Still Waters

 

We were a little disappointed we weren’t the ones who found her. Michael and I arrived after they had already pulled her out of one of the Judenteiche, the Jews’ ponds. We still got to see the vehicles from the fire and police departments, as well as the news reporters, so at least we didn’t miss out on all of it. We stood around and gawked, trying to see as much as we could. We all knew it was Silvana’s mother who had been found there in the water. No one had to tell us.

Thorsten had gotten there long before we had. His parents lived in one of the half-timbered houses on St. Annenstrasse, only a stone’s throw from the Judenteich. He was still in his PJs when we walked up, and he claimed to have seen everything from the very start. He said she had looked like Barschel in his bathtub, and he went on to mimic how her head had lolled onto her right shoulder, twisting his arms as if suffering from cramps. We acted like we didn’t care, like we always did when Thorsten was telling one of his dumb horror stories, but I still wondered at that moment what Silvana’s mother had actually looked like when they found her in the pond. I had never seen a real corpse. None of us had. So we kept standing there and gawking, until we realized that we were really late for our first class. Thorsten wanted us to wait for him. On the way, we discussed what we were going to tell Herr Schneider. We could hardly throw open the classroom door and tell everybody why we were tardy, considering that Silvana was in that class. I suggested we get him out of the classroom somehow, maybe even by calling him from the secretary’s office. Michael and Thorsten nodded: Michael because he didn’t have a better idea, and Thorsten because his aunt worked in the office, which is why he always had it easy whenever it came to getting his tardies excused.

We ran into Cem on our way to the office. He was just stepping out of the bathroom, which is where he always went during German class because he couldn’t stand Herr Schneider. Cem wanted to come with us to the office, so as we walked, we filled him in on the news that Silvana’s mother had drowned in the Judenteich. Then we told Thorsten’s aunt about what had happened, and she immediately grabbed the microphone and paged Herr Schneider. After that, Thorsten’s aunt called Silvana’s apartment, but no one answered. They briefly considered calling her father over at the chemical factory. Cem knew the number by heart, since his father also worked at Oker Chemical, but Herr Schneider thought the police had surely contacted Silvana’s father by now. It was finally decided to call Silvana into the office, where she could wait until her father picked her up. We hung around the hallway until Herr Schneider came back with Silvana. She was pale and had rings under her eyes, which was the way she had started looking recently, even before her mother had vanished a week ago. She would not make eye contact with us, keeping her eyes fixed on the floor instead. It was better that way. Michael, Thorsten and Cem stared at her, jaws dropped, and I’m sure I didn’t make a better impression. That ended up being the last time we saw Silvana. At first, they said she’d be coming back after the funeral. Then they said she was sick and would be coming back next week. The week after next. Before the break in order to pick up her grades. But she never returned. Some said that her father went back to Italy. Others thought he moved to another city. We never found out for sure. Just like the police never figured out who murdered Silvana’s mother. Maybe they never really searched hard for the murderer. At least, they never questioned us.

 

Two months before that, in March 1989, I celebrated the coolest birthday in my fourteen-year life. I had been allowed to invite my friends to a cook-out at the Grane Reservoir, and for the first time ever, my parents got my gift right: the new LP from New Model Army. My brother, who was living in Berlin in order to skip out on his military service, sent me a New Model Army t-shirt. My grandparents, aunts and uncles gave me the money I had wished for, so I could buy a leather motorcycle jacket as soon as possible from the secondhand shop. I had seen one there for forty-five marks, but I had to first save up for it.

I had also invited a few girls, including Silvana, because she was in my class and because she was pretty and because they said she was willing do things with boys that the other girls wouldn’t. We were not the kind of boys who easily got girls. We were the outsiders. Unathletic, shy, not particularly attractive. Our parents were not wealthy. Thorsten, whose father had been out of work since they’d shut down Rammelsberg the year before, always rode around on an old collapsible bike, while boys like Max and Marcel showed up at school with brand new BMX bikes. In the winter, if we did anything, we stayed with relatives in Salzgitter and went ice skating, while the others took ski trips to Switzerland. Some had gotten into snowboarding last year. We didn’t even have a skateboard.

Thorsten was the short, fat one, who only attracted attention because of his perverted stories and stupid jokes. He could also belch and fart on command. Michael owned the biggest music collection in the entire school, but this consisted exclusively of punk rock, metal and indie music, which the girls didn’t like anyway. Cem was an amazing chess and skat player, but nobody except us thought that was cool. A guy from our class had found out that after school he read the Turkish newspaper out loud to his father, who couldn’t read it for himself. The others laughed themselves sick over that one. And I was simply the freak, because I was too tall, too skinny, too lanky, too pale, and too red-haired. Ever since elementary school, they’d called me “Feuerlöscher” - “Fire Extinguisher” - which they shortened to Löschi. At some point, my father even started to call me this whenever he wanted to get on my nerves.

Anyway, this was the coolest birthday of my life, because everyone I had invited actually came. Silvana had made me a mixtape, since she knew I liked to listen to music. Unfortunately, it was all commercial crap, but I didn’t say anything. She had even made a little cover for the cassette case, on which she had very neatly written out all the songs. She really thought I loved INXS and Simply Red.

This was the first time we’d ever had beer. We stayed up at the hut until eleven o’clock, and then the parents who had agreed to drive us back home started to show up. They also had some beer, stood around gossiping for a while, and after polishing off a large share of the potato salad, set off for home. Cem’s parents didn’t own a car, so he was driving back to town with us. Silvana’s parents also didn’t come, but that hadn’t been arranged. We took her along as well. My parents weren’t exactly thrilled because Silvana lived in Jürgenohl, which was quite a bit out of our way. As my father pulled up at the public housing building on Königsberger Strasse, the lights were blazing in Silvana’s apartment on the third floor. We could see that Silvana’s mother was standing on the balcony. We could hear through the closed car doors that she was screaming at her husband. We could hear him yell back, and her volume level spiked so sharply they had to have heard her as far away as Rammelsberg. I looked over at Silvana. Cem was sitting between us on the back seat, and he was watching her, too. She had dropped her head, shut her eyes, and stuck her fingers in her ears. My parents were whispering with each other, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then my father honked briefly, and the yelling on the balcony broke off. In response, the lights in the other apartments flashed on. Silvana tore the car door open just as my mother was turning around to say something to her. She jumped out of the car and dashed to the building, but we couldn’t see if she actually went in.

“It has nothing to do with us,” my father said, and my mother shook her head like she did whenever I came home with a hopelessly screwed-up piece of homework.

 

Mein Kampf