Zoo Station: The Story of Christiane F. Read online

  One afternoon, one of the mice ran into the grass that we weren't allowed to step on. We couldn't find it again. I was a bit sad but consoled myself with the thought that the mouse was probably much happier outside than in the cage.

  Of all evenings, my dad picked that one to come into our kids' room and look into the mouse cage. He asked in a funny tone of voice, “Why are there only two? Where is the third mouse?” I didn't sense any danger yet, didn't pick up on the weird tone of voice. My dad never liked those mice and always told me to get rid of them. I told him how the mouse got away on the playground.

  My dad looked at me like a lunatic. I knew that now he'd go totally psycho. He screamed and immediately started beating me. He was hitting me, and I was wedged into my bed and couldn't get out. He had never before hit me like that, and I thought he was going to kill me. When he also started in on my sister, I got a couple of seconds of air and instinctively tried to get to the window. I believe I would have jumped, right out of that eleventh-floor window.

  But my dad grabbed me and threw me back on the bed. My mom probably stood crying in the doorway again, but I didn't see her. I only became aware of her when she threw herself between my dad and me. She pounded on him with her fists.

  He'd completely lost it. He was punching and beating my mom in the hallway. Suddenly I was more afraid for my mom than I was for myself. So I ran after them into the hallway. My mom tried to escape into the bathroom and close the door before my dad could get there. But my dad had a good grip on her hair. The tub was full of laundry soaking in soapy water like every evening because we didn't have the money for a washing machine. My dad thrust my mom's head into the full tub. At some point she emerged from the water. I don't know if my dad let go of her, or if she managed to free herself.

  My dad had turned deathly pale and disappeared into the living room. My mom went to the closet and put on her coat. Without a word, she left the apartment.

  That was without doubt one of the most terrible moments of my life, when my mom simply left without a word. Left us alone in the apartment. At first, all I could think was that he'd come back and continue beating us. But in the living room, all was quiet, except for the TV, which was on.

  I brought my sister into my bed with me. We hung on to each other. My sister had to go pee. She didn't dare go into the bathroom, and she was trembling. But she also didn't want to pee in the bed because that would result in more beatings. At some point, I don't know when, I took her by the hand and walked with her to the bathroom. From the living room, my dad said good night to us.

  Nobody woke us up the next morning. We didn't go to school. Some time before noon, my mom returned. She hardly spoke a word. She packed a few of our things, stuffed Peter, the cat, into a bag, and told me to put Ajax on the leash. Then we were off to the subway. The next few days we stayed with one of mom's work colleagues in her small apartment.

  My mom explained to us that she wanted to get a divorce. My mom's colleague's apartment was too small for my mom, my sister, Ajax, Peter, and me. After a few days, her colleague showed signs that we were getting on her nerves. So my mom packed up our stuff again; we grabbed the animals and headed back to Gropiusstadt.

  My dad came into the apartment just as my sister and I were taking a bath in the tub. He came into the bathroom and said real normal-like, as if nothing had happened, “Why did you go away? You really don't need to sleep at strangers' houses. The three of us would've had a nice time together.” My sister and I just looked at each other awkwardly. My dad pretended that my mom was invisible for the rest of the evening. He looked right past all of us, as if we weren't there. And he never said another word to us about it. That was somehow worse than beating us.

  My dad never beat me again. But the fact that he now pretended that he was no longer part of our family was horrible. He was there but not there, and that made me miss having a dad even more acutely. I never hated him; I'd only been scared of him. I'd also always been proud of him. Because he loved animals, and because he had such a cool car, his '62 Porsche. In a weird way, he no longer was our dad, although he still lived with us in our small apartment. And then something else really terrible happened: Ajax, my Great Dane, suffered a fatal abdominal infection and died. Nobody consoled me. My mom was totally preoccupied with herself and the divorce. She cried a lot and didn't laugh at all anymore. I felt very alone.

  One evening the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and it was Klaus, one of my dad's friends. He wanted my dad to go barhopping with him. But my dad had already gone out.

  So my mom asked him in. He was much younger than my dad—in his early twenties. And this Klaus guy suddenly asked my mom if she wanted to go out and get something to eat. My mom didn't hesitate: “Sure, why not.” She got changed, walked off with him, and left us alone.

  Other kids might have been pissed or afraid for their mom. I had those feelings for a moment, too. But then I was honestly happy for her. She looked positively perky when she left, even if she tried not to show it. My sister noticed it too: “Mom was really happy.”

  Klaus came by more often now, when my dad wasn't there. It was on a Sunday, I still remember it very well, when my mom sent me out to take the trash downstairs. I was very quiet when I returned upstairs. Maybe I was quiet on purpose. When I peeked into the living room, I saw Klaus kissing my mom.

  I felt really weird and tiptoed into my room. Neither of them had seen me. And I didn't tell anyone about what I had seen. Not even my sister, from whom I usually didn't keep anything.

  I began to feel pretty weird and uncomfortable about this new guy who was always over at our apartment. But at least he was always nice to us—and (even more importantly) always really nice to my mom. She was laughing again, and she'd almost completely stopped crying. She even started thinking about the future again. She talked about moving into a new apartment with Klaus and about this new room that my sister and I were supposed to get if we all moved in with him. But of course we didn't have that new apartment yet. And my dad wasn't moving out anytime soon. In fact, he stuck around even after my mom and he were finally divorced. My parents continued to sleep in the same bed even though they hated each other. There wasn't really another choice: We still had no money.

  And when we finally did get another apartment, one subway stop away, in Rudow, things weren't ideal either. Klaus was a permanent fixture now, and even though I still thought he was kind of nice, he was always getting in the way. He soaked up a lot of my mom's attention and also got in the middle of fights between my mom and me. I just didn't accept him as one of us. I didn't think that this guy, who was just in his early twenties, had any right to tell me what to do. And so, as a result, I had less and less patience with him.

  We started getting into fights—just over little things at first. Sometimes they were my fault. Most of the time, we fought about music. My mom had bought me a record player for my eleventh birthday, just a little cheap one, and I had a few records: some disco and teenybopper music. And, in the evenings, I'd put on a record and turn the volume all the way up, loud enough to burst your eardrums. One evening, Klaus came into our room and asked me to turn down the record player. I didn't. He came back and yanked the arm off the record. I put the arm back on and positioned myself in front of the turntable so that he couldn't get at it. At that point, he pushed me away, and as soon as that man touched me, I freaked out.

  When we had these fights, my mom would cautiously take my side. That was also awkward because then it would escalate to a fight between Klaus and my mom, which made me feel kind of guilty. There was definitely one person too many in the apartment (and I had a strong suspicion about who that one person was).

  That being said, for the most part our fights weren't that bad, and they weren't that frequent either. What was worse than the fights was the quiet, when we'd all sit together in the living room. Klaus would be leafing through some magazine or flipping through channels on the TV and my mom would try to start a conversation, first with Kl
aus, and then with us, and then with Klaus again, and nobody would respond. It was so uncomfortable. When my sister and I couldn't take it anymore, we'd ask if we could go outside to play, and nobody ever objected. Klaus, for his part, usually seemed happy when we left. So we'd stay away for as long as possible.

  Looking back, I can't really blame Klaus. After all, he was only in his early twenties. He didn't know what it meant to have a family. He didn't get how much our mom loved us and how much we loved her, and he probably couldn't understand that we needed some time alone with her during the short periods that we got to spend together in the evenings and on weekends. He was probably jealous of us, and we were just as jealous of him. My mom wanted to be there for us, but she was also worried about losing her boyfriend, so it wound up really stressing her out.

  I responded pretty badly to the situation—with a lot of anger (and a lot of yelling). My sister, however, got more and more quiet and was clearly hurting inside. She probably didn't know why she felt so bad herself. But she started to talk more and more often about moving back in with my dad. I thought that idea was totally crazy after all that we'd been through with him. But he actually offered to let us stay with him. It was as if he'd become a different person after we left. He had a young girlfriend. And he always seemed to be in a good mood when we saw him. He was really nice to us, and, for the first time, I hoped he might actually live up to the image I'd always had of him as a nice person. He gave me another Great Dane—a female this time.

  I turned twelve, and my breasts started growing. I started to get weirdly interested in boys and men. They were like these strange creatures, and they were hard for me to figure out. They were also all so brutal: the older boys on the street, and my dad, and, Klaus, too, in his own way—they all were. I was afraid of them, but they also fascinated me. They were strong and they had power. They were just like I would've liked to be. Their power, their strength, drew me in like a magnet.

  I began to use a blow-dryer on my hair. I used the nail scissors to cut my bangs a little shorter and then combed them to the side. I spent a lot of time on my hair because people had started to tell me how beautiful and long it was. I also didn't want to wear kids' pants anymore; instead, I wanted jeans. Then, when I got jeans, I absolutely had to have high-heeled shoes. My mom gave me one of her old pairs.

  With my new jeans and high-heeled shoes I'd go parading through the streets until 10 p.m. almost every night. I felt like the new me was being rejected back at home. But even though that hurt, their rejection gave me a kind of freedom, too, which I loved. I also kind of enjoyed my fights with Klaus. It made me feel powerful to fight with an adult.

  My sister couldn't stand it though, and as a result, she did what was for me the unthinkable: She moved back in with my dad. In so doing, she deserted my mom and left me behind as well. So I became even lonelier, and our mom was totally distraught. She started crying again. She was torn between her kids and her boyfriend and she didn't have any idea what to do or who to choose.

  I thought that it wouldn't take long for my sister to come back. But she liked it at my dad's. She got an allowance. He paid for her riding lessons and bought her a pair of real riding pants. That was pretty tough for me to see. I had to keep on earning my riding lessons by mucking out the stalls. But that didn't always pan out, and before long, my sister, with her fancy riding pants, was a way better rider than I was.

  But my dad made it up to me by inviting me on a trip to Spain. I'd done really well in sixth grade, and as a result, I'd been recommended for the Gymnasium—the college preparatory track.7 I was registered for the comprehensive school8 in Gropiusstadt.

  So before the start of this new chapter of my life, which would culminate in the college entrance exams,9 I flew to Torremolinos, Spain, with my dad and his girlfriend. It was an amazing vacation. My dad was great, and I was able to see that, in a way, he did love me. He treated me now almost like an adult. He even let me go out with him and his girlfriend at night.

  He finally seemed to have his head screwed on right. He had friends that were his own age, and now he managed to actually tell them that he'd been married once before. I didn't have to call him Uncle Richard anymore. I was his daughter. And he seemed to be really proud of the fact that I was his daughter. However, as was typical for him, he'd planned his vacation according to what was most convenient for him and his friends. At the end of my school break. Which meant I started my new school two weeks late. So I began my college prep years as a truant.

  Coming in late made me feel like an outsider in the new school. New friendships and new cliques had already been established. I sat by myself. But the biggest issue was that, during the first two weeks, while I was in Spain, they'd explained to the newcomers how the comprehensive school system worked—how you can pick classes, how difficulty levels vary, etcetera—and it's actually really complicated, especially when you've just arrived from elementary school. Everyone else had gotten help with selecting their courses and setting their schedules. Meanwhile, I was lost and alone. I had absolutely no idea how the school functioned. And I never figured it out either. It wasn't like elementary school, where each grade would have a designated teacher who would look out for his or her own group of students. Here, every teacher taught a couple hundred students, all in different grades and courses. If you wanted to successfully complete your college entrance exams in comprehensive school, you really had to know what you were doing: You had to be self-motivated and make the conscious decision to study and work your way up into the advanced courses. And to do that, you had to have parents who would tell you exactly what you needed to do and who got on your case if you started to fall behind. I just had no idea what was going on; I was totally lost.

  I didn't feel accepted there either. Everyone else had had a two-week head start—and that's a huge advantage at a new school. I reverted to my old elementary school tactics and started annoying the teachers with interruptions and contradictions. Sometimes I'd do it because I actually knew something, and other times, just because I felt like it. I was fighting again, against the teachers and against the school as a whole. But I just wanted to be accepted.

  The coolest kid in our class was a girl named Kessi. She already had boobs. She looked at least two years older than the rest of us, and she acted more mature, too. Everyone liked having her around. I admired her, and more than anything else, I just wanted her to be my friend.

  Kessi also had an awesome boyfriend. He was in the same grade as us (in a different class) but was also a year older already. His name was Milan. He was at least 5'7” tall and had long, black, curly hair down to his shoulders. He wore jeans and these badass boots. All the girls at school liked Milan. Kessi wasn't just popular because she had boobs and acted so mature, but also because Milan was her boyfriend.

  Back in those days, we had very specific ideas about what a “hot” boyfriend should be like. He couldn't ever be seen in baggy pants. Skintight jeans were a requirement. Guys with sneakers also looked stupid. Instead, they had to wear really dramatic, decked-out boots. We thought that the guys who still played immature pranks—like shooting spitballs or chucking apple cores around—were ridiculous. They were usually the same kids who still drank milk and played soccer during recess. The cool guys, the ones we all had crushes on, disappeared into the smoking corner every recess. And if a guy wanted to be really cool, he also had to be comfortable with drinking beer. I still remember how impressed I was when Kessi told me a story about how drunk Milan had been at some point.

  I kept wondering about how I could transform myself into the kind of girl that would matter to someone like Milan—into someone that he would want to talk to or ask out. Or—and this was actually one and the same thing—how I could become accepted and respected by someone like Kessi. I already thought her nickname, Kessi,10 was super cool. I wanted to be the kind of person who had a cool nickname.

  After a while, I started to ask myself why I was so worried about my teachers, when I only sa
w each of them for an hour or so each day. Why was I so worried about getting their approval? It's way more important to be accepted by the people who you actually spend your time with. So from that point on, all bets were off: I was the teachers' worst nightmare. I didn't have personal relationships with any of them. And most of them didn't seem to really care anyway. They didn't have any real authority over us, and as a result, they tried to intimidate us with their insults and threats. But whatever they dished out to us, I gave back to them with both barrels. Before long, I'd become an expert in wreaking havoc in the classroom; without hardly even trying, I could mess up the teacher's entire lesson plan, and the more destructive I was, the more recognition and respect I got from the other students.

  I used every extra cent to buy cigarettes so that I'd have something to smoke in the smokers' corner. And once I started smoking regularly over there, Kessi warmed up to me. We started talking and hanging out after school as well. Eventually she even invited me to her house, where we shared a couple of beers (until I felt kind of giddy and woozy). We talked about our home lives. We were both stuck in pretty similar situations, but Kessi's home life was even more fucked up than mine.

  Kessi's father wasn't part of her life, and her mom went through a lot of different boyfriends (who obviously didn't accept Kessi as part of the deal). She'd just gone through a rough time with one of these boyfriends who went ballistic on her. He beat up on Kessi and her mom and one day wrecked all the furniture in the apartment. Then, when he was done, he threw the TV set out of the window, as a kind of exclamation point to the episode. Kessi's mom was different from mine in one crucial respect though: She was strict, or tried to be. Kessi had to be home by 8 p.m. almost every night.