You (35 page)

It’s terrible. The Danisches are sitting side by side on the sofa, looking miserable. Aunty Henna has come. She’s nobody’s aunt. She lives two streets away and everybody calls her Aunty. She’s always there if you need her. The women say Aunty Henna buried her husband in the cellar because she wanted to keep him to herself. You think that’s a lie. Aunty Henna’s too good-looking for that. She’s got no shortage of men running after her, she doesn’t need to bury one in the cellar.

Aunty Henna brings coffee and schnapps and talks quietly. She says all the things the Danisches would say if they were talking to your parents. It’s like listening to the radio. After half an hour Frau Danisch leaves the room and goes upstairs. Your mother follows her. After less than a minute, Frau Danisch’s grieving wails are heard. You get goose bumps. Everyone else pretends they haven’t heard. You drink your fourth cup of coffee and wish you could stick your finger down your throat. Your sister has curled up like a cat on one of the armchairs, she is fast asleep. Aunty Henna tops up your coffee. Herr Danisch holds his hand over his empty cup. He says he has enough. You wish you could creep under the table so that everyone would forget you. It has a glass top. Herr Danisch would see you. He wouldn’t forget you. He’d ask you what you were doing there. You drink your coffee. You can’t think of anything better to do.

Herr Danisch goes out onto the terrace. You follow him. Snow has collected on the roof. The terrace looks as if someone’s dipped it in a glass of milk. The covered pool is the same as ever. It’s a mystery to you. It should have changed. You swam in it only recently, you chased each other from one end to the other, while the snow raged around you, and all of a sudden the pool is taboo, even though nothing about it has changed. If you narrow your eyes, you can see Robbie. Arms spread, facedown, naked and motionless.

Nothing.

“I wish we’d never built that pool,” Herr Danisch says and turns the switch. The roof slides slowly sideways. Snow comes pelting through the gap and dissolves on the surface of the water.

“It’s the best pool in the whole city,” you say, and your words are as hollow and empty as the space your brain is sitting in.

“I know, Robbie said the same thing,” says Herr Danisch and turns away, without closing the roof again. Snow drifts onto your face, snow is everywhere. The water steams. Robbie turned the temperature up for you this morning. You’d like to turn the switch and watch the roof closing silently again. Like a weary eye. Like your thoughts, if you could think. But you don’t dare touch the switch. You don’t know if Herr Danisch would go completely nuts.

You hear him saying from the living room: “It happened quickly.”

And Aunty Henna replies, “He didn’t suffer.”

And the sound of Robbie’s mother howling comes from upstairs.

“Here.”

Your father’s come after all. He’s shaved and says he’s sorry, it took him a while to pull himself together.

“Delayed response time,” he calls it, and Herr Danisch nods and shakes his hand. Later the two men will withdraw to the den and sit on two stools and pass a bottle back and forth. Whiskey or vodka or brandy. You know the Danisch family’s alcohol supply. You know which pile of books it’s hidden behind. You and Robbie drank half the vodka and filled it up with water. The men won’t notice. Herr Danisch will tell your father how guilty he feels. He’ll look for a pickaxe to destroy the pool. Your father will restrain him. Later. Later isn’t now. Now your father’s eyes are fixed on you, just as they were when your sister came storming into the house with news of Robbie’s death. You know your father’s problem. He imagines it had been you. There in the pool. As if something like that would happen to you. Your mother thinks the same thing. They barely communicate now, but when they do, it’s on a shared wavelength.

“Go on, have some.”

Your father holds a beer bottle out to you. You’re too young to drink beer. Thirteen’s too young. Coffee’s okay, beer’s taboo. But the death of the neighbor boy makes your father look at you with different eyes. He doesn’t know how old you’ll get. From today, anything is possible. Drink.

“Thanks.”

You sip at it and then turn the bottle in your hands the way you’ve seen people doing it on television. Your sister has woken
up, she is drinking Coke. What you wouldn’t give for a Coke right now.

You’re standing by the big plate-glass window. You thought everyone would balk at the idea of looking at the pool. But everybody’s looking at it. They’re looking at it as if something was suddenly going to happen and time was going to reverse itself, as if Robbie might rise unharmed from the water. The snow pelts through the roof. You wish it would fall more gently. But the snow doesn’t want to fall. It’s just pelting.

“I still can’t believe it,” Herr Danisch says quietly, pulling his upper lip into his mouth. All of you are reflected in the window. Your sister turns away first and switches on the television. Aunty Henna whispers to her that that’s not quite decent. Your sister tells her what series is about to come on. Aunty Henna says:
Well, if that’s the case
. You keep watching the room in the reflection. You keep watching your father on your left and Herr Danisch on your right. No one mentions what’s happened. You shut your eyes. Like a jackknife. Like a door. Like a grave that’s being sealed.

Dennis waits for you before school the next day and asks, “What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing?”

You try to walk on, but he grabs you by the arm and drags you into a doorway. Your winter jackets rub against each other and make a whispering sound, as if sharing a secret.

“What do you mean nothing?” Dennis repeats, and presses you against the wall and pushes his forearm against your throat so that you have to stand on tiptoe.

“Don’t fuck with me!” he says menacingly, and you can clearly see the fear in his eyes and hear it in his words, and you can smell the smell of fear in his mouth, too.

“If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you.”

“It … was … nothing,” you manage to say.

Dennis lets go of you, takes a step back, and runs off.

Robbie used to come out with these sayings. He said things like
Not every open door is a way in
, or
He who sees much light, casts a
shadow
. At school he was dismissed as a weirdo. The girls liked him because he was always paying them compliments that they never really understood but which always made them laugh. He said:
The way you smell is the way I’d like to dream
. Or
When you laugh, the sun shuts an eye
. The boys told each other that his mother had been X-rayed once too often when she was pregnant. The girls swore it had something to do with the tap water.

You liked Robbie. Perhaps because you drank the same tap water, or perhaps you thought you understood his sayings. He talked a lot of nonsense, but that’s better than being quiet. Quiet like you. Like a fish.

Now the seat next to you in the classroom is free, and everybody avoids looking at it. The teachers don’t pick you either. You’re invisible, because Robbie’s invisible. If you got up and left now, no one would say a thing. It’s a good feeling. You’ve always dreamt of it. Being invisible. Two days before Christmas. Like an angel hiding in its angel state. You’d walk through the city and eat what you liked. You’d read comics without buying them, go to the movies for nothing, and feel girls up whenever you felt like it.

Simple as that.

Over the blackboard dangles a Christmas star one of the girls has made. On the right of the door there’s a photograph of Robbie. Your classroom teacher has pinned it on some cardboard, and you’re allowed to write your names around the photograph. It reminds you of your sister’s autographed cast when she fell on a skiing holiday. Six weeks later, the plaster came off and ended up in the trash. Your sister cried for an afternoon because she wanted to save the signatures. You imagine your classroom teacher giving the photograph, cardboard and all, to Robbie’s parents. You can clearly see them stuffing the cardboard into the trash can. They’ll probably keep the photograph.

Once Robbie tangled with a guy from the senior class. He was a rocker with hair down to his ass, who’d sprayed beer all over the place at the last school party and sold hand-rolled cigarettes at break time. Robbie had no respect. He had this way of looking askance at people so that they thought one of their legs was too short or something.
The rocker noticed this and asked Robbie what he wanted. He asked what Robbie thought about minding his own damned business. Robbie shrugged and said:
Lots of hair on the head don’t make a hairdo yet
. The rocker just stood there as if someone had pulled his plug out. And Robbie turned away and never so much as looked at the rocker again. He knew what was good for him. He never went too far. He wasn’t stupid. If he was challenged, he said:
No, leave it be, or do you think a snowman pees on the fire?
And he would laugh. He was good at laughing, you always thought.

Two girls come up to you in the playground at break time. They ask how you’re coping, whether you saw him there in the pool and what sort of feeling it is, you had been friends and everything, after all, it must be a weird feeling, isn’t it? And while they’re talking you watch their breath, which detaches itself from their lips in wispy clouds and comes together in the air, and you wonder what it would be like if you breathed in one of those clouds of breath, would you know what they’d eaten or drunk or thought over the past few hours? Maybe every cloud of breath is a scrap of soul. If that was so, you’d suck the air out of their lungs in tiny portions to make them shut up for a while.

During second break you stay in the classroom. The school principal shoos a group of boys downstairs and ignores you. You’re standing by the window again, you’re invisible. It’s lonely being invisible on your own. It’s a bit like standing wet in the rain. It doesn’t make sense.

You cut the last period and go home. You stand up in the middle of class and walk out the door. The teacher doesn’t even look at you. It’s a good feeling. You’re the last soldier of the winter. Christmas will only take place if you want. You don’t know what you want. Your mother is over at the Danisches’ again, your sister’s at school, you shut the front door and you’re alone.

“I’m alone,” you say, and switch the receiver to the other ear. “We need to talk.”

“No.”

“If you don’t come I’m going to the cops.”

“Oh Christ, shit.”

Dennis hangs up and you know he’ll come. You stand by the window and wait. As you do so, you touch your stinging throat and remember the fear. Everything hides in the eyes, the mouth, the words. Fury and fear and desire. Dennis will weaken. You’ve seen it before. And if Dennis weakens, everything will collapse. Like a house of cards. Like ice after a long winter. Or like a lie when it meets the truth.

You know each other from the neighborhood. Dennis and Robbie and you. Dennis is two years older. Last summer he took your pocket money in return for letting you touch his cousin. Cousin Rita. And once you spent the night at Dennis’s, and he went on and on until you jerked each other off. It was okay as long as you kept your eyes shut and imagined it was Beate from your class. After that Robbie made his jokes, of course. That was when it got embarrassing. And Dennis said Robbie should take a breather, or would he rather take a fist in the face? And Robbie waved him away, as he always waved people away, and kept his mouth shut. Dennis and Robbie and you. You know each other from the neighborhood.

You look at your watch. You need something to counteract the fear in Dennis’s eyes. You want to steal his words, leaving him breathless. Anything to keep the fear at bay. You have to convince him there’s something worse than an elbow that cuts off air. Something worse than a fist delivering pain.

In your father’s den you find exactly the right hammer. It has a hard plastic head and it’s as heavy as if it were made of iron. That’ll be enough. You take the hammer upstairs and hide it under one of the sofa cushions. You’re looking at your watch again when the doorbell rings.

“Come in.”

“I don’t know.”

“Come in, Dennis.”

He pushes past you and stands uncertainly in the corridor. He’s half a head taller than you, he has no cause for concern.

“Sit down.”

Dennis follows you into the living room and sits down. On the edge of the armchair, his eyes darting. You see the wet trails his boots have left on the floor. You’ll have to wipe that up later, or your mother will go crazy. Dennis is uneasy. His winter jacket squeaks. You’re glad you’re not wearing your jacket. You’re no longer the same. He’s him, you’re you.

“What do you want to talk about?” he asks.

“No one’s to know anything.”

“Sure.”

“I don’t want you freaking out, Dennis.”

“What are you saying, what the hell are you saying?”

“I said I didn’t want you freaking out.”

“Are you out of your mind? I had nothing to do with it.”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“What?”

You pull the hammer out from under the sofa cushion. You don’t take your eyes off Dennis. You lean forward and break his elbow with a single blow. It’s as easy as answering a question.

It was the second time that year that heavy snowfall had brought the city to a standstill and school was shut. Robbie rang shortly after breakfast and said the water was hot and his parents were away and anyone who wouldn’t like to be in a heated pool on a day like this in the middle of winter had a dick like a caraway cat. You had no idea what sort of dick a caraway cat had, you were not even sure if a cat like that existed, but you and Dennis went straight over to the Danisch house.

It was a dream. You opened the roof and lay in the warm water, the icy wind swept over you and froze the tips of your hair, while the snowflakes settled on your faces like a shower of cold kisses. At that point the snow was a treasure that the sky was gently spitting down on you.

You swam naked, you chased each other the full length of the
pool and played cockhunting. The hunter had to catch one of the others and tug his cock, then he was free and the other guy became the hunter. It was your turn, and according to the rules you weren’t allowed to leave the pool.