Why We Took the Car (16 page)

I felt great again after that, and had no objection to walking another few hours in search of a hose. Which is good, because it did in fact take two hours before we caught sight of the dump. Giant mountains of garbage, hemmed in by the autobahn on one side and woods on the rest. We weren't the only ones poking around there. We could see an old man bent over collecting electrical wire. And there was a girl our age there too, covered in filth. And two children. But they didn't seem to be together.

I started working through a mound of household trash and picked up two photo albums to show Tschick. One was a family album full of pictures of a father, mother, son, and dog all smiling in every picture, even the dog. I flipped through it, then decided to throw it away after all — it made me depressed. It made me think of my mother and how badly things were going for her and how much more distress I was probably going to cause her when she found out about all of this. Then I slipped on a slick plank of wood and fell into a pile of rotten fruit.

Tschick had climbed onto another mound and found a big brown plastic canister with a filler cap. He beat the canister like a drum and then held it over his head. It was great. But as for a hose — negative.

I kept an eye out for washing machines, but in all the ones I found, the drum had been ripped out and the hose removed. As the hunched man wandered past me, I asked him if he had any idea why the hoses were missing from all the washing machines. He barely looked up and just pointed to his ears, as if he were deaf. The girl shot past me like a quick little animal at one point too, but she didn't even look at me. She was barefoot and her legs were blackened with dirt all the way up to her knees. She had on rolled-up army pants and a filthy T-shirt. She had small eyes, bulging lips, and a flat nose. And her hair — it looked like the clippers had gotten fouled up while she was having a haircut. I decided not to try to talk to her. She had a wooden box under her arm, but I wasn't sure if she'd found it here or had brought it to carry things, and it wasn't clear what she was looking for anyway.

After a while I went up and met Tschick on top of the biggest mound. Neither of us had found anything except for the ten-liter canister Tschick had. But what use was that? This was a dump with no hoses. We sat down on a gutted washing machine on top of the mountain of garbage. The sagging sun had already reached the tops of the trees. The sound of the autobahn was quieter, and the old man and the children were no longer in sight. The only person left was the girl, who sat on top of another mound looking across at us. Her legs hung from the open door of an old wardrobe. She yelled something in our direction.

“What?” I yelled back.

“You're idiots!” she called.

“Are you crazy or something?”

“You heard me, moron. Your friend's an idiot too!”

“What the hell kind of asshole is that?” said Tschick.

For a long time all we could see were her legs, dangling out of the wardrobe. Then she sat up and started to put on a pair of boots that were sitting next to her in a drawer. She looked across at us.

“I've got something!” she yelled, though it was clear she didn't mean the boots. “Do you?”

“Shove it up your ass!” shouted Tschick.

She stopped tying the boots for a second. Then she bent forward and stretched out her legs and called, “You're so dumb you couldn't even fuck!”

“Shove it up your ass and shut your mouth!”

“Russian bastard!” She'd made out his accent.

“I'm going to come over there!”

“Oooh, the big bad man is going to come over here. What are you going to do? Come on! Come over here, you pussy! I'm
so
scared.”

“I don't think she's right in the head,” said Tschick.

The mounds were so steep that it would have taken several minutes to get over there.

It was quiet for a few minutes, and then she called, “What were you looking for?”

“A pile of shit,” said Tschick.

“Hoses!” I shouted. All the cursing was beginning to bug me. “We were looking for hoses. You?”

A crow swooped over the mound and skidded down on a piece of sheet metal. The girl didn't answer. She lay back down in the wardrobe again.

“What about you?” I shouted.

For a while all you could see were her filthy calves. Then a hand came into view.

“Hoses are over there.”

“What?”

“Over there.”

“She's just pretending she knows,” said Tschick.

“I heard that!” yelled the girl.

“So?”

“Dirty bastard!”

“Where over there?” I called.

“Where am I pointing?”

You could see her knee and her hand, but to be honest it looked as if her hand was pointing at the sky. It was quiet for a few minutes. Then I climbed down from our mound and up the one she was on.

“Where?” I asked, catching my breath as I approached her wardrobe.

She lay there without moving and stared at my neck. “Come here. Come on.”

“Where?” I said, and suddenly she hopped up. Surprised, I staggered back a few steps and nearly fell. Behind me was a ten-foot drop. “Do you know where the hoses are or not?”

“You're the queer with the dirty Russian boyfriend, yeah?” She wiped a piece of fruit off my shirt that I hadn't noticed. Then she picked up her wooden box, tucked it under her arm, and started off. Up the next mound, then the next, and then she stopped and pointed down, “There!”

At the foot of this mound was a smaller mound of scrap metal and behind it a huge pile of hoses. Long hoses, short hoses, all sorts of tubes and hoses. Tschick, who had followed us, had already scrambled down and grabbed a thick washing machine hose. “Built-in angle!” he called. He wouldn't look at the girl.

“No, an angle is no good,” I said. I disconnected a handheld showerhead from its hose.

“What do you need it for?”

“An angle is always good,” said Tschick, running the angled end into his canister.

“Hey, I asked you something,” said the girl.

“What was the question?”

“What do you want it for?”

“It's a birthday present for my father.”

Oddly enough she didn't curse at me. She just put an annoyed look on her face and said, “I showed you where the crap was, so now you can tell me what you want it for.”

Tschick was kneeling among the hoses, examining the various washing machine hoses and shoving them into the canister.

“Why do you want them?”

“We stole a car,” said Tschick. “And now we need to steal gasoline for it.”

He looked at the girl through a big tube.

She pelted him with about a hundred curse words. “I should have known. You retards. Even though I showed you the damn things. Typical. Do whatever you want.” She wiped her face with her T-shirt and sat down with her wooden box on a tractor tire. I held up my shower hose and gave Tschick the signal to quit looking. With three hoses and a canister we headed off.

“What are you really going to do with them?” the girl yelled.

“You're getting on my nerves,” Tschick said.

“Do you have anything to eat?”

“Do we look like we do?”

“You look like retards.”

“You're repeating yourself.”

“Do you have any money?”

“For you?”

“You wouldn't have found them without me.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Tschick and the girl continued to insult each other until we were nearly out of earshot. He kept turning around and yelling insults at her, and she shouted insults back at him from a mound of garbage. I stayed out of it.

But then she started to run after us. For some reason I had a funny feeling about the whole thing when I saw
how
she was running after us. Normally, girls don't run right — they run awkwardly. But this girl could
run
. She ran like it was a matter of life or death — and with the wooden box under her arm no less. I wasn't exactly afraid of her, the way she hurtled toward us, but I definitely thought she was weird.

“I'm hungry,” she said, catching her breath. She was looking at us as if she was staring into the distance.

“There are blackberries over there,” I said.

She drew a circle around her mouth with her finger and said, “And here I was thinking you were queer. Because of the lipstick.”

Tschick and I walked on, and he whispered to me that she wasn't right in the head.

We hadn't gotten far when we heard her yelling again.

“Hey!” she called.

“What?”

“Where are the blackberries, man? Where are the blackberries?”

CHAPTER 30

The way back seemed to go a lot faster than the way there. Maybe it was because the girl talked nonstop. At first she had walked behind us, then between us, and then on the other side of the path. Tschick held his nose at some point and looked at me, and it was true. She stank. She smelled horrible. You didn't notice it while in the dump, because the whole place stank. But she was giving off a serious stench. If she'd been in a cartoon, flies would have been buzzing around her head. And she talked nonstop. I don't remember exactly what she was talking about, but she kept asking us stuff like where we lived and where we went to school, whether we were good at math. That seemed particularly important to her — whether we were good at math. She asked if we had siblings, whether we knew Cantor's theorem of infinity and on and on. But whenever we asked why she wanted to know all of this, she never answered. She wouldn't even tell us what she was looking for at the dump.

Instead, she told us that she wanted to work at a TV station one day. Her dream was to be the host of a quiz show. “Because you look good and you work with words.” She had a cousin who worked in TV and said it was a super job except that you had to work nights.

After she'd talked for long enough about TV, she came back to the joke about us stealing a car and said that Tschick was a funny guy, and that she had laughed inside when he'd told the joke about stealing the car. Tschick scratched his head and said that, yeah, she was right, he was a funny guy sometimes, which was exactly why he planned to give his father a hose for his birthday.

“And you're more the quiet type,” said the girl, poking me in the shoulder and asking me again if I
really
went to school. I hope we reach the blackberries soon, I thought, or we'll never get rid of her.

I figured she would turn around and go back at some stage, but she walked the three or four kilometers to the blackberry patch. I was hungry again too, and so was Tschick, so we all plunged into the berry patch.

“We have to get rid of her somehow,” whispered Tschick. I looked at him as if he had said we shouldn't saw off our feet.

Then the girl started to sing. Very quietly at first, in English, broken by pauses when she was chewing berries.

“Now she's singing some crap too,” said Tschick. I said nothing, because for one thing she wasn't singing crap. She was singing “Survivor” by Destiny's Child. Her pronunciation was ridiculous. She must not have spoken English — it sounded as if she was just imitating the sounds. But she sang unbelievably well. I gingerly grabbed a thorny branch with my thumb and pointer finger and pulled it aside to have a look through the leaves at the girl singing and humming and munching berries there in the bushes. Add to that the taste of the blackberries in my own mouth, the orange-red sunset, and the background sound of the autobahn, and I found myself in an extremely weird mood.

“We're going to head off on our own now,” said Tschick when we were standing on the path again.

“Why?”

“We have to get home.”

“I'll go with you. I'm going that way too,” said the girl.

And Tschick said, “This isn't the way you were going.”

He told her a thousand times that we didn't want her to come with us, but she just shrugged her shoulders and kept walking along behind us. Finally Tschick faced her and said, “Do you know how bad you stink? You smell like a pile of crap. Get out of here.”

As we walked on, I could tell she was still following us. But she started walking slower and slower, and soon enough we could no longer see her. Darkness started to creep between the trees. We heard some noise in the bushes at one point, but it was probably just an animal.

“If she follows us, we're screwed,” said Tschick.

Just to be safe, we walked faster and then, after rounding a sharp turn, hid in some bushes and waited. We waited at least five minutes, and when the girl didn't appear, we walked the rest of the way back to the rest stop.

“You didn't have to say all that stuff about her smelling bad.”