lit up the night. There were dark trees around the building. And in the foreground, an eight-year-old was jogging past. I was annoyed. The women were probably annoyed too, and also wondering what the heck an eight-year-old was doing out running at night. We looked at each other, them crying and me running. I have no idea why that made such a strong impression on me. I guess I’d never seen grown women crying before, and I thought about it a lot afterward. Anyway, this was a night like that.
I leaned my head to the side and looked out the window as the Lada quietly took the cu
rves of the road through the blue-green grain fields of summer. At some point I said I wanted to stop, and I stopped. The countryside was dark, and we stood and looked out over a field where in the distance you could see the black shape of a farm. I was about to say something when off to our left a light went on in the window of another farmhouse. I didn’t say anything after all. Then Tschick put his arm around my shoulders and said, “We’ve got to get going.”
We got back in the car and drove on.
CHAPTER 43
The next day we were back on the autobahn. A huge tractor-trailer passed us. It looked as if it was made out of pig stalls. A couple of wheels, a rusty cab, and license plates from Albania or something. It was only with a second glance that I saw that what looked like pig stalls actually were pig stalls. The cages were stacked next to each other and on top of each other, and out of every one peeked a pig.
“What a shit life,” said Tschick.
The road slanted slightly uphill in this section, and it took the truck ages to pass us. When we could finally see its rear wheels, it started to drop back again. After a minute, the cab reappeared next to us. Somebody rolled down the window of the passenger door.
“Did he see you?” asked Tschick. “Or is he looking at the dents on our roof?”
I let up on the gas pedal to make it easier for him to get by us. The truck put its blinker on, swerved into our lane, and then started going slower.
“What the hell kind of idiot is this guy?” said Tschick.
We slowed way down.
“Pass him.”
I went into the left lane. The truck swerved back into the left lane in front of us.
“Pass him on the right, then.”
I steered back into the right lane. The truck got in the middle, straddling the two lanes, and to this day I don’t know if he was trying to slow us down or if he was just a moron. Tschick said I should wait for another car to come along and then follow it past the truck. But no other cars came along. The autobahn was completely empty.
“Should I use the emergency lane?”
“Maybe if we can get a running start,” said Tschick. “If you think you can do it. You’ll have to shift.”
We fell back, I stepped on the clutch, and Tschick put it in third. The engine whined.
“Now step on it — it’ll take off like a rocket.”
Rocket turned out not to be the best description. More like the shifting of a sand dune. We had fallen about a hundred and fifty or two hundred meters behind the truck, and even with the pedal to the metal it took about a minute before we got back up behind it. And the tachometer was quivering in the red by then. I pulled up right behind the truck so I’d be invisible to the driver. He was swerving back and forth, and I wasn’t sure which side to pass him on.
“Swerve with him,” said Tschick. “Then at the last second, zip by!”
I still had my foot all the way down on the gas pedal. I should point out that I wasn’t nervous at that moment. I’d swerved like this a million times in video games. It came more naturally than driving straight. And the pig transporter was just the sort of obstacle you had to go around in driving games. I pulled right up behind the truck so I could shoot around it in the emergency lane. And that’s exactly what I would have done if Tschick hadn’t been there. If Tschick hadn’t been there, I wouldn’t have survived.
“HIT THE BRAKES!” he screamed. “BRAAAAAKE!”
My foot stepped on the brake pedal even before I heard and understood his scream. My foot braked automatically because I was used to doing what he said to do when I was driving. So he shouted “brakes” and I braked — without knowing why. Because as far as I could tell there was no reason to brake.
There was space between the truck and the guardrail for at least five cars, and it would have been ages before I had realized that the truck hadn’t made way but rather had skidded out of the way. The rear end of the trailer had slid sideways, and even though we were right behind the trailer I suddenly saw the cab directly in front of me in the middle of the road — and I saw the trailer overtaking the cab. The eighteen-wheeler was transforming itself into a barrier — and that barrier was skidding in front of us, across the entire width of the autobahn, as we skidded toward it. The scene was so strange that later I had the feeling it had taken several minutes to unfold. In reality, it didn’t even last long enough for Tschick to scream “brake” a third time.
The Lada turned sideways. The barrier in front of us drifted backward, tipped over with a crash, and left us faced with eighteen rotating wheels. Thirty meters in front of us. In absolute silence we glided into those wheels, and I thought, Okay, we’re going to die. I thought I would never get back to Berlin, I would never see Tatiana again, and I would never know whether she liked my drawing or not. I thought I needed to apologize to my parents and I thought, Crap, I forgot to save the game.
The other thing I thought was that I should tell Tschick that I’d nearly decided to become gay because of him. I was going to die sometime, so it might as well be now, I thought as we finally slid into the truck — and nothing happened. In my memory I didn’t even hear a crash. Though there must have been an incredible crash. Because we rammed straight into the truck.
CHAPTER 44
I didn’t feel a thing for a minute. The first sensation I had was the feeling that I couldn’t breathe. The seat belt was cutting me in half and my head was practically on the gas pedal. Tschick’s cast was also somewhere near my head. I sat up. Or at least I turned my head. Above the cracked windshield was a truck tire obscuring the sky. It was turning silently. There was a dirty lightning bolt sticker on the hub of the wheel — a red bolt on a yellow background. A fist-sized clump of gunk dangled from the axle, slowly detached itself, and then splattered on the windshield.
“So much for that,” said Tschick. He had survived.
Thunderous applause broke out. It sounded like a huge crowd was shouting, whistling, hooting, and stomping their feet, and it didn’t seem completely unjustified — for an amateur driver, my braking performance had been top notch. At least that was my opinion, and it didn’t surprise me that others thought so as well. It’s just that there was actually no crowd there.
“Are you okay?” asked Tschick, shaking my arm.
“Yeah. You?”
The passenger side of the car next to Tschick had been crushed inward about a foot, but very evenly. There were shards of glass everywhere.
“I think I cut myself.” He held up a bloody hand. The audience was still roaring and whistling, but those sounds were mixed with grunts now.
I extricated myself from the seat belt and fell onto my side. The car was apparently lying at an odd angle — I had to climb out the side window. I immediately fell over something in the street. I tried to get up but fell over again and landed in a pool of bloody sludge. A dead pig. A few yards behind us a red Opel had come to a stop. Inside the car were a man and a woman, both pushing down the door locks. I sat down on the hood of their car and grabbed the radio antenna. I wasn’t able to stand anymore, and the antenna felt good in my hand. I never wanted to let go of it. For the rest of my life. “Are you okay?” Tschick called again when he had climbed out of the Lada.
At that moment, a screeching pig came running around the end of the overturned trailer. And then a bunch more. The lead pig ran, bleeding, across the autobahn and into some bushes. Some of the others ran after it, but most of them just stood there surrounded by dead pigs and battered stalls and screeched hysterically. Then I saw the police on the horizon. At first I wanted to run, but I knew there was no point. And the final two images that I can remember are of Tschick hobbling off into the bushes with his cast, and of the trooper standing next to me with a friendly look on his face, taking my hand off that antenna and saying, “It’ll be okay without you.”
I’ve already told you the rest.<
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CHAPTER 45
“He doesn’t understand.”
My father turned to my mother and said, “He just doesn’t understand. He’s too stupid.”
I was sitting on a chair and he was on another one facing me. He was bent over so far that his face was directly in front of mine and his knees were pressing against mine. I could smell his aftershave with every single word he shouted. Aramis. A gift from my mother for his hundred and seventieth birthday.
“You really screwed up. Is that clear?”
I didn’t answer. What would I say? Of course it was clear. And he wasn’t saying it for the first time. More like the hundredth time that day. I had no idea what he wanted to hear from me.
I looked at my mother. My mother coughed.
“I think he gets it,” she said. She stirred her Amaretto with a straw.
My father grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Do you understand what I’m saying? Kindly say something!”
“What do you want me to say? I’ve already said yes. Yes, I understand. Yes, it’s clear.”
“You don’t understand a thing! Nothing is clear to you. He thinks this is just about saying the words. What an idiot!”
“I’m not an idiot just because for the hundredth time . . .”
Bam. He smacked my face.
“Josef, don’t.” My mother tried to stand up but lost her balance and let herself sink back into the armchair next to the bottle of Amaretto.
My father got right in my face. He was shaking with rage. Then he crossed his arms on his chest and I tried to put on a face creased with worry — because my father probably expected that, and because I knew his arms were only crossed because he was about to smack me again. Up to that point I had just said what I thought. I didn’t want to lie. This face was the first lie that I trotted out — to speed things along.
Why We Took the Car Page 17