27/04/2019 travis and volker final draft - google docs · 27/04/2019 travis and volker final draft...

27/04/2019 TRAVIS AND VOLKER FINAL DRAFT - Google Docs

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZZgD2KboSaMFn38irzYnp-9tgRBwz_oo40kp4EGYu-A/edit 1/29

TRAVIS

This was her in 1990, sitting in the passenger seat of her mother's car with her feet up

on the dashboard. This was the young woman known as Travis, blinking very slowly

behind her sunglasses and biting into a piece of pink confectionery from a bag branded

American-style Taffy. She was on her fifth, and the sugar content was starting to

dessicate her tongue. The car had not moved in several minutes. She was wondering if

anyone would notice if she kept her eyes closed when she next blinked.

Beside her, the driver let out a sigh in the direction of the kind of traffic that persists

between five and eight in the evening at the centre of a large city. She was her mother,

Sylvia, whose wedding ring repeatedly clicked against the wheel as she tapped it with

her hand. As they started to inch forward along the road, she rolled her shoulders, partly

to force some feeling back into them, partly because it expressed her irritation in a way

that was satisfying.

The car was a relic, far wider and longer than the cars around it. It had been

expensively imported, twice. Entering a hard corner posed such a challenge that it gave

Travis the sensation of being the confectioner's hook from which a long piece of hot taffy

is pulled.

'You'll fall asleep and choke if you aren't careful.'

Travis swallowed, lowered her feet, and pushed her sunglasses further up her nose to

mask her eyes. 'It wasn't so bad before,' she said. 'It won't be like this on the other

side.'

'I don't know who would think of living in this city,' Sylvia said. 'I'll be surprised if we

get there at all.'

There was a shushing sound from the back, where the car's third and youngest

passenger, Lula, sat in the middle of the bench seat, straining forward against her

seatbelt with a thumb looped inside so that it didn't dig into her stomach. Her head was

tilted and she stared at her shoes. They were green leather boots. She was listening to

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the music playing on the radio, which had been turned down to almost nothing. She held

still and stared at her green boots and wished her family would keep quiet for a moment.

'We should have taken the other car,' Sylvia was saying. 'God knows why Hans let me

take the Buick out of the garage.' It was the third time she had said something to this

effect. 'And why we didn't drive in from the East side.'

'I told you already I could've looked at the map,' Travis said. She reached for another

taffy from the bag resting on the control panel. She split the wrapper with her nail and

let it fall into the pocket in the car's door.

'No, no. It's an experience,' Sylvia said. 'I should get used to the roads here.' She

checked her mirrors, setting the car into drive and edging it along towards the rear

bumper of the car ahead. 'Can we turn it down, Lula? Just a little? The radio always gives

me an awful headache.'

'It's practically off already,' Travis said. 'We should park somewhere and get a drink.'

'I'm scared to leave this thing out of my sight.'

'There's a gated place not that far away.'

'That might do. Obviously, I'd rather drop you off at your place.'

'You don't need to do that,' Travis said.

'No, no,' Sylvia said again. 'I should see where my own daughter lives. I'm happy

you've found somewhere you can flourish. And I'm not one to make judgements about

individuals I haven't met, but you know how Hans is. He seems to think it sounds

communist , how you live together and share your things, but I told him that wasn't the

case. I told him that's just what the students here do now.'

'He doesn't know what the word means. I don't remember ever hearing him consider

the finer points of dialectical materialism.'

'Yes, it's very silly of him,' Sylvia said, 'I mean, they aren't , are they?'

'It's not like people there walk around waving the hammer and sickle. People are tired

of all that,' Travis said. Sylvia made a small noise that wasn't quite clearing her throat.

'And it wouldn't sit well with our anarchists.'

'Sorry?'

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Lula hushed them again. No one paid her any attention as she unclipped her belt and

shifted further forward in her seat, her head practically adjacent to the other passengers

by this point.

'Well, whoever they are, I'm glad you have company. It can be terrible living in the

city. Do you remember how I was in Strasbourg? Trapped inside all day, forgetting how

to answer the phone or host dinners. You were too young to notice things like that, but a

city can turn you crazy. Let alone two cities at once.' They changed lanes and the car

behind leaned on the horn. 'I've read that it has something to do with the traffic noise,

you know.'

'Is that right?' Travis said. The sweet in her mouth was so soft that it hardly held

together in one piece but she resisted biting into it.

'It sounds ridiculous, but that's exactly what it is,' Sylvia said. 'It's all of that traffic

noise, around the clock, without a single moment of silence. It's enough to drive

someone totally crazy if they aren't watching out. I mean clinically crazy, not just a blue

day here and there. Like the girl last spring, the Thomas girl.'

'What?'

The lights changed, and the car jerked forward as they set off again. The untethered

Lula slid across the polished leather bench seat and knocked her head against the

window glass. She touched her head and looked at her hand a few times, and laid flat on

her back across the seats. The car's roof was lined with cream-coloured leather to match

the seats.

'What are you doing back there, Lula?'

'Nothing. Wanted to sleep.'

'Would it help if we turned down the radio a little, darling?'

'Um,' she said, weighing up her options. 'No.'

Travis had taken off her sunglasses and put them on the dashboard. She was looking

closely at her mother. 'What did you say about the Thomases? The Thomases from

Strasbourg?'

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'That's right. You must remember the news about the girl. I've never heard anything

like it before.'

'You didn't tell me. Which girl?'

'The daughter.'

'There were two daughters.'

'Yes there were, weren't there?' Sylvia put her wedding ring to her lips. 'Which girl?

The youngest, I think.'

'The youngest,' Travis repeated.

'She was tall.'

'What about her?'

'It's not like I'm any kind of psychoanalyst, of course, but - if I was going to make a

guess - I'd say schizophrenia. Why else do all that?'

'What?'

'Honestly, I can't believe you've forgotten. The amount of noise about it at the time.

The Thomases would hardly stop calling us up after it happened - practically every week.

But you stayed here to work for most of that Easter, I suppose.' Sylvia lowered her voice

and checked her mirror for Lula, who didn't appear in it since she was still lying across

the seats, now experimenting with putting the soles of her boots against the window's

glass and looking between them into the faces of passengers passing alongside. 'No, she

took her life.'

'She's dead?'

'That's right,' Sylvia said. 'It was far more than just that, though. A while before it

happened, she went off without telling anybody and rented a big apartment in Stuttgart,

of all places. She was very disturbed. And - to think she was only thirty or so miles away

from us and never called. It's all very eerie, I think.'

Travis looked at her mother, who was biting her lip as she read street names from a

sign. She suddenly had the urge to gag and spit out the softened toffee into her hand,

but she swallowed it instead, shuddering. No one saw her do this.

'You didn't tell me,' she said.

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'This is the right way, isn't it? This doesn't feel like the right way,' Sylvia said, rolling

the car across a junction towards a street saturated with traffic.

'No, it isn't,' Travis said, but there were already cars on all sides of them. Sylvia

sighed again, and Lula copied her. Travis reached for the mechanism in her door and

wound down the window.

The city rushed into the confines of the car. Hot breeze, engine hum. People on the

pavement walked home and overtook the traffic. Someone blew cigarette smoke in their

direction as they passed. Across the road, the evening light touched the upper floors of

the apartment blocks. A window was open on the third floor and through it Travis could

hear the sound of someone practicing the tuba. It was an obnoxious sound, that stopped

and picked up again every few seconds. 'You never told me,' Travis said again. She put

her sunglasses back on and leaned back into her seat.

'The little man! I'm going to see the little man,' Lula declared, after a few minutes of

silence among the car's passengers.

'They took them all down, Lula,' Travis said. 'You'll be lucky if you see a single one.'

'I wanna see the little man in the lights.'

Travis tried to look back at her sister in the wing mirror. 'Me too,' she said.

Sylvia was dabbing at her face with a tissue and kept looking towards the open

window on the other side of the car. At some point the radio must have been turned off

completely, because it wasn't making any noise anymore. She made a big deal of fanning

herself with the tissue.

'Don't do that,' Travis said. Sylvia looked at her, eyes wide. She sat up straight and

made a minute movement with her nostrils that wasn't quite flaring them. 'I'm not

closing it. When we get moving, we'll have a breeze coming in.'

'I never asked you to,' she said. 'Travis.'

Travis was shaking her head and patting the pockets of her jeans to make sure she

had her wallet and keys. 'You'd better find somewhere to eat before you turn back. I'll

make it home from here. I can see the old tram lines on this road that'll lead me to the

east side. If you go left about two blocks down, you can drive on that main road until

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you hit Kreuzberg, where you can pick up something good to eat. Get Lula a bagel or

something, I mean.'

Sylvia looked hurt. Travis slipped on her shoes and opened the door carefully so that it

wouldn't hit the adjacent car. She slammed it and walked around the back to retrieve her

bag. Lula rested her head on the back of the seat and looked at Travis as she picked it

up. 'Bye, Lula,' she said, but Lula slid out of view. She stuck up a hand over the seat and

swivelled it in a stiff, royal wave.

On the pavement, Travis hoisted the bag's handle into the crook of her arm so that

her hands were free to light one of the cigarettes from the paper carton in her shirt

pocket. She was hardly watching the pavement, and people walking in the opposite

direction sidestepped to avoid knocking into her. She caught someone's leg with her bag

and they swore, a native insult she hadn't heard before. She pretended not to hear and

kept walking.

There were the tram lines: a right-angled arc across the junction up ahead. She would

follow them east. They were a welcome sight, although they were disconnected, left

behind by the west in the sixties when they were considered antiques that could be

replaced by buses and the underground. Now there was some talk of reconnecting the

old stations. But then there was plenty of talk, and no way of knowing which talk would

come to be realised, or how soon.

It was rare for her to come over to the west side anymore, not even to the university.

She would go for a lecture or two, if it piqued her interest - occasionally, the library. But

now she belonged to the other side, and the apartment house in Prenzlauer Berg where

no one paid rent.

She flicked her cigarette into the road, regretting the head rush that was brought on

by smoking so furiously. Her pace slowed.

She was nearing the place where it used to stand, a blank space where no buildings

had yet been raised to fill its absence. Travis looked up as she passed by.

She saw it; it wasn't there. She would soon be close enough to touch it, with the next

step, then this exact step, now becoming the last. She passed through the wall.

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SHE PASSED THROUGH THE WALL.

People from either side often referred to the wall in the head, Mauer im Kopf. It was

possible to see things long after they were gone.

The Thomases, Quartier des Tanneurs, Strasbourg. A house smaller than their own on

the river. Was there anything to make of the news about the daughter? The way Sylvia

had talked about it in the car made her feel nauseous. She didn't know why, now. It

wasn't as though Travis had really thought about the girl in years. She couldn't think why

exactly they had fallen out of touch, but maybe that was what falling out of touch meant.

They had been good friends at some point, she guessed. They had collided in the way

that the children of wealthy families tend to, among social occasions that weren't

designed with them in mind, dinner parties and endless concerts. Very few childhood

friendships were intentional.

It didn't matter anymore, she thought. She lived in Berlin. S o she took a tram from

the little station at the next corner and rode it most of the way home.

Travis was raised in Vermont until she was nine, when her father sold most of his

shares in the petroleum oil company founded by his own father in the twenties and took

the family to Europe. It was only a year or two after her grandfather had passed, an

intense and well-dressed man who, at ninety, was taller than his son. He had a laugh

that seemed to burst out of the ground through him. She still dreamt about him

sometimes. He grew taller and taller in her mind as she forgot the finer details of his

appearance. More recently, he towered over her, nine or ten feet tall.

It was his name she adopted when they moved away from Strasbourg after her

parent's divorce. Her mother expressed her hatred of it at first - not only a masculine

name, but the name of the in-law to whom she owed her entire income. Travis made

sure it stuck, writing it in the cover of her books, school work, or beside the marks on

the doorframe that measured her height.

Her parents' divorce came in their fifth year in Strasbourg, when Travis was still a

young teenager doing her best to obscure the accent that still sharpened the French she

7



spoke in school. Her mother moved her again, now into a house nearby Stuttgart in what

was then the Federal Republic of Germany - a house that belonged to a man named

Hans. At some point he must have married her mother. Travis watched her mother grow

happy and big until Lula was born. She tried to learn German and found the vocabulary

less intuitive, her mind more scattered. Then in 1989, only a month after she left to

study literature in Berlin, the inner border between the east and west came down, and

then Berlin's wall.

She was nearing her stop. Looking out, she saw fire-stained brickwork, grey political

monuments, closed up shop-fronts. There were more empty buildings than there had

been when she was last here, and most of the construction sites were now deserted.

The tram's bell rung and Travis jumped. She stepped down onto the street. She

examined herself in a shop window and touched her hair before she walked on.

She took her residence with twenty or so others across the four floors of an apartment

house squat, the ground floor of which was converted into a kind of cafeteria where

anyone could come to eat and drink and otherwise entertain themselves. There were no

set prices and people normally ate for free, but regular customers came to understand

the fragility of its existence and sustained the place through donations.

It had no visible number but was distinct from its surrounding buildings because of

the brightly-painted window panes on the ground floor. Its front door was ajar. Travis

adjusted her bag and went up the couple of steps into the unlit hallway.

Before the stairway at the end of the hall was a door with a gap beneath where warm

light spilled onto the floor tiles. She stopped in this spot of light as she passed through

and debated whether to go inside. There was the clatter of china against more china

within, people speaking in German. She let the sound of conversation mingle and wash

over her as she gathered herself in the hall.

'It's certainly Bolivian. Which isn't to say it's bad, exactly.'

'I told him - I said if he doesn't like the noise he should take it up with the landlord if

he can find him, and I could tell he saw I was trying not to laugh in his face. Mind, we

should try to keep it down after dark. At least pass them along an invitation…'

8



'I can't seem to feel my legs.'

'It's hardly at all surprising, Julia. Julia. Don't you think this is hardly at all surprising?'

'… not seeing the bigger picture in this case, that the commodification of art is not

only a likelihood but an outright necessity if one wants to continue producing work and

comfortably existing under the system in which we live because, certainly, there's no

doubt even plagiarism can be a creative possibility in itself, and it's valuable, and even

anti-capitalist, but you can't be so idealistic, as you unfailingly are, nor look at me in that

way, you old Bolshevik, because total freedom of intellectual property would be…'

'It is good coffee. I've had better coffee.'

Travis touched her hair and smiled to herself in the empty hallway, then let the smile

fall. She did this a couple of times unconsciously, the way one stretches a muscle before

an exercise. She hadn't yet reached for the handle. She adjusted her bag again, which

was starting to dig into her shoulder and make it stiffen.

'I sincerely feel my legs now belong to the floor.'

'… a long time, maybe a year back. The room isn't built for it, but I swear to God,

push the tables aside and bring in some speakers and the mood can really be something.

Wild but intimate. That was when we had these crazy lights, blue and pink…'

She would go in later. That would be better, after dropping off her bag and taking a

shower. Her excitement had twisted itself into a different shaped thing. But she would

come down later. She went on towards the staircase.

SHE WENT ON TOWARDS THE STAIRCASE. The light switch on the wall did nothing

but hum slightly when she flipped it - the element in the light bulb or some other wiring

was out - and she realised she would have to go up in the dark. At first she thought she

was familiar enough with the building that she knew how to proceed, but she found it

impossible to picture the stairs in front of her. Instead, she found that she could only

imagine that there was a different staircase before her altogether. Placing a hand on the

bannister, she waited for her eyes to adjust and the dark space to be filled in.

9



It was similar to the feeling she sometimes had lying in bed while waking, before she

had opened her eyes - superimposing another scene over her real surroundings until she

recognised where she was and the image was lost, became unimaginable. But the brief

disorientation it brought on was almost pleasing.

The staircase she saw now was from the old house in Strasbourg, its steps wide and

painted white. All of their staircases and landings were painted like this, and each of the

rooms was a different colour. Each a different country, she had always thought. The

Thomas girl called the room with the mahogany chairs and the green floral wallpaper the

jungle. It was where they played together. She would be a frog sometimes, leaping from

one corner to another while her friend scrambled away. The frog was highly poisonous.

Whoever touched her would die, lying still on the floor until they were made to laugh.

The trick was to lightly touch the ankles. The floorboards, dark and waxed so they were

glossy with the light from the windows, felt cool underfoot.

They had always played together.

Travis clutched the bannister, sweating. She blinked and her superimposition slipped

away, but today its disorienting effect wasn't remotely pleasing. She wanted to sit down

right on the stairs and put her head between her knees. Instead, she strode up the rest

of the flight with her hand sliding up the bannister and her shoes catching and banging

against every other step, a sound that echoed down the hallway and got lost somewhere

in the noise of Die Kantine.

There was no lock on the door of her flat. Travis stepped through the doorway and

dropped her bag where she stood. The windows hadn't been opened for several weeks

and the air was thick with heat, but she looked around at the room before she entered.

To make the flat more habitable during her time as an unofficial tenant above Die

Kantine, she had claimed an entire set of dining room furniture left out in the street

nearby. It was the kind of old Soviet trash that people didn't think was worth throwing on

a fire, but she took an obscure pleasure its its hideous, faux wood-grain charm.

As she stood there catching her breath and finding comfort in the familiarity of the

room, her thoughts were cut short by the telephone ringing.

10



The phone was cool against her cheek.

'Hello, Volker,' Travis said.

'What are your plans for the night?'

'You tell me.'

'I'll be parked on the corner in twenty minutes.'

'Where are you thinking?'

'Oh, nowhere. I've been meaning to drive out into the country for a while. I hardly get

the chance to anymore. We'll think of something else on the way. You sound a little

quiet, there.'

'I thought I was getting sick,' she said, 'but I feel fine now.'

'Well, remember to bring something warm to wear later. You know how the country

gets at night. I would think that pink mohair sweater of yours is a good match for the

weather.'

'I'll look for it,' she said.

Before she rushed out, she changed her clothes, washed her face in the sink and left a

short message for her neighbour, Werner. He didn't see it until two o'clock in the

morning, when he stumbled in drunk and was confused by a note on the table that was

signed by someone called Renée. Here but back late , it read. Before he left the flat, he

crumpled the piece of paper in his hand and walked to the refrigerator to see if Travis

had made any new contributions.

VOLKER

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He was already waiting there when Travis reached the corner, leaning against the driver's

side of his car and eyeing the street in the other direction. Some of the other buildings

this way had windows repainted in garish colours, brickwork draped in flags, techno

blaring at an obscene volume - all overlooking a sofa in the street where some people

sat drinking beer.

He straightened up and came around to the other side of the car as she approached,

to greet her and open the door. His hair was different from the last time they met,

pushed back by a comb, the premature white streak made more prominent. He wore a

blue cravat tied inside the open collar of his shirt that was made from heavy-looking dark

cotton. Despite this, he looked comfortable in the heat. The windows of his little Russian

sedan were all lowered.

'What is that? Oranges?' Travis said, while Volker dropped himself into the driver's

seat beside her. 'I swear each time I see you this car has a different scent.'

'I have a lot of passengers' he said. 'And we don't see each other much.'

'Two months.'

'Try three.'

They always spoke English to one another. It was never clear where he'd picked up

the language. His pronunciation was simultaneously soft and brittle, and had an air of

southern England to it, although he had never left the country as far as she knew.

His legs almost touched the bottom of the wheel in the driver's seat. He gave the

impression from his posture - back straight, wheel held with only three or four fingers at

any given time - that he thought the car might break around him. He got the engine

running and eased the car back onto the road.

'Where does the time go, Volker?' Travis said. Then she blushed, and busied herself

with the seatbelt. It had sounded more sentimental than she meant it to; she was still in

the process of adjusting herself to her new surroundings.

'Maybe over the border with everyone else,' he joked, not noticing. He gestured

towards the sofa in the street where the people were drinking. 'The neighbours can't be

too happy about any of that.'

12



'Relax, you old man. Nobody's making them live here.'

Volker laughed. 'How old do you think I am, exactly?'

'Forty-five.'

'Fuck you,' Volker said, sounding pleased about something. 'I have something for

you.'

'Sixty-eight.'

'I'm not in my thirties yet. It's on the backseat.'

Travis reached back and picked up a thin, wooden board that was wrapped in light

tissue paper. The board was about fifteen by twenty inches, and had a pleasant chemical

smell to it that she slowly inhaled as she turned it over in her hands.

'Hold it landscape as you open it,' Volker said.

Travis slipped a thumb under the paper and carefully pulled the tape away from the

paper so that it could be resealed. She squinted into the dim gap she'd created. 'Oh,' she

said. Volker told her to go ahead and take it all the way out, and she did as he said,

making a show of pulling away its tissue paper very slowly.

Inside was a sign painted with black and white acrylics. Its design involved white

lettering placed off-centre within a large black circle, that was in turn overlaid on a white

background. The lettering was in a stark, featureless typeface with heavy lines and no

serifs. Each edge was so exact that it gave the impression it was machine-printed, until

the light caught it at a certain angle and the depth of the thing became clear. Slight

acrylic ridges, left by his brush.

Die Kantine .

Travis ran a finger over the sign and set it on her lap, not knowing what to make of it.

She had half-joked that she would commision him to paint a sign for the squat, months

before, when he was explaining his work as a commercial artist. At the time he had

fallen silent and sniffed, a minute gesture that Travis thought she might have imagined,

but which somehow both undermined and dismissed her idea. The possibility of it wasn't

brought up again.

13



Now this painted board sat on her lap, immaculate. He had apparently taken to the

idea and wanted to surprise her. She felt a strong impulse to place it back inside the

paper and not address it at all. It was immaculate, but she couldn't think what to say.

She knew that some response was expected of her. The work was perfect. It was the

product of hours of labour, but something about it was wrong to her.

She realised it was that it was ugly. She listened in horror to her own growing silence.

Ten, twenty seconds. She stayed mute. It was the same kind of muteness that had

settled on her when she first arrived in Berlin in the time she lived with her West Berlin

university friends, persisting for week after week. That had seemed to happen without

reason, too. It was noticed but never acknowledged by her friends. It became a larger

presence in the room than herself.

She felt Volker glancing away from the road towards her.

'What's wrong with it?'

'No - it's beautiful, Volker.'

She had jumped to conclusions; she was just fine. A muteness couldn't become

something irreparable in a single moment. And she was with her friend.

'You had an expectation,' he said, changing gear with a slow easiness, 'of something

different.'

Travis re-examined the sign for something she had missed and tried to formulate a

response. 'It's just that it's nothing like what you've shown me from your other work.

And compared to your other work it seems so… so brutal?'

'Brutal? Is that a question? The reason it looks different is because no one was telling

me what to paint.'

'I don't mean to offend you,' Travis said. 'Volker, I'm so tired tonight and my mood

was all over the place, driving here in the car. I know they'll love it in the squat.'

Volker's expression was tense for a moment, inscrutable, and then the tension broke

with a short laugh. 'It'll grow on you. I'm curious about this brutality, is all. Maybe we

have a different eye when it comes to the shape of the written word. I expect it's the

American in you that sees vulgarity over elegance, though that's nothing to be ashamed

14



of. Vulgarity has its place. Brutalism, even Dadaism, are my close friends. But this is

something quite different if you care to look closer. Please, Travis, tell me if I'm being

condescending.'

'Go on,' she said.

'There is a lot more going on here than it seems, and - though I have done my best to

cover my tracks - in this case I'll let you in on some details. Since you're not quite won

over, and I've always struggled to do anything but defend myself from these kinds of

personal attacks.'

She had encouraged him to talk and now he began to describe every aspect of the

design. While he spoke and drove - barreling towards the outskirts of the city, not so

much driving as guiding the car with a loose grip on the wheel - Travis watched him. 'A

historical tradition of typefaces… late-period El Lissitzky… a fine Russian typographer, if

we are to believe they exist.' Often he pushed the pedal to the floor as he came out of

slower sections of the road without bothering to change down a gear, the engine

groaning. He gestured with his hand to make certain points more visceral. 'Crushed

together… drawing the eye to the negative space between everything.'

They had met in a bar in Berlin a year ago. They had nearly slept together. In his

hotel room she had suddenly stood up and told him to get dressed. He hadn't minded,

and she had since been under the impression they were friends.

He was still hopscotching across the country as he had been then, working freelance,

getting contracts to produce designs for billboards, logos, labels. There were plenty of

West German companies looking to expand since the fall of the inner border, and nearly

as many new advertising campaigns. He capitalised on this. His success and his

commercial instincts placed him at odds with the kinds of artists Travis met in the squat.

She had been joking about his age but there was something weirdly aristocratic and

primordial about him, a quality that made her think folk tales. Or maybe that was only

something she applied to him with her own gaze, always seeing his Germanic

background in close focus, always noticing that accent that he'd constructed from

who-knows-what. The world in which her family existed was a different one from that of

15



the Prenzlauer apartment squat, American and expansive, but his was yet another, and

she struggled to hold a clear image of it. It was hard to even picture him existing outside

of their infrequent meetings.

In fact, they never saw each other outside of these meetings, always consisting of just

the two of them. He never came into the squat, not for a single coffee or plate of food.

His bizarre excuses ('I have the feeling I'm come down with a migraine, though I couldn't

tell you why...') became a running joke that neither of them acknowledged beyond his

apologetic smile. Soon she stopped making invitations altogether, and relying the fact he

would call randomly and want to see her.

'… the counter in letter a , proportional to the kerning… '

She listened to the sound of the words without exactly taking on their meaning. The

way that he spoke rubbed off on her - the confident rhythm to it. There was always a

structure, a context she could tell was internally cohesive even when she knew nothing

of the subject. This effect he always had on her somehow slipped her mind before, when

she couldn't speak. But that was nothing.

He was slowing the car for a junction, and his monologuing slowed with it. He was

tying what he'd said into a bow, coming back around to the point where he had left her:

'… not brutal at all,' he said, 'but quite delicate.'

'A gentle giant,' she decided.

He smiled at her. 'If you say so.'

She put the sign back inside the paper and looked out of the window, settling into her

seat.

They were already nearing the edge of town. The city greyed and darkened around

them. Brickwork became concrete. Volker switched on his lights, and other headlights

flickered on similarly as they passed going the other way. Tower blocks became few and

far between. Concrete gave way to wide banks of grass. As Travis stared out, she let her

focus slip and her surroundings blurred. Things fused into lines of shifting colour.

Streetlights, railings, trees.

16



She had the feeling she had just been asked something, and turned to Volker, who

was looking across at her like he was waiting for a reply, ignoring the road for just long

enough that it agitated Travis and she pointed ahead.

'Something wrong,' Volker said.

'I've travelled so much today already,' she said. 'I shouldn't have come out tonight.

You know, I stepped out in the middle of traffic earlier, I was so sick of the journey.'

'What did she say?'

'What do you mean?'

'Your mother. I should know her mistake just in case you're thinking of pulling the

same stunt again.'

'I don't know. She's bad at telling me what happens while I'm away.'

'What has happened?'

'Oh, she seems to think somebody from a family we knew in Strasbourg has died. But

neither my mother nor the family ever called me about it at the timem supposedly

around last Easter. I don't know what's the matter with her.'

'They were a friend of yours.'

'We haven't spoken in a long time, not since I lived in Strasbourg.'

'An old friend is still a friend. If you aren't sure about your mother's story you should

call the family, find out for yourself.'

'It's not that simple, is it? I couldn't just ask them whether their daughter is really

dead, or Sylvia had mixed them up - pretty close friends of ours at the time - with

somebody else. They probably hardly remember me, anyway.' Travis frowned. She

stared at the pulsing white line in the middle of the road. 'But, the story is so strange.

She said it was a suicide and that she had moved out to Stuttgart recently. Only twenty

or so miles away from us. But that she hadn't told anyone, not even her people at home.

It was a big apartment she'd put a deposit on, that she wouldn't have been able to afford

after the first couple of months. She hadn't asked the family for any money.'

'People do very bizarre things when they're in trouble,' Volker said, shrugging. 'What

was her name?'

17



'They were the Thomas family, in Quartier des Tanneurs .'

'You don't remember her first name?'

'It was a long time ago. Six, seven years.'

'Not so long ago,' Volker said. He looked thoughtful.

They were deep into the countryside now, on a road with only the space for a single

car. Fields close on either side. The sun had finishing setting, and there was a slight chill

in the air. Travis pulled on her sweater and Volker nodded, saying the colour was good -

very good.

She was glad to have told him about the Thomas girl. Often, when she spoke to him

about something on her mind, it was transfigured by how he thought and spoke. It was

no longer a concern, she decided. She leaned back in her seat and noticed the lingering

perfume in the car again, the scent of oranges.

She became aware that there was something sticky on her hand and pressed her

index finger to her thumb, noticing the skin stick as she separated them. It must have

been the residue from the taffy she was eating in her mother's car. She licked her finger

and wiped it on her jeans, only to find it became more sticky, the feeling making her

shudder.

'We need fuel,' Volker said, tapping the dashboard, 'and I need to take a piss.'

They were passing through a village, and he pulled the car over at a small station that

was hardly anything more than an old pump in front of a timber building with a shop

inside. The shop was lit by white fluorescent lights and had a closed sign up in the

window. Volker got out and knocked on its door until an elderly man appeared, wiping

his mouth with the back of his hand and nodding to Volker as a way of greeting him.

Volker asked him something and the man gestured to the side of the building, where

Volker next disappeared, presumably to find some privacy.

Travis closed her eyes so that she didn't have to make eye contact with the old man

as he came over, straining to carry the pump with both hands while its hose trailed

behind on the tarmac. Behind her eyelids, shapes appeared in her vision that were the

same hue as the fluorescent lights of the shop, disappearing as she turned in her seat.

18



The darkness reminded her of walking up the staircase in the squat before. Maybe she

would tell Volker about that, too - the sudden impression of being in the old house in

Strasbourg that came with a tightening of the chest, lasting until Volker had called and

distracted her. The image had been so clear that she was sure it hadn't been thought

over or tampered with in years. It was the staircase leading to the rooms where she and

the girl played.

Volker had asked the girl's name and she hadn't been able to tell him, but it was

impossible that she had forgotten it. She tried hard to think now, frowning at the grainy

white-then-red light that fluctuated across her vision as a car passed.

They had played for hours while her parents stood at the other end of the house and

shouted each other into submission. In the room they called the jungle they were

poisonous frogs, but there were other games.

In another, they became each other.

What did that mean? They were the same age and looked alike, or at least the girl

looked how Travis imagined herself to look. They had their hair tied into the same

ponytail, and they shared their clothes. They called each other by their own names - a

trick that no one noticed.

She had not always been Travis, nor had she always lived in Berlin. She was not sure,

in this moment, when she had become Travis. It might have been only been as she was

walking away from her mother's car, only as a bell rang and she stepped from the tram,

or the picked up the phone and the line connection was made to Volker.

Travis opened her eyes; she wouldn't think about it. Volker still wasn't back and the

man seemed to be taking forever to fill the tank.

When he was done filling it up, he wiped his hands on his dungarees and returned the

change for Volker's note from a deep pocket on his breast. Volker looked at Travis while

he waited, a long and unreadable look that she returned. Then, when he dropped himself

back into his seat, he didn't close the door. The car's interior light illuminated the

dashboard and the two of them. She wanted to ask why they weren't leaving. Volker still

wore his blank stare.

19



'She was Renée Thomas, wasn't she?'

'SHE WAS RENÉE THOMAS, WASN'T SHE?'

The force of what Volker said seemed to enter her through the stomach.

The way he had spoken was casual in tone, only vaguely curious. He was busy putting

on a pair of driving gloves that he kept down the side of his seat. When he was done, he

shut the door and closed off the interior light. During her silence he hadn't glanced at her

once.

Her name was Renée. It had been her own old name, before she took the name of her

grandfather. Something sharp coiled and uncoiled in her stomach again as she thought

about it. Talking about it to Volker, she had managed to get the thing in front of her to be

examined. Now he had said only a few words and now she was caught up inside it again.

'What?' she said simply.

'Am I right? I met her in Stuttgart - at a party.'

'Where?'

'At a party, Travis,' he said, shaking his head, and she thought she could hear a smirk

in his voice. 'What are the odds of that? It would've been around Easter - when she was

living there, as you say. I had a funny feeling as you brought it up, a French woman

staying in Stuttgart. Then you mentioned her family name and I knew it must be her.

'The party was this fussy, uptight thing someone had decided to host in their

basement. All mood lighting and contemporary jazz, but basically very unfun for the

most part. The crowd was mostly media people, a few established figures here and

there. Not the kind of thing I'd normally attend, but the copywriter I was working

alongside at the time needed a companion to tackle it with - you know how writers can

be - so I turned up. And she was there. I couldn't tell you why. I'm not even sure who

she was there with. We talked a bit, about what it was like to visit Stuttgart, both of us

being outsiders. How beautiful the hills and the vineyards can be. It's hard to think what

else we talked about. Everyone was drinking a lot, you know. I remember, I couldn't

place her accent at all. I thought she was Belgian.'

20



They'd set off again. The white markings in the middle of the road appeared at the

fringe of the headlights' beam and hurtled towards Travis at great speed. She shivered.

She asked, 'Did she seem like she was in a bad way?'

'Oh,' Volker said, drawing the syllable out as he considered the question. 'Not

especially, if I'm honest. There was nothing that I can think of. How much can you tell

about a stranger in the space of a few hours? I hardly knew her. I'm sorry I don't have

much to say about it, but at least you know that your mother had the right person in

mind. Isn't that strange?'

'But it would have just weeks, maybe days, before she…' Travis arrived at the words

too soon and the phrase formed so easily that it surprised her. 'When she killed herself.

Surely you noticed some thing about her.'

He pulled on one of his gloves and flexed his fingers so that the leather was snug over

his fingers. 'No,' he said. Travis expected him to say something more on the topic, but he

kept silent. They sped through fields, wind rushing in from the open gap at the top of the

window on Volker's side and unsettling his hair. He was less confident driving outside the

city at night. He paid more attention to the road. The world only became visible when it

entered the beam of his headlights.

Sometimes the headlights flickered when they hit a bump.

Travis felt something lightly touch her in the dark and jerked her arm away from

where it rested against the door on her side. At first she thought it was just the breeze

touching the small hairs on the back of her hand, but when she held it up in front of her

face she could make out a single ant, still clinging to her hand. It wandered around and

she tilted her hand so that it was always upright.

It had come in from somewhere, she thought, without knowing where. It edged

towards the sugary residue on her fingertips. 'You know,' Travis said, 'I think I remember

that time you went to Stuttgart.'

'Hmm?'

'You were talking about it for weeks before you left. It was a big marketing campaign

- billboards and things.'

21



'I believe you're thinking of Leipzig,' Volker said.

'No, I'm not. That was the toothpaste company, and this was for a music festival.'

He tutted like he was annoyed at having forgotten. 'It's been a busy year.'

'And when you came back, you were complaining about a girl.' The ant had stopped at

the tip of the third finger and was moving its legs. Whatever it was doing made her want

to itch her finger, but she left it undisturbed. 'A girl you were seeing for the few weeks

you were there, who you said was very pretty, and had an unusual accent. And after, she

wouldn't leave you alone. She made things awkward, and kept calling, and left a dozen

notes at your office. I remember you laughing about it.'

'Is that right?' he said. His voice had an edge.

They were passing through another village, this one hardly anything more than a

half-mile stretch of houses and a Lutheran chapel along the road. Travis couldn't make

out the sign for the settlement due to it being obscured by the limb dipping away from

an unkempt tree.

They drove beneath a solitary streetlight before the chapel.

Its light flashed into the car's interior and with sudden clarity she saw Volker's face,

looking straight at her, his eyes locked on her own for a brief moment before the light

was torn from the car and they were left in darkness. He returned his attention to the

road.

She sunk back into her seat. His expression had been alarmed, as if she had done

something so unexpected and beyond belief that all he could do was gaze at her, totally

repulsed. She felt her face become hot without knowing why. She forgot about the ant

consuming the sugar residue at the end of her fingertip. She opened her mouth and

made a noise so quiet it might have only been mental.

Some minutes later he said her name. 'Travis.' He had recovered his usual, reserved

manner. 'Maybe it was a mistake for me to bring this up. I thought that you might like to

know, but now I can see you're far more cut up about it than I'd realised. You couldn't

even remember her name, I thought. But let's leave the conversation for another time.'

'You were with her, in Stuttgart,' she said.

22



'It isn't any of your business.'

'How much did you see of her?'

'I said it isn't any of your business, Travis,' he said.

So she was quiet.

SO SHE WAS QUIET. They continued their journey, the car gliding on without a tremor of

hesitation from the engine. Whatever nebulous kind of intentions they had each

possessed at the beginning of their drive were lost. It was getting late. It would be wise

to start turning back, but, as the miles passed by, neither of them suggested doing so.

Travis compressed and decompressed the tips of her thumb and index finger, feeling

the adhesive pull of the residue on her skin with every parting. She did this and tried not

to linger too much on what had just crossed her mind. It was something that had

happened soon after she had met Volker last year. He hadn't been there when it

happened, and she hadn't told him. At the time, she decided it had no real significance in

their friendship. Besides, there was something about it that embarrassed her - not that

she had done anything wrong.

It happened soon after she had moved into her room above Die Kantine, on the

weekend they had turned the place into a kind of nightclub. Tables and chairs were

pushed aside, acetate sheets taped over lamps so that the room was cast in pink and

blue light. People came by and threw their records onto a stack beside the turntable that

was hooked up to an old set of speakers.

Travis had been waiting for her drink to be mixed when a young woman behind her

touched her arm and asked if she wanted to dance. It was around three in the morning.

The room was packed and the music loud.

'Later, maybe,' she laughed, disarmed by her forwardness. 'Who sent you over here?'

She looked about the room for her friends only to find that no one was trying to catch

her eye. The woman shook her head and said that no one sent her, she just wanted a

dance. She was about the same age as Travis and had an accent - Polish, she thought -

23



along with a slight, stuck smile that Travis took to mean she was drunk. She said her

name was Zofia. 'You're from university?' Travis asked.

The woman shook her head again and her body swayed with it. She said that she was

a friend of Volker's.

It was the first time Travis had heard someone refer to Volker outside of their

meetings, and it surprised her, although they hadn't known each other for long enough

to appreciate just how rare an occasion this was. 'Volker. He's not here, is he?'

The woman said no, and that she had heard Die Kantine was putting on a party and

wanted to drop by. She said Volker always talked about his friend Travis. They must be

very close. 'He's very particular about who he sees, isn't he?' she smiled, phrasing it so

exactly like how Volker himself had previously put it that Travis could only laugh

uncomfortably.

Then she grew more uncomfortable as the woman explained that, to be totally

honest, she had lost her handbag with her phonebook inside it a while ago and - of

course, she could get his number from someone else, but she was here after all - if it

wasn't too much trouble. She had halted her slow swaying to the music and stood rooted

to the ground now, the stuck smile seeming less like an effect of alcohol and more like

hostile politeness.

Travis took a long sip from her drink and felt its single ice cube knock against her

upper incisors. The woman was standing too close. Honey, if she could just get his

number, the woman insisted, she wouldn't bother her for another minute.

'I don't think that this is any of my business,' Travis said.

The woman leant closer still, putting a hand on Travis's shoulder and holding it so

hard that she could feel the individual knuckles on her collarbone.

She began to talk in a low and rapid manner that was hard to follow, saying that

maybe it was a bad idea for her to come here but she had to do something, she couldn't

just sit around for any longer. It had happened so suddenly with Volker. He was there

one minute and then there was nothing, absolutely nothing. You wouldn't think that

nothing could mean so much until it came from nowhere. No phone call, not even a note .

24



Initially she thought he had been in some kind of accident. Perhaps that old car had

crashed one night, out in the country, and no one had found him. She had really thought

he was killed , before she saw him pass by in traffic without so much as glancing in her

direction. You couldn't imagine the brutality of it, that parasitic … that monster. Look at

this necklace that he picked out just days before. He loves his gifts. Did she take gifts

from him, too? If she wouldn't let her talk to him she at least had to know herself, what

it felt like. He had done it before, and she wouldn't just allow him to -

'You have the wrong idea,' Travis said, interrupting the woman and trying to smile.

'Volker and I are friends. I don't know anything about this. Listen - you should go home.

I won't tell him anything, but you need to go now.'

The woman let go of her shoulder and recoiled, her lips parted in surprise, her lipstick

visible on her teeth. And what if she wanted Travis to tell him? Would she tell him then?

Travis looked into her drink and then towards her friends over by the dancefloor.

'No,' she said.

She took the drink and made her way through the room, weaving between groups of

people, moving towards the record player where she dropped the needle at a different

point in the vinyl and turned a dial until people jumped and yelped with the shock and

excitement of the increasing volume, and those who had been sitting to the side now

stood to make their way to the floor, blocking the strange, upset woman from her view.

She disappeared from the room.

SHE DISAPPEARED FROM THE ROOM. Travis shivered invisibly inside Volker's car and

watched the road wind back and forth before them. Neither had spoken for the best part

of an hour. He drove in a high gear despite the decreasing speed limits of the narrow

road, and paid close attention to his driving. Sometimes he adjusted his gloves or

cleared his throat.

She took one of her fingers, still tacky with residue from the sweets, and brought it to

her lips.

25



'What's that?' Volker asked, turning to see her absently lick the index finger, just as

something on four legs charged into the road close to the car. It was something squat

and dark-haired, that stopped dead as it was caught in the beam of the highlights to

raise its snout to the air. Its eyes were blank. There was no room to brake before they

reached it.

Volker muttered an expletive in his native language and slid the car across the tarmac

away from the creature, clipping the grassy bank with the end of his bumper. Travis

slammed into her seatbelt as the car came to a standstill in the space of several feet,

and the air was pressed from her lungs.

'That could have been lethal. A boar,' Volker was saying, looking over his shoulder. His

voice was almost unchanged despite the crash. 'It's probably run off already. I haven't

seen one in years. I didn't know you could still run into them like that.'

He said something else that Travis, now unclasping herself from the seat and swinging

open the door on the passenger side, didn't hear. She slid free from the car and

stumbled to her feet.

There were no street lights around them. There was only the car halfway off the road

and the dense forest beyond it. Volker called something after her, opening his own door,

but Travis had already broken into a run along the road, and picked up her pace to a

sprint as she swung herself over the ditch and into the pines. Branches were close on

either side, and she twisted and ducked to keep her pace. A car door slammed.

Soon she was far enough from the road that Volker's headlight beams were out of

view, and she had to run blindly, her face protected by her raised arms that were

battered and scratched by outreaching branches. Her mohair sweater caught and she

lost some of its fabric. She wanted to shout out but Volker might still be close.

There was no way to tell if he followed her; she only heard the wind in her ears as she

ran, leaning forwards in her run as if he might, at any moment, reach out to grasp her

by the wrist and pull her to the ground where the dusty earth would fill her hair and her

eyes and her mouth as it opened to scream. She breathed so violently that she could

hardly feel her face.

26



She had run into a clearing where the trees parted to make space for a gibbous moon,

hanging half-made in the sky. It was the only time she had seen it tonight. Before she

could help it her adrenaline was beginning to fade and she began to think in its place.

She pictured Ren ée waiting to die. For the first time she wondered how she had done it.

This was the thought she had as the ground vanished under her next step and she fell

hard into the bottom of a ditch.

The ground was wet. Her leg was in intense pain, and felt wet too. She had never

broken a bone before. She made herself breathe deep breaths and very gently turned

herself over from the awkward downward-facing position she had landed in.

He was standing over the ditch, looking down at her. The white streak in his hair was

the clearest part of him, no longer pushed back but resting tousled against his forehead.

Otherwise there was no indication from his appearance that he had been running. She

couldn't read the expression on his face. She closed her eyes.

SHE CLOSED HER EYES. Then Volker was speaking in a soft, German voice, lowering

himself into the ditch where she was still lying. One of his arms went behind her back

and the other under the backs of her knees. My ankle, she said. Nothing looks broken,

he said, and suddenly she was rising from the wet ground. She felt his muscles tremble

as he straightened his legs, but once upright he held her securely to his chest.

They started their slow journey back towards the car. She felt his breath on her

eyelashes with every few steps. 'You ran away,' he said softly.

A series of moments passed for which Travis hardly seemed present, until she heard

boot heels clicking on the tarmac and realised they were back on the road. When she

opened her eyes, he was leaning into her face to see if she was still conscious. She told

him to put her down, and he did so as lightly as he could manage, placing her feet on

the ground and not letting go until certain she was able to put her full weight on her

ankle. They now stood near the car, the engine still running and headlights illuminating

them. The interior light was triggered from when she left the door open.

27



Volker's back was turned to inspect the front of the car for damage, bending his knees

so he could reach under the chassis and the wheel arch. 'Better hope that boar doesn't

come back,' Volker said. 'Those things will charge you to the ground if they're taken with

the idea.'

As confidently as she could manage with her strained ankle, Travis stepped over and

got into the passenger seat, closing the door behind her and clicking down its lock. Next,

she slid across into the driver's seat, yanked the other door handle and did the same.

She wound the window down a little more than an inch.

Volker stood and looked in at her, putting both of his hands on the car's bonnet. 'What

is this, Travis?'

'Someone came to me a long time ago,' Travis said. She had to yell over the sound of

the engine and the volume of her own voice surprised her. 'Her name was Zofia, a Polish

girl.'

'You didn't tell me.'

'She was upset about you and I sent her away.'

He stood up straight and exhaled, now resting his hands on his shirt that had come

untucked on one side. 'That was a good idea on your part. We didn't leave things on the

best terms. It can't be helped, if one party anticipates something that was never

promised and finds out it was just as they were told, rather than as they assumed. I try

to be clear with everyone.'

'But the same thing happened with Renée.'

'I suppose if you wanted to put it like that.'

'I put it like that because that's how it is. And what about other women?'

Volker said nothing and for the first time in the night it seemed he was quiet because

he couldn't think of what to say. 'What was Renée to you?' he asked instead.

'It's hard to think about.'

'In that case I'm sorry I ever met her. That was unfortunate. I didn't mean to upset

you, Travis.'

'Stop talking. You didn't tell her you were leaving.'

28



'I told her everything she needed to know the first night we met,' he said. There was

unchecked bitterness in his voice. 'Now would you let me into my car?'

They sat beside each other again, Travis in the passenger seat and Volker putting the

engine into gear. He asked whether she was ready to go.

'Wait,' she said. She reached back and felt around for something on the back seat

while Volker stared at her. It was still clad in tissue paper that her hand, damp from the

ground, left a grimy mark on as she picked it up.

The sign landed face down in the road.

'Take me home,' she said.

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