“The girl blind, too?”
If only it were that easy, I thought. “She’s in a wheelchair and is the prettiest girl in the world.”
“Shit,” said the Turk understandingly.
After ten minutes I realized he was fucking with me. Einhausen wasn’t that big. It was a dump with ten thousand residents, you could walk all the way through town in fifteen minutes.
“We almost there?”
“Almost there,” the Turk echoed. “What are you here for?”
“My father died,” I said and couldn’t believe that he was suddenly pissed off and yelled that I shouldn’t fuck with him. It took a lot of effort to convince him to still take me all the way to my destination.
I stood before a gray box that was mostly hidden behind a meter-high hedgerow that smelled like cough syrup. On the gate was a plaque with my last name on it, engraved in rounded letters. The place was a nightmare in concrete. After all those years in our historic landmarked building, I wasn’t prepared for this. For a second I wondered if maybe what came between my parents wasn’t Tamara at all but rather aesthetic differences. Those were harder to overcome than a pregnant au pair. Even under happier circumstances I wouldn’t have been happy to enter this mausoleum. But the taxi was already gone and the driver had kept my change. I rang the bell.
It buzzed and I pushed open the gate. The yard was wide and lined with low hedges that also reminded me of a cemetery. I headed toward the door, from which hung a wreath, that also reminded me of a . . . The door opened.
I attempted a smile so painstaking that it pulled at my ear.
In the doorway appeared a tyke with spiky blond hair, just like mine had been. He was wearing Star Wars pajamas and slippers with bunny ears. His expression suddenly became the famous painting by Edvard Munch. Then he disappeared in a flash and his Scream echoed from somewhere inside the house. As I got nearer to the door I could hear him swearing loudly that he would never do it again if the man with the hat would just please, please go away.
And then I landed in Tamara’s arms.
Unlike the old days I didn’t have to stand on my tiptoes to be able to look down Tamara’s shirt. I flushed thinking how present Tamara’s breasts had been during that year at our place. As far as I could tell, my perspective was the only thing that had changed in the equation.
“Sincere condolences,” I mumbled, blindsided by the slew of postpubescent thoughts hitting me. Then I finally looked her in the eyes.
In the past I’d always found Tamara very pretty. That was basically still true, even though my standard of beauty had shifted significantly because of Janne. Compared to Janne, any other woman looked like a rough draft And at the moment Tamara wasn’t exactly bursting with life. She had red splotches on her cheeks and dark rings under her bloodshot eyes. She looked about as old as Claudia. And just to prove it, Claudia came up beside her.
“My sweetie,” said Claudia, her lips trembling as she stretched out her arms to me.
I didn’t understand whatever it was she whispered in my ear. She probably passed on her condolences, too. I said, “Likewise,” and looked at her so as not to have to look at Tamara or at the decor inside this concrete grotto. The stone floor beneath my feet was black with white specks, and somewhere farther back a fireplace with a curved mantel crept into my field of vision.
But I couldn’t count the lines on my mother’s face forever, so I turned back to Tamara with a sigh. Everything that had happened to me leading up to this moment suddenly rushed through my head and I wanted to turn away to spare the young widow’s nerves.
But Tamara walked around me so she was standing directly in front of me. She grabbed my chin with her hand. Spellbound, she scanned my face, but when she went to remove my sunglasses I shoved her hand aside. I broke out in a sweat. I saved myself by staring once again at her cleavage.
“You look . . . ” Tamara exhaled. My cheeks began to tingle. Claudia coughed quietly.
“Tammy,” she said, “I think you need to check on the little one.”
I sat on the leather sofa next to Claudia, who was looking through some folder as if her life depended on it. On the floor above us, war had broken out. Tamara screamed in a language I took for Ukrainian, and Ferdi answered in German.
“I AM NOT GOING DOWNSTAIRS!!”
Ukrainian chatter.
“I’M SCARED ANYWAY!”
Ukrainian chatter.
“I DON’T BELIEVE YOU! PAPA NEEDS TO COME HOME!!”
Claudia looked at the ceiling and wiped a tear from her cheek.
“Leave the boy alone,” I shouted. “He’s not the only person who’s afraid of me.”
Tamara’s Ukrainian rose to a pitch that rattled my bones.
“HE IS NOT AND NEVER WAS MY BROTHER!” the child screamed.
“Marek, come upstairs so you can meet each other,” shouted Tamara.
“NOOOOOOO!! PLEASE NO!! PLEASE NO!!!”
There was nothing else I could do, so I covered my ears with my hands. My nerves weren’t so strong at the moment either. Claudia played as if she was just continuing to read something in her folder. Though it had been a long time since she flipped the page. I wondered whether it was her heartbeat or mine that I was hearing. I took one hand off my ear and took another apple from the glass bowl. I’d already eaten four just out of nervousness. There were three left. The hard chewing was calming.
Tamara came running down the stairs and made another attempt at hugging me.
“I’m sorry, Marek. Ferdi is stubborn. You were the same way once, heaven knows. I apologize. It’ll get better.”
“Hmmmhmmm.” My mouth was stuffed.
“The boy has just lost his father,” Claudia said almost as an aside.
“Which one?”
“Both.” Claudia looked at Tamara over her glasses. “Presumably both boys.”
Two hours later I was pining for the villa in Marenitz. It was unbearable. I had no idea what I was supposed to do here. Claudia made it easy on herself by keeping her nose buried in the paperwork and pulling something out every once in a while for Tamara.
“You need to copy this. This needs to be filed. This is for the life insurance.”
“Okay,” answered Tamara without looking at the documents.
Ferdi refused to come downstairs as long as I was in the living room. He shouted something about frightening glasses. Claudia assured Tamara not very convincingly that it wasn’t so bad. I said I was used to children crossing the street because of me. Adults, too. Tamara looked at me. “Why?”
I wasn’t sure whether she was pretending or she was really that stupid. I couldn’t remember anymore what she’d been like in the brains department. I watched as she fumed around her tiled home, changed outfits, called somebody, broke down crying, screamed at Ferdi, made tea and left it sitting around, went out to the postbox to get the latest condolence cards. The entire town of Einhausen seemed in a hurry to proclaim their sorrow over Father in writing. In some envelopes was money that made its way into Tamara’s jeans.
“You should write it all down,” said Claudia. “You need to keep track so you can send personal thank you notes to everyone.”
“I will.” Tamara tossed the envelopes behind the sofa.
I had to admit that my father had chosen a death that you didn’t need to be ashamed of. He didn’t die miserably of cancer or just keel over, leaving me to worry about what health problems he’d passed on to me. He died while climbing a mountain in Switzerland.
“He climbed mountains?” I asked, pleasantly surprised. The father I remembered had a big belly and hamster cheeks, and everything on him drooped. The idea of him outfitted for a climb, on the side of a mountain, exceeded my powers of imagination.
“He had just started.” Tamara didn’t bother to try to wipe away the steady stream of tears. “And now he’s fallen
!” She buried her face in a sofa cushion.
I patted her back awkwardly. “At least it was a cool way to die.”
“It’s an idiotic way to die,” groaned Tamara through the pillow. “Why does someone who’s nearly sixty suddenly need to start climbing mountains?”
“What do you mean nearly sixty? He was only two years older than me.” Claudia looked up from her folder for a moment.
Tamara gave her a look that said to her it didn’t make much of a difference.
Ferdi sat under the table. He’d been hiding under there since I’d left the guest room and come downstairs. The tablecloth hung down and sometimes rippled. Now and then I saw the flash of a dark eye.
“Ferdi, durak, perestan,” said Tamara.
“Not in front of the child,” Claudia said.
Tamara reached out her arm and pushed my hair to the side.
“Your sunglasses make a monster out of you,” she said without acknowledging Claudia’s comment. “Otherwise you’re totally sweet. You always were. I would like to have adopted you. I thought it was awful that you left here straight away.”
I looked over at Claudia. She continued to study the folder. Her chin looked a little more square than usual.
There wasn’t another moment of peace.
The village mortician came, a man who looked like he had just stepped out of a Viagra commercial, with silver hair and a tailored suit, his face so serious it made you sick. He shook my hand and said he couldn’t find adequate words to express his feelings about my loss. I nodded.
He also had a thick folder under his arm and exchanged it for the even thicker one Claudia had prepared for him. The three of them sat at the table and talked, that is, Claudia and the mortician talked and Tamara sniffled into her handkerchief. They had invited me to join their roundtable but I declined. I had nothing to say anyway, and I had no desire to sniffle.
I sat with a photo album in my lap but couldn’t bring myself to open it. Tamara had insisted that I look at it. Claudia agreed that it could be helpful. Oddly enough, she herself had no desire to sit with me while I did. The album began shortly before Ferdi’s birth and took in his first year. Five more albums waited in a stack on the coffee table.
I didn’t want to snub Tamara, and anyway I was a little curious. But I wasn’t prepared for the naked photo of the two of them, Tamara heavily pregnant, my father presumably not. I covered his nakedness with my thumb and peered over at Claudia. I had no idea that my father had been so frisky. There certainly weren’t any photos like that in my baby album.
I flipped quickly past the first shots of the slop-covered, purple thing, too.
“You can compare them to your baby pictures,” Tamara had suggested as she’d dug out the albums.
“He doesn’t have any anymore,” said Claudia insensitively.
“What? Where did they go?”
“He destroyed them all. Last year.”
“Really? Why?” Tamara turned to me. I acted as if I hadn’t heard her. I was pissed off at Claudia.
I leafed through the heavy pages. Ferdi in a stroller, Ferdi in a high chair, Ferdi in a baby carrier. Where was my father? Here, at the beach. He was building a sand castle, and Ferdi was crawling away from it. He had built sand castles with me, too. And he probably wasn’t in the other photos because he had taken them all.
“What was he like?” I asked Tamara.
She waved her hand. “You know yourself.”
Only I didn’t know anymore. When my parents were still together, Claudia usually stayed with me, and she’d always been in a bad mood. My father had worked day and night but despite that he was always in a good mood as far as I could remember. He had loved his work. I liked to hear his stories while we cooked Sunday dinner, stories about murders without bodies, crooked witnesses who were too stupid to keep their stories straight, and judges he’d made livid by making sixty accusations of judicial bias per session. I kind of worshipped him for having such an exciting job. Not like Claudia, who just helped wives negotiate more money out of their divorces and never talked about her clients on principle.
Suddenly the memories overwhelmed me and took my breath away. I hadn’t known that they were all still there. How my father and I would go shopping in Einhausen on Saturday if for a change he didn’t have to disappear to his office. He carefully picked out stalks of rhubarb and talked with people at the weekly market. Everyone knew him. He asked the sellers about their families, they told him about their daughters-in-law and grandchildren. He was constantly greeted, people called him “Herr Barrister”; it didn’t bother him that he constantly had to stop and shake hands, on the contrary. They knew his parents and grandparents and in the unofficial rankings he was somewhere between the mayor and the parish minister and he basked in the recognition. I walked along holding his hand, looking at the shoes of the people who interrupted us while we were shopping, and I was unaware how much rubbed off on me. The only one who seemed troubled by the majestic appearance of Herr Barrister and his crown prince was Claudia. She also missed Berlin and called Einhausen “Swinehausen.”
And for the first time I realized that everything could have been totally different than I’d always believed. Maybe my father took up with Tamara only after Claudia decided she wanted to split up with him. What did I know. I had never asked her and didn’t think this was exactly the right moment either. No idea if there would ever be a better moment.
At dinner, Ferdi sat with us at the table for the first time. Tamara had probably bribed him. His blond hair was standing up like the wet feathers of a newly hatched chick, and his eyes were glued to the contents of his plate. It didn’t seem like the right time to discuss the correct usages of died and dead with him. Tamara had cooked cream of wheat for everyone, a quick meal, and, as she explained to Claudia, in her homeland, “oddly enough, a mourning dish.”
Ferdi sprinkled sugar and cinnamon over his bowl by the spoonful. A puff of powder went up as he began to stir it in.
“Ferdi, perestan,” said Tamara. Perestan was apparently something like a second name for him.
“Ferdi, have you shown your cool older brother with the unbelievably nice sunglasses your toy cars?”
Ferdi shook his head and shoved an empty spoon into his mouth.
“Marek would really like to see them. Isn’t that right, Marek, you want to see Ferdi’s toy cars?”
“Oh yes.” I straightened my glasses. “That’s why I came here, actually.”
Ferdi risked a quick glance at me. There was a bottomless horror in his eyes.
“I have plenty of my own at home,” I quickly added. “But will you show me yours?”
He shook his head quickly and adamantly.
“Fu, nekrasivo, Ferdi.”
“Leave him alone,” said Claudia flatly.
“Why do you look like that?” Ferdi suddenly asked, shoving a full spoon into his mouth this time, chewing the bite busily, and looking around as if he hadn’t said anything.
“It was a Rottweiler,” I said with the usual melancholy. And when he looked up uncomprehendingly, “A Rottweiler is a big, mean dog with really sharp teeth.”
“See, Ferdi,” said Tamara. “Do you still want a dog?”
He nodded just as quickly and decisively as he had shaken his head just before.
“Papa promised me a dog,” he said, slumping closer to the table. And then I saw that he was crying.
Maybe I had never really seen a child crying before. Maybe I had never really understood why on earth they would be crying. But now, as I looked at Ferdi’s little wet, contorted face, I suddenly had a lump in my throat. I was ready to do anything to get him to stop crying. I didn’t want him ever to cry again.
“Ferdi,” I said. “Stop crying. I hate dogs more than anything else in the world, but I’ll get you one.”
Claudia put down her spoon and lo
oked at me.
“Actually I need two dogs,” I mused aloud. “I recently promised a girl a dog as well.”
Ferdi stopped chewing. For the first time, his dark eyes rested on my face for a bit of time. Probably all he saw was his future dog because suddenly he started smiling. I had never seen him smile before. I was amazed that he even could. I stared at him with my mouth open until Tamara tried to pinch my thigh under the table and missed the mark.
That evening Ferdi, at Tamara’s prompting, loudly said “goodnight”—first to Claudia and then also to me. He looked at his toes in his red no-slip socks as he did.
“Sleep well, my dear,” Claudia answered sweetly. I looked at her. She had never spoken to me in such an artificially sweet tone.
“Sleep well, gnome,” I said.
Tamara blew us both kisses.
“She likes being the center of attention, don’t you think?” asked Claudia after Tamara had disappeared upstairs with Ferdi riding her piggyback.
“She’s still a child herself,” said Claudia.
“She’s at least twenty-four years old.”
“Exactly.”
Claudia sat on the leather sofa, snuggled a throw pillow, and looked somehow lost. Upstairs Tamara began to sing. A few minutes later Ferdi joined in. Claudia looked up at the ceiling and stealthily wiped her face.
Maybe she was thinking about how nice it was when I was Ferdi’s age, sweet, blond, and with a real face.
“Is he really gone? Forever?” I asked.
“No idea,” said Claudia. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that this is all a farce. I just can’t believe it. I keep thinking the door is going to open any minute and he’ll walk in.” She covered her face with her hands.
I had to think about how one day in the hospital, after the pain had subsided, I looked in the mirror and imagined that everything was the same way it had always been.
I had the guest room in the attic, with angled walls and a skylight window through which you could definitely have seen the stars on a cloudless night. The house was gigantic, Claudia was on a floor below that I hadn’t even seen yet. Ferdi’s room must have been there, too, and Tamara’s, which she had until a few days ago shared with my father. There was also a sauna, a huge wine cellar, and a fitness room full of machines.
Just Call Me Superhero Page 11