You. Zoran Drvenkar

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СКАЧАТЬ Your brother won’t let go.

      “One of your stupid girlfriends has been ringing up a storm, how can’t you hear it?”

      That’s enough. You kick the covers away, bickering like a washerwoman. You swing your legs out of bed and a whole universe of stars explodes in front of your eyes. You feel dizzy and you bend down and look at your toes until the explosions subside. You didn’t hear any ringing. Good thing your aunt’s on night shift tonight.

      “God, Paul, I didn’t hear it ring,” you murmur.

      “Yeah, right.”

      Your brother slams the door behind him, you sink back.

       Maybe it’s all just a dream? Maybe I can just go back to sleep—

      Your bedroom door flies open again.

      You raise your head.

      Ruth is standing there, and she says, “I hate it when you don’t charge your battery.”

      And as she says it you know something has happened.

       Something bad.

      The clock by the door says ten past three.

       Whatever it is, it’s definitely bad.

      The realization reaches your brain like a shock wave, your ears pop, you have to rub your nose because it’s suddenly itchy.

      “My goodness,” you say, like a grandma whose shopping bag tears on the way home, then you totter to your feet and get dressed while Ruth tells you about the message she got.

      Five minutes later you’re sitting on the stolen Vespa, your hair blowing in the wind, Berlin is in a coma, the streets are deserted and the traffic lights have a weary pulse that looks a bit like slow-motion Christmas lights. How you hate Christmas, how you love the city at night.

       III

      drives up to the next seat and onto the roots

      drinking up the village

      Portugal. The Man THE DEVIL

       THE TRAVELER

      And then you disappeared.

      Without a trace.

      And chaos was left in your wake.

      The special crimes unit has been searching tirelessly for you. They said you wanted to be caught after they found your blood on the corpses. They said you were losing your concentration. They were now as familiar with your DNA as they were with your fingerprints.

      Did that worry you? Were you even aware of it?

      You were aware of it, the way you’re aware of things because people are talking about them. They said the Traveler was getting careless, and would soon fall into the special unit’s clutches. It didn’t occur to anyone that the Traveler didn’t care what he left behind. You were moving forward. The past remained behind like the vague memory of a dream or a smell that gets blown away by the next breeze. Not that you woke up drenched in sweat and wondered what had happened. Things like that are stupid. That’s what psychopaths do. The past was behind you, it wasn’t pursuing you.

      You’re like a shark that always has to keep moving or it’ll sink. In a flowing forward motion. There is no going back. And just as a shark has no swim bladder, you have no morals. If you hesitated, you would sink to the bottom of our society in an instant and disappear.

      Stasis is corruption, so you stay in calm motion.

      For six years no one heard a thing from you. On the internet they wondered if the Traveler had reached his destination. You’re responsible for over sixty corpses. All inquiries have led nowhere, no one saw anything, the investigations washed out and the special unit was called into question. There was no pattern and no connection between the victims, there was no apparent motive. Even though the special unit would never have admitted it, they were waiting for your next step. They wanted mistakes. They looked at psychograms of serial killers, studied the behavior of frenzied attackers, and tried to force you into a category. They really had no idea who they were dealing with.

      In 1998 you were offered a better job and moved to a bigger city. Your son turned seven and wrote his first letter, asking you if you couldn’t have him for the summer. You wrote back to say it was a good idea, he should ask Mom. Mom said no. Life took its course.

      Your girlfriend split up with you because the long-distance relationship was too uncomfortable. You started spending your evenings in theaters and at concerts. You started reading more books, and built up a collection of documentaries on DVD. You discovered culture and met a woman who shared your passion for architecture. Otherwise hardly anything in your life changed. You weren’t calmer, you didn’t drink to excess or call your existence into question. Your friends didn’t notice any changes either. You were balanced. You traveled a lot throughout those years. Sometimes as a couple or in a group or on your own. And you never left any corpses behind.

      When the new millennium was ushered in, your name was a legend. Someone wrote a book about you, someone put up a website that not only offered a forum for discussion but listed all your victims and was regularly checked by the special unit with the agreement of the provider. And of course someone tried to copy you and was promptly overpowered by his first victim. The day the two passenger planes flew into the World Trade Center, people started forgetting about you. The world was heading toward a new chaos. You grieved with the Americans, spent that afternoon in front of the television, and then got on with your life like the rest of us.

      Year after year after year.

      It was once again winter when you traveled across the country with a lot of snow and a storm at your heels. The papers said: The Avenging Angel strikes again.

      Avenging what, is the question.

      You keep quiet.

      It is November.

      It is 2003.

      It is night.

      Fennried is a tiny village on the river Havel between Ketzin and Brandenburg, so insignificant that there’s no phone booth and no public mailbox there. A main street and a side street, thirty-eight houses, eight run-down farms, two cigarette machines. The bus stop is by the entrance to the village, a van parks outside the bakery twice a week, and once a week a van selling frozen food drives through the streets and honks its horn. It seems like the village is all the time asleep, the tallest building is a dilapidated church with a little cemetery, in which the gravestones have either fallen over or lean wearily against one another. In the run-up to elections the parties don’t bother to put up posters along the two streets. It’s an in-between place. It doesn’t get bigger, it doesn’t get smaller, it stagnates in its insignificance.

      One of your fans wrote that the challenge was so great that you couldn’t resist it. He wrote that after lengthy planning you had finally decided to pay Fennried a visit. He made a sketch of your journey through the town, as if he’d СКАЧАТЬ