Joachim and Aika's Relationship

Joachim’s relationship with Aika is one of the most intimate and sharply contradictory bonds in his childhood: the dog is his refuge, the companion he longs to draw as close as possible, and the unwilling participant in a blood pact that leaves him afraid. Later, they share a moment of exuberant play in the snow. Their story does not resolve into uncomplicated harmony; affection and injury remain part of the same bond.

A chosen confidant

When Joachim is unhappy, he lies crying against Aika’s belly and tells the dog that nobody understands him except Aika. He is allowed to sleep in Joachim’s bed, where Joachim presses himself against the wall beside the dog’s open, sleeping mouth. The closeness is physical and unguarded: Aika is not simply a pet in the household but the ally to whom Joachim turns when he feels alone.

Aika technically belongs to the narrator’s second-oldest brother, who chose the breed and spent a week with breeders near Hamburg. He gave the dog the elaborate registered name Biggi von den Ziegelteichen, though the dog was called Aika. The brother also took Aika to competitions and made the phlegmatic animal perform commands, including one that required him to raise his lips. Joachim, by contrast, was drawn to Aika without a contest or performance as its purpose. He secretly fed him sausage, patiently picked burrs from his bushy tail, and accepted being covered in dog hair. The distinction between ownership and attachment is central: the brother had selected and trained Aika, but Joachim describes himself as the one who loved him beyond measure and continually sought his company.

That devotion also appears in Joachim’s pride in the dog’s distinctive body. At school, he reports that Landseers have webbing between their toes, only to be met by his biology teacher’s disbelief. Joachim offers to bring Aika in as proof. When his mother arrives with the dog, Joachim runs forward and embraces them both; Aika is lifted onto the cleared teacher’s desk, and the class gathers around him. The teacher checks between the dog’s toes, confirms the webbing, and lets each pupil feel it. Joachim’s attachment thus includes a wish to make Aika’s particularity visible to others, even in a classroom where the claim was first dismissed.

Companions in the water

Aika’s love of water gives their closeness a setting in which the dog’s own physical abilities take the lead. On family trips to the Ostsee, he can hardly wait in the car. As soon as the door opens, he squeezes out, races to the sea, and plunges in, diving and resurfacing with a strength unlike the awkward paddling Joachim might expect from a dog. Joachim follows once he has put on his bathing suit and diving mask. They swim together toward the first sandbar, and when Joachim dives, he sees Aika underwater, his floppy ears spread out from his head like fins.

The scene makes their companionship reciprocal rather than merely possessive. Joachim seeks Aika’s nearness, but in the water he follows the dog into an element Aika loves. The underwater look, which Joachim remembers as seeming like a broad grin, gives the encounter the feel of shared play without suggesting that Aika is only a human confidant in canine form. His swimming is his own exuberant activity; Joachim joins him there.

The blood pact and its cost

Joachim’s wish to be bound to Aika takes a more dangerous shape after he sees Winnetou and Old Shatterhand cut their arms and bind their bleeding wounds together. He wants a blood brother of his own and specifically wants dog’s blood in his veins. Alone at home, he lures Aika into the basement with a treat, takes a scalpel from his parents’ medicine cabinet, and uses a shoelace from one of his father’s old running shoes to tie their paws and hands together. He intends only a slight cut, but Aika recoils as the blade touches his paw. Joachim cuts deeply into the soft pad; Aika, startled and hurt, begins licking the gaping wound.

Joachim then cuts his own hand with the scalpel. He brings Aika close and tries to bind their injured pads together, but Aika whines, pulls free, and runs away. Joachim follows him up the stairs. The frightened dog hops on three legs through the living room, leaving blood across the recently installed ochre carpet. The ritual meant to make them inseparable instead turns Aika’s pain and fear into the scene’s most immediate facts.

The attempted cover-up compounds the harm. Joachim locks Aika in the bathroom and tries to remove the blood from the carpet. Water spreads the marks; Domestos removes the blood but also bleaches the carpet. Aika continues to whine in the bathroom while Joachim faces both the injured dog and the ruined floor. When his father comes home, Joachim breaks down, admits that he and Aika had been playing at being blood brothers, and is carried to the kitchen. His father sees the wound and then discovers Aika shut in the bathroom.

The father treats both injuries: each receives a tetanus injection and a local anesthetic. Aika’s deeper, still-bleeding wound takes four stitches; Joachim’s takes three. Joachim remembers envying the dog the extra stitch, a small and unsettling measure of how even the treatment becomes part of the childhood story. His father advises him to think carefully before telling his brothers and suggests keeping the incident between them.

Secrecy, teasing, and distance

The secret does not stay between father and son. Joachim’s brothers want to know what happened, and he trades the story for a turn on his eldest brother’s cherished red ten-speed bicycle. He is proud of the absurdity of his idea, but the brothers turn the blood pact into a recurring joke. They call him the one with dog’s blood in his veins; on Sunday walks, they throw sticks for him to fetch, bark at him, and threaten to have him put to sleep. His eldest brother also jokes that Aika has become even more foolish since their blood brotherhood.

The physical aftermath remains visible too. The bleached patches are cut from the carpet and replaced, but the new pieces do not match. The floor ends up looking like a garden path made of differently sized paving stones. More consequentially, Aika continues to tuck his tail when he sees Joachim for weeks afterward and never again enters the basement with him. The basement, initially the private setting Joachim chose for a binding ritual, becomes a boundary Aika will not cross alongside him. The episode reveals a painful difference between Joachim’s intended meaning and Aika’s experience: Joachim wanted proof of closeness; the dog’s lasting response registers the encounter as something to fear.

A later moment of trust

After the North German snow disaster, Joachim finds another way to be physically joined to Aika, this time through play that follows the dog’s movement rather than cutting into his body. He puts plastic bags over his rubber boots, secures them with preserving-jar rubber bands, and takes Aika into the woods. On the straight path where his father’s running ambitions had failed, Joachim grips the leash with both hands, crouches, and urges the dog to run. Aika accelerates, pulling Joachim behind him over the uneven ground in a fast, improvised sled ride.

When they finally stop, Joachim falls into the snow and Aika licks his face. Joachim pats him, embraces and kisses him, and for days afterward carries the memory of the ride as a small, golden source of happiness. The scene does not state that Aika has forgotten the blood pact, nor does it erase his earlier fear. It does show them once more sharing movement and closeness, with Aika active in the encounter and Joachim joyful in following. Across the relationship, that contrast gives the bond its emotional force: the same desire for nearness can lead either to a violation Aika resists or to a play they experience together.