You (32 page)

The year after your father died you lived in various shared houses and didn’t leave Berlin for as much as a day. You were a punk and a revolutionary, you were sixteen years old and deep in your heart hungry for the vile world and yet at the same time you despised it. It took you one year to summon the courage and call home. Oskar picked up after the second ring, as if he’d been waiting for your call. If your mother had come to the phone, you’d have hung up without a word.

“Hey, little brother, did you miss me?”

Oskar didn’t think that was funny, he didn’t think any of the things you said to him were funny. Your story sounded lame to his ears—that you were fed up with your father, that Berlin had always been your dream.
Being free means being alive
. You murmured something about how you were sorry for not calling before. Oskar said in the middle of your excuses, “He’s dead.”

No name, no title, just
he
. You knew you had to act surprised. It didn’t work. You were you, there was no getting past it. So you just said
good
and felt relieved and had just one thought:
It’s really true
.

A dog stopped by the phone booth, lifted its back leg, and peed against the glass. You kicked the windowpane, the dog jumped back with a start and left a zigzagging yellow trail on the pavement.

“How could you leave us alone?” your brother asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What sort of an answer is that?”

“If no one does anything, nothing happens,” you answered.

Oskar hung up. Really, what sort of a stupid answer was that? You couldn’t use that kind of revolutionary talk on your little brother, and anyway you’d got the phrase from a calendar. It was hardly original.

You called back. Oskar asked what you wanted this time. You apologized. He told you to shove your apology. You couldn’t help laughing. Oskar had a big mouth for a thirteen-year-old, that’s exactly what you said to him, even though you knew he turned fourteen a week ago. You wanted to irritate him, so that he’d be your brother again and not some insulted teenager snapping at you.

“Ragnar, I’m fourteen and you’re an incredible asshole for somebody who’s supposed to be my brother.”

“Is that so?”

“That’s so. And if my swearing bothers you, you can go fuck yourself.”

Silence. You each listened to the other one breathing, then Oskar couldn’t keep it up anymore and burst out laughing and you laughed with him. It was such a relief, it was so liberating, that at that moment you’d have given a lot to be there with him.

“I hate you.”

“I know.”

“How could you just disappear?”

“I’m sorry.”

There was that silence again; this time it was you who broke it.

“Is he really dead?”

“Heart attack. They found him at another woman’s house.”

“What sort of woman?”

“No idea. He had another child. A boy. The bastard had two families, can you imagine that?”

You nodded and dodged his question.

“How’s Mom?”

He told you everything, it was like a dam giving way under the pressure of the last year. You found out how they were living, how everything had changed since your father’s death. About the friends who were allowed to come by. About the laughter that filled the apartment.

“Aunt Mara and Aunt Joos were there. Half of Norway visited us and you missed it, bro, you miss everything,” said Oskar, and you
wanted to yell at him:
I’m in fucking Berlin! I’m in the most happening place on the planet, so don’t tell me I’m missing something!

Oskar wanted to know when you were coming back, you explained that you didn’t know, you had a job, you’d find a way, soon perhaps. It was another lie. You never wanted to see the dump of a place again. Oskar must have sensed as much. He never asked you that question again.

Over the next nine years the distance between you grew. After Oskar finished school, he and your mother moved to Norway and into the old beach hotel, which was already closed by then and urgently in need of renovation. Ulvtannen, the only beach hotel without a beach. Your mother had always dreamed of going back.

While your brother was starting a new life in Norway, you put down deep roots in Berlin. The jobs were pretty low-rent—handing out flyers, night shift at gas stations, part-time work on building sites, waiting tables, shelf stacking, delivering drinks and turning bratwursts at sausage stalls. There was no job too low for you, and perhaps it would have gone on like that forever, and one day you’d have got one of your angels pregnant. Family with dog and you, pushing a pram through the park and sitting in the bar with the guys in the evening—the infinitely free life of an unemployed person in Berlin who doesn’t want anything more because he has so little and needs so little. It all ended the day Flipper stepped into your life.

The eighties were taking their last breath. You were twenty-three, and for a few months you’d been working in a video shop that kept banned movies under the counter and mostly survived on pirate copies. Flipper had just arrived from Vancouver, he was the distant cousin of a good friend, and was stopping off in Berlin for New Year’s. In his early forties, he looked sixty and was so exhausted by life that he could barely keep his eyes open. Or as he put it:
God, I’ve seen so much that I have to take a break
. Flipper wasn’t just the most exhausted man who ever crossed your path, he was also the very first dealer.

New Year’s Eve 1989.

Your father had been under the ground for almost a decade, and the Wall was about to collapse. Berlin was in an ecstasy of freedom, and Germany didn’t yet know that it would one day look at the East as a thing of the past.

The stream of people was endless. They came from everywhere, as if the whole eastern bloc had been emptied, as if Berlin was a swing door that anybody could go marching in and out of whenever they liked.

On every other day you thought the city was the most exciting place in the world, but on this particular New Year’s Eve you felt displaced, perhaps not least because you were standing in a smoky pub at Görlitzer station, your mouth was full of blood, and you were listening to an old man who called himself Flipper spreading his life out in front of you.

You were miserable. That evening a particularly brutal dentist had extracted two of your wisdom teeth in an emergency operation, and your head felt like a blocked toilet that gasped for air every few minutes. Normally you would have been in bed ages ago, but stubbornness kept you on your feet. It was only New Year’s Eve once a year. And you also enjoyed Flipper’s company, even though you could only hear every third word over the noise.

Flipper would have had more fun with a glove puppet. You couldn’t speak, you were pumped up with painkillers and weren’t allowed to drink alcohol, but you were able to listen. And Flipper talked without interruption. About his life in Tunisia, about his drug experiences, the women and the various bones in his body that were broken. He showed you a scar on the back of his neck and described the knife that had nearly sawn his head off. He said he’d spent four years in an Italian jail, smuggled thousands of Mexican migrants into America, and if fate had anything left for him, he wanted to move to Alaska one day.

“Because of the cold, you know?”

It was the talk of an aging junkie who drank Metaxa and smoked nasty little cigarillos. At the time you had no idea who he really was. At the time you couldn’t know that you’d be standing in tears by his grave three years later. Tears over Flipper, over you and your father, but especially over the feeling of having been abandoned.

Flipper stayed by your side the whole evening. He kept you
supplied with bags of ice and looked away when you spat blood into a plastic cup. The pub started to fill up at midnight, and you decided that a little bit of alcohol might back up the painkillers. It helped you over the next hour. You drank eight lemon vodkas and rinsed out the wound with the alcohol. You sucked on ice cubes and numbed the pain with the cold. After the hour you started feeling sick and dragged yourself outside.

Berlin was playing war.

The rain came down like a glittering curtain that was caught by the wind and whipped against the façades. People were standing on the balconies, throwing firecrackers and screaming like banshees. You watched fascinated as a group of drunks tried to pick the firecrackers up and throw them back before they went off. Wiener Strasse was packed. You didn’t know where you wanted to go. After ten yards you staggered and nearly fell. Flipper supported you as you leaned between two parked cars. He held your head, kicked the hissing firecrackers away, and wiped the vomit from your mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. A stray rocket landed in the middle of the street, and for a few seconds you were lit up by a red light. Flipper grinned at you, looking like a devil that’s just climbed out of a bloodbath. He took you to a house doorway, the air around you stank of sulfur and the rain on the pavement splashed up to your knees.

“Fucking New Year’s Eve,” said Flipper.

You didn’t want to go back to the bar. You wanted to stand here all night inhaling the stench and the cold of the rain. Flipper smoked and looked down the street as if he weren’t in Berlin but somewhere far away. Tijuana, Cairo, Rabat. His gray hair was woven into a plait, not a strand was out of place. You studied the wrinkles in his face, which, in the light of the flickering rockets, looked like streaks of mascara. And you swore never to look like that when you were forty. Flipper noticed your expression and smiled at you. His teeth were brilliant white.

“Everything okay?”

You nodded. You started to like the fact that you couldn’t speak.

“Do you have a problem with coke?”

You shrugged; until now alcohol and marijuana had been your only sin, but if Flipper thought coke would do you good now, you’d
be the last one to say no. It was a new year, new decisions needed to be made.

“I’ve got a package.”

He took a drag on his cigarillo, the smoke puffed from him with every word he said.

“Could you store it for me?”

He spat.

“For a few days?”

You nodded again, and Flipper tousled your hair as if you were ten years old, and asked where you lived. Arm in arm you walked down Skalitzer Strasse. Your days as a squatter had come to an abrupt end a year before, when you met angel number 11. She was a nurse, the apartment was in her name, three rooms in an old building on Prinzenstrasse with a tiny balcony looking out over a courtyard.

“Better a view than no view,” said Flipper and left the balcony door open. You heard the city, you heard the rain, and Flipper went on talking until nine in the morning. The pain in your mouth eased after an hour and you managed to speak too. It was your best conversation ever. Flipper was interested, he wanted to know everything about you; and you told him more than you’d ever told anyone. You also spoke about your father, particularly about your father.

“So you killed him,” Flipper said at last.

You just looked at him, you didn’t know what to say.

“It’s fine,” Flipper went on. “It’s good to let it out. If you ask me, I forgive you. You’ll have to do the rest yourself.”

“There is nothing to forgive,” you replied.

Flipper nodded as if he hadn’t expected any other reply, then he said something that won’t let go of you even today, something that gives you courage even in your most difficult moments.

“Your father would have done exactly the same. He would have shown you no mercy. You did the right thing.”

Angel number 11 came home from emergency service at eight o’clock and made you scrambled eggs, then she said that it was time for sleep and took you to bed. Flipper fetched a blanket and made himself comfortable on the sofa. You slept until the afternoon and
then met in the bathroom. Flipper was wearing your dressing gown and bore a strong resemblance to Christopher Lee.

“I’ve made us coffee,” he said.

“How long have you been awake?”

“Ten minutes.”

You took a shower, and then you drank the coffee. Flipper didn’t once mention the package. He made two phone calls and went to the bathroom for half an hour. When the doorbell rang you opened up, but there was nobody there. A paper bag lay on the doormat.

“Good service.”

Flipper stood behind you and pulled up the zipper of his trousers. He reached past you and picked the paper bag up off the floor, weighed it in one hand, and handed it to you. Then he took his lighter and the pack of cigarillos off the table, pulled his coat on, and said goodbye with a handshake.

“I’ve got to go now, be a good man.”

It was the last time you saw him alive. The stench of his cigarillos lingered for four days in the apartment and clung firmly to the curtains and the sofa.

The package was in the bag. You didn’t touch it, but put it in your closet and forgot all about it. You knew from the start what had to be done. Instinctively. Six weeks later Flipper called. It was three in the morning. Flipper was making a stopover in Vladivostok and wanted to ask if you could quickly deliver the package to Dahlem.

“Right now?”

“If you have nothing better to do.”

You had nothing better to do, so you got on your bike and rode with the package thirteen kilometers to Dahlem. It was unbearably cold, but you enjoyed cycling through the sleeping city in February. It was wild, it was different, it was life.

That morning you met your second dealer. Marcel Tanner welcomed you with a cup of tea and a well-stuffed pipe. It was friendship at first sight, and Tanner became your mentor over the next few years, before he gave up dealing and became a partner in your firm. Since then you’ve kept things small, because small means safety, small is manageable. Your efforts paid off. Your company now has three partners, as well as an IT guy, a lab assistant, and two lawyers.
You grew into a little family, trusting each other and being closed off to the outside world. And even if you would never admit it, you were already acting along your father’s lines. Everything begins and ends with discipline.

The boy in front of you knows what discipline is. The barrel is pressed against his head, his head yields slightly, the boy puts up no resistance and doesn’t duck. He reminds you a little of yourself, when you finally stood up to your father and jutted your chin and took the blows and never showed any weakness. Weakness stirred up the fire in your father. Don’t let him break you, don’t bow the knee.
Bite, keep biting
. Without a bite you’d never have ended up in Berlin, you’d still be sitting in that dump of a house and you’d be one more idiot who was afraid of his father and of life in general.