In a few minutes it will all begin.
It’s midnight.
Four people are sitting in an apartment. They’ve talked a lot, they’ve
eaten and drunk and they’re glad they’ve met up again. The singing of Thomas Dybdahl comes out of the speakers, the wail of an ambulance siren rises up from the street, then it’s quiet again and Berlin goes on breathing. Calm and resolute.
Four friends are sitting in an apartment. They have more defeats than victories to show for themselves. They live on their overdrafts, hope for the love of their lives, and shop at Aldi, even though they hate Aldi. Up until now not one of the four has the slightest idea where they’re headed. If chance had willed it, Tamara wouldn’t have picked up the phone and would still be lying on her bed reading. A frustrated Frauke would have ended up staying over with one of her three lovers, and Wolf would have spent the day outside the university and gone to the cinema with Kris in the evening. If chance had willed it, none of any of this would have happened.
But today chance doesn’t come into it.
“I have to piss,” says Kris, and goes off to the bathroom.
Wolf passes the joint to Tamara. She shakes her head and says her eyes are too dry, she can’t smoke any more, then she creeps on all fours to the stereo to change the CD. Wolf tries to slap her on the bum, and misses by a foot and a half. Frauke nestles her head on his thigh. Tamara puts on Elbow. Guy Garvey sings,
I haven’t been myself lately, I haven’t slept for several days
. Wolf thinks the guy knows what he’s talking about. Tamara says the last time she had an orgasm she smelled flowers. She doesn’t say that when she was having her last orgasm she was by herself in the shower thinking about a film star. Wolf doesn’t want to know the details, either. He feels Frauke’s breath on his thigh and tries to suppress an erection. There’s a sound of flushing. Kris comes out of the bathroom and stops in the doorway. He looks at his friends as if he hasn’t seen them for days. Then he says:
“Do you know what people out there lack?”
“I know what you lack,” says Tamara.
“No, seriously. What do people lack?”
“Which people?”
“Business types, for example. What are they short of?”
“Good taste?” Wolf suggests.
“Dammit, take me seriously here, people. Just for a minute, OK?”
“OK, then, tell us,” says Frauke. “What do people lack?”
Frauke can do that. She can switch from one moment to the next, while Wolf takes a bit longer. Tamara, on the other hand, doesn’t react
at all. She tosses around in her head the memory of the flowers that she smelled when she had her last orgasm, and suddenly bursts out laughing. Frauke nudges her. Tamara stops laughing. Kris raises his index finger, every inch the teacher.
“There’s one thing,” he says, “that bosses and action men lack, and which they can’t get by without. There’s one thing that hangs over their lives like a dark shadow and pisses in their macchiato every day. No wealth protects them against it, it doesn’t even help if they make donations to charity or take out
Greenpeace
magazine subscriptions for their employees. This one little thing makes their lives so incredibly difficult that you can see it in their faces.”
Kris looks at them one by one. It’s plain that none of them has the faintest idea what he’s talking about. So Kris stretches out his right hand, palm upwards, like an offering.
“They can’t apologize,” he says. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to offer them. Apologies galore, at a damned good price.”
K
RIS TALKS ABOUT HIS
morning at the Urbanhafen and how he apologized to the woman. He said he knew exactly what was going on with her.
“And she believed me. She accepted my apology without hesitation. No doubt, nothing.”
“You couldn’t have done that with me,” says Frauke.
“With me you could,” says Tamara.
They talk for a while, and one idea chases the next. They anticipate each other’s sentences, they are moving on a single wavelength, so that Frauke can’t shake the feeling of floating above the ground.
It’s the dope
, she thinks,
we’re just a bit high, it’s nothing more than that
.
But it isn’t the dope or the wine. It’s a particular string of circumstances that brings particular people together at particular times. And anyone who finds that puzzling has never been influenced by such a concatenation.
At three in the morning Wolf gets up and announces that he’s going to butter some rolls.
“I’m incredibly hungry, aren’t you?”
They watch him go, then Tamara explodes with laughter and says, “He’s not really going to do rolls, is he?”
“Of course I’m doing rolls!” come the words from the kitchen.
They laugh, tears run down their faces, they gasp for air. The last time they got so hysterical was at the end of school. All the senior grades went to the Teufelsberg to celebrate their goodbyes. Kris wore a suit, Frauke and Tamara came in dresses. Black and white. They all felt inviolable, and Frauke can still remember what she whispered in Tamara’s ear:
I’m immortal, what about you?
Tamara had grinned and said she was with them.
Of course I’m with you, do you think I’d leave you in the lurch?
They thought the whole world was at their feet. First university, then the big job, then masses of cash. They particularly agreed on the last point. They planned to meet up again in a few years and celebrate their successes appropriately. Even today Frauke can’t get her head round how naïve they were back then. They talked about going abroad, as if abroad were right on their doorstep waiting for them. England, Spain, Australia, China. They wanted to go everywhere.
We thought no one could touch us. We thought we could get everything that could be—
“Frauke, are you still there?”
Tamara snaps her fingers in front of her face.
“Where else would I be?” Frauke asks back.
She has no idea how long she was thinking about the party on the Teufelsberg. No one is laughing now. Kris rolls the next joint, Wolf goes on busying himself in the kitchen, and Tamara sits with a ballpoint in her hand, bent over a notepad.
“One minute,” she says.
Frauke is amazed at what it is that has brought her and Tamara together and held them together for so long. There was one falling-out during their school days. Tamara had met a new clique of girls, and Frauke didn’t fit in with them at all. It was a bad month, and then all of a sudden Tamara sat next to Frauke during break and said it had been a really bad idea. Frauke never told her that she could almost have cried with relief. She felt incomplete without her best friend. She knows exactly what her life would be without Tamara. Like an endless winter’s day. Like no sun ever again.
“I’ve got it.”
Tamara holds the notepad out to Frauke. Frauke reads, and the grin vanishes from her face.
“What’s up?”
Kris crouches down and joins them. He and Frauke freeze. Wolf comes out of the kitchen with the rolls.
“What’s wrong with you guys?”
Tamara blushes.
“Nothing in particular. It’s just what Kris said,” she explains, and is about to set the notepad aside when Kris grabs it.
“You’ve
just
written this?” he asks. Tamara shrugs.
“I could try and do it a different way, if you …”
She gets no further, Kris has passed the pad on to Wolf, and put his hands on Tamara’s cheeks.
“You bloody genius,” he says and kisses her.
When Frauke comes back into the room at half past four, her answering machine is flashing. Three messages, three times the same voice.
How are you …
What are you doing …
When are we seeing each other …
Frauke deletes the messages without listening to them all the way through, and pins Tamara’s text to the corkboard beside the monitor. Kris said she should take her time, Wolf would really want to do it himself, and Tamara had no opinion, because she’d gone to sleep on the floor.
Frauke promised to set about designing the text right away the following morning. But she’s so uneasy that she doesn’t know if she can even get to sleep. To calm herself down she takes a shower. Her brain is intoxicated with the ideas that they all had last night. It feels a bit as if they had traveled into the past together to bring their youthful immortality into the present.
I’m immortal, what about you?
I’m not tired
, Frauke thinks and gets out of the shower to switch her computer on.
Two and a half hours later Frauke pushes herself up from her desk. She has turned Tamara’s text into an advertisement, and is now so amped that she can’t sit still. Work as a pick-me-up. Her muscles are tense, her thoughts a bright flame. In a few minutes Frauke has put on her running things and is out the door.
• • •
The Tiergarten is deserted at this time of day, the morning light is like underwater photographs on a rainy day. Colorless and crisp. Frauke runs three times around the little lake, her body has found its rhythm, her breathing adapts to her footsteps.
As if I could slow down time, as if the minutes were collapsing into one another and the clock hands slowing down
. Frauke likes the idea. The faster she runs, the harder it gets for time to advance. Time becomes material. Frauke has the feeling that she can stretch, compress, or tear that material. Time has torn so often for her before that Frauke finds herself wondering how it is that time still exists at all.
When she gets back from her run, he’s waiting for her by the door to her apartment. She often wonders how he manages to get up the stairs. The tenants are very suspicious and even discuss on the intercom with the man from the parcel service because they think he’s delivering some sort of junk mail.
He’s sitting on the floor, his back resting against the door of the apartment, chin on his chest, hands clasped in his lap. Once a neighbor found him like that and called an ambulance. Frauke knows he isn’t asleep, he’s in more of a twilight state. Or as he once explained:
Half the time I’m on standby
.
She shakes him by the shoulder. He stirs, opens his eyes, grins.
“Hi, sweetie.”
“You shouldn’t do that,” says Frauke.
“What? And what am I supposed to do in
your
opinion, if you don’t call back?”
He sits up and she helps him; even though she doesn’t really want to, she helps him. He gets to his feet, groans and sighs, then tries to hug her. Frauke shrinks back.
“Let’s go in,” she says.
Frauke’s flat isn’t big, and with him inside it shrinks by half. Space and time. It all comes back to her father.
“Have you been running again?”
“What does it look like?”
He takes his shoes off and marches into the living room as if he does this every day. Frauke hears him sigh again, then he falls silent. Even though she knows he expects coffee, she puts on water for tea. Green tea that tastes like hay, which she drinks when she wants to punish herself with health.
“What’s that supposed to be?” he asks when she comes into the living room with the tray. He holds up one of the printouts. Black text on a white background. Frauke sets the tray down and takes the printout from his hand.
“Since when have you been doing obituaries?”
Frauke is glad she used a dummy text, otherwise she would have had to give her father answers that she doesn’t want to give him. She sets the printout back on the desk. Her life is none of his business.
“New job?” he asks.
“New girlfriend?” she asks back.
“First some coffee,” her father says to change the subject and walks over to the tray. For a few seconds he stares at the teapot and the two cups as if he can’t work out what their function might be. Frauke can tell from his back that he is repelled. His shoulders are slightly hunched, he looks ridiculous. He looks like all the fathers over the age of fifty that she meets in the street. Preposterous and old.
“What’s this?” he asked, sniffing at the tea. “Cow piss?”
Frauke pushes him away, takes one of the cups and sits down on the sofa. She can’t help grinning, even though she doesn’t want to. Her father sniffs at the tea again and leaves his cup where it is.
“Sweetie,” he says, and walks over to her. His head settles in her lap and his eyes close contentedly. He always uses the same tactic. As if his life ran only on a single track. The gestures, the words.
“I miss you both,” he murmurs.
Frauke feels like crying. It’s been her ritual since she moved out ten years ago. And she always gives her father the same answer, because whether she likes it or not, she’s part of the ritual.
“Your own fault,” she says, although she knows it isn’t his fault.
Frauke drinks her tea, as her father’s head lies heavy in her lap and time seems to stretch out comfortably again.
Gerd Lewin owns a construction company and various plots of land in the north of Berlin, occupied by apartment blocks. He owns shares in two big hotels, and twice a year he changes his girlfriend, who is supposed to replace Frauke’s mother and can’t. Every two weeks it’s visiting time.
Frauke takes the train down to Potsdam and waits outside the clinic while her father smokes one last cigarette. Always frantically, with one eye on the street, as if he can only accept the presence of the clinic at
the very last minute. It’s only when he drops the cigarette on the pavement and crushes it with his shoe that the brick building, with its park and its grandiose entrance, becomes real for him. By now Frauke wants a cigarette as well, but she quells her craving because she doesn’t want to be like her father.
Tanja Lewin has been living in a private clinic for fourteen years. Her life there is barely any different from the life she led at home. From outside everything looks normal, if it weren’t for the times when Frauke’s mother would climb the walls, throw up her dinner, and hide in the wardrobe. Times when she saw the devil everywhere.
If you ask Frauke’s father, he claims he should have seen it coming. He often says he should have seen something coming. The crisis in the building trades, the chlamydia one of his girlfriends gave him, the bad weather, and of course the misunderstandings between him and his daughter.