“Psst,” said Tschick, looking past me. I followed his gaze and spotted two policemen walking along a row of parked cars looking at every license plate number. Without a word, we took our paper cups and sauntered casually back to the bushes where we had parked the Lada. Then we drove back the way we had come that morning, back along a country road, out of there like a shot. We didn't have to talk long about what we would do next.
In a wooded area not far away, we found a parking lot where people parked to go hiking. We started looking for a license plate we could unscrew, but it wasn't easy to find one. Most of the plates weren't even attached with screws. Fortunately there were quite a few cars there. And finally we found an old VW Beetle with Munich plates. We attached our plates to the VW in the hopes that the owner wouldn't immediately notice his were gone.
Then we drove a few miles on dirt paths that crisscrossed fields before taking a little road into a forest and then pulling over at an abandoned sawmill. We stuffed our backpacks and hiked off into the woods.
We weren't planning to ditch the Lada, but despite switching the license plates we weren't too confident about the whole situation. It seemed like the smartest thing to do was to keep it off the road for a while. We could spend a day or two in the woods. That was the plan. Though we didn't have a real plan. We didn't really know if they were looking for us or not. And whether they would give up after a few days if they were looking for us.
We hiked up a trail, and as we rose higher on the ridge the woods thinned out a bit. Eventually we came to an observation platform with a cool view out over the area. But even better than the view was the fact that there was a snack stand there selling water and candy and ice cream. So we wouldn't starve. And we decided to stay near the snack stand. Not far below the scenic lookout was a steep meadow. We found a quiet spot there below a giant elderberry bush. We lay down in the sun and snoozed the day away. Late in the day we loaded ourselves up with Snickers and Cokes and crawled into our sleeping bags and listened to the crickets start to chirp. During the day, hikers, bikers, and buses had come and gone constantly to the observation platform, but when it started to get dark we had the entire mountain to ourselves. It was still warm, almost too warm, and Tschick, who had managed to get the owner of the snack stand to sell him two beers at the end of the day, popped them open with a lighter.
More and more stars appeared in the sky above us. We lay on our backs and watched as the spaces between the stars filled with smaller stars, and then even tinier stars came into view between the smaller stars. The blackness kept retreating.
“It's amazing,” said Tschick.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is amazing.”
“It's way better than TV. Though TV's good too. You ever seen
Star Wars
?”
“Of course.”
“You seen
Starship Troopers
?”
“Is that the one with the monkeys?”
“No, bugs.”
“And a brain bug at the end? A giant brain with â with slimy things sticking out of it?”
“Yeah!”
“That's an amazing movie.”
“Yeah, it is amazing.”
“Can you imagine? Somewhere up there, on some star â that's what's happening! Actual bugs are taking over some planet, slaughtering all the inhabitants, and nobody even knows about it,” I said. “Except for us.”
“Right, except for us.”
“But we're the only ones who realize it. And the bugs don't know that we know.”
“Seriously? Do you really think so?” Tschick rose to his elbows and looked at me. “Do you think there really is something out there? I mean, not necessarily bugs. But something?”
“I don't know. I heard one time that you can calculate the probability of there being other life in the universe. The chances are very slim, but since the universe is infinitely large, if you multiply even the slimmest odds by infinity you get a number â a number of planets where there's probably life. It worked here, after all. So somewhere out there I guarantee there are giant bugs.”
“That's exactly what I think, exactly what I think!” Tschick lay back down on his back and looked intensely at the sky. “Amazing, isn't it?”
“Yeah, amazing.”
“It just blows me away.”
“And just imagine: The bugs go to the bug movies! They make movies on their planet and they're sitting in some bug cinema watching a movie set on Earth â it's about two kids who steal a car.”
“And it's a horror film!” says Tschick. “The bugs think we're disgusting because we're
not
slimy.”
“But they all think it's just science fiction, and that we don't exist in reality. People and cars â what a load of crap! Nobody watching the movie thinks it could be true.”
“Except for two young bugs! They think it could be real. Two young school bugs who have just stolen an army helicopter. They're flying around the bug planet thinking the same thing we are. They think we exist because we think they exist.”
“Crazy!”
“Yeah, crazy.”
I looked up at the stars extending out into incomprehensible infinity and was somehow frightened. I was moved and frightened at the same time. I thought about the bugs. I could almost see them up there in some flickering little galaxy. Then I turned to Tschick and he looked at me, looked me right in the eyes, and said that everything was amazing. And it was. It was truly amazing.
And the crickets chirped the entire night.
CHAPTER 24
When I woke up in the morning, I was alone. I looked around. There was a light fog clinging to the meadow and no sign of Tschick. But since his air mattress was still there I didn't think much of it. I tried to go back to sleep, but at some point my uneasiness got the better of me. I went up to the observation platform and looked in every direction. I was the only person on the mountain. The snack stand wasn't open yet. The sun looked like a red peach in a bowl of milk, and with the first beams of sunshine came a group of cyclists riding up the road. Not even ten minutes later, Tschick came tromping up the hill too. He had walked down to the sawmill to check on the Lada and see if it was still there. It was still there. We went back and forth for a while on what to do, and then decided that we would go back down now and drive on after all. Waiting around made no sense.
While we were talking, the group of bicyclists had spread out and sat down on a low wall near the observation deck â a dozen kids our age and one adult. They were eating breakfast and talking quietly among themselves, and there was something really weird about them. The group was too small to be a school class or summer camp, too big to be a family, and too well dressed to be from a loony bin or orphanage. Something was off about them. Their clothes were strange. They weren't brand-name clothes, but they didn't look cheap either. On the contrary. They looked expensive â but uncool. And they all had really clean faces. I don't really know how to describe it, but their faces were somehow cleaner than normal. The weirdest one of all was the chaperone. He talked to them like he was their boss. Tschick asked one of the girls what institution they'd escaped from and she said, “We're not from an institution. We're Mobile Nobles. We're riding from manor house to manor house.” She said it very seriously and very politely. Maybe she was putting us on and this was a bike tour organized by the local clown school.
“And you guys?” she said.
“What about us?”
“Are you also on a bicycle tour?”
“We're motorists,” Tschick said.
The girl turned to the boy next to her and said, “You were wrong. They are motorists.”
“And you guys are what exactly? Mobile Nobles?”
“What's so strange about that? Is
motorist
somehow less weird?”
“Yes, but
mobile nobles
?”
“And you guys are the proletariat in a chariot?”
Man, they were mean. Maybe the stash of cocaine had gone missing at the local clown school. We never figured out what those kids were really doing up there on the mountain, though we did come across them a little while later on the road. We passed them in the Lada and the girls waved and we waved back. Don't know about the nobility, but at least the mobility was true. For some reason we felt unbelievably confident again from that point on. And Tschick also suggested that if we needed to use code names, he would be Count Tschickula and I would be Count Lada.
CHAPTER 25
The problem we had that morning, however, was that we had nothing to eat.
We'd brought some cans of stuff but no can opener. There were a couple crackers but nothing to put on them. And the six frozen pizzas were thawed and absolutely inedible. I tried to use a lighter to grill a piece of one of them, but it didn't work. In the end, six Frisbees flew out of the Lada like UFOs fleeing the burning death star.
Relief came a few kilometers down the road. A sign pointed left to a little village, and on the same signpost was an ad for a supermarket one kilometer away. We took the left and you could see the huge store from a long way off, sitting there like a shoe box plopped down in the landscape.
The adjacent village was tiny. We drove through and parked by a big barn, where nobody would see us, and then walked back into town. Even though the entire village consisted of maybe ten streets that all met at a fountain in the town square, we couldn't figure out which direction we needed to go to get to the supermarket. Tschick thought we needed to go left. I thought we should go straight. And there was nobody on the street to ask. We wandered through totally empty village streets until finally a boy on a bike appeared. It was a wooden balance bike with no pedals. He had to move his legs like he was running in order to push the thing along. He was probably twelve, meaning he was about ten years too old for the bike. His knees dragged on the ground. He stopped right in front of us and gaped at us with huge eyes â like a mutated frog or something.
Tschick asked him where the supermarket was and the kid smiled â a smile that said that he was either confident or clueless. He had huge gums.
“We don't shop at the supermarket,” he said decisively.
“Interesting. But where is it?”
“We shop at Froehlich's market.”
“Aha, at Froehlich's.” Tschick nodded at the kid like a cowboy who didn't want to have to hurt another cowboy. “What we're really interested in is how to get to the supermarket.”
The boy nodded eagerly, lifted a hand to his head as if he was going to scratch himself, and then motioned indistinctly with the other hand. Finally he stuck out his pointer finger and aimed it between two houses. There, on the horizon, was a farmstead set among tall poplar trees. “There's Froehlich's! That's where we always shop.”
“Fantastic,” said Tschick. “And now, one more time, where is the supermarket?”
His gums made it clear that we probably weren't going to get an answer. But there was nobody else on the street we could ask.
“What do you guys want to do there?”
“What do we want to do there? Mike, Mikey â what do we want to do at the supermarket again?”
“Do you want to get stuff or just have a look around?” asked the boy.
“Look around? Do you go to the supermarket to look around?”
“Come on, let's go,” I said. “We'll find it.” And to the boy, “We want to buy some food.”
There was no point in making fun of the boy with the frog eyes.
Just then a tall, very pale woman stepped out of a house and called, “Friedemann! Come inside, Friedemann, it's noon!”
“I'm coming,” answered the boy, and his voice had changed. He had taken on the same singsong tone as his mother.
“Why do you want to buy food?” he asked. Tschick had already walked over to the woman to ask the way to the supermarket.
“To the what?”
“The supermarket,” said Friedemann.
“Oh, the big store,” said the woman. She had a strange-looking face. Emaciated but not unhealthy looking. She said, “We don't shop there. We shop at Froehlich's.”
“So we've heard.” Tschick put on his most polite smile. He was good at it. Though I had the feeling he overdid it a little sometimes. Still, the fact that he looked like a Mongolian invader balanced things back out.
“Why would you want to go there?”
Oh, Christ, was the entire family like this? Didn't any of them know what you do at a supermarket?
“Go shopping,” I said.
“Shopping,” said the woman, drawing her arms to her chest as if to keep herself from accidentally pointing the way to the supermarket.
“Food! They want to buy food,” squealed Friedemann.
The woman looked at us suspiciously and then asked if we were from around here and what we wanted here. Tschick told her a story about a bicycle tour, crossing East Germany, and the woman looked up and down the street. Not a bike in sight.