Sorry

The man shakes his head and walks on. Frauke snorts and grins. On days like this it’s plain to Tamara that Frauke is still a street child. While Tamara had to fight to leave the house for as much as an hour, Frauke had wandered around freely, taking advice from no one. The girls looked up to her as a leader, while the boys feared her sharp tongue. Frauke has always had both pride and dignity. Now she’s working as a freelance media designer, but only takes on commissions that she likes, and that often leaves her broke at the beginning of the month.

“I need a new job,” she says. “Just anything, you know? But really urgently. My dad has another new girlfriend, and his girlfriend is of the opinion that I should stand on my own two feet. I mean, hey, am I like fourteen years old or something? He stopped the checks. Just like that. Can you tell me what kind of sluts my dad’s hanging out with? Let ’em come and ring my doorbell, I’ll tell them a thing or two.”

Tamara has the image clearly in front of her eyes. She doesn’t know whether there’s a Latin name for Frauke’s father complex. Any woman who gets involved with Frauke’s father experiences his daughter as a Fury. Tamara was there a few times, and the memories aren’t good. Tamara sees the father as the problem, not his girlfriends, but she keeps that thought to herself.

“And now?” Frauke asks, suddenly feeble. “What do I do now?”

“We could mug somebody,” Tamara suggests, jutting her chin toward the man who stopped when he saw the cigarette butt.

“Too poor.”

“We could open a bookshop?”

“Tamara, you need seed money for that. Monetos, capice?”

“I know.”

It’s always the same dialogue. Tamara dreams, Frauke wakes her up.

“And don’t suggest I go to the job center,” says Frauke, tapping a new cigarette out of the box. She offers one to Tamara, Tamara shakes her head, Frauke puts the pack back in her pocket and lights her own.

“I have my dignity,” she says after the first drag. “I’d rather beg in the street.”

Tamara wishes that Frauke’s character traits would rub off on her a little. She’d love to be choosier. In men, in work, in her decisions. She’d also like to be proud, but it’s hard when you’ve got nothing to be proud of.

I’ve got Frauke, Tamara thinks and says, “You will manage.”

Frauke sighs and looks into the sky. Her neck lengthens as she does so; it’s white like a swan’s.

“Look down again,” Tamara says.

Frauke lowers her head.

“Why?”

“I get dizzy when people look into the sky.”

“What?”

“No, it’s true. It makes me really ill. I think it’s some sort of nervous disorder.”

“You really are a case, aren’t you?”

And she’s absolutely right, Tamara is a case.

An hour later they share a bag of chips by the district court building, and wait for the 148, toward the zoo. Frauke is feeling better. She has worked out that she sometimes sees nothing but storm clouds everywhere. When Tamara tells her to take less medication, Frauke doesn’t even pull a face and says, “Tell that to my mother, not to me.”

At Wilmersdorfer Strasse they get off the bus and head into the Chinese supermarket opposite Woolworth’s. Frauke fancies stir-fried vegetables and noodles.

“It’ll do you good to eat something healthy,” she explains.

Tamara doesn’t like the smell in Chinese shops. It reminds her of the hallways in the blocks of apartments with corners stinking of piss, and it also reminds her a bit of an InterRail journey when she got her period and couldn’t wash herself down below for two days. But what bothers her most is that she has gotten used to the smell of dried fish after a minute, but knows very well that it’s still in the air.

Frauke isn’t worried about that. She puts bok choy, baby eggplants, and leeks in the basket. She weighs a handful of bean sprouts and searches for the right noodles. Then she runs back to the vegetables to get ginger and coriander. She doesn’t like the coriander. She talks to a saleswoman and asks for a fresh bunch. The saleswoman shakes her head. Frauke lifts the coriander and says, Dead, then taps herself on the chest and says, Alive. The saleswoman holds Frauke’s stare for a minute before disappearing into the storeroom and coming back with a new bunch. Tamara thinks the new bunch looks exactly the same as the old one, but she says nothing, because Frauke is content. Frauke thanks the saleswoman with a hint of a bow and marches to the register with Tamara. The Vietnamese man behind the register is about as nice as the kind of uncle you might imagine trying to grope you under your skirt. Frauke tells him he can stop grinning. His mouth becomes a straight line. Frauke and Tamara hurry out of the shop.

“Plan B,” says Frauke, dragging Tamara over to one of the phone booths. Plan B can mean anything with Frauke, but in lots of cases it just means that no Plan A exists.

As Frauke is making her call, Tamara studies the people outside the Tchibo coffee shop. Even though it’s overcast they’re crowding around the tables under the umbrellas, shopping bags crammed between their legs. Grandmas with a cigarette in one hand and a coffee cup in the other; grandpas silently guarding the tables, as if someone has forced them to leave their flat. Among them are two laborers bent over their tables eating as if they aren’t allowed to leave crumbs on the pavement. Caffè lattes and apple tarts are on sale. Tamara imagines herself standing there with Frauke in thirty years’ time. Fresh from the hairdresser’s in their beige orthopedic footwear, their plastic bags full of booty, lipstick crusted in the corners of their mouths.

“It’s been months,” Frauke says into the receiver. “I can’t even remember what you look like. And anyway my kitchen’s too small. I hate cooking in it, is that something you can possibly imagine?”

Frauke looks at Tamara and holds up her thumb.

“What? What do you mean, when?” she says again into the phone. “Now, of course.”

Tamara presses her ear to the receiver as well and hears Kris saying he thinks it’s nice of them to call but he has no time right now, his head’s in the oven and they should try again later.

“Later’s not good,” Frauke says, unimpressed. “Do you really not fancy stir-fried vegetables?”

Kris admits that he isn’t in the slightest interested in stir-fried vegetables. He promises to call again later.

“After the autopsy,” he says and hangs up.

“What does he mean by autopsy?” Tamara asks.

“For God’s sake, Tamara,” says Frauke and pushes her out of the phone booth.

Whenever Tamara thinks about Kris, she thinks of a fish that she saw once in the aquarium. It was her twentieth birthday. Frauke had bought some grass from a friend, and the plan had been to get completely stoned and look at the fish in the aquarium.

“You can’t beat it,” she had said. “You suddenly understand what a fish is really like.”

They strolled giggling from one room to the next, got terrible munchies for Mars bars and stocked up on them at a newsstand before entering a room with a big pool. A handful of tourists had assembled, students sat yawning on the benches. Tamara’s mouth was full of chocolate when she stepped forward and saw the fish.

The fish wasn’t swimming. It floated among all the other fish in the water and stared at the visitors, some of whom pulled faces or knocked on the glass, making the fish jerk backward and swim away. But the one fish remained still. Its eyes were fixed, and it looked through the visitors as if no one were there. Tamara thought, No one can hurt him. And Kris is just like that. No one can hurt him.

At the time they all belonged to the same clique. Kris and Tamara and Frauke. There was Gero and Ina too, and Thorsten, Lena and Mike and whatever all their names were. They sailed through the nineties like an armada of hormone-drenched seafarers with only one goal in mind: one day to reach the sacred shore of high school graduation, and never to have to take to the sea ever again. After school they lost touch. Years later they bumped into each other by chance and were amazed at how much time had just slipped through their fingers. They were seafarers no more, neither were they shipwrecked; they were more like the people who walked along the beach picking up flotsam and jetsam.

“What’s up?” Frauke asks, turning to Tamara, who is still standing beside the phone booth. “What are you waiting for?”

“Are you sure he wants to see us?”

“What sort of a question is that? Of course he wants to see us.”

The last time Tamara talked to Kris was New Year’s Eve. Kris described her as irresponsible and incompetent. Tamara is in fact irresponsible and sometimes incompetent as well, but there was no reason to rub her nose in it. She has no great desire to listen to this tirade all over again.

“Today’s his last day at the paper,” says Frauke. “Wolf mailed me. Kris has to see someone, or he’ll go off the edge.”

“Wolf said that?”