Euphoria

1

When it’s too cold to lie down at night we remain standing. We stand close together, back to back to side to front. We turn slowly over the course of the night so that each of us gets a turn in the middle, and from time to time each one of us has to be on the outside. When the sun comes up we look past each other, avoiding eye contact, and we can clearly see out of the corners of our eyes that the others are also looking in some other direction. Each of us is looking somewhere else, each into his own distant nothing, or everything, it doesn’t matter, we don’t look each other in the eye, that would be painful, a different and far greater pain than looking at the sun as it rises. Usually it’s cloudy, and we continue to look past each other and feel relief at the receding cold and the increasing light and we stand huddled together, almost like we did before, on the underground, at rush hour.

2

In the twilight we see a kid. It is sitting a little away from the road, which isn’t really a road so much as a path, and it is sitting upright and casually and introverted, facing the charred remains of a tent, which it is hitting at regular intervals with a rotten branch. We stop. Strangely, the form and circumstance of the child’s body do not trigger any protective impulse in us, nor any emotion or warmth. We look at the kid, see the thin hair on the back of his head, the too-short neck, the short, soft limbs carrying out violent, senseless movements with great seriousness and concentration, as if this were some sort of scientific experiment involving hitting sheets of nylon repeatedly with a charred piece of wood. The kid still looks quite well fed. He will last another week at least, assuming it doesn’t suddenly turn colder. Maybe his mother is just off fetching water or something. We leave him alone. As we start moving again the kid turns around and stares at us. I’m afraid he will start crying because I don’t know what we would do to get him to stop. But he just sizes us up, one after the other, his face totally expressionless. Then he turns to face the burnt-out collapsed tent and hits it with his charred stick again: smack, smack, smack. We move on. After a little while we find his parents, lying in the bushes with their skulls smashed open.

3

The next day it’s darker and a light drizzle sets in, growing imperceptibly denser and denser. It is as if it’s not droplets of water that are falling on us, on the black tar and on the gravel crunching beneath our feet, but rather fine, unbroken streams, like the trickle of a thousand leaky taps. The type of rain whose intensity you don’t notice until you are soaked through, and you stop and look down at yourself and then up at the sky and shake your head in disbelief.

We get off the road. We walk through brown fields, traverse gentle hills, meadows and other open spaces whose function is unclear. Ahead of us is a gigantic, flat block. We walk towards it. It takes longer than we thought. It’s farther away than we thought. It is much, much bigger than we thought. The exterior walls are over thirty feet tall and punctuated by sliding doors of rusty steel and broken glass. Chimneys. A former factory, perhaps. As we circle the bare, angular cube in search of a way in, the rain gets heavier and the sound of the drops on the building’s roof is tinny and bright, it gets louder and less fragmentary and soon the building is transformed into one big resonance chamber, singing a single, high-pitched note.

We find a door frame. The door is gone. We go in, one after the other, and oddly the sound of the rain on the roof is barely audible on the inside. We are in a big, empty hall. The floor is littered with broken glass, abandoned campfires, it smells of old oil, and there are stains left behind by various substances that have seeped into the concrete. The assembly pits reveal that this used to be a place for servicing cars or farming machines. Apart from the stains, the floor, the walls, and the roof on which the rain is falling, there is nothing here. We leave the building and walk on, through the dense rainfall, back to the forest.

4

In the last light we reach a village. Here too all the windows are shuttered, the doors bolted. We encounter no one and find no indication of the inhabitants’ whereabouts. We go into a supermarket through the broken glass door. We walk up and down rows of empty and half-empty shelves. The floor is strewn with torn packaging, broken glass, dented aluminium and squashed cardboard boxes, and everything is shrouded in the inevitable, almost unbearable smell: the smell of all the things that were ever in a supermarket. Packaged soups, crisps, chocolate, cat food, drain cleaner, frozen lasagne, deodorant, beer, rotting meat. We find a pallet of water bottles and a couple of sticks of garlic bread still in their plastic packaging. With our bounty we withdraw into the warmest and safest room of the abandoned complex: the defrosted cold storage room. We eat, we drink, we sit in silence. It’s a good silence, a kind of, See, it’s not so bad, we can make it, we’ll find a way. And we savour the cold garlic bread. The butter tastes good when it’s this hard, you really have to bite it in order to taste the intense flavour. After the exertion of the past few days, the fat is like a revelation. Having made sure we can’t be locked in from the outside, we build a camp out of alternating layers of cardboard and plastic wrapping. We lie down side by side and then we cover ourselves with more layers of cardboard, resting our heads on wads of plastic, the bottles of mineral water within reach. Our breathing doesn’t just sound exhausted. It sounds peaceful.

5

A few weeks ago we were in the car. The autobahn was mostly empty, and on either side the grey-green alpine upland was covered in a thin layer of frost. The hard shoulder was covered in gravel and the dirt of weeks past. Another age. And the radio was playing a song that we all claimed not to know and never to have heard before, but now we were all roaring the chorus:

Euphoria!

Forever till the end of time

From now on, only you and I

We were flying up the Irschenberg – in actual fact we were driving, of course, but you always fly up the Irschenberg, never down it. The difference between coming and going is categorical. We were going fast, the noise of the revving engine sounded like courage and determination. To our right groaning lorries, creeping, crawling up the hill: pathetic beasts, fused with their drivers. A docile herd caught in the daily to and fro of the working week, which, to us, ever since we got in the car, had seemed as distant, harmless and controllable as death.

There were five of us. Drygalski, Gruber, Fürst, Golde, and me. We had packed eggs and milk, beer, mince, pasta, Nutella, everything except for bread, which we wanted to buy at the baker’s in the village, down in the valley. We had left the city behind us, the suburb where we had grown up together, the autobahn junctions, the carpet, furniture and DIY stores, the industrial estates that were home to companies with metal detectors and security guards and complicated English names that had something to do with computers. Two in the front, three in the back. We were packed in tight. The ones in the back could have held hands if they had wanted to, but that would have been gay, and in any case, notwithstanding the euphoria we felt at our communal forward motion, we also felt a certain distance from one another; after all, it would never be as much fun as it used to be, just more expensive each year, and really we were all getting too old for this stuff, and besides it now took us at least three days to recover from a decent bender.

On the crest of the Irschenberg, just as we saw the golden arches, one of us shouted, McFlurry!, and another one of us laughed, though the one driving just gave a tired smile and raced on, past the American fast food restaurant whose menu we had known off by heart before we had even learnt to play cards, if we ever even had, and then we drove steeply downhill. Through the wind-screen we saw the Inn valley spread out before us, dark green, empty and silent, all the way to the misty Alps, dissected by six straight lanes of civilisation, trailing on in shimmering red and white. The windscreen wipers squeaked.

6

The following morning we leave the village on foot and take the highway that runs the length of the valley. It takes us around the next mountain, through the next valley, past the next mountain. We pass signs with the names of towns that are probably deserted now, and no sooner have we passed them than we’ve forgotten them again. We see pylons with no wires between them, abandoned petrol stations, supermarkets, holiday homes, vacancy signs, here and there the burnt-out wreck of a car.

We get to a lake. The opposite shore is out of sight; this one is full of charred sailing boats, smashed furniture and bottles, empty packaging and articles of clothing. Bloated corpses. As if anything went away just because you throw it in the water. The only dissolution in sight is the way the gentle waves merge with the