__________
Y o u _ B o y s
A r e _ D o i n g
t h e
R i g h t _ T h i n g
This week, Holger and I are on school tour four. I'm riding shotgun, so I have to get out at every stop, ring the doorbell, lead the children to the van, buckle them up. The only one I don't like to buckle up on this particular tour is Anke because she is usually drooling, and she always smells sweaty. Anke wears a red bicycle helmet, in case she has a seizure. Martin buckles himself up, and he talks incessantly. He insists we are driving too fast. Every day, he brings a new cardboard coaster and draws a speedometer on it that shows insane speeds, as proof for his teachers that we went too fast. Andreas is the youngest: he looks about five, but you can never tell. Andreas doesn't do anything. He just looks sort of cute, except that his mouth is open and his eyes are blank.
We're the last of the busses to make it to school, and the teacher with the short cropped hair gives us shit about it. Holger ignores her, just holds on to the wheel and stares straight through the windshield. I have to get out and unbuckle everybody. "We can't be on time if their parents aren't," I say, but the teacher just gives me a stern look.
"These boys went over a hundred and twenty," Martin says and waves his coaster. I pull the sliding door shut with a bang. Holger is flashing the finger at somebody low under the dash so they can't see it; I'm not sure if it's for the teacher or Martin or the whole bunch of them as they shuffle through the gates of the school.
Holger pulls out into traffic.
"I'm so ready for this shit to be over," he says.
I say, "Fuck yeah."
"They're really screwing us," Holger says. He looks at me straight on although he's speeding and the street is swarming with cars. "But I'll screw them back," he says. "I'll get out of here doing as little fucking work as possible."
"I don't know," I say. "Someone's gotta do it."
"Yes," he says. "But you better believe it wouldn't be me if they didn't force me. As a matter of fact--" he makes a pause, for effect, "we'll not follow any orders for a bit. Time for breakfast." He takes the microphone off the hook and turns the radio off. Without its occasional cackling to remind us that we're working, we seem free to go wherever. Holger takes a left on Konrad-Adenauer-Ring, heading straight downtown, to his apartment.
We park the bus second row in front of Holger's building, blocking two cars. The building is old, but the wooden stairs don't creak. Maybe they're so old all the creaking has been kicked out of them. There's a health bakery on the ground floor, and the heavy smell of bread that's rising up the stairway makes me hungry.
Holger knocks on his door, and Inka lets us in. She's wearing a bathrobe and looks sleepy. Holger holds her face in one hand and kisses her while I am still standing out on the staircase. Inka is a student in Berlin, and she's just visiting for two weeks. We go to the kitchen. Holger puts water on, and Inka asks me if I want some yoghurt. I like it when Inka asks me things.
"What kind of yoghurt do you have?" I say.
She leans into the fridge. The bathrobe rides up over her legs; I can see her calves, the back of her knees, a little thigh.
"Mango, Vanilla, Strawberry," she says.
"Thanks," I say, "I'm fine," and she turns back around. Holger is grinding coffee. He doesn't have a regular coffee maker like my parents. His involves whole beans and boiling water on the stove, metal filters and good timing. The first time I was over here, he told me he had bought it in Paris. Now, he turns on the little black boom box that sits on a shelf over the sink. Low bass drum, at least one-twenty beats per minute, then the ditz-ditz of a high hat, a five-note keyboard riff played over and over.
"This stuff is hot in Berlin right now," Holger says.
"It's pretty boring," I say.
"You wouldn't say that if you were at an illegal acid house party in a Kreuzberg basement," Inka says. She turns away from me to rinse mugs out in the sink. Holger is faking some house dance steps that remind me of a Janet Jackson video. Inka takes spoons from a drawer and bumps it shut with her hip. She's next to Holger now and falls into step with his dancing, and for just a second, they're in synch. I think, Ginger and Fred in fast forward, but then they fuck up and Inka giggles. Holger shrugs his shoulders and says to Inka, "Ollie here is the dancer, not me. You should see him at the kuz. He goes nuts on the dance floor."
"Not when they play techno," I say. "Too monotonous."
The water is boiling now and Holger pours it. The kitchen window opens into a yard that's surrounded by old grey buildings like this one. Someone out there yells something Turkish. I wonder if he's calling for prayer. It's almost nine. I don't know when they're supposed to call for prayer at all.
"Maybe I'll go into American Studies, too," I tell Inka. The coffee is pretty weak and tastes soapy, Paris or not.
"Where?" she says.
"Mainz."
"Mainz is no good," Holger says. "For American Studies, it's gotta be Berlin."
"Gotta be Berlin," Inka says.
"If I went to Mainz, I could stay here," I say.
"That's why it's gotta be Berlin," says Inka, and she winks at me, and I think that means she's just given me good advice. Not for a second do I think it means that she wants me to come to Berlin because she likes me. Just as if to prove that, she turns her head away in a dip, like fighter planes peeling off in formation, and looks up at Holger. They kiss again. The coffee seems to taste worse now.
"I better get dressed," Inka says and slips out of the kitchen.
"I'll be right back" Holger says and winks.
I say,"It's nine-thirty. Rotländer's gonna be pissed."
He holds up one index finger, "I'll hurry." He follows Inka into the bedroom. I put the mug to my lips but I don't drink. I look into the refrigerator. I turn the techno off. I look out the window. I listen. I yell something out into the courtyard that I think might sound Turkish.
Holger comes back twenty minutes later. "Let's go," he says. Downstairs, a man is waiting next to an Audi we blocked in. Holger waves at him, says "Thank you for your support." The man doesn't seem to mind. Holger kicks the bus hard on the way back to B-1, our headquarters. Rotländer and two medics are sitting on the back of chairs outside of his office. They're all in white; Rotländer always wears the white uniform even though he hardly ever leaves B-1.
". . . so I had no choice but to give him twice the dosage," he is saying, and then he sees us and says, "Kloppner! Decker! In here."
He points his thumb to the office, closes the door behind us, gives us the usual crap about turning the radio off. He points to his console and the black neck of his microphone. "This is the central nervous system of this operation. We bought these radios for a reason, guys. I needed two hundred sleeping bags from Flensburg, and I couldn't get a hold of you. Where the fuck have you been?"
Holger keeps his hands in the pockets of his jacket. He is looking straight at Rotländer. "Breakfast," he says. He takes a breath. "Even indentured servants are allowed breakfast."
Rotländer says, "Just for that, you're on night shift, Kloppner, for the next two weeks. Decker, you're on meals. That's it, gentlemen." He leans back into his chair and taps his fingers on the console, as if he has something important to do.
We hang around the lobby for a bit. Some of the others come in, Dietrich, Langner, Petersen. They sit down at another table, though. I drove with Langner for two or three weeks once, and we didn't have anything to talk about. Langner was a mechanic before he got drafted. I don't know anything about cars. He also told me about the time he got two whores and made them do the raven. I didn't know what that meant, doing the raven.
On the way back to school, Holger says, "Man, can you do me a favor? This night shift thing. I don't want to leave Inka alone, you know, while she's here."
"I don't think Rotländer would let us trade."
"Screw him. Rotländer isn't there at night, only the night operator. You don't even have to talk to him, just go straight up to the room."
"If there's a call?"
He shrugs his shoulders. We don't say anything else. We make it to school on time. Holger gets out and buckles everybody up. I scoot over to the driver's seat. He doesn't object, and we pull back out. When we come over the bridge, Andreas leans over the back and reaches his arm through between the front seats. He makes a little clicking sound, which is the most we've heard him do.
"What do you want?" Holger asks him.
Andreas keeps making the clicking sound. His hand is pointing at the dashboard, at the radio.
"The microphone," I say.
Holger pulls the bubbly, palm-sized microphone off its hook and gives it to Andreas, who takes it into both hands. The talk button on its side looks large. Andreas can't push it in. He makes some kind of voice, a faint sound, like something heard through fog or a forest.
"What?" Holger says.
Andreas says it again; it sounds like a little "hello".
"What?" Holger says again. I put my hand on his elbow to make him shut up.
"Hello, hello," Andreas says, both hands around the microphone. I think, his parents should be here to hear this.
"I don't think Andreas is allowed to use the CB radio," Martin says. "I think you boys aren't allowed to do that." Then Andreas drops the microphone, and sits back with his mouth open and his eyes blank. Martin keeps on talking, but it is more to himself than anything.
Andreas' dad is waiting for us on the street, and we can see from two blocks off that he's drunk. It seems like he's always drunk. We don't tell him about the microphone and Andreas talking. It would have pissed him off.
On the way back to B-1, Holger tries once more. "Maybe we can make a deal or something. It's not fair to Inka, her coming here and then I'm on goddamn night shift."
"I would do it," I say, "but it scares me. I mean, if there's a call--that's why I didn't become a medic. I can't stomach that stuff--"
"I'll make it up to you," he says. "You know I'll make it up to you."
"Like how?"
He taps his knuckles on the window. "I saw how you looked at Inka."
"What do you mean."
"I'm sure--she doesn't want me to work night shift either. Ollie. She'd make it worth-"
"Hold it right there. I don't want to hear it."
"You wouldn't believe some of the shit she's done," he whispers.
Somebody honks because the lights turned green and I'm not going. We drive in silence for a block. It's warm out now, but our windows are rolled up.
"I mean it," he says.
"No."
"Ok," he says. "Ok. Fine. I give up."
"Look," I say, "I'll do it. I'll do it, but I don't want anything for it. I'll do it just because you're so desperate. That's why I'll do it. Ok? And I don't want to hear anything anymore--"
"Ok." he says. "Ok. Thanks. Thanks, Ollie."
We park the bus, go in to punch, and leave. He looks at me one more time, with a frown, and I nod, but nothing more.
The first night is fine. The night operator doesn't know me; I just wave at him and go upstairs. There's one call around eleven, a man on Platter Strasse who needs his legs massaged. I drive out there and let myself in. The apartment smells sweet with just enough of that bitter, old smell to make me gag for a moment. He can't get out of bed, so he needs me to help him sit up and massage his legs. They fall asleep sometimes, and he tells me it hurts bad. His face is incredibly wrinkled, like the skin of five faces pushed onto one. I have no idea how old he is. I wonder: if he thinks it hurts bad, how much would I think it hurts?
I lean down over him as if I was about to kiss him. He puts his arms around me, and I lift him up. He isn't heavy at all. He doesn't smell; it's not him the bitter smell is coming from. I have trouble turning him around to face the side of the bed. While I'm holding his upper body, I grab his legs and pull them over the side. His legs are white and riddled with blue veins. I kneel down in front of him and start running my hands over his shins and calves.
"That feels so good," he says.
I nod.
"Are you one of those conscientious objectors?" he says.
"Yes," I say.
"Further up," he says, and I start kneading his knees.
"I think that's great," he says. "You boys are doing the right thing. War is terrible. You are good boys."
"I think it's the right thing, too," I say, but it comes out weak and unconvincing.
"You see what the war has done to me?" he says. He pulls the covers back all the way. He is naked. There is a chunk missing from his right thigh, on the inside, as if someone had carved a big piece of meat out of the old man. It's not pink or rosy; it doesn't look like a wound at all. The flesh is just as pale as the rest of his skin, and there's hair growing there. It looks like a cheek sucked in, only bigger.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"You can't let anything like that happen ever again," he says. "Do you understand that?"
"Yes, yes," I say. I massage a little faster. "I understand."
"Good," he says. He covers himself again. "Tell you what," he says. "Bet you boys aren't well paid."
"It's ok," I say. The truth is, because we get a food allotment and clothes money and because I'm still living at home, I make more than I would have in the military.
"See that commode over there? Top drawer. There's a box with a little sack inside. Get that."
I have trouble opening the drawer, and then it's full of boxes, mostly wood, some low cardboard ones, plastic transparent boxes with beads, or maybe earrings. "Which one?" I say.
"To the back, with the sunflower."
I find it; there's a cloth sack inside that fits right in my palm.
"What is it?"
"My teeth," he says. "Gold crowns. I know they don't pay you well. It's always the same."
I don't know what to say.
He flops his hand at me. "Go ahead, open it." He is smiling. I wonder how long it has been since he last had a chance to give a present. I pull the neck of the sack apart. Something is clicking inside. I open one hand and shake the contents into it. Four teeth fall out. They are the color of old piano keys, with gold crowns, worn shiny and thin, transparent at the corners. I am afraid to move my hand, or to touch them with the other. One of them has a single, long root that makes it look like a saber tooth. I try to imagine the old man with these teeth in his mouth. I can't; not without turning him into a predator, a friendly cartoon predator, an elephant or a harmless walrus.
"Thank you very much," I say. I hope that is enough.
The old man nods his head benevolently. "You're very welcome. Now, help me back down."
I put the teeth back, trying to touch them as little as possible, then slide the sack into the pocket of my whites. I put the old man's feet up first, careful to not let the covers slide over his thigh again.
On Friday night, a woman in Biebrich sets the alarm off and then doesn't speak, always an immediate emergency. It's out of our league, so we call the hospital for an ambulance. But since we have keys to all the patients' houses, I have to go urgent to let the medics in. It's three thirty when the night operator wakes me, and I'm whacked with sleep, and I can't get the van on, can't find the lights, don't know where the buttons and switches are for the siren. Then I find them and the parking lot flashes blue around me. The siren is incredibly loud. There's no one out in the streets, and I hit all the lights green. There are too many turns to go fast until I reach Biebricher Allee. I speed up as much as I can, run two red lights, and then I notice I have been whooping with excitement for the last hundred meters. The flashing blue light illuminates houses around me in a circle. The siren sounds all wrong, not like an ambulance's at all. I realize that's because I'm riding with it and can't hear the wailing of the Doppler effect that must be sneaking its way into the dreams of everybody in the houses around me.
Then I think about the woman. The ambulance has to come down all the way from the hospital. If I keep driving like that, I'll be there first. The woman might be dead, collapsed right next to the alarm, by the phone, or worse: she could still be alive, just barely, and I won't know what to do. Maybe there'll be convulsions; blood; spasms. I don't want to hear what she'll say. I imagine her eyes, wide and panicky. I pull over to the side, take a breath, fumble for the buttons, turn everything off, the siren, the blue light, the engine, roll the window down, close my eyes, take deep, slow breaths.
Somewhere above me, a window opens. There's light, voices. If I just stay calm, I'll be alright. Another window opens and closes. Then the lights go out again. My radio feeps; I freak and hit my elbow on the door. The ambulance is in, the operator tells me, they don't need me any more. I'm still shaking, so I sit for another minute. Then I drive back very slowly. When I come in, I just wave at the operator. I want to ask about the woman, but it's better not to. It takes me a long time to go to sleep again, and when I do, I fall into a dream full of corpses and anguish and long, dirty fingernails.
Holger calls me Saturday. We decide to go to the kuz. I pick him and Inka up at ten, and we drive over to Mainz. We all talk about movies, and Holger talks about Marcel Proust. The kuz is good and crowded, and three beers into it, I'm on fire. As usual, the music is loud enough so you don't have to talk, and I'm glad. Inka looks awful; her eyes are sunken in, and although it can't be, I imagine she has lost weight since I last saw her, less than a week ago. She doesn't dance much. She sits on the ground a lot, back against the wall, arms around her knees. I'm on the dance floor all the time, except for the couple of ska tunes they play. Mostly, it's Holger and me dancing next to each other. Sometime after two, Inka wants to leave. On the way back, they both sit in the back seat, and I beat the wheel in time to the music on the radio. The Rhine gleams like oil in the moonlight.
Since night shift doesn't start until 6 pm, I try to sleep in as long as I can. On Monday, the phone wakes me at noon. It's Holger. The first thing he says is, "What the fuck did you do?"
It turns out that somebody in those houses on Biebricher Allee must have written down the van number that's painted on top and called in to complain. They thought it was some kind of prank, reckless c.o.s rough-housing with the vehicles, abusing their privileges, on and on. Of course, Rotländer demanded an explanation, and Holger couldn't give him any. So Rotländer pulled out his biggest gun: technically, we should all be living at headquarters, just like soldiers. But nobody does, and generally, nobody wants us to, so we are on permanent leave. Rotländer revoked Holger's--he has to live at B-1 for a month now, stay in one of the rooms under the roof.
"What the fuck did you do?"
I tell him about the woman, about going urgent. I tell him how I had to pull over.
"You chickened. I have to sleep under the fucking roof because you chickened."
"You ever have to go urgent?" I ask him.
"That's not the point," he says.
"What's the point?"
"The point is, you fucked up. We had a deal, and you didn't hold up your end of the agreement."
"Agreement?" I say. "I was doing you a favor. Sorry I didn't do well enough."
"Oh, that's right, you were too valiant to accept my offer."
"Whatever."
"Hey, guess what, man, your meal tour starts in a couple of minutes. You better hurry down here, because I'm not going. I gotta be here for night shift. Thank you for nothing." He hangs up.
Of course, I am late for the meals-on-wheels. The food is usually cold by the time we deliver anyway. One couple at the end of the tour is waiting outside their house and complaining, each echoing the other's sentences. I grin and smile and charm and wave my way out of it. When I drive off, they wave back and I'm sure they won't call B-1. There isn't anything for me to do after that, so I punch out and walk downtown.
In Karstadt's basement, next to the Mr. Minit desk where they copy keys, I find a place that buys jewelry, silver, and gold. The jeweler whistles when he sees the long tooth. I sell all four for fifteen Marks, just enough for a nice price CD.
I ride the escalator up to the record department on the second floor. On a sales table, I find an Italian Jimi Hendrix bootleg. The cover doesn't give the date or location of the concert, it just says, "Jimi in California." It has a seventeen- minute "Voodoo Chile," so I buy it. I walk around the pedestrian area, get a sausage, watch a busker who plays folk songs on a guitar with his own generator and a cruddy PA. After six o'clock, I head over to Holger's house.
Inka is leaning against the door frame as I come up the stairs. She is wearing tight, dark blue jeans and a red fuzzy sweater.
"Hey," I say.
"Ollie," she says. "Holger isn't here."
"Yeah," I say. "I just wanted to bring you something real quick."
"Oh," she says and waves her arm. "You want to come in? Coffee?"
"Sure, I'd love some coffee."
Inka moves through the kitchen without wasting a move. I imagine all the men's kitchens she has made coffee in before. A long line of men, winding all the way from Berlin to right here. I'm glad I came. She sits down across from me while we're waiting for the water to boil. She rests her face in her hands. She looks tired.
"So what do you have for me?"
"It's a present," I say. "You have to promise something, though."
"What?" She puts her head to one side, like a schoolgirl.
"That you'll never forget about the war."
Her eyes roll back. "Ow," she says. "What is this shit all about."
I blush. "Please?"
She says it in a deep, fake-serious voice, "Ok: I'll never forget about the war."
I give her the CD, face down because it's not wrapped.
"Hey," she says, "cool. Thank you." She puts on a goofy face and flashes me a peace sign.
"Never mind," I say.
"No, really, thanks," she says.
The water is starting a low gargle. The noise grinds on my nerves, I wish the temperature would kick the water to boil and rip into us with a sharp whistle--but the gargle drags on and on.
"I'm going back tomorrow," she says. "With Holger having to work night shift, I'd just sit around during the day and sleep alone at night. Might as well go home."
I don't know what to say. The water is almost there, not quite yet. Inka gets up and pours it anyway. It never whistled.
"It's sort of my fault," I say.
She looks up at me. "Because of the woman?"
"You heard about that."
"First thing out of Holger's mouth."
I put milk and sugar in my coffee, just to avoid her eyes.
"I don't blame you," she says. "I wouldn't want to have to do that, finding someone dead and stuff."
"Still," I say.
We drink coffee for a while, without saying anything. Then she puts a hand on my elbow and leans toward me. "I'll have to hide this. Holger gets really jealous." She holds her hand a little longer on my elbow and looks at me, just long enough to make me wonder, and then she turns. I wash down the rest of the coffe and follow her out into the hallway. She fumbles with her bag, packing the CD away. She puts it all the way in the bottom; I watch her as she stuffs handfulls of clothes on top of it. She looks up at me and winks. I wink back. I thank her for the coffee. She straightens up. The hallway is around us. We say good bye, putting one hand on each others' shoulder. Inka closes the door, and I walk down the stairs that never make a sound. I step out into the street.
Jürgen Fauth studied in his native Germany and at the Center for Writers in the U.S. His stories have appeared in Enterzone, Georgetown Review, Mississippi Review Web, and elsewhere, and he publishes Der Brennende Busch, a web-based literary magazine in German.
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