I come back from the shitter and gulp down a gallon of tap water when a voice calls out from the pit: “Heiko! Heiko! You there?”
I step over to the edge of the pit. Arnim takes a step back from the earth wall so he can see me better.
“Can’t get out of here!”
I laugh at him, which he doesn’t think is very cool, and he bellows up at me, “Come on and hand me the ladder! I have to piss.”
For a minute I consider leaving him in the tiger pit, just to give him hell, but he’d given me a leg up so I could reach to top edge. So I get the aluminum extension ladder from the shed and let it slide down. When he steps on the lowest rung, it slides farther down, and under his monstrous weight the bottom sinks into the soggy earth.
“What’d you have planned for the walls?” I ask and hold the ladder tight.
“What d’ya mean?” he wheezes.
“Well, did you ever see one of those tigers for real? I mean in the zoo or a TV nature show? In the end, they’re still cats. Fucking huge cats, but cats. You probably don’t think it could scramble up a dirt wall with its claws.”
Arnim gets off the ladder and stands still, with his hands resting on his knees, breathing deeply. Then he snorts and says, “Sure did cross my mind, my boy. Everything’s lined up. It’ll get fine accommodations with walls of aluminum siding.”
By now it’s late in the evening. Arnim had set up extra floodlights after taking a piss and pointed them into the pit. We need another two hours to reach the depth of four meters.
I chuck the shovel out of the pit in a high arc and sigh, “Finally,” and start to climb up the ladder when Arnim holds me back.
“Not so fast, my boy. The lid’s going on before we knock off.”
There are tons of aluminum studs and wooden boards stacked in front of the shed. I pass Arnim one after the other. He temporarily spreads them out next to the pit while I bring over screwdriver, square, and other tools, and then we put this monstrous fifteen-square-meter lid together, drilling, screwing, and nailing it under the shine of the floodlights.
“So, tomorrow the walls, and then you’re released for the time being,” he says, and tosses two big-ass steaks into the sizzling skillet.
I stuff myself full of meat till the meat in my throat hits other meat, and Arnim tells me the old story for the nth time while I keep on nodding off at the table: “My boss offered me 10,000 marks. That was a real stack of cash at the time. I hadn’t even earned that much in a year as a butcher. Maybe earned, but I didn’t get it.” He shakes with laughter at his own joke. “Well, I thought, can’t be that hard. Knocking someone off. You see it on TV all the time. In all the movies. People are constantly being offed. I can hack it, I told myself. So one day I went over to the farm of my boss’s neighbor. With a gun. Double barrel. In case one bullet wasn’t enough, y’know? Went over there. Ski mask, you say! Why would you need it? A dead person can’t identify you, I thought. The thing might slide in front of my eyes and I’d end up blasting away at my own foot. Which would be pretty stupid. Nope. So I head over. Looked around and didn’t see no one in the yard. I went into the loafing shed. It was already evening. Not so light anymore. And there, standing between his cows, I see him bending over a cow’s ass. Snuck up, but he probably heard me. Doesn’t matter because he’ll be dead in a sec, I thought to myself. Gets up and makes to turn around, and I cock it. But I don’t shoot from the hip. Could go who the hell knows where. I might even shoot a cow in the ass. I cocked, and pulled the trigger right away. Boom! Right in his face. Did a top-notch pirouette, the dumbass. Well. And then he lay there, arms all twisted under his body and the legs cockeyed, like he’s climbing a steep staircase. Wouldn’t recognize him. Sure did take care of his face. That’s where the bullet came out, ’cause I shot him in the side of his head and it came out front. I’m telling you, it looked all messed up. A hole about”—he used the thumbs and fingers of both hands to form a big hole—“about yea-big in his kisser. I split from there as fast as I could. Yeah, and I got into really deep shit, you know? Because that wasn’t him. It was the vet. The actual target, the dumb fucker, was on the latrine. Shittin’ away. The vet was there to look at the cow because it was supposed to drop one soon. Then it all got out, and less than two days later the marshals came and popped me at my place. Locked, cocked. Yep, that’s what happened. Went to Hainholz, in the slammer. Sat there for ten years. Never saw the cash either. But I’d wasted the wrong guy, after all. Fucking vet.”
I’d finally fell asleep at the “boom” part, but I’d already heard the story a dozen times, so I knew it in my sleep.
My second week in the Neustadt hospital. But even after one day, they’d shown me unmistakably that, as someone doing voluntary service, I was just their slave. Go there and mop up the puke! Come here and scrub the blood off the walls! Dig the pieces out of the bone saw blade! Not that the tasks themselves were annoying. After all, someone had to do the dirty work, and if I’d been the doctor or nurse, I’d have made the volunteer do it too. It was the way they talked to us. As if we were the worst of the tards. It wasn’t much help either that at twenty-one I already looked like I could pound all of the head physicians into the ground. I almost regretted not having listened to my father’s bitching and moaning and just done the mandatory military service. Almost, but didn’t. ’Cause first of all, then I’d have been doing far worse, and second, I would’ve had to put up with all the fatherland patriots, and third, I’d have done anything to avoid giving Hans the satisfaction of heeding his sniping. Like, what a little fag you are, doing voluntary service. Go to the army, they’ll make a real man outta ya. What a pushover! I’d already had to hear it when I got kicked outta school for the second time and could forget about getting a normal degree. My teachers were a bunch of snobbish assholes and frigid old cunts. All of them! And the worst was our principal, the old jerk-off. Put ’em in a sack and beat ’em. You won’t hit anyone who doesn’t deserve it. But the fact that I didn’t even go into the army, which was what was expected for a straight-shooting young guy, that really made Hans even more livid. Such bullshit. Whatever. At any rate, all that changed in week two, when I was called to the room of some senile geriatric who was only clinging on the threshold of death with his little toe. He’d almost croaked three times during my first week, but then he came around every time. So I went into the room and heard the doctors and nurses yelling at each other. Saw everyone fussing over him. I wanted to scream they should let him die in peace. Then I noticed her. She was standing at the edge of the group. She seemed completely uninvolved, as if she’d done this a thousand times before. But Yvonne was still in training, as I later found out. So she couldn’t have done it that often yet. If at all. She was holding something. I don’t even want to know exactly what. It was obscured by the back of a doctor and a chubby male nurse. But it was more about her face. So fucking beautiful! Her cheeks were so smooth your hand would slip if you stroked them. They narrowed as they approached her mouth. A cute, small mouth. Not one of those big old frog mouths like so many others. Her nose was so narrow and delicate. Hardly had nostrils. Everything about her is slender in the first place. Seems so delicate. And then when she opened her mouth, I was left gaping and just thought, kudos, girl, I wouldn’t have had the balls to say that. And her little eyes, those blue eyes. Like ice cubes with a fly frozen in the middle. So sharp and precise, but at the same time so open and free-floating. But the best thing about her, I noticed in that moment, was her brow. Free of eyebrows. Two perfectly formed crests I immediately wanted to kiss, one after the other. Or wanted to trace with the tip of my tongue. Simply smooth skin, without pores.