Ana’s sister

I want to tell you the story of my favorite sister. She is really bad. She is the sister of a friend of mine.

The story begin in the highway such as all the crazy stories in my life.

The word is “aquaplaning” a rare word for me. I had known that while I was driving to the school. In order to keep my car under control, I clipped the steering wheel until the ankles. I were anemic to blood, whitish. How did I get here?

I steered my thirteen-year-old Audi over an unlit expressway. I looked a river. Oh! My god. This is my expression. It had turned puddles into lakes and made my car into a boat. On board were four people whom I knew more badly than right. We had been fidgeting for two hours in a village disco and were now on our way home.

Next to me was the reason why I had landed here in Warburg. Her name was something with A, as far as I remember now, after more than 20 years. When I talk about her today, which I rarely do, I always call her the “girl with A”, or simply “Ana”.

On the back seat were three more people. Ana`s brother, who embraced a mini-be-rocket disco queen. They both put their tongues into their heads alternately, as if they were looking for brain there, which, in my view, was definitely not available. I have also forgotten the names of the two brain researchers. This is called selective perception.

And then there was Ana’s younger half-sister, Flo, who was actually called Florentine. There was nothing I could ever forget about her. Her eyes whirled like small, speckled chestnuts, and disappeared from time to time behind the delicate, unvarnished eyelids, which Flo slammed slowly and again, as if a clumsy marionette player moved her. Unforgettable to me also her mouth, who smiled at me with closed lips, in a quiet sadness. Yes, even her smell, in which apple shampoo mingled with the drenched sweat of that night, will be remembered forever.

I took a look inside the mirror and saw Flo leaning her head against the side window. The driving force formed rain drops into fine lines, the shadows dancing on Flo’s flawless forehead. Ana seemed to have boundless confidence in my travels. Perhaps she was already too drunk to get something else. It also bothered me that she put her arm around me all the time. How the outside had to look … as if they wanted to say:
You belong to me now. I will not give you back. Perhaps she had thought of it three weeks ago when we first met,

I had just changed 20 beds on this day. Departure day at the youth hostel, where I worked as a Zivi. A girl – the one with “Y” – suddenly stood behind me.

“Well, how are you?” She asked.

How should it be? I said something. We were making small talk, talking about music, movies and all that. Ana kissed me suddenly, and it was anything but a kiss of friendship.

Well, if you’re young and have a hormone problem, you’re not thinking about this at the moment: Hey, what is that and how old is she? It just does not matter and anyway too late the moment it happens. Just wondering if the little one has perhaps more experience in these things than himself, and then the mind is already out. If you know where the key to the fireplace room is, use the opportunity to learn. On the couch, you risk ugly spots and a summons with the commissioner for community service, and if you’re lucky, like me, you can be lucky twenty years later if the thing has been without consequences in any way.

Without consequences, except for the fact that three weeks later I was able to get to know Warburg and its disco village.

“Visit me,” Ana had said in the fire-place. “Can you also break with me.”

Then she had scribbled her address on my belly with a coolie.

And now I was here. Although Warburg was only a little more than an hour away, it felt like a strange planet. I set the windshield wipers to the fastest step and looked alternately backwards to Flo and again forward in the pouring rain. Drops came towards me and flew by like stars. I was Han Solo and there sat Princess Leia. She was the rose in the asphalt that I would surely bring home. I had to think of the moment when I first saw Flo:

The apartment where I had left my belongings in the afternoon was small and smelled of smoke from self-turned cigarettes. Ana and Flo were still living with their mother on the third floor of a downturned tenement house. When I looked around, I wondered if it had ever been cleaned. And since when are there actually curtains? Those here looked like a thousand years old. Daylight tormented through the yellowed fabric to the living room, where Ana’s mother sat in front of the gossip. She was just about to light a cigarette. The lighter looked tiny in her fleshy hand. Ana sighed.

“Mama?”

On television ran “Falcon Crest”. Mama did not answer.

“Mama. I brought a friend. Can he be with us, tonight? “

The question aroused fleeting interest. A far too big flame burned over the cheap lighter when Mama looked at me.

“Is’O.K.”

And then the cigarette jogged between her painted lips.

Ana pushed me quickly into the next room, as if she were ashamed of her mother. There was no furniture in the room next door. Only a few mattresses, another TV and on the floor an overflowing ashtray. And then there was that other girl.

“My half-sister Flo,” said Ana. “She does not talk much.”

And she did not need that because you could read everything in her eyes. Flo sat on the window sill, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out into the courtyard of the house.

“I’ll show you the attic. Are you coming? “Ana asked, taking a couple of videocassettes on the floor.

But I could not turn my eyes away from Flo for a long moment. She was maybe sixteen (I hoped). Her top left a clear view of a small hollow above the clavicle, which looked as she finally turned my head. The sun made her body into a sculpture and her skin to the canvas. I wanted to paint, wanted to touch them.

“She’s only fifteen. Leave her fingers off her, “said Ana, who could read immediately in my eyes. “Are you going to the attic now?”

From this room the path led directly over a long, narrow staircase. There was another TV, a further mattress and a somewhat punkigged guy.

“My brother,” Ana said, and I felt something like pride in her voice.

“What about today? Let’s go into the “Yoi”? “Asked the brother without greeting me. I guessed it must be a discotheque at the Yoi. How this lanky punk probably looked when he was trying to dance, possibly to Modern Talking? I was already looking forward to this sight.

“OK – but we have to drag Flo along. Mom has to work tonight. “

They were still floating around the ballast in the form of Flo for a while, because this meant we were not let in by the doorman. But after some discussion, which I did not really interfere with, it was clear that she would come along.

“OK. What are we going to do then? “Her brother wanted to know.

“Have some videos with high,” Ana replied, and gave her to her brother. He looked at the VHS tapes.
“Hm – dance of the devil, nightmare … so’n scrap. What about porn? “

Even though he was laughing, I was not sure how serious he was. And when Ana replied that the porn had been so often seen and it would be boring in the meantime, I was just as little sure whether it was only a matter of production. I laughed, did not want to give me any nakedness and so it was that I saw my first Horrorfilm. Ana and her brother agreed with Bacardi-Kola on the evening. I refused and drank water. When the script had about half of the actors on the conscience, I went downstairs because I had to go to the toilet. All the time I had to think of Flo. Yes, she was the rose in the asphalt.

I came into the living room where Mama had fallen asleep. The cigarette was still burning in the ashtray. Suddenly the bathroom door opened in the corridor, and Flo came out. She was wearing only a panty, and held a towel to her chest. Her hair was wet from showering. Then she came up to me and we were standing right between the armchair with her snoring mother and the TV, where the day watch was running.

“Can you kill me?”

She held out a small necklace with a Jing and Jang pendant. Then she turned and took the towel down. Her nut-brown back was covered with droplets that made her skin sparkle-even in this dim light. I slowly stroked her shoulders with my flat hand.

“You should dry yourself.”

I felt her smile, even though I only saw her back.

A scent of apple shampoo rose into my nose. She lifted the long, dark hair back up so I could close the chain. I saw their little hairs under their shoulders. She was now forbidden from behind to her breast. Too cheap – too much porn movies, I thought. But then she had her arms down again. My mouth was suddenly very close to her ear. I looked over the shoulders the curves of her breasts and the buds. I wanted to kiss her on the neck. But the final gong of the Tagesschau interrupted my plan. Her mother gave a grunt, as if she were awakening. Quickly Flo flopped the towel around the upper body smiled at me and went out.

“What are you doing?”

The mother asked me how she thought I’d watched her in her sleep.

“I’m looking for the loo,” I said truthfully.

Towards nine we set off for Yoi. From today’s point of view it can be said that discotheque visits are the same everywhere: uncommunicative, loud and usually frustrating. Ana had met a few friends and drunk unrestrainedly. The punk brother crashed with some hollowed-out tussi, which did not fit at all. And what about Flo? She had not even let me dance. She had turned away as if she were dancing in a world of her own. She had left the dance floor with the quiet pieces. But even then it was too loud for a conversation outside of Smalltalk. The evening was a disaster. All in all, I was glad to be back home. I looked back into the mirror.

Damn, what was she thinking? Was that what had happened in the living room in front of the TV, about nothing? A fleeting breathing in the storm of my imagination? A touch of apple, and what I really wanted the whole fruit?

About half an hour later, we arrived at the apartment again. We dragged into the room under the attic. Ana, the punk, his new bride and me. Flo stayed downstairs in the other mattress room because she wanted to sleep. I would have liked to stay there, but Ana would have looked through me. Already lamenting, she suggested drinking a drink and screwed back at the bottle of Bacardi. Her brother suddenly had a porn cassette in his hand. Everyone grumbled as he pushed her into the recorder. All except for me. It was not long before alcohol and porn had their effect. Ana was asleep with the glass in his hand while Punky and his Queen clumsily clenched. I decided to go down before I got sick. Quietly I entered the room. Everything was dark. Everything was quiet.

“Flo?”

She lay under the blanket on one of the mattresses. But she did not answer.

“Flo?”

Nothing. She slept really.

I lay down in the other corner of the room, on one of the mattresses Ana had covered for me with Schalke bed linen. I turned to the wall and heard a rhythmic groan in the room above me, which fell silent after a few minutes. The night enveloped my thoughts.

What would I remember from this weekend? The smell of a strange world? A taste for women who use apple shampoo?

And suddenly I smelled it again. Someone lifted the blanket and slipped underneath. Someone who was naked and wrapped his hands around my chest from behind. Someone who smelled of apple shampoo.