Marlon’s hand was on my upper arm again. I could barely stand it. I hated being touched. The sudden solidarity of our disabled troop made me want to escape. All for one and one for all. I didn’t want that. Not with these people or anyone else. I was already sick of it.
In no time at all we had lined up on one of the two platforms of the tiny little station. The only thing missing was for us to be put into pairs and told to hold our line buddy’s hand. The guru counted heads. Sweat dripped from his forehead. Friedrich opened the wheelchair as if he had been doing it his entire life. Janne smiled down at us from Richard’s arms. The sun shone.
It turned out we had about a twenty minute walk to our lodgings. The guru had arranged transportation for the luggage but he didn’t seem to believe that it would come. We were waiting outside, sitting on our suitcases, when a tractor rattled into the parking lot pulling a trailer. At the giant steering wheel was a boy who couldn’t have been older than twelve and next to him was a shaggy bear-sized dog. The two parties looked at each other curiously for a while until the guru realized this was the transportation to the farm.
We threw our bags into the trailer and the tractor chugged off. We walked around the station building and found a paved path that curled into the woods. The guru compared something on one of his sheets of paper with the sign at the start of the path and turned on the navigation function of his phone.
“I can take a turn,” I said to Richard, who had stationed himself behind Janne’s wheelchair. He nodded indifferently and stood aside for me.
“Did you ask me?” asked Janne with an unpleasantly high-pitched voice.
“May I, Janne?”
She ground her teeth together. I took this as a yes. After the first few meters I was already bathed in sweat and began to suspect that Janne’s mother didn’t need to go to the gym to keep herself so fit.
The promised twenty minutes stretched on for an eternity. The paved path gave way to a gravel path and then a dirt path. At some point I realized we’d been walking for nearly an hour. Nobody said a word, Kevin just hummed a tune. He moved like a stork on his stilt-like heels, swinging his bag back and forth, and he didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered that the ends of his heels kept sticking in the sandy soil. The guru was a few meters ahead and had been on the phone for the last ten minutes.
“I’m hungry, I’m hungry,” Friedrich repeated as if in a trance.
“Then eat some grass,” said Marlon.
Those must have been the first word I’d heard from him all day. He had finally let go of me and was walking with light, tentative steps in the middle of the group. I kept waiting for him to bump into someone but it didn’t happen. Now and then he made a strange clicking noise with his tongue.
“I saw somebody do that on TV but I couldn’t figure out how they did it,” said Friedrich enthusiastically.
Marlon didn’t think to enlighten him.
When I was sure that we were lost the guru suddenly put his phone in his pocket, and gestured with his arms.
“We’re here!” he yelled. From where we were there was still nothing to see but trees. The guru waited until we caught up. And when we did, I wasn’t the only one who stood there with my mouth wide open.
I was prepared for all sorts of things. That we would be staying in a horse stall or in a yurt or in dilapidated tents. The last thing I expected was a forest villa with towers that reached up to the clouds. A yard spread out in front of the house, and behind it was some kind of shed with a grill and a nicely stacked pile of wood. Our bags were stacked at the base of the stairs that led to the entrance.
“There must be another way here,” said Friedrich profoundly, fishing out his suitcase and backpack.
I just stood there, still gripping the handles of Janne’s wheelchair. Even she had turned her face up to look at the towers. The guru climbed the stairs and reached under the doormat.
“By the way, there’s a ramp!” he called to us and then stood up again. He raised his hand proudly into the air; in it gleamed a key.
I sat down on the bed and untied my sneakers. Against the opposite wall was a second bed. Marlon was lying in it with his arms crossed on his chest. He still had his sunglasses on so I couldn’t say whether he was sleeping. His breathing was soft and steady.
We were so close that there I was listening to his breathing. I didn’t like it. This handicapped accessible villa was certainly big enough for each of us to have a separate room. I got the feeling that the sleeping arrangements were part of the plan, and I was an opponent of such a plan.
The room was spacious, with a huge antique chandelier hanging from a ceiling that must have been three meters high. There was a giant window that Marlon found immediately and threw open. The light white curtains fluttered in the breeze and I felt like I was in an Impressionist painting. The chest looked antique. Near the window stood a secretary, and I looked to no avail for a inkwell on it. It was a giant, fantastic room, but stuck in there with Marlon I felt confined.
To take my mind off it I tried to imagine what I must seem like to Marlon. Probably an amorphous sweating, panting, heat-radiating lump.
“Why are you lying there like a corpse?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. I had an idea of what was going on with him. He too had imagined everything differently. He had wrongly assessed both himself and the trip, and he felt humiliated about looking helplessness in front of Janne. So he had as much right as I did to hate everything here, myself included.
I opened the well-oiled door to the room, went out, and closed it quietly behind me.
The guru was unloading boxes of groceries that someone had obviously left for us in the kitchen. He looked a bit more relaxed. Across the polished counter rolled apples and lemons while the smell of marinated meats and olives wafted out of bags, and I would love to have just bitten right into the big loaf of dark bread sitting on the table.
“Why don’t we have our own rooms?” I asked with the slightly annoyed tone of a package tourist. “There seems to be more than enough space.”
“Because they are renovating,” said the guru without turning around.
“So who’ll be doing the cooking?” I didn’t think there would be anything wrong with my taking a banana. After all, Claudia had paid for the groceries.
“You.”
I decided to take it as a joke, left him to sort out the groceries, and moved on.
The villa had a wheelchair-accessible elevator between the ground floor and the second floor. I took the wide staircase with the wine-colored banister that had been polished by many hands. Upstairs, where our room also was, I found half a dozen doors. Some were locked. I heard Kevin giggling behind one of them. He was sharing a room with Friedrich. I wondered whether the guru was going to room with Richard or whether an exception to the plan would be made in this particular case. And I wondered why others always got luckier with such things than I did.
Janne, of course, wasn’t upstairs. I went back down the steps, my hand again sliding on the now-warmed wood of the banister. I’d last seen her just after our arrival as she disappeared behind the door to her assigned room on the ground floor. The guru carried her suitcase in after her.
I knocked on the door.
She answered, sounding cheerful and welcoming. With a vague sense of gratification that she was feeling at ease, I turned the doorknob. Janne’s wheelchair was in front of the wardrobe and she was sorting her things. Girls, I thought. I never would have thought to unpack the week’s worth of clothes I had.