Freak City (10 page)

Sabine disappeared and returned with a helmet. “Here, you can have this one. I’ll take you on my motorcycle. Those are my parents, by the way.” She pointed to a photograph standing on a dresser in the hallway as she walked past it. “That was last year at Oktoberfest.”

The couple looked sweet and seemed to be in high spirits. They were holding up two huge mugs of beer.

I only remembered when we were in the stairway—Sabine’s parents were both deaf. She had mentioned it the first time we had met. “Hey, your parents . . .” We had reached the front door to the building. “What’s it like growing up with deaf parents?”

Sabine shrugged her shoulders. “Totally normal, actually. Okay, I had to translate for them often. But you get used to that.”

“Did you get into arguments with them sometimes?”

“Sometimes?” Sabine laughed out loud. “After I turned twelve, practically uninterrupted. They didn’t like the way I ran around. They called my first boyfriend Chicken Pock, and they flushed my cigarettes down the toilet. The usual family madness. But now we’re really close.”

We had reached Sabine’s motorcycle. I pulled the helmet over my head and lifted the visor. “Wouldn’t you rather have had parents who could hear?”

Sabine thought about it for a minute. “Not really,” she replied. “Do you know AC/DC? Back then, I was the head of their fan club! At my house, we could listen to their music with the volume all the way up! Everyone thought that was cool. Only the neighbors across the street kept calling the police.”

Sabine started the motor, and we drove off toward the university.

My parents were sprawled in front of the TV with Iris. In front of them, on the glass coffee table, was an enormous bowl of potato chips. My father had opened himself a beer.

“Where were you?” My mother only looked up for a second, then immediately turned her attention back to the TV program.

No one in my family had ever mentioned the sign language class since Iris’s birthday party. Maybe my parents hadn’t even taken it seriously.

I had learned so much in Sabine’s afternoon class it almost felt like I was high. Nonetheless, I did not intend to let my family in on it. It was their own fault if they took so little interest in my life. They constantly complained that I shut myself off and didn’t do anything with the family anymore. But basically they were no different. They didn’t give a rip about my life.

“I was in town,” I said, which was not untrue.

“Claudio called,” my father mentioned without looking up from the screen. It was some series about a doctor, and Iris had been in love with the main character for weeks now. She had posters of him hung in her room, and she had decided to become a doctor herself someday. Why my parents were watching that crap, though, was a complete mystery to me.

“I’ll call him back later,” I replied, as if I wanted to apologize for something.

“Claudio and I are going to the climbing hall on Sunday,” my dad volunteered surprisingly. His voice sounded dismissive, almost cold. “If you want to join us, I’d be thrilled. If not, your loss. We’ll leave around one. We’ve already planned everything.”

I was meeting Leah at the outdoor swimming pool on Sunday. “I can’t,” I said. “Already have something going on.”

“Of course you do.” My father didn’t even seem upset. More like completely indifferent. I stood in the doorway for a moment longer, and then stole away to my room.

Mika and Sandra forever!
was the first thing I saw when I turned on the light. Somehow, the writing seemed to have faded a lot all of a sudden. I wouldn’t need much paint to cover the words. The smallest container, no more.

I threw my bag down next to the desk. So my father was going climbing with Claudio the day after tomorrow. The idea didn’t sit right with me. I had no desire for the two of them to talk about me. I also didn’t want them to start acting like father and son. Like two buddies. Claudio had his own dad. It wasn’t my fault if he didn’t pay enough attention to him.

I took an old binder from the shelf and put the papers from Sabine’s sign language course in it. The finger alphabet. Each letter had its own hand gesture. I could already spell my name. But usually they used signs. There was a separate sign for almost every word. Body language and facial expression were part of it, too. It was anything but simple—that much I had grasped right away.

Family,
I formed with both hands. Two circles that came together to form one large one. Absurd. My family was just about anything but a big circle.

I continued practicing the other words.
Father. Mother. Brother. Sister.

“What are you doing?” Iris had slipped into my room and stood behind me.

“I’m studying,” I said, nervously turning over the practice sheet. “For school. It’s none of your business. Why don’t you knock? I’m getting tired of telling you that over and over again!”

Iris’s eyes were glued to the upside-down paper. “You’re lying! School is over, and we have vacation!” she said. “You were doing some weird exercise with your hands. I saw you!”

Hand exercises! I couldn’t believe how defiant she was. “Is your TV show over?” I was desperately trying to get rid of Iris again.

“Doctor White kissed a nurse!” she said, her feelings hurt. “A really dumb one. And she’s someone who only tells lies all the time. And steals stuff. But he doesn’t even care! He kissed her really long, at least fifteen minutes.”

So my sister had a broken heart, too. Sometimes life was fair, after all.

I took pity on her. “I’m learning a special language now,” I confided in her and turned the sheet over again. “Imagine you were deaf.” Iris nodded. “You couldn’t understand what everyone around you was saying. And it would be hard for you to talk, too, because you didn’t learn to speak when you were young.”

“Why not?” Since when was Iris so curious?

I thought about it for a minute. “Because we learn to talk when we hear words. A baby hears the word ‘mama’ and at some point it just babbles the same sounds. But when the baby is deaf, it can’t hear the words and remember them and repeat them.”

That was too much for Iris. She furrowed her brow.

It was also too much for me. At the same time I was explaining it to my sister, I was asking myself how that could possibly work. How did deaf people learn to speak, when they had never heard what a word sounded like spoken aloud? The more I thought about it, the more of a mystery it seemed to me.

“Lunch for Leah and me!” Leah’s friend Franzi had said at Freak City, loud and clear. Okay, it had sounded monotone, but it was still understandable.

Who had taught Franzi that magic trick? Why had Leah kept her lips firmly sealed the entire time? My head was spinning.

“And then?” Iris looked at me impatiently. I was amazed that she was interested in this at all.

“So that these people can still communicate, they created their own language. A language with their hands.”

“A secret language!” Iris looked at me with excitement. With her little friends, she was constantly trying out different secret languages. The tra-la-la language, for example.

“We-tree-lee-lee want-tra-la-la coo-troo-loo-loo-kies-tree-lee-lee.” Iris’s secret languages were so awful that you could figure them out immediately.

“Well, in some ways it is a secret language, because so few people can understand it,” I agreed.

“Will you show me something?” Iris begged.

I groaned. “Wouldn’t you rather listen to Benjamin the Elephant? You can use my stereo!”

“No!” Iris folded her arms over her chest. “I want to learn the secret language. Right now!”

I laughed. I had Iris all wrong. Usually, she didn’t want to learn anything. Getting her to do homework was a big battle.

“This sign, for example, means sweet,” I explained and touched my chin with two fingers.

“And how do you say mom?”

I glanced at the paper. Sabine had already taught us a few important words. “This means mother,” I said, tapping my chin twice with the thumb of my outstretched hand. “And father is almost the same, just here on your forehead.”

Iris copied the signs. “It’s super easy!” she crowed.

“There are a few thousand more words,” I cautioned her. No doubt she would lose interest again soon.

“The next time we’re on vacation in Italy, I can talk with the grannie!” Iris gushed. In the little family-owned hotel where we had spent our spring vacation the past three years, there was a grandmother who was hard of hearing. She was usually in the kitchen, but sometimes she came into the restaurant and nodded at the guests in a friendly way.

“I don’t think she knows sign language,” I countered. That’s something else I had learned in the first class. Not every deaf person knows sign language. Especially when people didn’t lose their hearing until later in life, they often just resigned themselves to not being part of conversations. Another big complication made things difficult, too: there was no such thing as one, set, sign language that was used worldwide. Instead, there were hundreds of them. Sign language was completely different from one country to the next, and even within a country, it often varied from city to city. Different signs were used for lots of words depending on whether you were in Germany or Spain, Berlin or New York. Only a few of them were identical.

“Dinner is ready!” our mom yelled from downstairs.

I grabbed my sister by the shoulder. “Iris, this thing with the sign language is our secret, you got that?”

Iris looked at me uncertainly. “Why?”

“Just because. Mom and Dad don’t need to know everything. You promise?”

“I promise!”

We went downstairs together.

“Can I use the computer?” My dad looked at me suspiciously. Usually, I only wanted to use the family computer in the afternoons to do homework or to chat with my friends. I almost never sat in front of the screen at night because there was no privacy. Any chatting with my friends had to be done by text.

“I have to do some research for a bike tour later,” my dad claimed. He was sitting in front of the TV again watching a mafia film. Mom had already gone to bed, and Iris had been sound asleep for hours.

“I’ll be finished way before then.” I hated it that I had to constantly ask my dad to use the computer. I really wanted to have a laptop of my own or a smart phone.

“All right. But what are you doing on the Internet at this hour? Don’t you go looking up any eighteen-and-older sites!” What did my father think of me?

“I just want to check e-mail!”

My dad turned down the sound on the television. “Mail from Sandra?”

I nodded apathetically. Sometime I’d have to tell them about Leah. Sometime, but not now.

“Did you two patch things up again? It looked like it at Iris’s birthday party.”

I shook my head. “It’s over. For now. But she wants to think it over.”

“Uh huh.” Suddenly, my dad seemed nervous. Now he was finally having it, that great father-son conversation he always wanted so badly. And he was immediately out of his depth.

“Girls!” was all he said. “Complicated. Even back in my day. Maybe Sandra would want to come climbing? Or hiking in the mountains. Invite her sometime! Your summer vacation is long. And I wanted to take Tanya along sometime anyway. We could make a kind of family trip.”

I stared at my dad. Did he really think Sandra would come back to me because of a climbing trip?

“We’ll see,” I dodged. Sandra wasn’t the athletic type at all. She was much too afraid for her makeup, and the helmet would ruin her hair.

It might be more something for Leah, actually. She seemed to be up for adventure, but I couldn’t say for sure.

I went over to my dad’s office. On the shelves stood trophies from days gone by, and the walls were covered with awards. Until a few years ago, Dad had been active in all kinds of sports clubs: badminton, aikido, squash. It was only natural that he wanted to make an athlete out of me, too. Sports, and especially mountain climbing, were his passions. It must have been hard for him to have such a couch potato for a son, who would rather do other things. Movies, hanging out in the city, swimming, sign language. . . . No wonder he had reacted so negatively to the news!

I turned on the computer. The background was a family photo my dad had scanned. It was old; Iris wasn’t even in kindergarten back then. We all looked happy.

What had changed since then?

Three e-mails, my mailbox indicated. A spam mail promising me inexpensive Viagra pills. The second was from Sandra, the third from Leah.

Sandra had sent an e-mail to me and nineteen other people. A couple of pictures from her last performance were attached and an announcement for the next concert. In four weeks, she’d be singing at a music festival taking place in the park across the street from Freak City, of all places.

Sandra also announced that she had joined a new band. Now she was also the lead singer for the Colored Pieces, because their singer had quit on short notice. How had she managed to get into such a well-known band? Why hadn’t she told me about it sooner? Lost in thought, I stared at the pictures.

“Sandra looks like a real star!” Dad stood directly behind me. Was there absolutely no privacy in this family anymore?