Why We Took the Car (22 page)

“Do you need help?” asked the man.

“What?”

The nurse looked as if she was going to grab the phone from me any second to speak to Aunt Mona herself.

“You have to pick us up, Aunt Mona. Can you? Yes?”

“I don't really understand what this is about,” said the man on the phone, “but it sounds like you're in real trouble. Is someone threatening you?”

“No.”

“I mean, a broken ankle, making a fake call at four in the morning, and you sound like you can't be a day over thirteen. You must be in trouble.”

“Well, yeah.”

“And obviously you can't say what it is. So one more time: Do you need help?”

“No.”

“Are you sure? This is the last time I'm going to offer.”

“No.”

“Okay, I'll just listen, then,” said the man.

“In any event, if you could maybe pick us up in the car,” I said, sounding embarrassed.

“Not if you don't want me to,” the man said, chuckling. And that threw me off. If he had hung up or yelled at me, I would have understood that at four in the morning. But the fact that he was amused and offered to help us, that was crazy. Ever since I was a little boy my father had told me that the world was a bad place. The world is bad and people are bad. Don't trust anyone, don't talk to strangers, all of that. My parents drilled that into me, my teachers drilled that into me, even TV drilled that into me. When you watched the local news — people were bad. When you saw primetime investigative shows — people were bad. And maybe it was true, maybe ninety-nine percent of people were bad. But the strange thing was that on this trip, Tschick and I had run into almost only people from the one percent who weren't bad. And now here I was, getting a random stranger out of bed at four
A.M.
, for no good reason, and he was super nice and even willing to help us. Maybe they should tell you about things like that in school too, just so you're not totally surprised by it. I was so surprised that all I could do was kind of stutter.

“Yeah, twenty minutes, great, yeah. You'll pick us up. Good.” For the grand finale of my performance, I turned to the nurse and asked, “What's the name of this hospital again?”

“Wrong question!” hissed the man immediately.

The nurse furrowed her brow. My God, was I an idiot.

“Virchow Hospital,” she said slowly. “It's the only one within
fifty
kilometers.”

“Exactly,” said the man.

“Ah, she just said the same thing,” I said, pointing to the phone.

“So you're also not from around here,” said the man. “You must have really gotten yourselves into some shit. I hope I can read about it in the paper tomorrow.”

“Yeah, me too,” I said. “Definitely. We'll be waiting.”

“Okay, good luck,” said the man.

“Thanks!”

The man laughed again and hung up.

“Was she
laughing
?” said the nurse.

“This isn't the first time we've made her worry,” said Tschick, who had only gotten half of the conversation. “She's been through this before.”

“And she thinks it's funny?”

“She's
cool
,” said Tschick, emphasizing the word “cool” in a way that said not everyone in the room was cool.

We stood by the phone for a few minutes; then the nurse said, “You're a couple of rascals.”

Then she let us leave.

CHAPTER 41

We sat down in front of the hospital entrance and acted as if we were keeping an eye out for Aunt Mona. Once we were sure nobody was watching us anymore, we took off. I ran and Tschick hobbled. There was a fence at the edge of the field. Tschick threw his crutches over and then threw himself over. A few yards into the field he got stuck. The field was freshly plowed and the crutches sank into the dirt like a hot knife in butter. It wasn't going to work. He started swearing, left the crutches sticking up, and hopped along with one arm around my shoulders. When we had made it across about a third of the field, we turned around. The landscape was blue. Light from the sun, which was still hidden behind the hospital building, shone through the mist and the tops of trees. The crutches, still sticking up, though one had drooped to the side, looked like a cross. In one of the windows of the upper story of the hospital building — maybe even the same window we'd looked out and seen the Lada — there was a shape in white scrubs looking out at us. Probably the nurse thinking about what a couple of nut-jobs she'd just taken care of. If she had realized how crazy we really were, she probably wouldn't have been standing there, just watching.

But she must have seen where we were heading, and she probably also saw us arrive at the car. The roof and the passenger side were dinged up, but not so badly that you couldn't sit comfortably inside. The passenger door couldn't be opened, but you could slide across from the driver's side. The interior looked like a dump. The accident, being flipped over, and then being flipped back up, had sent everything flying all over the place — all our supplies, jam jars, gas canister, empty bottles, sleeping bags. The Richard Clayderman cassette was stuck between the seats. The hood of the car was slightly buckled, and the part of the roof where the car had been lying upside down was smeared with sand-covered oil. “That's it,” I said.

Tschick squeezed himself into the driver's seat but couldn't get his plaster-covered foot onto the gas pedal — the cast was too wide. He put the car in neutral, squirmed in the seat a little, and tapped the gas with his left foot. The engine fired right up. Tschick shifted into the passenger seat. I said, “You must have lost your mind.”

“All you have to do is push the gas and steer,” he said. “I'll shift.”

I sat down at the wheel and told Tschick it wasn't going to work. There was half a tank of gas, and the motor was idling smoothly, but when I looked at the autobahn and saw the cars going by at two hundred kilometers an hour, I knew it wasn't going to work.

“I have to tell you a secret,” I said. “I'm the biggest coward in the world. The most boring person on the planet and the biggest coward. We'll have to walk. Maybe I could give it a try on a dirt track or something. But not on the autobahn.”

“Why would you possibly say you were boring?” asked Tschick. So I asked him if he realized why I had even agreed to go with him to Wallachia in the first place. Namely, because I was boring — so boring, in fact, that I didn't get invited to a party that everyone else got invited to. So I had decided for once in my life
not
to be boring. Tschick said I was nuts and that he hadn't been bored for a single second since he had gotten to know me. That on the contrary this had been the coolest and most exciting week of his entire life. Then we talked about the coolest and most exciting week of our lives — and it was hard to accept that it was now over.

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.