The brains probably come from his father, Tobi. That little punk kid, as Grandma Bine always calls him. No one ever talks about Tobi anymore, besides Grandma Bine. Nowadays Skinny Anita barely says anything to Marco anyway. Fat Anita liked to rant to Mini-Marco: “Who needs fathers—we can do fine, just us!” Just what Fat Anita did he wasn’t so sure about at the time. She liked to slump in front of the tube, watching shows and soap operas, or sometimes cartoons with Mini-Marco. She called her friends or fought with Grandma Bine. “How am I supposed to work if I have Marco hanging around my neck? Who’s gonna help me with that? You’re not, that’s for sure. Who’s gonna hire me to come with a kid?” Sometimes she did hair or nails in the kitchen for women she knew from the playground or the building. She went out at night—“If I don’t dance a little, I’ll forget I’m still alive.”—sprayed herself with perfume, painted gloss on her lips, and hung huge earrings from her fleshy earlobes: peacock feathers, golden suns, silver birds. Mini-Marco stayed home alone on his mattress near the sleeper sofa, unable to sleep. He knew she always came back eventually, poking around forever with the key until she found the lock, stinking of smoke and beer, and that she’d be in a foul mood the next day. She never brought anyone home. In those days Eino would come by in the afternoon with a case of water and a family-size box of popsicles—bright yellow orange-flavored ones—stuck between the bottles. The wet wrapping came off without a sound.
Everyone in Marbach calls Tobi, Marco’s natural father, Electro-Breining, since he owns an electronics shop. Aside from Grandma Bine. “Don’t make me laugh,” she says, “that little punk kid! I still call him Tobi whenever I run into him. So, Tobi, how’s your family? He gets real red and runs away. Just like he did with Anita back then.” Tobi got Anita pregnant. At sixteen, for Pete’s sake. Since the seventeen-year-old Tobi was still a mama’s boy and had no interest in playing house with Anita, he cleared off one day, after a few tears in front of the ice cream shop downtown. Marco has never seen Tobi. But any guy who knows about mechanical stuff can’t be a total dimwit. And if Marco manages to pass into the next grade, even though he always has other things on his mind, it must be because of Tobi, because Anita is dumb. She let Eino go and took up with Pornstar, so she has to be dumb. Dead from the neck up. A little beetle who totters around all night, attracting vermin with the battery light in her ass. Porno flew after her and sank his teeth in—a fat, stinking dung beetle with pincer teeth.
Twelve minus nine is three. Marco can do that in his head easy. That means the asshole has been around for three years. Marco giggles. Happy three-year anniversary. Marco forces himself to breathe slowly. There’s no one in the apartment. He’s out cleaning and Anita is too. Porno got her the job. That way he can keep her under his thumb all day. It’s already dark by the time they come home. They’ll think he’s just hiding behind the curtains, out of the line of fire. But he’ll be long gone, over the hills and far away. Now he finally he has time, plenty of time, just for himself.
Marco walks down the narrow hallway. The bathroom door is open, the toilet cover and seat left open like a giant mouth with swollen lips. Blue cleaner foams in its white maw. Everything always has to be open—proper ventilation, good air. The toilet seat used to be made of wood, before Porno tore it out. Plastic is more hygienic. Eino had brought the wooden one with him. Marco has forgotten what the kind of wood was called, he’s not great at that kind of thing. It had dark whirls in it, like bird’s eyes. “Of course the boy wets the bed when the toilet’s so cold. This is good wood like we have in Eestimaa, warm on the bum. He’ll love sitting on it, right karu?” Fat Anita had whined that it was ridiculous to waste more money on the little pisser. It was a lost cause—he’d wet the bed at least once every week, every single week, for as long as she could remember. Here or at Grandma Bine’s, it didn’t make any difference, he probably did it on purpose. Just like he had to show up right when she least wanted him. Her whole life had been shit from that day on. He never slept through the night, he was always sick, one thing after another: bronchitis, pneumonia, angina. He had it all. At fifteen months he still couldn’t walk and hadn’t said a peep. Eino had no right to act like he knew better. But Eino just shook his head: Pea suu, kallis. That’s what he always said when Fat Anita yelled at Mini-Marco. Eino let Mini-Marco hand him screws when he installed the toilet seat, and told him he was doing a good job.
Marco walks past the bathroom and into the tiny kitchen. The window is open here, too. The Olgaeck noise roars in through it: streetcars, four lines, chug up the hill or into the tunnel, cars squeal and honk up and down the four-lane Hohenheimer Straße. Busses drive over the wide surface of the main road that goes downtown, and stop in front of the distant castles. They’re fairly high up. You can see the old orange orphanage and the beer garden behind the huge iron gate, the towers, some church, who knows. Marco looks down into the courtyard. A couple benches next to a sandbox full of cat shit, a rusted-out jungle gym, swingset, and slide, overflowing trash cans against the wall. Nobody down there. The high-rise has fifteen floors. He moved here with Fat Anita when he was two, their first real apartment. One main room, a kitchen, bathroom, narrow hallways, and a windowless storage closet behind a curtain. Eino ripped out the shelves and made space for Marco’s mattress, his Mickey Mouse lamp and the banana carton that held all his crap. “Karu needs his own den—a little hiding place.” Eino got out Anita’s bedsheets and flipped through the pile with his big hands as if it were a kiddie book with thick cardboard pages—pink flowered, light blue, tiger print, black. Marco couldn’t decide, so Eino chose for him: “Take the blue one—it’s the best color, it’ll be like sleeping in heaven.”
Marco yanks open the refrigerator. There’s nothing to eat. There’s never any grub around here. “No cooking, it just makes a mess. The little bastard already ate at school, what are we paying those bills for every month?”
Eino had cooked a lot in the evenings, mostly potatoes. And then yelled “Sööma!” when it was ready. He was really into potatoes, he made kartulipuder—mashed potatoes with chunks of bacon—and frikadellisupp from carrots, potatoes, and little meatballs. He brought weird stuff that made Anita shake her head, but Mini-Marco was curious and tried everything: hard slices of black bread baked in fat that looked like strips of bark, canned fish, beets, dried mushrooms.
There’s a bottle of Pornstar’s disgusting cranberry-flavored gin and a package of margarine in the door. Marco screws open the bottle and drinks until he can’t breathe. The fake sweetness makes his mouth water and his teeth ache, then the stuff flows down his gullet, burning slightly and coating his empty belly with warmth. He turns on the radio. Robbie Williams is howling. He finds a can of ravioli in the cabinet over the stove. He eats it straight from the can, stopping just before he gets to the bottom. If Anita and Pornstar were here, he’d let out a quiet tomato-sauce-and-fatty-meat-scented burp. But here, alone with Robbie’s voice and the weak afternoon sunlight, he really lets it rip. He feels stuffed but not satisfied. A few gulps from the tap, which tastes like fake lemon. White traces of scouring powder cling to the sides of the sink. Pornstar cleaned. The drainboard gleams. Marco catches sight of his silhouette, his hat still on; he tosses it on a chair. Then some more gin. The bottle’s fluted glass belly is noticeably emptier. Pornstar will definitely notice. Suddenly Marco grins. He unscrews the top again and unbuttons his cargo pants. With a quick motion he takes his penis out of his boxers. It’s small and floppy, like an uncooked rope of dough. When he did the vocational class at the bakery, rolling pretzels felt a lot like this. The dough was warm, limp, and almost felt alive. Marco holds his dick in his hands. It weighs practically nothing. A harmless little thing. He can’t imagine that a girl wouldn’t want to laugh if she had to mess around with it, even if it can also look way different than this. Hey man, there’s work to do. It’s not really fun work, but at least the location is pretty dope. He pulls back the foreskin and presses the head into the smooth bulge of the bottle’s open
ing. It feels good, cool and sticky—he tries to piss, but then suddenly the bottle is hanging off his boner. He doesn’t get boners very often. The others seem to jerk off so much their dongs almost fall off. They won’t shut up about it: how long, how big, christ almighty. And women, they’re always going on about the women from school. As if you needed more trouble. Another slut who would probably just bitch like Anita and stress you out. Better to steer clear. Not that that’s easy. Marco knows that the girls—Aysel, Sinem, and Aliki, or whatever their names are—call him Georg, because he looks a little like the bassist from Tokyo Hotel. It feels good to hear them giggle when he walks by, but he can’t deal with that right now.
Finally a stream of light yellow urine comes out. The fake red color of the drink doesn’t change, but the former level is restored. He leaves the can in the sink, the spoon dripping a long trail of tomato sauce across the shining silver. He dumps out a few ravioli too—they look like something, eyes maybe. Pornstar will lose it. It’s a shame Marco won’t get to see his face, especially when he feels like knocking back some of his swill. Normally Marco would wipe up all of his mess, hide the can in the trash, secretly, like a rat, a pest. He’s learned that over the years with Porno. The fact that it’s all over now feels so strange that Marco just stands and stares into space, his torso slumped slightly, hands in his pockets. He has to think.
Before, when he was still Mini-Marco, he was obsessed with his hiding place: his clothes hiding place. It was a million times more important than learning vocabulary or math, or whatever the idiot president said they had to do. Mini-Marco always had to have clean pants. He was insanely careful, stopped playing soccer, stopped going to Wren House. Sometimes he even hid in the closet at school so the teachers wouldn’t drag him out for fresh air. If he didn’t watch out, something could always get on them. Then he would be “filthy,” as Pornstar liked to yell. He had a plastic bag with pants and a shirt. He folded everything as small as possible and stuck it behind the pipe in the far right cubicle of the boy’s bathroom, the one against the wall. Mini-Marco was always checking to make sure everything was still there, that no janitor or workman had discovered it. Something like that could take up a lot of time for a little baby like Mini-Marco, not to mention all the time he spent thinking about the schnitzel hands and the vacuum cleaner pipe, and Skinny Anita, who didn’t talk to Grandma Bine anymore and didn’t call Marco “retard,” and instead didn’t talk to him at all. There was no space for other thoughts—about himself, or about Eino and Estonia. That’s why they’re all flooding in now, crashing through his skull like wet rags tumbling around in the washing machine. He doesn’t know what to focus on first. He has to be careful not to screw around, otherwise he’ll never pull off getting out of here. For example, the way it all started, with Porno—that always comes back to him. He can’t do anything about it, doesn’t want to think about it, but it rattles around in his head anyway, and he has to look: Fourth grader Marco Knopp sat on the sofa watching the tube. It was some kid’s show, that’s right: Spongebob. Spongebob had accidentally taken Gary’s snail medicine and turned into a snail himself; he started sliming around saying “Meow! Meow!” in a high, squeaky voice like Gary always did, and everything was slimy, totally gross, squish-squish. Mini-Marco thought that was hysterically funny. He was doubled over with laughter, sitting there on the couch. He loved Spongebob. A bag of marshmallows lay next to him, white and pink striped with coconut flakes, already half eaten. Grandma Bine had just brought them. Slime dripped from Spongebob’s long nose. Mini-Marco reached into the bag, deep in among the soft balls. Just the smell of them still makes him puke. Suddenly the screen went black. Only the little red light at the bottom still glowed. He didn’t move, and in the shiny black surface of the big screen he saw himself, saw the leaf pattern of the sofa—brown, yellow, purple—and the legs of his jeans on top of it and his dirty bare feet. He’d gone to Wren House after school to feed the greasy sheep and play catch with Stavros and the others. There was a big spot on his T-shirt, somewhere near his belly. Tomato-Paprika sauce, the school lunch. Mini-Marco’s hair was bleached from the sun, the way it always got in the summer. Anita had to dye hers. “Look at him, he’s so blond, with real highlights—it’s not fair.” In the black glass of the screen, Mini-Marco saw the feeble palm tree with the string of heart-shaped lights and the table with four chairs. He saw the shelves with plates and glasses and Anita’s stuffed animals sitting on top. He saw the clock and the wreath of plastic flowers from Grandma Bine and Anita’s Sarah Connor poster next to it. He saw the brown doorframe with the Disney stickers that led to the hallway—to the kitchen, bathroom, and to his little room behind the curtain.
A man stood in the doorframe with the remote in his hand. He had his arms crossed in front of his chest and wore a muscle T-shirt, shorts, and basketball shoes. He completely filled the doorway, his left elbow on Micky, his right on Donald. His hair was cut short and stood up in spikes.
“Closing time, buddy.” His voice sounded funny to Marco. It came from the back of his throat—husky, as if he’d eaten something greasy. He sounded like he didn’t come from around here. He spoke German, sure, but not the Swabian that Anita, Grandma Bine, and most of the kids in school spoke. Not like Eino, either, who rolled his r’s and got his sentences twisted when he was tired, patching them up with Estonian words. Where could he be from?
Slowly he came closer and tossed the remote on the couch. Mini-Marco could smell the man’s sickly-sweet deodorant and saw the big tattoos that sprawled across his biceps like a black rash. The man took the bag of marshmallows and twisted the top like he was trying to strangle it. “Hey!” said Mini-Marco. “Those are mine!” “You must be Marco. I’m Achim. I’m living with you from now on. It’s all settled with your mother. Her and I, we go way back.” He breathed deeply. His fat lips shone as if he’d smeared them with something. “Cunthead,” Mini-Marco thought. And that’s when it started. Achim flung the bag in his face. “Get rid of this crap, pronto. I don’t want a mess in this room. Get it?” Of course Mini-Marco didn’t get it. He was karu, even if Eino was gone. He’d just run off, months ago. All he’d left was a note. But Mini-Marco was still karu. And a karu might be slow, and not so quick with words, but he doesn’t take any shit. A karu is stubborn. He says things like: “What’s your deal? You can’t tell me what to do!” Achim sat next to him on the couch. The cushions caved in. Anita had been sleeping here forever—first alone, then with Eino, and now alone again. Achim looked Marco in the eye. His eyes were small, blue, and watery. Totally different from Eino’s. He’d had blue eyes too, but really blue, like Mini-Marco imagined the sea would look, even though he’d never seen it, the sea around the country that Eino came from, Estonia. Eestimaa, the place Eino talked about almost every time he opened his mouth. Achim’s face, like his arms and legs, was very brown. Marco saw veins and muscles everywhere, but not a single hair. Everything gleamed like oil. “Pornstar,” thought Mini-Marco. Achim looked like one of those sweating, groaning guys that he’d seen on a DVD his buddy Didi made him watch. “It’s totally sick, I got it out of my old man’s nightstand. They fuck for real. Wanna watch?” They watched, and Mini-Marco found it boring and kind of gross. He couldn’t quite believe that grown-ups really did that stuff and squealed and yodeled about it like Grandma Bine’s folk music. He’d never heard or seen Eino and Flabby Anita at it, even though there was only a curtain between them.
Achim cleared his throat with a greasy croaking sound. What are you doing here, Pornstar? He turned Mini-Marco’s chin toward him. His fingers stank of aftershave. “I don’t like to talk much, so I’ll only say it once, get it? I work long and hard. When I come home, I want peace and quiet. No TV, no crap lying around. The Russian who lived here before was probably OK with that—dirt on the furniture and a rude little brat with no respect and no manners. They don’t know any better, Russians. They’re all drunks. Just cause trouble. But that’s over now, understand?” Mini-Marco did not understand why he
left the room, went into the kitchen, and rummaged around, or why there was so much clattering. What was next? It was all very strange, and Anita was nowhere to be seen—she wasn’t home yet, so probably she was hanging out in the city somewhere. Then Pornstar was back with the vacuum cleaner in his hand. Marco remembers exactly what Mini-Marco thought: “Oh, the crumbs—the coconut flakes from the marshmallows that fell on the sofa like little white worms, I’m going to have to clean them up now.” What a load of crap, Mini-Marco thought: Housecleaning with Pornstar, who doesn’t even know that Eino’s Estonian, not Russian. Eino would have laughed, but it wouldn’t have been a real laugh. He didn’t like to be mistaken for Russian. Something finally clicked for Mini-Marco when he noticed that Pornstar hadn’t brought the whole vacuum cleaner, only the tube with the sucking part at one end.
The shiny thing flashed in his direction, thick as an arm. He tried to run, to get to the door. But Pornstar took care of that, pushing Mini-Marco against the wall, No way. He threw Mini-Marco to the floor. It was impossible to get up. Then Pornstar kneeled on his legs. Mini-Marco could feel his fat ass and the bony stalks with hard muscles twitching inside them like disgusting animals. The tube came down on him hard, and the more he screamed and tried to wriggle away, the worse it got.
Mini-Marco could handle a little knocking around, but this wasn’t like that. Of course Eino scolded him sometimes. “Karu, you’re too loud! Shut up, karu.” When he got too crazy, Eino would grip the back of his neck so hard Mini-Marco felt like he was in a vise, and he wouldn’t be able to turn his head for hours afterward. “Had enough?” Eino would ask, his voice quiet and angry, and Mini-Marco would yelp out his yes, since he couldn’t nod in Eino’s huge clamping hand. Besides Eino’s special grip, he was familiar with Anita’s slaps, which made a cracking sound and left fingerprints, and with being snapped with piss-sheets. Or there were Grandma Bine’s bare-handed spankings, which stopped as soon as her hand began to hurt. Grandma Bine would also smack him “upside the head” or give him a “clip ‘round the ear,” which Mini-Marco thought of the same way he thought of the chewy candies she’d stuff in his pockets when he left, or the soft yellow cookies with the orange filling that he only got at her house.
Shorter Days Page 10