That weekend, while we were at Timpen watching the Bundesliga live scores, like every year we had a discussion about whose turn it was to get the wreath or bouquet. And just like every year, we’d all forgotten who’d taken care of it the year before. I thought it was me, but I couldn’t prove it. So this week I called up our regular florist to order a wreath in green, white, and black. Even though 96 was always called the Reds, because that’s what they took the field in, those were the team’s official colors. I picked Kai up at the station and together we drove to Luthe. To the cemetery on the edge of town, near the fields between Luthe and Wunstorf.
Jojo and Ulf are already waiting at the gate. We greet each other, and I get the wreath in 96 team colors from the trunk.
Why’d you dress so fancy?” Ulf asks Kai, who looks down at himself. He’s wearing a tight-fitting black shirt. Sleeves rolled up. Black pants and black Lacoste shoes.
“You’re not gonna get started on that. Heiko was saying the same thing in the car.”
“He’s not getting buried again, right?” Ulf joked.
“You should be able to dress up for once to honor a deceased friend, you fucktard. Am I right, Jojo?”
We turn to Jojo. He’s standing at the edge of the field, one hand forming a canopy for his eyes, looking over the fields at the sky.
“Something’s brewing over there,” Kai says and peers in the same direction. We’ve been having heat thunderstorms nonstop since the beginning of the month, but unfortunately they only bring brief periods of cooling. It’s still so unbearably hot you could change your sweaty clothes three times a day.
“The shoes are still hanging there,” Jojo says, without shifting his gaze.
We follow his gaze. Only when you protect your eyes against the sun and look very closely can you see the shoes hanging from the power lines in the glaring light.
“That’s unbelievable,” Kai says. We’re standing in a row at the edge of the field and shielding our eyes, “that they’re still hanging there.”
“Almost ten years,” I say.
“And they haven’t fallen down,” Ulf says.
“Or no one took them down.”
“Almost ten years,” Jojo murmurs to himself. Maybe just to realize for himself what an eternity has gone by.
I kneel down and place the new wreath in front of Joel’s grave. In the meantime, the sun has retreated somewhere behind the clouds. There’s a creaking sound in the distance. I rejoin the semicircle made by my friends and clasp my hands over my crotch like the others, head bowed. No one says anything.
Even after nearly ten years, I feel strange standing here like this. I’m guessing the feeling won’t ever go away. How bizarre is it to stand in front of a polished slab of stone representing a person six feet underground? I feel the sweat collect between my fingers, and I stare at the tombstone. Joel Seidel. Seventeen years lay between his birth and death. Seventeen pitiful years. Out here in the cemetery, I’m always aware of how long Joel’s been dead. Precisely here. When we come together to memorialize him. Whenever I come here, he dies again. Because out there in my normal life I think he’ll call any minute, come over with Jojo, or we can go see him at practice. Admire his dribbling skills again. Bernd Schneider. Ansgar Brinkmann. The white Brazilian… my ass! Joel Seidel, that was the white Brazilian! The dribbling machine from Luthe. Here in the cemetery, his face disappears before my eyes.
No one says anything. Maybe others mourn differently. Someone says something to the deceased. Gives a speech. Reels off an anecdote. We do that too. But not here. We can’t think of anything as soon as we walk through that gate. No one dares say anything. And so we’re standing here, hands clutched in front of our balls as if we were forming the wall on a free kick. He could do free kicks like no other. Direct free kicks. Bent into the corner. Roberto Carlos from Lower Saxony. I could say all of that. But I don’t. I don’t know why. I just stand there, stare at the ground, and feel strange.
Kai and Ulf are the first to turn away and go back to the road. That relieves me too. Relief sounds brutal in this context, but much as I’d like to express my respect and grief, the fact that I’m standing here is just so much fucking torture. I sneak a glance at Jojo, who’s standing next to me. He’s stock still. Doesn’t make a sound. But his upper body is racked by soft shudders. As if he had hiccups. I look at his face. His eyes are pinched tight. His lips are rolled inside his mouth. I can’t stand it, so I leave him with his little brother for a moment.
We’re standing in the middle of the cemetery with our hands on our hips, looking at the ground or up in the sky. Huffing away in the hope it brings some relief. The worst thing is it was only the first half. We’re still waiting patiently for Jojo. He should have all the time he needs. We’re only a couple yards away. Then he finally comes over. As he takes an obligatory deep breath, I place my hand on his shoulder and press tight.
“Well, then,” he says with a cough, picking up the bouquet he’d set down when we’d arrived, and goes ahead of us to the next row of graves.
No one could have guessed beforehand how all this would play out. Which is why, at the time, it wasn’t possible to find two graves next to each other. Which is why Jojo and Joel’s father are one row over.
It’s a large tombstone. “Dieter Seidel” is engraved there. There’s still space on it for his mother’s name. That’s fairly macabre. What must it be like for Ruth, Jojo’s mother, to come here every day? To her son’s and husband’s graves, and see the extra space on the stone. Jojo positions the bouquet, briefly pausing in a crouched position, and asks us for a lighter. Kai hands him his, and Jojo lights the votive candles spread across the grave that have gone out. He very carefully removes the lids, tilts the candles, fills them with flame, and then sets them back down using both hands. Doing some things with both hands is much more respectful than with just one hand. Shaking hands, for example.
The clouds slowly start to dump on us. The thunder has already moved closer. I catch Ulf sneaking a quick glance at the sky. Then his eyes look straight at the ground.
This time I’m the first to leave the grave. It takes unbelievable strength to be the first. You don’t want to seem as if you want to quickly put the whole thing behind you. But I can’t leave this burden on Kai and Ulf. I take the first two steps backward. Then I turn around in a fluid movement, making the rocks squelch under my soles, and go to the main gate. I wait to smoke until Jojo is back with us.
We make plans for the evening, in the gambling hall. Blow some money, that’ll help, Kai says as we climb in. The first thing the ones in the front seats do is rub their faces.
On the way home from picking up some cans and frozen pizza at the supermarket, we gradually shed the heavy cloaks of grief. Have to somehow. And Kai tells us, with growing excitement, he has something to show us later that’ll drive us crazy, but he doesn’t want to reveal any more now.
“Wait till later, dude. I want to present my discovery to all of you. It’s fucking awesome.”
We’re sitting at the bar in the Midas gambling hall, which is located in a former supermarket behind a Mongolian buffet. For the hell of it, to try something new, we’re drinking the traditional beer from Cologne in the typical miniature, kid-sized glasses. It’s still early in the evening. The constantly ringing, blinking machines on the walls are just sparsely manned. The rows of lights divide the hall into islands of red and blue. Where no light falls, it’s so dark you can hardly see anything. You can tell the newbies by the way the first thing they do is fall on their faces in the areas where there’s no lighting.