19
Sunday morning. Four o’clock, Tschick said, that would be the best time. Four in the morning. I basically didn’t sleep and was awake for the night and jumped up when I heard steps on our terrasse. I rushed to the door, and there stood Tschick with a backpack in the dark. We whispered, but there were no reasons to do so. Tschick put the backpack in the doorway, and then we started.
On the way from Potsdam back here, he had parked the Lada on the street. It was only a ten minute walk from our house. A fox ran direction city center by our feet. A vehicle of the transporation management center or something flew by, a retiree went past us coughing like crazy. We felt as if it was day. Thirty meters from the Lada, Tschick gave a sign to stand still, and I stood by a wall and let my heart beat. Tschick found a yellow tennis ball from his pockets. He pressed the ball on the door handle and twirled with his other hand. I couldn’t really tell what he was up to, but Tschick said: “Professionals at work!” and opened the door. He winked at me.
Then he fiddled with the cables again, started the car and tried to park around our front steps. I sat on the passenger’s seat and examined the tennis ball. A normal tennis ball with a hole of about a finger’s size.
“And it works with every car?”
“Not with every one. But ones with central locking – it creates a vacuum.”
He scraped out of the parking spot, and I pressed the ball in my hand and couldn’t even hold it properly. Russians, I thought.
Ten minutes later, we loaded the Lada full. Our garage had a direct door to the house, and we shoved everything that seemed to make sense in. At first bread, biscuits and crackers and some conserved cans, because we thought maybe we could also eat that. We obviously needed plates and knives and spoons for that. We packed a three-man tent, sleepings bags and mats. Then we took the mats out and opted for air matresses. Eventually, half the household was in the car, and then we started to take them all out again: You didn’t need the most of them. It was going back and forth. We had trouble deciding whether you needed rollerblades. If we were out of gas, one of us could bring the tank and rollerblade to a gas station, that was Tschick’s opinion, but I thought the foldable bicycle could also do the job. At the very end, we decided to bring a pack of water, and as it turned out later, that was the best idea ever. Or the only good one. Because, other stuff were more or less shit. Tennis rackets, a huge pile of mangas, four pairs of shoes, my dad’s toolbox, six frozen pizzas. What we didn’t bring were phones. “Then none of those losers could find us.” Tschick said.
And also no CDs. The Lada had two huge speakers, but only a broken radio which was tucked under the glove section. I was, to be honest, happy about it, because that meant I didn’t have to listen to Beyonce in the car. And of course we took the two hundred Euros and all the money that I had, though I was not really sure when would that come in handy. In my imagination, we would be driving though lands without a single soul, or even desserts. I didn’t look what the road to Walachei was like on Wikipedia. But I eventually knew it, when we were on our way.