“Tschick[1]”by Wolfgang Herrndorf[2}
Extracts translated from German by xia23
1.
I never had a nickname. I mean at school. But also nothing else. My name is Maik Klingenberg. Maik, not Maiki, not Klinge and also not the other rubbish either, always only Maik. Except when I was in sixth grade, my nickname was psycho once. If a man's name is psycho, that is also not a big deal. But that did not last long, and then my name was Maik again.
If a man has no nick name, then there can be two reasons. Either the man is really boring and therefore gets nothing, or the man has no friends. If I have to choose one of the two, I would, rather say honestly, to have no friends, than to be really boring. Well, if a man is boring, the man is automatically no friends, or only has friends who are as boring as the man himself.
There is also the third possibility. It can be that the man is boring and has no friend. And I'm afraid of, that is my problem.
…
2.
I couldn't like Tschick from the beginning. Nobody liked him. Tschick was an Asi[3], and he also looked like Asi[3] too. Wagenbach dragged him to the class after Easter, and if I said he “dragged” him to the class, I mean it so. The first lesson after Easter: history …
So Wagenbach came in a bad suit with the brownish poo-colored book bag under his arm as usual, and slowly behind him this boy dragged himself, it seemed that the boy as close as to be in a coma or so. Wagenbach slammed his bag on his desk and turned around. He frowned and waited for the boy, who shuffled slowly, and then said: “We have here a new classmate. His name is Andrej –“
And then he looked at his note, and then looked again at the boy. Apparently his family name should be mentioned. But the boy looked at nothing through the central aisle with his slant eyes and said nothing.
...
“Andrej", Wagenbach said, stared at his note and moved his lips silently. “Andrej Tsch… Tschicha…tschoroff.”
The Russian mumbled somewhat.
“Please?”
“Tschichatschow”, the Russian said, without looking at Wagenbach.
Wagenbach inhaled some air through one of his nostrils. That was a tic from him. Air from only one nostril.
"Handsome Tschischaroff. Andrej, would you like perhaps to talk about yourself a little bit? Where do you come from? From which school were you coming here?”
That was a standard procedure. If new students came to the class, they had to tell where they were and so. Now the serious change with Tschick happened. He turned his head slightly to the side, as he looked at Wagenbach first at the moment. He scratched his neck, turned himself further to the class and said “No.” Somewhere a pin of needle fell at the floor.
Wagenbach nodded seriously, and said: “You don't want to talk about where you come to here?”
“No”, Tschick said. “I don't care.”
“That’s fine, then I'll just talk about you, Andrej. Based on politeness I myself finally have to introduce you to the class”.
He looked at Tschick. Tschick looked at the class.
“I take your silence as consent", Wagenbach said. And he talked about that with an ironic tone, just as all teachers, if they say so.
Tschick did not answer.
“Or do you have anything you don't like?” Wagenback asked.
“You begin”, Tschick said and made a hand movement.
…
3.
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[4] 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.
[1]:
p. 120, p. 123, Stationen, Ein Kursbuch für die Mittelstufe, 3rd Edition, Prisca Augustyn & Nikolaus Euba, Cenga-ge Learning, USA, 2015
p. 206, Wolfgang Herrndorf, Tschick, Rowohlt, Berlin, 2010.
[2]:
Wolfgang Herrndorf was born in 1965 in Hamburg, Germany. He studied art and worked as an artist for different magazines. His novel Tschick was published in 2010. Since then the book had won many awards, including the youth literature award, and became a theater piece with great success (original text is German*).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Herrndorf
Tschick is a novel concerned with intellectual or spiritual development of two 14 year old boys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We_Took_the_Car
Herrndorf committed suicide in 2013 (wiki link above).
[3]:
Asi, abbreviation of an antisocial person.
[4]: mirror.
His novel Tschick was published in 2010. Since then the book had won many awards, including the youth literature award, and became a theater piece with great success.
TSCHICK Trailer German Deutsch (2016)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ph5NOf-di18
The book and CD:
