They were going to a party. Butch had promised to take a girlfriend, while Sundance was doing a mate a favor and picking him up. There were so many circumstances that day which didn’t tally, and still they led to Butch and Sundance meeting up again. Probably it’s one of the many rules that life has come up with to knock us off balance.
It happened in the corridor. Music was racketing in the background, a neighbor in flip-flops asked them to be quiet, and a few screeching girls passed a wig around, while the boys sat on the steps calling out to the girls to tell them how ugly they looked. Amid this chaos Sundance was coming upstairs just as Butch was going downstairs. They recognized each other immediately. As if twelve years were a gap that could be covered in a few footsteps.
Butch was scrawny and tall, looming a few inches over Sundance. But his face, Sundance would never forget that face. As if Butch never got enough sleep. Sundance, on the other hand, looked the way he always had, but Butch saw the difference right away. If Sundance had still had the same naïveté as his friend during their childhood, it had completely vanished. Sundance seemed driven, he wanted something from life.
“Wassup,” said Butch.
And Sundance burst out laughing.
The evening ended in a bar in Schöneberg, where they drank cocktails and couldn’t get over the coincidence. They talked about everything that had happened before their encounter with Karl and Fanni. In their stories the memory of their childhood ended with the day at the building site. Time after that was a void. It belonged to a different Butch and a different Sundance. There was only one afterward—after school, after passing the driving test. They moaned about community service and asked each other how so-and-so was doing.
Fanni and Karl were not even mentioned.
This façade survived until dawn. Until Butch said he couldn’t drink any more, his bladder was about to burst. Sundance remained alone at the table, while Butch went to the bathroom. Sundance was pleasantly drunk. He leaned forward slightly to get a better glimpse of the morning sky through the window. And as he was nostalgically watching the new day, he suddenly had a curious feeling. It was one of those premonitions that can be prompted by anything—by the silence between two
songs, the sound of a waiter clearing his throat, scraping chair legs, or the silence after someone has lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke.
Sundance went to the bathroom. He knew that Butch wouldn’t be there any more. Vanished through a window or a back door. Forever.
“Are you still there?”
Silence. Above the silence the hum of the air conditioning, a cough from the bar, then quietly, from one of the stalls:
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Is everything OK?”
“I …”
Butch fell silent, Sundance looked under the door of the stall and saw Butch’s shoes. He waited for Butch to go on talking.
“I can’t go on anymore,” Butch said at last. “It’s been such a long time … and I … I missed you so much … and I … I can’t … I can’t look at you any more …”
Sundance suddenly felt an emptiness in his head. Reality had arrived. With billowing banners and an army of clamoring warriors it had marched in and taken him, here in the bathroom of a bar in the middle of Berlin, on a day like any other. He leaned his back against the stall door and squatted down. For a while they didn’t speak, then Sundance asked the question he’d been trying to squeeze out of himself. For years.
What happened next? How did we lose each other?
And Butch began to tell the story, well hidden and with a door between him and Sundance.
They came to get him once a month. Twelve times a year.
“At first they picked me up from the street. You know, like someone who doesn’t know where he wants to go, and then someone who does know comes along and picks him up. That’s exactly how I felt every time.”
He talked of the drive through Berlin. Over time he became familiar with every crossing and the phasing of every traffic light. He counted the seconds, he counted the passers-by, he counted his breaths. They never talked to him. They drove through the city center to Kreuzberg, where they stopped outside an old apartment building. A park opposite. Butch never found out what the park was called. Through the building into the courtyard. No sun, only shade, a row of garbage cans, neighbors behind curtains, a cat that darted away, the fourth floor, the stairs and then the door to the apartment. No nameplate, no bell. Corridor. Kitchen. Bathroom. Everything rundown and dirty, except for one room. The floor
mopped, the windowpane washed and with a view of a façade. That was where they brought him.
“… always had to walk in first, then they closed the door behind them and talked to each other, as if I wasn’t there, as if I was a ghost.”
He remembers the smell in the apartment, the stench of fried onions and meat, along with the chemical smell of detergents and stale cigarette smoke, as if the building were sending its breath up through the parquet into this room. And he remembers the photomural. An autumn landscape with a forest and a lake. On the shore of the lake was a stag. The first time Butch saw that mural, the woman ran her hand over his head and said, If I were a good boy …
“… If I’m a good boy and stretch really high, I too will certainly get to heaven. On the same wall there was a hook. They stripped me to the waist. Then they tied my hands together and told me to stretch up. They hung me from the hook like that. I could only stand on tiptoes, my feet just touched the floor, and I remember thinking, how do they know how tall I am? They took photographs of me.
Before and after
, they said, and took off the rest of my clothes as I hung there. They said:
We don’t want your parents to think badly of us
. That was one of their jokes. They said that often. As if my parents knew what was happening to me. Then, when I was naked, they washed me, because I had to be clean. They washed me before and after. They took warm water that they heated in a kettle. As they did so they played around with me and told me to watch, because that was how they were going to do it, but I tried to look away …”
The stucco on the ceiling of the room had been painted over so many times that its outlines had dissolved. The stucco was like a tumor growing white and pale out of the walls. Butch knew every crack and every spot where the rain had come through the roof. He had counted the fishbone pattern on the floor.
“… hit me on the shoulder till I cried. It was important to him that I cried. He said:
If I see no tears, I see no repentance
. I didn’t know what he meant by that, I would have cried anyway, but he struck me and I could see that he himself had tears in his eyes, as if I was the one hitting him rather than the other way around …”
In the winter the heat was on full, and it was stuffy in the room. In the summer, on the other hand, it was consistently cool, as the sun never reached the façade. Butch never knew how long they kept him prisoner. He got used to the smell, he got used to the light. He got used to everything. As soon as he was in the room, he lost his sense of time. In retrospect
he understood that it was better that way. If he had been able to impose a framework on time, it would have become as real as a timetable. Butch didn’t want reality.
“… outside and left us alone. Then the woman stuck her fingers into me. Into my mouth, my ass. She stuck her fingers into my nose, holding my mouth closed so that I nearly suffocated. Then she asked me if I wanted to see her naked, and I wasn’t allowed to say
no
, that was important, I had to say
yes
. The first time I shook my head, and she squeezed my throat shut until I could hear it cracking, as if my neck was a dry branch. So I said
yes
. Always
yes
. Then she took my foot and rubbed herself against it and asked if I could feel how wet she was. As she did so she looked into my face, and I had to smile, I had to have fun. It was so hard. It was so terribly hard, because my face—”
The bathroom door flew open, and a drunk staggered in. He saw Sundance sitting on the floor and recoiled. Sundance told him to clear off, the toilets were broken. The drunk murmured an apology and went on his way. Sundance got up and bolted the door.
“Are you still there?” Butch asked.
“I’m still here.”
Sundance sat back down and waited. Butch spoke of his feeling of shame, of the fury and the hope of just sticking it out, because if he stuck it out everything would be good again, and his parents would be safe and the nightmare would finally be over.
“… the man came back, and she told him what to do. She sat down on a chair and said:
Turn him around and fuck him till he faints
. Then he turned me around. I saw the photomural, I looked straight into the forest. Then there was the cold of the lubricant and the hands on my shoulders pulling me down till I thought my arms would tear at any moment …”
Butch plunged into the photomural. He stood beside the stag on the lakeshore and heard it drinking. The slurping noise, the splashing of the water, the murmur of the forest, and as Butch looked across the lake into the green he saw himself far away in a room in Kreuzberg standing with his face to the wall. He saw what the man was doing to him, and it didn’t touch him. He couldn’t even have described the man’s face. Even when they demanded that he look at them, he looked through them. He wanted to forget who they were. His whole existence had shrunk to a tiny moment. The moment he left that room and returned to real life. Butch saw what he wanted to see, and wanted to see so little that he could even have been blind.
“… I came to again, they lifted me down and washed and dressed me. That’s how it was every time. Sometimes they said,
If you don’t scream, if you’re very quiet, we’ll let you go right now this time, and you’ll never see us again
. And I believed it, you know, I really believed it. So I tried not to scream, but have you ever tried not to scream when someone’s holding a cigarette to the sole of your foot? It’s impossible, however hard you clench your teeth, it just doesn’t work. I couldn’t even press my hands over my mouth because I was hanging on that hook. So I screamed. And the woman shoved …”
One day a month, twelve days a year. In between, Butch worked like clockwork. He didn’t cause any trouble, he seemed to be a self-sufficient boy. He waited by the fountain for the car once a month. In retrospect he was surprised that no one noticed him regularly getting into a car at an intersection in the middle of Zehlendorf. The same ritual for years. Maybe it was something to do with the place, maybe too many things were happening at the same time. And maybe in his shame he just didn’t want to be seen.
Being in darkness while everyone else was in the light. Being helpless, defenseless. Being furious and not showing it. Alone in society. Constantly hungry, thirsty, weary, exhausted. Feeling the life around him and not being able to touch it. Not thinking about that one day a month. Thinking about that one day a month all the time. Subconscious. Traveling on a distant track. Far away. Invisible.
Butch thought he would bore them sooner or later. He bet on it. He turned thirteen, he turned fourteen. Sometimes he wished they would leave him hanging on the hook. For thirty days. And then when they came back he would have died of hunger and thirst, and it would all be over. But whatever he wished, he also knew somehow, deep inside, that one day it would all be over. He knew it for sure. He turned fifteen and he turned sixteen.
“… and then they disappeared.”
Butch was seventeen years old, he was standing at the curb, and the woman and the man didn’t come. Out of fear, he went back to the intersection every day that month. The red Ford never came. It never occurred to Butch that he had grown too old for them. Young Butch wasn’t a boy anymore. His seventeenth birthday made him an adult and no longer significant to them.
Butch repeated the ritual over the months that followed. At night he looked out the window and waited for them to come and get him.
He was sure he had done something wrong. He feared for his parents. Month after month. And then he was the one who didn’t come.
“… Nights got worse, even though it was what I had wanted, I couldn’t believe it was over. I think that if you’ve been pursued by a nightmare for seven years, however often you wake up, you don’t trust the whole thing. The nightmare becomes reality, and why should reality suddenly disappear?”
Butch fell silent. Suddenly the sounds came back. The music from the bar, the splashing of the water, the fluorescent light humming quietly. Butch remained quiet for a long time. Sundance looked at his watch. He felt tired, he was cold.
“Are you coming out?” he asked.
“I can’t.”
“Just open the door.”
“I said I can’t!”
Butch’s voice sounded panic-stricken. Sundance walked into the next stall. He stood on the toilet and looked over the partition. Butch had drawn up his legs and wrapped his arms around them. He was sitting on the lid of the toilet, his face hidden between his knees, rocking back and forth.
Sundance heaved himself up. The partition wobbled, but held. Sundance climbed into the stall and put his arms around Butch. It was like hugging a stone. It took Butch ten minutes to relax. They left the bar, and from that day on they were inseparable again.
“L
ET’S GET OUT OF HERE
,” says Tamara.
Wolf gives a start, he’s been so locked away in his thoughts and feelings that the sounds around him have faded out. He didn’t talk to anyone during the ceremony, he stayed by Tamara’s side and gave her support, he wasn’t capable of anything more than that. Now Tamara tugs on his arm. They break away from the mourners, but don’t head for the exit from the cemetery, the way Wolf had hoped. Instead, Tamara crouches by the coffin, and when she gets back up to her feet she is holding a rose in her hand.
“I think everyone saw that,” says Wolf.
“I don’t care.”
Tamara takes his arm, they don’t say goodbye to anyone, they just go. When they get to Wolf’s car, Tamara stops on the driver’s side. Wolf doesn’t ask, he throws her the key and gets in.