“Holy shit, my boy. They’re gunning for us. I’m not going back in—”
“A deep rumble cuts off Arnim’s tirade, and we simultaneously look back. Then we look at each other, eyes wide.
“Fuck, what now?!” I blurt. “The fucking tiger’s awake! Arnim!”
“Shit, shit, shit. All right. Heiko. Now you take the gun and shoot a tranquilizer dart into his pelt. Don’t dilly-dally!”
“What?! Have you totally lost your mind?” I scream, and I can’t control my hands anymore, which are waving around my face in panic.
“Well, come on!” he bellows.
Somehow I manage to reach behind me with a wildly groping hand and retrieve the tranquilizer pistol. I tear open the box of the ammo, crack the barrel of the gun, and, shaking, slide a cartridge inside.
“And now?” I ask.
“Well, fire away, damn it!”
I turn and slide open the little window to the cargo bay. The animal stench fills my nostrils. I hastily begin to breathe through my mouth. Then I shove the gun barrel into the darkness where the menacing growl is coming from, amplified by the boxy cavern of the cargo bay. I try not to aim too high. Don’t want to shoot the critter in the face, after all.
“Shoot!” Arnim screams into my ear.
“Yeah, sure,” I stammer and pull the trigger. The tiger hisses and the rotten stench from its mouth wafts toward me.
“Well? And?” Arnim prods, and revs the motor again.
“What do I know? Can’t see anything. Listen for a sec.”
I stretch, pressing my ear up against the little window, and listen. It’s still growling, but the sound is definitely getting weaker. There’s silence again a short while later. I take a deep breath and ease back down. Arnim has the presence of mind to turn off the headlights. A narrow turn-off into the woods appears on the left ahead of us.
“In there!” I yell and point to the forest track.
Arnim yanks the wheel hard and for a millisecond I’m almost floating as the van’s right wheels lift off the ground and we crash into the woods. Twigs and branches slap at the hood and windshield. I hold tight to the dashboard and door handle, but then the tires smash back onto the ground and we come to a stop. Surrounded by trees.
“Fuck!” I spit out. “God damn ass-fucked son of a bitch! I think I’ve pissed myself.”
I touch my crotch. Everything dry. Wouldn’t have taken much more, though.
“My, oh my,” Arnim pants.
Then he drives us deeper into the woods. At this point, it doesn’t fucking matter if we get lost. We park the van a little off the track where the trees get thicker, and climb out. I feel the simultaneous need to barf and pee. I calm myself by lighting up and letting myself fall back onto the wet, brown leaves beneath me.
What a screwed-up, shitty day! Erich Ribbeck’s worthless national team had just lost 1–0 against the Brits, and I was tossing the sofa cushions across our living room while the television reporters together with the players were scrounging around for some sort of reason for the national team’s failure. With the three beers I already had in my system, I didn’t really care if I hit the tube when I kicked the sneakers off my feet.
Manuela came running into the living room and screamed at me, “Heiko, are you retarded? You’re making such a racket in here! I’m trying to study. Final exams. Hello-o-o-o!” she said, drawing out the last word. I hated her guts.
She pointed to the empty bottles of beer on the table: “And what’s that about?”
I’d stolen the beer from Hans’s stash.
“Dad’ll kill you when he gets back!”
“Now calm down a little, Manuela! People drink a couple when they’re watching football,” I said and stuck out my tongue.
“You’re fourteen, you little dick.”
She slammed the door.
I yelled after her, “Hey! You don’t say ‘little’ and ‘dick’ to a man. Hurts my feelings!”
I think I whipped out my pecker, grabbed it by my hand and used it to knock the beer bottle off the table, which fell onto the carpet with a thud.
“What’s all this yelling?” All at once I heard my father’s voice.
I put my little worm away. It wasn’t any more than that, after all. Then I quickly gathered up the bottles and pushed them under the sofa. I forgot about them later. May still be under there today. He was standing there when I came into the hallway. Tanned the color of leather. Welf, his best friend, was there too. Two weeks earlier, the two of them had flown to Phuket last-minute. And by last-minute, I mean at least he told Manuela and me while he was packing his suitcase.
Welf bit the dust a couple of years later. Cirrhosis of the liver or something horrible like that. The thing just went out of service at some point, and he fell off his bar stool. Was years ahead of my father. Welf was already well lubricated when Hans had to retire and boozing slowly took the upper hand.
“Hey, Heiko,” Hans said and grinned at me stupidly, “did you leave the house in one piece? Did you take good care of the pigeons?”
I nodded. Didn’t say anything. Just stared at the two Asian women he and Welf were holding in their arms and who each had a big suitcase with an ugly flower pattern beside them. The whole hallway smelled of perfume.
“Come on,” Welf said and snickered, “introduce the kids to their new mother.”
“What? Oh, yeah.”
Hans pushed the woman forward. She was half a head shorter than me. She looked at me, embarrassed, and held out the back of her hand. I looked at my father and then back at her.
“Now don’t be impolite, boy. Shake the lady’s hand. For heaven’s sake.”
I lifted my arm as if remote-controlled. My hand bumped against her and somehow we accomplished a bad imitation of a handshake. My open mouth went completely dry and sticky. Manuela jumped in front of me and bowed in front of the woman with the pitch-black hair that almost reached to her bottom.
“I’m Manuela.”
The woman bowed as well and laughed stupidly.
“This is Mie,” Hans said proudly, as if she was a vacation souvenir.
“My pleasure,” Manuela said, and I would have liked to yank her braid.
“Well, come on into the sitting room,” Hans said and winked with exaggeration. And continued with an exaggerated accent: “Coam in, pleez. Welf, you old dog, you knows where ze beer is at.”
“Aye, aye,” Welf joked, and saluted.
Then he pushed his wife into the sitting room and went to get some cans for himself and my father.
“I’ll show you our bedroom, Mie. Our little bed cave.”
She looked at him with a questioning gaze while he pushed her up the stairs before him. Every now and then he stopped and turned around to me. All at once, he made a completely different face.
“Bring the suitcases here. Pronto!”
I watched them climb the stairs and saw the disgusting sparkle in Hans’s eyes and decided I’d never speak a single fucking word to that woman.
Over two weeks, and Kai’s still stuck in the med school clinic. Indefinitely. For further examinations and treatment. If his eyes weren’t taped shut, he’d almost look like a normal person. The swelling has largely gone down, and the wounds have healed. But the way he was, he looked like a dead stick figure with Xs instead of eyes. I’ve made a tacit agreement with his parents. Which means I only go visit him when they’re not there. They come every afternoon after work for one, two hours. I’m there almost every noon and in the evenings. Mondays and Thursdays I bring along the new Kicker magazine and read him articles aloud. I’m pretty good at it my now. I also read to him out of the latest issue of 11 Friends, and he offers some commentary on each piece. Then we make our own sports talk show out of it, and I’ve never felt as well informed as now. I mean better than before, and not so focused on Hannover. A couple days ago, we discovered a reading plug-in for the internet browser. That way I don’t have to talk until I’m blue in the face, and we can go to all kinds of internet sites and get the text read to us in a robot voice. That usually works fairly good, but sometimes it makes really funny mistakes. Mostly, when it comes to the names of foreign football players. We make a game of it by looking for profiles of the most exotic or weirdest player names. Then we have it read aloud by the laptop and laugh our asses off. Though unfortunately, that doesn’t work all the time. Sometimes Kai’s just Kai, like always. Makes jokes. Even about his injury. For instance, he thought about going to New York to hunt criminals while dressed in a red devil’s superhero costume. And when the first movie interest came in, I should make sure that under no circumstances would he be played by Ben Affleck. But sometimes Kai isn’t the Kai I know. Then he seems pressed down into his hospital bed by an invisible weight, and I can see how it churns inside him and the rows of his teeth grind behind his cheeks. The Dutch doctor is often there and every now and then even takes the time to sit down with us. He told us he comes from the same villages as the former Ajax and Arsenal player Marc Overmars. I’ve already forgotten the name of the place. By now I even like the cheesy Dutch accent he speaks with. He’s fairly reserved when it comes to prognoses. But he’s also honest about not wanting to get our hopes up too soon. He also tried to explain all these surgeries and treatments they’re trying on Kai, but at some point Kai said he couldn’t remember all that crap anyway and it’d be better if they’d just do it and leave it at that.