Hooligan Page 10

  “So much money,” he repeats, “so much money. Imagine that.” And “Where the hell is Dubai again?”

  The fact the Ajax Amsterdam and Steaua Bucharest haven’t been top European clubs for ages appears to be news to him.

  We bypass Bremen, which seems enclosed in a single massive cloud bank, only exiting the autobahn at the Arsten interchange. Then we cross Werder Lake, the choppy Weser River, and drive to the familiar Osterdeich Avenue. Weser Stadium protrudes before the gray sky like a gigantic petri dish from biology class. It’s fairly quiet in the open space in front of the stadium entrance. The cops standing around in protective vests and with their hands near their batons cause a nervous shiver to run down my spine, and we disappear into the crowd. It lasts even when I buy our black-market tickets from a guy who seems too friendly for a scalper, but anyway I don’t have a choice.

  Weser Stadium is full, every last seat. There’s a tifo being prepared on the East Curve, where the Werder ultras are located. They’re unrolling a banner that covers almost the entire corner. On the opposite side, the Hannover fans are making a racket, yelling insults in the direction of the Bremen fans. I’m glad we’re in neutral seats and aren’t sitting in the visitors’ section. Wouldn’t have been too keen to cross paths with certain familiar ultras. One of the Capos, the oldest ultra group in Hannover, is probably still a little sore at me since we tangled by the urinals at the traditional Marksmen’s Fair, which ended with him getting a black eye and his face shoved in the trough. Not that he could do anything to me. But it wouldn’t be a chill stadium experience.

  “What, did they run out of Coke?” Hans jokes when I return to our seats with two cups of beer. Before taking a seat next to him, I have a view of his old man’s receding hair line through his thinning, brown hair. Soon it will meet up with the increasingly large spot on the back of his head and merge.

  The game is fucking disgusting. No goals. The Reds, along with Bremen, all lose a handle on balls somewhere in the midfield because no one can make a decent pass. Or someone sends it long and they go for it like in amateur league—one bungled header after another. Because the Bremen defense has a tradition of being a pile of incompetents, several chances for 96 do materialize during the course of the match, but they’re all wasted, as commented on by my father with a throaty “crooked foot!” He also keeps bringing up the Cup-winning team’s finals in ’92, when Hannover’s first-round draw was Werder Bremen, of all teams, which meant their European adventure was over before it started.

  “Still hurts, you know. Still hurts, I’m telling you.”

  Then he pats me on the knee with his fist if I can’t pull it away fast enough.

  “Are you taking good care of the critters?” he asks, and I confirm it monosyllabically and swallow the stadium beer.

  “How’s Mie doing?”

  “Yeah, good, I think,” I say, and he says: “She’s a good woman, Mie is. Good woman.”

  “Aha.”

  “And the boys? What are they up to? Kai, Ulf, and the two brothers?”

  Something goes down the wrong way and I start hacking. Hans is about to pound me on my back when he notices how deeply he’s put his foot in his own mouth and withdraws his hand.

  Several errant passes and botched headers, and I say out of the blue, “Was at the psychiatric clinic with Axel. We visited one of his old friends. Somehow seemed familiar to me.” I keep watching the game, occasionally catching Hans numbly staring straight ahead. “Must have been a huge guy.”

  My father mumbles something indefinable into his beer while taking a sip.

  “Sat in a wheelchair. Dirk was his name.” Now I notice Hans is rocking back and forth, barely perceptibly. I have no clue if he’s been doing it the whole time and I only noticed now. “You remember him?”

  Hans coughs into his cupped fist, and I have the feeling he hasn’t blinked for several minutes. Then he says, “Hey, let’s watch the game, okay?”

  Without another word spoken, a miserable North German rivalry comes to a close.

  Just before Bad Zwischenahn, Hans tries to apologize while the rain begins to beat down hard on the windshield. I say he should forget about it and that it didn’t matter.

  “Thanks, my boy. Really had fun. Horrible match … but, oh well.”

  I nod and turn the key in the ignition. “Gotta go.”

  “Yep,” he says, “take it easy. Drive safe and give them my regards back home.”

  He closes the door, turns, and stops for a second. He looks over at the clinic, and I can hear his deep sigh even through the car door.

  ———

  Something was banging against my door like crazy, making me sit almost bolt upright in bed.

  “Heiko! Heiko! Fucking hell, you open up now!”

  The wooden door is just barely hanging on its hinges. It vibrates with each of Arnim’s blows. When he hears me turn the key, he stops the pounding.

  “What’s up? How late is it?” I ask.

  Arnim is covered with drops of sweat. From his medicine-ball-sized head down to his old man chest, which must have been muscular once. His much too deeply cut wifebeater sticks to his paunch.

  “The time has come! I’m getting it. I’m finally getting it!”

  “What, huh?” I ask and rub a hand over the stubble on my head.

  “Man, the tiger, my boy. The tiger!” But he pronounces “tiger” like “tigger.” Because I’m still busy rubbing my eyes and not really registering things, all I can think to say is a meager “Huh.”

  “My dear boy,” he booms, “you’re sure slow on the uptake today.”

  “Yeah, I understood: Tiger. You’re getting a tiger.”

  “Oh, knock it off. It’s finally happening. I’m getting it next month!”

  Gradually, I grasp the significance of what’s he’s been jabbering, and I peer at him through my fingers.

  “Holy shit! For real? Don’t jerk me around!”

  “Nope. Not shitting you, my boy. An honest-to-God fucking Bengal tiger! Here in our house.”

  I drop my hands from my face. “What, that’s it? Is it here? Where’d you put the beast? You didn’t put it in with Poborsky or Bigfoot, right?”

  He flips me off, pushing his flabby skin up on his forehead.

  “Did they take a shit in your skull, my boy? Naw, the month after next. Then it’ll be time. I can pick it up.”

  He turns around, almost skipping down the hallway like the fattest kid in the world, calling out to me, “Come on, pull yourself together, it’s time to pack!”

  After I’ve gathered my wits and figured out that I slept late into the afternoon, I go down to the kitchen. The dogs are barking their asses off at each other and don’t stop. Arnim’s yelling at them that they should shut up only spurs then on. I bend over the sink filled with weeks’ worth of dirty dishes and look outside. In the back of the yard, which seems unusually well lit, there’s a small yellow backhoe. I move through the door. The yard really is getting more light than usual, though the sky is cloud-covered. The camouflage netting is rolled up in front of the shed. Arnim swings himself up behind the backhoe’s controls, spots me, and waves with a grin. Which once again makes him look like the fattest, sweatiest, most heavily tattooed kid over fifty. He starts the motor and all at once you can hardly hear Poborsky and Bigfoot.

  “Arnim!” I shout. “Arnim!”

  He stares at me, eyebrows raised, and turns it off again.

  “What?”

  “What are you doing? Where’d you get the backhoe?”

  “Don’t scream your head off like that. Borrowed it from a buddy.”

  Ah, okay, borrowed. I ask ironically if he’s planning to dig a tiger’s pit.

  “Whadda you think? Sure, that’s gonna be a tiger pit. Top-notch tiger pit, my boy.”

  “I-I can’t believe it,” I stammer.

  “What?!” He calls, “Come and lend me a hand!”

  Using the scoop of the backhoe, Arnim had done most of the dirty wor
k of clearing the earth out of the planned pit, whose edges he’d marked beforehand with an X and wooden stakes. All the while I’m standing in the increasingly deep hole and going at it with a shovel. Shove it into the earth, which luckily isn’t too hard, scoop, and toss it over my head and out of the hole like a no-look pass. After a couple hours, the arm of the backhoe doesn’t reach deep enough. It’s raining. The soil is soft and soggy. I’m covered with a thin film of mud, but it’s only drizzling. I pray it stays that way. Or it really starts pouring and we have to stop. Though Arnim wouldn’t hear of it anyway. Arnim joins me, jumping into the pit, and the slurry splashes. Together we shovel out the remaining pile in the middle, because the arm of the backhoe was too short to come that far. Arnim had estimated about fifteen square meters and a depth of four meters. After leveling off the inside of the pit, we start to work toward the desired depth. The whole dirty job drags on into the evening. My hands have blisters despite the work gloves.

  I come back from the shitter and gulp down a gallon of tap water when a voice calls out from the pit: “Heiko! Heiko! You there?”

  I step over to the edge of the pit. Arnim takes a step back from the earth wall so he can see me better.

  “Can’t get out of here!”

  I laugh at him, which he doesn’t think is very cool, and he bellows up at me, “Come on and hand me the ladder! I have to piss.”

  For a minute I consider leaving him in the tiger pit, just to give him hell, but he’d given me a leg up so I could reach to top edge. So I get the aluminum extension ladder from the shed and let it slide down. When he steps on the lowest rung, it slides farther down, and under his monstrous weight the bottom sinks into the soggy earth.

  “What’d you have planned for the walls?” I ask and hold the ladder tight.

  “What d’ya mean?” he wheezes.

  “Well, did you ever see one of those tigers for real? I mean in the zoo or a TV nature show? In the end, they’re still cats. Fucking huge cats, but cats. You probably don’t think it could scramble up a dirt wall with its claws.”

  Arnim gets off the ladder and stands still, with his hands resting on his knees, breathing deeply. Then he snorts and says, “Sure did cross my mind, my boy. Everything’s lined up. It’ll get fine accommodations with walls of aluminum siding.”

  By now it’s late in the evening. Arnim had set up extra floodlights after taking a piss and pointed them into the pit. We need another two hours to reach the depth of four meters.

  I chuck the shovel out of the pit in a high arc and sigh, “Finally,” and start to climb up the ladder when Arnim holds me back.

  “Not so fast, my boy. The lid’s going on before we knock off.”

  There are tons of aluminum studs and wooden boards stacked in front of the shed. I pass Arnim one after the other. He temporarily spreads them out next to the pit while I bring over screwdriver, square, and other tools, and then we put this monstrous fifteen-square-meter lid together, drilling, screwing, and nailing it under the shine of the floodlights.

  “So, tomorrow the walls, and then you’re released for the time being,” he says, and tosses two big-ass steaks into the sizzling skillet.

  I stuff myself full of meat till the meat in my throat hits other meat, and Arnim tells me the old story for the nth time while I keep on nodding off at the table: “My boss offered me 10,000 marks. That was a real stack of cash at the time. I hadn’t even earned that much in a year as a butcher. Maybe earned, but I didn’t get it.” He shakes with laughter at his own joke. “Well, I thought, can’t be that hard. Knocking someone off. You see it on TV all the time. In all the movies. People are constantly being offed. I can hack it, I told myself. So one day I went over to the farm of my boss’s neighbor. With a gun. Double barrel. In case one bullet wasn’t enough, y’know? Went over there. Ski mask, you say! Why would you need it? A dead person can’t identify you, I thought. The thing might slide in front of my eyes and I’d end up blasting away at my own foot. Which would be pretty stupid. Nope. So I head over. Looked around and didn’t see no one in the yard. I went into the loafing shed. It was already evening. Not so light anymore. And there, standing between his cows, I see him bending over a cow’s ass. Snuck up, but he probably heard me. Doesn’t matter because he’ll be dead in a sec, I thought to myself. Gets up and makes to turn around, and I cock it. But I don’t shoot from the hip. Could go who the hell knows where. I might even shoot a cow in the ass. I cocked, and pulled the trigger right away. Boom! Right in his face. Did a top-notch pirouette, the dumbass. Well. And then he lay there, arms all twisted under his body and the legs cockeyed, like he’s climbing a steep staircase. Wouldn’t recognize him. Sure did take care of his face. That’s where the bullet came out, ’cause I shot him in the side of his head and it came out front. I’m telling you, it looked all messed up. A hole about”—he used the thumbs and fingers of both hands to form a big hole—“about yea-big in his kisser. I split from there as fast as I could. Yeah, and I got into really deep shit, you know? Because that wasn’t him. It was the vet. The actual target, the dumb fucker, was on the latrine. Shittin’ away. The vet was there to look at the cow because it was supposed to drop one soon. Then it all got out, and less than two days later the marshals came and popped me at my place. Locked, cocked. Yep, that’s what happened. Went to Hainholz, in the slammer. Sat there for ten years. Never saw the cash either. But I’d wasted the wrong guy, after all. Fucking vet.”

  I’d finally fell asleep at the “boom” part, but I’d already heard the story a dozen times, so I knew it in my sleep.

  ———

  My second week in the Neustadt hospital. But even after one day, they’d shown me unmistakably that, as someone doing voluntary service, I was just their slave. Go there and mop up the puke! Come here and scrub the blood off the walls! Dig the pieces out of the bone saw blade! Not that the tasks themselves were annoying. After all, someone had to do the dirty work, and if I’d been the doctor or nurse, I’d have made the volunteer do it too. It was the way they talked to us. As if we were the worst of the tards. It wasn’t much help either that at twenty-one I already looked like I could pound all of the head physicians into the ground. I almost regretted not having listened to my father’s bitching and moaning and just done the mandatory military service. Almost, but didn’t. ’Cause first of all, then I’d have been doing far worse, and second, I would’ve had to put up with all the fatherland patriots, and third, I’d have done anything to avoid giving Hans the satisfaction of heeding his sniping. Like, what a little fag you are, doing voluntary service. Go to the army, they’ll make a real man outta ya. What a pushover! I’d already had to hear it when I got kicked outta school for the second time and could forget about getting a normal degree. My teachers were a bunch of snobbish assholes and frigid old cunts. All of them! And the worst was our principal, the old jerk-off. Put ’em in a sack and beat ’em. You won’t hit anyone who doesn’t deserve it. But the fact that I didn’t even go into the army, which was what was expected for a straight-shooting young guy, that really made Hans even more livid. Such bullshit. Whatever. At any rate, all that changed in week two, when I was called to the room of some senile geriatric who was only clinging on the threshold of death with his little toe. He’d almost croaked three times during my first week, but then he came around every time. So I went into the room and heard the doctors and nurses yelling at each other. Saw everyone fussing over him. I wanted to scream they should let him die in peace. Then I noticed her. She was standing at the edge of the group. She seemed completely uninvolved, as if she’d done this a thousand times before. But Yvonne was still in training, as I later found out. So she couldn’t have done it that often yet. If at all. She was holding something. I don’t even want to know exactly what. It was obscured by the back of a doctor and a chubby male nurse. But it was more about her face. So fucking beautiful! Her cheeks were so smooth your hand would slip if you stroked them. They narrowed as they approached her mouth. A cute, small mouth. Not one o
f those big old frog mouths like so many others. Her nose was so narrow and delicate. Hardly had nostrils. Everything about her is slender in the first place. Seems so delicate. And then when she opened her mouth, I was left gaping and just thought, kudos, girl, I wouldn’t have had the balls to say that. And her little eyes, those blue eyes. Like ice cubes with a fly frozen in the middle. So sharp and precise, but at the same time so open and free-floating. But the best thing about her, I noticed in that moment, was her brow. Free of eyebrows. Two perfectly formed crests I immediately wanted to kiss, one after the other. Or wanted to trace with the tip of my tongue. Simply smooth skin, without pores.

  All at once, the whole group around the bed jumped back. When the old man started hacking. He had one of those thumb-sized tubes sticking out of or into a hole in his throat. For breathing and all, I think. They’d pulled out the tube because of complications, and now he started rattling and squirting bile and puke and even some blood. And after the first big torrent, all of them went back to the man, and the resident there cracked some kind of joke. I didn’t understand it because of the acoustics, glued as I was to the doorway and ogling Yvonne, and then she started laughing. Her laughter sounded like one of those wind chimes or whatever they’re called. Like a rainstorm in summer, sprinkling down on my exposed brain, calming me and giving the feeling that this miserable life was somehow bearable. As long as I could listen to her laughter. Yvonne’s laugh is actually more like a choppy cackle if you take a sober look at it, yet I’d never heard anything more beautiful. In that moment I wished I’d made the joke and not the asshole resident, and she was laughing at my joke.

  Nobody there called out for me to help. No one even noticed I was there because they were so busy with the bag of bones in the bed. The geezer died. The doctor recorded the time of death, and they joked they’d all have to change their clothes now. I’d snuck out into the corridor. By the door. I didn’t want to stand there completely useless. Later that day, smoking outside, I saw Yvonne again and I talked to her.