We’d just gotten in deep shit in more than the metaphoric sense. I dial Ulf’s number.
Back then, we spent a lot of time at the Seidels’ house. Had given up on forcing Jojo to do something with us. He actually only left the house to go to work or go shopping with his mother at the discount supermarket. So we were constantly hanging out at his place. But it wasn’t cool, and we were relieved every time Jojo closed the front door behind us in the evening. This day, we were sitting as so often in Joel’s old room, which meanwhile had halfway become Jojo’s room. I thought it was spooky and somehow sick that he slept in his little brother’s bed. Of course, I’d have never said that to his face, and if it did something for him or made him feel better, well then he should do it anyway. We watched as he constantly sorted through photos and organized the reports of Joel’s games in folders. He hadn’t been to the barber in ages, and with his mop of curls he was beginning to look like the German version of the great midfielder Carlos Valderrama.
We went into Jojo’s room to smoke and leaned out the window. Jojo didn’t want us to smoke up his little brother’s room because it would yellow the football posters Joel had covered the slanted ceiling with. And Joel had never smoked. In contrast to us. Hadn’t even tried it. Never. We didn’t put any pressure on him. Knew why he did it. And he didn’t touch alcohol either. Except on birthdays or something. He couldn’t hold his liquor and was smashed after just one and a half beers.
So we spent the day hanging out on the sofa bed that had once been Joel’s bed, leafing through old issues of Kicker magazine, and watching action movies, the American Ninja stuff, or old Jackie Chan Easterns, from back when they were still cool. Joel’s jerseys hung on the clothes hangers next to the door. Jojo wanted to have them framed at some point. His father was constantly walking past the open doorway. I still remember he seemed vaguely busy without giving the impression he was doing anything in particular. He had really come unglued in the months following Joel’s death. Even more than Jojo and his mother. Hardly said a word, and within months Dieter looked like he’d aged years. Face fallen in. And even though he’d stopped smoking after the funeral. If he ever uttered a sound, his voice was as rough as it always had been. Comes from all those years of inhaling cigarillos. Gives you a voice like the vocal cords have been put through a cheese grater. So he wandered the corridors in his long, gray work coat like the resident ghost and occasionally glanced in the room while floating past.
Mrs. Seidel was down in the kitchen. That was her place. One of those real traditional housewives. Hair pulled up into a tennis-ball-sized knot at the back of her neck and always wearing an apron. She prepared coffee and cake. It was a firm tradition at the Seidel house. Nice in a way, I guess. I’d never really known it myself. I mean at my house. On the other hand, it also seemed really annoying you had to gather at the kitchen table at three thirty in the afternoon. Whether you wanted coffee and cake or not. The same thing applied for us visitors. The rule simply transferred to us. Besides myself, no one seemed to think it was strange, so I never said anything. Different house, different rules, I guess.
I think I was out smoking with Kai. We were debating where we should go drinking that evening, and with our phlegm we were spitting yellow holes in the thick layer of snow covering the Seidels’ garden and everywhere. It was already cold by early autumn, and snow soon followed. We closed the window. When we opened the door to Jojo’s room, the warm, sugary smell of cake was floating up the narrow staircase. Despite it all. I was looking forward to having my own place. Even though I was still in school, if you could even call it that with my infrequent attendance, I had moved out once already two years earlier. Simply hadn’t been able to take it anymore, just the three of us with my father and Mie. Manuela had left to study in Göttingen long before. At any rate, even if my place in the Barne residential tower was no bigger than a shoe box, living alone was a thousand times better than some pragmatic living accommodation with my family. You can’t pick your family, unlike your friends. And when it’s fucked up, then you just move out. Regardless of how old you are.
“Coffee is ready!” Mrs. Seidel called from below. Ulf and Jojo came out of Joel’s old room. Jojo’s mother was waiting down below on the landing and asked if we’d seen Dieter.
“He was walking around earlier,” Jojo said. “Maybe he’s taking a nap. I’ll go look.”
The rest of us followed his mother to the kitchen and took our seats at the table. There was steaming hot black coffee in our cups. A piece of poppy seed cake was waiting on each plate.
“You boys go ahead and start,” Mrs. Seidel said. “Otherwise it’ll get cold.”
We thanked her like nice, pleasant boys. Kai and Ulf relished these cake sessions considerably more than I did. Ulf most of all, that icebreaker. The way he shoveled it in obviously pleased Jojo’s mother and confirmed her in her housewifely pride.
There was a bang from outside. Mrs. Seidel got up and closed the kitchen window.
“Those neighbor boys with their fireworks again. But it’s still a ways until New Year’s Eve.”
“Probably left over from last year,” Ulf said, and had poppy seed cake crumble out of his mouth.
“They’re desecrating the beautiful, white snow with their explosions.”
Kai gave me a light kick to the shins, leaned over to me, and whispered: “You remember? The dead rat?”
He threw back his head and laughed diabolically.
One fall, I’d just left grade school, and we were shooting off the leftover fireworks from the previous New Year’s. We had found a rat carcass in a construction pit close to the main train station in Hannover, and we shoved a thin, powerful firecracker from Poland into its asshole and lit the fuse. Had underestimated the explosion radius and hadn’t moved far enough away.
“Pssst,” I said and whispered out of the corner of my mouth, “sure. That was a huge mess.”
Mie had been scared to death when she found the innards still stuck to my clothes in the laundry basket. The memory made me grin.
Jojo came into the kitchen.
“He’s not in the bedroom, but I looked out the window and the footprints go across the lawn to the garden shed.”
Mrs. Seidel wiped her hands on the kitchen towel and went to the window.
“He can’t be tinkering again. Dieter knows when coffee’s served.”
“Let him be,” Jojo said, pulling on his rubber boots and heading out into the garden.
“Eat. Eat,” his mother encouraged us. Ulf didn’t have to be told twice and pushed another brick-sized piece of cake onto his plate.
The coffee and cigarettes from before were already having a little brown fiesta in my abdomen, and I was preparing for a nice round of fecal bobsledding.
Jojo came back into the kitchen through the living room, leaving tracks.
“Joachim, take your boots off!”
“You guys have to help. The door to the shed isn’t locked, but something’s pushed against it from the inside.
The three of us fetched our shoes, putting them on in front of the patio door, and followed Jojo through the snow to the pitiful garden shed his father had repurposed as his personal carving shop.
“Look.” Jojo pushed against the door, which gave way slightly, but couldn’t be opened completely. “Doesn’t open.”
We helped him, pressing our hands and shoulders against the wooden door.
“You smell that too?” Kai asked, face twisted.
Something inside gave way, and something could be heard crashing down. A cupboard fell over and spilled tools onto the floor. Screwdrivers and bits rolled against the rifle lying there and the foot belonging to Jojo’s father.