Blue Night

by Simone Buchholz

  RILEY, CHASTITY

  The last summer holiday before high school tears us apart. Some of us are going to one place, others are going to another.

  The last summer before things get serious, says Dad.

  As if it had been a barrel of laughs till now.

  I wear cut-off jeans and Dad’s old army shirts and sometimes clogs. Mostly I go barefoot. I like the warm streets under my feet. I like needing to be careful.

  We play James Bond on the banks of the Main. The boys want to play James Bond. Or we play World War II. Then we ride through Sachsenhausen on our folding bikes. Germans versus the Allies.

  I’m always the Americans.

  Of course.

  The boys go nuts for Dad’s army shirts.

  We play war or James Bond till the sun ducks behind the houses.

  All of Frankfurt glows gold and orange and pink. It comes from the red sandstone that they built the city from.

  At night in bed I think that sometimes I’d like a girl friend, but I don’t know how to get one. And I think that I’d like a mother – a mother who’s here, that is; here with me. Really, I want my mum.

  Every evening I think about her and ask myself over and over again how she could do that, just go off. And Dad stands outside my door and sheds secret tears for me and my childhood and our broken family. And I act like I don’t notice, and try to damn well pull myself together again.

  He really can’t help it.

  She just wanted to get away. Out of the country bombed by the war when she was a kid.

  And then this man – this other officer – took her with him.

  That’s what I tell myself. In bed at night.

  Dad really can’t help it.

  But he still thinks it’s all his own fault.

  KLASSMAN, HENRI

  I hadn’t even been born. So I’ve got nothing to say.

  Perhaps my mum had just met my dad. Whoever he was.

  I do know one thing: my mum wanted a son called Henri. Because of all the sailors she used to know.

  CALABRETTA, VITO

  Through the streets of Altona. Alone.

  I like running around alone. I run to and fro and to and fro. And whenever I go past my parents’ supermercato, I pop in.

  It sucks me in, the shop. Because an Italian can’t walk past his family, says my dad.

  But I don’t like to stay long. I usually go straight out again. It’s cold in the shop. The chiller’s too big.

  And if my mum catches me, I have to sort things. Into boxes, out of boxes, in and out. I hate sorting boxes.

  It’s not complicated or anything, but it makes me crazy. Because it seems so pointless. As if I only have to do it so I’ll stay in the shop. So I won’t run around outside.

  But running around outside is the only thing that untangles my brain. When I’m running around outside I can cope.

  It’s my way of sorting things, I tell my mum.

  She doesn’t understand. She wants me to sort the boxes.

  VELOSA, CARLA

  Early morning at Grandma’s in Lisbon. Down in the Alfama.

  She beats octopuses against the wall. As many as she can, she beats against the wall.

  It softens the brutes up, she says.

  My grandpa caught them. The octopuses.

  But me too, says Grandma.

  Later, Grandpa sells everything at the fish market.

  But not Grandma, he says.

  The wall next to the door to my grandparents’ ground-floor flat is all black. From all the ink.

  Soon, when I go to school and finally learn to read and write, I’ll pinch a bit of ink, then I’ll write things on the road.

  The sky over the Tejo is purple and red. From all the octopus souls, says Grandma.

  Is the sky a different colour everywhere in the world?

  Yes, says Grandma, because it depends who is dying under that sky.

  MALUTKI, ROCCO

  My mum is the most beautiful hooker of all. Not just in St Pauli. In the whole world.

  She has the biggest and most beautiful boobs in the whole world.

  My dad played the violin in an orchestra. Nobody knows where he is now, but that’s not so bad, says Mum.

  She says: Some people weren’t meant to stay put.

  We manage just fine as it is. Fresh money comes in every night.

  In the morning, when she gets in from work, she stands at the ironing board and irons the money.

  There, she says, when she’s finished and has folded up the board, now it’s clean again.

  JOE

  Hey.

  Hamburg.

  ONLY THE ROAD (AND ABOVE IT THE PRETTY LIGHTS)

  Watch out.

  Early-rising day in the Klatsche household.

  The Blue Night is shut on Mondays and the boss goes shopping. Schnapps, pretzels, butter, liquorice. Then in the mornings, there’s the beer delivery. Bottled beer. Klatsche had draught beer poisoning a few years ago. Badly cleaned beer lines. It happens, I said at the time.

  ‘Not at my place,’ he said when he took over from fat, old Ali at the Blue Night.

  So there’s been a sign hanging over the bar ever since:

  ‘DRINK WITH CONFIDENCE

  NO DRAUGHT BEER POISONING HERE – GUARANTEED’

  He brings me a coffee in bed, drops a kiss on my brow.

  What a lovely alarm clock.

  Then he’s gone.

  I get up and gather my clothes from last night. My jumper’s in the living room, right next to the window sill, my jeans too. My underwear is somewhere else entirely. He always does that. I put some clothes on and go over to my flat to shower. I take the coffee with me.

  Later, in the taxi, the city slips past the corners of my eyes. It’s like somebody intentionally thought up the dirty grey of advanced February but then just spewed it out instead of putting their heart into it. Outside, it’s so sunless the streetlamps are on the point of coming on but not quite dark enough for them to make it.

  A lousy fake of a day.

  The suit feels heavy and black in my hands. Expensive fabric, no label. Clearly made to measure. The black shirt is a British brand, the shoes come from the USA.

  The walls around me are light grey and they glisten. The smooth lino under my feet swallows up every sound and every odour; the neon light absorbs all warmth.

  I’d almost like some company.

  It’s always the same when I hold this kind of thing in my hands: clothes, or a murder weapon, or some bloodstained item from a person who didn’t get out of an incident in one piece. I think that these things ought to tell me a bit about what happened. As if objects have a memory. But as always there’s only a feeling. This time it’s:

  It wasn’t a surprise.

  I put everything back in the plastic wrappers, take off the gloves and thank my colleagues from forensics, hunched over a couple of microscopes in the room next door. Then I get into the lift at the end of the corridor and go up a couple of floors to have a closer look at Calabretta.

  Once I went in and out of police headquarters all the time. Now I avoid coming here. Because it makes me feel watched. A few years ago I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I was screeching round the bends all the time, but really I was going dead straight compared to the lurching zigzag of my current life.

  Calabretta looks like shit, of course, but at least he’s more than just physically present now. I can actually make out signs of life in his eyes. In the first few weeks after he and Betty split up, they were just two glowering holes, scattering darkness, and not entirely belonging to the body curled in a foetal position under the blankets on Carla and Rocco’s couch.

  But something seems to have happened since Saturday. Carla hinted as much.

  At least Calabretta’s no longer lying on that couch. Calabretta’s sitting at his desk and tapping at his computer keyboard. When he spots me, he looks up.

  I lean against the wall opposite him. ‘Well?’

  ‘
Nice to see you,’ he says.

  ‘Nice to see you,’ I say.

  He breathes in deeply, and out again, and looks out of the window.

  Ah. End of conversation. In my imagination, I can hear the half-fossilised heart in his chest. It’s trying to knock on the walls, to send a signal perhaps, but nothing’s coming through properly.

  He starts typing again.

  I look at him a bit longer, but there’s no further reaction. I head into the room next door, to my colleagues Schulle and Brückner.

  ‘Hey, boss.’

  ‘Mornin’ boss!’

  ‘Hello gentlemen. I’m not your boss any more. Remember?’

  ‘Don’t matter, boss.’

  ‘Yeah, fuck ’em.’

  I like these two so much that I could buy them an ice cream every time I see them.

  ‘How’s business?’ I ask, sitting on the ripped, black leather sofa in the corner.

  ‘Fine,’ says Schulle. ‘We’re watching a guy who’s probably taken out his wife, but we’re still looking for the body.’

  ‘Are you still looking after your depressive colleague?’ I ask quietly.

  ‘Naturalmente,’ says Brückner.

  ‘Does he go out with you now and again?’

  ‘Jesus!’

  They slap their thighs as if I’ve asked if they’ve heard the rumour that the moon’s been seen wearing ears and a false nose.

  Schmilinskystrasse. Right on the border between the squalor behind the station and the elegant surroundings of the Aussenalster Lake.

  A white turn-of-the-century house; the ground floor façade’s painted grey and merges almost seamlessly with the asphalt. Two trees stick out of the pavement right and left of the door, their bare branches stretching towards the sky. Ghostly fingers. Across the road is a tree hung all over with fairy lights; its suggestion of homeliness strikes me as no less spooky.

  They found the man here. He was lying on the pavement, his broken arms and legs at unusual angles to his body; he’d probably fainted from all the blood flowing from the wound on his right hand, as well as the pain in the rest of his body.

  The blood has gone now. They’ve been and scrubbed it away, as fast as ever. Now things look almost like they did forty-eight hours ago, before he was beaten to a pulp on Saturday night. All you can see is a large, faint stain; all that distinguishes the cleaned grey from the rest of the grey is its slightly chemical nature. The colour doesn’t smell of the street.

  I stand on the steps by the front door and sigh at the pavement. Look left and right along the road.

  One man?

  Hardly.

  A gang attack?

  More likely.

  I look up at the façades; people live here, although not many – most of the flats are offices now. If you attack someone here you want things to quieten down quickly because it’s always quiet here the rest of the time. You want things short and sweet. Not too much of a struggle. So you’d do better as part of a group. Besides, the man in the hospital is too tall and broad-shouldered for a single attacker. There must have been at least two of them, if not three or even four.

  I pull a Lucky from the box and light up. Where did they come from? From all sides, I think. And then they left him lying outside the house. I scan down the doorbells and note the names. There are people with names like bad weather: Rainier and Fogdt. And then they shack up together.

  ‘He woke up briefly last night,’ says a doctor who looks barely seventeen. ‘Spoke to the nurse on duty.’

  ‘What did he say?’ I ask.

  ‘He said: “It takes over from everything you love.”’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘“It takes over from everything you love.”’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing else.’

  The teenage doctor is standing by the man’s bed, looking at him, his hands in his pockets. His white coat hangs loose on his body; he wears it like a trench coat.

  I sit down on the man’s bed and look at him. Between his eyes is a frown line that wasn’t there yesterday. He doesn’t look peaceful any more. You could say that he looks a little dangerous.

  ‘How is he?’ I ask.

  ‘He’ll need a lot of physio,’ says the doctor. ‘And he’s not a young man any more. With all those broken bones … it might be a while before he can walk again.’

  ‘I mean, how’s he doing now?’

  ‘His body has got over the initial shock quite well. Everything’s doing its job. We’ll gradually phase out the soporifics.’

  ‘But he’s still on painkillers…?’

  The seventeen-year-old says, ‘Of course.’ He frowns and stares at me, and his look says: Do you take me for an idiot?

  I give him five of my cards and say: ‘I’d like you to put them up in the nurses’ station and on all the toilet mirrors. I want one of you to call me right away if he wakes up, even at night.’ My look says: Or there’ll be trouble, kid.

  He gets it and departs in official silence. If he weren’t even younger than Klatsche, I’d go out for a beer with him like a shot.

  I watch the child-doctor for a moment longer through the closed door, then I take the hand of the man I’m responsible for. Dry and warm. Unchanged.

  We sit like that for a long time. Outside, someone – the late winter or the early spring or just the north – is whistling a quirky tune. The wind at hospital windows sounds different from a breeze swinging past a cinema, for example. Or a café. There’s something comfortable about an outdoor sound like that. Maybe you pull your collar a bit tighter and hunch your shoulders a little, and then you sigh and feel cosy and happy that you’re wherever you happen to be. The wind at hospital windows, on the other hand, inspires yearning. Although you know that the wind out there would only whistle in your face – and you must be too weak for that or you wouldn’t be in here, would you? – there’s nothing you’d rather do than get out and into the whistling.

  The man suddenly takes two rather deeper breaths and winces as he breathes out again. Something tells me that he’ll wake up tomorrow morning.

  I pick up a water glass from the window sill, hold it over my mouth, wheeze into the glass and whisper: ‘Luke, I am your father.’

  Classic displacement activity.

  As I leave the hospital, the day’s clocking off too. A deep sigh falls over the city. The streetlights now have a right to be on and the asphalt relaxes. I walk along the Alster and the canals that take me to the port. Walking beside water always seems so much easier than taking some road. The water moves with me, sweeps me along.

  And sweeps out my messed-up head.

  The windows in Carla’s café are fogged up, the chandelier and candles are lit. The place is like a perpetual Christmas tree, shining tirelessly on the concrete outside the windows.

  The door opens; two guys in woolly hats come out. They nod to me and I let myself be drawn in by the warmth.

  Carla threads her way through the tables in her high heels, serving up steaming plates of food. She’s wearing a tight black dress with a neckline as deep as the harbour basin, her long, dark curls tumbling down her back. She twinkles at me and blows a kiss across the room. Rocco is standing in the tiny, still-improvised kitchen right behind the bar. He’s busy with pans, pots and plates, his disorganised hair flying out behind him, followed by tiny droplets of sweat. His performance looks like a cross between Flashdance and the Muppet Show chef. He’s got no time for anything. The kitchen’s too tense and too crowded even for the heat, so it comes to stretch and settle down out here with us. Inspector Calabretta is sitting at the bar, drinking beer. He’s wearing the same grey jumper and jeans as this morning, his once-black hair is greying nicely; slicked back this morning, it’s come loose over the day and wavy strands have fallen into his face. He just needs a fag in the corner of his mouth, a hand raised to heaven, a twist of the hips, and it’s a perfect Celentano impression. Seeing him sit there like that, I realise he’s lost weight. Not the slightest hin
t of a belly, not anywhere. Broken heart, cold kitchen. Poor bloke. I sit next to him, look at him. He doesn’t look back.

  Carla slips behind the counter, glances at Calabretta and shrugs. ‘You want a beer too, darling? If you want to match your neighbour you’ve got some catching up to do.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I’d like a beer too, please.’ And I put a hand on Calabretta’s forearm. ‘What are two pretty things like us going to get up to this evening, eh?’

  He turns to face me, looks at me, eyes full of nothing. Then he looks back at his half-full bottle of beer and I can tell from his expression that right now, for him, every bottle is definitely half empty and not half full. Carla passes me my beer and we clink bottles. She’s grabbed herself a knolle, a stubby bottle of Astra, from the fridge, which means it’s about an hour till closing time. I show my Italian pal how fast I can drink then put my bottle down next to his.

  ‘Snap,’ I say.

  ‘If you’ve just secretly emptied three more, then yeah,’ he says.

  There it is again: empty.

  I let my head drop onto the bar; it doesn’t hurt. I lift my head again and we sit side by side in silence for two more beers. The people at the tables begin to ask for their bills, Carla starts polishing glasses, and I turn to Calabretta:

  ‘Have you eaten anything?’

  He shakes his head.

  Rocco comes out of the kitchen, strokes his hair out of his eyes and then wipes his greasy hands on a towel.

  Looks like someone needs a bath this evening.

  ‘Can we still get something to eat?’ I ask.

  Rocco pulls a tired, stressed face.

  Since the two of them turned the café into a daytime restaurant, both the owners’ skills and the kitchen capacity have been permanently overwhelmed. But they cope and the place is buzzing.