Why We Took the Car (5 page)

Perhaps it's not worth mentioning what I thought the moment I saw Tschick for the first time, but I want to anyway. I had an extremely bad feeling about him the second I saw him next to Wagenbach. He seemed like just another asshole. Even though I didn't know him at all and had no idea whether he really was an asshole. He was Russian, it turned out. He was average height, had on a dirty white shirt that was missing a button, bargain basement jeans, and misshapen brown shoes that looked like dead rats. He also had extremely high cheekbones and slits instead of eyes. His eyes — these narrow slits — were the first thing you noticed about him. They made him look Mongolian and you could never tell where he was looking. He had his mouth open a little on one side — like he was smoking an invisible cigarette. His forearms were huge and there was a big scar on one of them. His legs were skinny, and the top of his head was kind of squared off.

Nobody giggled. Nobody ever giggled in Wagenbach's class. But I had the impression that even if we'd been in somebody else's class nobody would have giggled. The Russian just stood there and looked who-knows-where out of his Mongolian eyes. And he completely ignored Wagenbach. It was quite an accomplishment to ignore Wagenbach. It was practically impossible.

“Andrej,” Wagenbach said, staring again at the notepad and silently moving his lips. “Andrej Tsch . . . Tschicha . . . tschoroff.”

The Russian mumbled something.

“Excuse me?”

“Tschichatschow,” said the Russian without looking at Wagenbach.

Wagenbach inhaled through his nostrils. That was one of his quirks. Inhaling through his nostrils.

“Great, Tschischaroff. Andrej. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Where you're from, which school you attended previously?”

This was standard. Whenever new students arrived in school, they had to say where they were from or whatever. And now for the first time since he entered the room, Tschick's expression changed. He turned his head slightly toward Wagenbach as if noticing him for the first time. He scratched his neck, turned back toward the class, and said, “No.” The room was deathly quiet.

Wagenbach nodded seriously and said, “You don't wish to say where you're from?”

“No,” said Tschick. “Who cares?”

“Fine. In that case I will tell the class a bit about you, Andrej. Out of politeness, I would like to introduce you to the class.”

He looked at Tschick. Tschick looked at the class.

“I take your silence as consent,” said Wagenbach. He said it with an ironic tone the way all teachers do when they say something like that.

Tschick didn't answer.

“Or do you have something against it?” asked Wagenbach.

“Go right ahead,” said Tschick with a wave of the hand.

Somewhere a couple of girls started to giggle.
Go right ahead!
Insane. He pronounced each syllable distinctly, with a strange accent. And he was still just staring at the back wall of the classroom. His eyes might even have been closed. It was tough to tell. Wagenbach gave the class a look. And it was absolutely silent again.

“Right,” he said. “Andrej Tschicha . . . schoff is the name of our new classmate, and as you can no doubt discern from his name, our guest has come from far away. The boundless Russian expanses, which Napoleon conquered in 1812 and, as we'll see, was soon expelled from again. Just as Charles XII had been before him and Hitler would be after him.”

Wagenbach inhaled through his nostrils. The introduction had no impact on Tschick. He didn't move.

“In any event, Andrej came to Germany four years ago with his brother, and . . . Wouldn't you rather explain this yourself?”

The Russian made some sort of sound.

“Andrej, I'm talking to you,” said Wagenbach.

“No,” said Tschick. “And by no I mean, No, I would not rather tell it myself.”

Suppressed laughter. Wagenbach nodded awkwardly.

“Fine, then I will do it, if you have no objection. But this is most unorthodox.”

Tschick shook his head.

“It's not unorthodox?”

“No.”

“Well,
I
find it unorthodox,” insisted Wagenbach. “I think it's admirable to introduce oneself. But in the interest of time, we'll keep this short. Our friend Andrej is from a family of German origin, but his native language is Russian. He's a great communicator, as we can see, but he first learned German when he arrived here in Germany, and as result should be granted understanding in certain . . . in certain areas. Four years ago he started in a special education program. Then he transferred because his grades permitted him to enter a standard school. But he didn't stay there long either — next up was a year at a vocational school and now he's joining us. And all of this in just four years. Is that right so far?”

Tschick rubbed the back of his hand across his nose, then looked at his hand. “Ninety percent,” he said.

Wagenbach paused to see if Tschick was going to say anything more. But he didn't. The ten percent discrepancy remained unexplained.

“Alright,” said Wagenbach in a surprisingly friendly tone. “No doubt we're all interested to hear the rest of the story, but unfortunately you can't stand up here forever, as enjoyable as it is talking with you. I would like to suggest that you sit at the free desk in the back there, since it's the only one available. Yes?”

Tschick lumbered down the aisle like a robot. Everyone stared at him. Tatiana and Natalie put their heads together, whispering.

“Napoleon!” said Wagenbach. Then he paused dramatically to pull a pack of tissues out of his briefcase and blow his nose at length.

Tschick arrived in the back of class in the meantime, and down the aisle where he had walked wafted a scent that almost knocked me over. A vapor trail of alcohol. I was three seats from the aisle and I could have put together a list of the drinks he'd had in the last twenty-four hours. That was how my mother smelled when she had a bad day. Maybe that was the reason Tschick hadn't faced Wagenbach or opened his mouth — he was worried about the booze on his breath. But Wagenbach had a cold. He couldn't smell anything anyway.

Tschick sat at the free desk in the back row. Kallenbach, the class clown, had started the year there, but he'd been moved to the front row before the end of the first day of school so the teachers could keep him under control. And now, instead, this Russian was sitting in the back row, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one thinking that it hadn't been such a great idea to move Kallenbach now that the Russian was going to end up back there. He was on a totally different level from Kallenbach — that was obvious. And that's why everyone kept turning around to look at him. After his performance with Wagenbach you just knew something was going to happen. This was going to be interesting.

But then nothing happened the rest of the day. Each new teacher who came in greeted Tschick and he had to spell his name at the beginning of every period. But everything went smoothly. The next day was quiet too. It was a major disappointment. He always wore the same ratty shirt to school, didn't participate in class, said “Yes,” “No,” or “Don't know” whenever he was asked anything, and didn't disturb things. He didn't become friends with anyone. He didn't even try to make friends with anyone. He didn't reek of alcohol the second day, but you still got the impression when you looked at him in the back row that he was somehow out of it. The way he slumped in his chair with his eyes barely open, you never knew whether he was asleep, wasted, or just really laid-back.

But about once a week he would smell like booze again. Not as bad as on that first day, but still obvious. There were some kids in class — myself not included — who had already gotten drunk or high, but for somebody to show up to school in the morning drunk? That was new. Tschick chewed really strong-smelling mint gum whenever he was drunk, so everyone figured out how to tell what state he was in.

But otherwise nobody knew much about him. It was absurd enough that someone would transfer from a special ed program to a school like ours. And then there were his clothes. But there were people who defended him, saying he actually wasn't stupid at all. “At least not as stupid as Kallenbach,” I said one time — I was one of the people who defended him. But the only reason I defended him, to be honest, was because Kallenbach was standing next to me and he always got on my nerves. From the things Tschick said, you really couldn't tell whether he was smart or stupid or somewhere in between.

Of course there were also rumors about him and his background. Chechnya, Siberia, and Moscow all came up. Kevin said Tschick and his brother lived in a camping trailer on the outskirts of the city, and that his brother was a weapons dealer. Somebody else said he knew for a fact the brother was a pimp and there was talk of a forty-room mansion where the Russian mafia had orgies. Another kid said Tschick lived in one of the old high-rise apartment buildings out toward the big lake, Mueggelsee. The truth was that all of it was a load of crap. And the only reason he generated so many rumors was because Tschick himself never talked to anyone. But for the same reason, he was slowly forgotten. Or at least forgotten as much as someone who comes to school in the same awful shirt and cheap jeans everyday and sits in the class clown's seat can be forgotten. At least the dead animal shoes were replaced by a pair of white Adidas, which, of course, somebody
knew
had just been stolen. And maybe he had stolen them. But the number of rumors surrounding him kept dwindling. The last thing was a nickname for him, which was Tschick. And for those who thought that was too simple, there was also “special ed.” And with that, the topic of the Russian was pretty much exhausted. Inside our classroom, at least.

Out in the parking lot he remained a topic of conversation a bit longer. In the morning, kids from the adjacent high school hung out in the parking lot. Some of them already had cars. And they found the Mongolian incredibly interesting. Guys who'd been held back five times and liked to stand in the open doors of their cars, just so everybody could see they were the owners — owners of cars that were hunks of junk, but which were tuned and modified. They made fun of Tschick. “Wasted again, Ivan?” Every morning. Especially one guy with a yellow Ford Fiesta. I didn't know for a long time whether Tschick realized they were making fun of him, but one day he stopped in his tracks at the edge of the parking lot. I was locking up my bike and heard them all loudly taking bets on whether Tschick would manage to make it through the door to the school the way he was staggering. Or as they put it, the way the fucking Mongolian was staggering. And Tschick stopped and went back toward the parking lot and up to the guys doing the talking. They were all a head taller than he was and several years older, and they grinned as the Russian walked up to them — and then past most of them. He went straight up to the Ford Fiesta guy, who was the loudest of all, put his hand on the car door and said something to him so quietly that nobody was able to hear what it was. The grin on the Ford guy's face slowly disappeared and Tschick turned around and went into our school building. After that, nobody made any comments when he walked past.

I wasn't the only one who saw this happen, and from that point on there was no stopping the rumors about his family being in the Russian mafia. Nobody could imagine any other way he could have managed to silence the idiot with the Ford with a couple of sentences. But of course that was baloney. Mafia. Bunch of baloney. That's what I thought, anyway.

CHAPTER 10

Two weeks later we got our first math assignments back. First, Mr. Strahl put the results on the board to scare us. This time there was one A, which was unusual. Strahl's favorite sentence was: “As are reserved for God.” Horrifying. But Strahl was a math teacher, after all, meaning he was a madman. There were two Bs, loads of Cs and Ds, no Es. And one F. I had a slight hope that I'd earned the A — math was the only subject I ever managed to score an A in once in a while. But it turned out I had a B−. Still, not bad. In Strahl's class a B− was practically an A. I looked around discreetly to see who was celebrating having gotten an A as the papers were passed back. But nobody showed any sign of celebrating. Not Lukas or Kevin or any of the other math wizards. Instead, Strahl held on to one assignment, walked it personally to the back row, and handed it to Tschichatschow. Tschick was sitting there chewing intently on strong peppermint gum. He didn't look at Strahl. He just stopped chewing and breathing. Strahl bent down, wet his lips, and said, “Andrej.”

There was practically no reaction. His head turned ever so slightly — like in a gangster film when somebody hears the click of the hammer when a gun is put to his head.

“Your assignment. I don't know what it is,” said Strahl, leaning a hand on Tschick's desk. “I mean, if you didn't have this at your old school, you'll have to repeat math class. You didn't even . . . you don't seem to have even attempted to solve the problems. All the stuff written here” — Strahl leafed through the pages of Tschick's assignment and lowered his voice, though you could still hear him fine — “these
jokes
. I mean, if you haven't studied it before, I'll take that into account, of course. I had to give you an F, but the grade is, shall we say, not written in stone. I would suggest that you turn to Kevin or Lukas. Have a look at their assignments. Go over their notes from the last two months. Ask them any questions you have. Because the way things are going now, there's just no point.”