Sorry

“I can’t smell anything any more,” Astrid replies and taps her nose. “It’s like Chernobyl in there.”

Tamara kisses her sister on the cheek and opens the window.

“So? What happened?”

Tamara would like to answer that nothing’s happened, because nothing actually has happened, but she knows exactly what Astrid means. So she keeps quiet and pulls off her boots and hopes to get away without any further questions. There are days when she manages to do that.

Astrid studies each of Tamara’s movements. Not a lot has changed between the sisters since childhood. They might be four years apart, but no one can see the difference. Tamara doesn’t know whether that speaks for her or against her. In the old days she always wanted to be the older one.

“Don’t make that face,” says Astrid. “One of those big bookshops will take you on eventually. Dussmann or someone. They’re always looking for people.”

Astrid can talk. People with jobs are always hearing that there are jobs everywhere. A year ago Tamara’s sister set up a nail studio in the basement of the building. She also mixes up creams and face masks to order. At the end of the year she intends to specialize in massages. Astrid runs the nail studio on her own. Tamara would like to help her, because anything would be better than sitting around idle, but Astrid thinks Tamara is overqualified.

Tamara hates the term. It sounds as if she’d developed an infectious illness after she took her final exams. Normally qualified is always better, it means the employer can pay less. Student is best of all, of course, but Tamara has sworn never to study again. She’s glad that school’s behind her; she doesn’t have to wear the academic invisibility cloak all over again. She doesn’t even expect much from life. She just wants to make a bit more money, travel a bit more, and she wants things to be a bit better overall.

“Did you call in and see them?” asks Astrid.

“See who?”

“Are you even listening? Bookshop? Big one? Dussmann? Something’ll come up there soon, believe me.”

Tamara nods even though she doesn’t want to, then stands by the kitchen table and empties all the sugar packets from her jacket pocket.

“Look what I’ve brought.”

Astrid grins.

“So who got on the wrong side of you this time?”

“A member of the working class,” says Tamara, kisses her sister on the cheek again and disappears into her room.

Even though she’s only been living with Astrid since the spring, it’s felt like an eternity. It was Tamara who chose to move in, but sometimes you just go with it and then you’re surprised that things happen the way they do.

If you could look around Tamara’s room, you’d think the person who lives here is just passing through. Two open suitcases with clothes spilling out of them, two rows of books along the walls, no pictures, no posters, not even any little ornaments on the windowsill. Having arrived is a state that Tamara is still waiting for. She doesn’t dream of owning her own house with a parquet floor and a husband whom she will bless with three children. Her dreams are bleak and feeble, because she doesn’t know what she wants from life. She doesn’t feel any sense of vocation, she isn’t enticed by a mission. There’s just the desire somehow to fit in, but without really having to belong. She likes society too much to be an outsider; she’s too much of an outsider to conform.

After Tamara has closed the bedroom door behind her, she listens to the treacherous silence. Through the wall she hears first a quiet cough, then a loud groan.

I’ve got to get out of here, Tamara thinks, and resists the urge to hammer on the wall. Werner is on the toilet again. Werner is Astrid’s current boyfriend, and he spends five days a week at her place, even though his flat is twice the size of hers. Astrid doesn’t see him on the weekends, because that’s when Werner goes from one house to another with his friends, getting so drunk that he can’t be bothered to see anybody. Werner is a high school gym teacher, and he’s had hemorrhoids since childhood. Every day he sits on the toilet for an hour and groans. Tamara hears every sound. Except on Saturday and Sunday, of course.

She climbs onto her bunk bed, grabs her headphones and the historical novel that lies open and facedown beside her pillow. Seven pages later the ceiling light flickers on and off. Tamara takes the headphones off and looks down from the bunk. Astrid is standing in the door frame, waving the telephone.

“Who is it?”

“Who do you think?” Astrid replies and throws her the phone.

Tamara’s heart starts thumping. There are days when she hopes to hear an elegant, almost tender voice at the other end. She knows it’s an idiotic hope, but she still excitedly presses the receiver to her ear and listens. She hears breathing, she knows the breathing and is disappointed, but tries not to let any of her disappointment show.

“Save me,” says her best friend. “I’m on my last legs here.”

Tamara Berger and Frauke Lewin have known each other since grade school. They ended up at the same grammar school, fancied the same boys, and hated the same teachers. They spent almost all their evenings with the clique at the Lietzensee. From the first kiss to the first joint they experienced everything there—lovesickness, crying fits, political discussions, arguments, and the depths of boredom. In the winter you could see them sitting on the benches by the war memorial. The cold couldn’t touch them in those days. They drank mulled wine from thermos flasks and smoked their cigarettes hastily, as if they might warm them up. Tamara doesn’t know when the cold took hold of them. They feel it much more quickly now, they whine more, and if anyone asks them why, they reply that the world is getting colder and colder. They could also answer that they’d got older, but that would be too honest, you don’t say that until you’re forty and you can look back. In your late twenties you go through your very private climate disaster and hope for better times.

Frauke waits by the war memorial, which looms out of the park like a lonely monolith. Her back rests against the gray stone and her legs are crossed. Frauke is dressed in black, and that has nothing to do with this special day. In her teenage years Frauke went through an intense Goth phase. On days like today she looks like one of those innocent women in horror films whom everyone wants to protect against evil, who then suddenly transforms and shows her fangs. Take a good look at her. You can’t know it yet, but one day this woman will be your enemy. She will hate you, and she will try to kill you.

“Aren’t you cold?” Tamara asks.

Frauke gives her a look as if she’s sitting on an iceberg.

“The summer’s over and my ass is an ice cube. Can you tell me what I’m doing here?”

“You’re on your last legs,” Tamara reminds her.

“How I love you.”

Frauke slides along, Tamara sits down, Frauke offers her a cigarette, Tamara takes the cigarette, although she doesn’t smoke. Tamara only smokes when Frauke offers her a new cigarette. She doesn’t want to disappoint her friend, so she keeps her company. Sometimes Tamara doesn’t know if there’s a name for women like her. Passive smoker doesn’t capture it.

“How did you even manage to get out of bed this morning?” Frauke asks.

They danced the previous night away at a disco, and got so drunk that they didn’t even say goodbye.

Tamara tells her about the closed job center and the coffee at the bakery. Then she draws on the cigarette and coughs.

Frauke takes the cigarette from her and stamps it out.

“Has anyone ever told you that you smoke like a fag? People like you shouldn’t smoke.”

“You’re telling me.”

They study the few strollers who risk going to the park in this weather. The Lietzensee glitters as if its surface were made of ice. A pregnant woman stops by the shore and rests both hands contentedly on her belly. Tamara quickly looks away.

“How old are we?” asks Frauke.

“You know how old we are.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

Tamara doesn’t know what to say. At the moment she has other things to be worried about. Last week she split up with a musician whom she met on the subway. His notion of a relationship was for Tamara to rave about his talent during the day, and in the evening keep her mouth shut when his friends came by for a jam session. Tamara doesn’t like being alone. She sees loneliness as a punishment.

“I mean, doesn’t it worry you that ten years after leaving school we’re still sitting here by the war memorial and nothing has changed? We know this place like the back of our hands. We know where the winos hide their bags of returnable bottles, we even know where the dogs like to piss. I feel like an old shoe. Imagine going to a class reunion now. God, how they’d laugh.”

Tamara remembers the last reunion a year ago, and the fact that nobody was doing particularly well. Twelve were jobless, four were trying to keep their heads above water by selling insurance, and three had set up on their own and were just short of bankruptcy. Only one woman was doing brilliantly: she was a pharmacist and couldn’t stop boasting about it. So much for high school graduation.

But Tamara doesn’t think that’s really Frauke’s problem.

“What’s happened?” she asks.

Frauke flips the cigarette away. A man stops abruptly and looks at the stub by his feet. He touches it with his shoe as if it were a freshly killed animal, then looks over at the two women on the park bench.

“Fuck off!” Frauke calls to him.