Читать книгу You - Zoran Drvenkar - Страница 25

She yells at you. She yells at you through the closed door as if you were a stranger, as if your life were worthless and she had the right to spit on it. In the background you hear your father mumbling. She ignores him and goes on yelling at you. One of the neighbors calls up the stairwell, telling her to shut up. You call down telling him to shut up himself.

A door slams.

It continues.

She calls you a whore. She calls you a bastard. You wait till she is out of breath, then press the doorbell, you press so hard that your thumb turns white, when the ringing suddenly stops. You laugh out loud. She’s seriously switched off the bell. You laugh until the tears come and the tears have nothing more to do with laughter. Your finger slips off the doorbell, you sit down on the doormat, your back against the door.

And I’m only three hours late, what’s three hours?

Some nights you slip into the apartment unnoticed, a few times your father sits waiting in the kitchen, he shakes his head and says he was worried. But he isn’t really bothered, he trusts you and calls you his little sunshine.

If it wasn’t for her …

Your mother must have left the key in the lock. You wouldn’t have credited her with so much imagination. She told you the houses in her village didn’t have any doors, because people trusted each other, and if someone stole something, the whole family was chased from the place. So that’s how things are back home. It’s a mystery to you how someone who grew up without doors could come up with the idea of leaving the key in the lock.

You’re so tired.

Now you’ll wait till she’s asleep, then your father will let you in. Wait for half an hour, an hour at most. The day rushes through your head like the subway train that you’ve been waiting for. You see Nessi in the water, you see yourselves in the cinema and you can taste the stale popcorn. You like looking back on the day. It’s a bit like coming home late in the evening, turning on the television, and there’s a program on that shows only you, going through life, all your mistakes, all your heroic deeds. You want to tell your father about the movie. He likes Denzel Washington. But how surprised will your father be when he opens the door in twenty minutes and sees that you’ve disappeared? And how surprised will you be in retrospect that your life has taken a new turn in a few seconds, and dragged you thousands of miles away from Berlin?

Anything is possible. And it all begins with two short beeps.

You’re sitting in the dark corridor, because you don’t feel like pressing the light switch over and over again. You sit there in the darkness, and there are two beeps. You take your phone out of your jacket and read the text on the blue display and react the way you all react to this message tonight.

You run.