Stephanie de Velasco: Tiger Milk

Noura runs her hand over my head.

Yes, she says, but where we’ll be living the moon is the sun.

Bye, says Jameelah.

Bye, I say.

We hug each other and then Noura and Jameelah go through security.

I’ll come visit, I call, whether there’s snow, sun, or moonlight, I swear I’ll come visit.

Jameelah turns around and raises her little finger.

Pinky swear?

Pinky swear, I call and raise my finger.

Rainer is sitting in the driver’s seat reading the paper. He starts the engine when he sees me. I slide into the backseat.

Don’t be sad, he says turning around to me, all good things must come to an end.

Leave me alone, I say but Rainer won’t let it go, he says, come on I’ll drive you around a bit and you can take in the pretty sites, the Reichstag and Friedrichstrasse.

No just drive me here, I say handing Rainer the piece of paper with Amir’s address on it.

In that disgusting part of town?

Like we live any better, I say.

That’s enough of that, says Rainer.

Drive me there, I say, or I’m getting out of the car and I’ll take the train.

Fine, fine, says Rainer putting on the radio.

My eyes are burning. I don’t want to cry, not in front of Rainer, I fold up the piece of paper with Amir’s address, folding it smaller and smaller, I press it together as hard as I can and it helps. When I was younger and I skinned my knee at the playground or whatever, Mama always said it’ll be healed long before you get married. Skinned knees and jammed thumbs might heal but nothing else does, nothing on this rotten earth heals. I think I hate Mama and I hate Papa too, much more than Mama, Rainer I don’t care about and you can’t hate someone you don’t even care about.

Rainer turns up the radio. ‘When Will The Clouds Part’ is playing but it’s not the normal version with the normal verses, in this version people answer the question what does happiness mean to you and then in between the singer sings, she sings when will the clouds part and then someone else starts talking about happiness and how they define it. They say stuff like happiness is being free or happiness is never losing laughter, having fun in life, they say happiness is having someone who loves me, or it’s wanting to hold onto a moment.

Man how Jameelah and I always hated this song. We hated it because we thought it was stupid to think back on moments in your life that you wish you could hold onto because moments like that somehow never happen, at least not moments like the ones in the song.

The day we first drank Tiger Milk, that was a good moment, when we started using O-language and started going to Kurfürsten, those were good moments too. It’s funny, but I can remember all sorts of things from my childhood now but the things that happened just a few years ago, as we started to become adults, I can barely remember those things. Drinking Tiger Milk and going to Kurfürsten, those were good moments but I have no idea who came up with the idea, no idea why we decided to wear the striped stockings, I don’t have the slightest idea when it became a game or which one of us came up with the recipe for Tiger Milk. I don’t know when and why we started to speak O-language, I don’t know why we ended up on Kurfürsten of all streets and with the men there, I don’t know any of that, I just know that we always thought nothing would ever go wrong, nothing would happen, as long as we didn’t go anywhere alone, never alone.

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Stefanie de Velasco

An invitation from the publisher

Nini and Jameelah are best friends. They’re going to be best friends forever.

As the long summer holidays stretch out before them, Berlin becomes their playground. The days all merge into one: swimming, smoking, shoplifting, and hanging out with friends from their estate. At night they descend on the red light district, impersonating the prostitutes there in order to practise for their first time, giggling to each other, tipsy on the Tiger Milk — their homemade cocktail — they’ve been sipping all day.

But then, one night, Nini and Jameelah witness a devastating crime that threatens to ruin everything.

Tiger Milk is an explosive story of love, death and rebellion and of an extraordinary friendship.

‘Nails the undertone of an untethered, feral generation.’

Die Welt

‘A novel of rebellion, love, death, and an extraordinary friendship.’

Bucher

STEFANIE DE VELASCO lives and works in Berlin. In 2011, she received the Literature Prize Prenzlauer Berg for the first chapters of Tiger Milk and was shortlisted for the Aspekte Literature Prize for Best Debut 2013. This is her first novel.

Contact her via Twitter: @stefdevelasco

Find out more at: www.headofzeus.com/newvoices

TIM MOHR has translated such authors as Alina Bronsky, Charlotte Roche, and Wolfgang Herrndorf. His own writing has appeared in the New York Times, Daily Beast , and Playboy . Prior to starting his writing career he made his living as a club DJ in Berlin.