Axolotl Roadkill (11 page)

And then at some point I just stopped turning up, so to speak. Not because I think people can do without education; it was because I just couldn’t deal with it. That kind of thing’s never a conscious decision, it’s an act of desperation. I just found the unserious side of life much better, that sexy moment, the provisional, the luxurious and the playful elements. The fact that it makes no sense at all to be alive. And that it’s an absolute cheek that you have to die. I often fall asleep thinking these thoughts. I feel like life’s majorly taking the piss, because my consciousness will automatically end up pushing up daisies when my body stops working, even though I actually . . .

It’s 12:30 p.m. I find everything Herr Kroschinske is saying interesting.

Herr Kroschinske: ‘In that building over there are tiny dungeons where people were locked away in the dark for months on end.’

I light a cigarette.

‘That’s not such a good idea, Mifti.’

‘Sorry.’

I put my cigarette out again and put on the credible smile of a person willing to make a sacrifice. Herr Kroschinske puts on a credible calm smile back. A boy from a different class, whose name I don’t know, yells, ‘FUCK, WHY AREN’T WE ALLOWED TO SMOKE HERE? THERE’S SHITLOADS OF BUTTS IN THAT BIN THERE!’

‘Anatol Schmidt, the problem is, I talked to the people here when we arrived and smoking is just not allowed here.’

‘Jesus, but I mean, there’s loads of fag ends in this bin, for fuck’s sake!’

‘That’s presumably because other people have ignored the no-smoking rule and then somebody collected up all their butts and threw them in the bin later, I’ve no idea, and why are you taking your cigarettes out so demonstratively?’

‘WHAT? WE’RE NOT ALLOWED TO SMOKE HERE?’

‘No, you’re not allowed to smoke here.’

‘Jesus, shit, what are we gonna do now?’

‘Well, we can decide in a moment if we want to leave the premises as a group, but first of all can you all have another look at the white lines over here, there was a building over there where six hundred people were deliberately assassinated because they were regarded as biologically inferior, and they really all died.’

The class leaves the premises as a group even before Herr Kroschinske has finished his sentence. On the way I talk crap to Virginia, who’s wearing four pairs of tights at once.

‘And one time, Mifti, I sent my father a text and it said, “Fear Dad.” And he like texts me back, “Dear Virginia, I assume you meant DEAR Dad? Have you got a problem with your T9?”’

‘What an anus.’ (I find it so difficult to exercise full concentration because it seems so incredibly old-fashioned, etc.)

So this is the funeral I’ve always wished for, right? My father, my mother, my child and my brother and sister and my grandparents are all dead. Because my family’s been wiped out, I’ve suddenly become a discount funeral parlour for some inexplicable reason, in which the lower middle class dies after it’s dead. Everything’s real but there are times real is fake, flowers, tons of smells, wood halls polished like fingernails. I’m struggling through a mass of poorly dressed people all staring at me – I don’t allow anyone uglier than me to watch me crying or collapsing to the floor under the pressure of this widely spread standard definition of authenticity – and attempting to maintain the appearance of a cathartic effect in a credibly obnoxious manner.

I want to inherit four hundred shares and I’ve just calculated how hysterical I am when the preacher asks me, ‘Do you know anything good for me to say (I have to say something: SAY SOMETHING!) over your family’s mutilating bodies?’ And I tell him how beautiful they all were. No one cries, they’re all there to stare at me. Did I really love them? I want a pet that can turn round in circles. The head teacher Frau Pegler shouts down the telephone, ‘Mifti, I consider you the most immoral person I’ve ever come across.’

I refuse to let this two-bit whore turn me into a lobotomy case.

‘What?’

‘I consider you the most immoral person I’ve ever come across, and I insist right now, at this very moment, regardless of whether a huge stone just fell on your head two seconds ago or not, I insist that you get right on a train this instant and appear in my office in less than two hours from now.’

‘All right.’

‘All right?’

‘Frau Pegler, you know perfectly well I’m not capable of making it easy for you to build up any form of trust in me.’

Herr Kroschinske brushes a bushel of hair out of his face with an unnaturally unstrained gesture, looking elsewhere and then kind of back at me again after all. While he’s still resisting the impulse not to take the side of a totally and utterly neurotic head teacher this time around, instead taking that of a problem child pretending to be fully reflective of herself and therefore unassailable, I hang up. I hand him back his mobile phone, imparting five different impressions through a single cool gesture: I am expected to get on my bike a.s.a.p., Frau Pegler is an insecure cunt whose misguided educational methods are inappropriate but understandable, you’re a really cool teacher and I totally like you, your hair’s pretty cool as well, I’ll fill in that really interesting worksheet you put together and handed out before we arrived at the concentration camp at home and present it to the whole class the year after next as part of the presentation I’ll have to give to make up for missing three hundred days of school in the months to come. Thank you for being pleased to see me.

The train I find myself on twenty minutes later is named after the former chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

I attempt to elevate my basic mood to that of the past year. A state of such productive sentimentality that I had no other option but to dance to techno mixes of violin passages in front of the mirror with lead weights around my ankles. Every track was a personal challenge. I’d have swallowed electricity if it had enabled me to spend longer than forty-eight hours leaping ecstatically around a puke-encrusted dance floor. A period when strangers on trains whispered, ‘Crazy choreography’, rather than ignoring me, a period dominated by an idea raised above any will to survive: the idea that Alice and I had of one another – an answer to all questions, which lay in the absolute intensity of my desire, a desire impossible to translate into a specific demand.

It doesn’t work. Nor does looking out of the window. Nor does imagining you’re driving a Vespa across the ground floor of a mid-range department store, whacked on a weekday afternoon and categorizing the soft golden flashes of the watch display cases as an adequate replacement for everything you’ve had taken away from you over the past two years: dreams, desires, sexuality, faith. An underworld in a land that’s menstruating, turning to shit day after day and plunging all the existences patched together out of fantasies to their doom with its relentless putrefaction: they all die.

They play, eat, fuck, sleep, wake up, forget to be in when the gas man comes, they order inflatable gymnastic balls to strengthen their back muscles, download Iggy Pop’s discography for free, finish their vocational training as landscape gardeners, make a wrong decision, book a package holiday, spend a year on an exchange living with Mormons in Las Vegas, decorate their flat to go with the season, get themselves a four-legged friend whose excrements have to be stored temporarily in plastic bags and then thrown away, split up, call their school band ‘Planet Palin’, become grandparents, are severely impressed, have bad skin, get stabbed, lose their left leg in a car accident, buy buttermilk, respond to the question of their star sign with the word, ‘Arsehole’, set up the website
www.live-rapes.com
, and have been wondering for years why mattress stores are always on street corners.

Frau Pegler holds up a piece of paper in front of my face, on which her secretary has written in her best handwriting: ‘Mifti will be ten minutes late.’

She waves it around under my nose in all seriousness for thirty seconds. I start to suspect my head teacher might be mentally disabled.

‘I just found this on my desk.’

‘I called to say the train was running late.’

‘The fact is that you didn’t do everything in your capacity to get here on time.’

I smile at Frau Pegler and allow her to place me on a dark blue upholstered chair, which would be reason enough in my sister’s view to leave the office instantly. With the aid of a final spark of self-discipline and the thought of a serene green meadow, I manage to keep my aggression in check and my gob modestly shut.

‘Mifti, I have a hundred and fifty per cent instinct for good and evil. And you are definitively evil.’

‘Are your thirteen years of experience with psychologically unstable adolescents not enough to tell you that that statement’s going to push me over the edge into a big fat identity crisis?’

‘No.’

‘Do you really mean that seriously? Do we really have to have this conversation on this level?’

‘Yes.’

‘Frau Pegler, somebody’s just trying to criticize the hell out of you in a stylish and appropriate manner, and all you can do is say yes and no.’

No answer from Frau Pegler.

‘Someone’s criticizing you to hell in a stylish and appropriate manner, and what do you do? You don’t say ANYTHING. What a crock of shit!’

I wish someone would ask me how my day went at school.

(The Charlatans)

Funnily enough, it’s pretty simple. The incredible paean to a well-planned lighting concept, which only a few seconds ago consisted of nothing more than two misplaced floor lamps. A kebab shop turning more and more into the desired techno palace with every blink. The question of whether a life spent sober can ever have any point.

Edmond, having stuffed a Turkish börek in his mouth while mumbling that he really ought to get more poetic, provides the answer to this all-important question: ‘And at last it’s all over, our hearts are really pretty fucked, but suddenly they’re not scared any more of turning into historical documents!’

Yeah, right. I’m wearing a dark blue parka, and the present day is still burning through the material into my back muscles. The world is melting. When I glance at my wrist, three stamps remind me that Berlin belongs to me. Varnished wooden furniture with unacceptably patterned upholstery, the walls decorated with enlarged passport photos of the children of the man currently standing behind a glass counter, with a daily habit of processing salmonella-infected meat using high-quality kebab slicing equipment.

I say, ‘You guys have got it so good, you’ve got siblings.’

Instead of diverting her attention to me, Annika leans over the back of her chair, her eyes closed. I’m vulnerable in this respect.

She says, ‘Don’t talk such a load of crap, you’ve got siblings too. You’ve got us – we’re incompetent and crap, but we’re your brother and sister.’

‘That’s not what I mean – you grew up together and everything.’

‘We shared bunk beds.’

‘Exactly.’

‘That was completely shit, it’s nothing to envy.’

‘But what you said the other day sounded so awesome, when you were staying in that holiday home with Dad in Zurich and you decided you wanted to eat fish, but then his girlfriend wanted to buy this cheap salmon at the supermarket and you said, “No, we’re getting proper fish!” And then the stupid cunt dragged Dad down to the basement and shrieked, “I can’t take it, this whole luxury crap and all the whole crap and they’re so spoilt and all that – they get it from their mother.”’

‘Jesus, I’d almost repressed that memory.’

‘And then you looked at Edmond and asked if you ought to call up the car-sharing agency and get a lift home, and Edmond like pursed his lips and nodded.’

Edmond, ‘Did you tell her that, Annika? That I pursed my lips and nodded?’

‘Anyway, I thought it was so great that you weren’t alone. Imagine if it’d been me sitting there, I couldn’t have looked at anyone to make sure it wasn’t me that was the problem, it was that stupid cunt’s inadequate reaction that was the problem.’

‘Please stop saying stupid cunt, I’ll pick it up and if those words come out of my mouth at the agency tomorrow morning, some intern in snakeskin boots will ask if I have Tourette’s syndrome.’

‘But don’t you understand what I mean?’

‘The thing is though, while you were at the concentration camp yesterday, Edmond admitted that he fed my hazelnut-brown mouse to the cat.’

Edmond sniggers.

‘I went crazy, Mifti.’

‘What hazelnut-brown mouse?’

‘We used to have two mice each, I had two girl mice and Edmond had two boys. And at some point we thought it’d be like really cool to swap one of them over, and suddenly we both had twenty mice each, and they were all black or white or kind of spotted. But I had a tiny hazelnut-brown mouse in my litter, and it was the total freak in the family and it always did different stuff. It was just a really cool mouse, and one day it just disappeared.’

‘It always did different stuff?’

‘Yeah, really, like if the others were digging like tunnels inside their little hutch, she’d sit down on the roof and do nothing.’

‘And then?’

‘All of a sudden she disappeared. I looked for her everywhere. In the garden, everywhere, in the fridge, I swear, and then at first I thought she’d just run away, but she really couldn’t have got out of the little hutch, you’d never have managed it as a mouse. I checked everywhere, but the bastard mouse just wasn’t there any more. And while you were at the concentration camp yester day Edmond suddenly piped up, “Annika, I have to tell you something, no actually, oh God, maybe I’ll wait another year.” And I’m like, “Hey, come on, just tell me right now,” and he’s like, “I fed your hazelnut-brown mouse to the cat.”’ Annika lets out a deep breath, as if she expected a compliment for not killing Edmond.

‘Man, Annika, I’m really sorry, Jesus.’

I’m like, ‘Why didn’t you kill him when he admitted it?’

‘I was just sad. And then he told me in all this detail how the cat played around with the mouse, and then I thought, maybe at the beginning the mouse was still – oh no, really, that can’t be true.’