Just Call Me Superhero

by Alina Bronsky

  And Janne and I were alone.

  She sat next to the grill and held her hands, shivering, over the coals. I pushed a few plates together on the table. I was oddly calm, and my hands weren’t trembling.

  “Janne,” I mumbled. “Tell me, what can I do for you, Janne?”

  She kept holding her hands closer and closer to the coals until they were practically touching them.

  “Don’t burn yourself.”

  “They’re not hot anymore,” she answered dully.

  I went to her, squatted in front of her, and pulled her arm to me. I kissed her dirty hand and put it on my cheek. Her eyes were so dark that I barely recognized her.

  “I love you.”

  “Bullshit.” Janne tried to pull her hand away, but I didn’t let her. “Stop,” she said.

  I took her other hand, blew the ashes off it, and put it to my lips.

  “Don’t be so bitter. Everybody loves you. You don’t have to pretend.”

  “Like you have any clue.” Suddenly she started crying.

  I hadn’t reckoned with this. I never thought she would ever cry in front of me. And that the tears would be so big and glitter in the moonlight as they rolled down Janne’s cheeks.

  “You look so beautiful when you cry,” I said.

  She pulled away from me and hit me in the face. With the palm of her hand, on the cheek, a weak awkward slap. It didn’t even hurt. Still, it was the second smack of the day for my poor face. For a second I was shocked, then I approached the wheelchair from the other side.

  “Don’t forget the other cheek,” I said, smiling.

  “You’re an idiot. Do you not understand what you said?”

  “You look so beautiful when you cry.”

  “Exactly.”

  Now she really started to sob. It was no longer single tears but torrents that left a wet trail on her face. She sniffled. It didn’t look so nice anymore. Her eyes swelled and narrowed to slits. Her nose was probably all red, too, but you couldn’t really tell in the dark. She sobbed like an old lady at a funeral and her shoulders trembled.

  I put my arm around her. The tears tasted salty, what else.

  “Don’t cry,” I said. “Look, you have no reason to cry. And you look most beautiful of all when you smile. Stop crying. You’ll have your movie and your face will look down from all the billboards and smile, everyone will recognize you and you’ll have to give autographs.”

  She shook her head. I pushed her over to the house and up the ramp. She gestured with her hand that she wanted to go straight to her room. Maybe she was afraid to be seen because she didn’t look as good at that moment as she usually did. She kept turning her face away from me the whole time.

  “You have to stop this bullshit,” I said. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Then take off your glasses.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Of course I do. Take them off, they’re stupid.”

  “Screw you, Janne,” I said.

  She rolled into her room ahead of me; I followed her and sat down on the bed.

  She rolled over to the dresser and pulled out a bright white shawl and put it around her shoulders, shivering. Then she rolled over to the mirror and grabbed her hairbrush. I watched her. Nothing could be more beautiful than watching a girl brush her hair. Of course it was even more beautiful if the girl was yours.

  “Do you want to marry me, Janne?” I asked. “Right now, or when we’re older—it doesn’t matter to me.”

  She laughed. Watching the brush glide through her dense, shiny hair had a hypnotizing effect on me. I had to yawn so wide that my jaw cracked. I untied the laces of my sneakers, took them off, stretched out on the bed, and buried my nose in the pillows.

  I was woken up by someone shining a flashlight in my face. I tried to push it away. But it wasn’t a flashlight after all but a ray of sunlight, so I had to move away from it. My nose tickled and I ran a hand over it and noticed a strand of black hair between my fingers.

  Suddenly it all came back to me and I sat up.

  Janne was sleeping next to me. We were sharing a blanket. She was under it and I was on top of it. She was wearing a long nightgown with lace trim. On anyone else it would have looked absurd. Janne’s hair was in a ponytail. The nightgown had slipped down over one shoulder.

  It was light out, way too light out. At home I always kept the shades down. I went to straighten my sunglasses but my hand found nothing but air.

  I didn’t have to look for long. They were sitting on the dresser. Right next to the hairbrush.

  Fucking hell, I thought.

  I climbed carefully across Janne, who was breathing evenly, and walked on my tiptoes across the room and slid the glasses onto my nose. I turned around again. Janne looked unimaginably beautiful. I had spent the night in her bed and slept through it all.

  It was a gorgeous morning. Friedrich, with suds up to his elbows, was scrubbing the grill grates out on the lawn. Kevin was still quietly snoring in the cot. The guru wasn’t there.

  “Did he take off?” I asked Friedrich, pointing at the empty stretcher.

  “Showering.” Friedrich wiped his face with his forearm, leaving soap foam on his eyebrows.

  It looked like there had been an orgy on the lawn. Empty red wine bottles lying around under the table. Paper plates and bits of tinfoil fluttering in the wind. A little tabby cat sat on the table licking the salad bowl out.

  I went back into the house and looked through the kitchen cabinets for a garbage bag. Couldn’t find one so I grabbed a shopping bag instead. Ran into the guru, his face looked rumpled and he reeked of aftershave.

  “Yes, I’m ashamed,” he said. “I just can’t understand how it happened.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. He might as well feel bad—it never hurt anyone.

  “Is anyone else injured?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. Then I took the shopping bag outside and began to pick up the trash.

  We planned to have breakfast in the garden together around noon. An hour beforehand I started knocking on Janne’s door.

  “Can’t right now,” she called, sounding happy, and I wondered how she knew it was me who was knocking. Or whether she thought it was somebody else. Or whether she even cared. Every time I thought about her taking off my glasses, I got chills down my spine.

  Kevin was standing in our room complaining of a migraine, trying to get a pain reliever out of Marlon. Marlon said he didn’t have any.

  “That can’t be true,” Kevin whined, grabbing Marlon’s T-shirt. “I can tell you have some. Look again.”

  I watched this play and weighed my desire to steer clear of Marlon against the need to talk to him. I felt like a pig, but a lucky pig.

  So I decided to wait on my bed until Marlon had gotten rid of Kevin. Then at some point Kevin started to cry. I couldn’t watch. I jumped up and starting rummaging around in my suitcase for my pills. I pushed one out of the blister pack and handed it to Kevin.

  “It’s good for everything,” I said. “Consider yourself warned.”

  “You are my savior.” Kevin pressed the hand with the pill to his forehead theatrically and put his other hand to his heart. The he blew a kiss to Marlon and, when he didn’t react, another one to me, and then minced out of the room.

  *

  “Marlon,” I said when we were finally alone. “I have to talk to you.”

  He was standing sideways to me with his hands in his pockets. He swayed back and forth. Somehow it reminded me of a tiger behind bars.

  “Marlon,” I said. “I really don’t know how to say this. The problem is that you look absolutely perfect, even if you can’t tell, and I am as ugly as the night and always will be. You can’t possibly understand what that means. Not only that, you’re cool, and I seem to have forever lost the ability
to strike the right tone.”

  “Your phone rang all night,” he interrupted.

  My cell. I picked it up. I hadn’t looked at it a single time since we got here. I had forgotten to send Claudia a message to say I’d arrived safely. She was probably worried sick. She might not have had the guru’s number, either. She didn’t even know exactly where we were.

  I tipped over the chair as I searched for my phone in my suitcase, in the wardrobe, and finally found it in a jacket pocket. I had eleven missed calls, all from Claudia. She started dialing me yesterday night and didn’t stop until the early morning hours. There was only one text, from a number I didn’t recognize. I read it first. It said: “Marek our father is died come cwick. Ferdi.”

  At first I took it for a joke. Somebody was trying to trick me. Some huckster wanted me to call that fraudulent number and it would charge me hundreds of euros. If not for those five letters. Ferdi. Ferdi was the little son of my father and my former au pair. My half-brother who I’d never seen. The baby in that photo six years ago. Ferdinand. Claudia had sighed, “How could you do that to a child?”

  Suddenly my knees buckled and I was afraid to listen to Claudia’s messages. She hadn’t sent me any texts because she wanted to tell me directly. I did not want to hear it directly. I wanted to hide my phone under a pillow, lock the door to the room, and go have breakfast. I didn’t want anything to do with this.

  Marlon came closer. No matter what everybody said, I no longer believed he was really blind. He asked, “What is it?” and I held out the phone with the text on it. He didn’t move.

  “I got a message.” Then I read it to him.

  “What’s Ferdi?” asked Marlon.

  I didn’t answer.

  “And is it your father who’s dead?”

  Again I said nothing.

  “This brother, does he have a strange sense of humor?”

  “He’s still little,” I said. “Six or so.”

  “Then you need to get going,” said Marlon. “To the funeral.”

  I had no idea what was to be done. What I should do or say. I felt like a first grader who’d accidentally wandered into an empty classroom. I wondered whether I really needed to go to my father’s funeral since we’d been out of touch for a while. But my father had visited me in the hospital, so I guess I also had to go to his funeral.

  Just to be sure, I asked Marlon his opinion.

  “Don’t be crazy,” he said.

  I read the text again. It still said the same thing. Marek our father is died come cwick. Ferdi. The letters were all still there.

  “Who was trying to reach you all night?” asked Marlon.

  “My mother.”

  “Call her back.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Do it. It’ll just get worse otherwise.”

  I nodded and dialed Claudia’s number. And as soon as I heard her voice on the line I knew there was no hope that it had all been a misunderstanding.

  A little brother, how cute,” said Kevin. “Do you have a photo?”

  Richard looked at him and shook his head. The guru was holding his head in his hands and still didn’t look good. I clenched my phone as if somebody else would die if I let go of it.

  Claudia had cried on the phone. I had grown accustomed to her never crying anymore. I was ready to do anything to keep it that way. And now this.

  I truly didn’t understand why she was even crying. Why she sobbed “why now,” as if today was so much worse than yesterday or the day after tomorrow. He had left her, and she’d been happy without him for a long time now. They hadn’t been in touch, at least as far as I knew. She still had Dirk, I thought tolerantly.

  “Ach, Marek,” she said after I asked her about that. “You really don’t understand anything.”

  I sat at the breakfast table and they all stared at me. All so sorrowful and sympathetic, what I really wanted to do was shout at them that they should look at me with normal faces again now.

  “He left us when I was little!” I said to try to wipe that look off their faces. “He didn’t even call me on my birthday anymore or send me anything. I don’t give a shit, do you understand?” No idea why my voice cracked.

  The funny thing was that I didn’t look at Janne at all. I looked at Marlon. As soon as I’d come to the table with my phone in hand my heart hadn’t skipped its usual beat at the sight of her. A pretty girl in a wheelchair. Marek our father is died. Now she was looking at me with the same affected look as the rest of them. I was back on the other side of the glass.

  I got up and went across the lawn to the edge of the woods. I tried to make a call from there but the reception was no good. I kept dialing the number that the text had come from, it beeped, and then there was absolute silence on the line. Then I realized I should try from a different spot. As soon as I walked to a spot with better reception, the phone rang. It was Claudia.

  I was relieved that her voice was halfway recognizable this time.

  “The funeral is in four days,” said Claudia. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to pick you up before that. I have to help Tamara, she’s completely out of sorts. You’ll have to take the train. Can you manage that? Or should I send Dirk to get you?”

  “Do I really have to?” I asked.

  “Marek, I’m begging you. I know it’s difficult. I know you’re . . . with your new friends. But these things happen when they happen. He is after all . . . your father.”

  “I haven’t had a real father for ages,” I said.

  “If you only knew,” said Claudia.

  I sat on my suitcase beneath the information board that had no information at all. The train back to Berlin was supposed to come in half an hour. They all wanted to take me to the station but I refused. I had said that I wanted to be alone and that seemed to make sense to them. I also didn’t want the farmer and his tractor. I pulled my suitcase the long way, staying on the paved path, and my thoughts rattled in rhythm with the wheels.

  They gathered around me to say goodbye and I set off quickly and didn’t look back even once. I had a lump in my throat but I couldn’t tell if it was because of my father or Janne or general Rottweiler-weltschmerz. It felt as if I’d been here for weeks, not two nights, one of which was awful and the other would have been the most beautiful night of my life if I hadn’t have slept through it. I tried to imagine myself going to another group meeting back in Berlin and I started laughing.

  The loudspeaker crackled loudly and a few minutes later the regional train pulled in. I hoisted up my suitcase. The train was nearly empty and nobody looked at me. With my index finger I felt my face under my sunglasses to make sure nothing had changed over the last couple of days. Everything was the same as ever. If my father had seen me again it would have cost him a few nights of sleep for sure. At least in that regard he’d been lucky.

  Claudia had sent me the address, with annotations, in a text. My father had lived in a village near Frankfurt called Einhausen, the same place where he and I had both been born. After he had discovered his love for our au pair, Claudia had gone back to Berlin with me. My father was born and bred in the state of Hesse and had his office there where his family had lived for generations.

  I had to switch trains in Berlin, Hannover, and Frankfurt. The ride seemed like it would never end. The phone stuck in my hand. Claudia kept sending texts, where was I and how was I feeling. I wasn’t feeling a thing.

  I didn’t have a phone number for Janne. Not even the guru’s number or anybody else’s number. Maybe I had the list with everyone’s contact info stuck in my suitcase somewhere, but probably not. Marlon would now have Janne to himself in Marenitz—oddly enough that thought didn’t upset me at all.

  What was funny was that I almost missed Marlon more.

  An old lady in a blue uniform, with swollen feet, pushed the refreshment cart down the aisle. Badly damaged
venous valves, I thought, and I ordered myself a coffee. She took my coins without counting them and handed me a lukewarm paper cup.

  People were not in such sound condition as I’d always thought. I let my gaze sweep over the backs of heads that I could see from my seat. Some of these people probably thought they were healthy and always would be. I used to think the same thing. My father, too, probably, and now he was dead.

  Claudia had said that I should take a taxi from the station. They didn’t have time to pick me up because they needed to stay with Tamara and the little one. It was tougher than I thought to get a taxi. There wasn’t a single one waiting at the tiny station. I walked all around it, startling a couple of teenagers with beers in their hands. I wondered whether I’d be standing here if my father had used a condom with our au pair. Then with a sigh I opened the map function on my phone and tried to figure out which way I had to walk.

  As I set out across a parking lot a taxi showed up. A man with a black mustache sat at the wheel, probably a Turk rather than a Pakistani I decided as I slid into the back seat next to some bags. I told him the address. He looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  “Who did that?” he asked.

  “A Rottweiler.” It had been a while since anyone had asked about it. About a week. An eternity.

  “My brother-in-law had a Rottweiler.” The Turk sounded as if he was doing me a favor telling me. “Real nice. But such teeth!”

  “If it was up to me I’d have them all ground into bonemeal. As far as I’m concerned, that could go for every dog on the planet.”

  The Turk shook his head. “Not all. My brother-in-law’s Rottweiler is nice. But you really look different. What does your girl say?”

  “She’s getting off with a blind guy,” I summed up our complicated love triangle for him.