If his father hadn’t sent him to run home from the construction site that day to get some beer, he wouldn’t have come down the path just as she was picking raspberries with her father on the slope across from their house. Her father had waved him over and asked whether he wouldn’t like to have some raspberries too, and he’d said yes. From then on, the first time he plucked raspberries with her, until today, when he climbs up on the ladder to straighten the tarp on the roof of the bathing house, life has taken its course. Sometimes he asks himself whether, if their two fathers had not acted as if in cahoots that day to make them playmates, his life would still have become his life. But life would no doubt have filled up with various other sorts of would-haves and probably been just as much his life as this one. At the time, when he was five years old and she had just turned four, their fathers or who knows who had made a decision once and for all about the gestures with which he now, in his mid-fifties already and perched atop a ladder, is tugging straight a tarp that’s gotten rumpled in the wind.
I dare you to crawl out farther on this branch, let’s go for a swing, did you know you can smoke cattails, let’s use the tiles to build a house in the water, I found a bullet casing, me too, let’s go for a swing, if you put a board over the tire you’ll have a raft, you have to use elderberry stalks to make a blowpipe, they’re hollow on the inside, the gardener said so, let’s go to Liedtke Park, it’s all wild and there are apples growing that don’t belong to anyone, let’s go for a swing, c’mere, I’ll give you a boost, how far down can you dive, my ship has a rudder made of metal, let’s say the bedroom is from the pillow there to the blanket, let’s go for a swing, can you ride no-hands, did you know that little boy Daniel got up on the windowsill and peed out the window, oh no, my oar just fell in the water, give me a kiss.
Over there between the roots of the big oak tree that he can see perfectly well from up on the ladder is where they’d buried the little chest that contained, as treasure, the aluminum pennies from his sister’s wedding, and when they dug the hole they found the pewter pitchers that someone else had put in the ground at exactly that spot. When he stands on the ladder now, he isn’t looking at the roots of the oak tree, but presumably the little chest is still there in the ground, or, if it’s rotted since then, at least the pennies are still there. Did you know that Daniel is dead? Did you know he died even before his father tried to shoot his mother dead? Do you remember how he used to go diving with us, among the pikes in the reeds, and how cold the pikes were when they bumped our legs with their fish mouths? Not long after the border was opened, he went diving in the Caribbean and drowned. No, really. As if opening the border just gave him more possible ways to die. The trip was his would-have. Now he’ll be a little boy forever. After the night when Daniel’s father, who had cancer and was on his deathbed, shot at Daniel’s mother, she too lay on her deathbed. No, really. As if dying in such a family just eats its way through everything. Did you read the newspapers when for days the front page showed the bungalow where Daniel peed out the window that time? Now the window is dark and empty, the whole bungalow has been dark since the shooting. They say the argument was about the bungalow itself. Daniel’s father shot at Daniel’s mother from the bed. It was about the inheritance for Daniel’s younger half-brother. The one from the West. No, really. So opening the borders apparently also gave Daniel’s parents more possible ways to die.
In order to stretch the tarp over the roof last fall, he had set foot on the property of his childhood friend for the first time since helping her pack up and empty out the house years before. He hopped over the little wall made of fieldstone and worked his way through the bushes because the gate he’d always entered as a child was locked now. He had sat with her on the bricked pillars to either side of the gate so they could stick their tongues out at passers-by. When he now thinks back to that weekend when she emptied out and left the house, or even to his visit in Berlin when he was fourteen years old, or, even further back, to that afternoon in the woodshed when she and he had seen something it would have been better for them not to see, it strikes him as strange that, independent of what is happening, one day is always followed by another, and to this day he doesn’t know what it actually is that is continuing. Perhaps eternal life already exists during a human lifetime, but since it looks different from what we’re hoping for — something that transcends everything that’s ever happened — since it looks instead like the old life we already knew, no one recognizes it. The house too is still standing there, and he doesn’t know what it is that is still standing. And he himself. And no doubt she as well, somewhere in the world.
At our house we have gooseberries and currants and apples in the garden, but the gooseberries and currants are already done for the year, he’d said, and her father had given him permission to show her his garden that afternoon. At our house there are just roses, she’d said when she stood there in his garden, then she bit into an unripe apple. That is when what he now, in retrospect, would call his childhood first began, from vacation to vacation it would begin when she arrived and end when she departed. On the day when his sister stepped out onto the road in her wedding dress to walk to the church to be married, and a pot of pennies was dumped out over her for luck, and afterward he and his friend picked all the lightweight coins from the sand, aluminum money that weighed almost nothing — on that day, while the wedding party was already drawing farther away and they were still dragging their hands through the pale sand, she and he had spoken for the first time of marriage.
You can break open hazelnuts with a heavy stone, they’re still white on the inside, let’s go for a swing, I can ride around the puddle to the left with my front wheel and to the right with the back one, let’s make up a secret language, kissing should be called twittering, no really, let’s go for a swing, you can’t talk while you’re fishing, squeeze the lilac leaf all the way flat between your hands, that’s how it makes the best whistle, the gardener said so, let’s go for a swing, c’mere, we’ll bury the mole under the tree right here, you can eat the little hearts on the shepherd’s purse, let’s go hide under the fir bush, give me a — I want to twitter, me too.
His parents always left the house early, at six in the morning, at eight his friend had breakfast, at eight-thirty he was allowed to come over. On cool mornings, the handle of the gate with the pillars to the right and left of it still had dew on it when he pressed it down. As he walked past the kitchen window, he would knock on the greenish panes so that the cook would unlock the door for him, then he would go inside and wait in the living room next to the long table at which his friend and her family and the friends of her family were sitting, he would stand there, leaning up against the cold stove, waiting until she finished eating. Afterward they would play in her garden or his, go swimming from his or her dock, hide in the secret closet in her room under the coats and dresses or go to his house, where the television would be on even during the day, and watch the black and white cowboys galloping across a black and white plain and eventually their black and white falling down and dying.