Florian Kessler

Hello

He looked back at me, then at the number plate. The men from the van came towards us now from the rear of their vehicle, all of them wrapped up in their jackets against the next squall of rain. One of them had some plastic bag or other in his hand, which must have contained the warning triangle. The hitchhiker laughed in his high, clear voice. He looked down at the twisted number plate, dismissing it with a wave of his hand. “It's just a number plate," he said. "But where are we really, I mean, which country?"

I’d already seen the minibus before the accident. It was late in the evening, already the other side of the Czech border. I followed it for a while, for no particular reason. It was a new model Seat. It wasn’t going very fast. The number plate was neither Czech nor German. Just letters. It had to be a small state, or a new one; I couldn’t think which country it was. And I’m someone who travels around a great deal by car, so I know a bit about these things. There was something tied to the roof, not a box or a coffin, it was too shapeless for that, although for a brief moment I imagined that the travellers might be taking home a deceased compatriot. But it was just some bulky bits and pieces. Some of the things had been wrapped up in the kind of heavy duty bubble wrap you can get at DIY warehouses in Germany. The sheeting had been poorly secured, so part of it had come away and, as night set in, it was fluttering in the wind atop the minibus.

Later I decided to overtake it and for a brief moment we were driving along side by side. The overhead light in the back of the Seat was on. The men stared over at me. They looked like workers. I thought: they are Eastern European handymen heading back home to their families after a few weeks’ work. One of them leaned his forehead against the window, shielding his face with his hands, as if he were trying to make me out as precisely as possible in the dark. He said something to the others, and they laughed. I accelerated.

Later that night, I stopped at a large rest area somewhere the other side of Prague, much further to the south-east on the D1. The place was dead. A dozen or so lorries with curtained windows, and over in front of the petrol station something that looked like an empty Czech builders’ van, or at least it was painted orange. Every few minutes a single car sped past. At some point, the minibus with the men and the roof luggage and the foreign number plate must have gone past again. There was no moon in the sky. I tipped the seat backwards and tried to get some sleep.

A man came across the forecourt. He looked strange, with the bobbing, buoyant gait of a hiker, a cardboard sign in his hands, and a huge backpack. He saw my car parked between the lorries, stopped short, came closer, and then spotted me behind the wheel. He looked out of place in the parking area at that time of night, with his harmless, round student’s face, his wire-rimmed glasses, the carefully closed backpack straps over his outdoor jacket. He raised a hand in greeting and showed me his cardboard sign. With a black marker pen he had written SARAJEVO on it. He waved the sign around a bit, smiled at me encouragingly through the car window. I let it down. The hitchhiker said nothing, I said nothing; I knew right away that he was German too.

Later I dozed a little while the hitchhiker waited inside the petrol station, his bulky backpack propped up outside against the front window. We drove off. It was still night. It felt strange to be suddenly no longer alone. He sat with his hands open on his lap, as if he didn’t want to touch anything for fear of wearing it out. His voice betrayed that he was making an effort to take a friendly interest in everything, which slightly irritated me. In a laboured way, always waiting for answers from me, which seldom came, he went on for a long time about his backpack and about luggage in general, and about the merits of his outdoor jacket and the merits of my outdoor jacket, which lay side by side on the back seat.

I like being on motorways at night. There’s hardly anything to see, you just follow the beams from your headlights, and nothing is recognisable outside the few yards of road ahead of you. The hitchhiker hardly ever looked out of the window, which bothered me, even if there was nothing to see. He couldn’t keep quiet for very long; soon he started talking about clothes again. He said something about socks, why individual socks would always disappear in the washing machine. Every household had a huge collection of single socks. It was the same with the distribution of shoes in the world: for example, every year on the Atlantic coast more right shoes would be washed ashore than left shoes. There are statistics about it, had I ever heard about it before?

We drove on without saying anything. To break the silence I asked him what he was planning to do in Sarajevo, why he was hitchhiking there of all places. He seemed to be pleased at my question, laughed, and then said surely it was obvious. Why not go to Sarajevo? From Berlin it was only a fourteen-hour drive across Europe, and in any case Sarajevo suggested itself if for nothing else then for historical reasons.

I don’t know whether we were still in the Czech Republic or already in Slovakia when we had our next longer conversation. Anyway, we hadn’t yet reached Bratislava when the hitchhiker started off again talking about shoes and things to wear. "Second-hand shops in Poland are called Lumpex," he explained. "A friend of mine did his voluntary service in Lodz. He goes into a Lumpex and rummages around in the clothes. He finds a jacket that he feels once belonged to him. He had worn it the whole time he had been at university; he had first studied history and only then done his year of voluntary work, but it’s a complicated story. This friend of mine is not sure: had he in fact ever given his jacket to a charity shop in Germany, or was it just the same kind of jacket? The best-preserved old clothes from Germany all go to Eastern Europe. And the clothes hanging in second-hand shops in Germany come from Sweden. So surely the things that are sold in the Lumpex shops in Sweden must originally have come from Eastern Europe?"

It rained, then it stopped raining again. According to the clock day was already breaking, but it wasn’t actually any lighter. The hitchhiker said that his backpack only looked like a lot of luggage, for an all-out trip around Europe a single backpack was never a lot of luggage. The weather in Sarajevo was good; he had checked it out on the Internet. "It rains a lot less there. It does, really. I’ve even brought shorts with me. I ordered them specially, together with the jacket and even more equipment, from a German hiking store. From Luxembourg, because for tax reasons that’s where all the online orders actually come from, even if another sender is written on the parcel. I want to go hiking starting from Sarajevo; I like hiking. Of course, it’s not really possible to do any proper hiking there, because often the countryside hasn’t yet been cleared. “However,” he said, pointing out of the window, "the weather will be very good. Later on when we get to Sarajevo, it will be almost like summer again."

There was a light rain; I had almost forgotten the minibus. We kept silent. We must have crossed the border to Hungary. Later, at some point we talked one last time about hitchhiking itself, which is the usual topic of conversation with hitchhikers; what else is there to talk about otherwise? I said that I almost always picked up hitchhikers, for no particular reason, it’s a way of hearing stories." “And why do you travel around Europe so much?" asked the hitchhiker and yawned. I yawned, too. By now I was very tired. "It sounds like you've been everywhere." And then, when I didn’t answer, a bit later, by which time the morning sun was beginning to pierce through the clouds: "How far is it to Sarajevo? Where are we, I mean, what country are we in?"

Finally then he fell asleep, and I drove on, ever further. The hitchhiker murmured in his sleep. He still held his hands open limply, as if he wanted someone to put something into them. There were almost no other cars on the road. I half turned around to take a look at our two almost identical outdoor jackets. I had ordered my jacket on the Internet, too, also from a German online retailer. Over my shoulder, I saw that the hitchhiker’s cardboard sign with the word SARAJEVO on it was also lying on the back seat. It was the wrong way round; I saw that the hitchhiker had written a destination on the other side with his black permanent marker. I kept hold of the steering wheel with one hand, leaned further back and pulled the sign out completely from under the jackets. On the back was just written HELLO, followed by an exclamation mark and a smiley. I stared down at the sign, rubbed my eyes out of tiredness, wondering what the hitchhiker meant to say and who on the European road network he was addressing. I imagined him holding it as he went hiking in his shorts in the rain on some road or other near Sarajevo. I ... The squeaky, almost cracking voice of the hitchhiker jolted me back.

“Oh, no! No!"

I was thrown forward and then squeezed backwards. I was tossed around, the car was tossed around. I saw the airbag. I thought very slowly and as if I were still half asleep: So this is my airbag. So my airbag is white. There was something in front of the car. The car was stationary. By now it really was morning, it was even light; next to me the hitchhiker was laughing. His door was open and somehow he was hanging out of the door beside his airbag. I just sat there, exactly as before. The car made a beeping noise that must have been the electronics, then it was completely silent for a while, then the GPS said in its perfectly ordinary tone of voice that we should go back on to the road again. It said: "Continue," pause, "along the M6 for 82.5 km," pause, "Turn off at the," pause, "border crossing to Croatia”, then came a long , badly pronounced Hungarian word, and then: "Note that tolls operate on this road". I wondered whether the hitchhiker was actually properly conscious; he just kept on laughing. I reached back and pulled out my outdoor jacket. I opened the car door on my side.

Immediately the hitchhiker straightened up. He was holding on to the window. The window opened electronically, he looked at me. He wasn’t bleeding, he was just very pale.

"What happened?" I asked.

"There are some other people over there. We drove into a car with other people."

"I’m sure they’re OK," I said, although I hadn’t looked outside.

I got out. Of course it was raining again. I had probably braked for a long time, but we had rammed another car. The other car and mine were standing at a point where there was a kind of noise barrier, which meant we couldn’t get down from the road. All you could see, either ahead or behind, was just the empty motorway and our two vehicles.

The hitchhiker now got out too. I tried to run forwards, but only managed a few steps. I was utterly exhausted. The car just in front of us was the minibus from the previous evening. It was the new model Seat, its shattered tail lights still on. The number plate was all twisted.  It must have been a state like Kosovo or Moldova; I had no idea because the letters made ​​no sense. The hitchhiker had also taken his outdoor jacket from the back seat. He stood on the other side of the car, swaying as if he were about fall over; with some effort he put his jacket on and smiled at me again; he struggled like a drunk with the zip. "I’ll go and have a look," he shouted, and laughed eagerly.

He staggered forward, describing a semicircle over the motorway. I stayed where I was. At times the rain became heavier. I sat down on the road, moved a few inches to the right in case a car came. I looked at a thistle by the side of the road. It was grey and bent, with flowers that bobbed in the wind. Right next to it was some grey plastic casing, perhaps from the minibus, and half a yard further on a long, black strip of plastic was being buffeted by the wind. It was the heavy-duty bubble wrap you can get at DIY warehouses in Germany. The plastic sheeting was hanging from a bundle, a cardboard box. This had to be the load from the roof of the Seat, the bulky goods. Ski poles and brightly-coloured skis with their bindings were lying around, and a few yards further on, as if it had been flushed from the accident to the roadside, a lone right ski boot.

The hitchhiker came staggering back into the middle of the road, pausing halfway to do up the zip of his jacket very slowly and carefully; his face shone with concentration. Behind him were some other men, the men from the minibus. The hitchhiker sat down beside me on the wet asphalt. I made room for him by moving a few inches to the right in case a car came. The hitchhiker rubbed his wire-rimmed glasses. He pointed to the skis, said in his eager manner something about ski tourism and that he himself had specially ordered some shorts, then he fell silent. I pointed to the number plate in front of us, the unknown letters. I asked what country the people in the Seat came from. The hitchhiker looked at me blankly, then laughed again in his friendly, interested way. "They set off from Dresden," he said, "they want to go skiing in Sarajevo. Skiing at this time of year!"

"But the number plate,” I said.