Martin's Car Crash

Martin’s car crash kills Joachim’s middle brother and the brother’s girlfriend, turning an ordinary afternoon in Wyoming into the news that reshapes the family’s life. Joachim receives the message far from home, struggles to make the death intelligible in English, and returns to Schleswig for the funeral; afterward, he goes back to the United States and refuses, for a time, to grieve openly.

The News in Wyoming

Joachim is at his host family’s home when his father calls to tell him that Martin has died in a car accident. The news leaves him unable to find the English words to explain what has happened. He reaches for a dictionary and slowly assembles a way to tell his host family, then confirms the news in German. The scene makes the distance between the two countries more than a matter of geography: even the language he has been learning fails him at the moment he needs it most.

The timing complicates his return. Joachim and his host family are about to leave for Yellowstone National Park, while his booked flight home is still four days away. They go ahead with the trip. He travels through a landscape of buffalo herds and geysers, but remembers it as desolate; the grandeur around him cannot offset the death he has just learned of.

The Crash and Its Victims

The crash killed not only Martin but also his girlfriend, who was sitting with him in the back seat. In the middle of the night, a truck had stopped just beyond the crest of a hill to let two female hitchhikers out, with its lights switched off. The car carrying Martin and his girlfriend slid beneath the truck. The driver, Martin’s best friend, was uninjured.

These details emerge alongside Joachim’s account of receiving the news, giving the event a sudden, contingent shape: a truck stopped in the dark, a car arriving from beyond the hill, and two young passengers who did not survive. The account identifies the circumstances and the people lost without turning the crash into a scene of graphic description.

Homecoming and Return

Joachim flies back to Schleswig for the funeral. The journey takes thirty-four hours and involves four transfers. At Frankfurt airport, he waits for his connection to Hamburg, where his parents and surviving brother meet him. He sees them through a large pane of glass before they see him: while other travelers run to greet and embrace their families, his own sit motionless, staring toward the exit. When they recognize him, they embrace and hold on to one another.

The homecoming is not the triumphant return Joachim had imagined before the crash. He had pictured himself coming back as a fit basketball star, fluent in English and brimming with confidence. Instead, he arrives in the middle of his family’s bereavement. Even so, he decides to return to Wyoming. His father, bent over an armchair and crying, asks whether he might rather stay; Joachim is determined to go back. Fourteen days later, he is again with his host family in Laramie.

Grief and the Family Aftermath

Back in Wyoming, few people at school know about the crash. Joachim’s host family is the exception, and the absence of wider sympathy allows him to resume his previous routines. He plays basketball, learns to throw a football and carve a large turkey, shovels snow, rides across the prairie, and travels with his host parents. He says he refuses to grieve and rarely thinks of Martin, except after his Sunday calls with his parents. By the time he leaves the United States, he weighs ninety-five kilos, can do a hundred push-ups, and speaks fluent English; these concrete signs of change stand beside, rather than resolve, his avoidance of mourning.

The crash has changed his parents as well. Although they return to work, eat together, watch television, and take walks, Joachim sees their shared routines as a simulation of their former life, an effort to remember who they had been. With his eldest brother studying in Munich, Joachim is the only child left at home with them, in their house within the psychiatric hospital. The event therefore marks not just two deaths but a family’s altered daily life: ordinary habits continue, while the life they once contained has yet to grow back into them.