Sundance helped Butch out of the mud, took off his own T-shirt, and used it to wipe away the dirt from Butch’s body. Blood. Sperm. Soil. The rain helped, while Butch let him get on with it as if he were anesthetized. He stood there motionless, breathed, blinked, and was both present and a long way away. Sundance picked his clothes out of the mud, rinsed them in a puddle and helped Butch put them on.
On the way home they didn’t exchange a word, they kept a yard’s distance apart. The city ignored them completely, its noise continued regardless. There was the rattle of rain on the asphalt, as it hit the puddles, there was the whoosh of the passing cars and their dazzling headlights. Nothing could interrupt that rhythm.
When they got to Butch’s house, Sundance waited till his friend had disappeared through the door, and then continued on his way home. That same night he was woken by his walkie-talkie, which was under the bed and always set to receive.
“Yes?”
There was a crackle on the line, Sundance heard Butch’s breathing as if he weren’t four streets away, but right beside him.
“They’re here,” said Butch.
Sundance didn’t hesitate for a moment. He put his clothes on and crept outside. He crossed the street and took the shortest way across the gardens. Butch was waiting for him. He was standing up on the second floor by his bedroom window, still as a ghost behind glass. Sundance waved to him. Butch disappeared from the window, and a few moments later the terrace door swung open.
“Where are they?” Sundance whispered.
“Outside the house.”
“Are you sure?”
“They said they’d be back. As a warning. So that I’d keep my mouth shut.”
Butch’s words sounded rehearsed, as if he’d recited them mechanically several times before. The mantra of a boy who wants to drive evil away. Sundance asked how they knew where Butch lived.
He wished he hadn’t asked.
“They know!”
Butch hissed, grabbing Sundance by the wrist. He pulled him into the kitchen, and then onto the floor. They crouched down behind the sink and carefully got up to look outside through the window. There was a car parked on the opposite side of the street. Sundance thought it could have been any old car; he was about to say so, when he saw the glow from the tip of a cigarette inside the car. Shadows. Two. Sundance put his hand over his mouth. Midnight struck inside the house. The car doors opened, the man and the woman got out.
“Midnight,” whispered Butch. “They …”
His breath came in hectic bursts.
“… said they’d come … to … If I tell … They …”
He gasped for air, he tugged on Sundance’s arm.
“… said … They’ll slice my parents open and I … I’ll have to watch and … and they asked if I wanted them to prove it … Said I believed them … I swear! You know … what … they said … next …”
Sundance went on looking outside. The man and the woman were standing in the middle of the road, looking up at the house. Their faces looked blurred, as if somebody had set the focus wrong. The street at their feet was still glistening with the rain that had stopped hours before.
“… said at midnight,” Butch stammered. “And now … You see, now they’re here.”
He was crying. His head was touching his chest. Sundance bit his upper lip to hold back his own tears.
“Let’s run away,” he said quickly, dragging Butch back down to the kitchen floor. “Let’s just run away, do you hear me? Then they’ll look for us and leave your parents in peace because they can’t find us.”
Butch looked at Sundance with surprise. The idea made his face light up. Hope. When you think back on it, you can’t help smiling at the naïveté of the two boys. They thought life was fair. They believed in equilibrium, and the good guys winning in the end and the bad guys losing mercilessly and shamefully. You’re aware that life is anything but equilibrium. It’s the purest chaos. Darkness lurks behind every door. Shadows live behind every window.
“Run away?” Butch asked.
“Run away,” said Sundance, and meant it.
They listened to the silence. A car engine started. Butch and Sundance stood back up and saw that the car had disappeared from the opposite side of the street. The boys exploded with hysterical laughter, they pressed their hands to their mouths and laughed. They high-fived each other and believed in magic, as if their decision had banished the demons. Simple as that.
“They’ve fucked off now,” said Butch.
“They really have fucked off,” Sundance agreed.
They were relieved, they hadn’t really planned to run away from home. They had wished so hard for the two demons to disappear from their lives, and the demons had obliged. They were gone.
For a year.
To the day.
Then they came back.
Butch and Sundance never mentioned abuse. If you could go back to that time, you would whisper that word in their ears. You would write it in their school exercise books, you would go from one class to another and fill the blackboards with that one word.
Abuse
.
Only a single sentence was ever uttered about it. That sentence still resounds for you like an unpleasantly high note that summons up all the memories at once. Even though it only ever left Butch’s mouth in a whisper, it held more power than a scream.
“I never want to be a dog again.”
Butch was the first to see the woman and the man a year later. The car was parked in the driveway opposite the school gate. The couple didn’t seem to have changed, as they sat behind the windshield and waited.
Butch saw them, they saw Butch.
He turned round and went back into the school. He sat down on the floor next to the vending machine and waited till Sundance came in from games. He just sat there on the floor for two hours without moving. He knew they would never dare set foot in the school. He thought he was safe and stared at the entrance. He tried not to blink, because if he kept his eyes open all the time, they might stay away.
Sundance nearly walked past him.
“Hey, what are you doing here?”
Butch couldn’t answer him. His eyes were dry, his mouth felt like a trap that had snapped shut and wouldn’t open again.
They’re here again!
he wanted to shout.
I saw them!
Not a word came out, it was only when Sundance helped him up that the trap suddenly snapped open, and the words came tumbling out of his mouth like prisoners who hadn’t seen daylight for a year.
“It’s starting again.”
He didn’t need to say anything more than that.
The same day they planned their escape.
At the time it had seemed there were rules in life. The boys woke up in the morning and went to sleep in the evening. They ate several times a day and listened to their parents; they behaved at school and stood at the crossing and waited when the light was red. That regulated world began to break down on the day of the rape.
The boys didn’t think of telling anyone about what had happened at the building site. The fear of punishment was too great, because what if Fanni and Karl found out? And then of course there was the fear that people would point at them and think it was their own fault.
What did we do wrong? What could we have done differently?
You can understand it, down to the tiniest detail. There are books on the subject, the power of the perpetrator over the victim. Children are so easy to manipulate, they only know the simplest rules. If you throw them a ball they catch it. Everything changes when the light turns away from them and the darkness touches them.
Butch and Sundance allowed themselves two days to prepare. They wanted to be inconspicuous. During those two days they kept a lookout for the car and saw it several times outside the school, at the bus stop, at a crossing. Once the man was sitting alone in the car, and Butch and Sundance got in such a panic that the woman might suddenly appear behind them that they got into the wrong bus. Just to keep moving. Six stops.
On the evening of the second day they decided to spend the night at Butch’s, before disappearing during the night. They had two addresses. Butch had an uncle in Bochum. He said his uncle was OK, they could
tell him anything. The second address was Sundance’s sister. She lived in Stuttgart. If worse came to worst they could go there. That was their plan.
You remember the smell of fear that rose from the scalps of the two boys when they said goodnight to Butch’s parents. They lay down in bed, fully dressed, and waited for the lights in the house to go out. They had hidden their rucksacks behind the trash cans, and their bikes were ready beside the garage. They had also thought of taking money out of their parents’ wallets, and knew the times of the first trains.
Until two in the morning they lay sweating and nervous in the dark and pretended to sleep, in case Butch’s parents looked in on them unexpectedly. At exactly two o’clock the alarm clock under Butch’s pillow went off. They got up and crept downstairs in their socks. It was silent, it felt as if the house were watching their every single footstep and holding its breath.
The woman was waiting for them in the living room. She was sitting in one of the armchairs with her legs drawn up, so that it looked for a moment as if she were floating. She was a shadow in the shadows. When Sundance spotted her, he stopped on the last stair. Butch bumped into him and was about to say something when he saw the woman, too. Butch immediately started breathing faster, and that was probably the signal for the house. Suddenly everything clicked and started moving again, suddenly the living room was filled with sounds—the clock on the wall ticked, the wooden floor creaked, and the fridge came on in the kitchen. The woman put her forefinger to her lips. The hissing of a snake.
“Shhh.”
Butch wet himself. His teeth chattered. He was ready to die on the spot. You can still hear that noise. One row of teeth against the other. Wherever you happen to be, in the quietest moments of your life, that sound is hiding everywhere. Sundance, on the other hand, didn’t shiver, he didn’t make a sound, tears just ran down his cheeks.
“Where do you think Karl is now?” Fanni asked.
The boys didn’t answer. Fanni pointed upstairs.
“He’s checking to see if everyone’s really asleep. Why aren’t you asleep?”
Sundance knew at once that the woman was lying. How was Karl supposed to have crept past them? Never in a million years was he upstairs.
Butch, on the other hand, believed the woman’s every word. He wanted to, because he thought that everything would be all right if he did.
“Please,” he whimpered.
“Shhh,” said Fanni. “Otherwise your parents will wake up, and you don’t want them to see that you’ve wet yourself.”
It was only at that moment that Sundance noticed the smell of warm urine. He didn’t look at Butch. He wondered whether he could make it to the veranda door.
“We don’t see each other for a year, and you want to go off on a journey,” said Fanni. “How very rude of you.”
Butch tried to deny it, the woman shook her head, she didn’t want to hear any explanations.
“You’ve hidden your rucksacks behind the trash cans. Your bikes are ready. Where are you off to?”
There were footsteps on the stairs behind them. Butch nearly burst out laughing. His parents had woken up, and were coming downstairs, and once they got there—
“I’m sure they want to go to our place,” said Karl. “Isn’t that right, lads?”
Butch and Sundance turned round. The world collapsed, all rules vanished.
It was only years later that you thought seriously about how that could have happened. Books. Statistics. You’ve studied everything. About child behavior. Men and women who move around as couples, murdering people. America. There was something like that in America. But here in Germany? You weren’t aware how transparent children are. Butch and Sundance thought they were being secretive, but they carried their plans in front of them like a neon sign. Clearly visible to everyone who looked closely. Fanni and Karl had looked closely.
They said they would take Butch with them now.
They said they’d developed a taste for him.
“We like you,” said Fanni.
And Butch cried. Silently. And Butch looked at Sundance. And Sundance was brave and told them to let Butch go. Quietly.
Please.
“Take me.”
Fanni and Karl thought for a moment and then shook their heads. No. They liked Butch better. You should have thought of that. You had your chance at the building site.
Karl ran his hand over Sundance’s head.
“Maybe we’ll come back to your offer one day.”
Then Butch sobbed. Once, loudly. Karl immediately drew a knife from his belt. Butch fell silent. Karl tapped the tip against Butch’s nose. He ran it over his cheek and wiped the tears away with the blade.
“Would you like me to pop upstairs to your parents and cut their lousy hearts out?” he asked softly. “Would you like that?”
Butch gasped for breath again, he felt dizzy, he swayed and began to fall. Fanni jumped from her chair and caught him. She pressed Butch to her chest and whispered in his ear: “OK, it’s OK. Breathe, my little one, breathe.”
Karl ordered Sundance to fetch the rucksacks from outside. Then Sundance was to go upstairs and get into bed.
“If you don’t listen to us I’ll open up your face to see if there’s a brain hidden behind there. Like this, you see?”
Karl came closer to him, he showed Sundance a scar that ran from his left ear to his chin.
“I survived,” Karl said. “Who knows if you will. And don’t worry about your friend, he’ll be back soon. Do you believe me?”
Karl smiled, he put his forefinger to Sundance’s lips as if asking him to be quiet. Sundance was silent, he was a master of silence.
“Lick my finger if you believe me,” said Karl.
Sundance licked his finger. Salty. Sharp. Karl brought his hand back down and put the damp fingers in his mouth.
“Mmmmm,” he said.
Then they left. With Butch in Fanni’s arms. Through the veranda door into the night. And Sundance remained behind. Trembling, silent. He just stood in the living room for ten minutes, before wiping his mouth, again and again, spitting and spitting, before he crept into the bathroom and washed his mouth out until the taste of soap made him retch. Then he did as Karl had told him. He brought the rucksacks in and took them to Butch’s room. He didn’t get into bed, though, but came back downstairs. He sat down on the floor and waited for Butch to come through the door. He was being disobedient. He knew it. He struggled with himself, but he had no option, he had to wait for Butch. As he did so he thought of the knife, and he thought again and again:
I will survive
I will I will I will survive I will wait and I will survive when Butch is with me again we will survive together we will survive we will …