Authors: Clemens Meyer
‘Don’t be so soft, we’re nearly finished.’ We were standing close together, the tiny clouds of steam mingling between our faces, and as we were piling crates of frozen pizza in the trolley she suddenly turned to me and looked at me, her hat down to her eyebrows. I didn’t say anything, just looked at her. It seemed as if I could feel her breath through the thick padded jacket. ‘Nice,’ she said, ‘it’s nice of you to help me.’ We stood there like that for a while in silence, then I said, ‘Do you know how Eskimos say hello?’ And I was surprised how quiet my voice sounded in the big cold storage room, as if the cold was swallowing it up. She looked at me, and I bent my head down to her and rubbed my nose against hers. She stayed still and quiet, not moving, and after a few seconds I felt her nose moving too.
At some point we turned back to the shelves. ‘Now I know,’ she said. Then we put the last of the pizza cartons in the trolley.
When I got to work the next day I went straight to the beverages aisles. Bruno always came a bit earlier to fetch the forklift from the recharging station, but I couldn’t find either him or the forklift.
There were more customers in the aisles than usual for the time of day. Perhaps there were a couple of good special offers on, and sometimes there are just days when people want to go shopping; I’ve never understood why that is. And I walked along the aisles; perhaps Bruno had something to do in another section, lending a hand, but actually they always gave me that kind of job, and then I saw the boss of ‘Shelf-filling/Night’. He was leaning against the whisky shelf, the customers passing right by him, but he seemed not to notice them at all as he stared at the tiled floor. I went up to him.
‘Hi boss,’ I said, ‘I’m looking for Bruno.’
He looked up and stared at me in surprise. ‘Bruno?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m on Beverages today, aren’t I?
‘You’ll have plenty to do on Beverages for a while – Bruno’s not coming back.’ He gazed past me and I suddenly knew Bruno was dead. I felt like I had to vomit, and I leant against the shelf next to the boss. ‘He just went and hanged himself. That stupid bastard went and hanged himself.’ I felt a fist in my stomach; it wouldn’t let me go.
‘No one knows anything. I’ve known him for more than ten years. No one knows anything. Get your forklift and take care of the beverages.’
‘OK, Dieter,’ I said. I had trouble walking straight, and I kept thinking, ‘Bruno’s dead. Bruno’s hanged himself.’
I met all sorts of workmates as I wandered down the aisles and then realised I had to go to the recharging station. They seemed to know already and we just nodded at each other, some of them looking at me as if they wanted to talk about it with me, but I kept walking until I was at his forklift. I pulled the big charging cable out of the socket. I’d forgotten to switch the power off first; that was pretty dangerous, all it took was a touch of the contacts. I held onto the forklift and gave a quiet laugh: ‘One down’s enough for now!’ I got in, put the key in the ignition, and then I drove back to the aisles.
There was that smell, of animals and stables. His smell was still in the little cab, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the seat had still been warm. I drove the forklift to Beverages and worked with his smell in my nostrils all night long.
And that smell again, country air, it was fertilising time. I stood on the narrow road leading to the graveyard – I could see it ahead, a little gate, the roof of the chapel – then I turned around and walked back down the road. The funeral would be starting any minute; there were a few workmates there and the bosses, and I’d brought flowers especially, but I walked back through the little village a couple of bus stops outside of town.
I stopped outside his house. It wasn’t far from the bus stop; he’d described it to me a few times. It was a perfectly normal two-storey detached house, like you’d find in lots of villages, not one of those old half-timbered ones or anything. The road was empty and I climbed over the fence. Maybe the gate wasn’t even locked, that’s probably normal in the kind of villages where everybody knows everybody, but I kind of felt inhibited about going into his place through the gate. I walked around the house. A stable, a couple of sheds, chickens pecking away at the ground, further back I saw two cows in a fenced-in field. At first I wanted to go in the stable, but then I saw the bench. It was against the back wall of one of the sheds. I went over to it. I sat down and looked out at the fields. There was a tractor with a trailer in one of them. It seemed not to be moving, and I could only tell by the couple of trees at the edge of the field that someone was driving it. A couple of birds flapped up around it. Why should I go into the stable? I didn’t know which beam it was anyway. I watched the tractor.
‘Raise the fork right to the top,’ said Marion.
‘Why?’
‘Hey come on, just do it. Bruno showed me it. I don’t know, I like it.’ I raised the empty fork as high as it would go. The forklift made its usual sounds, a humming and a metallic pling, then I let go of the lever. I tipped my head back and looked up at the fork, still swaying slightly. ‘And now?’
‘Let it down again, but really slowly. And then keep quiet.’
I moved the lever a tiny bit, and the carriage with the fork lowered itself down again slowly. ‘And now? I don’t understand.’
‘You have to be quiet. Really quiet. That sound, can you hear it, it’s like the sea.’
And she was right; I heard it now too and I was surprised I’d never noticed it before. The fork lowered with a hissing and whooshing sound from the air expelled from the hydraulics, and it really did sound like the wash of waves in the sea. The fork came lower; I sat in the forklift, my head slightly inclined. She stood right next to me, one hand on the control panel. ‘Can you hear it?’ she whispered, and I nodded. Then we listened in silence.
She stands up and walks across the room. From one wall to the other. She raises both fists, looking at the white wraps on her hands. A man signed them, that was … minutes, hours ago? She stops at the wall and throws a couple of left jabs. She keeps her right hand up at her chin and punches left, left, left again. ‘Jab,’ says the old man, ‘keep those jabs coming, don’t show her your right hand too soon.’ She watches her shadow on the wall, she bobs and weaves and moves her torso, jabs left, left, and then a punch with the right, left-right, left-right, and then a right without the jab, ‘Don’t show her your right hand too soon,’ she twists her body into the punch, puts her weight behind it and exhales loudly. She pulls both fists up in front of her face and takes a careful look over her shoulder. The room is empty. She holds her fists in front of her face and dances back from the wall and wonders where the old man is. Sent him out myself, she thinks, that was … minutes, hours ago? She sent him out, sent her brother out too and the trainer, ‘I wanna be alone.’
Still got time, she thinks and goes over to the bench, sits down and leans against the wall. She shifts, feeling the rough concrete through her shirt.
She raises both fists and looks at the white wraps on her hands. The old man put them on for her, holding her arm really carefully, as if her hand were injured. ‘Too tight?’ he asks. ‘No, no,’ she says, moving her fingers. Two men are standing next to the old man, watching every move, and she looks up at them for a moment and then at her hands and the old man’s hands; they’re trembling a tiny bit, or is that her hands? But then they’re still again, and one of the men signs on the white crepe. ‘OK,’ says the other man, looking down at her and raising the corners of his mouth as if he were smiling, and she stares him in the eye until he looks away and turns towards the door. She feels the old man’s hand on the back of her neck and watches the men as they leave the room. You go to her, she thinks, and tell her … tell her I’m weak, tell her there’s no way I can beat her.
Her brother is standing by the door and closes it behind the men. ‘Don’t show her your right hand too soon,’ the old man whispers directly by her ear, and she nods and she’s perfectly calm.
She gets up and begins to run across the empty room again. She stops in front of the big mirror. The glass is flecked with streaks and dots, sweat and water, and in the middle there’s a large crack. She smiles; before her second professional fight she threw a right straight at the mirror, and then, twenty or thirty minutes later, her right fist broke the nose of the girl standing slightly fearful before her – why don’t you move? why don’t you dodge? – she could feel it through her glove, and the fearful girl went down on the floor, crouching down more than falling, and let the referee count her out as the blood seeped over her lips. When was that, a year and a half ago, two years ago? She sees herself smiling in the mirror, she moves her torso to and fro, and when her face touches the crack in the mirror her smile is gone.
She stands in front of the mirror, makes a curtsey and smiles and sticks out her chest; her brother doesn’t like that. ‘You’re thirteen,’ he says, ‘the boys’ll come soon enough,’ but her brother can’t see her now, turning and smiling in front of the mirror and pushing first her left leg and then her right leg forward.
Her brother is somewhere in the big hall, boxing. He took her along the first time, ‘So you get out and meet people, Alina,’ no, he said ‘Alinchen,’ she doesn’t like that, it means something like ‘little Alina’ in German, he told her. ‘Alinchen,’ he said and danced in front of her, throwing straight rights and lefts at the air. They walked there, all the way from the harbour to the training hall, past the big containers and the dockers, the cranes and the ships, then past the market where their father sometimes sends them to buy fish; the fishmongers shout and yell, she’s never seen so many fat women and she presses herself close to her brother as he holds her hand tight. Downtown, between all the people and the shops he doesn’t dance any more, only throwing straights and hooks again in the side streets and alleyways, teasing her: ‘Alinchen, little sister, you’re much too small still.’
No, she thinks in front of the mirror as she moves her hips like a belly dancer and sticks out her chest, I’m not all that small. She dances in front of the big mirror and doesn’t even hear the voices from the hall, the shouts, the trampling of feet and the smack of gloves on punching bags and sparring partners, she closes her eyes and she’s all alone. The woman who used to live in the room next to her and her brother showed her what real belly dancing looks like, but she’s not there any more. She had a cassette recorder, and some evenings they could hear music from her room, strange laments but not sad, not too loud because of the rules, and if they had their window open they closed it because the sea outside roared and the gulls and the ships made all their noise. Sometimes she went over with her brother, very quietly because their father, who lived next door with another man they called ‘Uncle Toni’ even though he wasn’t their real uncle, their father didn’t want them to go out in the evenings. The door is just pushed to and they open it cautiously. The woman is standing in the middle of the room, in the dark, dancing. Alina can make out the slight curve of her belly, moving in circles to the rhythm of the music, the woman holding up her hands next to her face, now she lifts them higher and places her palms together. They stand in the doorway and watch the woman, who doesn’t seem to see them; now her belly is a little round ball, then it disappears in the shadows, and now all they can see is her hips, and Alina puts her hands on her belly and wishes it were so lovely and round and not so flat and thin, she feels her hip bones and wishes she could dance and be one with the music like the woman moving there in the dark. The spotlight of a passing ship falls through the window onto the dancing woman’s face, and Alina sees that it’s twisted, as if she were very sad and about to cry, but she’s silent and dancing. Then the ship’s light disappears, it’s dark again in the room, the floor begins to sway, here come the waves from that other ship, it must have been a big ship, and their ship pitches and tosses, glasses clink somewhere in the room, and her brother holds onto the door frame, and she holds onto her brother, but the woman doesn’t seem to notice anything and dances … quietly, thinks Alina.
She throws a right and feels the world champion’s nose breaking. Alina knows her name but she doesn’t say it, doesn’t think it … she throws another right, she sees the crack in the middle of the mirror, the floor’s going to sway, she thinks,
I’m
going to make it sway, and you’re going to fall. Alina moves her torso loosely from her hips.
‘Hey kid, you’re doing that right.’ She opens her eyes and turns around. An old man in a sweat suit is standing behind her, white hair and pretty fat. She feels herself blushing and folds her arms in front of her chest. ‘But we only dance in the ring here, kid.’ He smiles and beckons her over. ‘You here with your brother, are you?’ She takes a couple of steps in his direction and nods. ‘But if you want to come along you’ve got to join in, kid.’ She shakes her head and wants to go back to their room on the ship. She hears all the noise of the gulls and the ships when she opens the window. ‘Can’t just stand by the mirror and watch,’ the old man says, clenching his fist in front of his chest. ‘You’re a good mover, no need to be scared … no need. Come on, let me show you a couple of things.’ He waves a hand over at the punching bags, men standing by them and hitting them, some of them dancing with their feet and moving their torsos. ‘But my shoes …’ She points at her feet. She’s wearing suede boots, almost up to her knees, her brother gave her them, he and some of the other boys from the ship went to the warehouses one night, and when he came back he said: ‘You’re getting a treat tomorrow, little sister.’
Their father told him off, ‘Where did those shoes come from, they’re much too expensive,’ but her brother gave him a shiny black leather jacket and said, ‘That’s for you, father, we bought them cheap from the Arabs.’ Their father turned away and looked out to sea over the rail; he doesn’t much like Arabs, but he likes the shiny black leather jacket and wears it every day.
‘My shoes,’ she says, but the old man shrugs.
‘Take your jacket off, roll your sleeves up and come with me.’ He turns around and walks over to the punching bags. She stays where she is for a moment, looks in the mirror, tries to smile and sticks out her chest, then she follows him.
‘Little sister,’ calls her brother from somewhere in the hall, ‘Alinchen, you want to box? You’re much too small still, and your shoes …’
She looks at her feet and takes a left and then a right straight behind it, right on the nose, and she pulls up her guard. ‘Damn,’ shouts the old man, ‘watch out, go back.’ And she goes back, goes back to the ropes and touches her glove briefly to her nose, not broken, she thinks and waits and draws her opponent over to her on the ropes and hits out. The right hook she took was good, she only notices that now, she’s slightly dizzy, the floor seems to be swaying, but she hits out, left, left, left, two straights, a hook, head, body, head, ‘Right,’ shouts the old man, ‘show her your right,’ and then the girl’s sitting on the floor of the ring in front of her and looking up at her, eyes wide. The referee pushes her away and she goes into the neutral corner and looks at her shoes as she walks; she has a tiny stone with a hole in it on the lace of her left shoe, her father gave it to her. ‘From back home,’ he said, ‘from the mountains, it’ll bring you luck.’ She looks at the audience, the hall is pretty empty still, a long way to go before the main fight, she can make out a couple of friends of her brother’s fairly far back, boys from the asylum seekers’ ship, she raises her fist, they jump up and wave at her and call out: ‘Alina, Alina,’ and she hears the referee counting. ‘… three, four, five …’ Stay down, girl, she thinks, the floor sways, stay down.
‘So, kid, you OK?’ She turns around, the old man’s behind her, she didn’t hear him coming in. ‘Want to be alone a bit? You’re starting soon.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘yes,’ and sees the old man putting his hand on the back of her neck in the mirror, then she feels it and she’s perfectly calm. ‘This is your night,’ says the old man, ‘this is gonna be your night,’ and she sees herself nodding.
‘Time for you to warm up,’ says the old man, and he takes her arms and pulls her boxing gloves on carefully, ‘time for us to warm up.’
He takes her right hand, in its red glove now, and lifts it. ‘Remember …’ he says. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’ll only show her it when she’s open.’ She punches her fists together, and he nods and pulls the two big black punch mitts over his hands. ‘Hit her over her left hand, just punch across it when she’s open.’ He takes a couple of steps back to the middle of the little room, holding both hands up with the mitts on them. ‘Left,’ he shouts in a hoarse voice, ‘keep her away from you, don’t let the bitch near you!’ She punches a left jab, jacking her left leg slightly, breathing out, ‘uh, uh, uh,’ punching her left hand over and over against her old trainer’s big black mitts, him moving now in the middle of the room as if he were a young boxer, ‘Hook,’ the young boxer shouts and dances from left to right, and she slams left hooks into his mitt, and when his right hand smacks out at her face she just blocks it and counters with her left fist, it’s her left over and over, until the old man calls ‘And now your right, show her your hard right,’ and she punches her right hand into his right mitt, right across his left hand just in that moment twitching towards her face, she twists her body into the punch, puts her weight behind it and screams.
She screams, Alina screams, and her brother screams too, ‘Alinchen, come to me, quick,’ she wants to push the front door closed again but one of the men has his foot in the door. The floor sways, even though they’re not on the ship any more, even though there are no gulls and no machines and cranes making all their noise outside in the harbour, even though no lights of passing ships shine in though the window any more and no passing ships take the daylight away, the floor sways, and she holds onto the door frame as the men just walk into the flat. ‘You’ve got to go,’ one of the men says, ‘you’ve got to go back.’ A couple of the men are wearing uniforms, and Alina knows what that means: back. There was an old Kurd on the ship, one storey above them, and he used to say, ‘If they come to take me back I’ll go to the captain.’
‘There is no captain here,’ she said and laughed, but he said he was fast, he said he’d worked on a boat before and he’d cast off, ‘And if the helmsman doesn’t play along I’ll beat him to a pulp.’
‘I’ll beat you to a pulp!’ screams Alina. ‘Left,’ calls the old man, ‘head, body, head! And when she’s open …’ She sees her brother sitting behind her on the sofa and hugging their father, their father looking tiny and disappearing into the cushions, her brother’s head on his chest. She pulls her fists up in front of her face, pushing her left leg a little forward and locking her knee as she slams her left fist into the first man’s chest. Two or three times she throws a straight left, and the man stops still and looks at her in amazement. ‘Right,’ calls the old man, ‘show her your beautiful right!’ she twists her body into the punch, puts her weight behind it and screams.
They walk along the long narrow corridor. The old man is next to her, his arm around her shoulders. She hears the music she asked for in the hall, a song from the mountains; her father is sitting right at the front somewhere, waiting. She looks at the floor and sees the tiny stone with the hole in it on her shoe. Her brother’s walking next to her. She punches her gloves together and says, ‘Yeah, yeah.’ She’s pulled the hood of her robe down low over her face. She sees the end of the corridor ahead. She takes a couple more steps and stops a moment. She sees the hall, she sees all the people, she can hear them. The roar of the sea.