Why We Took the Car (19 page)

You had to have seen it: The landscape just stopped. We got out and stood by the last clump of grass. At our feet the ground had been steeply cut away, dropping at least thirty or forty meters down. And below was a moonscape. The ground was whitish gray and pockmarked with craters so big entire buildings could have fit in them. Off to our left was a bridge that led out over the abyss. Although bridge is probably not the right word. It was more like a trestle made out of wood and steel — like a giant scaffold running dead straight out across the pit to the other side, which was maybe two kilometers away. Maybe more. It was impossible to gauge the distance. You couldn't tell what was on the other side either. Maybe trees and shrubs, but who knew. Behind us the massive swamp, in front of us the void. And even if you listened closely, you heard absolutely nothing. No crickets, not a single blade of grass rustling, no wind, no flies, nothing.

We wracked our brains for a while trying to think what this place could be. Then we walked over to look at the trestle. It was wider than it looked from a distance, and was covered with thick wood planks. There didn't seem to be any other way around the abyss. And since we didn't want to drive back the way we'd come, Tschick went and got the Lada. He rolled a few meters onto the trestle — or bridge, or causeway, or whatever it was — and said, “It'll work.”

Still, I didn't like the look of it. I got back in the car, and, even slower than a walking pace, we drove out along the wooden planks. The noise the planks made was so hollow and eerie that I got back out so I could walk ahead of the car. I kept an eye out for broken planks, tested suspicious looking spots with my feet, and looked through the cracks down into the depths. Tschick rolled along a few car lengths behind me. Anyone who had come upon us would have thought we looked like old people, creeping along. On the other hand, this wasn't exactly a street with an express lane.

When we had gotten far enough out that we could barely see the spot where we'd started but still couldn't really see the far side either, we took a break. Tschick grabbed Cokes out of the car and we sat on the edge of the plank road. Or tried to, anyway. The wood was so hot you couldn't sit on it until you stood there and cast a shadow for a while on the spot where you wanted to sit. We stared out at the crater landscape. And once I'd looked at the crater landscape for long enough, I thought about Berlin. It was suddenly difficult to imagine that I had once lived there. I could hardly imagine that I'd gone to school there. And I also couldn't possibly imagine that I would go back again.

CHAPTER 36

On the other side of the abyss were scraggy bushes and some grass and a sort of village. A crumbling road meandered between derelict buildings. The windows were nearly all broken, the roofs caved in. No signs, no cars, no vending machines, nothing. The fences around the gardens had long since fallen apart. Weeds grew from every crack.

We went inside an abandoned farmhouse and looked through the rooms. Moldy wooden shelves leaned against one wall. In a kitchen, an empty jam jar and a plate. A newspaper from 1995 on the floor with a report on strip mining. Once we were sure there were no people in the entire area, we went through a few more houses. But we didn't find anything interesting. Old clothes hangers, worn out rubber boots, a couple of tables and chairs. I had expected at least one skeleton. Though we didn't venture down into the dark basements.

We drove on through the town. The windows of one two-story ruin had been covered with plywood, and someone had painted symbols and numbers in white paint on the wood. There were white symbols and numbers painted all over the place — on rocks to the left and right of the road, on fence posts. And then in the middle of the road a huge pile of scrap wood and planks. There were car tracks going around it, and as Tschick approached it warily, shifting down to first gear, we heard an incredible blast. Then a creaking sound. We looked at each other. The Lada was standing still now, and then came another blast that sounded like someone had taken a sledgehammer to the car's body panels. Or had thrown a big rock at it. Or shot at it. Tschick turned his head, and then we realized the entire back window was cracked in a spiderweb pattern.

I sprang out of the car. I don't know why, but I jumped into some grass behind the car. And I don't remember the next few seconds. What I do know — because Tschick told me afterward — is that he threw the car into reverse and shouted at me to get in. But I had crawled alongside the car and was waving both of my arms above the hood. I was also carefully peeking at the ruin on the opposite side of the road, scanning the bombed out windows until I saw just what I expected: In one of the window frames was somebody holding a rifle aimed at us. I looked at the muzzle for a second, but then he raised the barrel and put down the gun. It was an old man.

He was standing on the second floor of the house with white writing on it. He was shaking, but not, as far as I could tell, the same way I was shaking. In his case it looked to be old age making him shake. He put a hand up to shield his eyes against the blinding sun as I continued to wave like an idiot.

“What are you doing? Get in!” Tschick yelled. But I had stood up and started walking — still waving my arms and showing my hands — toward the building.

“We don't want anything! We just got lost. We're leaving!” I called to the old man.

He nodded. He picked up the rifle by the barrel, shook it in the air, and shouted, “No timetable! No map and no timetable!”

I stayed there in the yard in front of his house and tried to express with my body language how right he was.

“Never go into the field without a map!” he yelled. “Come on in. I have sodas. Come on in.”

Obviously that was the last thing I wanted. To go in there. But he insisted. And in the end it wasn't a very difficult decision. He could easily still shoot us. It was tough getting around all the wood, but the old man didn't seem to be too crazy. I mean, at least he spoke like a normal person.

His living room — if you could call it that — wasn't in much better condition than the rooms we'd searched in other houses. You could tell it was occupied, but it was incredibly dark and dirty. A bunch of black-and-white photos hung on one wall.

We had to sit on a sofa and the old man, now apparently in a festive mood, brought a half-full bottle of Fanta orange soda. “Drink,” he said. “Go ahead and drink out of the bottle.”

He sat across from us in a comfy chair and started sipping some kind of moonshine out of an old jam jar. The rifle was between his knees. I had figured he'd ask us about the Lada first off, or ask where we were trying to get to. But it turned out he wasn't itching to know any of that stuff. As soon as he heard we were from Berlin, he was most interested in whether the city had really changed as much as they said, and whether you could walk on the street without being attacked. After we told him about ten times that violence was unheard of in our school, he suddenly asked, “Do you have sweethearts?”

I was going to say no, but Tschick answered more quickly.

“His is named Tatiana, and I'm crazy about Angelina,” he said. I realized why he said it right away, but the answer didn't seem to satisfy the old man.

“Because you are two very handsome boys,” he said.

“No, no,” said Tschick.

“At your age, you don't know in a lot of cases which way you might lean.”

“Nah,” said Tschick, shaking his head. I shook my head too, sort of the way a Lionel Messi fan would shake his head if you asked him if he didn't really think Cristiano Ronaldo was the greatest soccer player of all time.

“So you guys are in love with these girls, yeah?”

We said yes. It made me kind of queasy the way he kept dancing around the topic. He just kept talking about girls and love and the fact that the most beautiful thing in the world was the alabaster body of adolescence.

“Believe me,” he said. “One day you close your eyes and the next you open them to find withered flesh hanging in tatters. Love, love! Carpe diem.”

He got up, took two steps over to the wall, and pointed at one of the many little photos. Tschick shot me a worried look, but I got up immediately, put on my best overly respectful smile, and examined the photo his wrinkled finger was hovering near. It was a passport photo, and in one corner you could see a quarter of a stamp and a quarter of a swastika. The photo was of a handsome young man in uniform with a slightly sullen look on his face. Apparently the old man himself. As I was looking at the picture, his wrinkled finger wandered over to indicate the next photo to the right.

“And that's Elsa. She was my sweetheart.”

The picture showed a sharp-featured face, and at first glance I couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl. But “Elsa” was wearing a different uniform from the soldier or Hitler Youth member next to her. So it might have been a girl.

He asked whether he should tell the story of his relationship with Elsa, and since he'd picked up the rifle again — without thinking, as if it was just an extension of his body or a part of his history — we could hardly say no. So we listened to his story.

It wasn't a proper story. At least it wasn't told the way people normally tell a story about the love of their life.

“I was a communist,” he said. “Elsa and I were communists. Devoted communists. And not just after 1945 like all the rest of them. We'd always been communists. That's how we met — in a resistance group named after Ernst Roehm. Nobody would believe it all now, but that was a different time. And I had no equal when it came to marksmanship. Elsa was the only girl in the group, very reputable, from a good family, and she looked like a boy. She had translated lots of forbidden literature. She had translated that Jew Shakespeare. She'd translated Ravage. She could speak English exceptionally well, and not many people could back then. And I typed it up for her on a typewriter — yeah, that's how it was back then. Love of my life, fire of my loins. In the concentration camp they gassed Elsa right away. I was conscripted into a penal battalion and sent with my rifle to the Battle of Kursk. I could pick off an Ivan from four hundred meters.”

“A what?” asked Tschick.

“An Ivan. A goddamn Russian,” said the old man, pausing to think. He didn't look at me or Tschick, and Tschick and I were able to exchange a quick glance. Tschick didn't seem particularly uneasy, and I wasn't anymore either.

“I thought . . .” I said. “Weren't the Russians also some kind of communists?”

“Yes.”

He thought silently again. “And I could hit one in the eye from four hundred meters. Horst Fricke, the best sharpshooter in his unit. I had more oak leaf clusters on my chest than an entire damn forest. I picked them off like clay pigeons. They were crazy. Or rather, the commanders were crazy. They drove the hordes at us. Private Sinning cleaned things up at the front with a machine gun, and Fricke was the rear guard. Sometimes it was Fricke alone versus Ivan. And they were armed too. Think about that before you ask such stupid questions. Talking about morals and all that crap. It was me or them! That was the only question. More Ivans every day, youthful flesh tumbling toward us. An ocean of flesh. They had a lot of it. All that living space out east. There were just too many Russians. And behind every line the Cheka, the counterrevolutionary police, shooting anyone who wouldn't run into our barrage of fire. Everyone thinks the Nazis were so bad. But compared to the Russians? Pissants. And that's how they finally overran us. With flesh. They never would have managed it with machines. One Ivan and another Ivan and another Ivan. I had a callus on my trigger finger as big as a grape. Look.”

He held up both of his pointer fingers. And sure enough, the one on his right hand had a bulge near the first knuckle. Of course, I had no way of knowing if it really came from shooting Ivan.

“This is all a bunch of crap,” said Tschick.

Oddly enough, the man didn't really react to this. He kept talking for a while, though we never did find out what it all had to do with the love of his life.

“There's one thing you need to understand, my doves,” he said, finishing up. “Everything is meaningless. Love too. Carpe diem.”

Then he pulled a little brown glass bottle out of his pants pocket and handed it to us as if it was the most precious thing on Earth. He made a big fuss about it, but he didn't want to say what was in the bottle. The label was yellowed and the bottle looked as if it had been in his pocket since he fought in the Battle of Kursk. We should open it only in case of an emergency, he said, only if the situation was so dire that we no longer knew what to do. Not before that point. And this stuff would help us. Actually he said
save
. It would save our lives.

We took it with us and walked out to the car. I held the bottle up to the light but couldn't tell what it was. Some viscous liquid and something solid.

Once in the car, Tschick tried without luck to decipher what was left on the label. And when he finally opened it, the car started to reek of rotten eggs and he tossed it out the window.

CHAPTER 37

The road petered out at the edge of town, and we had to go cross-country. The chasm we'd crossed was off to the left somewhere. A long gravel embankment fell away to the right. In between was a forty- or fifty-meter-wide berm — like a small plateau. I turned around and in the distance I saw the village, the two-story house where sharpshooter Fricke lived, and — that a police car was pulled up in front of the house. It was tiny from this distance, barely visible, but it was unmistakable — the cops. The car seemed to be turning. I pointed it out to Tschick and we took off across the dirt. The berm kept getting narrower and the cliff edge kept getting closer. Then we saw the autobahn running below as it snaked around the gravel embankment. I could see a little rest area with two picnic benches, a Dumpster, and an emergency call box. We could probably drive straight onto the autobahn there — if we could find a way down. We were at the end of the damn plateau. I looked frantically out the back window as Tschick aimed the car at the embankment, a forty-five-degree slope covered with gravel and boulders.