Why We Took the Car (11 page)

“What are you, anyway? Russian? Or Wallachian or something?”

“German. I have a passport.”

“Yeah, but where are you from?”

“A city called Rostov. It's in Russia. But my family is from all over — Volga Germans, ethnic Germans. Danube Swabians, Wallachians, Jewish Gypsies . . .”

“What?”

“What what?”

“Jewish Gypsies?”

“Yeah, man. And Swabian and Wallachian . . .”

“No such thing.”

“As what?”

“Jewish Gypsies. You're talking shit. You're talking nothing but shit.”

“Not at all.”

“A Jewish Gypsy would be like an English French. There's no such thing.”

“Of course there's no such thing as English French,” Tschick said. “But there are French Jews. And there are Gypsy Jews.”

“Gypsy Jews.”

“Exactly. They wear a funny thing on their head and drive around Russia selling carpets. You know what I'm talking about — the things on their heads. Coverings. Coverings on their heads.”

“Coverings on their asses, more like. I don't believe a word you are saying.”

“You know that movie with what's-his-name?” Tschick really wanted to prove it to me.

“Movies are not real life,” I said dismissively. “In real life you can only be one or the other — a Jew or a Gypsy.”

“Gypsy isn't a religion, man. Jewish is a religion. A Gypsy is just someone without a home.”

“People without homes are Berbers.”

“Berbers are carpets,” said Tschick.

I thought about it for a while longer, and when I asked Tschick one last time whether he was
really
Jewish Gypsy and he nodded solemnly, I believed him.

What I still didn't believe was the crap about his grandfather. Because I knew for a fact that Wallachia was just a made-up word. I tried a hundred different ways to prove to Tschick that there was no such place as Wallachia. But I noticed the only time my words made any impact at all was when I made a couple of grand arm gestures as I talked. Tschick mimicked the gestures. Then he went to get more beer. He asked whether I wanted another one too. But I just wanted a Coke.

I was really wound up. And as I watched a fly flitting around the table, I had the feeling that the fly was wound up too — because I was. I'd never had such a good time before. Tschick put two bottles of beer down on the table and said, “You'll see. My grandfather and my great-aunt and my six cousins — four of them are girls, and they're as pretty as orchids. You'll see.”

My mind was soon occupied with thoughts of the cousins. But Tschick had no sooner left the house than the images of his cousins and everything disappeared into the ether, leaving only a feeling of misery. It had nothing to do with Tschick. It had to do with Tatiana. It had to do with the fact that I had no idea what she thought of me now, and that I might never find out. And at that moment I would have given anything to be in Wallachia or anywhere else in the world but Berlin.

Before I went to bed, I opened my laptop. I had four e-mails from my father complaining that I'd switched off my cell phone and wasn't answering the landline. I had to think up some excuse and would need to write him an e-mail back saying that everything was going great here. Which it was. And since I didn't feel like writing the e-mail and couldn't think of a good excuse, I looked up Wallachia on Wikipedia. That's when my mind
really
started to race.

CHAPTER 19

Early Sunday morning. Four o'clock. Tschick had said that would be the best time. Four
A.M.
, dead of night. I had barely slept at all, just dozed on and off a little, and I was instantly wide awake when I heard footsteps on our terrace. I ran to the door and there was Tschick, standing in the darkness with a duffel bag. We whispered even though there was no reason to whisper. Tschick threw his duffel down in the hall and we set off to retrieve the car.

When we'd driven back from Werder, he'd parked the Lada where it was normally parked, which was about a ten-minute walk from my house. A fox crossed the sidewalk right in front of us, heading in the direction of downtown. A garbage truck whooshed by us and we passed a coughing old lady walking in the opposite direction. We actually stood out more in the middle of the night than we would have during the day. About thirty meters from the car, Tschick gave me the signal to wait. I stood in some bushes and felt my heart racing. Tschick pulled a yellow tennis ball out of his duffel bag. He pressed it on the door handle of the Lada and hit it with the flat of his hand. I couldn't imagine what good it would do, but Tschick rasped, “Professional on the job!”

The door opened. He waved me over.

Inside he fiddled with the wires and the engine fired up. He hit the bumpers of both the car in front of us and the one behind us as he tried to get out of the parking spot. I huddled down in the passenger seat and examined the tennis ball. It was a normal tennis ball with a finger-sized hole cut into it.

“Does that work on all kinds of cars?”

“No, not all of them. But ones with central locking — it creates a vacuum.” He scraped his way out of the parking spot as I pressed and squeezed the tennis ball in my hand. I just couldn't see how it worked. Russians!

Ten minutes later we were loading up the Lada. There's a door directly from our house to our garage, so we carried everything we thought we needed out that way. First off was bread — along with crackers and various spreads and a couple jars of jam. We figured we'd want to eat at some point. And to do that we also needed plates and knives and spoons. We threw in a three-man tent, sleeping bags, and sleeping mats. Then we took out the mats and replaced them with air mattresses. Half the household ended up in the car after a while, and then we started taking stuff back out again. Most of it you don't really need. There was a lot of back and forth. We fought about whether we'd need Rollerblades, for instance. Tschick said that if we ran out of gas, one of us could Rollerblade to a gas station. But I figured we might as well just throw in the foldable bicycle for that. Or just go by bike instead of car. We were nearly done when we decided to bring a case of bottled water, and that turned out to be the best idea of all. Or rather the only good idea at all. Because everything else proved useless: badminton racquets, a huge stack of manga, four pairs of shoes, my dad's toolbox, six frozen pizzas. One thing we didn't take were cell phones. “So the cocksuckers can't tell where we are,” said Tschick.

And also no CDs. The Lada had big speakers in the back but only an old lint-stuffed cassette player bolted under the glove box. But to be honest I was just as happy not to have to listen to Beyoncé in the car. And of course we took the two hundred Euros as well as what money I had of my own. I wasn't sure what we would use it for. In my mind we'd be driving through unpopulated wastelands — practically deserts. I hadn't studied Wikipedia enough to have seen what it looked like down closer to Wallachia. But I definitely couldn't imagine there was much going on there.

CHAPTER 20

I had hung my arm out the window and put my head down on it. We were driving at a leisurely pace through pastures and fields as the sun slowly rose somewhere beyond Rahnsdorf. It was the weirdest and most beautiful thing I'd ever experienced. I can't pinpoint what was so weird about it, because it was just a car ride, and that was nothing new. But there's a difference between sitting in a car with adults who are talking about construction-grade concrete and Angela Merkel, and being in a car with no adults and no chitchat. Tschick had hung his arm out the window too and was guiding the Lada up a little hill with his right hand. It was as if the thing was driving itself through the fields. It was a totally different sort of car ride, a totally different world. Everything seemed bigger, the colors brighter, the noises as if they were in surround sound. It wouldn't have surprised me a bit if all of a sudden Tony Soprano or a dinosaur or a spaceship had appeared on the road in front of us.

We took the most direct route out of Berlin, leaving the early-morning bustle behind us, and then wound our way through the villages on the outskirts of town on back roads and quiet country lanes. Which is where we realized we hadn't brought a map. All we had was a map of Berlin.

“Maps are for pussies,” said Tschick. And he was right, of course. But there was an obvious problem with that logic: How would we ever find our way to Wallachia when we couldn't even find Rahnsdorf? So we decided just to head south. Wallachia was in Romania, and Romania was south.

The next problem was that we didn't know which way was south. There were already storm clouds in the sky that morning, and you couldn't see the sun. It was sweltering outside; much hotter and more humid than the day before.

I had a little compass on my keychain — got it out of a gumball machine one time. It didn't seem to point south inside the car and when I tried it outside the needle spun all over the place. We stopped just to try it out, and when I got back in the car I noticed there was something under the mat in the footwell. It was a cassette —
The Solid Gold Collection
, by Richard Clayderman. But it wasn't real music. It was just some tinkling on the piano, Mozart or something. We didn't have anything else to play, and we thought maybe something else had been taped over it, so we listened to it all the way through. Forty-five minutes. The idiot. Though I have to admit that even after Richard and his piano had made us puke, we flipped it over and listened to the other side, which had exactly the same kind of crap on it. Better than nothing. Seriously, though, I didn't tell Tschick at the time and I'm not proud saying it now, but the minor-key stuff really took the wind out of my sails. I kept thinking about Tatiana and the way she had looked at me when I gave her the drawing. And then we were rattling down the autobahn to “Ballade pour Adeline.”

Somehow we'd strayed onto a road that dumped us onto the autobahn. Tschick could drive okay, but he had never experienced anything like a German autobahn. Dealing with it took all he had. When he was supposed to merge, he stepped on the brakes, hit the gas, braked again, and then weaved along the shoulder at a snail's pace before he finally managed to swerve left into the lane. Luckily nobody rammed us from behind. I was pressing my feet against the floorboard with every ounce of my strength. And I thought if we died, Richard and his piano would be to blame. But we didn't die. The rattling in the Lada kept getting louder and louder and we decided we'd get off at the next exit and stick to little local roads. There was another problem with the autobahn too: A man in a black Mercedes pulled up alongside and looked across at us, making wild gestures. He was flashing numbers with his fingers and held up his cell phone and seemed to be trying to write down our license plate number. I was scared shitless, but Tschick just nodded as if to thank the guy for telling us we still had our lights on. Then we lost him in traffic.

Tschick did look older than fourteen. But no way did he look eighteen — old enough to drive. Though we had no idea what he looked like at full speed through the filthy windows of the Lada. We decided to do a few experiments on a dirt road after we'd gotten off the autobahn to see how he could best come across as an adult. I stood on the side of the road and Tschick drove past me about twenty times. He started by sitting on top of our sleeping bags and putting my sunglasses on top of his head. He tried smoking a cigarette. He ripped some pieces of duct tape and stuck them on his face to simulate a goatee. But he just looked like a fourteen-year-old with duct tape on his face. Then he took the tape off except for a little strip under his nose. He looked like Hitler that way, but from afar it actually made him look older. And since we were now out in the politically backward state of Brandenburg, nobody would take offense.

So the only thing we still had to deal with was our lack of orientation. But we saw a sign to Dresden, and Dresden was definitely south of Berlin. So we went that way. Whenever we had a choice of roads we took the smaller, less trafficked option. And along those roads the signs only indicated the next tiny town rather than Dresden. How did you know whether Burig or Freienbrink was farther south? We flipped coins. Tschick loved flipping coins to decide. He said we should make all our decisions on the route that way. Heads we turned right, tails left, and if it stayed upright on its edge we would go straight. But obviously it never stayed upright so we never made any forward progress. So we quickly abandoned the coin flip and just went right-left, right-left. That was my suggestion, but it was no better. In theory, if you keep turning right and then left, you'll never drive in a circle. But we managed to drive in a circle. When we passed a sign for the third time that said Markgrafpieske to the left and Spreenhagen to the right, Tschick came up with the idea of only going toward places that began with the letter
M
or
T
. But there were too few of them. I suggested looking at how far away places were according to what was listed on the signs and heading to ones where the distance was a prime number. But at a sign that said
BAD FREIENWALDE 51 KILOMETERS
we mistakenly turned that way and by the time we realized it was three times seventeen we were already at another crossing.

Eventually the sun came through the clouds. The road forked in the middle of a cornfield. To the left the road was cobblestone. To the right, dirt. We fought over which way was south. The sun wasn't quite in the middle. It was a few minutes before eleven o'clock in the morning.