You (42 page)

“I know,” you reply and immediately feel the rage rising, and rage is a good substitute for grief. Of course you can’t know that this is another of your father’s lessons. He makes you believe what he wants to make you believe. He feeds you with lies and stokes your rage. He’s like all fathers. They want to see their sons grow and flourish; and they always want to keep the possibility open of capping their growth if the son becomes a threat. Your father wants to take you to your limits, and you’re an obedient dog who trusts only his master’s hand and nobody else. If Tanner told you now that your father had punished Mirko with a bullet to the head for his arrogance toward him, you wouldn’t believe a word of it.

Doubting your father isn’t an option.

The girls are responsible.

For Oskar. For Mirko.

Your father told you they’d found Mirko by the pool. Revenge for the deal that went wrong? Revenge for your failure? Who knows.
He was still warm
, your father said. And there he lies now. Cold. And you don’t question a thing.

“Are you ready?”

You try to lift Mirko’s head, it sticks, the surface of the puddle cracks, Mirko’s mouth flips open, a little fluid seeps out, the fly creeps out over his lower lip and zooms off, you suppress a retch and lower his head again.

“Take his arms.”

You take his arms and don’t understand how Tanner can stay so calm. He takes Mirko’s legs and says, “Just pull away, he can’t feel anything now.”

You pull on his arms. Mirko’s head comes away from the floor
and falls back. You regret not closing his eyes. Mirko looks at you, upside down.

“What does he see?”

Absolutely nothing
.

Yes, but what if he can see something?

Me. His best friend. The friend who got him involved in all this
.

You look past Mirko to Tanner. An empty gaze. A forlorn gaze.

“Everything okay?”

You want to nod, but you can’t. Inwardly you’re weeping for your friend, you really loved that Yugo and you still can’t get your head round what’s happened here. He was like a little brother to you. He did everything for you.

“All okay,” you reply and blink away the tears, and then Tanner and you carry the corpse upstairs, wrap it in a blanket, and put it with Oskar in the trunk.

After leaving the highway near Oranienburg and driving through the city center, you stop at the Lehnitzsee. From outside, the crematorium looks old and dilapidated, but Tanner says that’s just a façade, it’s all high-tech inside. Ten years ago the facility was privatized, and your father was involved in the conversion. He was of the opinion that a crematorium is a good investment.

A man in blue overalls stands by the entrance, smoking. Tanner flashes the headlights twice, the man opens the gate. You follow him at a walking pace, park under a massive plane tree, and stay in the car as the man disappears into the crematorium. Tanner lowers the driver’s-side window and adjusts the mirror so that he has a view of the entrance. Your hands are damp, you have to wipe them on your sweatpants. You wait for ten minutes and don’t say a word, then the man comes back out.

“There he is,” says Tanner, and moves the mirror back into its original position.

You get out and shake the man’s hand. Tanner hands him an envelope. The man doesn’t count the money; he puts the envelope in his pocket and says, “Let’s do this.”

The trunk opens silently. Tanner watches as you and the man
carry first Mirko’s and then Oskar’s corpse into the crematorium. Two plain wooden coffins stand ready. The man looks at his watch.

“The incineration chamber’s been fired up. We can do this now, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Both at the same time?”

“Both at the same time,” says the man.

You thought it would be more dignified. You thought you’d stand there and watch first your uncle and then your friend go up in flames.

The man leads you away from the coffins and along a corridor.

“We don’t need the boy’s ashes,” says Tanner.

You don’t contradict him. You step into a low-ceilinged room with two monitors and a keyboard on a table. The man points to the monitor on the right-hand side. You see the two coffins starting to move and sliding into the oven chamber. The man looks at his watch again.

“If I can just put the remains through the grinder we’ll be finished here in no more than an hour and a half. Will that do?”

“That’ll do,” says Tanner. “We’ll wait outside.”

And then you wait outside.

Two hours later you go into a restaurant on Olivaer Platz that is one of your father’s favorites. You’ve spent every birthday and every Christmas here. The cooks are on first-name terms with you, and the owner has been trying to set you up with his daughter forever.

Your father is sitting with Leo by the window, his hand on the menu, his thumb drumming gently on the paper. Even though no one can really see it, your father’s psyched up. The calmer he looks, the tenser he is.

You sit down. He asks if it all went well. Tanner opens the menu and doesn’t reply. You understand that the question was meant for you. It was your task to deal with the corpses.

“No problems,” you say, thinking about the urn on the backseat of the car.

My uncle. Dead. My best friend. Dead
.

You want to say it out loud, you want to ask how on earth something
like this could happen, even though you know the answer, so it’s better to keep your mouth shut. You can be anything. Stupid and anxious aren’t in your repertoire. On the way back, when you asked Tanner what sort of grinder the man at the crematorium had been talking about, he laughed and asked you to finally grow up.

“Your father doesn’t want you thinking simplistically.”

He clapped you on the chest with the flat of his hand.

“You should stop putting your brain into your muscles. If you don’t understand something, then try to understand it. The answer will come all by itself.”

You looked down at the urn in your lap and felt like a child. Tanner left you dangling in midair for a good five minutes, then he said, “When you cremate someone, not everything always gets burnt. A thousand degrees is no guarantee. And you can be sure that people don’t want to see bits of bone or teeth when they’re scattering the ashes. So the remains are put through a bone grinder.”

Of course you’d already thought of something like that, but you can never keep your trap shut. Tanner’s right, you have to grow up. Think everything through, then you can spare yourself all the remaining questions that won’t leave you in peace:
What about Mirko? Has he just disappeared now? What will his mother say? And what will I tell the rest of the gang?

You’re like somebody looking out of the window and seeing rain and having to say out loud that it’s raining. Death is perfectly self-evident, learn to cope with that, because death is now a part of your life.

“The urn was still warm,” you blurt out.

The men look at you. Your eyes are moist again. Seventeen years old, a boy among men. Your father hands you the menu. You take it, you open it. The menu’s full of indecipherable signs that have no meaning to you. Find a meaning, give them a meaning. Tanner saves you by flicking you on the ear and saying, “At least they didn’t freeze-dry Oskar, or you’d have frozen your balls off on the way back.”

The men laugh. You laugh with them. Self-evident.

You’re on your appetizers when David comes into the restaurant and wrecks your plans for the whole day. Your father won’t be going to the theater this evening, Tanner will disappoint his girlfriend and cancel dinner, Leo will sit at the wheel again, and you’ll have to miss your training.

David tells you the Lasser family called.

“Bruno’s in a coma, a van hit him. They don’t know exactly what’s happened. But it gets even better. Oswald bled to death outside the café, and one of the girls bought it too.”

“Which one?” asks Tanner.

“The blond one that Darian beat up.”

You hiss between your teeth. They look at you, you mustn’t bat an eyelid, stay calm, they want you to be cool, so you’re cool and ask the right question.

“What about the other girls?”

David spreads his hands.

“Disappeared.”

Your father wipes his mouth with his linen napkin and pushes the plate aside. No one’s interested in Oswald and Bruno. They’re soldiers, they’re expendable. The same is true of the girls. They should have known better, they’d been warned. Your father sips his wine and looks out the window. Nobody speaks, nobody moves, the waiters keep their distance. At last your father turns to Tanner and asks him his opinion. Tanner doesn’t hesitate.

“We can’t let that be.”

Your father waves to the waiter for the check, then looks at you one by one.

“Leo, you drive us. Tanner, tell the Lasser family to stay out of this, it’s our problem. David, we don’t need you. You stay in Berlin and take care of Oskar’s house. All traces must disappear, clean the place from top to bottom and find the goddamn access code for the Range Rover. Tell Fabrizio to keep a line open for us and locate the girls’ cell phones every five minutes. I want to know if they move an inch from the spot.”

He glances quickly at his watch.

“We’re leaving in half an hour. Any questions?”

You have no questions.

“Fine. As soon as we’ve found them we’ll head home and scatter Oskar’s ashes. And Darian …”

He looks at you.
At last
. He hasn’t forgotten you.

“… you will prove to me that you’re more than just my son.” He doesn’t take his eyes off you, he’s no longer your father, he’s your boss. You say nothing. Your boss doesn’t expect an answer.

You know that they will come. You think it’s appropriate to go back to the beginning, because everything started here on the shore, so it will end here too. Your head is dull and disconnected. Thinking doesn’t help right now, action is required.

The water glitters below you and reminds you of a dress. You were very small at the time and can’t remember where the party took place, just that there were unbelievably large quantities of cakes, and what that dress of your mother’s felt like. As if her skin had turned liquid. Look, what you’re doing, it is very clever. You’re thinking your way past your problem. Keep going like that. You consider surprising your father. Perhaps you’ll take that journey to Berlin, kidnap your mother and bring the family together. Your father would never forgive you. But it would be a heroic feat. You’ve felt heroic since abandoning the Range Rover. You’re also aware that there will probably be no Later as far as you’re concerned.

You shake your head. You know it’s nonsense. So much is unresolved. You’ve achieved so little in your life that it’s shaming. You haven’t climbed a mountain, and you haven’t swum in the ocean. You haven’t even solved your problem of falling in love. If you disappear right now, no trace will be left of you.

The footsteps behind you are different. They’re not the footsteps of strollers going somewhere. Not those footsteps.
No
. You don’t want to be afraid, and no one should be afraid.
Fear is for sissies
, Grandpa Max told you. Remember that. You never wanted to be one of those people who keep their heads down. Not then, not now.

You don’t turn round.

Sweat trickles down the back of your neck, your clammy hands cling to the railing. You stare down at the water flowing by, as if the answers to all your questions were hidden in there. The footsteps fall silent behind you. The water flows and flows. The strollers are still walking, the day moves tirelessly toward evening and your instincts yell at you to get yourself in gear.

Run, get away, just do it
.

You might be your father’s son, but at the same time you’re also his opposite—you aren’t going to run away and spend eight years licking your wounds.

Not you.

No, not me
.

They lean against the railing, one on each side of you. They don’t touch you, you don’t look at them. You wait. You’re playing black, and that means being patient, because white makes the first move, it’s always been that way and it always will be. An eternity passes, then the first move is made and a voice on your left says, “We’re here.”