“Boy, listen to me.”
You wake up with a start and gasp for air. It feels as if a great weight is lifted off your chest. The seat belt cuts into your ribs, you unfasten it and look around, register your environment and breathe out with relief. Your fists are clenched, you open them and wonder how long you’ve been sitting like that. In the yellow light of the filling station your fingers look dead. They’re ice-cold and filthy, black soil is stuck under your nails. It tingles as the blood starts flowing again. Slowly the rest of your body wakes up. An unpleasant clamminess creeps up from your feet as if you were standing in water. You touch your knees. Dry. You look at your hands. Dirty. You shut your eyes again and try to make everything around you disappear. Your arms tense, you’re in your cellar lifting weights. For a few seconds.
“Your father wants to train you.”
Tanner’s last words won’t leave you in peace. The thought that your father still wants to train you. The thought that Tanner was telling the truth.
“He does what he has to do.”
You jolt upright, you have nodded off again. Tanner’s voice falls silent, your car is still at the filling station, moths flutter around the pale yellow light, and your father is a silhouette ringing a doorbell beside the closed gas station shop. He’s put his jacket on again, he means business.
The house looks as if it’s been yielding to the wind for a decade. It leans slightly to the side, even the window frames look crooked. In another life you’d have been messing about with your mates and taken a picture of them—Darian, supporting the house. In this life you stare at the façade, and imagine everything going up in flames.
Upstairs there’s a television on, the first floor is in darkness. A low-energy bulb flickers on. How you hate that lifeless light. A shadow passes by one of the windows. You can just imagine one of those old shits muttering and cursing his way through the house in his slippers and coming downstairs, a shotgun in the crook of his arm, spitting with rage. But he doesn’t know my father. No one knows your father, who knows whether your father even knows himself after tonight.
You wonder, not for the first time, where you’d be if your mother had taken you to Spain. You’d probably be running one of her boutiques in Madrid, and you’d have biceps like a girl.
I’d probably be gay.
You are who you are because your father made you what you are.
I am who I am because my father made me who I am?
You’re not sure what to make of that thought. Perhaps you will love this summer with your mother so much that you won’t be coming back. Anything is possible.
The front door opens. The woman has put a woolen jacket around her shoulders, and rather than a shotgun she’s holding a cup. For a moment it looks as if she’s bringing your father some tea. You wait for an explosion of rage, the clock says six in the morning, and instead the woman laughs. Ragnar Desche and his charm. Your father opens his briefcase, the woman waves him away and drinks from her cup. She spots you in the car, you look in the other direction.
The night is fraying at the edges, a gloomy gray flows into the black while the road remains a colorless strip leading all the way across Norway to Ulvtannen. You only know your destination from stories, your father never talked about his origins, that was your uncle’s job. You wish he’d kept his trap shut.
When Oskar left Norway with Taja and moved from Ulvtannen to Berlin, you were four years old and your uncle told you all about the beach hotel overlooking the fjord, about the people from the next village and their peculiarities, but what impressed you most was how the cliff got its name.
Ulvtannen means wolf’s tooth.
Winter after winter a wolf pack used to assemble here at full moon. In those days the ground was still densely covered with fir trees. Then one summer your great-great-grandfather came with his four brothers. They felled the firs and built a massive house for their family, a house that would one day become the beach hotel. They left a single Nordmann fir standing; it became the family tree. At the time everybody thought the wolves had been driven away, but in the winter they arrived right on time every full moon and stared at the house. The wolf pack would not be driven away by noise or gunshots. It only disappeared with the waning moon. Since then every generation has put up with the wolf pack in the winter months, and watched the wolves lying patiently in the snow or pacing around the house and rubbing against the fence, leaving clumps of fur hanging on it. As soon as winter was over, the clumps of fur were collected by the children and thrown into the big fire for the spring festival to keep the wolves’ hunger at bay.
You wish your uncle had never told you those stories because by doing that he gave you attention and got closer to you than your father did. Without your uncle’s interest you would never have been so aware of your distance from your father. The yearning began. The longing for a father who would talk to you, who would take an interest in you, and at the same time it was the longing for Ulvtannen, a place at the end of the world. Although you hardly had anything in common with Taja, in those days you had the same longing and wanted to spend your winters in the beach hotel—by a big hearth with ice flowers on the windows and a wolf pack outside the door, howling and wailing. How were you supposed to know that Taja had more in common with you than just that sense of yearning? Both of you yearned so much for your fathers that you lost yourselves.
A car speeds past the filling station and drags you from your thoughts. For a moment you could swear it was the Range Rover, but of course that’s silly. Oskar’s car is a good four hundred miles away in front of the restaurant and will stay there until your father deals with it.
My father.
You look over at the house. Your father is handing the woman a few bank notes. The woman goes back into the house and shuts the door behind her. Your father comes back to the car and opens the fuel tank flap. You hear the gasoline flowing. Three minutes later you’re still sitting in the car and your father is a little way off at the tap washing his face and hands. He has hung his jacket on top of a young tree that leans slightly under the weight. That’s exactly what I feel like, you think and want to slip over, start the car, and just drive off.
As if.
After your father turns the tap off, he shakes his hands out, tugs the sleeves of his sweater back down, and pulls on his jacket. When he gets into the car, you smell the water on his skin. Rusty and cold. You smell your father, too. That familiar mixture of sweat and energy. You don’t look at him. You’ve made your decision. He will never know what Tanner told you. Because if he finds out, you’ll have to react to him, and if you react to him, his world will keel over and everything will be different and you’re not sure if you can bear that.
You haven’t spoken for hours, not since all the white appeared in the road and you thought it was slush. Your father took his foot off the accelerator, and you saw the burst bags glittering in the headlights. Your father hesitated for a moment before putting his foot down and driving on. In the rearview mirror you saw the heroin floating in the air like fog.
Your father didn’t waste a word on it. He didn’t ask what you were thinking, and for the first time you were happy about his lack of interest. The sight of the heroin had made you feel calmer. As if it was right for your father to fail too. Satisfaction was the right word.
Over the next few hours you kept falling asleep, because there was nothing to say. Now you’re fifty miles away from your destination at a closed filling station. Dawn is breaking, and the silence has made itself comfortable on the backseat, and won’t think about leaving you alone.
“You should wash too,” says your father and starts the car but doesn’t put it in gear, as if he wants to give you a chance to jump out quickly. You don’t move, you stare straight ahead, your hands are still dirty, there’s no reason to leave the car.
The car moves into gear, you drive away from the gas station.
Fifteen minutes later.
“Well?”
He takes a break, the break is like an airless space that you’re suddenly standing in and don’t know where to go next. Everything within you contracts, you don’t want to ask, you ask.
“Well what?”
“How did it feel?”
You look at your hands, which are fists again. It happens automatically. As if your hands wanted to take the answers from you. “It was okay.”
“Okay?”
“It was …”
The oxygen turns to lead in your lungs, you try to find the right word, a manly word. And you know you’ll only say the wrong thing. And you say, “… a relief?”
Your father doesn’t react. For a brief moment you’re sure you didn’t answer, that the word has got stuck in the convolutions of your brain, then your father says, “Give me the gun.”
He sticks his right hand out. You hesitate. How can you hesitate? His hand stays in the air, waiting. When your father speaks again, you give a start.
“You are responsible for the deaths of two important people. Leo looked after you, he taught you to box and was beside you when your mad mother wandered around the house at night. And Tanner was your godfather. He’d have done anything for you. He …”
He stops, you both know what he wanted to say, the words “loved you” hang like a gentle sound in the air. Your father changes the subject, this isn’t a space for gentle sounds.
You draw the gun and rest it in your father’s open palm, grip first. He’s right. You don’t deserve the gun. Your father weighs the weapon in his hand as if checking whether it has lost weight. He doesn’t look at you once, he looks at the road and looks at the road and suddenly the barrel of the gun is pressed to your temple and pushes your head aside so that you have to look straight ahead.
You tense up, you freeze.
“How could you.”
It isn’t a question, it’s an observation, but you still try and defend yourself like an idiot.
“I’m. I’m sorry. The boy …”
“It wasn’t the boy’s fault.”
Your chest is covered with sweat and you even feel it running down the back of your neck, but that’s very unlikely, it’s more likely that it’s your soul saying goodbye.
“Then why did he have to die?” you blurt out, and you understand that you’re calling your father into question. What on earth am I doing here? The pressure against your temple increases, you sit still, just don’t show any weakness.
“It was a punishment,” says your father.
“But I thought he wasn’t to blame.”
“Who said he was the one being punished?”
You understand, you want to lower your head. Shame. You keep your head up.
“I will never forgive you,” says your father. “Never.”
Your father pulls the trigger. Once. Twice. Each movement of the trigger is like an electric shock that travels into your brain on one side and shoots out on the other. You think about Mirko, you think about Gina and Nadine and that you’ll probably never decide which is the right one for you. You think everything at the same time and sit still and wait.
Your father takes the gun from your temple. It leaves a deep imprint on your temple.
“You can thank me because I didn’t forget the safety catch.”
“Thanks,” you say quietly.
He hands you back the gun. It’s over, you think, then he looks at you, both hands rest on the steering wheel, he isn’t interested in the road anymore, he looks at you and there’s sheer rage in his eyes and at that moment you realize that he despises you, that your own father deeply and fervently despises you. You want to explain yourself, you somehow want to react to that gaze, when he looks ahead again as if nothing had happened, and the gun is in your hand. Everything’s going too quickly. Like Timo, who got stuck on LSD two years ago, ended up spending a few months in the bin and later told you the world was a record player turning too fast. You need something to come down. Gear down. Take a break. A bit of weed would be good. Just a couple of drags. Something to relax you. Your father doesn’t plan to let you take a break. He says, “At least you’ve understood what it means to be a man. You know the relief. You know the loneliness. Did you look him in the eye?”
You react far too quickly.
“Of course.”
Your father laughs, it’s like the barking of a dog that you sometimes hear in the city at night, short and dry. And then you feel his hand pressing your knee.
“That’s my boy. A damned ice-cold killer who can’t even look his victims in the eye.”
It’s so terrifyingly intimate that you get goose bumps.
How can he know me so well?
Your father lowers the window and spits, spits his rage and his closeness to you into the road. You look at your knee, from which his hand has disappeared, and don’t know what’s going on with you. Love and hate are raging in you, and you’re filled with pride. You’ve been close to your father, he’s touched you. Be honest, how sad is that? The man who’s bringing you up the way you bring up a fucking pit bull. The man who makes you murder, and who is tirelessly bringing you toward chaos at sixty miles an hour. This man has made you proud.
You eat breakfast in a café that a taxi driver recommended to you. Vik wakes up slowly. Oskar worked in the hydraulic power station here, and met Majgull on the night shift. Love at first breath, he called it. You ask your father if he knows anything more about the story. Your father doesn’t react and you go on eating in silence.
It makes you nervous that you’re not getting a move on. You have no idea why your father is taking his time. It’s a bit as if he’d lost his sense of logic. Even in Berlin you had a sense of that when you were standing on the Teufelsberg watching him scattering Oskar’s ashes. Tanner must have felt it too. And now all this creeping along. Since you’ve been on the road he hasn’t driven above the speed limit, he’s eaten his omelet in slow motion and seems to be as calm as anything. On the other hand you feel as if you’re sitting on a pile of burning firecrackers.
Of course your father doesn’t miss any of that.
“We have all the time in the world. They’re not going to run away, they’re going to wait for us. Finish your coffee, then we can get going.”
You could ask what makes him so sure, but you’ve got Tanner’s voice in your head: If you don’t understand something, then try to understand it. The answer will come all by itself. You drink your coffee and wish your father’s confidence was infectious. You have a bad feeling, you don’t like Norway. Until today Norway was the memory of your uncle, which took place entirely in Ulvtannen. You don’t want to take the magic away from that memory and tear it down into reality, it should stay a memory. You miss Berlin, because Berlin is reality and a safe place, your place, which you know and control. So much has changed in your life. Death travels with you now. It hides in the corners of your eyes and in the shadows that surround you and accompany every one of your thoughts. You’ve already noticed the change. Ask your father, he’ll know what’s happening to you. He’s responsible for the fact that you have a companion. Death has devoured your innocence. From now on every moment of your life will feel as if you’re running across a frozen lake, knowing quite clearly: Every moment the ice is about to break, every moment it will happen. And you run and run, because it would be a mistake to stop. As soon as you stop, it’s all over. Your father shares this feeling with you. In his case it’s a steep slope plunging ceaselessly down. You on the other hand are running over ice.