I go down to the kitchen. There’s a scrap of paper held down by a cup. Arnim scribbled something in his barely legible scrawl using a permanent marker. After nearly three years of living with him, I’m halfway able to decipher what he considers writing.
He writes that he’s away on business. I mentally add the quotation marks around the word “business.” No mention of approximately when he might return, but I’m supposed to take care of the animals. That was the agreement from the beginning. Sure, back then I thought I’d be living for free in a place where no one would get on my nerves. Feed a couple critters every now and then in exchange. No problem. But at the time, I didn’t have the slightest clue what kind of animals he had.
“I guess I’m a full time zookeeper now,” I say to the empty kitchen. No one there to laugh at my joke.
I wash out the coffee machine from who knows when—it’s full of slime—dump some grounds into the filter, and smoke a cigarette while I wait for the morning’s black milk. The back door isn’t closed all the way. It was banging softly in the cool draft.
After going in the bathroom briefly to toss water on my face and notice how my stomach muscles are threatening to disappear under a thin layer of fat, I do various exercises in the living room for half an hour. I have them from a manual Kai gave me. It was written by a legendary inmate and street fighter from England who called himself Charles Bronson. Like the actor. It has instructions about how you can exercise your body without any equipment. Even if you’re cooped up in a tiny prison cell. The best book I’ve ever read. Also pretty much the only one I’ve read, if you leave aside all the crap we were served up in school. But all you had to do was buy the CliffsNotes, with all the content and interpretation and stuff that was in it.
I slip into the boxer shorts from yesterday because I still haven’t been to the laundromat. Doesn’t matter. Don’t want to go anywhere important today anyway. I pull on my rubber boots on the stoop behind the back door. The ground looks pretty soggy. I take on the dogs first.
Two Amstaffs that Arnim’s probably had for at least two years. He got the white one, Poborsky, from a breeder of fighting dogs in Olomouc. At the time, Kai, Ulf, and me even went with him to Bohemia to pick it up. But we were along just to get drunk. Although Kai absolutely wanted to go see the breeder and check out the setup with the dogs, I was able to convince him not to. I told him he really didn’t want to come along, and he should trust me.
Arnim had gotten the other one, a seven-year-old brown monster of a dog with the name Bigfoot, in exchange for a pit bull that had pulled in one win after another for Arnim. What his exchange partner didn’t know was the pit bull had a heart defect and wouldn’t last very long. The dog came from Russia. From beyond the Urals. From a place no one had ever heard of, not to mention the whole pronunciation thing. Which is why Bigfoot only understands Russian. Or as the previous owner said, “Beegfood.”
I’m guessing it doesn’t matter what language you speak to it. It’s pumped so full of steroids it doesn’t even notice when it has a massive flesh wound.
I thought it was all pretty exciting after moving in and recognizing what’s going down here in Wunstorf. But that ended after I was at one of Arnim’s events, which he puts on randomly from time to time. I mean sure, we slap each other around and sometimes something breaks. But this! Ulf asked me how I could tolerate it and square it with my conscience. How I could still live with Arnim. But I didn’t even tell him everything I saw here. I didn’t have a real answer for him either. I guess you get numb over time. Tune out some things. Fuck it. It is what it is.
Poborsky only notices me when I come out of the house. He starts to yap. Only then does Bigfoot catch on and start to yap too. Although yapping is probably the wrong word for the two of them. That sounds more like a dachshund or something. The two of them are like four-legged subwoofers. They throw themselves at their cages’ fencing. Their cages are built together. Of course, there’s a fence between the two of them. They’d tear each other to pieces in an instant otherwise. Sometimes they try to go at it even so, but dogs like that usually do catch on pretty fast when a fence can’t be beat. Even these dogs. I walk past the cages and call out to them in a singsong voice: “All right already, I’m on my way.”
The whole area behind the house is covered with multiple layers of camouflage netting from which water is dripping. The netting is draped over wooden posts and, along with the oak and the other trees on the property, offers perfect visual cover. Arnim is the most paranoid guy I’ve ever run into. But he has to be with his “hobby,” as I like to call it, although he does earn money from it. One corner of the shed is still full of acoustic panels he’s been meaning to attach to the cages since forever.
The shed is another one of Arnim’s masterpieces of manic-paranoid underground architectural art. Everything here he’s put together himself. Everything except the house. He inherited that ages ago. Even though the shed was already here, he completely redid the interior so his little arena would fit inside. Everything done by hand. He only has to close the shed doors and no one outside of a hundred-yard radius would have a clue what’s going on in there. And no one just happens to come by either, because he owns the surrounding land. Inherited that too.
I push the huge shed door open wide enough to slip inside. It’s not a joke like the one at my parents’ place. But my grandpa had only had little tractors. There must have been some massive equipment in here. I fill the salad-sized bowls with food and water and set them outside. The dogs go crazy as soon as they pick up the scent. I pull two steaks as thick as my hand from the cooler in the kitchen and inject them with hell-if-I-know-what from the syringe in the “morning” box. Don’t even want to know what the stuff is. Use the steaks to lure the dogs out of their kennels and into their cages. I toss the steaks through the window around head level. Then I can use a rope setup to close the doors to the fenced run area so I can safely go inside and change out the dishes. Also one of Arnim’s DIY numbers. Everything in exactly that sequence. You don’t go inside the cage to change out the bowls when the mutts are running around free in there. Otherwise you’re short of at least two limbs in no time flat. After changing out the dishes, checking twice to see if the cage doors are really closed, and hastily rinsing out the used dishes, I reopen the doors. The two of them race out in tandem, broad muzzles straight to the food dishes, which they scrape across the floor against the mesh fence. They’ve already scarfed down the steaks.
After the second round of coffee and cigarettes, I go down into the basement, which extends beneath the entire house and stinks of moist mildew and rot. Down there I fill a bucket full of pig and cattle bones. I use the electric mortar and pestle to smash the bones into bite-sized pieces. I garnish the meal with a clutch of dead chicks and bring it all the way up to the second floor along with a deep bowl filled with fresh water. I knock on the first door on the left, saying, “Siegfried, are you awake yet? Yummy, yummy.”
Something in the room rustles. I open the door. A narrow beam of light falls through the space between the window and the cloth hung in front of it, hitting me eye-level as I enter. I duck underneath it. Avoiding it.
“Siegfried?“ I toss the question into the room. There’s more rustling. The sound comes from the corner between the window and the slope of the roof. Siegfried’s favorite spot. My eyes have readjusted to the darkness. I can see him now. He’s sitting on the back of an ancient armchair completely covered in shit. It was already there before Arnim’s time. Siegfried hardly moves. He still has his head hidden under a wing. Just peeks out a little to see who’s talking and bringing him breakfast.