Tschick*
Extract
Wolfgang Herrndorf translated from German by xia23
Berlin would be a little bit far away, she said, and where would we have to go now? I explained to her that we would be here to visit our aunt and there was no problem at all – and I should better not have said that. The nurse actually did not ask me where this aunt lived, but she dragged me immediately to the nurse’s office instead and put me in front of a telephone. Tschick stifled his pain, waved with the crutches and shouted, we could actually also go on foot, and the nurse said: “First just try it. Or don’t you know the number?”
“Yes, we know it exactly.” I said. I saw a telephone book lying on the table, but I also didn’t want to grab it in my hand. So I would choose a number randomly, hoping no one would pick up the phone. Four o’clock in the morning.
I heard it ring. The nurse also presumably heard it, since she stood near us. The best thing would have been, to call home, that was a sure thing, that no one would pick it up. But with the Berlin area code there were 11 digits, and the nurse right now already looked suspicious enough. It rang once, twice, three times, four times. I thought, I could slowly hang up the phone and say that our aunt would still be in her sleep and we would go on foot –
“Chrr ..äch, Reiber,” a man answered.
“Oh, hello, Aunt Mona!”
“Reiber!” the man groaned drowsily, “No aunt. No Mona.”
“Did I wake you up?” I asked. “Yes, sure, dumb question. But there is something.” I gave the nurse a signal that all our problems were solved and she could get to work again if there is any problem.
There seemed nothing. With her iron determination she remained standing near me.
“Hello, you dialed a wrong number!” I heard the voice. “Reiber here.”
“Yes, I know. And I hope, you are not…oh yes…yes.” I said and gave Tschick and the nurse a look of how surprised - and worried - Aunt Mona was, at this hour to receive a phone call from us.
The silence of the receiver was almost more irritating than the puffing earlier.
“Yes, no… something happened,” I continued. “André had had a small accident, something fell on his foot… no… no… We are in a hospital. They had given him a cast.”
I looked at the nurse. She did not move.
From the phone receiver’s side came an incomprehensible noise and suddenly a voice was there again. This time no more drowsy. “I understand,” the man said. “We are making a fictitious conversation.”
“Yes,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter. It is really not bad, a hairline fracture or so.”
“And I’m Aunt Mona.”
“No, I mean…yes…yes, exactly…yes.”
“And someone is standing near you and listening to.” The man made some noise that I first could not understand. I believe that he laughed quietly.
“Yes. Yes…”
“If I shout loudly now, you’ll have a gigantic problem, right?”
“Please don’t, ah… no. You must not really worry. Everything is under control.”
“Nothing at all is settled,” the nurse was miffed and said, “She must pick you up.”
“Do you need help?” asked the man.
“What?”
The nurse looked like, as if she wanted to grab the telephone from my hand at any moment and even wanted to talk to Aunt Mona herself.
“You must pick us up, Aunt Mona. Did you get that? Yes? Yes?”
“I don’t understand it at all, what’s going on?” the man asked, “but you called, as if you are in real trouble. Does someone threaten you?”
“No.”
“I think, you broke your foot, four o’clock in the morning, you faked a phone call, and you called, as if you were thirteen at most. You are in trouble. Or it is you.”
“Yes. Well.”
“And you can’t really say, in which. So one more time. Do you need help?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? My last offer.”
“No.”
“OK. Then let me simply listen to,” the man said.
“In any case, if you could pick us by your car,” I did not say it clearly.
“If you don’t want,” he giggled. And that would really throw me off if he had hung up or yelled, that I would have understood, four in the morning. But that he amused himself all the time and offered his help for us – wow. Since I was little, my father had taught me that the world is bad. The world is bad, and people are also bad. Trust no one, do not go with a stranger etc. My parents told me that, my teachers told me that, and TV also told me that. If a man watched news: people are bad. If you watched Spiegel** TV, people are bad. And probably it sounded like that, and 99% of people were bad. But the strange thing was that Tschick and I in our travel almost exclusively encountered the one percent that was not bad. Thus you called a man in bed at four in the morning. Because you wanted nothing from him, and he is super friendly and still offers his help. That was what people in the school probably should also be told, so people should not be completely surprised. I was anyhow so surprised, that I now still stuttered.
“And… in 20 minutes, good, yes. You pick us up. Good.” To the ground finale of performance I walked further to the nurse and asked, “What is the name of the hospital again?”
“Wrong question!” the man immediately hissed.
The nurse frowned. My god, I’m stupid.
“Virchow-Klinik,” she said slowly, “that’s the only hospital within a 50 kilometer radius.”
“Certainly,” said the man.
“Ah… she also said yes,” I said and pointed to the telephone handset.
“And you are also not from around here”, the man said. “You are definitely in trouble. I hope, at least I‘ll read the morning newspaper, see what happened.”
“I also hope so,” I said. “Definitely. We will be waiting for you then.”
“Hope everything is fine for you.”
“You too!”
The man laughed once more, and I hung up.
“Did she laugh?” asked the nurse.
“It is not the first time we make trouble for her,” Tschick said, but she had only understood half of them. “She already knows that.”
“And does she find it funny?”
“She is cool”, Tschick replied, and he emphasized the word cool in such a cool way that not everyone in this room was cool.
We stood by the phone for a while, then the nurse said: “you two are probably rascals”, und let us go.
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*: p. 123, Stationen, Ein Kursbuch für die Mittelstufe, 3rd Edition, Prisca Augustyn & Nikolaus Euba, Cengage Learning, USA, 2015.
*: s. 206, Wolfgang Herrndorf, Tschick, Rowohlt, Berlin, 2010.
**: mirror.
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Wolfgang Herrndorf:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Herrndorf
Tschick (English translation "Why We TookThe Car" by Tim Mohr):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Took_the_Car
Why We Took the Car (German: Tschick) is a youth novel by Wolfgang Herrndorf first published in German by Rowohlt Verlag in 2010. The English edition, translated by Tim Mohr, was published by Scholastic in 2014.
It deals with the unconventional friendship between a 14-year-old middle class boy and a Russian late repatriate youngster. The novel was awarded with the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Children's Literature Award) as well as the Clemens-Brentano-Preis in 2011. In 2012, it was also awarded with the Hans Fallada Prize. It was published in over 25 countries and sold over 2 million copies in Germany alone until September 2016.
I’ve reread the books of my childhood in 2004, ‘Lord of the flies’, ‘Huckleberry Finn’, ‘Arthur Gordon Pym’, ‘Pik reist nach Amerika’ and so on. I did this because I wanted to know whether they were really as good as I remembered them, but I also wanted to find out who I was as a twelve-year-old. During that process, I realized that all of my favorite books had three things in common: a quick elimination of the grown-up attachment figure, long journey, wide waters. I thought about how I could integrate these three things into a somewhat realistic youth novel. Sailing down the Elbe with a float seemed ridiculous; to sign on a ship as a runaway in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 21-century: jabberwocky. I only could think of something with a car. Two boys steal a car. The water was missing, but I had figured out the plot in a couple of minutes.
注意：作者于2013年8月16日逝去。
我买的这本已经是第94版：
