Why We Took the Car (21 page)

CHAPTER 39

There was a lot of activity in the emergency room. It was Sunday night, and there were at least twenty people waiting around. At the check-in desk, a man wearing stone-washed jeans was puking into a bucket he was holding under one arm while holding out his insurance card with the other arm.

“Please wait outside,” a nurse said to us.

Tschick and I sat down on two free plastic chairs. After we'd been waiting for a while, the speech therapist went to the vending machines to buy drinks and candy bars. While she was away, we were called. Tschick couldn't stand on his foot, so I went up to the desk to explain the situation.

“And what is his name?”

“André.” I said it the French way. “André Langin.”

“Address?”

“Fifteen Wald Street, Berlin.”

“Insurance?”

“DDK.”

“You mean DBK?”

“Yep, that's it.” DBK. I'd heard André bragging about it during his physical on health day. How great it was to have such top-notch health coverage. What an asshole. Though of course now I was happy about it too. My voice was cracking a little. Guess I should have done a bit of speech therapy in the car too.

I was mostly nervous about what all they would ask me next. I'd never been to an emergency room before.

“Birth date?”

“Thirteenth of July, 1996.” I had no idea when André's birthday was. I was just hoping they wouldn't be able to check it too quickly.

“And what's wrong with him?”

“A fire extinguisher fell on his foot. And he might have hit his head too. It's bleeding. The woman there” — I pointed to the speech therapist, who was walking back toward Tschick with an armful of candy bars — “can confirm everything.”

“Don't talk my ear off,” said the nurse. She'd had her eye on the man with the bucket the entire time and seemed constantly on the verge of standing. In fact, during the minute I was standing there talking to her, she got out of her chair twice, like she was going to go over there and take away the bucket, but she sat back down both times.

“The doctor will call you.”

The doctor will call us. It was that easy.

The speech therapist was somewhat surprised I'd taken care of the health insurance issue. She looked at me with her head cocked to the side.

“I just gave them my name,” I said.

She sat with us, waiting for us to be called. We told her she didn't have to, but I think she felt guilty. For hours, she talked to us about speech therapy, video games, movies, girls, and car thieves. She was really nice. When we told her about trying to write our names in the wheat field with the Lada, she giggled the whole time. And when we told her we were probably going to take the train back home to Berlin when we got out of the hospital, she believed us.

They kept rushing people with blood streaming down them through the emergency room waiting area. And when it was almost midnight and they still hadn't called us, the woman finally said good-bye. She must have asked us a thousand times if there was anything else she could do for us. She gave us her address in case we needed it to get reimbursed for the medical bills, and gave us two hundred Euros to pay for the train tickets. I was a little embarrassed, but I wasn't sure how to turn it down. And then she said something weird when she was leaving. She looked at us, after having done everything anyone in her position could possibly do, and said, “You two look like potatoes.” Then she walked away. She pushed her way through the revolving door and was gone. I found it unbelievably funny. To this day, I still laugh every time I think of it: You two look like potatoes. I don't know if anyone will understand it, but she really was the nicest of all.

Tschick finally got to see the doctor. A minute later he came back out. We had to go upstairs for an X-ray. I was getting more and more tired. At some point I dozed off on a bench in the hall, and when I woke up, Tschick was standing in front of me on crutches. His foot was in a cast. A real plaster cast, not some plastic splint.

A nurse put a few painkillers in his hand and told us we had to wait because the doctor needed to look at his foot again. I wondered who had put the cast on if it wasn't the doctor. The janitor? The nurse took us to an empty room where we could wait. There were two freshly made beds in the room.

The mood was no longer a happy one. Our trip was over. Even if nobody except us knew about it. We were pretty miserable. I had no desire to go anywhere on the train. Tschick's pills took a while to work. He lay in bed moaning. I went to the window and peered out. It was still dark out, but when I pressed my nose against the glass and put a hand on each side of my face, I could make out the coming dawn. I saw a hint of light and . . .

I told Tschick to turn off the light. He used one of his crutches as a remote control. The landscape became much more visible. I saw one lonely phone booth along the hospital driveway. I saw a sole concrete block. I saw a desolate fence, and a field. Some open land. Something about this area seemed familiar. As it got lighter, I could make out three vehicles on the other side of the strip. Two cars and a giant tow truck with a crane on it.

“You are not going to believe what I'm looking at.”

“What is it?”

“I'm not sure.”

“What is it?”

“Have a look.”

“I'm not looking at shit,” said Tschick. And then, after a pause, “What is it?”

“Seriously, you really have to see it for yourself.”

He groaned. I heard him fiddle with the crutches. Then he pressed his face to the glass next to mine.

“It can't be,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

We stared out over the plowed field we had seen a few hours before from the other side. There'd been a white box on the horizon then. We were in that white box now. The speech therapist had driven in a big loop.

The sun had yet to break over the horizon, but you could already see the black Lada in the rest area next to the autobahn. It was upright now, resting on its wheels. They must have turned it back over. The trunk was open and three men were walking around the car, standing next to it, walking around it some more. One was in uniform, two in the overalls typical of sanitation workers. At least that's what it looked like from a distance. The crane on the tow truck was being maneuvered over the Lada, and somebody was putting chains around the wheels. The uniformed man closed the trunk, opened it again, then shut it again. Then he went over to the cab of the tow truck. Then two people went back over to the Lada. Then one went over to the truck again.

“What are they doing?” asked Tschick.

“Can't you see?”

“No, I mean, what are they
doing
?”

He was right. They were just walking back and forth doing this or that, doing the same things over and over again, but really doing nothing. Maybe they were looking for clues or something. We watched for a while longer, then Tschick lay back down in bed, moaning, and said, “Wake me up if anything happens.”

But nothing happened. One of the men tested the chains, one went back over to the tow truck, one smoked.

Suddenly the view disappeared because the light went on in our room. The doctor was standing in the doorway, breathing loudly. In one of his nostrils was a blood-soaked cotton ball hanging down to his upper lip. He slowly shuffled over to Tschick's bed.

“Lift up your leg,” he said. He had a voice like a war-movie general.

Tschick hoisted the cast. With one hand the doctor jiggled the cast, while with the other he held the wadding in his nose. He grabbed an X-ray out of a folder and held it up to the light. Then he threw it onto the bed next to Tschick and shuffled back out. He turned around in the doorway and said, “Contusion, hairline fracture, fourteen days.” Then he rolled his eyes. Then, like he was steadying himself, he leaned against the door frame. He took a deep breath and said, “It's no big deal. Fourteen days off your foot. Consult your own doctor once you're home.” He looked at Tschick, gauging whether he'd understood him, and Tschick nodded.

The doctor closed the door behind him as he left. But two seconds later he threw it open again, now seemingly wide awake. “A joke!” he said, smiling first at Tschick, then at me. “What's the difference between a doctor and an architect?”

We didn't know. So he gave the answer. “A doctor buries his mistakes.”

“Huh?” said Tschick.

The doctor swatted the air with his hand. “If you get tired, there's coffee in the nurse's station. You can help yourselves. Good ol' caffeine.”

He closed the door again. I had no time to wonder why the doctor was so weird because I went straight to the window. Tschick shut off the light with one of his crutches, and I just caught sight of the police driving off on the autobahn. The tow truck was already gone. The Lada was all by itself in the parking lot of the rest area. Tschick didn't believe me.

“Did the tow truck break down or something?”

“No clue.”

“Well, it's now or never.”

“What?”

“What do you mean,
what
?” He hit a crutch against the window.

“There's no way it'll still drive,” I said.

“Why not? And if it won't, who cares. We at least need to get our stuff out of it. Even if it can't be driven . . .”

“There's no way you can still drive it.”

“Still drive what?” asked a nurse, switching on the light. She had Tschick's — or rather André's — file in one hand and two cups of coffee on a tray in the other.

“Your name is André Langin,” I whispered while rubbing my eyes like I was blinded by the light. Tschick said something about how we needed to get home. And unfortunately, that was exactly the reason the nurse wanted to talk to us.

CHAPTER 40

Berlin was pretty far away, she said — where were we headed now? I told her we were staying in the area with an aunt and that it was all no problem. I shouldn't have said that. The nurse didn't ask where the aunt lived, but she took me to the nurse's station and put a phone in my hand. Tschick suppressed his pain, staggered out on his crutches, and said that we could go by foot. The nurse said, “Go ahead and try her first. Or don't you know the number?”

“Of course I do,” I said. I saw a phone book on the table and didn't want that shoved into my hands next. So I dialed a random number hoping nobody would answer. Four in the morning.

I heard it ring. The nurse probably heard it too, since she was standing right there next to us. The smart thing would have been to call my own house, because it was a sure bet that nobody would answer there. But to do that I would have had to dial the Berlin area code first, and the nurse already looked suspicious enough as it was. It rang once, twice, three times, four. I was getting ready to hang up and say our aunt must still be asleep and that we could just walk . . .

“Errm, uh, Reiber residence,” said a man's voice.

“Oh, hi, Aunt Mona!”

“This is the Reiber residence,” said the man sleepily. “No aunt. No Mona.”

“Did I wake you?” I asked. “Of course, stupid question. Here's the deal.” I gestured to the nurse that everything was taken care of so she could get back to work if she needed to.

Apparently there was no work to be done, because she stayed as still as a statue.

“You must have the wrong number,” I heard the voice say. “This is Mr. Reiber.”

“Yeah, I know. I hope you didn't . . . yeah, oh yes,” I said, signaling to Tschick and the nurse how surprised and worried Aunt Mona was to get a call from us at this hour.

The silence on the line now was almost as annoying as the throat-clearing and coughing had been.

“Yeah, no, well, something happened,” I continued. “André had a little accident. Something fell on his foot. No, no. We're at the hospital. They put a cast on him.”

I looked at the nurse. She still didn't budge.

There were some unintelligible noises from the other end of the line, and then the voice was there again. He didn't sound so sleepy anymore. “I get it,” said the man. “We're having a pretend conversation.”

“Yes,” I said. “But it's no big deal. It's not too serious — just a hairline fracture or whatever.”

“And I am Aunt Mona.”

“No — I mean, yes, yes, exactly.”

“There's somebody next to you, listening.” The man made a noise of some sort. I wasn't sure, but I thought he might be quietly laughing.

“Yep, yeah . . .”

“And if I shout really loud right now, you'd have a major problem on your hands, right?”

“Please, no, uh . . . no. You really don't need to worry. Everything's all taken care of.”

“It's not taken care of,” said the nurse. “She needs to pick you up.”