back to contents

“Thousands of variants” is the promise of the clamping brick pack, which at least features a robot, a car and a kind of vise. The instructions for the other 997 variants can probably be downloaded via some kind of app. Actually, I would have been happier with a normal bouquet of flowers for Valentine’s Day, but I always knew that Malte was still a child at heart. And that’s a good thing. He will probably start building right after the evening’s restaurant visit.

Just one new figure every evening, that’s the deal. I suspected that Malte had bought these bricks more for himself than for me, but I didn’t expect him to not want to do anything else. Sometimes I get the feeling that he only visits me for that reason. After all, he comes by every day after work and at the weekend, and he hasn’t been out with his friends for at least three weeks now. They call sporadically to let me know that Malte isn’t just mine. I explain to them with slowly diminishing patience that I am aware of this and that sometimes I would like to have the old Malte back. What use is it to me if my boyfriend blocks the living room table every evening in order to rearrange several hundred bricks into ever new shapes?

After almost six weeks and exactly forty assembled variants, Malte must have forgotten one of the square one-bricks when taking them apart and putting them back in the box. It drills so deeply into the bare sole of my right foot that I cry out in pain, fall onto the couch and clutch my foot, still breathing heavily. When I pull my hand back, it’s covered in blood, and the stone I finally find on the gray carpet is also glistening blood-red. I throw it back into the pack of cursed stones without cleaning it. I want Malte to see what he’s done to me.

In the evening, Malte builds a model of a saw and I could swear there’s a drop of blood on one of the prongs. Whether he doesn’t see it or ignores it, I don’t know. But now it really is time for this madness to come to an end. I stand in front of him, waiting until he finally lifts his eyes from the model and looks at me. “Either you throw this crap in the bin or I will,” I say, crossing my arms. “It can’t go on like this.”

His gaze wanders back and forth between me and the model, and all of a sudden I’m afraid of losing him. To a pile of plastic parts. “Now go home and sleep on it for a while,” I say and push him out of my apartment. If he has enough time, he’ll come to his senses.

It takes me a long time to fall asleep that evening. I dream of saws made of clamping bricks that are, crazily, sharp enough to saw through human skin. But of course that can’t be, I know that even in my dream, and sink into a deeper sleep.

When Malte M. entered his girlfriend’s apartment early on Saturday morning to have breakfast together, he found her lifeless. The emergency doctor who was called could only determine that she had died. For reasons as yet unknown, there was a blockage in her windpipe, which led to her death by suffocation. Malte M. confirmed his girlfriend’s almost obsessive preoccupation with such bricks and told this newspaper that he wanted to continue using his deceased girlfriend’s last large set of bricks as a memento of her.