Sorry. Shaun Whiteside

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      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, СКАЧАТЬ