While we were dreaming, p.48
While We Were Dreaming, page 48
‘Can’t we do something else for a change?’ Mark said, lighting his cigarette and giving me a light. ‘All this painting.’
‘I thought you wanted to be a painter and decorator?’
‘Yeah, I do. That’s why.’
‘OK, listen, I’ll send you one of the JCSs, then you’ll be finished quicker and you can sand down the stairs.’
‘Thanks, Andrea!’ He took her hand and patted it; she pulled it away and laughed and shook her head.
She went behind the bar and put an ashtray down on the counter. ‘We don’t want everyone to see you drinking. Next time, wait until you’ve knocked off for the day, OK?’
‘Yes, Andrea,’ we said.
‘There’ll be lunch upstairs at around two,’ she said, and then she crossed the cellar to the door. We watched her go; she really did look pretty good, even though she had a kid already.
‘Must be a real arsehole,’ said Mark.
‘Who?’
‘The guy, the arsehole who knocked her up… just buggers off and leaves her on her own, must be an idiot.’
Someone came down the stairs. A guy in blue overalls and a blue flat cap stopped in the doorway. He said hello and tapped his cap, then came over to us. He stopped again and inspected the wall. ‘Looks pretty good, boys,’ he said in a low, calm voice. ‘Not much more for us to do.’ He stood between us and rapped his knuckles on the counter. ‘Taking it easy, boys?’
‘Course,’ I said. ‘Course, Mr Singer, got to take a break now and then.’ He took off his cap, put it on the bar and looked at me. Mark picked up his beer and drank a mouthful; at first, I thought he wanted to smash the bottle over Singer’s head.
‘Daniel,’ said Singer, moving his cap back and forth on the bar, ‘Daniel Lenz.’ He looked old, much older than he used to, he had hardly any hair and what was left had gone white. He held out his hand to shake and that seemed to have got smaller as well, he’d had enormous hands and loads of strength in them. He’d been a woodwork teacher, woodwork and metalwork and high up in the party. I took his hand and pressed it as hard as I could, but it was just soft and moist and limp.
‘Bormann,’ Mark shouted behind him, and Mr Singer jumped. ‘Mark Bormann! Hello, Mr Singer!’ Mark slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Long time no see, Mr Singer!’
Mr Singer looked at Mark’s hand, still on his shoulder, and stepped aside. ‘Hello, Mark.’
Mark grinned. ‘So how are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ he said, ‘I’ve got work to do, plenty of work.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘We can see that.’
He ran his hand over his bald head, picked up his cap and put it back on. ‘And how are you boys? Volunteering as well, are you, always ready to help?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mark, ‘we learned that from you, sir, you know that, always prepared, always ready to help, right, Danny?’
‘Course,’ I said. ‘A Pioneer is always willing to help. And friendly, and disciplined!’
‘A Pioneer always keeps his body clean and healthy,’ Mark gulped down his beer and slammed the bottle on the bar. Mr Singer smiled. He went over to the paint buckets and picked up a roller. Mark went behind the counter and put the empty beer bottles in the crate. ‘Old Mr Singer,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Would you believe it, Danny? If Rico…’
‘Don’t tell him, Mark. Please.’
Mark nodded. ‘He’d give him a right going over, you better believe it, Danny.’
‘I know.’ I looked over at Singer. He was moving the roller up and down the wall; he had to stretch to reach the ceiling.
‘He’d deserve it, though, wouldn’t he, Danny?’
‘I guess. But remember back then at shooting practice, with the electric rifles, you were really good. Remember that…?’ I couldn’t help laughing, ’cause I saw us standing at the electric shooting range with Mr Singer, Mark’s red neckerchief tied wrong, the ends far too long, but he got every shot…
‘Ah, forget it,’ he said.
We went over to the wall and picked up our rollers. Mr Singer didn’t turn round when we walked past him. Mark started on the opposite wall and I went to the other end of Singer’s wall. It was a pretty long wall. I’d just put my roller to the wall and he took my arm. ‘Line it up properly, Mr Lenz.’ He only called us Mr when we weren’t paying attention or were being undisciplined or… ‘Use the sights,’ he put his finger on the barrel, ‘use these two points to set your sights on the third point, the target, and then you’ll hit it!’ And he was right, I did hit it. Up, down, up, down, then in the paint bucket, and again: up, down, up, down; I heard Mr Singer breathing, it sounded almost like low moaning, I turned round to him, he was red in the face and had taken his cap back off. I worked pretty fast ’cause I wanted to get to him before he’d done half the wall. My paint bucket was almost empty and I opened a new one. Dipped the roller in and brushed it off against the plastic lattice, and then up, down, up, down again… Disruptive tendencies, and aside from that Rico’s character displays… disruptive tendencies… admit, admit everything… we know… that… they always know everything… disruptive tendencies… no longer tolerate… the Elbe flows to Hamburg, the Elbe flows to Hamburg… ‘The Elbe,’ Mr Singer said in his low voice, ‘do you know why the Elbe is so dirty? The Feddies, the Federal Republic of Germany, they pump the pollution out of their polluting factories into the Elbe, and that’s why the Elbe is so polluted here! And then they lie, then they lie and say it’s us, it’s us causing the pollution. But we don’t pollute the Elbe, the German Democratic Republic doesn’t pollute! Only those dirty Federal German factories!’ The Elbe flows to Hamburg, I thought, and I dipped the roller in the paint, disruptive tendencies. I’d never been to Hamburg. ‘Breaktime!’ I put the roller down, paint dripping down my hand. I was standing next to Mr Singer; his face and forehead were shiny.
‘Come on up,’ Andrea called from the door. ‘Lunch is ready!’
‘Right then, boys!’ Mr Singer wiped his face with a big handkerchief.
‘Exhausted, eh?’ Mark planted himself in front of him, hands in his pockets.
‘I’ll be alright,’ Mr Singer said. ‘I’m used to hard work.’
‘Leave him alone,’ I said. ‘He’s just a poor bastard…’
He pulled his cap out of the breast pocket of his overalls and put it back on. He took a silver cigarette case out of his trouser pocket and opened it. The cigarette case had the GDR emblem on it, and underneath it said in capitals COMRADESHIP MEANS COMBAT.
‘Help yourself, boys,’ he said, holding it out to us.
We looked at him, then we turned away and went up the stairs.
HOUNDDOG HEART
Stefan had a dog now, a Pitbull. ‘A Pitbull’s not a dog,’ he said. ‘A Pitbull’s a Pitbull. They’re special.’ And he wasn’t wrong, ’cause even though the dog wasn’t exactly big, everyone was shit-scared of it. He’d bought it over in Grünau, from these skins who bred Pitbulls in their allotment. Fifty marks, he’d paid, but only ’cause he knew a couple of them. The dog was only six months old and still really little, but it got a bit bigger every week. Stefan had a wall down in his cellar where the dog had to stand, and Stefan drew lines on the wall so we could see how fast it was growing.
The dog didn’t have a name yet, he just called it ‘Pitbull’, but he thought about what to call it every day and probably every night as well.
‘Just leave it,’ I said. ‘Just call it “Pitbull”, that’s good enough.’
‘No, Danny, no, it’s not. He needs a name, he’s special, he’s got to have a proper name.’
He stroked the dog’s head, then he picked it up and put it on his lap. The dog rolled on its back and Stefan stroked its tummy. ‘Look at his balls, they’re gonna be huge.’
I laughed. ‘What do you care about his balls, or are you into that kind of thing?’
He went red. ‘Shut it, Danny.’
He stroked the dog under its jaw and on its neck, and the dog breathed loudly and grunted and stretched its front legs against Stefan’s chest like two arms.
‘Hey Danny, we need more dog food.’
‘Give him here.’ He picked up the dog and passed it to me. I leant back and put it on my chest; it was getting pretty heavy. The dog sniffed at my face. ‘Look, he likes me.’
‘Oh, he’s always like that.’ Stefan budged his chair closer to my seat. We were down in his cellar ’cause that was where his dog lived. ‘Hey Danny, the thing with the dog food…’
‘Have your parents stopped giving you anything?’
‘Come on, you know.’ Stefan’s parents didn’t like his dog, especially his dad, and that was why he spent all day outside with his dog or at friends’ places or down here in the cellar. ‘I’ve run out of money but he’s got to eat, he’s still growing, he needs a lot of food.’
‘I can lend you a couple of marks.’
‘No, I need more than that, I need a bag or two. Eukanuba’s the best, it’s got everything in it, gives him real power.’
‘Man, d’you know how much that stuff costs!’
‘No, Danny, I don’t want to buy it. You know that pet shop out in Mölkau…’
‘Yeah, the one by the flower market.’
‘Right, that’s the one, Danny, that’s the one.’ He went to the cupboard and took out two bottles of beer. The dog jumped off my lap and followed him. ‘See, Danny, I’ve got him trained!’ The dog jumped up on his leg and Stefan bent down to it, and it licked Stefan’s face with its pink tongue.
‘That’s disgusting,’ I said.
‘He’s a dog, Danny.’ He opened the bottles and gave me one. ‘To my dog,’ he said.
‘To your dog.’ We drank. ‘So you want to nick it. But a sack like that must weigh ten kilos.’
‘I know, Danny. Not from the shop, that’d never work. They store stuff out the back. I’ve checked it all out, it’s only padlocked. All we need is ice spray.’
‘And how are you gonna get it out of there? You don’t want to take a car…’
‘No, we’ll use our moped, with a trailer on the back.’
‘You’re losing it!’
He put his beer down, picked up the dog and held it up over his head. The Pitbull moved its legs and howled quietly. ‘I don’t think he likes it, Stefan.’
‘Rubbish, he’s just happy.’ He swayed it around a couple of times, then he put it back down. The dog went to its cardboard box and climbed in. ‘I think he needs a pee,’ said Stefan, getting up. He picked up the leash from the table, stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Pitbull’s head poked out of the cardboard box, Stefan whistled again, and now the dog climbed out again and came over to him, slowly. ‘Come on, Pitbull, walkies!’ Pitbull turned in a circle, howling and trying to bite his own tail.
‘Look at that,’ I said. ‘Look at him!’
‘That’s normal,’ said Stefan, ‘he always does that when he’s happy.’
Outside in the cellar corridor, the dog pissed on the wall. ‘No, not here,’ Stefan said, dragging it away. I laughed. The whole cellar reeked of perfume ’cause Stefan kept spraying the places where his dog had pissed so the people in the building didn’t tell him off. Now his mum started telling him off for using up her nice perfume. In the beginning, the dog had shat and pissed all over Stefan’s cellar every day, but that was Stefan’s fault ’cause he left the dog alone when he went to his pre-training year in the morning and he didn’t come back ’til the afternoon, which was a pretty long time for a little dog. He’d taken it to college a couple of times. He’d left his books at home and made holes in his bag, and Pitbull curled up inside it and went to sleep. The teachers hadn’t noticed anything and Stefan took Pitbull for a walk in his breaks. But one time, the dog crawled out of his bag and ran up to the teacher’s desk, and the teacher was shit-scared; it was a Pitbull, wasn’t it? Now Stefan had to get drinkers we knew from the bar or outside the supermarket and give them korn and beer to come down to his cellar in the morning and look after Pitbull and take him out to the park when he needed a pee. I did it too when I had time, of course, or Rico or Mark. We were proud walking round the streets or the park with the dog.
Pitbull squatted and took a huge dump on the middle of the pavement.
‘I thought you’d got him trained, Stefan?’
‘Eh? I have!’
‘No, I mean not to shit on the pavement.’
It stank really bad and we moved off, quick. ‘I have, Danny. He usually only shits on the grass. He must have eaten something dodgy. So are you in? The thing with the dog food, I mean.’
‘Stefan, mate, I don’t know. When d’you want to do it?’
‘I thought between three and four, when there’s hardly any cops around.’
‘Course, but what day?’
We’d got to the park and he let the dog off the leash. The dog ran straight to the grass and started jumping round in circles like an idiot.
‘What about tomorrow, Danny? Yeah, tomorrow night.’
‘Don’t know. Don’t you want to wait ’til Saturday? They’re closed on Sundays.’
‘Na, Danny, tomorrow’s better. The dog needs food and if we take four or five sacks it’ll last a while.’
‘Alright, but only if you let me drive.’
‘Thanks, Danny!’ He punched me on the shoulder, then gave me a cigarette. I smoked carefully, not inhaling most of it, ’cause it still sometimes made me cough. ‘Course you can drive.’ The dog had found a bit of wood and was chewing on it. We ran over to it. The dog stood up, clenching the wood between its teeth and growling at us. ‘Drop it, Pitbull, drop it!’ Stefan stood in front of him and lifted up the leash. ‘Drop it now, Pitbull!’ Pitbull took no notice; he ducked down, bit at the wood and growled even louder. Stefan squatted down and grabbed him by the head. ‘Drop it! Dirty!’ The dog howled and dropped the piece of wood. ‘Good boy.’ He picked the dog up, squeezed him to his chest and stroked him. ‘Who’s a good boy, eh? Such a good boy!’
‘You need to give him a name or he’ll never do what you say.’
‘Course he will, Danny. I’ve taught him all sorts already, you know that.’
He’d even tried to teach him to shit or at least piss on command, ’cause then he could take him round to people he didn’t like, like his teachers for example. They wouldn’t let him in their houses, but he could go up to their front doors with Pitbull. ‘Do a poo,’ Stefan kept saying when the dog shat on the grass or the pavement, and then he’d give him a dog biscuit or a bit of bread, but Pitbull didn’t shit because Stefan said ‘Do a poo,’ he shat ’cause he needed a crap. He’d taught him ‘Speak!’ as well, and that worked, even if Pitbull only howled and didn’t bark properly. ‘Speak!’ said Stefan, and got a bit of bread out of his pocket. ‘Come on, speak, Pitbull!’ The dog sat down, raised his head and looked up at the sky, then he started howling but with a couple of barks in between; he was getting better. ‘See, Danny, look how good he is at that!’
‘Yeah, not bad.’ He held the bread out but then he pulled it back when the dog snatched for it. ‘Go on. give it to him, he’s hungry!’ The dog was on his haunches in front of Stefan, staring at the piece of bread, panting, and there was slobber running out of his mouth.
‘Watch this, Danny!’ Stefan squatted down in front of the dog and stuck the bread between his own teeth. ‘Pitbull, come and get it,’ he mumbled through the bread. Pitbull tipped his head to one side and looked at him. ‘Pitbull, come and get it!’ And now Pitbull jumped, he jumped past Stefan’s head and grabbed the bit of bread out of Stefan’s mouth mid-leap. ‘See that, you see that, Danny? What a dog! Come here, you!’ Pitbull had choked down the bit of bread and now he ran to Stefan and jumped up on him and licked his face with his long pink tongue.
I squatted down next to them. I stroked Pitbull’s head and he licked my hand. ‘He really is a great dog, Stefan.’
He smiled. ‘Once he’s really big he’ll look after me, Danny, then no one’ll start anything, you know?’
‘Right. He already looks pretty dangerous right now.’ The dog had lain down on his back, kicking his legs and rolling on the grass. ‘But you still gotta give him a name.’
‘I know, I know.’
We crossed the grass back to the path and sat down on a bench, up on the back rest. Pitbull sat on the bench as well, by our feet, and panted and watched the people walking past.
‘It’s tricky with the name, though, Danny. Rico wants me to call him after a boxer, like Tyson or something.’
‘Nah, that’s stupid. Anyway, Tyson’s inside again, I think. He’d only bring bad luck.’
‘Every bloody dog’s got some dumb name, Max or… Hey Danny, I know this guy over in Grünau, his dog’s called Adolf.’
‘A skin?’
‘Yeah, a skin.’
Stefan gave me a cigarette; we smoked and looked at the grass on the other side of the path.
‘Hey Danny, I think I’ll just name him Pitbull.’
‘If you say so.’
‘I bet there isn’t any other Pitbull just called Pitbull.’
‘I bet there isn’t, nah.’
‘And anyway, he knows that name already. Right Pitbull?’ The dog looked up at us, still panting like crazy – maybe he was thirsty – and it looked like he was nodding. ‘Pitbull. Yeah, Danny, that’s good. Come on, we’ll have a beer to celebrate, at Goldie’s.’
‘I thought you were skint?’
‘You were going to lend me a few marks, Danny.’
‘Yeah, for dog food…’
Stefan got up and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Come on Danny, you know you want to, just a couple of beers at Goldie’s.’ Pitbull howled, jumped off the bench and ran onto the grass. ‘See, he wants to go to Goldie’s and all.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But only one beer.’
We crossed the grass; Pitbull had found his piece of wood again and was running ahead.
We were in the East Woods, Rico, Stefan and me, up on the little hill by the old open-air stage, so we could see if anyone came along. Stefan was inflating a blow-up doll. Karsten and his brother had cleared out some kiosk, out in one of the villages. All they wanted was booze and fags, but they’d found the whole lot in a little storage room, the place was some kind of dodgy village sex shop, and now they had all the stuff at home and couldn’t get rid of it.
