Sorry (5 page)

That’s almost it. You’ve met nearly all of them now. Kris and Frauke and Tamara. The fourth member of the confederation is missing. His name is Wolf. He will be the only one that you will meet personally, for just a moment, which is a shame because he’s like you. You’d have got along. You both walk through life feeling guilty. The big difference is that Wolf is wrong to feel his guilt, while you are completely aware of your responsibility, which is why you’re slowly going mad.

At the moment Wolf is less than thirty yards away from Frauke and Tamara. He is holding a stack of books in his arms, and even though he would never admit it, he’d be really glad for a bit of company.

Let’s not keep him waiting.

F
OR A WHILE
W
OLF
drove a truck. Out in the early morning to the central market, then delivering to the fruit stalls and the little neighborhood grocery stores. After that came a phase in which he did the rounds for various record labels, distributing promo CDs to the shops. That wasn’t the right thing either. But he does enjoy selling books outside the university. There are nice female students, who like to haggle
and go for coffee. Otherwise, Wolf is in the fresh air and can read as long as nothing is going on. He gets most of the books from Hugendubel or Wohlthat. Today it’s Woolworth’s turn.

Wolf is one of those writer types who only venture into writing very cautiously. He says he’s collecting experiences, but in fact he uses that to hide the fact that he isn’t sure what story he has to tell. His first great novel is waiting to be written. Short stories and poems are his bridge to that dream.

Since waking up Wolf has had a brilliant dialogue going on in his head, he just wants to buy this last stack of books before sitting down in a café and putting the words in order. He doesn’t know that his course has been predetermined.

On the way to the registers he sees Frauke.

Wolf is about to duck. He has nothing against Frauke, in fact he makes a lot of time for her, they mail one another, they phone, but there’s no getting past the fact that there’s a lot of history between the two of them, and sometimes Wolf doesn’t want to see Frauke. The past can be like a millstone hung around your neck at the most inappropriate moment.

At moments like these.

Men don’t like to let their defeats simply happen, they experience them like a bad film, over and over again from the start, and enjoy the bitterness of loss as if it were something precious. When Wolf thinks back to his time with Frauke, he isn’t really thinking about Frauke. He is thinking about the woman who extinguished the memory of Frauke. That’s exactly where sand gets into the works, and the machinery of his thoughts begins to falter.

Her name was Erin. For two weeks, every hour, every minute, she and Wolf stuck together.
That’s what love must feel like
, Wolf had thought then, because everything seemed in focus and super-sharp. His senses were overstimulated, his belly constantly hungry. When Wolf went to the bathroom, he left the door open to go on listening to Erin. And listening was required, because that woman could talk. It was incredible. Wolf found everything she said right and good. Of course a lot of nonsense came out of her mouth as well, but during that brief period it didn’t bother Wolf for a second. His head transformed even that nonsense into razor-sharp philosophy. Wolf belonged to her completely.

• • •

It was Erin who had sought out Wolf. It happened on the night bus. Wolf was on his way home from a concert. Erin came and stood next to him, said
Hi
, and then said her name.
Erin
. It sounded like a question.
Wolf
, said Wolf, and made it sound like an answer. She took him by the hand, the bus stopped, they got out, and in a deserted playground a few yards from the bus stop they had sex together for the first time. It was very quick. Wordless. Wolf came right away.

“At last,” Erin said afterwards.

“At last,” Wolf said too, knowing that she would disappear almost immediately and he would lose her forever. He saw himself spending the rest of his life walking around the place with a broken heart. From the beginning Wolf had had that premonition.

They didn’t part for a minute. Time existed for them alone. Wolf lost ten pounds because he more or less forgot about eating. His new life consisted of vodka, television, dope, Pizza Express, sex, cigarettes, Vaseline, music, sweets, baths, talking and talking some more, of sunrises, sunsets, laughing, the best deep sleep of his life and of course one hundred percent of Erin.

On the fourteenth day her cell phone rang. Up until that point Wolf didn’t even know she had one. It was three in the morning, and Wolf said:

“Don’t answer it.”

Erin took the call, listened briefly, and hung up. Wolf wanted to know who was calling at that time of night, but before he could ask, Erin turned onto her belly and stuck her bottom in the air.

“Come on, fuck me again.”

Wolf didn’t take the trouble to pull down her panties. He pushed them aside to reveal her cunt. He couldn’t understand how this woman could always, but really always, be moist and ready for him.

It would be the last time.

Afterwards Erin was in the shower, and Wolf was sitting cross-legged on the lid of the toilet, rolling a joint and listening to her.

“As far as I’m concerned this could go on forever,” he said during a pause.

“What do you mean?”

Erin opened the shower curtain. The water sprayed Wolf and slowly
covered the floor. Wolf laughed and didn’t reply. She didn’t have to know everything, after all. Erin turned the water off and reached for a towel. She said she was hungry now. She said the word
hungry
so many times that it lost its meaning. Then she got dressed, took Wolf by the hand, and they went to have breakfast.

Berlin is the only city in Germany where you still feel alive at night. It was summer two years ago, they cycled from west to east and sat down in a café at the Hackeschen Markt. When Wolf crosses the market square today he feels uneasy, as if the tourists are watching him, as if everyone knows that this is the place where he failed.

There was hardly anyone to be seen in the square that morning. There was just a council street-cleaning machine going around sweeping up the dirt from the previous night. Wolf had no idea what day of the week it was. A romantic veil lay over his eyes. Everything about Erin was right—taste, humor, every touch found a perfect echo, no words were out of place, their gestures were almost synchronized. Wolf knew he had found the right woman.
She is mine and belongs to me alone!
He wanted to sing it out loud.

When the first people walked past the café on their way to work, Erin snuggled up to him and said, “You and me and me and you.”

“No,” Erin contradicted him. “You
and
me, you
and
me.”

She laughed, stood up, and explained she just had to go to the little girls’ room for a moment. Wolf didn’t follow her. He sat there and played with a beer mat and let five minutes go by. He should have followed her right away.
If only I had … Then I would have …
Guilt began. Erin didn’t come back.

There are days when Wolf sees her in the street, at a newsstand or waiting by a traffic light. Sometimes she sits down next to him on the subway and he doesn’t dare look at her. Today on his way to Woolworth’s he saw her on a park bench. Her legs were crossed and she had a cell phone pressed to her ear. Of course she paid him no attention, and he didn’t stop to chat with her because he had accepted long ago that Erin settled wherever and whenever she felt like it.
She hides in details, she is never the sum of the whole
. Since Wolf accepted that, he has stopped talking to women who are complete strangers.

Wolf is still Wolf. He’s a bit broken, he has lost himself a little, but
he’s still Wolf—a man who thinks that the love of his life is still nearby. He finds her in the tiniest detail. As if her spirit were in turmoil; as if her spirit wanted him to see her.

Wolf found her in one of the stalls in the bathroom. Her head was thrown back, her half-open eyes stared at the ceiling as if there was something to see there. He doesn’t know how long he crouched by her motionless body watching her. At some point he leaned forward, closed her eyes, and carefully pulled the needle from her arm before asking one of the waitresses to call an ambulance. When he went back to the bathroom Erin’s left eye had opened again.
Automatically
, thought Wolf, feeling hopeful nevertheless, but there was no breathing, there was no pulse. He walked back to the table, sat down, and waited until the police came. He didn’t want to know what they had to say. He didn’t want to know anything. But he couldn’t go. He couldn’t simply leave Erin on the toilet in that café. Alone.

For this reason there are days when he even avoids his friends. On those days he doesn’t want to exist, or be reminded that he does. He knows it sounds absurd. But the attempt to keep out of his own way is absurd enough already. Wolf just wants to function, with a feeling of guilt by his side and melancholy in his head. The million-dollar question is how long you can go on doing that without feeling like an idiot.

“Look who it is,” Wolf shouts across Woolworth’s. “It’s Frauke!”

Frauke turns around, surprised. Wolf feels his heart contracting.

Such joy
.

“Yeah, look,” Frauke calls back. “It’s Wolf!”

At school Wolf was two classes behind his brother. Little Wolf, so different from big Kris—wittier, noisier, more present. Kris’s clique treated him as a mascot. They took him along to parties, watched him bouncing around, trying to get off with girls and puking into the bushes behind the house. When the clique left school, they left Wolf behind like a dog that wasn’t old enough to join the pack. The two years till his own school-leaving exam were a torment for him. He wasn’t interested in the kids his own age, he listened to different music, spoke a different language. For a while he grew bitter, stole money from his father and
drank the evenings away, started fights and had his heart broken by a girl who looked very much like Frauke. During that time melancholy broke out in Wolf like a creeping infection.

He passed his leaving exam with difficulty and went traveling. He explored Scandinavia, spent a month in a dilapidated hut high in the north of Norway and didn’t see another human being for six weeks. Then he took a freighter to Canada, where he worked little jobs, felled trees, and cleared snow from driveways. In the summer he slept in the forests and stayed far from civilization. Everything he owned was in his rucksack.

After six years Wolf came back to Berlin having decided to be a writer. No one collected him from the airport the day he arrived, because no one knew he was back. For six months everything was fine, until one day his brother bumped into him in the street.

“And there I was wondering why you didn’t answer the phone in Toronto,” Kris said by way of greeting.

They looked at each other, they didn’t come any closer; something was missing, something had turned the brothers into strangers. Wolf was no longer little Wolf; a strange man was standing in front of Kris. It’s always difficult when your surroundings don’t change at the same pace as you do yourself. Wolf had gotten burlier, his hair reached his shoulders, his attitude was defensive. And Kris was Kris.

“What are you doing here?”

“Living.”

That was all that came out of Wolf. He would have liked to follow it up with another line, he would happily have laughed away the moment, but he had frozen.

“Well, then, go on living,” Kris said at last, leaving him standing.

Kris could do that. Kris could draw a line and go on with his life as if nothing had happened. Wolf found that very hard. The brothers remained strangers to one another, and probably nothing would have changed if Erin’s death the same year hadn’t turned Wolf’s world upside down.

Wolf hugs Frauke. The smell of vetiver rises into his nose. Earthy, crude, warm. He feels her breath on his neck and wonders how he could ever have thought of running away for a second.

“What are you doing here?”

“Look to your left,” says Frauke.

Two aisles over Tamara is rummaging in a pile of socks. Frauke puts her thumb and forefinger in her mouth and whistles once. Tamara looks up, Wolf waves, and Frauke says:

“Well, if that isn’t a coincidence.”

Wolf twitches imperceptibly. As far as he’s concerned coincidences are an invention of people who can’t come to grips with life. The minute something goes wrong they go all helpless. If things are going well they try and find a reason why they’re going well. They haven’t the guts to say,
This thing and that thing happen to be because I’m the way I am
. Coincidence is Wolf’s great weak spot. Since Erin’s death he has been trying to find answers to questions that have no answers.
If only I had, I would be
. Nonexistent coincidence caught him off guard and Wolf is hoping for revenge.

Kris greets Tamara and Frauke with a kiss, he’s clearly glad of their visit. When the women have gone in, the brothers hug.

“How bad was it?” asks Wolf.

“So-so. My boss couldn’t give me a straightforward apology. You know how much I hate that. He said I should give
Taz
a call. Can you imagine me doing that?”

Wolf shakes his head.

“Thanks,” says Kris, and they walk into the apartment.

Tamara and Frauke have occupied the kitchen. Frauke is busy washing the vegetables, while Tamara pokes about in the fridge and takes out yogurt, tofu, and sauces.
It’s like family
, Wolf thinks, putting his bag of books down on the floor. Kris puts his arm around his shoulders and says something that makes Frauke laugh. Tamara chucks a baby eggplant at Kris and hits Wolf. They laugh. It’s as if they have no ballast.

We’re approaching the start. You are now ready for the present and know who’s going to be crossing your path. Over the next few days you will learn more about Frauke, Tamara, and Wolf. Kris, on the other hand, will remain a mystery to you. He’ll get close to you, but he’ll still stay out of reach. All your efforts to uncover his motivation and his background will trickle into the sand. You won’t be able to bridge the distance between you and him until the finale. But you don’t need to worry about that now.