Broken Glass Park

by Alina Bronsky

  Then I think of a heavy object—an iron or a dumbbell. In old mysteries they always talk about candlesticks, and we have one of those at home that would do the trick. From the flea market.

  That could work. Here’s the scenario: Vadim comes to visit, to see Alissa and Anton. As usual—like he always used to before—he brings chocolate. “I’ll make us some tea,” I say helpfully, “and you can tell us about prison.” Vadim sits down at the table with his back to me, waiting for his tea. That was something he always used to do, too. He always sat and waited for things—a plate of pickled herring, a pen, a clean shirt.

  I hate men. All of them except Anton.

  Then the moment would come. Finally. Yes.

  The spot where Vadim had just a moment before had a head would be reduced to nothing more than a bloody mush. A bit of a shame that it would drip on our table and floor. Maybe I’ll put down a tarp. I’m not sure whether I’ll say anything as I do it: “This is for my mother and Harry,” for instance. Or, “Drop dead.” But hang on, this isn’t a soap opera I’m planning here. I just want to get it done. No need to sing a song or recite a poem.

  And by the way, that’s not how it’s going to go. Anton and Alissa can’t be there. Especially not Anton. Once is enough. I’ll tell Vadim that the kids are on their way home and will be right there. That he should have a seat so I can bring him a cup of tea.

  His kids. That’s what they used to be. Now they’re mine.

  Shooting him would also work. But I have to be realistic. The chances of me getting hold of a gun are slim. Though it would be appropriate. Vadim had a pistol for years. Anna says guns are just a way to compensate for a small cock. It’s the best line I’ve ever heard come out of her mouth.

  Back in the army, a hundred years ago, Vadim was supposed to have been a pretty good shot. He loved to talk about it whenever he couldn’t understand something he got in the mail from the authorities, or when he couldn’t find any clean socks, or when my mother went out at night without him, ignoring his tantrum. At those moments he would talk about the army and his face would get all pensive. “Back in the army,” he would say, “we skewered the bastards on the bayonets of our AK-47s.”

  Anton shivered and didn’t ask what Vadim meant by that.

  In the final stretch, before Vadim moved out, Anton often shook with fear in his presence. And never opened his mouth. Sometimes I thought he had completely lost the ability to speak. It didn’t surprise me at all that his teacher kept asking our mother to come in for parent-teacher conferences to discuss the fact that Anton “refused to participate”—as she put it in the letters she sent home—in class discussions.

  If he hadn’t continued to show “good effort” in his written work—even “very good” sometimes—the teacher would probably have just tolerated a student who sat pale and silently in the back row, barely distinguishable from the wall. But she was a young teacher, and still cared about her students. She wanted to find out why when this kid in her class was spoken to he would just clamp his mouth shut and refuse eye contact as adamantly as he refused to speak. So she tormented Anton with unusually determined efforts to engage with him, and my mother with invitations to come in to talk about the problem.

  The first one was actually a parents-teacher conference. Both of Anton’s parents went. Vadim let my mother tie his tie for him, but he kept swatting her hands away impatiently. My mother wasn’t as good at tying a tie as Anton was at his written school work.

  A steady stream of comments came from Vadim, too. Like, “I keep asking myself if maybe they switched the arms and legs when they were putting you together.” And, “Quit yanking me all around, you idiot.” And, “Why can’t you just tie the fucking thing?” And, “You are the most useless woman I’ve ever met.” And, “Get it done—how many years am I supposed to wait around while you figure it out?”

  Through all of this I was doing my homework at the kitchen table. Actually I wasn’t doing my homework because I was sitting there in a helpless rage, my fist clenched around my pen. I wasn’t upset at Vadim but at my mother—a situation I found myself in a lot back then.

  If someone did that to me, I’d pull the stupid tie until his throat started to rattle. Then I’d go into the kitchen and put the kettle on. And before he had a chance to loosen the noose and catch his breath, I’d go back in and pour boiling water over his head. That’s the bare minimum someone who talked to me that way could reckon with.

  And what do you do, I thought, scrawling angry, jagged lines across my binder. You don’t say a thing. You let yourself get pushed away and smile, lost in your own thoughts. You go back to helping him if he asks you to, and you even keep helping him when he viciously insults you. With the patience of an angel, you let yourself get walked all over—you, of all people. You, a person who takes such pride in being courteous to everyone around you.

  It pains me that you almost always remain civil. And I know it’s not because you’re afraid of him. You don’t even see him anymore, you don’t hear him. You couldn’t care less about him—and for that you feel bad. Despite what he’s like.

  You don’t take him seriously at all. You let him rage and scream at you and tell you you’re not allowed to do things—things you’ll obviously do anyway. You let him blather on about things he doesn’t have a clue about, which is pretty much everything except his glory days back in the army and the exact mechanical workings of our toilet.

  You don’t react when he spews his hateful tirades about the fucking Germans, who can’t manage their own country, the fucking Americans, who try to worm their way into everything like members of the biggest cult in the world, the fucking Italians, who talk so damn fast. About the Russian mobsters who turn their backs on their own country and about the Russian morons who don’t. About the fucking job placement office, which is never able to find the right job for such a world-class professional like Vadim. And about his piece-of-shit boss who dared to make a stupid comment—just too stupid for Vadim to take, too stupid for him to be able to stay on the job, making that piece of shit the only boss he’s ever had here, and for only a short time at that.

  And first and foremost, over and over, about fucking women. About the German women, who wear the ugliest clothes on earth, don’t shave their legs, and have the gall to earn more in a month than Vadim has in his entire life. And French women, sluts every one—even the way they talk sounds slutty, as if they all just want to be laid down and nailed. Turkish women, so disgustingly fat beneath the tents they wear, pumping out a new baby every year, drinking tea with their husbands’ other wives, and speaking German worse than Vadim himself.

  And about the Russian women, stupid and ugly, with vulgar taste in clothing, who think they can talk and laugh around Vadim with their backs to him, as if he weren’t even there. Of all people, they are best equipped to understand and appreciate Vadim’s unique qualities but—damn them!—they simply refuse to do so.

  And then there’s this one here, the one he took pity on and married despite the fact that she had an insufferable, illegitimate freak of a daughter on her hip. The one he generously gave two more kids—kids who didn’t fucking appreciate him nearly enough. Instead of listening to him ramble on for hours, they pored through pointless books by moronic writers. Instead of polishing Vadim’s shoes, the girls teach his son how to play chess. Instead of cooking, they cackle on the telephone with their friends. Whenever Vadim’s on his deathbed with the flu, they make tea with lemon for him, sure, but they sing as they do. As if it’s all fun and games.

  She acts in plays and gets applause. Her picture appears in the paper. People approach her on the street. The phone is constantly ringing. Always for her, only her. Nobody ever wants to talk to Vadim. And if they do, it’s only about one thing: “your wife this,” “your Marina that.”

  She shouldn’t think as a result that she’s somehow better than him. Under no circumstances should she ever be permitted to think she married an old, useless sack of shit, which is how he
sometimes feels about himself as he sits in front of the television morning, noon, and night, watching all those idiots who just waste Vadim’s valuable time—and get paid to do it.

  To make sure she never thinks that way, she can’t be told often enough who she really is: a useless wife who can’t run the household or make decent money running around at what she calls a job but that doesn’t seem fit to be called work at all.

  An uncaring mother who doesn’t iron her kids’ T-shirts, who has nothing against her kids making a mess doing arts and crafts or playing, who doesn’t care whether their hair is neatly cut—especially the one who is supposed to be a man. I should pull your hair right out myself; I’m sure everyone makes fun of you at school.

  A chaotic woman whose bureau is always messy and who can’t manage to have meals ready on time. No wonder the children are so directionless. They think they’re allowed to do whatever they want. Like yelling and screaming inside the apartment when Vadim is trying to watch TV.

  And a whore who can get herself off with a vibrator as if it were the real deal. Who goes out to the movies at night without her husband, who dyes her hair and wears it down. Who dresses as if she had a nice figure—maybe the Turks are onto something after all with their full-body curtains.

  You let him say all of this, you let him show all his disgust, I think bitterly, and the most you ever do is shrug your shoulders. Your most extreme facial expression is nothing more than a look of bottomless sorrow. Instead of thinking how to save yourself, you think about how to save him before he goes over the edge. You’re worried he’ll start to drink. You just don’t understand that his survival instinct is stronger than yours.

  You raise your voice only when he turns from you to the children. That’s his biggest weapon. He knows that’s the only way he can really hurt you. And that’s the only time you will strike back. When he’s shouting at Anton, he knows your broken-voiced threat to divorce him is serious. So usually he does that only at home. Anton is about as capable of defending himself as the little lemon tree on the windowsill. And he makes just as frail an impression as it does.

  I’m not sure the extent of the daily hell Anton experiences—Vadim holds back when I’m around and Anton never talks about it. The most common word I use around Vadim is “police.” And even though he always laughs, I can see the fear and doubt in his eyes.

  But he also knows I don’t want to hurt you. It’s a perennial woman’s mistake: I don’t want to cause you pain, so I allow you to be killed. I never do go to the police—in part because Vadim always pulls himself together around me, but mostly because I know you would never approve of it except in the most dire situation.

  You hope everything will somehow work out. One time you tell me you dream of him leaving on his own after he falls in love with someone new. Otherwise, you feel like you’d be kicking someone when he’s down. If somebody is on the ground, you can’t kick them. Just another one of the many noble but hollow rules you live by. When you tell me this, I have to laugh, long and sinister, until I start to cry. I’ll never forget the look on your face at that moment.

  You’ll never know why for years I left my room only once I was fully clothed, never in pajamas or a bathrobe. Or why I locked the door to my room at night, and why only now can I wear short sleeves or anything else remotely revealing. You always called me “buttoned up,” even “prudish.” You accepted it as my own peculiarity, and I never let on that there was something else behind it. I thought it would hurt you, that you wouldn’t be able to take it, that you would snap from the guilt and horror.

  Which means I enabled you to remain blind to him.

  Among the happiest moments of my life with Vadim were the victories I scored on the battlefield, little personal victories that affected only me. The look on his face when I kicked him—I could see the debate raging in his hate-filled eyes as he weighed whether to keep it up or to hit me back. Because that might leave clues I might not stay quiet about. I could see his fear as I sat at the kitchen table slowly turning the bread knife in my fingers and staring at him. And I could feel him slowly pull his knee away from mine under the table.

  But maybe I’m lying to myself, and the victory was really his. His triumph that I never left my laundry or any personal items in the bathroom and that I kept everything locked in my room. That I steered clear of him, meaning I spent almost all of my time at home in my room. And that I never said a word about any of it to my mother.

  I feel so horribly guilty thinking that maybe my silence was the railroad switch that sent the train onto the wrong track, headed for death.

  He who shoots gets shot, I think. How simple and just.

  It warms my heart.

  I still have a lot to read, I think. Read and study and think. He mustn’t stand a chance. No way to defend himself and no way to live through it.

  These are nice thoughts, but they’re taxing. I should spend some time on the other plan.

  I sit down that same night at the computer. I sit there for a long time, at least an hour. It’s harder than I thought it would be. It’ll probably be easier to strangle Vadim.

  All the scenes I want to write down seem to have vanished. Every syllable I try to capture seems banal. Warm hands and lullabies and dirty jokes and coffee by the liter—none of it hits the mark. All I can see is her face in my mind, and I begin to type just to avoid staring like Anton.

  “Red hair,” I write. “Dyed with henna as long as I can remember. What color was her hair before that? Probably some shade of brown. She once told me she found her first gray hair early. By the time she was thirty she had skeins of gray hair. She had the type of life that makes people prematurely gray. With the henna, her gray hair became streaks of light orange. Her eyes were light brown and big. Her mouth was big, too, and, like her eyes, was usually wide open. She talked and laughed a lot. Even when she read, she talked. She would always show up in front of me with a book in her hand and say, ‘Should I read a passage to you? Here’s an incredible paragraph.’ I would answer, ‘I’m doing my homework,’ or, ‘I’m trying to read something of my own.’ She read the passage anyway, and I never understood what was so great about it. I never really listened because it annoyed me and I was happier lost in my own thoughts.”

  I read through it again. I don’t cry.

  I go to bed early.

  In the morning I put on my sneakers with my eyes still closed. Maria is snoring loudly in her bed, and when I go to close her door so she doesn’t wake up the children, I see little Alissa next to her, half buried by Maria’s overflowing hips. Alissa’s in a hand-made floral nightgown. Memories of a pink sweater shoot through my head and I decide I need to do something about organizing the clothes.

  Maria listens to me.

  I run three times around the Emerald and then head off. I’m dragging. I haven’t run in a long time and wouldn’t have today if I hadn’t woken up with a sick, tense feeling. I try to run away from this feeling but just end up with stitches in my sides. So I shove my hands under my ribs and stand there wheezing in front of the newsstand.

  I’ve had a subscription to the local paper for the past year. I need to. If the Emerald were being torn down, for instance, Maria would probably only realize when they carried her out of the apartment in her chair. And anyway, reading the paper often pays off for school.

  I look at the headlines of the dailies, more out of a sense of duty than out of real interest.

  I wonder to myself who in this area buys these. Sometimes I feel like the only literate person in the entire Emerald. The rest of them carry half-empty bottles around in the pockets of their track pants, wrap smoked fish in bright-colored papers with headlines like “Who does the severed head belong to?” or “Government covers up evidence of another UFO landing,” and look suspiciously at anyone who uses German to speak to them. “Can’t he speak normal?” they ask.

  On this morning, my heart suddenly freezes—just for a second—then it kicks on again and jumps into my throat and
flutters there like a bird in distress. I gasp for breath and try to swallow in order to get my heart back down where it belongs.

  As I do this, I move closer so I can read a box in which one of the big Frankfurt papers highlights the main stories of the day. Under “local” I read: “A visit with the double-murderer Vadim E: ‘remorse is tearing my heart apart.’”

  His heart, my heart, I think. Maybe it would be a good idea to tear that organ right out of his chest and impale it on a spear for all to see. Actually I get queasy easily. I don’t like to watch when Maria guts a chicken and explains how you have to cut the oil gland off the back of the bird and how the part with the eggs is the ovaries. And how if you hold a severed chicken foot and pull the tendon in the front, the claws will make a fist—what’s so disgusting about that, sweetie?

  But for this one thing, I could get past any hang-ups.

  My running pants don’t have any pockets. No pockets on the jacket either. Otherwise I wouldn’t have my keys dangling from my neck, jangling like a cowbell.

  I have to read what’s in the paper right this second. In the amount of time it would take me to go upstairs and get money, the world could end. Five times.

  I look over at one of the Emerald’s second-floor windows. Normally there’d be a bald head sticking out of it, with an unlit, saliva-soaked cigarette stuck in the corner of its mouth.

  There’s nobody in the window. It’s still really early, and any sensible person who has to be awake at this hour is making a cup of coffee right about now. Or a second cup.

  All I can think is how glad I am Ingrid and Hans don’t see me grab the paper, roll it up, and tuck it under my jacket.

  On the staircase I open it up again and flip through it looking for the article about the woes of the aging Vadim E.

  The first thing that catches my eye is the byline—Susanne Mahler. She’s the writer. Only after that do I see the grotesque face. The sight of it makes me feel faint.