While We Were Dreaming

‘On reading Clemens Meyer’s debut novel, it is impossible not to draw the comparison with another coming-of-age-novel, Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. It has the same power, the same narrative virtuosity.’

— Santiago Artozqui, La Quinzaine littéraire

‘A beautiful debut on friendship, boredom and hope…. Meyer manages to bring to life a hazy and complex period of history.’

— Pierre Deshusses, Le Monde

‘It is breathtaking in its power, in its harsheness, and tenderness. It reminded me of Jean Genet’s Miracle of the Rose.’

— Marine de Tilly, Transfuge

‘A book like a fist… German literature has not seen such a debut for a long time, a book full of rage, sadness, pathos and superstition.’

— Felicitas von Lovenberg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘Meyer has been compared to Salinger, Jean Genet and Dostoevsky – and rightly so.’

— Roberto Brunelli, Il Venerdì/La Repubblica

‘Still a literary revelation fifteen years after its publication. No other book describes the attitude to life of an entire generation in East Germany more authentically and precisely.’

— Esquire

‘[H]ypnotic prose… this suburb is the whole world.’

— Paolo Giordano, Corriere della Sera

Praise for Dark Satellites

‘Figures from society’s margins are at the centre of the stories… Dark Satellites throws a perceptive light on circumscribed lives on the edges of Europe.’

— David Mills, The Sunday Times

‘Meyer’s snapshots of urban life — a burger bar, a fairground wheel, a neglected train station — are so vivid they make you see your own surroundings in the light of those faraway buildings.’

— Anna Aslanyan, Spectator

‘Meyer’s writing is brittle, laconic, clear, intense – and once again on top form. Short stories are clearly his forte. He finds memorable images for his themes: a dance without music in an unused Russian canteen; a midnight haircut; a man who slides into another identity after a break-in to his home and leaves his briefcase, the last requisite of his old life, in an abandoned shop. Meyer’s stories are quiet, tragic and once again populated by ordinary people, for whom he has always harboured sympathies.’

— Steffen Roye, Am Erker

Praise for Bricks and Mortar

‘The point of Im Stein [Bricks and Mortar] is that nothing’s in stone. Clemens Meyer’s novel reads like a shifty, corrupted collocation of .docs, lifted off the laptop of a master genre-ist and self-reviser. It’s required reading for fans of the Great Wolfgangs (Hilbig and Koeppen), and anyone interested in casual gunplay, drug use, or sex.’

— Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers

‘Meyer’s multifaceted prose, studded with allusions to both high and popular culture, and superbly translated by Katy Derbyshire, is musical and often lyrical, elevating lowbrow punning and porn-speak into literary devices … [Bricks and Mortar] is admirably ambitious and in many places brilliant – a book that not only adapts an arsenal of modernist techniques for the twenty-first century but, more importantly, reveals their enduring poetic potential.’

— Anna Katharina Schaffner, Times Literary Supplement

‘[Bricks and Mortar is a] stylistic tour de force about the sex trade in Germany from just before the demise of the old GDR to the present, as told through a chorus of voices and lucidly mangled musings. The result is a gripping narrative best described as organic.’

— Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

‘A journey to the end of the night for 20th/21st century Germany. Meyer reworks Döblin and Céline into a modern epic prose film with endless tracking shots of the gash of urban life, bought flesh and the financial transaction (the business of sex); memory as unspooling corrupted tape; journeys as migrations, as random as history and its splittings. A shimmering cast threatens to fly from the page, leaving only a revenant’s dream – sky, weather, lights-on-nobody-home, buried bodies, night rain. What new prose should be and rarely is; Meyer rewrites the rules to produce a great hallucinatory channel-surfer of a novel.’

— Chris Petit, author of Robinson

‘This is a wonderfully insightful, frank, exciting and heart-breaking read. Bricks and Mortar is like diving into a Force 10 gale of reality, full of strange voices, terrible events and a vision of neoliberal capitalism that is chillingly accurate.’

— A. L. Kennedy, author of Serious Sweet

WHILE WE WERE DREAMING

CLEMENS MEYER

Translated by

KATY DERBYSHIRE

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

CHILD’S PLAY

ALL THE LOVELY LANDMINES

PALAST-THEATER

RAYS

THE BLACK HOLE

THE BIG FIGHTS

CHIPS AND KETCHUP

ALWAYS PREPARED

THE RETURN

GREEN NIGHTS

INJURY TIME

ZEITHAIN JUVENILE CUSTODY CENTRE

ALL MY WOMEN

EASTSIDE STORY

IN THE SILVER SLOPE

TATTOO-THILO

MONGRELS

SHOTS

RETURN, GOODBYE

GREEN PASTURES

BIG DIPPER

BOY RACER

MEETINGS

JOB CREATION SCHEME

HOUNDDOG HEART

ICARUS

GOODBYES

WHEN WE WERE REPORTERS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

COPYRIGHT

CHILD’S PLAY

There’s this nursery rhyme I know. I hum it to myself when everything starts going crazy in my head. I think we used to sing it when we hopped about on chalk squares, but maybe I thought it up myself or dreamed it. Sometimes I mouth it silently, sometimes I just start humming it and don’t even notice because the memories are dancing in my head, no, not just any memories, the ones of the time after the Wall fell, the years we – made contact?

Contact to the brightly coloured cars and Holsten Pilsener and Jägermeister. We were about fifteen back then and Holsten Pilsener was too bitter for us, so we’d usually drink local. Leipzig Premium Pilsener. It was cheaper too, seeing as we sourced it straight from the brewery’s backyard. Mostly at night. The Leipzig Premium Pilsner Brewery was the epicentre of our neighbourhood and our lives. The wellspring of long drunken nights in the suburban cemetery, endless orgies of destruction and dances on car roofs in the Bockbier season.

Original Leipzig Pilsener let loose our bottled blond genie, who grabbed us by the hair and lifted us over walls, magicked cars into flying machines and lent us his carpet to float away on, spitting down on the cops’ heads.

Usually, though, those strangely dreamlike flying nights ended with a crash-landing in the drunk tank or on the corridor of the nick, handcuffed to a radiator at Leipzig Southeast Police Station.

When we were kids (are you still a kid at fifteen? Maybe we weren’t anymore, that first time we faced a judge, usually a woman judge, or the first time the police drove us home at night and we went to school the next morning, or not, with the 8 from the handcuffs still imprinted on our skinny wrists), when we were good kids, the epicentre of our neighbourhood was the big Duroplast State Toys and Rubber Stamps Factory, where an otherwise insignificant classmate got us rubber stamps and toy cars from his stamp-pad-manufacturing mother, so we never beat him up and sometimes gave him a few coppers, or let’s call them aluminiums, ’cause that’s what our coins were made of back then. The big factory went bust in 1991 and they tore the building down, and the little rubber-stamp and toy-car fence, his mother was out of a job after twenty years and hanged herself in the outside toilet, so we still never beat the insignificant boy up and sometimes gave him a few coppers. There’s an Aldi there now – I could pop in for cheap beer or spaghetti.

That thing about the boy’s mother, it’s not true. She got a job at a new Shell garage in 1992 and pretended not to recognize us when we bought beer or vodka or korn from her, because it was night and the shops were shut and the walls of the Leipzig Premium Pilsner Brewery were just too high sometimes.

The best thing was, the brewery was there even when we couldn’t see it, when we were carrying an old lady’s handbag home for her a couple of streets over, or when it was night (I mean those terrible dark nights in winter, when all you see is the lights and you feel so sad), or when we closed our eyes as we drove past. The big old Leipzig Premium Pilsner Brewery was there. We could smell it. It smelled so fucking great, it really did, tangy like hops, a bit like tea only way better. When the wind blew the right way, we could smell it for miles.

And I can still smell it now when I open the window even though I’m far away, but the others don’t believe a word of it. And how would they know anyway – I haven’t told them – and when we’re lying in our beds on sleepless nights, I bite down on the corner of my blanket to stop myself telling tales of those wild times.

On nights like that, I often think of Alfred Heller, the kid we called Fred. He had a face gone greyish blue from all the drinking, like ripe stilton. Fred was a couple of years older than us but he looked fifteen, wore these round glasses like a good little schoolboy, and then he’d joyride stolen or dirt-cheap cars without a licence, around our neighbourhood and all round town. Sitting in a car with him was weird because there was hardly any space, too many beer cans on every surface, and we did the craziest things on our nights out with him. Something happened to us when we got in a car with Fred, something made us lose all inhibitions, we felt this absolute freedom and independence we’d never known before, and we yelled it out; it was like the witch with five cats who lived next door to me had cast a spell on Fred’s beaten-up cars. Sometimes we used the rolled-down passenger window as a surfboard, holding onto the roof with one hand. It was like a merry-go-round after a bottle of Stroh 80.

This one time, speeding through the city, wasted Fred let go of the steering wheel and said, ‘Shit, I can’t hack it no more.’ I was in the back, between Mark up to his eyeballs on drugs and Rico, still clean back then, and we couldn’t hack it either and we only had eyes for the lights of our city racing past us. And if it hadn’t been for Little Walter, who was in the front seat next to a suddenly resigned Fred, and whose life I saved twice in one night, later on (and who still just walked out on us, on another night much later), if he hadn’t grabbed the steering wheel and jumped on Fred’s lap – slumped down on the driving seat – and brought the car to a halt with a whole load of burnt rubber, I’d be dead now, or I might have lost my right arm and have to do all my paperwork left-handed.

Fred Heller had a brother, Silvio. Silvio didn’t have Fred’s criminal energy, but he did play chess. The brothers lived together and while Fred & co. were doing dirty deals in the living room, I’d play chess in the kitchen with Silvio. He had his own interpretation of the rules, but I accepted it ’cause (like he told me once as he balanced his bishop on the top of the vodka bottle and checked me from there, or rather checked my king) the Ghetto doctors had fucked him up in the days of the Zone and he only had a few years left to live. There must have been some truth to it because he dragged one leg and his left arm was almost lame. Aside from that, his face would sometimes make these really weird contortions, he’d roll his eyes ’til the whites went green and beat his head against the chessboard (I was scared he might get one of the pointy bishops stuck in his eye). The whole thing impressed me so much that even in winning positions, when my knight was raping his king (by his rules), I’d give up right away, bite the head off my king and stick it in the four-star freezer compartment, run off to Fred & co. in the living room and join in the dirty deals.

The Ghetto doctors fucked him up. Took me a while to work out what that meant, ‘Ghetto,’ when Fred and his brother were telling their tales. Their parents had given them up and they’d been in a secure facility for kids and teens with behavioural issues for years, in the Ghetto, and Silvio must have had too many of the antidepressants and hush-you-up jabs and messed up his liver and kidneys. Sometimes he talked about experiments, but I don’t think that was true. I once asked Fred if he was still in contact with his parents. ‘No,’ he said, ‘my knife gets a hard-on when I see them.’ Old Fred probably gets a hard-on when the wind blows these days, ’cause he’s in some bastard jail. I don’t know what his last trick was that got him put inside, all I know is he was on probation for the umpteenth time and his file was as thick as Meyers Encyclopaedia, and all I know is what I’ve been told and what’s turned to legend, almost, by now.

He was driving around town and the cops were on his tail, it was night and he was at his normal alcohol level, and somehow it suddenly took hold of him. He’d probably planned it as his last big show. Certainly had style. Slammed on the brakes. Turned the car 180. Pedal to the metal. Rammed the first cop car. Rammed the second cop car. Reversed and did the same again. Don’t know how many times. They say the cops couldn’t get their doors open in the end. Then he got out and stuck his hands up like Billy the Kid, and said: ‘I surrender.’

I don’t know if the cops climbed out of their concertina cars through the sunroofs but in any case, the first one who came stumbling towards him got a punch in the face that broke his nose, and Fred’s been gone ever since. Even though he told me before that he’d never go back inside the Ghetto and he wanted to give up all that crap. And I almost believed him. This one time, see, Fred and me and my old school friend Mark, already up to his eyeballs on drugs even then, we were in a bar and these guys tried to start a fight with Fred (about some old dealings, he said), but he wouldn’t rise to it, not even when they tipped beer over his face. And when I reached for a bar stool he said: ‘Leave it, Daniel, forget it, this is my business.’ The three guys were next to us at the bar and one of them nudged Fred so hard he fell off his stool. His glasses smashed but he put them back on, blinked through the broken lenses and said to me: ‘Leave it, Daniel,’ and to them: ‘I’m not doing a thing, you tosspots, I’m on probation.’ He kept on saying it as they pushed him around, and one of them hit him in the face a couple of times. Then Fred pulled out a jack-knife, there was a quick click and the blade stood upright, and he laid his left hand on the bar and rammed the blade through it into the wood. ‘You nasty fucking poofters aren’t getting me out of here!’ They fucked off then and I called a doctor. And before the doctor came and pulled out the knife, which was jammed pretty deep into the wood, me and Fred had a couple of shots of double-distilled korn, while the landlord wiped away the surprisingly small amount of blood. Never in his life had he felt this good, Fred said, with one hand nailed to the bar.

My old school friend Mark, sitting next to us off his head, didn’t notice a thing. He still doesn’t notice a thing these days, ’cause he’s strapped to a bed in some empty white room, in rehab.

Bed. Rehab. My sweet little Estrellita. I sing, I dream, my sweet little Estrellita. She wasn’t really called Estrellita but I like to call her that, it means little star in Spanish, and when some arsehole drove into a tree with her in the passenger seat she was in a coma for five weeks, and when she woke up again she was even sweeter than before, so tiny and fragile, and she made eyes at me at least five times over. I can’t even remember what colour eyes she had. I must have been in love or something, ’cause she was really a gorgeous little… slut. Walter, also little but not as gorgeous, he told me that and said I should keep my hands off her ’cause half of Leipzig (including him, that dirty bastard) knew every inch of her body, except for the colour of her eyes. And that was how Little Walter saved me from getting the clap and paid me back a bit for saving his life twice in one night.

It was a night like a dream. We were hanging out in our park. I’ll soon be walking through it and watching the kids playing there, in the same sandpit we used to piss in, and puking wasn’t unusual either. Fred got caught again that night, standing up on top of the brewery wall and handing down the beer crates to Rico, who we called Crazy Rico behind his back ’cause he’d once bitten the tip off our Pioneer leader’s nose, back in the Zone days when the guy tried to confiscate Rico’s Captain America comic book, and the only reason Rico didn’t get kicked out of school was ’cause a few weeks later there were no Pioneers and no more Pioneer leaders either. But it’s not true that Rico took a bite out of the cop’s nose when he tried to confiscate the beer crate and Rico and Fred. Mark, who was supposed to be helping but was sitting on the kerb juggling pebbles for some drugged-up reason, unnoticed by the cops, Mark saw it and clawed his way past all the spiders and spider’s webs to the park, where Walter, Stefan – we already called him Pitbull in those days – me and my clapped-up Estrellita were waiting, all thirsty. We were really crazy thirsty ’cause just before, to start off the evening if you like, we’d slaughtered one of Fred’s semi-legal wrecks. Fred said he didn’t need the car anymore, and then someone kicked in the door, and then we all ripped the door out together and smashed all the windows, knifed the tyres and all that. I reckon if we’d had the skills of that French guy Monsieur Mangetout, the one from the Guinness Book of Records, we’d have eaten that car right up. I don’t know what came over us, we got high on it. Sure, it was the alcohol too, but something inside us went click and switched to insane in the brain. My sweet little Estrellita danced screaming on that car roof, my God, did I love her.

We went insane in the brain again once Mark told us where Rico and Fred were. We wanted to get them out and we smashed up every rubbish bin, traffic sign, park bench and every fifth car along the way to Leipzig Southeast Police Station. The crazy thing was that when we politely kicked the big iron gate and told them why we were there, the cops just said: ‘Get out of here, you can come and collect them in the morning.’ Even though our yelling, thumping, shouting was loud enough to wake Rico’s deaf grandmother, who got a bad night’s sleep ’cause Rico didn’t come home to her. Rico’s arms were behind his back and they pushed him down a long white corridor into a bright white room with a typewriter for writing up the arrest report, suspected theft. We heard him shouting from inside, ‘It’s OK, I’m fine, we’re the greatest!’ Like he’d already got used to being behind bars, even back then.

Outside, Estrellita puked on the windscreen of a cop car pulling in, so we took her home right away. And when we got to her building, Little Walter jumped out of a third-floor window ’cause of some bitch who wouldn’t fall in love with him and go on a trip to the seaside, and I caught him by the collar just as he was falling, and that crazy bastard was yelling, no, more like babbling, ‘I love you, Anja!’ as the fabric ripped and Mark leaned way out, no longer in command of his motor skills, trying to pull Walter back in. I can’t remember exactly how we all managed not to break our necks, all I know is that Little Walter gave it another try later and threw himself in front of a truck and we stumbled home dazed and confused after I’d plucked him off the road, just before he got mushed to a pulp. It was all crazy, like a nightmare on a hot summer night, thirty degrees.

Not a night goes by when I don’t dream of all that, and every day the memories dance in my head and I torment myself asking why it all turned out the way it did. Sure, we had a whole lot of fun back then, but still there was a kind of lostness in us, in everything we did, a feeling I can’t explain.

It’s Wednesday, and in a minute they’ll unlock the door and take me to Doctor Confessor. There’s this nursery rhyme I know. I hum it to myself when everything starts going crazy in my head.

ALL THE LOVELY LANDMINES

The school was on fire. We were on our backs in the stairwell and the corridors, too late to get out. Grenades were hitting the ground floor. Mark came stumbling up the stairs, a sign round his neck saying GRENADE SPLINTER INJURY in big black capitals. He lay down a couple of steps below me.

‘Shit, I’m hit,’ he said quietly.

‘Where?’ I leaned my head against the bannisters.

He pointed at his sign. In small print and brackets at the very bottom, it said: ABDOMINAL REGION.

‘Grenade splinter in your abdomen, that’s your lot,’ I said. ‘That’s like a shot in the stomach, you’re gonna cark it. Dead!’

‘Nah, they’re coming for me any minute!’

‘Doesn’t matter, you’ll get internal bleeding.’

‘Shut it, Danny!’ He turned his face to the wall. He was so quiet now I could hear him breathing. The bannister rails were uncomfortable on the back of my head and I slid closer to the wall. ‘If you had a gun you’d have to shoot yourself,’ I said. ‘Would you do it?’ He didn’t answer, probably in pain. Like the guy in the western who shot himself in the head ’cause he knew he wouldn’t make it. I was glad there was nothing wrong with my stomach. I raised my head and coughed loudly – I had a couple of burns and smoke poisoning, although there was nothing about the poisoning on my sign. I coughed even louder so they’d hear me and come and get me. Someone ran along the upstairs corridor where Katja was. She’d lain down on a blanket next to the door and when I went to lie down next to her, the stupid medics sent me away. ‘Burns and minor injuries on the first and second floor,’ they’d said. Katja’s sign read: SEVERE HEAD INJURY (PROBABLE LODGED BULLET). She was head of the Class Council – she’d picked the best spot and the best injury.

‘Burns are harmless, they’ll leave you to rot here, they don’t care. All you need is a bit of water on it.’ Mark had turned back around and was tapping at his sign with a grin. ‘With me, they gotta cut me open, they have to be quick with me, it’ll be the girls from year eleven and then I can rest my head on their tits!’ Just then, they really did come down the stairs but their stretcher was occupied by Katja, her head injury sign on her chest. She didn’t have proper breasts yet, you could just about see them in P.E. and when she held a speech on Pioneer afternoons and did a nice lean forward. Her head wobbled side to side on the stretcher – Hey, watch it, there’s a bullet in there somewhere! She put her hand underneath her head and smiled at me. I gripped my sign and smiled back. The two year eleven girls were wearing brown army shirts unbuttoned over the chest (not that big), their sleeves rolled up and their boots making a lot of noise. Mark was now lying right in front of them in the middle of the stairs. ‘Oi, what about me, am I supposed to snuff it here, or what?’

‘Come on, mind out the way, it’ll be your turn soon!’

‘Shot to the stomach, I’ve got splinters in my belly, grenade splinters, gigantic ones!’

The girls laughed and clambered over him. I watched Katja’s head bobbing down the stairs, dangling lethargically off the stretcher again.

‘This is such crap, Danny, my arse is starting to hurt!’

‘See, who are they leaving to rot now?’

‘Leave me alone!’ He turned back to face the wall.

‘You know what they’ll do to me? I’ve got smoke poisoning, pretty bad. Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, get it?’

‘Rubbish!’ Mark righted himself and looked up at me, his eyes wide. ‘That’s rubbish, isn’t it?’

‘No, no, believe me, this boy from year six told me, he had the same thing as me last year. Severe smoke poisoning!’

‘You’re crazy, it doesn’t say anything about smoke poisoning, and nothing about severe either!’

‘Yeah but smoke poisoning’s always severe, they don’t have to write that down specially. You always get smoke poisoning when you have burns – I was right in the middle of the fire! And they have to do everything exactly like in real life!’ I coughed and wheezed and held onto the bannisters.

‘So they’ll give you the kiss of life, I mean really, and press air into your lungs?

‘Right, just not too much air of course, ’cause you’re OK really, but they have to practice it. They french you as well, ’cause they have to check you haven’t swallowed your tongue, that happens sometimes, see.’

‘Danny, you’re pulling my leg!’

‘No, I swear. Pioneer’s honour!’ I raised my hand. ‘They roll their tongue around your mouth, and maybe they even like it. Right, yeah, they definitely like it. With me, anyway, I know all the tricks, Mark – and then they just can’t stop frenching you!’

‘And their tits, Danny?’

‘Yeah, they’re resting on you, you get a good feel of them!’

‘Let’s swap, come on!’ He took off his sign and held it up to my face.

‘Forget it!’

‘Danny, listen, a shot in the stomach’s fine too, they feel up your belly, you get a nice stroking, only the girls do it, you know, they only let the girls do it ’cause they’ve got more nimble fingers!’

‘No, Mark, forget it!’

‘Come on, look what it says here: abdominal region! Get it, Danny? Abdominal region!’

‘I don’t wanna swap, Mark, no, I don’t want to. Bugger off with your stupid splinter!’ I slid away from him to the wall. He crawled after me.

‘Hey, wait, no listen, abdominal region, right, they have to check it all out!’

I pushed him away. ‘I don’t want your stupid sign, don’t you get it? It’s my smoke poisoning! Get off my back with your crappy shot in the stomach!’

‘Please, Danny, go on, give it to me, let’s swap, we’re friends, aren’t we?’ He grabbed at me and my sign and I slapped his hand away. His other hand was instantly on my jumper, I stood up, kicked at him, and we rolled down the stairs. The string from my sign tangled around my neck, Mark fell on top of me and his knee bored into my belly. ‘Mark!’ I couldn’t shout properly, couldn’t get enough air. ‘My sign, Danny, give it here! You always want everything for yourself!’

‘Mark, please!’ He let go at last, probably seeing I was going blue in the face. I took a deep breath. ‘You’re crazy, man!’

Two legs. Two brown leather shoes. Two trouser creases right in front of my face. I turned away and looked up. The headmaster. Mark rolled off me; the string from my sign was now broken and it fell off my neck as I stood up. ‘Name, class?’

‘Mark Bormann, 7b.’

‘Daniel Lenz, 7a.’

‘I know you, Daniel, don’t I?’ He looked me straight in the eye and I nodded and looked at the wall. ‘You do know we’ve got visitors today?’ We nodded. ‘So you know we’ve got visitors today.’

‘Yes, sir,’ we murmured.

He bent down and picked up my sign. ‘You’ve got burns, Daniel?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, quietly again.

‘Well, Daniel, imagine a child in… Nicaragua. You do know what’s happening in Nicaragua?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, although I didn’t know exactly what was happening in Nicaragua.

‘A child with burns waits for help. He waits for trained medics. And he’s in pain, so he tries to lie nice and still.’ The headmaster knotted the string back together and hung the sign around my neck. ‘You’re good in class and the Pioneers, Daniel. You know our military defence lessons are very important for our Free German Youth members, so they can learn to help injured children.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He took a step aside to face Mark.

‘Mark, you do know who’s come to visit our school today?’

Mark had one hand in his pocket, and he took it out again. ‘The National People’s Army, Mr Künzel!’

‘An officer of the National People’s Army, Mark. Our school has a reputation for our military defence lessons. And our Free German Youth members are relying on your cooperation, and I expect,’ he turned back to me, ‘I expect you, in future, and by that I mean from now on, to refrain from such disruption and cooperate with discipline.’

‘Yes, Mr Künzel,’ said Mark.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

He nodded a few times and rubbed his chin, then continued up the stairs. Before he went through the door to the corridor, he turned around again. ‘Remember: discipline, like good Pioneers!’ He smiled and left.

‘I wish he had a splinter,’ whispered Mark, ‘no, I wish he had two, right in the belly. From a grenade exploding right next to him!’

‘Hey,’ I said, sitting back down on my step, ‘that stuff about the girls was made up…’

‘Come off it, you’re just saying that so you get them to yourself.’ He squatted three steps down from me and faced the wall. I listened to the sounds around the school building. There were people running on the floor above us, someone somewhere called out, it sounded like ‘Is there a fire here?’ and it echoed in the corridors, doors slammed. Then a couple more medics came past us, girls and boys this time, talking and laughing and paying us no attention, ’cause all the stretchers were occupied.

‘This is so crap,’ Mark said, and his voice sounded dull – he was speaking to the wall. ‘Let them leave us here to rot, the stinkers, let them leave us here all day, I don’t care!’

‘Not so loud, he’s bound to be sniffing around here somewhere, still.’

‘Danny, I tell you, if Rico was here…’

‘Jeez, Mark, don’t keep going on about Rico…’

‘Sorry, Danny, I just meant…’

I crawled up a few steps to where I could look out of the window. I saw the medics running across the playground with their stretchers, past the extension, to the sports field. There were big tents set up there, where we were supposed to be treated. I could see them if I lifted my head a little; they were green and when I squinted it looked like a dense forest. I closed my eyes. A door slammed below us and then they came up the stairs. ‘Over here,’ Mark yelled, ‘we’re here, come on, get us out of here, can’t you?’ Two girls came over to me, the same ones as before, and two boys stopped by Mark. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not fair, Danny, tell them!’

‘Stop making such a racket!’ The boys grabbed him by the head and feet and rolled him onto the stretcher they’d put down beside him.

‘Burns.’ The two girls leaned over me, one holding my sign. They both had dark hair, almost black. ‘Burns aren’t that bad, we’ll start by cooling them.’

‘Smoke poisoning,’ I said and slid onto the stretcher. ‘I’ve got real smoke poisoning as well!’ The girls laughed and then jiggled me into position, and I looked down the front of their shirts, their breasts not very well hidden.

‘Don’t believe a word he says,’ Mark yelled from one flight down, ‘he’s lying, he’s lying about his smoke poisoning!’

The girls laughed again, then lifted the stretcher and walked slowly down the stairs. I was lying feet-first, looking up at the breasts above me moving inside their shirts on every step. Then we got to the bottom and they carried me across the playground. The two boys went much faster with Mark, almost at the extension already. Next to me, I saw the podium with the stone lectern and the three flagpoles, empty now. The flags were only fastened to the ropes for muster, and then pulled up very slowly to marching music or something. The stretcher swayed, the sun shone, and I shut my eyes. The playground was quiet; someone was sweeping somewhere, probably the school caretaker. My face got warm and the dark space in front of my eyes grew lighter, and there were white dots in it. I laid one hand over my closed eyes. I was tired, fell asleep late the night before. Dad had been out drinking ’til one ’cause he had two days off. I wanted to take a day off school as well but I wasn’t allowed, and anyway I saw Katja at school every day, sitting in front of me, and the back of her neck was so beautiful.

‘Wakey, wakey!’ I opened my eyes. We were in a tent, Katja a few yards away from me on a stool, winding a bandage around her head. No, she was unwinding it and rolling the bandages up as she unwound.

‘Your head wound all better already?’

‘Oh, Danny.’ She smiled and I looked at the ceiling. Nice green canvas.

‘Here we are.’ The two girls lifted me onto a cot they’d set me down beside. ‘Tina, can you get me the burns pack?’ Tina was the one whose breasts I’d been lying underneath; she went to a folding table covered in bandages and bags and cases. She picked up one of the cases, with a big red cross on it and a small flame in the top corner. She put the case on the cot and sat down next to me. ‘So where’s it burning?’ she asked, and then they laughed the way only year eleven girls laughed. Tina put her hand over her mouth and the other one blushed. They opened the case and rummaged around inside it. ‘I mean, where are your burns?’

‘On my leg,’ I said, and looked at Katja. She’d finished unwinding her head and she shook her hair, then combed it with her fingers.

‘You’ll have to get undressed, then.’

‘On my neck, I mean, my whole neck’s all burnt, no skin left at all!’

‘We’ll have to take your shirt off, or we can’t treat it.’ I sat up and lifted my arms. They took off my sign and then fiddled around with me, Tina unbuttoning my shirt.

‘Where’s Mark gone?’

‘Another tent.’ Tina’s breasts brushed against my chin. I saw Katja’s face between the two girls’ arms. She looked at me and then turned her head aside.

‘Ow,’ I said as they took my shirt off; it caught on my ear and they tugged at it.

‘Don’t be a baby.’

‘Don’t you be so rough,’ I said, loud enough for Katja to hear.

‘You wish!’ Tina folded up my shirt and laid it next to me on the cot.

‘Hey, Daniel.’ Katja was standing in front of me. I looked down at myself, checking my vest was clean.

‘You mustn’t mess around today, Daniel.’

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Oh, Danny.’ She smiled. ‘You know what I mean. You have to come along this afternoon, otherwise you’ll get a black mark…’

‘I’m gonna get a black mark anyway.’

‘Oh, Danny…’

Tina and her friend bandaged my neck and then Tina took a little plastic pot out of the case and held it up for me to look at. ‘This is what we would have put on there, I mean, if it was real. It’s for cooling. And don’t scratch your burn or you’ll get germs in it and it’ll get infected.’

‘I haven’t got germs,’ I said. ‘You can take it off again now.’

Katja put her hand on my bare shoulder. The hand was very cool. ‘Danny, listen, you have to come this afternoon, you and Mark.’ She stepped closer, put her mouth to my ear. ‘I know you want to go to the cinema again, Danny, but you have to come, for my sake.’

‘Look at those two lovebirds!’ Tina’s friend clapped her hands and they both laughed.

Katja took a few steps back. There were two frown lines above her nose. ‘You can cut your silly gossip! Or I’ll tell Mr Dettleff about all your corner-cutting!’

The girls weren’t laughing now, they were fiddling around with my neck. ‘What a little snake!’ Tina whispered. She stuck a safety pin in my bandage. Her breasts brushed against my chin. Katja turned away and walked to the tent flap. ‘Hey, Katja!’ I pushed the hands and breasts away, got up and went after her. She stopped but didn’t turn around, and I stood behind her. I lowered my head and whispered into her hair, ‘I’ll definitely come this afternoon, definitely!’ The bandage dangled from my neck onto her shoulder.

‘You promise?’

‘Promise.’

‘Pioneer’s honour, Danny.’ She turned her head and looked me in the eye.

‘Pioneer’s honour,’ I said, and then she smiled, pushed the flap aside and left the tent. I’d actually wanted to cross my fingers behind my back, ’cause I’d promised Mark that morning on the way to school that we’d go to the cinema later, but I couldn’t do it. Old Surehand was on at the Palast-Theater, which Mark and I had seen three times already, which I wanted to watch over and over ’cause of the train robbery at the beginning where Old Surehand shoots through the fuse at the last moment, but that didn’t matter now.

I heard footsteps and voices outside the tent. The flap was lifted aside and two girls came in, on their stretcher a boy from year six, who grinned and waved at me. His sign said: BURIED UNDER RUBBLE. They lifted him up and laid him on the cot. I folded my arms over my vest and rubbed my shoulders. ‘What are you still doing here? We’ve got enough to do, look!’ Tina was holding a rubber tube with some kind of mask on one end.

‘My shirt,’ I said quietly.

‘Over there.’ She pointed at a folding chair and pushed me aside. I unwound the bandage from my neck and put it on the chair, picked up my shirt and put it on. ‘Buried under rubble,’ one of the girls behind me shouted, ‘stopped breathing a while ago!’ I tucked my shirt in and went outside.

The sun was shining but it was pretty windy. I walked around between the tents, looking for Mark. Mrs Seidel was standing outside one of the tents. I turned around and walked back but she’d already seen me. ‘Daniel!’ she called, and I stopped in my tracks. ‘Daniel!’ I heard her footsteps behind me and turned around. She was wearing her good grey slacks and an army jacket with epaulettes, undone at the top so everyone could see her blue Free German Youth shirt. ‘Have you finished your task, Daniel?’ She eyed me over the top of her glasses.

‘Yes, miss.’

‘Good,’ she nodded, at which her glasses slipped down to the end of her nose and she pushed them back up, ‘then report to the School Council tent. It isn’t one o’clock yet.’ She checked her watch. Then she nodded again and took a few steps back. ‘And, Daniel, I want you to wear your neckerchief this afternoon…’

My hand rose to my collar. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘of course, Mrs Seidel.’

‘Good, Daniel.’ She nodded and then went back to the tent. Her trouser legs were too wide, billowing in the wind. ‘Daniel!’ She’d turned around again and waved. ‘Come with me.’ She walked up to the tent, me trailing her slowly. ‘Wait here.’ She pushed the flap aside and went in. I could see a few chairs, teachers sitting on some of them. I drew a rifle in the gravel of the sports field with my foot, then I picked it up, aimed – no, I didn’t need to aim properly, it was a machine gun, I just pointed it at the tent and pulled the trigger. Nothing. I’d forgotten to flip the safety catch. I fired off the whole clip through the canvas, the empty bullet casings flying off behind me.

Mrs Seidel came back out. There were two bullet holes in her shoulder. She was holding an army jacket, which she handed to me. ‘Here you are, put this on, Daniel, or you’ll catch cold. Why aren’t you wearing your jacket, I told you earlier it’s chilly outside!’

‘I…’

‘Hand the jacket back in before you go home.’ She adjusted her glasses and returned inside the tent. Someone in there laughed.

I put the jacket on; it was far too big, over my knees.

Someone’s hand alighted on my shoulder, a very light touch. Katja laughed. ‘It’s way too big for you.’

‘So? It’s what soldiers wear!’

‘Hey, Danny, I just wanted to tell you boys to tidy the stretchers away now. You can’t go yet, it’s not one o’clock.’ She pushed up her sleeve and checked the watch on her thin wrist.

‘No, Mum,’ I said, stroking a finger over the glass of her pretty watch, ‘I’m not going home yet.’

‘Katja, can you come, please!’ A girl from the School Council was standing in the space between the tents, beckoning. Katja turned around. She took my hand and pulled. ‘Hey, Danny, go and look for Mark so he joins in as well. I think he might have gone. You have to report to Teachers’ Tent Two. Everything has to be by the book today.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She smiled, then she waved at the girl from the School Council and ran over. ‘Daniel,’ she turned around again. ‘Remember your promise!’

I nodded, then buttoned the jacket up to the top and walked slowly between the tents. A group from year six marched in step past me, and I turned away and put my hands in my pockets. I walked to the wall and sat down on a bench. Some kids were lined up at the very back of the sports ground; I could make out their green uniforms. Now they threw something, little red balls: practice hand grenades. I’d found one once and taken it home with me. I’d painted the ribbed metal with black varnish and now it looked like a real one. I spotted Mark walking by the extension; I could tell him by his yellow jacket. He walked across the playground to the school gate. I wanted to get up and call him, but I stayed put and watched him bend down and pick something up, a stone perhaps or a dropped coin. We were going to meet at the pirate ship at quarter to three, we’d it arranged that morning. Mark walked out of the big gate and disappeared from view.

A couple of boys from 7c passed my bench, that little Walter behind them, dragging an empty stretcher, red in the face with his jacket unbuttoned. He saw me and nodded, then he stopped. ‘Hi, Danny, alright?’

‘Yeah, I’m alright. Where d’you get the stretcher?’

‘They’re in front of the School Council tent. We’re supposed to tidy them all away, Danny. They go in the extension, in the cellar.’

‘Yeah, I know that.’

‘You are joining in, Danny, right? You know, the School Council…’

‘Yeah, I know.’ I got up, nice and slowly, and then I stretched and smoothed my jacket. ‘Shall I take one end?’

‘No thanks, Danny. I can manage, otherwise it’d look stupid, you get it…’

‘Yeah, I get it.’ I turned around and headed to the School Council tent.

‘Hey, Danny, I’ll wait here, then we can go together.’

‘Right, OK.’

Outside the School Council tent, a few teachers were standing in a circle around the stretchers. I looked at the ground and walked between them, then squatted by the stretchers and pulled the top one off the pile.

‘Always working hard, our Pioneers!’

Two brown leather shoes. Two trouser creases right in front of my face. I held onto the stretcher grip with both hands and looked up. The headmaster laughed, next to him a man in uniform. He looked a bit like Rico’s dad, who’d been an officer as well, but this man had more medals on his chest and he was pretty old. One medal had a fist and a flaming torch on it; he must have pinched it from Mr Singer’s suit jacket, but now I saw Mr Singer beside them and his medal was still there, along with all the others. I tugged at the stretcher, already rolled up; I stood up and tucked it under my arm.

‘That’s right,’ said the man in uniform. ‘You’ll make a good soldier one day, won’t you?’ He patted me on the back and smiled with his mouth closed.

‘This is our Daniel,’ the headmaster said, and Mr Singer nodded once, twice, three times. ‘He was in the talent contest last year, recited a poem. Top marks, Daniel, remember?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. My foot drew a circle in the gravel.

‘That’s the stuff, Daniel,’ said the man in uniform, ‘always keep active, always play an active role in the collective. Always stick to it, always lead from the front of the collective! That’s a terrific jacket you’ve got there.’ He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled with his mouth closed, and the headmaster and Mr Singer nodded.

‘Yes, Daniel,’ Mr Singer said in his deep voice, ‘you can learn a lot from our comrade the colonel.’

‘Keep it up,’ said the colonel, and he took his hand off my shoulder, a big heavy hand. ‘Here come your classmates.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, ‘thank you, sir,’ and then I walked off. The boys from 7c came past me, walking very fast, almost running. ‘Our Pioneers,’ Mr Singer said behind me in his deep voice. I walked between the tents, along the wall. I looked at the grey buildings on the opposite side. A woman leaned out of one of the windows. She had long white hair and was shaking a pillow like she was waving at me.

Walter was still standing all alone on the sports ground. He was leaning on the two poles of the rolled-up stretcher like on a double lance, and now he raised them slightly and stamped little clouds of dust out of the ground. ‘There you are, Danny. You took ages.’

‘Nice of you to wait.’

‘No problem, Danny.’ We headed round to the extension, Walter with the stretcher over one shoulder, walking crooked. ‘Look, Danny, like a builder.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘not bad.’ We went down the cellar stairs, tube lights flickering ahead of us.

The school caretaker was standing at the end of the cellar walkway. ‘Left,’ he said, ‘to the sports compartment.’ Walter removed the stretcher from his shoulder. There was a bang.

Shards of glass rained down on our heads. ‘Damn!’ I ducked. Walter had hit one of the tube lights with his stretcher.

The caretaker came running towards us. ‘You little buggers!’ he yelled, waving his hands around in front of our faces. ‘Jesus, you li-li-little buggers!’ He’d always shout that when there was any kind of trouble, he’d wave his arms around and his face would go bright red. I knew he’d calm down again in a minute. The caretaker was alright. Everyone liked him, even though he was a bit funny in the head. Someone told me once he’d fallen out of a first-floor window, years ago, while he was cleaning it, fallen right on his head, and since then he’d been a bit funny in the head and had a stutter, but not a bad one, and only when he got worked up. Another thing I’d heard was that he’d been really handsome before that, the lady teachers had secretly kissed him at breaktime, probably down here in the cellar. Now he had a nose like a boxer and his chin was all crooked.

‘You… you li-little bu-bu-bu… Oh well, never mind, I’ll put a new one in later.’ I brushed the glass out of my hair.

Walter was squatting down, picking up a few shards. ‘Sorry, Mr Schädlich.’

‘Stop that, st-stop that, kid, leave that Russian rubbish, you’ll cu-cut yourself on it. The broom’s ba-back there, boy, you sweep it up pro-properly!’

‘OK, Mr Schädlich.’ Walter stood up and walked down to the broom corner. I jammed his stretcher under my other arm. ‘Come on, get on with it, gimme that Russian rubbish!’ Mr Schädlich grabbed the stretcher from me and dragged it behind him to the wooden cage with the thousand balls. He chucked the stretcher in there and stayed put in the doorway. ‘Want to take a look? I know you boys are always wanting a look in there!’ He smiled and moved out of the doorway, and as I passed him he put his hand on my shoulder, just for a moment. I shoved aside the nets of footballs hanging from the ceiling and put my stretcher down carefully with the others. ‘Hey,’ the caretaker whispered behind me, ‘there’s table tennis balls back there, a whole bu-bucketful, the good ones, kid, you can take a couple, I know you like table tennis. Five stars, boy, they’re all four or five stars!’ I heard Walter sweeping up the glass outside the cage. ‘Go on, quick, boy, quick, quick, the others are coming. No one nee-nee-needs to see. I won’t see a thing, boy. Five stars!’ His head was right by mine, shooting me a crooked grin. I walked past shelves, ropes, javelins, red hand grenades, then squatted by the bucket and stuffed a couple of handfuls of table tennis balls in the pockets of my army jacket. ‘Competition balls,’ the caretaker whispered behind me, ‘five stars… You can hit ’em ’til the soup spills.’

‘Thanks, Mr Caretaker,’ I said, ’cause I knew he liked it when we called him ‘Mr Caretaker,’ and he smiled and brushed a hand over his crooked chin.

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘They’ll just go to rot down here, everything rots down here.’

Footsteps outside the cage; I heard Walter’s voice and other voices and I walked outside, past the caretaker. ‘Wait… wait a mo, kid,’ he said behind me, but I went on walking, ’cause the boys from 7c were standing around Walter with their stretchers. They were laughing.

‘Made a mess, have you, pipsqueak?’ Walter had stopped sweeping and was resting on his broom.

‘Shut it, you wankers!’ He couldn’t stand being called ‘pipsqueak,’ it made him really angry, even though he really had hardly grown since he started school.

‘Keep on sweeping, pipsqueak, sweep it all up!’

‘Piss off – you stink!’ Walter shoved the biggest one of them in the chest with both hands. The biggest one was Friedrich, Maik’s best friend. He wasn’t as strong as Maik the Bruiser, but he was strong enough, and he didn’t even move when Walter pushed him. He looked down at him and I saw his cheeks and his mouth moving. Out of his mouth came spit, still hanging on a thread like a spider, then it slapped down on Walter’s hair.

‘You stupid pig, you stupid disgusting pig!’ Walter rammed his head into Friedrich’s chest, Friedrich stumbled against the wall, the others stepped back and put their stretchers down. ‘Knock him down, Fried!’ I ran between them and shoved them aside, Thomas from 7c planted himself in my path, I slammed my elbow against his shoulder and he made way. Friedrich had raised his fist right above Walter’s face. He had gigantic fists but he was still a coward, only ever started fights with boys smaller than him. I’d beaten him up once, even though I was a bit shorter than him, but it wasn’t easy and it took a long time. Rico had stood by and watched and called out tips for me, back then, while Friedrich and I pummelled each other. Now I was standing next to Walter and Friedrich, but Walter didn’t stand a chance even if I called out tips – he was just too small. Friedrich was holding him by the throat with his other hand; all he needed was to land one punch and he’d have him. I grabbed his fist. ‘Let go of him.’

‘What’s it got to do with you?’

‘Let go of him!’

Friedrich let him go. Walter leaned against the wall, his head down. Suddenly the caretaker was between us, pushing us apart. ‘Not OK, not OK, boys. No fi-fighting. Get that Russian rubbish out of here!’ He shoved the stretchers with his foot.

‘That little cry-baby started it!’

‘Do-don’t care. Put that r-rubbish away and go home.’ Friedrich and the others picked up their stretchers and deposited them in the compartment with the thousand balls. The caretaker went after them, grumbling. ‘None of that crap here in my cellar.’

I put my hand on Walter’s shoulder. He pushed it away and then wiped his face on his sleeve. ‘I didn’t mean to cry, Danny.’

‘You weren’t crying.’

Then they passed us again, the caretaker jangling his keys behind them. ‘You’ll get your turn!’ Friedrich clenched his fist as he went past Walter. I ran after him and positioned myself on the stairs ahead of him. ‘Listen,’ I whispered in his ear, one hand on his arm, ‘you leave him alone in future, OK?’ Friedrich stared past me, stepped aside and walked up the stairs backwards. He stopped