Why We Took the Car (17 page)

“I had to say something. And anyway, man, she did stink! She must live in that dump.”

“She sure did sing nicely,” I said after a while. “And there's no way she lives in the dump.”

“Why did she ask us for food?”

“Yeah, okay, but this isn't Romania. People don't live in dumps here.”

“Did you catch a whiff of her?”

“We probably smell just as bad.”

“I'm telling you, she lives there. Ran away from home. Seriously, I know people like that. She's messed up. Nice body and all, but she's a homeless nut-job.”

To the left, above the autobahn, you could see the first stars. It was getting tough to see the path and stay on it. I suggested we walk along the shoulder of the autobahn. I was afraid we'd lose our way otherwise. It was a stupid argument since we could hear the rush of the autobahn from the woods anyway. But to be honest, I was getting a little afraid in the dark woods. I have no idea why. It couldn't have been the fear of running into criminals — we were definitely the only criminals running around in those woods. In fact, maybe that's what made me uncomfortable. I guess I finally realized that's what we were. I was happy when we could see the neon lights of the rest stop through the trees.

CHAPTER 31

The first thing we did was buy ice cream and Cokes. We hid the canister behind a guardrail and walked through the parking lot with our ice creams, eyeballing the gas tanks of parked cars. None of them could be opened. I was beginning to have doubts when Tschick finally found an old VW Golf with a broken gas tank door.

We waited until it was really dark and nobody was anywhere in sight, and then got to work.

The washing machine hose was so inflexible that we might as well have thrown it out. But we got the shower hose into the tank with no problem. We just couldn't get the gas to start flowing. Even though the tank was full. The end of the hose was all wet with gasoline.

After I'd tried sucking on the tube about ten times with no luck, Tschick tried. After he'd sucked a bunch of times he looked at me and said, “What the hell kind of book was it you saw this in? Where'd you get it?”

I had no desire to tell him what kind of book it was. I tried sucking on the tube again. I could tell the gas was coming up the tube. Once I had it almost to my lips. But no more than three drops came out. We squatted between the parked cars and looked at each other.

“I know how it works,” Tschick finally said. “Fill your mouth and then spit it out. That'll work for sure.”

“Why me?”

“This wasn't my idea.”

“I have a better idea. Do you still have the tennis ball?”

“Oh, man,” said Tschick. “I can't. No way.”

“It's pitch-black out here. Nobody will see us.”

“I
can't
,” Tschick said with a pained look on his face. “You didn't really believe that, did you? You can't open a car lock with a tennis ball. Otherwise everybody would steal cars. The Lada was open the whole time. Didn't you notice? The lock is busted or maybe the owner just never locks it — I mean, who's going to steal a rust bucket like that anyway. My brother realized it was always open and . . . don't look at me like that! My brother pulled the same prank on me with the tennis ball. Oh, man.
Don't turn around
.”

“What's wrong?”

“Get your head down. There's somebody over there. By the Dumpsters.”

I leaned up against the Golf and tried to carefully look over my shoulder.

“They're gone. There was a shadow over there by the recycling bin.”

“So let's get out of here.”

“There he is again. I'll have a smoke.”

“What?”

“Camouflage.”

“Forget camouflage, let's get out of here.”

Tschick stood up and kicked the container and hose under the Golf. It made a loud scraping noise. I stood up too. Something moved behind the Dumpsters. I saw it out of the corner of my eye.

“Could be goats,” murmured Tschick. He lit up a cigarette in his mouth, standing right next to the gas tank door.

“Why don't you just throw a match in there while you're at it.”

He took a few puffs and started stretching. It was the least convincing acting job of all time.

Then we went slowly back to the Lada. As we walked away I nudged the gas tank door of the VW closed with my hip.

“You idiots!” yelled someone behind us.

We looked into the darkness in the direction the voice had come from.

“Screwing around for half an hour without getting a drop. Idiots. Real pros.”

“Maybe you can say it a little louder,” said Tschick.

“And smoking on top of it!”

“Can't you shout any louder? We want the whole parking lot to know.”

“You guys are too dumb to fuck.”

“True. And now could you please piss off?”

“Don't you know you have to suck on the hose?”

“What do you think we were doing the whole time? Get out of here!”

“Shhh!” I said.

Tschick and I ducked behind a car. The girl didn't care. She looked around the parking lot.

“There's nobody around, you scaredy-cats. Where's the hose?”

She took our equipment out from under the VW. She stuck one end of the hose into the gas tank and the other — along with a finger — into her mouth. She sucked ten, fifteen times like she was gulping down the air; then she pulled the hose out of her mouth with her finger over the end.

“Right. Where's the canister?”

I pulled it out from under the car and set it down. She stuck the hose into the mouth of the container and gas rushed out of the tank. All by itself. And it didn't stop.

“Why didn't it work for us?” asked Tschick.

“The end of the hose has to be below the level of the gas in the car,” said the girl.

“Aha,” I said.

“Oh,” said Tschick. We watched as the canister filled up. The girl kneeled down, and when the flow of gas stopped, she screwed the gas cap back on and shut the tank door.

“Below what level?” whispered Tschick.

“Ask her, you idiot,” I said.

CHAPTER 32

That's how we met Isa. With her elbows on the backs of the two front seats she watched closely as Tschick started the Lada. We still had no desire to take her along, but after the whole gasoline thing it would have been tough not to. She wanted to come with us, and when she heard we were from Berlin she said that was exactly where she was heading. And then when we explained that we weren't going toward Berlin right now, she said that was perfect. She kept trying to find out where we were going, but since she wouldn't tell us where she was going, we didn't tell her either. We just said we were heading south, at which point she remembered she had a half-sister in Prague she really needed to go see. And we had to go right past Prague anyway. Plus, like I said, it would have been tough not to take her with us since she was the only reason we had any gas.

Once we were rolling down the autobahn again, we opened all the windows. It still stank, just not as badly. Tschick had adapted to driving on the autobahn by this point. He drove like Hitler in his heyday, and Isa sat in back and jabbered on and on. She was suddenly full of energy and shook the backs of our seats as she talked. Not that it was normal behavior, but it was preferable to the streams of obscenities she'd been screaming earlier. And the things she talked about weren't entirely uninteresting. I mean, she wasn't stupid. And even Tschick held his tongue after a while and nodded as he listened to her.

But the two of them still hadn't entirely settled their differences. When Isa stuck her head between the front seats Tschick motioned to her hair and said, “There's things living in there.”

Isa sat back immediately and said, “I know.” And a few kilometers later she asked, “Do you guys happen to have a pair of scissors? I need to cut my hair.”

With the help of the exit signs, we tried to figure out where we were. But none of us recognized the names of the towns. I began to suspect we hadn't gotten far on all those dinky country roads. But it didn't matter. At least not to me. The autobahn didn't seem to be heading south anymore, and at some point we exited and started following the sun along country roads again.

Isa asked to hear our lone cassette tape. Then after one song, she asked us to throw it out the window. A ridge of mountains came into view on the horizon — we were heading straight for them. They were really tall, with jagged bare tops. We had no idea what mountain range it could be. There was no sign. Definitely not the Alps. Were we still in Germany? Tschick swore there were no mountains in East Germany. Isa said there were, but the tallest were only a thousand meters high. In geography, we'd just studied Africa. Before that we'd learned about America, and before that the Balkans. We hadn't gotten any closer to Germany than that. And now, here was a mountain range that wasn't supposed to be there. At least we all agreed it didn't belong there. It took about half an hour before we reached the foot of the mountains, and then we began the serpentine climb up them.

We had sought out the dinkiest road we could find, and we had to put the Lada in first gear and fight our way up. To our left and right the fields hung like towels from the steep hillsides. Then came a forest. And when we emerged from the forest we were sitting at the top of a gorge with a crystal clear lake in it. A small lake. Half of it was bordered by pale gray cliffs, with a concrete and metal structure on one side. The rest was ringed by a dike of some sort. And we were the only people around. We drove down and parked the car near the edge of the lake. From the concrete dam you could look down toward the valley below and across at the rest of the mountains. A few hundred meters below the dam was a little village. This was an ideal spot to spend the night.

The lake looked too cold for swimming. I stood on the dam next to Isa and took a deep breath. Tschick went over to the car, grabbed something, and walked back with it casually hidden behind him. We'd apparently both had the same thought. With a nod from Tschick, we picked Isa up and tossed her into the water. A fountain of water shot up as she went under, and another one shot up as she surfaced with her arms flailing. It was at that moment that I realized we had no idea if she could swim. She screamed and splashed — though she overdid it enough that you could tell she knew how to swim. She also started treading water and wasn't sinking an inch. She shook her wet hair, swam a little breaststroke, and cursed us out. Tschick threw her the bottle of shower gel he'd gotten from the car. And as I was trying to figure out if that was funny or if I should feel bad for her, I got a poke in the back and fell into the water too. It was colder than cold. I screamed as soon as my head was out of the water. Tschick stood on the side and laughed as Isa alternately laughed and cursed.

The concrete structure was too tall to climb up, so we had to swim across the lake to a part where the bank was at water level. While we swam, Isa let an unending stream of curses fly, kicked me underwater, and said that I was an even bigger moron than my boyfriend. We got into a tussle. As this was going on, Tschick strolled to the car, put on his bathing suit, and came to the lakeside with a cigarette in his mouth and a towel over his shoulder.

“This is how a gentleman goes swimming,” he said, making what was supposed to be an elegant face. Then he dove headfirst into the lake.

We cursed him in tandem.

When we got back on land, Isa immediately took off her shirt and pants and everything else and began to soap herself up. That was just about the last thing I had expected.

“Lovely,” she said. She was standing in knee-deep water, gazing out at the landscape, and washing her hair. I wasn't sure where to look. I acted like I was looking all around. She really did have a great body and her skin was covered with goose bumps. I had goose bumps too. Tschick swam to the bank freestyle, and oddly enough there was no more chitchat. Nobody said anything, nobody cursed, and nobody made any jokes. We just washed ourselves, shivered from the cold, and dried ourselves off with the same towel.

With a mountain view and fog beginning to creep into the valley below, we ate a package of gummy bears we had left over from our visit to the supermarket. Isa had on one of my T-shirts and shiny Adidas shorts. Her stinky clothes were lying on the edge of the dike — and stayed there, forever.

That night we tried to figure out where she was from and where she was trying to go, but the only thing we could get out of her were crazy stories. It was clear she wouldn't tell us what she was doing in the dump or what she had in her wooden box even to save her own life. The only thing she told us was her last name, Schmidt. Isa Schmidt. At least, that was the only thing she told us that we believed.

CHAPTER 33

Early the next morning, Tschick set off alone to go buy food in the village down in the valley. I was still half-asleep on the air mattress, looking out over the dimly lit landscape. Isa had the back of the Lada open and asked again if we happened to have scissors and if I would cut her hair.