and pithy:
“Full of shit,” said Markus as they smoked their first cigarette spiked with grass in the old stone pavilion.
And Frickel said, “The hell with it,” and handed the joint to Markus.
Then they were joined by Klinke and Zeppelin, and Zeppelin had the idea of slashing the crappy tires on the Opel of some crappy Turk who’d been making up to someone’s fiancee from Zeppelin’s former class, but in the first place it was still too early for that, and in the second place the Opel wasn’t there, luckily, because although Markus had gone along with the others at once, so as not to seem soft, the idea—in the third place—was as good as suicidal.
They got to the Bunker club just before midnight. Zeppelin knew the doorman. They went down the steps. Even here the music was loud. The typical sourish, smoky, musty, grubby smell of cellar air came to meet them; it was so penetrating that Markus didn’t like to breathe in, but when the steel door opened the techno basses hammered on his body like a huge, invisible fist, and there was no more smell. There was only the sound, and the strobe light, and the swaying crowd, and the inaccessibly distant go-go girls gyrating on crates for platforms, flinging their hair around and circling their bellies and their asses and their cunts, wanting to be fucked and never, never, never getting fucked, at least not by him, not by Markus Umnitzer, and not by Frickel from the Gropiusstadt, and probably not by Klinke and Zeppelin, although they were two years older and had lewd tattoos on their upper arms.
Zeppelin pushed an Ecstasy tablet over, Markus paid, and washed it down with a large cola (Ecstasy didn’t mix well with alcohol for Markus). He stood around for a while longer, swaying slightly to the rhythm and keeping his eyes open for other, accessible women, and the closer he came to the dance floor the more superwomen there were on it. Gradually his shyness seeped out of his bones. He couldn’t dance, true, had never been able to dance, but he slowly loosened up, for a while he had a kind of invisible physical contact with a small, athletic woman with off-blond hair in a floppy top that kept slipping so that you could see her small, round, firm tits, he kept staring, and she let him. Hardly looked at him, but let him stare. It made him horny, although strictly speaking her breasts were so small that she could have been a man. Then he lost sight of the woman, danced on his own for a while, had a beer. Began dancing again, had eye-contact sex with a girl in torn pantyhose with black zombie eyes, and at some time it was all the same to him, he suddenly felt incredibly sexy, and then for a while felt nothing, there was only the music driving his breath out of his lungs. Then he found the off-blond with the athlete’s tits again, they agreed by eye contact to have a drink together, and sometime later, when both of them had drunk two Black Russians, they smooched in a corridor to the right of the toilets, he found out the real size of her breasts, fumbled a bit between her legs, but that was all there was to it.
All of a sudden someone had more pot. Markus smoked some to drive the disappointment out of his head. When they left he had entirely lost all sense of time. He didn’t understand why the others were laughing their heads off. They waited forever for a train. The cold gradually crept into their bodies, which had been danced to exhaustion, stimulated, and were now slackening again, and when he woke at some point on a bench everything about him hurt, his head, his hips, his crotch, he could hardly manage to get into the train that had just come in, and when he woke next time he found himself in a pad he didn’t know, his head on Zeppelin’s shoes. His throat was so dry it hurt. And his brain was swaying back and forth inside his skull so much that he almost lost his balance on the way to the bathroom.
That afternoon they went to McDonald’s. There were a few more of them now. Two hoolies had joined them, friends of Zeppelin’s, rather dopey characters who made an unnecessary amount of noise, so that after a while they were thrown out of McDonald’s and went to the next McDonald’s, until finally they went to the club again after hours, where in essence the same happened as the day before, except that this time, how he had no idea, Markus made it back to Grosskrienitz, where he woke on Sunday afternoon in his room, or more precisely was woken by Muddel just back from church.
He took a long shower and two aspirins, threw the sourish-smelling, sweaty, smoky, musty clothes in which he had slept into the laundry basket, and went down to the big kitchen cum living room, twice as large as before since the renovation, where Muddel and Klaus were cooking (that’s to say, Klaus was cooking, and she was allowed to chop something), and only then, when Muddel handed him two onions and a knife, did he remember the letter that was still in the back pocket of the jeans now in the laundry basket.
“I forgot something,” said Markus, and he went back to the bathroom to retrieve the letter, by this time rather battered and crumpled, from his jeans.
“This came,” he said, and gave Muddel the letter.
Muddel put her knife down and wiped her hands on her apron before opening the envelope.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Now Klaus, too, leaned over the letter. Muddel cast him an inquiring glance, which Klaus did not return. Suddenly Markus realized that someone had died.
Muddel gave him the letter, or rather the postcard, also with a black border, that had been inside the envelope, and there was nothing on the front of the card except the words:
Muddel looked at him; he didn’t know what she was expecting. It was ages since he had seen Granny Irina, and last time he had visited his grandparents she had been dead drunk, and spent the whole time crying and claiming that she wasn’t crying, she had thrown her arms around his neck and kept calling him “Sasha,” and after that he hadn’t been to see them again. And now… Markus looked at the name printed there, half of which was his own name. He looked at the name, and for a few moments everything else around him kind of disappeared, and he was feeling rather queasy, but maybe that was from yesterday evening.
He gave the card back to Muddel. Muddel turned it over, sat down, read what was on the back and told Klaus:
“The funeral’s on Friday. Goethestrasse.”
She looked inquiringly at Klaus again.
“Well, I’m not going on any account,” said Klaus. “All those old Socialist Unity comrades will be there…”
“She wasn’t in the Party,” said Muddel.
“You can go if you like,” said Klaus. And it sounded even less convincing when he added: “I’ve no objection.”
As they cooked, Klaus and Muddel talked a little more about Granny Irina (and her alcoholism), Grandpa Kurt (and whether he was still a Party member), and Wilhelm, whom Klaus had never met, but he spoke of him as if he were a criminal. It annoyed Markus that Muddel (as always) agreed with him. He remembered, as he folded the green napkins and put the green candles on the table, how when they had been to Wilhelm’s birthday party Muddel had told Klaus it was her mother’s birthday, and if he said nothing about that now, it was because he didn’t want to show Muddel up in front of Klaus.
Over the meal Klaus was boring on again about politics, or rather telling little anecdotes to make himself seem important. Who was interested in what Helmut Kohl had said at lunch last week, or in the theft of spoons from the Bundestag restaurant? Markus didn’t listen; suddenly he was ravenously hungry. There was roast pork fillet and spinach dumplings, but the fillet of pork was stuffed with Roquefort, and Markus ostentatiously scraped the Roquefort off, and Klaus was cross, you could see he was. But he said nothing.
And then, suddenly, a “family council” was announced.
It turned out that yet again a letter from his Telekom job had come. The usual: missed days at work there, bad marks, but now things were getting serious.
“It’s not about the fact that I got you the Telekom trainee post,” said Klaus—oh yes, it is, thought Markus, that was exactly what it was about.
He let the usual sermon wash over him: life, your profession, and if you don’t pull your socks up now… And then he was asked to give his own views.
“It’s all crap anyway,” said Markus. “At the start the Telekom people said everyone would be taken on. And now, all of a sudden, it’s going to be just one of us!”
