The builders have left the flat in a very, very bad state. Franziska’s wearing a white T-shirt and invites us in with a pseudo-relaxed gesture. I want to go to the toilet but my father’s standing naked at the basin with his back to me and says, ‘Can you wait outside a minute?’
I say, ‘Dental floss in the bathroom is actually totally unsexy, but camouflaged as a shark like that it looks kind of decorative.’
We’ve been through some pretty strange situations in this atmosphere. Our last family get-together started with a Patti Smith cover version of ‘Gimme Shelter’ and ended with us rushing outside without saying goodbye. My father was enthroned on one of his rococo furnishings with his back to us, staring at the TV tower through the wall of windows. So now we’re back here again. Nirvana, just like the old days. Here we are now, entertain us, yeah, that’s right. Something suddenly stops buzzing. Either the light or the wasp trapped in the window frame.
I’m offered a seat on the sofa in a mega-formal manner. I’m starting to notice more and more clearly with every second how sober and upset this family is acting. Franziska with her fear-instilling horsey teeth is hanging on a chair, her torso leant forward in a mega-opportunist pose, a permanent nervous grin on her face. She’s put on the hand-me-down Sabrina Dehoff scarf I gave her. My father’s staring at a table leg, his fingers spread and affixed to his mouth, Annika’s smoking, and Edmond looks me in the eye without laughing for the first time in his life. So they start off talking about how they all find it difficult to distinguish between the terms signifier and signified. I say I mainly find it difficult to distinguish between DIY stores and electronics stores, but nobody laughs. In fact nobody here has laughed at all during the past half hour. ‘Hey, I was really loving that!’ I say, for no reason other than desperation.
Annika says in a pretty bored voice, ‘Who did that come from again?’
‘From Consti, when he was bouncing.’
Dad, ‘Bouncing?’
‘At that thing in Munich last year, when he shouted down the stairs, “Hey, guys, they’re playing hip-hop!” And we like totally bounced for six hours in a row, and later we were in a taxi, Consti was at the front and Timo and me were in the back, and he turns round and says, “Hey, I was really loving that!”’
‘Ha ha.’
‘He was deadly serious and we were like, “Awesome, yeah.”’
‘Awesome, yeah.’
‘Mifti, we . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Mifti, I have to, actually—’
‘Don’t say anything, Dad.’
‘But—’
‘Please just don’t say anything, all right?’
Annika: ‘Mifti?’
I sense strong waves of energy pulsing through me. I feel movement. Enormous, increasing movement. When I look around, shapes form out of the blur. I’m facing four people radiating sensationalism and sadism. Every pore of their bodies seems to be radiating light. The group gathers around the dining table and I know it’s time for me to sit down.
‘Mifti, look at us. We know you’ve got massive problems.’
‘Why the hell do you think you have the right to claim you know the slightest thing about ME?’
‘We’re not talking about dope or truancy here.’
‘So what are we talking about?’
‘You’re mortally unhappy.’
‘Did you read that in the book Why Our Kids Are Turning into Dirty Sex Beasts?’
‘No.’
‘Do you ever read parenting books? Do you sometimes get so bored and sentimental that you read those instant parenting instruction manuals, and now you think you ought to fulfil some duty sixteen years on by telling me I’m mortally unhappy? Do I get an answer?’
‘Honey, I’m really sorry about this, but . . . Edmond?’
Edmond rummages in his bag, pulling something out in slow motion, and I see that it’s a magenta notebook with my name written on the cloth binding.
Mifti: you losers.
They’ve got everything I wrote in their hands there, and I feel like I don’t even exist any more. I close my eyes, and as I rotate around my own axis I’m suddenly detached from my body as a cloud-like empty hull, no idea how that happens all of a sudden, and I watch everything that takes place from above. I see my body screaming and I feel how that scream drives into me. How I try to resist with all my strength, but it must be some kind of incomprehensible detachment from my model of myself. I’m just about to enter a state of non-existence.
My body tears the notebook out of Edmond’s hands and runs to the door. Edmond grabs my arm and says, ‘I’ll say one thing for you.’
‘What?’
The words bring us back into a single entity, my body and me – odd.
‘You write like roadkill.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like a dead animal squashed against the road.’
I slam the door behind me and count my money. The necessity of a family is just dissolving before my very eyes. Mummy, Daddy, baby – why can’t we wipe out this barbaric family model at long last? The only way out is spilling blood and guts. Or, as in my case, getting yourself disowned in a terribly tragic drama. Despite our blood ties to each other, I’ve suddenly managed to hand in my notice. I haven’t got a sister any more, or a brother, or a father. You need more than goodwill for a community to work. Goodwill towards the model doesn’t mean the model will work. I get on a random bus and spend all day riding around, seeing as I have no destination whatsoever. Seeing as I have to start a new chapter. I watch myself discovering a new existence, or whatever you want to call it, when suddenly the word heroin lights up and you get off the bus without even noticing at Kottbusser Tor station, the epicentre of Berlin’s illegal drug supply chain, eyed by a one-legged old biddy who does look a bit scary despite it all – and in the end I send Ophelia the last text she’s ever going to get from me, asking for the number of her nineteen-year-old Russian from the organic waste bin. She sends me his contact details at 16:42 with no further comment. Say whatever you want, scream at me, shove me up against the walls, beat me out of bed, stare me in the eyes or laugh at me – I can’t do anything to change it. I can’t watch you lying to me. Watch you pretending you want me to do nothing.
What do I want?
I want you to laugh, to cry, to know what you’ve got before it’s gone. I don’t want you to think you’re on your own, I want you to be free, to come to me, to stop forgetting everything, not to have to do anything, to want to do something, to try new things, to leave me behind. If you have to.
* * *
At 22:00 I check into the Ibis Hotel on Prenzlauer Allee, so bored that I wash my clothes with soap in the basin and watch repeats of docusoaps all night long, which is great because in one of them there’s this fourteen-year-old girl whose father collects vintage cars and her mother has a poodle farm with four apricot-coloured king poodles and two white ones. They all live together in this completely tumbledown house in the East German countryside, and naturally enough the daughter Justine is pretty pissed off because her parents’ time-consuming hobbies mean they not only neglect their household duties, they also neglect her. But most of all Justine gets upset about all the dog turds in the living room, which stop her from ever inviting friends round.
How the rare times when a vicissitude of human relating, sheep-shearing, or pasture-status pissed him off, he’d get positively other-, under-worldly with anger, a bearded unit of pure and potent rage, ranging his sheep’s ranges like something mythopoeic, thunderous, less man or thing than sudden and dire force, will, ill.
(David Foster Wallace)
I walk round the Galeries Lafayette and deposit all the cashmere sweaters I come across in my bag as conspicuously as possible, as befits my current state of mind. The ones that don’t fit in pile up on my folded arms. Then I take a long detour to the exit via various escalators. Naturally enough, the electronic security device starts bleeping. Perfectly aware of the faked school ID card in m
y pocket, I stop and wait for the store detective, who comes running up behind me and grabs me coyly by the arm.
Half an hour later, I’m at a police station in the company of two of those curly-permed policewomen straight out of an early-evening TV series. One of them is staring at one of the two computers and taking down my details.
I keep repeating the sentence, ‘My name’s Ophelia and I’m thirteen years old.’
‘Nothing will happen to you anyway then.’
I show her the fake school ID.
‘Haven’t you got a proper ID card?’
‘You don’t have one when you’re thirteen.’
‘Oh, right.’
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
‘A policewoman.’
‘Sounds interesting.’
‘YOU’RE telling ME that?’
‘You’ll ruin your future if you keep stealing three hundred euros’ worth of clothes and getting caught. A parent or guardian has to come and collect you, otherwise we can’t let you go. Can we get hold of one of your parents?’
‘Well . . .’
‘What? Your father? Your mother? Is neither of them available?’
‘My father’s putting on a ready-made opera in Brazil right now.’
‘And your mother? Huh?’
‘She’s in a psychiatric hospital.’
‘Oh.’
‘But, well, there’s a friend of the family who’s kind of . . .’
‘Kind of . . .?’
‘Been awarded . . .’
‘Kind of.’
‘. . . my CUSTODY.’
And that’s the moment I’ve been waiting for since all that excess on the coast of France. I text Alice.
A heavily armed police officer comes in, shakes hands with the two women and, after a brief hesitation, with me. Then he disappears again.
‘Look how fast you’ve climbed the career ladder, Ophelia. Now they think you’re an intern.’
I’ve been waiting ninety minutes. I hear Alice’s voice in the corridor, leap up and walk to meet her. Alice is having a discussion with the doorman about the correct hardness of wood for chopping. When she sees me she stares at me in disbelief for a moment, until a cautious smile gradually takes possession. She rushes towards me, sweeping me up in an embrace and saying demonstratively over my shoulder to one of the policewomen: ‘Baby, what’s all this crap you’re getting up to, huh?’ I don’t take my eyes off the floor.
‘The child really doesn’t have it easy with all that garbled art crap and the tiny little flat and six younger siblings and hardly any pocket money. It won’t happen again, will it, Mifti?’
‘What won’t happen again?’
‘Mifti? Why Mifti?’
‘You know, the criminal activity stuff.’
‘Mifti, yeah, that’s what Alice always calls me because she finds my real name crap, depressing, oppressive, crap, umm . . .’
‘Can you sign here please?’
‘Exactly, depressing, oppressive, crap.’
‘Like a slap in the face for the soul, ha ha.’
‘Oh, I don’t care.’
‘Sign where? Here?’
‘Yes, right here where my finger is, that’s it.’
‘So, right, here.’
‘Where my finger is. Thanks very much.’
No no, no no no no, no no no no no
(Roy Orbison)
She’s working this ultra-chic neo-folk look. A jungle-green velour leather biker jacket, an oversized cardigan and a Donna Karan bag with a double zip for 1,543 euros, as in: city girls know that an across-the-body bag’s the only way to keep your essentials in one place at the height of summer.
Her hair’s kind of blowing in the wind – what else is it supposed to do in this situation? – and we’re walking side by side along a pavement with a startling amount of plant growth.
‘Can’t you nick tights from H&M like any normal girl your age? Does it have to be that secretary chic? Ophelia? OPHELIA? WHY THE HELL DID YOU THINK UP SUCH A STUPID BLOODY NAME FOR YOURSELF?’
‘Can you help me?’
‘WHAT WITH?’ she shouts really loudly.
‘I can’t go home.’
‘Sweetheart, it’s—’
‘I don’t know what to do, really. I can envisage one of those nasty wood-panelled institutional short-term homes where you have to share a room with four under-achieving bulimics under the age of eighteen and do basket-weaving and take part in video-supported therapy groups sitting on beanbags. All I can do right now is accidentally kick in windscreens from the passenger seat, and then all this shattered glass shit rains down on me.’
Take the money and run
(Steve Miller)
‘Really.’
‘Or you can (. . .)’
‘I keep demolishing stuff the whole time.’
‘You can . . .’
‘It’s all just really crap right now, Alice, it’s all just really badly crap right now.’
‘MIFTI, DO YOU WANT TO SLEEP AT MY PLACE?’
Now she starts blubbing, in all seriousness, from one second to the next there’s a blend of mascara and tears flooding down her face, and to make it worse I know why. I don’t react, standing still due to a psychosomatic dizziness attack and propping myself up against some lamp post. This thing here right now: I think it’s equivalent to seeing my own face reflected in the creation of the world. From one second to the next, this woman no longer matches up to my image of her. Maybe because I know that I don’t match up to her image of me any more. That I’m too old now – I can tell by her face. I can only rely on the idea that this impulse to turn around and leave is a mistake. That she hasn’t changed, and that everything will work just like it used to. And that’s why I nod.
‘You can sleep at my place, it’s no problem.’
We get into a red Mercedes with a white leather interior. All I know is that she always used to say she didn’t have a driving licence. Maybe she really hasn’t got one. But she’s obviously got herself a new Mercedes. We bomb silently through the shit in it, listening to Brinsley Schwarz on repeat from a mix CD of seventies stuff.
The sky darkens. She parks outside a rococo building, closer to the Turkish part of Schöneberg than the gay part and only a hundred yards away from one of the two branches of Lidl with the best opening hours in the city. I wind the window down and watch her walking through the front door into a corridor with black wood and mirrors. I don’t dare to ask where she’s going and how long she’ll be gone. Just after the twenty-two tracks have played all the way through for the second time and the street lights have switched on, Alice comes back with her face washed. She gets back in the car and looks at me.
I’m like, ‘Where were you?’
‘I cancelled my lover.’
‘And how am I supposed to react to that?’
‘Not at all.’
She takes a new CD out of the glove compartment and puts it in the player, takes a deep breath, clutches the steering wheel and says, as she stares straight ahead through the windscreen without blinking a single time, ‘What do you do when the war’s over?’
I shrug my shoulders. ‘What war do you mean?’
‘That doesn’t matter. You put on an old raincoat and wipe the dirt off your face, you walk through the rain to the end of the platform at a small-town station, from where you can see the grey ocean. You put your bag on the black, battered train standing there as if it had been expecting you. You sit down on a seat made of first-class leather, it smells totally musty and mouldy, and you stare through the yellowed train curtains at the wheels just chugging their dumb rotating rhythm. Your state of mind begins to improve as you speed through a landscape of metal and concrete. Through a dilapidated world that seems permanently on the brink of collapsing forever. Dirty washing hangs in ash-pale backyards, abandoned toys everywhere, they’re all wilted impressions, and your concentrated face is framed, so to speak, by a window to the past that you’re constantly trying
to fold up forever. On your withdrawal to some place called home that’s still a long way away at the moment. And where fearful encounters await you, hopefully a cup of tea, warmth, sleep. I think all that would sound a bit like this.’
She presses Play. Let’s just go home, I think. Curled up small in the passenger seat, I start to cry and don’t stop for a long time. Because I’ve found it. Because this is true love and true hate and true revulsion and real disappointment.
Machine Gun
(Portishead)
She lives in a plasterboard palace in a converted loft space. The apartment is primarily cream. Mega-old tables, mega-old seating opportunities and expensive picture frames. I sit down in the kitchen. We drink some kind of nasty tea, made of leaves that turned yellow when she poured water on them. I don’t dare raise the cup to my lips, knowing full well I’ll drop it.
I lie down on her bed, absolutely terrified. It’s one long moment of expectation.
I sit up, she leans down to me and says, ‘You’ve changed.’
I say, ‘You changed me.’
I kneel on the floor. My wrists are crossed behind my back, attached to my neck with extra-strong army-issue duct tape. She runs the rest of the tape from my wrists between my legs, across my left shoulder and back to my fingertips. The same again over my right shoulder. When she pulls it off, I’d say we’ll be back to the roots with the whole skinning thing. None of this has the slightest thing in common with a coming-of-age drama. To make sure skin doesn’t decompose once it’s been separated from an organism, you tan it. Using potassium cyanide and alum, dissolved in water and applied to the skin. It has to be stretched, that’s the tanning process, and after a while it hardens, then you have to keep stretching it more and more, watching out that it doesn’t tear of course. To be honest, though, I don’t know if I really ought to do it myself, it’s, well.
I won’t need my hands anyway.
There are parts of me that she doesn’t touch, that she has no access to.
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