Why We Took the Car (23 page)

Obviously I'd been out at night other times, earlier in my life. But it hadn't been the same. That had always been with my parents or in a car on the way home from a relative's house or whatever. This was a whole new world, a completely different world than it was during the day. It felt as if I'd just discovered America. I didn't see a single person the entire way. Then suddenly I saw two women. They were sitting on the steps in front of a Chinese restaurant, and I couldn't figure out what they were doing there. One of them was crying and shouting, “I'm not going in there! I'm not going in there again!” The other one was trying to calm her down, but to no effect. Above them, Chinese characters in yellow and red lit up the night. There were dark trees around the building. And in the foreground, an eight-year-old was jogging past. I was annoyed. The women were probably annoyed too, and also wondering what the heck an eight-year-old was doing out running at night. We looked at each other, them crying and me running. I have no idea why that made such a strong impression on me. I guess I'd never seen grown women crying before, and I thought about it a lot afterward. Anyway, this was a night like that.

I leaned my head to the side and looked out the window as the Lada quietly took the curves of the road through the blue-green grain fields of summer. At some point I said I wanted to stop, and I stopped. The countryside was dark, and we stood and looked out over a field where in the distance you could see the black shape of a farm. I was about to say something when off to our left a light went on in the window of another farmhouse. I didn't say anything after all. Then Tschick put his arm around my shoulders and said, “We've got to get going.”

We got back in the car and drove on.

CHAPTER 43

The next day we were back on the autobahn. A huge tractor-trailer passed us. It looked as if it was made out of pig stalls. A couple of wheels, a rusty cab, and license plates from Albania or something. It was only with a second glance that I saw that what looked like pig stalls actually were pig stalls. The cages were stacked next to each other and on top of each other, and out of every one peeked a pig.

“What a shit life,” said Tschick.

The road slanted slightly uphill in this section, and it took the truck ages to pass us. When we could finally see its rear wheels, it started to drop back again. After a minute, the cab reappeared next to us. Somebody rolled down the window of the passenger door.

“Did he see you?” asked Tschick. “Or is he looking at the dents on our roof?”

I let up on the gas pedal to make it easier for him to get by us. The truck put its blinker on, swerved into our lane, and then started going slower.

“What the hell kind of idiot is this guy?” said Tschick.

We slowed way down.

“Pass him.”

I went into the left lane. The truck swerved back into the left lane in front of us.

“Pass him on the right, then.”

I steered back into the right lane. The truck got in the middle, straddling the two lanes, and to this day I don't know if he was trying to slow us down or if he was just a moron. Tschick said I should wait for another car to come along and then follow it past the truck. But no other cars came along. The autobahn was completely empty.

“Should I use the emergency lane?”

“Maybe if we can get a running start,” said Tschick. “If you think you can do it. You'll have to shift.”

We fell back, I stepped on the clutch, and Tschick put it in third. The engine whined.

“Now step on it — it'll take off like a rocket.”

Rocket turned out not to be the best description. More like the shifting of a sand dune. We had fallen about a hundred and fifty or two hundred meters behind the truck, and even with the pedal to the metal it took about a minute before we got back up behind it. And the tachometer was quivering in the red by then. I pulled up right behind the truck so I'd be invisible to the driver. He was swerving back and forth, and I wasn't sure which side to pass him on.

“Swerve with him,” said Tschick. “Then at the last second, zip by!”

I still had my foot all the way down on the gas pedal. I should point out that I wasn't nervous at that moment. I'd swerved like this a million times in video games. It came more naturally than driving straight. And the pig transporter was just the sort of obstacle you had to go around in driving games. I pulled right up behind the truck so I could shoot around it in the emergency lane. And that's exactly what I would have done if Tschick hadn't been there. If Tschick hadn't been there, I wouldn't have survived.

“HIT THE BRAKES!” he screamed. “BRAAAAAKE!”

My foot stepped on the brake pedal even before I heard and understood his scream. My foot braked automatically because I was used to doing what he said to do when I was driving. So he shouted “brakes” and I braked — without knowing why. Because as far as I could tell there was no reason to brake.

There was space between the truck and the guardrail for at least five cars, and it would have been ages before I had realized that the truck hadn't made way but rather had
skidded
out of the way. The rear end of the trailer had slid sideways, and even though we were right behind the trailer I suddenly saw the cab directly in front of me in the middle of the road — and I saw the trailer overtaking the cab. The eighteen-wheeler was transforming itself into a barrier — and that barrier was skidding in front of us, across the entire width of the autobahn, as we skidded toward it. The scene was so strange that later I had the feeling it had taken several minutes to unfold. In reality, it didn't even last long enough for Tschick to scream “brake” a third time.

The Lada turned sideways. The barrier in front of us drifted backward, tipped over with a crash, and left us faced with eighteen rotating wheels. Thirty meters in front of us. In absolute silence we glided into those wheels, and I thought,
Okay, we're going to die
. I thought I would never get back to Berlin, I would never see Tatiana again, and I would never know whether she liked my drawing or not. I thought I needed to apologize to my parents and I thought,
Crap, I forgot to save the game
.

The other thing I thought was that I should tell Tschick that I'd nearly decided to become gay because of him. I was going to die sometime, so it might as well be now, I thought as we finally slid into the truck — and nothing happened. In my memory I didn't even hear a crash. Though there must have been an incredible crash. Because we rammed straight into the truck.

CHAPTER 44

I didn't feel a thing for a minute. The first sensation I had was the feeling that I couldn't breathe. The seat belt was cutting me in half and my head was practically on the gas pedal. Tschick's cast was also somewhere near my head. I sat up. Or at least I turned my head. Above the cracked windshield was a truck tire obscuring the sky. It was turning silently. There was a dirty lightning bolt sticker on the hub of the wheel — a red bolt on a yellow background. A fist-sized clump of gunk dangled from the axle, slowly detached itself, and then splattered on the windshield.

“So much for that,” said Tschick. He had survived.

Thunderous applause broke out. It sounded like a huge crowd was shouting, whistling, hooting, and stomping their feet, and it didn't seem completely unjustified — for an amateur driver, my braking performance had been top notch. At least that was my opinion, and it didn't surprise me that others thought so as well. It's just that there was actually no crowd there.

“Are you okay?” asked Tschick, shaking my arm.

“Yeah. You?”

The passenger side of the car next to Tschick had been crushed inward about a foot, but very evenly. There were shards of glass everywhere.

“I think I cut myself.” He held up a bloody hand. The audience was still roaring and whistling, but those sounds were mixed with grunts now.

I extricated myself from the seat belt and fell onto my side. The car was apparently lying at an odd angle — I had to climb out the side window. I immediately fell over something in the street. I tried to get up but fell over again and landed in a pool of bloody sludge. A dead pig. A few yards behind us a red Opel had come to a stop. Inside the car were a man and a woman, both pushing down the door locks. I sat down on the hood of their car and grabbed the radio antenna. I wasn't able to stand anymore, and the antenna felt good in my hand. I never wanted to let go of it. For the rest of my life. “Are you okay?” Tschick called again when he had climbed out of the Lada.

At that moment, a screeching pig came running around the end of the overturned trailer. And then a bunch more. The lead pig ran, bleeding, across the autobahn and into some bushes. Some of the others ran after it, but most of them just stood there surrounded by dead pigs and battered stalls and screeched hysterically. Then I saw the police on the horizon. At first I wanted to run, but I knew there was no point. And the final two images that I can remember are of Tschick hobbling off into the bushes with his cast, and of the trooper standing next to me with a friendly look on his face, taking my hand off that antenna and saying, “It'll be okay without you.”

I've already told you the rest.

CHAPTER 45

“He doesn't understand.”

My father turned to my mother and said, “He just doesn't understand. He's too stupid.”

I was sitting on a chair and he was on another one facing me. He was bent over so far that his face was directly in front of mine and his knees were pressing against mine. I could smell his aftershave with every single word he shouted. Aramis. A gift from my mother for his hundred and seventieth birthday.

“You really screwed up. Is that clear?”

I didn't answer. What would I say? Of course it was clear. And he wasn't saying it for the first time. More like the hundredth time that day. I had no idea what he wanted to hear from me.

I looked at my mother. My mother coughed.

“I think he gets it,” she said. She stirred her Amaretto with a straw.

My father grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “Do you understand what I'm saying? Kindly say something!”

“What do you want me to say? I've already said yes. Yes, I understand. Yes, it's clear.”

“You don't understand a thing! Nothing is clear to you. He thinks this is just about saying the words. What an idiot!”

“I'm not an idiot just because for the hundredth time . . .”

Bam
. He smacked my face.

“Josef, don't.” My mother tried to stand up but lost her balance and let herself sink back into the armchair next to the bottle of Amaretto.

My father got right in my face. He was shaking with rage. Then he crossed his arms on his chest and I tried to put on a face creased with worry — because my father probably expected that, and because I knew his arms were only crossed because he was about to smack me again. Up to that point I had just said what I thought. I didn't want to lie. This face was the first lie that I trotted out — to speed things along.

“I know that we screwed up big-time, and I know . . .”

My father started to move his arms and I flinched. But this time he just yelled: “No, no, no! It's not
we
who screwed up, you idiot. It's your piece of trash Russian friend who screwed up. And you're so stupid that you let yourself get dragged into it. You're too stupid even to adjust a rearview mirror!”

My face showed my annoyance, because I'd already told him a thousand times what really happened — even if he didn't want to hear it.

“Do you think you're an island? Don't you realize this is going to fall on us? How do you think this makes me look? How can I sell somebody a house when my son might steal their car?”

“You aren't selling any houses anymore anyway. Your company is . . .”

Bam
. The sound of his hand hitting my face made a crack. I fell to the floor. Moron. In school we were always told that violence is never the answer. My ass. When you get a smack in the face, you know damn well it's an answer.

My mother screamed, I got up, my father looked at my mother and then away again, and then he said, “Sure, sure, it doesn't matter anyway. Sit down. I said sit down, you idiot. You listen to me and you listen good. You've got a good chance of getting away with just a slap on the wrist. I know that from Schuback. Unless you act as idiotically as you are right now and you tell the judge how great you are at hotwiring cars with this and that wire and all that crap. They love doing that in the juvenile justice system — they bring charges against somebody so they will testify against others. And obviously that's what they plan to do to you too, except that you're too goddamn stupid. But you can be sure of one thing: Your Russian friend is not as stupid as you. He knows how it works. He's already got a criminal past — robbing stores with his brother, fraud, fencing stolen goods. Yeah, I see the look on your face. That's how those types of people operate. Of course he didn't tell you about it. He also doesn't have a nice home like this to show the court. He's living in a hole right now. In some closet-sized shithole. Where he belongs. He'll be lucky if he gets to stay in a juvenile detention center. Schuback says they could also deport him. And tomorrow he'll pay any price to save his own skin — do you understand? He already gave his statement and he put all the blame on you. It always works that way — every idiot tries to blame the others.”