You (56 page)

“And what about the key?” Stink calls after you.

You turn round and hold out your hand for her.

“We’ll find it, come on.”

After the first bend the road leads into a second bend. Fifty yards further on you see the summit in front of you; the sky all around it looks as if it’s been cut with a blunt knife. You’re glad to be moving. Over the past few days you’ve either been lying in bed or sitting in the car. Stink is cursing constantly, she’s out of breath after less than a minute. She says she’s absolutely had it, and she’s going to spit her lungs up if the rest of you don’t slow down.

“I need coffee, I’ve got to fill up my batteries.”

Schnappi links arms with her, Nessi does the same on the other side. They support Stink like a grandma who’s lost her walking stick. You go and stand behind Stink, grab her ass with both hands, and start pushing. Stink screeches and runs off. You all go after her and could be four girls who’ve run away from summer camp. And so you reach the peak and stop as if you’d walked into a glass wall. The cliff is in front of you, and Stink says, “That’s impossible …”

“But …”

You don’t get another word out.

Nessi throws her hand over her mouth as if to keep her words in.

Schnappi has no words left.

You stand there and don’t believe what you see.

“Boy, listen to me.”

You wake up with a start and gasp for air. It feels as if a great weight is lifted off your chest. The seat belt cuts into your ribs, you unfasten it and look around, register your environment and breathe out with relief. Your fists are clenched, you open them and wonder how long you’ve been sitting like that. In the yellow light of the filling station your fingers look dead. They’re ice-cold and filthy, black soil is stuck under your nails. It tingles as the blood starts flowing again. Slowly the rest of your body wakes up. An unpleasant clamminess creeps up from your feet as if you were standing in water. You touch your knees. Dry. You look at your hands. Dirty. You shut your eyes again and try to make everything around you disappear. Your arms tense, you’re in your cellar lifting weights. For a few seconds.

“Your father wants to train you.”

Tanner’s last words won’t leave you in peace. The thought that your father still wants to train you. The thought that Tanner was telling the truth.

“He does what he has to do.”

You jolt upright, you have nodded off again. Tanner’s voice falls silent, your car is still at the filling station, moths flutter around the pale yellow light, and your father is a silhouette ringing a doorbell beside the closed gas station shop. He’s put his jacket on again, he means business.

The house looks as if it’s been yielding to the wind for a decade.
It leans slightly to the side, even the window frames look crooked. In another life you’d have been messing about with your mates and taken a picture of them—Darian, supporting the house. In this life you stare at the façade, and imagine everything going up in flames.

Upstairs there’s a television on, the first floor is in darkness. A low-energy bulb flickers on. How you hate that lifeless light. A shadow passes by one of the windows. You can just imagine one of those old shits muttering and cursing his way through the house in his slippers and coming downstairs, a shotgun in the crook of his arm, spitting with rage.
But he doesn’t know my father
. No one knows your father, who knows whether your father even knows himself after tonight.

You wonder, not for the first time, where you’d be if your mother had taken you to Spain. You’d probably be running one of her boutiques in Madrid, and you’d have biceps like a girl.

I’d probably be gay
.

You are who you are because your father made you what you are.

I am who I am because my father made me who I am?

You’re not sure what to make of that thought. Perhaps you will love this summer with your mother so much that you won’t be coming back. Anything is possible.

The front door opens. The woman has put a woolen jacket around her shoulders, and rather than a shotgun she’s holding a cup. For a moment it looks as if she’s bringing your father some tea. You wait for an explosion of rage, the clock says six in the morning, and instead the woman laughs. Ragnar Desche and his charm. Your father opens his briefcase, the woman waves him away and drinks from her cup. She spots you in the car, you look in the other direction.

The night is fraying at the edges, a gloomy gray flows into the black while the road remains a colorless strip leading all the way across Norway to Ulvtannen. You only know your destination from stories, your father never talked about his origins, that was your uncle’s job. You wish he’d kept his trap shut.

When Oskar left Norway with Taja and moved from Ulvtannen to Berlin, you were four years old and your uncle told you all about the beach hotel overlooking the fjord, about the people from the next village and their peculiarities, but what impressed you most was how the cliff got its name.

Ulvtannen means wolf’s tooth.

Winter after winter a wolf pack used to assemble here at full moon. In those days the ground was still densely covered with fir trees. Then one summer your great-great-grandfather came with his four brothers. They felled the firs and built a massive house for their family, a house that would one day become the beach hotel. They left a single Nordmann fir standing; it became the family tree. At the time everybody thought the wolves had been driven away, but in the winter they arrived right on time every full moon and stared at the house. The wolf pack would not be driven away by noise or gunshots. It only disappeared with the waning moon. Since then every generation has put up with the wolf pack in the winter months, and watched the wolves lying patiently in the snow or pacing around the house and rubbing against the fence, leaving clumps of fur hanging on it. As soon as winter was over, the clumps of fur were collected by the children and thrown into the big fire for the spring festival to keep the wolves’ hunger at bay.

You wish your uncle had never told you those stories because by doing that he gave you attention and got closer to you than your father did. Without your uncle’s interest you would never have been so aware of your distance from your father. The yearning began. The longing for a father who would talk to you, who would take an interest in you, and at the same time it was the longing for Ulvtannen, a place at the end of the world. Although you hardly had anything in common with Taja, in those days you had the same longing and wanted to spend your winters in the beach hotel—by a big hearth with ice flowers on the windows and a wolf pack outside the door, howling and wailing. How were you supposed to know that Taja had more in common with you than just that sense of yearning? Both of you yearned so much for your fathers that you lost yourselves.

A car speeds past the filling station and drags you from your
thoughts. For a moment you could swear it was the Range Rover, but of course that’s silly. Oskar’s car is a good four hundred miles away in front of the restaurant and will stay there until your father deals with it.

My father
.

You look over at the house. Your father is handing the woman a few bank notes. The woman goes back into the house and shuts the door behind her. Your father comes back to the car and opens the fuel tank flap. You hear the gasoline flowing. Three minutes later you’re still sitting in the car and your father is a little way off at the tap washing his face and hands. He has hung his jacket on top of a young tree that leans slightly under the weight.
That’s exactly what I feel like
, you think and want to slip over, start the car, and just drive off.

As if
.

After your father turns the tap off, he shakes his hands out, tugs the sleeves of his sweater back down, and pulls on his jacket. When he gets into the car, you smell the water on his skin. Rusty and cold. You smell your father, too. That familiar mixture of sweat and energy. You don’t look at him. You’ve made your decision. He will never know what Tanner told you. Because if he finds out, you’ll have to react to him, and if you react to him, his world will keel over and everything will be different and you’re not sure if you can bear that.

You haven’t spoken for hours, not since all the white appeared in the road and you thought it was slush. Your father took his foot off the accelerator, and you saw the burst bags glittering in the headlights. Your father hesitated for a moment before putting his foot down and driving on. In the rearview mirror you saw the heroin floating in the air like fog.

Your father didn’t waste a word on it. He didn’t ask what you were thinking, and for the first time you were happy about his lack of interest. The sight of the heroin had made you feel calmer. As if it was right for your father to fail too. Satisfaction was the right word.

Over the next few hours you kept falling asleep, because there was nothing to say. Now you’re fifty miles away from your destination at a closed filling station. Dawn is breaking, and the silence
has made itself comfortable on the backseat, and won’t think about leaving you alone.

“You should wash too,” says your father and starts the car but doesn’t put it in gear, as if he wants to give you a chance to jump out quickly. You don’t move, you stare straight ahead, your hands are still dirty, there’s no reason to leave the car.

The car moves into gear, you drive away from the gas station.

Fifteen minutes later.

“Well?”

He takes a break, the break is like an airless space that you’re suddenly standing in and don’t know where to go next. Everything within you contracts, you don’t want to ask, you ask.

“Well what?”

“How did it feel?”

You look at your hands, which are fists again. It happens automatically. As if your hands wanted to take the answers from you. “It was okay.”

“Okay?”

“It was …”

The oxygen turns to lead in your lungs, you try to find the right word, a manly word. And you know you’ll only say the wrong thing. And you say, “… a relief?”

Your father doesn’t react. For a brief moment you’re sure you didn’t answer, that the word has got stuck in the convolutions of your brain, then your father says, “Give me the gun.”

He sticks his right hand out. You hesitate. How can you hesitate? His hand stays in the air, waiting. When your father speaks again, you give a start.

“You are responsible for the deaths of two important people. Leo looked after you, he taught you to box and was beside you when your mad mother wandered around the house at night. And Tanner was your godfather. He’d have done anything for you. He …”

He stops, you both know what he wanted to say, the words “loved you” hang like a gentle sound in the air. Your father changes the subject, this isn’t a space for gentle sounds.

“Give me the gun.”

You draw the gun and rest it in your father’s open palm, grip first. He’s right. You don’t deserve the gun. Your father weighs the weapon in his hand as if checking whether it has lost weight. He doesn’t look at you once, he looks at the road and looks at the road and suddenly the barrel of the gun is pressed to your temple and pushes your head aside so that you have to look straight ahead.

You tense up, you freeze.

“How could you.”

It isn’t a question, it’s an observation, but you still try and defend yourself like an idiot.

“I’m. I’m sorry. The boy …”

“It wasn’t the boy’s fault.”

Your chest is covered with sweat and you even feel it running down the back of your neck, but that’s very unlikely, it’s more likely that it’s your soul saying goodbye.

“Then why did he have to die?” you blurt out, and you understand that you’re calling your father into question.
What on earth am I doing here?
The pressure against your temple increases, you sit still, just don’t show any weakness.

“It was a punishment,” says your father.

“But I thought he wasn’t to blame.”

“Who said
he
was the one being punished?”

You understand, you want to lower your head. Shame. You keep your head up.