In the middle of that summer, something beautiful happened. When I went round to Ludwig’s one day, he was in the workshop, which was unusual. There he was in a corner, kneeling in front of a scarlet Triumph T20 Tiger Cub, one of the oldest motorbikes there, a rusty 1959 model. The stuffing was bursting out of the saddle, the wires and Bowden cables were frayed, and it had a damaged piston. The owner had brought it to be fixed years ago and hadn’t been seen since. Some said he’d run away from the responsibilities of fatherhood. Others said he’d ended up under a bus.
Ludwig was removing the front mudguard when I arrived. I went over to him and watched him struggling with the spanner. One of the bolts had rusted fast and he couldn’t get a purchase on it. I could tell from the look on his face that he’d been trying for some time. I also knew he hadn’t asked his father how you undid a rusty bolt, though he was there in the workshop too, holding a dark plastic mask with a small window to his face as he welded a frame. When he’d finished his welding, I went and asked him how you undid a rusty bolt. He fetched a yellow can with a red valve and told me it was rust remover—it would do the job in half an hour max. He didn’t look at me. I took the can, went back to Ludwig’s motorbike and sprayed all the rusty bolts. We spent the afternoon taking the Triumph to pieces. Ludwig didn’t say he’d begun to overhaul it so that we’d have a motorbike when he and I turned eighteen later in the year. He didn’t need to. It was a brilliant idea.
We started to spend a lot of time tinkering in the workshop, and as we worked, we pondered what we’d do when we left school. We wanted work we could do together, of course, but it wasn’t easy to find anything that appealed to us.
‘University’s boring,’ said Ludwig, as we removed the cylinder head from the cylinder, and he was, of course, absolutely right. We didn’t want to waste any more of our lives sitting in musty rooms while outside, in the real world, time overtook us. We racked our brains for a while until Ludwig suddenly said, ‘We’ll build a tower in Asia.’
I knew at once where he was coming from. There had been a lot of reports on how even young people could make heaps of money with real estate in Asia, and there was no reason we couldn’t give it a go.
No sooner was the idea voiced than we began to dream up a project of our own—though ‘dream’ is probably the wrong word, because we took it all very seriously and didn’t for a second doubt that we’d actually build our tower. We gave careful thought to the location. We rejected Seoul and Manila, thought long and hard about Saigon and eventually agreed on Hanoi, because Hanoi was not yet too developed—it had potential. Our tower would be the tallest in the world, of course, and that meant at least 450 metres. It was to be a round tower that tapered towards the top, like a chimney, and we wanted it built in red brick with non-reflective windows—not big windows, but plenty of them. We envisaged a classically handsome building, with flats and offices. Ludwig drew the tower in engine oil on a newspaper, and we hung the drawing in our corner of the workshop.
It was wonderful talking about our Asian tower as we inserted spokes into the wheel rims or adjusted cogs in the gearbox. We stayed in the workshop far into the evening, listening to bugs and gnats sizzle on the fluorescent tubes, and talking and talking. The top floor would be our office, of course—an immense loft, 450 metres above Hanoi, above the world.
‘We’ll have the most stunning secretaries you can imagine,’ I said.
‘At the top of a tower like that, anything is possible,’ said Ludwig.
We spent a lot of time working out the best way to power our lift, because it had to be fast, of course—as fast as lightning, the fastest in the world. We wondered about jets, about rockets—it was glorious. Building in Hanoi wouldn’t cost much, so getting hold of money for the construction would be a cinch. There were shares, the internet, millions of possibilities—and the banks would cough up the balance. Other people managed, didn’t they, and there were two of us. We were twins—together, we could do anything.
I’m afraid, though, that Ludwig’s mood grew worse over the course of that summer. Even when working on the motorbike, he was bad-tempered and unusually taciturn—it was only the imaginary building work on our tower in Asia that seemed to cheer him up a bit. Once the topic was exhausted—once we’d agreed, for instance, that we’d give preference to stockbrokers, modelling agencies and private military contractors when letting the offices—he fell to brooding.
I have a clear recollection of sitting with him on the grass one day, removing rust from the brake and clutch levers. All of a sudden, he stopped, looked at the brake lever and said, ‘Isn’t it strange that somebody’s life can depend on a stupid bit of metal like this? I mean, you pull it at the wrong moment, or you don’t pull it at all, and wham! Funny, eh?’ He went back to his sanding. He was right, of course, and as he said it, the thought seemed as familiar to me as if I’d thought it myself at that same instant. That was normal for us—it happened all the time—and yet I began to worry about him.
There was no overlooking the growing trouble he was having maintaining our ideal weight. He ate only two-thirds of what I ate, at most, and yet he felt permanently hungry. That, I think, was the main reason for his bad mood. Never being able to eat enough can be punishing, as I’d later discover for myself. It was probably the combination of eating so little and training such a lot that was getting him down. We’d stopped going to the taverna altogether.
‘Just the smell of that Greek shit is enough to make you fat,’ he said.
It was a surprise to us both when we lost the regatta in the neighbouring town. The twins from Potsdam overtook us in the final spurt, beating us by half a length, and we stepped up our training.
Training and tinkering—that’s how we spent our summer. It was a lot of work to get the old Triumph back in shape. We spent hours scratching rust from the paintwork with wire brushes, took parts to be painted, chrome-plated, upholstered, got hold of new pistons, new cylinders. I often went to Ludwig’s father to ask his advice, and he was always glad to give it. If anything, his answers to my questions were sometimes far too detailed. But he never gave us any practical help, never touched our bike. It was as if someone had chalked a line around our corner of the workshop, and Ludwig’s father knew not to cross it.
Around this time Ludwig started to get funny if he thought I was spending too much time with anyone else. We spent almost every waking minute together as it was, but I did sometimes ride home at lunchtime to eat with my mother, who was very lonely. It wasn’t long after our defeat, I think, that Ludwig asked me whether this was really necessary—whether it wasn’t driving a wedge between us and making it harder for us to grow together. I’d been wondering about that too and had come to the same conclusion. Besides, it wasn’t exactly pleasant having lunch with my mother, because she was always going on about my father, though apparently without the least resentment. You’d have thought from the way she spoke that she was expecting him back for dinner at the latest—and looking forward to it. I found this hard to cope with, so I’m sure I was right to abandon that particular routine.
My mother insisted, though, that I sleep at home during the week. ‘Until you’re eighteen,’ she said. That put Ludwig in a foul mood. He’d suggested moving a second bed into his room—a good suggestion, and a very reasonable one. It would, of course, have been wonderful to talk about our Asian tower just before we drifted off, in that sleepy state where you’re almost dreaming and it’s so much easier to give free rein to your fantasies. By then we’d decided to make the tower five hundred metres, to make it harder for anyone to outdo us. Our flag would fly from the top.
Our work on the Triumph was going well. We’d got all the parts working again or bought new ones, and now we began to rebuild it. It was incredibly satisfying, hanging that gleaming engine in its newly painted frame and screwing it tight. Over time we’d become good mechanics and hardly needed Ludwig’s father’s advice anymore. When Vera came into the workshop, she and I only gave each other a brief nod. She stayed at the front with her father, watching him work.
Ludwig usually went to bed at about midnight, after we’d listened to the radio for a bit. When I was sure his father had knocked off for the evening, I’d leave the house and head for the workshop, where I’d be sure to find the light on. Since our first time together, Vera often waited for me—in fact, come to think of it, she waited every night. As soon as she saw me, she’d throw her arms around my neck and start kissing me. I felt a bit uncomfortable about this—the workshop was a place I shared with Ludwig—but I let it happen.
We never spoke until after we’d had sex. I didn’t do much talking even then, but Vera talked a great deal. I liked listening to her. Sometimes the cat came and sat on the grass just near where we were lying and looked at us. Cats look so severe when they sit up straight and still like that—so stern, almost reproachful—and there was no ignoring Otto. It was no use just looking away—his oily smell carried to us on the breeze.
Vera seemed a little taller every time I saw her—she was still growing. She wanted to be tall, but more than anything she was waiting for her breasts to fill out. Sometimes it happened late, she said, cupping first her right breast and then her left.
‘Do they seem bigger to you?’ she asked.
‘I think so,’ I said.
‘Feel,’ she said.
I put my hand on her right breast and then on her left one.
‘Yes, a bit,’ I said.
‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter if they don’t grow any more. The main thing is that they’re a nice shape.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you think they’re a nice shape?’ she asked.
‘Very nice,’ I said, and it was true. They were almost perfectly round. They weren’t the kind of breasts you could lay your head between, but they felt nice—firm but yielding. Besides, I liked her mole.
‘If they grow some more, I’ll have a perfect figure,’ said Vera. ‘Not many girls have long legs and big breasts.’
‘You already have a perfect figure,’ I said.
‘True,’ she said. ‘But who cares, anyway? Do you know what? I want to come and live in your tower in Asia too.’
It was always the same with her. After we’d done it, she only ever lay quiet for a moment, then something would pop into her head and she’d start chattering away. I couldn’t just lie on the blanket and listen to her, though, because she always had so many questions.
‘How high is it going to be now?’ she asked.
‘Five hundred metres,’ I said.
‘How much higher than the bridge is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. We looked up at the bridge. I liked watching the white shimmer of the headlamps, moving like streaks of light. ‘Maybe eight times as high,’ I said.
‘I want the floor down from you,’ she said, ‘the second-highest. You boys have to live right at the top, of course, no question of that.’ She could be quite cheeky. ‘But do you know what? I think your tower’s going to be too gloomy—dark red bricks and such small windows. Why are you making it so gloomy?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘We like it like that.’
‘Oh well,’ she said, ‘maybe I’ll tie a bow around my floor—a yellow one. How long do you think the ribbon would have to be?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said. I didn’t want a bow around our tower in Asia.
‘My floor’s going to be amazing,’ she said. ‘I’ve got it all planned out. No walls—not a single wall, not even around the toilet—and hardly any furniture. Just a bed, a cupboard, a table and a chair—but loads of flowers and plants. Do they have ivy in Hanoi? Ivy would be great. We could grow it up the tower—it wouldn’t look so gloomy all covered in green. And I’d like tortoises,’ she went on, ‘lots of tortoises. I’d let them go wherever they liked, in and out of the flowers and plants—what do you think?’
‘Why tortoises?’ I asked.
She straddled me.
‘They’re so slow,’ she said.
A little later the questions started up again: ‘Will you come and visit me on my floor?’
I didn’t like that. The tower in Asia was something between Ludwig and me. I didn’t mind Vera daydreaming about it—I even liked the thought of her living up there with her plants and tortoises, nearly five hundred metres in the air. But I didn’t want her talking about the tower and me in the same breath. I can’t remember how I answered her question—or if I answered at all—but I don’t think she persisted, because I pulled her down to me and kissed her breasts. Maybe she even bit me. She never could resist biting me just as I was starting to revive, and I rarely managed to suppress a cry. Sometimes it was swallowed by a truck, and sometimes it wasn’t.
There’d been a few things I had to get straight with Vera right from the start. After our first time it was funny seeing her in school the next day, especially as I was with Ludwig when she walked past. We gave each other a nod as we always did, and I was glad it was over and done with, everything back to normal. That made it all the more annoying when fat Flavia, Vera’s best friend, handed me a note in the morning break. Ludwig wasn’t around. Meet me at lunchtime? it said on one side of the paper, and Physics lab on the other. I didn’t go. I wasn’t having any of that. You had to keep things separate. I think I managed to make that clear to her. We only met on nights when spending time with her meant giving up sleep, not giving up my time with Ludwig. I don’t see that anyone could have objected.
Vera often surprised me. One night, for instance, after telling me a bit about her friend Flavia, she said, ‘It’s really nice with Flavia too.’
‘What?’ I said.
Vera kissed me tenderly on the lips, and just then it started to rain, rather suddenly. We hurried into our clothes, I gave her a kiss and we went our separate ways. On the wet bike ride home, I thought a lot about what Vera had said and about her kiss. Did that mean she’d been with Flavia too? To be honest, I found it hard to imagine—Vera in bed with her fat friend. I knew it wasn’t as weird when it was girls as it would be for us, but the next time with Vera was a bit strange—I kept seeing her with fat Flavia instead of me. I’m not saying the thought was entirely unpleasant, just slightly bizarre. Afterwards I asked her whether she was really sleeping with Flavia and me.
‘I don’t sleep with you,’ she said. ‘We do it on a blanket under a bridge.’
She really could be quite cheeky. But I didn’t mind. I gave no more thought to Flavia—or only every now and then.
I’m afraid there was an ugly scene one day, a scene I don’t like to describe, but it was part of that summer and can’t be left out. Ludwig and I had been training hard and were so exhausted that we caught the riverboat home instead of riding our bikes. We sat side by side on a bench at the front, letting the wind cool us, one of those moments when you’re too tired to speak but don’t need to, each understanding perfectly how the other feels. But when we got back to the house under the bridge and went straight to the workshop, we saw something we’d never seen before: Vera was sitting on our Triumph, twisting the throttle grip, which wasn’t yet connected to the carburettor.
Remembering what happened next makes me shudder. Ludwig rushed across the workshop, grabbed his sister by the shoulders and tore her off the Tiger Cub, knocking it over on top of her. That turned out to be lucky, because it gave her at least some protection from the blows—and, I’m sorry to say, kicks—inflicted on her by her brother. If it hadn’t been for their father, who was in the workshop gutting an exhaust pipe, I’d never have got Ludwig off his sister. I dragged him outside, and on the grass beside the workshop he lunged at me. Too well matched, we wrestled for ages, neither of us able to get the better of the other, until finally, simultaneously, we gave up. We soon made it up, deciding that the length and intensity of our fight were further evidence of how alike we’d become. Looking back, I don’t think there was anything so unusual about Ludwig’s attack on Vera. Things often get pent up between brother and sister and then suddenly erupt, and such incidents can seem worse at first sight than they actually are.
The further the summer went on, the quieter things grew between Ludwig and me. For one thing, the assembly work demanded a great deal of concentration, and for another, Ludwig really wasn’t in a good way. I did all the talking and all the work while he sat cross-legged next to the Triumph, watching me. If I turned to look at him, I’d see that it wasn’t my hands he was watching as I filed and hammered—it was my face.
I can recall only one thing Ludwig said around that time, but it was so apt that it was almost poetic. ‘A motorbike,’ he said, ‘is like a coxless pair. Two lives, one fate.’
‘That’s what makes it so perfect for us,’ I added, and I seem to remember feeling almost touched.
The day I put in the manifold and the exhaust pipe, neither of us had spoken for over an hour when it occurred to me that it was a long time since we had last talked about our tower in Asia. Not wanting to lose sight of our project altogether, I suggested putting in an underground car park beneath the tower—the deepest underground car park in the world. Ludwig liked that kind of thing, and he seemed very bad-tempered lately—he needed cheering up. So as I tried to screw the exhaust pipe to the manifold—a fiddly business because the parts weren’t a perfect match—I told him that our underground car park would need forty levels, because there’d be so many people living and working in the tallest tower in the world.
‘Forty levels,’ I said, doing the sums out loud, ‘would go at least a hundred and forty metres into the earth—it would mean digging a really enormous hole.’
What appealed to me the most, though, was the thought of driving all the way up from the bottom. Even in regular multistorey car parks I loved those hairpin bends connecting the levels and the thrill you got in your belly, driving up and down.
I think I had just told Ludwig how we’d ride our Triumph all the way from the lowest level up to the top—at high speed, of course—when he suddenly interrupted me.
‘Stop it,’ he said. ‘Stop going on about that stupid fucking tower.’
I felt slightly hurt to begin with, but I soon realised he was right—the tower was a childish idea we’d outgrown. He didn’t have to say it the way he did, but he was hardly eating at the time. In spite of his diet, he was usually a kilo or two heavier than me before the regattas and had to sweat off the excess weight—go jogging with two tracksuits on, one on top of the other, and then finish off in the sauna. We’d won one regatta and lost the next. After that there were only three weeks to go until the regional championships on our reservoir.
We didn’t mention the tower again for a while, though Vera sometimes talked about it, chattering away about her plants and tortoises, and dithering between a yellow bow and a green one. I never bothered replying. I have a feeling I was pretty grumpy and uncommunicative myself at the time.
It was my poor mother who had to bear the brunt of my moods. She only ever got to see me at breakfast—by the time I got home at night, she’d long since gone to bed. She’d recently begun to snore slightly, which I knew because she always left the door to her room ajar. Until I got back, she only half slept. ‘I get worried,’ she told me at breakfast on more than one occasion, and there was no mistaking the reproach in her voice. I said nothing. I can’t remember a word of what I might have said to my mother back then. It’s possible I didn’t speak at all. She was working in the department store again, but in ladies’ clothes, not curtains. She often saw my father and his new wife in the canteen, and sometimes they had coffee together. That annoyed me. Most of what my mother said annoyed me. It began first thing in the morning with Johann, time to get up, her voice all nice and kind, and her hand stroking my cheek as she said it.
I do remember seeing her once at about three in the morning. I’d been with Vera and hadn’t long been asleep when I was woken by the phone. I jumped straight out of bed, because it could only be Ludwig—and it was. He’d sometimes rung me at night in the past when he’d had a sudden thought he couldn’t keep to himself—that we ought to build our Asian tower in Rangoon, the capital of Burma, for instance, rather than in Hanoi. But it hadn’t happened for a while.
‘Johann,’ he said, ‘get dressed and come round right away.’ He sounded wide awake.
‘Has something happened?’ I asked, but it was a stupid question. I could hear that nothing bad had happened. I even thought I detected excitement in his voice.
Just then my mother came out of her bedroom. Has something happened? her eyes asked. She was wearing striped pyjamas, and her hair was so thin, I wondered whether she wore a wig during the day, and I suddenly felt sorry for her. Perhaps I felt sorry for myself, too—I’m not sure. I didn’t want an old mother, but I knew then that was exactly what I had. After years of not caring how old our mothers and fathers were, it had recently started to matter to us. Anyone with young parents had acquired a certain kudos, perhaps because we assumed that young parents were like friends—or just less embarrassing. We were of an age when parents were almost permanently embarrassing. If someone had a party, for example, you could be sure that their parents would soon turn up and start dancing. They would dance differently from everyone else and wouldn’t notice how embarrassing they were. I saw an awful lot of parents dancing at parties and the looks on their children’s faces. It was painful, especially when the parents were old. My mother spared me that, but she did, as I realised that night, have extremely thin hair. I resolved not to be seen with her anymore. We really could be very cruel at times.
As Ludwig kept talking, I tried to reassure her with looks and gestures.
‘Okay,’ I said in the end, and hung up. ‘That was Ludwig,’ I told my mother. ‘He’d had a sudden thought.’
‘At three in the morning?’ she asked.
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ I said. ‘Go back to bed.’
Isn’t it strange that a time comes when you start sending your parents to bed? And isn’t it even stranger that they obey you? My mother went to the toilet and then to bed. I got dressed and waited in my room until I heard her soft snores.
Ludwig met me at the garden gate. I could see straight away that he was looking much more cheerful than he had in a long time. He took my bike and pushed it into the garden.
‘At last,’ he said.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked.
‘Come with me,’ he said. ‘Something’s happened.’
He led me to the other end of the garden at a kind of jog. There, at the edge of the wood, I could see somebody lying on the ground. I stopped. Vera, I thought. It was clearly a human body, but it wasn’t moving.
‘Ludwig,’ I said, ‘what is it? Who’s that lying there?’ I almost asked: What have you done? but I knew immediately that he wouldn’t do such a thing. He was my brother.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come closer.’
‘Who is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Ludwig.
‘Is she…is he dead?’ I asked.
‘Dead? Yes, of course. Come on.’
I took two steps towards the body and saw that it was a man with short hair, smaller than us. He wasn’t really lying—he was huddled up with his face to the ground, one leg folded beneath his body, the other stretched out behind him. His bum was slightly raised and his back arched more sharply than you would have thought possible.
‘He jumped half an hour ago,’ said Ludwig. ‘I heard him land and came straight out. The others are asleep.’
‘Are you sure he’s dead?’ I asked.
‘Anyone jumping from up there has to be dead,’ he said.
I looked up and saw streaks of light flash by as cars flew over the bridge.
‘Have you rung the police?’ I asked.
‘Just look at the funny way he’s lying,’ said Ludwig. He took a step towards the body.
For a while neither of us spoke. A car drove west, another east.
‘Come on, let’s sit down,’ said Ludwig, settling himself cross-legged in front of the body and leaning forward, his elbows propped on his legs, chin resting on his hands. ‘What do you think his name is?’
‘Don’t know,’ I said.
‘Aren’t you going to sit down?’ he said, and I squatted down behind him on my haunches.
‘Do you think it’s a good idea,’ I asked, ‘to be sitting here like this when the police come?’
‘Wonder why he jumped,’ said Ludwig. ‘Maybe his girlfriend left him, maybe he just had a boring life, maybe he was going to die anyway. Imagine being told you’re terminally ill—that you’ll soon be in constant pain and wheelchair-bound and all that shit.’ A truck drove over the bridge. ‘Though he doesn’t look ill,’ Ludwig said.
‘When are the police coming?’ I asked.
‘The police don’t understand this kind of thing,’ Ludwig said.
‘So you haven’t called them.’
‘I called you,’ he said. We were silent. For a moment I thought the dead man had moved, but of course he couldn’t have.
‘Isn’t it amazing, the way he’s lying there?’ said Ludwig. ‘So quiet and still. Have you ever seen anyone that still? I haven’t. Even when you’re asleep, you move a bit—you breathe and snore—but this guy really is completely still.’
‘Please call the police,’ I said.
‘Now listen,’ Ludwig said, ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for something to happen, something big. Death is a big deal, you know that. A dead man can tell us things, and I’m not going to let the police fuck that up for me. This dead man belongs to us—just us, you and me. We’re going to come back and sit here some more, and things will be good for us.’
I think he said something along those lines. He was crouching in front of me, grasping me firmly by the shoulders. I nodded. He thumped me on the back with his right hand. Then he got up.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you go home now. I’ll sort things out here.’
I got up and had another look at the dead man. I noticed that he was wearing shorts. Why’s that? Why would a grown man wear shorts? I wondered. I couldn’t see his face, but he didn’t look like a child—he was too big. Then I left. At the garden gate I turned and saw Ludwig dragging the dead man under the trees.
At school the next morning we didn’t mention the dead man, but I think we both felt a certain excitement—an excitement that bound us together as nothing had before. We were the guardians of a secret, but it was not the kind of secret usually kept—or rather, flaunted—by people our age. Ours was a real secret, and we cared even less than usual when our geography teacher tied himself in knots trying to explain the current political situation in the Balkans. We exchanged glances and smiled.
After school we went for a long row and then spent the rest of the afternoon putting the wiring harness in the Triumph. In the evening we sat in Ludwig’s room with the radio on. At eleven, he started listening at the door to see if his father had gone to bed at last. It was after midnight when we crept downstairs. I was worried Vera might be waiting for me in the workshop, and the light was indeed on. But Ludwig didn’t see it, or else he saw it and thought his father was still tinkering about after all.
We walked to the edge of the woods and Ludwig pulled the dead man out from the undergrowth. For the first time I saw his face. It was broad, with quite a round nose, and he was missing a few teeth. His hair covered his ears and looked strangely neat. I wondered whether Ludwig had combed it the day before.
That night we sat with our dead man until dawn. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. It wasn’t a solemn occasion—or only to begin with, perhaps, when Ludwig spoke of our friendship and how alike we’d become, and how important the dead man said it was that we stick together. We were twins, and now the dead man was with us too, but that made no difference except maybe to bind us even closer, because we shared him with one another and shared things were binding, whereas things you kept to yourselves drove a wedge between you.
He went on like that for the first half-hour while I, still somewhat tense, sat beside the dead man—not right beside him, but a metre or two away, cross-legged like Ludwig. I thought Ludwig had spoken well. Then the mood changed. It may seem odd, but before long we were feeling upbeat, even happy, and had to keep reminding each other not to laugh too loudly.
It began when Ludwig asked after a short pause why the dead man would be wearing shorts. He’d noticed, of course, just as I had. We always thought the same things, however ridiculous. The dead man was wearing pale corduroy shorts and even had a belt. Our fathers never wore short trousers, and neither did our teachers—none of the men we knew did, even in summer, no matter how hot it was, and we puzzled over it for a while. It’s amazing how trying to work out why a man might wear shorts can lead you to imagine an entire life for him. Hot weather might just be reason enough for a man who spends all day out in the open, we thought—and who does that apart from builders and farmers?
We decided he was a farmer, as there were some farmers in the region and he did have a rustic look about him. That told us he hadn’t had a wife, because farmers couldn’t find wives these days—and that in turn told us why he’d killed himself. He was lonely, and couldn’t stand it anymore—all day in the barn and out in the fields without a wife. We were quiet for a while, because we felt sorry for him. It was sad to think of him sitting in his farmhouse in the evenings, tired from work and feeling lonely. Then one of us—I think it was me—said that the reason farmers couldn’t find wives was probably that they wore shorts. We started to giggle and were soon in a silly mood we couldn’t get out of.
‘Men in shorts,’ said Ludwig, ‘always sit with their legs apart so you can see their balls, and women don’t like that.’
Perhaps it seems inappropriate that we talked like that about a dead man—and in the presence of a dead man—but I didn’t feel bad about it at the time and I don’t today. It’s just the way it was. When I think about the hysterical way we carried on that night, though, I do wonder whether the decomposing corpse wasn’t releasing some kind of laughing gas.
We imagined that he’d run a small organic farm, been nice to his pigs and hadn’t felt bad at all during the day, because he knew he was doing everything right and that he was a good person. But none of that was any use to him when he sat in his farmhouse in the evenings, drinking beer and watching endless football matches—even second-division games. When the phone rang, he’d think maybe it was the blond he’d met at the local dance, but it would only be the vice-president of the Livestock Association. Ludwig’s voice cracked slightly as he said that, and he may even have had tears in his eyes.
I felt very much at ease sitting there next to the dead man with Ludwig. I didn’t want the night to end, especially once we’d brought the dead man to life and begun to imagine him living with us. We planned to take him with us to our tower in Asia—he’d be useful there, because farmers are good handymen. It was hilarious imagining him as the caretaker in our tower, running up and down the stairs in his shorts and shooing the little Vietnamese people along in front of him. We liked him and were able to put him to good use.
We hardly noticed it getting light, but eventually we realised that the traffic on the bridge had grown heavier. We’d been lying on the grass, not talking, for an hour, each of us thinking his own thoughts. They were probably the same thoughts, pleasant thoughts of our future. When it was almost properly light, Ludwig dragged our farmer back into the undergrowth.
I’m afraid that our dead man began to smell the following night. It had been hot during the day and didn’t cool down properly in the evening. He gave off a sweet, slightly nauseating smell. We tried to revive the mood of the previous night, but with that smell in the air it was hopeless. Ludwig spoke gloomily of the pointlessness of a world where you couldn’t live with the dead, and despite sharing all his thoughts, I’m not sure I quite understood what he was getting at—at least not consciously. Our conversation tailed off and we sat in silence beside the dead man, who looked considerably worse than the previous night—older, much older.
‘What are we going to do with him now?’
I asked as the traffic on the bridge came to life.
Ludwig said nothing, and I rode home on my bike feeling sad.
When we were fitting the chain over the cogs the next day, a police car pulled up in front of Ludwig’s parents’ house. Because of the heat, we’d pushed the motorbike outside, where we could work in the shade. Two policemen got out and walked to the garden gate, the way policemen always walk: slowly, legs apart, faces inscrutable, as if they knew a great deal but weren’t allowed to talk.
‘The cops,’ Ludwig called into the workshop.
His father came out, wiping his oily hands on an oily cloth. I could sense his nervousness. He walked to the garden gate and we followed him.
One of the policemen said a man had gone missing, and since there’d been several cases of people jumping and landing in this garden, they wanted to know whether we’d noticed anything unusual.
I was suddenly afraid you might be able to smell the dead man even from the gate and began to sniff—quite loudly, Ludwig later told me, but the policemen didn’t notice.
‘No one’s landed here,’ said Ludwig’s father. ‘Sometimes they fall over by the agricultural repair shop,’ he added.
‘Would it be possible,’ one of the policemen asked, ‘for someone to land in the bushes over there without your noticing?’
‘If anyone jumps here, we know about it,’ said Ludwig’s father. ‘And my son always hears it when somebody jumps, even if the rest of us don’t.’
‘Haven’t heard anything lately,’ said Ludwig.
The policemen exchanged glances and I could tell that each was relieved by the other’s reluctance to crawl into the bushes and look for a corpse.
‘We’ll ask at the agricultural repair shop then,’ one of them said.
They turned to go, but Ludwig had a question. ‘What kind of man are you looking for?’
‘A farmer,’ said the policeman who had done all the talking.
As we headed back to the Triumph, Ludwig thumped me on the shoulder. ‘You see,’ he said.
The following night we held a funeral for our caretaker that he couldn’t have faulted. We rolled him up in an old rug and carried him to the river. There on the bank was a wide skiff we’d rowed out during the day. We stuffed a few stones from the river’s edge into the rug and secured the whole thing with tape. Ludwig lit a candle, dripped some wax onto the rearmost cross brace and set the candle on it. We put the rug in the stern and rowed slowly to the middle of the river until we were exactly under the bridge. The candle flickered.
Ludwig climbed into the stern and tried to heave the rug overboard while I held the boat steady. It was a delicate undertaking—with the caretaker and the stones, the rug was pretty heavy. More than once it looked as if we might all end up in the river. In the end, Ludwig managed to get the caretaker into the water without either of us being pulled in with him, though the boat rocked like anything. For a long time we sat in silence, looking at the light of the candle flame. I didn’t pray, because I didn’t know how at the time.
I was very sad, as if I’d buried someone I’d really known. And somehow it was almost as if I had known our caretaker. I knew all about his first life, as a farmer, and all about his second life, in our Asian tower, which I presume was a happier one, because caretakers don’t have such trouble finding wives, especially in Asia, where practical skills are more highly prized than over here. I think it was right to sink him in the river. He’d wanted to end his life under the bridge, and now he had found a permanent place there. Besides, he wouldn’t be alone there, because we, his last friends—if, that is, he’d had any friends before us—could go and visit him every day. From then on, Ludwig was always careful to plan the intervals in our training sessions so that we could use gentle oar strokes under the bridge. I think it’s fair to say that our caretaker’s life had a happier ending than he might have dared hope for, but the funeral was a sad occasion even so.
When we had moored the boat to the bank again, Ludwig suggested that we go up on the bridge together. We hadn’t been up there for ages and I liked the idea of going to the place where things between the caretaker and us had begun. We climbed the hill and then walked beside the crash barrier to the middle of the bridge. The river lay beneath us. We stood at the fence for a long time, thinking about our caretaker, who had stood here with all those terrible thoughts in his head, looking back at his miserable farmer’s life. Nothing but fields and pigs, day after day, and so little chance of finding a wife. If he had only got to know us sooner, we could have told him about our gloomy but wonderful tower in Asia—about the work awaiting him there, and the quiet little women who are just the thing for a farmer. I’m sure he wouldn’t have jumped then.
I was completely taken aback when Ludwig suddenly climbed the fence. To my horror, he threw one leg over, sat down on the top and then pulled the other leg over to join the first. His hands gripped the fence on either side of his buttocks.
‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘Get down from there.’
‘You come up,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll see what the caretaker saw before he jumped.’
I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t stand down below while Ludwig sat up on the fence waiting for me. I climbed up, swung one leg over the top and then the other. I closed my eyes, then opened them again. What a view. It was amazing to see the valley without the fence in the way—the river directly beneath me, the lights of the little town—but I was never so terrified in my life. One breath of wind, I thought. One breath of wind and you’ll fly like the caretaker. I didn’t want that. I had Ludwig—I wasn’t alone. I had Vera too.
‘Give me your hand,’ said Ludwig.
‘I can’t let go of the fence,’ I said.
‘Give it to me,’ he said, slowly taking his own hand from the fence. I was sweating. ‘We’re twins,’ said Ludwig. I loosened my hand and he grabbed it. We swayed a little, then we were still. I began to sweat even more. ‘Let go of your other hand,’ said Ludwig.
‘Are you crazy?’ I said.
‘Let go,’ he shouted. ‘We have to do it together.
I’ll count to three. One…’
Never would I let go of the fence.
‘Two…’
It was cold—I suddenly felt the cold. Autumn, I thought. Soon it’ll be autumn.
‘Three.’
I loosened my hand. Very cautiously, I glanced at Ludwig. I knew I mustn’t turn my head. I knew I mustn’t move. Ludwig wasn’t holding on anymore either.
‘We’re holding each other,’ he said. ‘We’re twins. Just you and me.’
I’ve no idea how long we sat like that. It felt like a long time, but in a situation like that, there’s no way of knowing. Long enough, at any rate, to shake my fear. We sat on the top of the fence looking down into the valley. There was the little town, the boathouse on the reservoir, Ludwig’s parents’ house, the workshop where our Triumph was waiting, the river, and on the riverbed in a rug was our caretaker who had once been a farmer. But perhaps he was already in our Asian tower, changing light bulbs—who knows?
I confess that I began to get worried when a whole week went by with no sign of Vera in the workshop. I started sniffing in class again, trying to get a whiff of women who’d had sex. I still love that smell like nothing else. I paid no attention to our teachers, or the writing on the blackboard, turning my head this way and that, sucking in the air until my nostrils flared, cursing soap and water and deodorant and perfume, wishing myself back in an age before people began to fight their bodily smells.
Sometimes I thought I detected something, a sour scent I associated with the half-hour after sex, and I don’t think I can begin to describe the euphoria that broke over me at such moments—the exquisite sensation that crept from my brain to the tips of my toes but lasted only a few seconds before I was gripped by sadness. This girl, sitting so unassumingly in front of me, had done it last night, and I hadn’t. Everyone was doing it.
I saw Vera at break, smoking cigarettes with Flavia. I didn’t talk to her. I gazed at her longingly, but only when I was sure no one was watching. When she passed close to me, I pressed my lips together and breathed in through my nose until everything went black and I felt dizzy—once Ludwig had to grab my arm to stop me from falling.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
And then there she was, sitting in the workshop, on the stool, and when she got up and kissed me I couldn’t wait—I fell to my knees, pushed my head under her dress, pulled down her knickers and pressed my face between her legs. I could feel her hand on my head through the fabric of her dress, and I stayed there like that for a long time. I don’t know what I was thinking—strange, new thoughts, I imagine.
We didn’t go outside that night. Instead, I carried her to the workbench—she was so light—and set her down next to the screw clamp. She took me inside her—slowly, carefully—and this time she was the one who said sh, not me. While we were doing it, though, she knocked a pot of rust primer off the workbench. The lid was off, and an orange splotch spread over the floor.
I felt a little ashamed afterwards, I must admit. I was so overcome—and we often find it hard, I think, to look back at moments when we were particularly happy, because we don’t recognise ourselves.
‘What’ll your dad say?’ I asked. It was a stupid question, I know, but at such moments stupidity is our only salvation.
Since I’m being frank—and I’ve decided to be completely frank—there’s something else I should add. As Vera was sitting there on the workbench with her eyes closed, it’s possible I was thinking:
That fat friend of yours can’t give you this—or rather that obese pig, because she really was getting heavy by then. It was mean of me, I know.
I might as well admit too that Vera had once asked me whether I’d like it if she brought Flavia along sometime.
‘Why?’ I asked, and I’m still slightly annoyed at myself for sounding so shocked.
‘I thought men fantasised about that kind of thing,’ she said, ‘and Flavia’s completely different from me—all soft, you know, and she has such amazing tits.’
It was strange to hear a woman talking like that—somehow I didn’t feel she had the right. It was our way of talking about women.
‘She likes you,’ said Vera. ‘I’m sure she’d come and join us, or else we could meet at her place.’
Somehow it didn’t come to anything—I don’t know why.
Anyway, Vera said she didn’t think the orange splotch on the workshop floor would be a problem. It was strange in the workshop. It was strange not lying next to each other afterwards, and I didn’t know what to do. I suppose what I really wanted was to leave. In the end I sat down on the motorbike that Ludwig’s father usually tinkered about with.
‘Why doesn’t your dad ever come to our races?’
I asked, because it was so quiet.
‘Maybe he’s scared,’ said Vera, who was still sitting on the workbench, her legs crossed. She was smoking. She’d only recently taken it up, but she smoked quite a lot.
‘Scared of what?’ I asked.
‘That you might lose,’ said Vera.
‘But why should he be scared of that?’
‘Maybe he lost once too often himself.’
‘Did he?’
‘Don’t know,’ Vera said. ‘He hasn’t always fixed motorbikes, but I don’t know what he did before—he doesn’t ever talk about it.’
She came and sat pillion on the motorbike, wrapping her arms around me. I noticed that she was shivering—the nights were growing colder. ‘Ride with me to the wild sea,’ she said.
If the motorbike we were sitting on had had an engine, I really might have ridden off with her then and there. Her head was resting on my shoulder and she began to make soft engine noises, a low rumbling sound. I could feel her pursed lips vibrating against my shoulder, and the whole thing just seemed silly to me, but at the same time not silly at all. It was a beautiful moment, really.
‘What will we do when it’s winter?’ she asked.
‘We can’t lie under the bridge when it’s winter.’
I’d been wondering the same thing myself. It had been worrying me, as I didn’t have an answer.
There were ten days to go until the regional championships, and we’d lost the preliminary race to the Potsdam twins by a long way. Ludwig was in a state that could only be described as desperate, so I was glad when he said, ‘Let’s go and play pinball again.’ I’d started to miss it too, and it would, of course, be a perfect distraction for him. But when we went to the taverna, something happened that came as a complete surprise to me. You might even say I was shocked.
We’d just finished the first game and had two or three sips of our water when Ludwig went to the counter and ordered not just yeeros, but yeeros with chips and tzatziki, and a Coke. He said nothing. He ate slowly, taking his time, and then he ordered ice-cream. At first I sat on a stool and watched him in silence, then I went back to playing pinball by myself and won a free game. Ludwig seemed very pleased with himself when he was finished. When we left the taverna, he bought two bars of chocolate, which he ate on the way to the boathouse.
That evening he asked his father if he’d make pancakes again, like he used to, and so his father made pancakes. The three of us sat at the kitchen table like in the old days and ate. I stopped after my first pancake, Vera after her second. Ludwig carried on eating. Vera looked at me, then at Ludwig. Nobody spoke. Their father fried pancakes, adding them to the ever-growing pile, and Ludwig ate them. I think he ate five altogether—or perhaps it was six.
‘What’s got into him?’ asked Vera when we were lying at the edge of the woods later that evening. We had two blankets with us: one to lie on and the other to cover us. Even so, it was too cold, and I no longer felt at ease under this bridge anyway, since the farmer had jumped. I kept thinking someone else was about to jump and land right next to us. I’d lost my fear of dead people, but this wasn’t the time or place for a visit from one. What’s more, it clearly wasn’t entirely safe lying here. Who knows what happens when someone lands on you from fifty metres up?
‘I don’t know either,’ I said in reply to Vera’s question. ‘At lunchtime today he just suddenly started to stuff himself.’
‘I thought you had to keep your weight down,’ she said. ‘But let him eat. Maybe he won’t always be so uptight then.’
I didn’t like it when she talked about Ludwig like that.
‘He’s been starving himself all this time,’ I said.
‘He has every right to eat properly for once.’
I was in a bad mood and left soon afterwards.
On the way home I was preoccupied with the thought of the last race. There were still ten days to go, and if Ludwig carried on eating like this, he’d end up over the weight limit. Sixty-five kilos was the most he was allowed to weigh, so he couldn’t put on more than two and a half kilos. It might be just about all right, but it would mean that I’d have to lose exactly the same amount. If he weighed sixty-five, I couldn’t weigh more than sixty, as our total combined weight couldn’t be more than 125 kilos.
The next morning I skipped breakfast. My mother asked a lot of questions, and I almost thought she was going to cry. Mothers and food—that’s always going to be a minefield. The first thing I ate that day was a cabbage salad at the taverna. It was seasoned with caraway and tasted good. I had a glass of water to drink. Ludwig ate moussaka and tzatziki and drank Coke. We didn’t say a word, and I didn’t look at him.
I starved myself for ten days, living off cabbage salad, Ryvita and apples. My stomach was an empty cave with someone clawing at the walls. It hurt all the time, and I often felt sick. After training, Ludwig sometimes had to help me out of the boat. When I didn’t manage to connect the cable to the Triumph tachometer first time, I very quickly lost patience. Ludwig sat beside me, eating almond cake. His father fried pancakes for dinner, and Ludwig looked happy. Vera sometimes ate three or even four pancakes to make sure Ludwig ate at least five. She looked happy too. I drank water and ate Ryvita topped with slices of apple. As soon as Ludwig was asleep I rode home—even if the light was on in the workshop.
The evening before the regatta I weighed 60.4 kilos. I put on two tracksuits and ran seven kilometres along the river. Then I had a hot bath. My mother woke me two hours later. I’d fallen asleep in the water and was cold and feverish. I barely slept.
When I stood on the official scales in the boathouse the following morning, the dial pointed to sixty. They were heavy old doctor’s scales. Ludwig got on after me and they immediately tipped to the left, then stopped with a clack. The referee pushed the counterweight a little to the right and the scales came to a standstill. He pushed a little more and the dial slowly rose. It stopped at sixty-five kilos—or perhaps a touch more. But we qualified for the race.
Perhaps those ten days leading up to the race weren’t our happiest—we hardly talked, and we moved more slowly than usual, one of us weak and the other bloated. But even so I have fond—very fond—memories of those days. It is true that we were moving in different directions, but even that we did in sync, so that it all came right in the end. Any weight that Ludwig put on, I lost. That, I think, can only be described as a higher level of friendship—one of the highest.
I don’t want to dwell on the race. Considering our physical condition, we didn’t do too badly. We led for a long time and weren’t overtaken by the Potsdam twins until just before the finish. It was so close that the referees had to confer at some length. When we got out of the boat, I took Ludwig in my arms. That was unusual for us—almost unheard of, in fact. But I was happy. We’d had a difficult summer, but all in all, we’d got through it pretty well. The few times we’d hugged each other in the past—after winning a race, or when one of us had a birthday—we’d made a mess of it. We both put our heads to the same side and almost bumped noses, or else we got our hands and arms in a twist. Somehow we weren’t good at it. But this hug was a success. We came together effortlessly and then stood nestled against one another on the jetty for a while. Yes, nestled against one another—why shouldn’t I put it like that? It felt as if Ludwig were actually clinging to me—refusing to let go until he was ready. I think of it as one of those long embraces you see in films before one person boards a steamer and leaves the other behind.
We stayed in the showers a long time. I cupped my hands in front of my chest to catch the water and then let it run over my belly or threw it over my back. Ludwig sat opposite me, cross-legged, his head bowed, the jet of water hitting his neck. We said nothing. I hardly noticed when the others joined us, the victors noisy, the losers subdued.
Ludwig didn’t want me to go home with him. He said he had to revise for his driving test. I went to a kiosk, where I ate two currywursts and drank a beer, which made me tipsy. My father, his wife and my mother stood there talking, first about the race and then about the department store. It’s so touching when parents make little victories out of their children’s defeats. I didn’t hang around for long.
In the evening I watched TV with my mother—something I hadn’t done for ages. She’d cooked a stew, which we ate in front of Crime Scene, and I made her very happy by eating three helpings. I went to bed early and then couldn’t get to sleep. I couldn’t stop worrying about Ludwig. He’d been so desperate to win, and now we’d lost. He took such things very much to heart. I imagined him lying in bed, listening to the cars on the bridge and brooding. He could brood endlessly, turning some little thing over and over in his mind until it seemed so big it was overwhelming.
I think I fell asleep eventually, but soon afterwards I was woken by a strange dream. I got up and put on my clothes, slipped out of the flat, fetched my bike from the cellar and set off. I don’t think I ever cycled to Ludwig’s as quickly as I did that night. I hardly looked at the road, looking up at the bridge instead, trying to make out whether there was anything there, but it was a dark night and I couldn’t see a thing.
At Ludwig’s parents’ house, I pushed open the garden gate. All was dark. The door was locked, and I couldn’t get into the house. I looked to see if there was a bundle anywhere nearby—the kind of bundle the farmer had been. There was nothing.
Please, I thought, please, please, don’t jump. It was the most horrific thing I’ve ever imagined: I’m walking through the garden and somebody hits the ground beside me and that somebody is Ludwig. I know now that I was being hysterical, and I should have known it at the time, but you can’t always stop yourself. Isn’t it worth asking, anyway, whether hysteria isn’t one of our higher states of mind? It liberates us, makes us open, shows how much we care. It often looks silly, I admit, but hysterical people are actually humans at their most honest.
I climbed the hill as quickly as I could. There was nobody on the bridge. I was relieved, but continued to the middle all the same. It was a cool night and a light rain was beginning to fall, the first rain for some weeks. When I turned to walk back, I got a shock—someone was coming towards me. But it wasn’t Ludwig—it was Vera.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘Saving your life,’ she said.
That stung me, because as she approached, I’d been thinking about how I could talk her out of jumping off the bridge. I had ignored the light in the workshop three times. That was no kind of reason, of course, but to have that driven home to me so bluntly gave me a jolt all the same. You don’t want anyone committing suicide on your account—nobody does. But at the same time, there’s no greater proof of love. Love is not, after all, diminished by unhappiness—indeed, unhappy love is often greater than the happy kind. I have since seen a lot of people I know make others unhappy to obtain proof of their love. It’s a difficult topic—one I wish I could talk over with Ludwig still.
Vera said she’d seen me standing in the garden and followed me. Ludwig was in bed, she added, and she was sorry we’d lost. We walked arm in arm to the end of the bridge, and I held her hand as we climbed down the slope. I didn’t have sex with her. It was too cold and wet to lie on the grass, and it wouldn’t have felt right just then anyway. Under the shelter where the motorbikes were parked, she hugged me, and I could tell she had missed me. I could tell, too, that I had missed her. I told her I’d talk to my mother—that I was sure she wouldn’t mind Vera staying the night sometimes. I wasn’t sure that was true, but my mother was hardly going to stop me. I also said I would talk to Ludwig.