Freak City (22 page)

I was quiet. Other than my parents, nobody had ever given me a name. Claudio sometimes called me brother, but this was something different. I got a little choked up.

“What does my name sign mean?” I imitated the hand movement.

“This is the symbol for bravery. But a special kind of bravery, that comes straight from the heart.”

Leah was embarrassing me. Not to mention that she had me all wrong. I was anything but brave. I still hadn’t introduced her to my parents. It took me a damn long time to realize that I loved her. And I had acted like a little kid. I still hadn’t confessed to her about my all-night drinking binge after our fight at the concert. I had drunk myself stupid and danced half the night away. I had smashed a glass on the ground. Was that bravery?

“Do you like your name?” I nodded.

Now I had two names. I was Mika, who asked himself, “Who is like God?” and I was Bravery, the kind that has less to do with being a hero and a lot to do with feelings.

I found that even though neither name really fit me, both touched on the same idea.

Tommek started the movie and turned off the lights. Carefully, Leah reached for my hand and squeezed it.

I didn’t know if she knew what this meant. That I was sitting next to her on an uncomfortable plastic chair and watching a fuzzy pirated version of a movie. The dialogue was hard to understand only because the music from the park was turned up much too loud and swallowed all other noises.

I didn’t know if it was clear to Leah that this was a fork in the road for me. That in these seconds I was leaving Sandra behind . . . in order to start something completely new with Leah.

“Popcorn?” Tommek handed over a paper cup. Leah stood up. “Wait a minute,” she signed to me and went into the building with Tommek. I surreptitiously looked after them. There was absolutely no reason to be nervous. Even so, I didn’t like it that the two of them were gone for so long.

Leah came back. “What were you two doing in there?” I asked.

“Are you jealous?”

I shook my head. She placed her index finger on my mouth and pointed at the screen.

The movie was over. The few people who had come to watch got up to go home. Tommek took down the screen, and I helped Leah stack up the chairs.

“That’s good enough, I’ll clean up the rest tomorrow morning,” Tommek said to us by way of parting. “Thanks for your help!” He nodded extra slowly at Leah. I didn’t have the vaguest idea what that knowing nod meant.

“Bye!” We left Tommek behind in the kitchen and went back outside.

In the park across the way, the crowd cheered for a punk band on the stage. I wondered if Sandra had already performed with the Colored Pieces. I had listened for her voice occasionally during the film but hadn’t consciously heard it.

Leah took me by the hand and pulled me behind the building. “And now?” I asked.

It was already approaching midnight, and we were surrounded by the blackest darkness. We leaned against the building and kissed each other like we were starving. We were standing directly beneath the open window of the café kitchen, and I hoped Tommek couldn’t hear us. Leah tasted so good, excitement was starting to build in my head, a mini round of exquisite fireworks.

“Have you ever heard that some Eskimos have refrigerators to keep their food from freezing?” Leah looked at me. She had spelled the word Eskimo; my vocabulary just wasn’t big enough.

“How much useless knowledge is in your sweet head, anyway?” I pushed a strand of hair away from her face.

Leah shrugged her shoulders. “There’s a lot more where that came from. Did you know, for example, that snails kiss each other before they have sex?”

“I didn’t even know that snails have sex!” I answered. Instead of the sign for sex, I had used the sign for table. Leah corrected me.

“Thanks,” I muttered. “I’m too stupid to get the sign for sex right. Now I know that every snail in our garden has a more active sex life than I do. Is there anything else you can tell me that will make me feel even better about myself?”

“What did you say?” her lips formed. “Can you repeat that? In sign language?”

“Not important!” I dismissed it. “It was just a joke.”

Her eyes glittered. “Don’t brush everything aside. I hate that. Don’t I get to be in on your jokes?”

“Forget it. I was just talking to myself.”

“So what? Repeat it for me!”

We were about to start fighting again.

The light went out in the kitchen, and I could hear Tommek leave Freak City and lock the door behind him. A bicycle was unlocked. Then he rode past us on his granny-style bike and headed west.

“Was that Tommek?” Leah looked at me questioningly. I nodded.

She left our hiding spot and took the stairs two at a time. She pulled a key out of her pants pocket and unlocked Freak City like she owned the place.

I stared at her. “What are you doing? Where did you get that key?”

Leah just shrugged her shoulders with a completely innocent expression on her face. “It’s the spare key. Tommek . . . lent it to me.”

I looked down the street where Tommek’s back light could just barely be seen and then it disappeared into the night. So he was a good loser, after all.

I followed Leah into the house, and she locked the door behind me. In the middle of the night, with no lights on and without any people in it, the café seemed to be a magical place. The pool table and pinball machine looked like slumbering shadows in the darkness. This is where I had met Leah. This is also where I truly saw her for the first time.

Leah took my hand. We took the stairs up to the second floor. I had never been upstairs before. I knew there were some seminar rooms and a small pottery workshop, but apparently those weren’t the rooms Leah wanted to stay in. She kept going. Higher. There was a little staircase that led up to the attic.

We opened the wooden door. The moon shone through the skylights, making it amazingly bright all around us.

“Enough light so we can talk!” Leah signed with relief. “Darkness is the natural enemy of deaf people, you know. When it’s pitch black, we’re completely lost.”

There was all kinds of junk in the room. A dusty world map, soccer balls, and a goal. Boxes full of old papers, broken bicycles, roller skates and . . . a bed. It was really a bed standing in the middle of the room beneath one of the skylight windows.

“From the theater group,” Leah explained when she saw my astonished expression. “
The Imaginary Invalid
. They needed a hospital bed for that play.”

The bed didn’t exactly look like a hospital bed; more like a love nest. It had a big, tacky metal frame and there was a huge mound of blankets piled on it.

We went over to it. “Isn’t this great?” Leah pushed the blankets aside. “I discovered this up here a few weeks ago when I wanted to borrow some roller skates.” I was glad I didn’t have to answer. To be honest, the sight of the bed had made me speechless.

Leah tipped the window open and, without meaning to, let in the music from the park. A saxophone and a piano. They were playing jazz over there. There was suddenly something magical in the air, and everything around us seemed to hover in the air.

Leah lay down and pulled me onto the bed next to her. We looked into each other’s eyes.

“We have to be out of here tomorrow morning at seven.” I nodded, in a daze. “Why do you look so scared?” Leah outlined my face with one of her fingers.

I shook my head. “I’m not scared. It’s just that . . .”

The jazz band had started to play one of my favorite songs. “My Way.” My grandfather’s favorite song. My dad’s favorite song. All of them had been with a new love for the first time at some point, and they had survived it. Then I started to relax. This here, this was absolutely perfect.

This wonderful song, the happy laughter of the people celebrating over there. A cat meowed loudly like it wanted to sing along with the music.

I turned onto my back and stared out into the night. That gigantic, star-filled sky above us. There must have been thousands and thousands of stars up there.

“What are you thinking about?” Leah asked.

“That this is a perfect moment.”

She nodded. “That’s true. It smells so unbelievable here. Like jasmine and raspberry bushes. A little like adventure from all the old stuff in here. The gentle breeze, it’s really warm. And the starry sky, it’s just enormous. There are millions of stars.”

There it was again, the intersection. I decided I would pay more attention to Ms. Hot Bod when school started up again. Sometimes math was important.

Leah started to undress next to me. I noticed out of the corner of my eye but didn’t quite dare to watch. Then she helped me take off my T-shirt.

I looked at her. The perfect moment, the perfect woman, the perfect decision. She was so beautiful it hurt.

Outside, the Colored Pieces began their performance. I could hear Sandra being announced all the way up in our little attic hideaway. Her voice sounded raw and a little wistful, like a good-bye intended just for me.

Good luck,
I thought.
Good luck, Sandra. You’ll make it out there.

“And what are you thinking now?” Leah looked at me with her deep green eyes.

I smiled. “That there are times when you don’t need to talk.”

Leah thought about that. “You’re right,” she said in sign language. Then she opened those hands that had so often spoken to me. She placed them very gently on my shoulders and slowly pulled me toward her.

Many people have supported the work that went into this book. I would like to thank my colleagues from the sign language course in which I was given a sign name, and we learned to understand each other even without words. I’m grateful to Claudia Kempter and Michaela Herdegen for valuable insight into working with deaf children. The same goes for Lucie Dachs, who reminded me to eat occasionally during the writing phase. Andrea Held was the first to demonstrate for me, with great confidence, what it sounds like when deaf people speak—and in Nuremberg I had the opportunity to see the Bavarian state anthem in sign language. Biographies of Bonnie Poitras Tucker, Emmanuelle Laborit, and Maria Wallisfurth gave me interesting background information about everyday life without hearing.

Christina Söllner was my first critical reader, and my agent Cristina Bernardi of the Meller Agency looked for and found the right publisher.

Finally, I owe special thanks to two fascinating women: Nicole Andrea Lohe, sign language interpreter from Berlin, who showed me the world of the deaf in the first place; and Kerstin Mackevicius, my deaf teacher and friend, who invited me to enter this enthralling world. Both of them answered countless questions for me and repeatedly inspired me anew.

This book is dedicated to both of them.

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Title of the German original edition(s):
Freak City
by Kathrin Schrocke
© S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2013
First published in Germany by Sauerländer, Mannheim, 2010

Translated from the German edition by Tammi Reichel

The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.