Frieder's suicide attempt and hospitalization are not presented as a crisis with a single explanation or a clean recovery. After he swallows medication and drinks wine, his father finds him in the cellar while searching for an axe; he survives, but the narrator and Frieder are left to reckon with the difference between an act, an intention, and a wish to stop living. The episode becomes a lasting fault line in their friendship, returning in later questions about rescue, risk, and what Frieder may have wanted.

The attempt and its accidental discovery

Frieder has taken sleeping pills that he had set aside from his mother's supply. She takes one or sometimes two each evening and changes her dose often, leaving her with little sense of how many remain in the packet. Once Frieder has collected enough, he drinks a two-litre bottle of wine after school, then goes down to the cellar and washes the pills down with the last of it.

The discovery turns on a coincidence. Frieder's father, who would ordinarily be away from the house in the stable or working at the post office, has received a load of wood and needs to prepare firewood. He searches for the axe, cannot find it, and eventually goes down to the cellar. There is no axe there, but Frieder is. The episode gives the narrator a concrete reason to call the missing tool the thing that saved his friend: without the search, Frieder might not have been found when he was.

Frieder wakes with a tube in his throat. The survival is real, but its accidental circumstances keep it from offering an easy account of rescue as either a deliberate choice or a settled wish to be saved. The axe becomes the dark joke at the center of the recollection: when the narrator tells him that it saved his life, Frieder objects that it was an axe that was not even there. His blunt dismissal preserves both the absurdity of the coincidence and the seriousness of what happened.

Hospitalization and uncertain return

Frieder is hospitalized after the attempt. In autumn he is permitted to leave the ward for the first time, but only with an escort and only to the hospital park. The narrator accompanies him, uneasy about being made responsible for the outing. He assumes that permission to leave must mean Frieder is considered well, or at least well enough, and notes that Frieder is taking his medication. Yet neither the outing nor the medication lets him know what Frieder intends.

That uncertainty becomes literal at the park exit. Frieder says he wants to go into town. The narrator panics, imagining that he may have to catch Frieder if he runs away; his body goes rigid even as panic seems to rush through it. The moment exposes the limits of the narrator's role: he is a friend and an escort, but not someone who can confidently tell whether Frieder is safe, recovered, or about to disappear from his reach.

The narrator's fear is not dispelled by ordinary signs of mood. At home, with the others watching Frieder as he leans against the refrigerator, even the most consequential announcement seems possible: he might say he has decided never to try to kill himself again, or that he has decided to do it that very day. The narrator admits that he cannot tell where he stands with Frieder. Sadness might be tiredness; cheerfulness might mean that Frieder has already made a decision. The attempt therefore changes the atmosphere of the shared house beyond the immediate hospitalization: everyday expressions become difficult to read because the stakes behind them are unknowable.

What Frieder says, and what remains unsaid

The narrator asks Frieder to explain the attempt. Frieder thinks about the question over the course of a day, looking to the narrator as if waiting for an invitation to speak. The answer he eventually gives is carefully bounded: he says he did not want to kill himself, but simply did not want to live anymore, and believes that distinction matters. Rather than supplying the cause of his despair, the distinction names an ambiguity the narrator has to carry forward.

The two friends had known each other since fifth grade and become close around ninth grade, spending summers cycling to the swimming lake, riding at night to a cinema twenty kilometres away, and studying together before exams. Frieder could explain difficult physics so that the narrator understood it. But they had never talked about sex, or even about not having sex, and after the attempt the narrator bites his tongue because his honest response would feel more embarrassing than admitting he had never had a girlfriend. Their closeness is longstanding, yet it does not mean they already possess a language for the most intimate crisis between them.

Later, the narrator asks whether he should rescue Frieder if he is suddenly in danger, such as falling through ice, or whether Frieder would resent it. After a long pause, Frieder says the narrator may rescue him, he thinks, because Frieder wants to choose for himself. The answer does not settle the question of suicide; it establishes a narrower permission for intervention in an immediate emergency, while preserving Frieder's insistence on his own agency. He also tells the narrator that someone who imagines what life would be like without him is not going to do it, because such a person still believes he matters to someone. This reassurance offers a way of thinking about attachment, but it cannot make the narrator's uncertainty disappear.

A crisis that keeps returning

The attempt remains present in the narrator's imagination after Frieder is back among his friends. When Frieder says he will ride his bicycle anyway and the others hurry to catch the bus, the narrator later sees an empty place beside him in class and pictures Frieder hanging from a rope in a hayloft. He associates the image with the possibility of Frieder's suicide and recalls that Frieder rejected other imagined methods: there were no guns, and he could not bear the thought of being thrown in front of a train, which he described as raspberry mush. The narrator's thoughts move between remembered conversation and recurring images, showing how the attempt makes the future feel present even during an ordinary school day.

The uncertainty intensifies when Frieder later says that he deliberately provoked a police officer into shooting him. The narrator responds by striking and beating Frieder, furious that he had put their friends in danger as well as himself. Frieder turns aside and tries to throw the narrator off, but does not fight back. This later confrontation does not resolve the original attempt; it demonstrates how the attempt has altered the terms of their friendship, making the narrator's fear erupt as anger when Frieder's actions again place death within reach.

After Frieder dies by suicide, the narrator asks himself why he had wanted to die the first time and whether the reasons were the same on the later occasion. He finds no answer. The question, he says, had gradually grown faint through talking with Frieder until it almost disappeared, but its disappearance is not an explanation. The first attempt therefore remains distinct from Frieder's later death: it cannot be read as proof that he had always made one unchanging decision, nor can survival be mistaken for a lasting resolution. Its significance lies in the unresolved space it opens between the wish not to live, the possibility of rescue, and the narrator's continuing effort to understand a friend who could not make those states fully legible to him.