23
He went back to the street. After we arrived at a backery, we suddenly got a craving for coffee. We parked the car in a bush behind the village and walked back to the backery on foot. We bought some coffee and munched on bread rolls. As I was about to bite into my roll, someone behind me called out: “Klingenberg, what are you doing here?”
Lutz Heckel, the lump on two sticks, was sitting at the table behind us. Next to him, a bigger lump on two sticks and a not-so-big lump on pillars.
“And the Mongolian is here.” Heckel said, surprised.
“Visiting relatives.” I said and turned back quickly. It wasn’t the time to talk for me.
“I didn’t know you have relatives here?”
“I do.” Tschick said, and fiddled with his coffee cup to protest. I couldn’t remember whether I saw Heckel at Tatjana’s party, but next up, he asked how we got here. Tschick told him some bullshit about a bike tour.
“Classmate of yours?” I heared the big lump ask, and then I didn’t hear anything for a long time. Some time later, car keys climpered at the table behind us, and Dad Heckel went into the backery. He came back out with an armful of bread rolls, put four on our table and said: “Gotta get some energy supply for our rider!” Then he knocked the table with his knuckles, and family lump went direction market.
“Uh.” Tschick said, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. We sat for quite a bit of time in front of this backery. We really needed the coffee, and the rolls. Every half an hour, a sighting bus with tourists on it would go through the market. There’s a castle somewhere in this village. Tschick sat with his back against the bus stop, but I looked the whole time at those retirees who tend to get on this bus. They all wore brown or beige clothes and a funny hat, and when they went past us, where there was a small step, they all look like they’ve just ran a marathon. I couldn’t imagine myself being a beige retiree when I’m old. Every old man that I know seem to be one, the ladies too. It was hard for me to imagine that all these ladies all had their youth at some point. When they were the same age as Tatjana and dressed up and danced at nightclubs, about fifty or a hundred years ago. Of course not everyone. Maybe some were already ugly at that time, but maybe it’s because they’ve been through something. But the ugly have their plans for the future too, just like normal people. And turnig into a beige retiree was definitely not a part of it. The more I think of it, the more depressed I get. The most depressing thought was, that these retirees were also once not boring, and someone probably fell in love with them, and someone probably sat on his Indian tower seventy years ago just to wait for the light in her room. These girls were now retirees, but you couldn’t tell them apart from other beige retirees. Everyone has the same gray hair and fat nose and ears, and that depressed me so hard, I felt horrible.
“Shh,” said Tschick, looking past me. I followed his gaze and spotted two police officers walking along a row of parked cars, looking at each license plate. Without saying a word, we took our paper cups and strolled inconspicuously back to the bushes where the Lada was parked. Then we drove back the way we had come in the morning, onto the country road and off at a hundred. We didn’t have to discuss what to do next for long. In a wooded area we found a parking lot where people parked their cars to go for a walk. And luckily there were quite a lot of cars there, because it wasn’t that easy to find one where you could unscrew the license plates. Most of them didn’t have any screws at all. What we finally found was an old VW Beetle with a Munich license plate. We put our license plates on it in return, hoping that it wouldn’t notice so quickly. Then we raced a few kilometers on some back roads through the fields before we turned into a huge forest and parked the Lada on an abandoned sawmill site. We packed our backpacks and hiked through the forest. We had no intention of abandoning the Lada just yet, but despite the license plate change we weren’t entirely comfortable with it. It seemed the smartest thing to take the car out of traffic for a while. Maybe spend a day or two in the forest and come back later, that was the plan. Although - it wasn’t a real plan either. We didn’t even know if they had really been looking for us. And whether they would stop looking for us in a few days. Our path led uphill the whole time, and at the top the forest thinned out. There was a small viewing platform with a wall around it and a pretty great view over the countryside. But the best thing was a small kiosk where you could buy water and chocolate bars and ice cream. So we didn’t have to starve, and that’s why we stayed near this kiosk. Not far down the mountain was a sloping meadow, and there we found a quiet spot behind huge elderberry bushes. We lay in the sun and dozed, and that’s how we spent the day. For the night we stocked up on plenty of Snickers and Coke and then crawled into our sleeping bags and listened to the crickets chirping. All day hikers, cyclists and buses had passed by to enjoy the view, but when dusk fell no one came and we had the whole mountain to ourselves. It was still warm, almost too warm, and Tschick, who had managed to coax two beers out of the kiosk owner with plenty of gel in his hair, opened the bottles with his lighter. The stars above us became more and more numerous. We lay on our backs, and between the small stars smaller ones appeared, and between the smaller ones even smaller ones, and the black sank further and further away.
“This is madness,” said Tschick.
“Yes,” I said, “this is madness.”
“This is much better than television. Although television is good too. Do you know War of the Worlds?”
“Of course.”
“Do you know Starship Troopers?”
“With the monkeys?”
“With insects.”
“And at the end a brain like that? The giant brain beetle with such - with such slimy things?”
“Yes!”
“It’s madness.”
“Yes, it’s madness.”
“And can you imagine, somewhere up there, on one of those stars - it’s exactly like that now!
There really are insects living there, which are fighting a huge battle for supremacy in space right this second - and nobody knows about it.”
“Except us,” I said.
“Except us, exactly.” “But we are the only ones who know that. Even the insects don’t know that we know that.” “Seriously, do you believe that?” Tschick leaned on his elbow and looked at me. “Do you think there’s anything else? I don’t necessarily mean insects. But something?” “I don’t know. I once heard that you can calculate it. It’s totally unlikely that there is anything, but everything is infinitely large, and totally unlikely times infinite does result in a number, a number of planets where there is something. Because it worked for us too. And there are definitely giant insects up there somewhere.” “That’s exactly my opinion, exactly my opinion!” Tschick lay back on his back and looked up with effort. “Incredible, isn’t it?” he said. “Yes, incredible.” “I’m totally overwhelmed.” “And can you imagine: The insects have an insect cinema too, of course! They make films on their planet, and somewhere in the insect cinema they are watching a film that takes place on Earth and is about two boys who steal a car.” “And it’s a total horror film!” said Tschick. “The insects are disgusted by us because we’re not slimy at all.” “But everyone thinks it’s just science fiction, and in reality we don’t exist. People and cars - that’s total nonsense for them. No one believes that.”
“Except two young insects! They believe that. Two young insects in training who have just hijacked an army helicopter and are flying around the insect planet and think exactly the same thing. They think we exist because we think they exist too.”
“Incredible!”
“Yes, incredible.”
I looked at the stars with their incomprehensible infinity and I was somehow frightened. I was touched and frightened at the same time. I thought about the insects that were now almost visible in their small, shimmering galaxy and then I turned to Tschick and he looked at me and looked me in the eyes and said that it was all madness, and that was true. It really was madness.
And the crickets chirped all night long.