“Intense,” he says, relaxed. He adds with pride: “I didn’t grunt at all.”
“I noticed.”
“But I almost exploded as a result.”
“Fortunately only almost.”
“No, actually I did.”
I have to laugh.
“Did it hurt?” Felix asks.
“Is it supposed to? No, it didn’t.”
“Me either,” he says.
The mosquito stops buzzing. I savor the silence. The only problem is that Felix is taken over by a sudden spell of talkativeness. He turns onto his side and snuggles up to me.
“If it wasn’t that great for you,” he says in my ear, “it’s just because you’re inexperienced and need to practice more.”
“What?” I shout. “You’re the one who needs to practice.”
“Okay,” he says quickly, “let’s practice some more.”
“Not with me.”
“Then with who?”
“Try Paz.”
He pulls himself a few inches away from me. “You’re really mean,” he says, hurt.
“I know. And you’re really chatty. I thought men fell asleep right afterwards?”
Felix curls up. “Not me,” he says. “I don’t feel like sleeping. Not at all.”
“Then give me my clothes. They’re over there on the floor. With yours.”
“Why me? Why don’t you get them yourself?”
“Because you are the man here.”
This seems to make him brighten. “You can’t look,” he says sternly. I pull the covers over my face.
“Where is your mother anyway?” I ask from under the covers.
“Here,” Felix says. “Hey, you’re not supposed to look!”
“Yeah, but when you say ‘here’ what do you expect?” I say.
“I meant there.”
I look where he’s pointing. The TV that’s been going the whole time. A man and a woman are anchoring a news broadcast.
“What do you mean, there?” I ask.
“The woman on TV—that’s my mother.”
“No way,” I say. To say I’m surprised is an understatement.
“Why not? That’s her.”
Just then their names appear in subtitles beneath their faces. Johann Keller and Martina Trebur.
“Amazing,” I say. “What’s she doing on the tube?”
“That’s her job. You can see that. In Berlin.”
“Are your parents split up?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Why did you stay with your father?”
“Why wouldn’t I? I didn’t want to move to Berlin. And I don’t like her new boyfriend. I like it here. I have everything I need right here.” He throws me my sweater, pants, and socks one after the other. He turns off the TV.
“Should we go out somewhere together?” says Volker that evening.
“Where,” says Felix suspiciously.
“I was thinking we could go someplace for dinner. Maybe that Italian place you liked recently, Felix. No reason always to stay home. Or we could go to the movies. What do you think, Sascha?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Whatever.”
“You say that about everything. What a couple of drips you both are. I was different at your age.”
“What were you like?” asks Felix and closes his eyes, relaxed.
“I definitely didn’t waste my weekends sitting around at home.”
“Home,” says Felix, “is the best place.”
“I should take away your computer.”
“Over my dead body.”
“If you want to go out, I’ll go with you,” I say. “To the Italian place, to the movies, or both.”
“Well, if you two are going, I’ll go,” says Felix. “I’m home alone all the time.”
“My point exactly,” Volker says.
We get into the silver Audi and drive to a neighboring town where there’s a little cinema. Felix and I sit in the back seat because we can’t agree on who should sit up front next to Volker. My gaze jumps back and forth between the back of Volker’s gray head of hair and the view out the window. Felix looks at me. I don’t look in his direction because whenever I do he looks away sheepishly. So sheepishly that it’s as if this afternoon never happened. As if we just met.
I find it funny.
Before we go to the movies, we sit at a dark wooden table at the little pizzeria. Volker orders wine. “I’ll have the same,” says Felix, and so do I. We trade toppings from our pizzas. I give Felix the cheese from mine; I take his mushrooms and hot peppers. We laugh a lot.
“Give me that,” says Felix, reaching out with his fork.
“Hands off my plate,” says Volker. “This is for me and me alone.” He observes us with a sympathetic and somewhat wistful gaze. I feel suddenly sad. Felix tells a joke and I forget to laugh.
“What’s showing?” I ask.
“At the cinema? ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ About gay cowboys. They finally got a copy of it here,” says Volker. “Everybody else seems to have seen it twice already.”
“There’s no point to going to the movies,” Felix says. “Not anymore. Cinemas are dying out. The movie will be out on DVD soon anyway.”
“But I want to see it on the big screen,” Volker says. “You’re just not interested in the film because there aren’t any girls in it.”
“None at all?” asks Felix, appalled.
I sit between the two of them at the movie.
It’s an old-fashioned cinema, everything covered in plush, dark-red velvet. Volker has put a huge bucket of popcorn on my lap. The place is full. My elbow rubs up against Volker and he doesn’t pull his arm away. I break out in a sweat.
Felix keeps reaching into the bucket of popcorn.
“Just take it,” I whisper.
“I don’t want it,” he whispers back. Then he forgets to take his hand out of the bucket and leaves it on top of mine. It’s warm, moist, and covered with popcorn crumbs.
I carefully pull my hand away.
Felix pulls his out of the bucket.
Volker has in the meantime moved his arm. His eyes are fixed on the screen. I look at him in profile for a long time. Either he doesn’t want to notice or he really doesn’t notice.
I shake Felix’s hand off my knee in annoyance and shake the bucket of popcorn off my lap in the process.
After half an hour I forget about everything else because the movie gets interesting.
Shortly before the end of the film, a woman in the row behind us starts to cry—so loudly that I’m distracted and turn around to look at her. Right then Volker and I exchange a glance. His lips open. He mouths a word. “Sad,” I think he says, and I shrug my shoulders questioningly. He points at the seat next to me with his eyes.
I turn around and look at Felix. His face is all wet.
Volker’s lips move again. “Console him,” I hear.
“I don’t want to,” I whisper.
Felix looks over at us suspiciously and wipes his face with his hand.
Afterwards Volker waits patiently as we watch all the credits. We walk silently to the car. Felix’s eyes are red. I know he’s embarrassed about crying.
“What did you think?” Volker asks. There’s no answer for a while.
“Good,” I say finally, because I don’t want to be rude. But I don’t feel like talking about it. “It was pretty decent.”
“What enjoyable company,” Volker mumbles. “What lively conversation. Next time I’ll take somebody from the nursing home. They couldn’t be less lively than you two.”
We drive home in silence.
I’m happy when I flop down on the white bed in the guestroom. It no longer smells so unfamiliar. It occurs to me that I haven’t called home yet. They haven’t called me either. I consider sending a message to Maria. One of those voice messages, where you type in a text message and a computer reads it aloud at the other end. Preferably something in Russian—it sounds particularly strange when the speech
synthesis program tries to pronounce things written in a foreign language.
I try to think of something funny to write. But then my door opens slowly and quietly and suddenly Felix is standing next to my bed in a T-shirt and boxers.
“You?” I say in an unfriendly tone. “There’s no way I’m going for it twice a day.”
“I didn’t come for that,” Felix says quickly. “You said your feet get cold. Volker always turns the heat down overnight. He’s always too warm.”
“When did I say that?” I say, realizing in the same instant that my feet are indeed cold.
Felix sits down nervously on the edge of the bed. He has a questioning look on his face.
“Suit yourself,” I say, moving sideways to make room for him to lie down next to me.
The bed is much narrower than his. The tips of our noses touch. I can feel his fresh breath. It smells like toothpaste but also, oddly enough, like chocolate. It’s as if he has just eaten a chocolate-covered mint. In the dark his pupils are so dilated that it looks like he has black eyes.
I throw the covers over him and roll over so I’m not facing him.
He shifts around a little and then snuggles up to me. I’m warm immediately.
He wraps his arms around me and clasps his hands in my lap. I unclasp them and hold them so they don’t start to wander around.
“They’re good right there,” I say.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“And what about here?”
“Not there.”
Felix sighs in my ear.
“Do you want to sleep?” he asks.
“Yes.”
He sighs again.
I lie there awake for a long time. Felix’s breath stirs the back of my hair at regular intervals. I can feel the hair move back and forth.
I think about the cowboys in the movie and can’t fall asleep.
“Felix,” I say quietly, “do you want to hear a story?”
He jolts awake. I can hear him blinking.
“Don’t know,” he says. “Depends.”
“It doesn’t have a happy ending,” I say.
Felix is silent, breathing.
“There was once a woman,” I say. “A pretty woman, who was smart in her own way. But in other ways she was stupid. She couldn’t protect herself. At some point she fell under a spell and was struck by a sort of mental blindness. She got married to a man and had two kids with him. She already had an older daughter from a previous relationship.”
Felix holds my feet between his. It feels good.
“Her husband was a rotten man,” I continue. “The woman kept wanting to leave him. But he always hemmed and hawed about how she couldn’t leave him. She probably thought he’d have a complete breakdown at some point. Or perhaps she wanted to have a breakdown herself instead. The man was short-tempered and jealous, and he shouted at her a lot and sometimes hit her.
“One day the whole family moved to another kingdom. The spell was broken. She managed to kick the asshole out. He was absolutely irate, hit rock bottom, and so forth. But she left him anyway.
“He settled down a little. He regularly visited his old family, as he called them, especially his two sweet kids. He didn’t get along well with the older daughter, who wasn’t his. She had always hated him and he knew it. He was also afraid of her. He knew that if he so much as laid a hand on her, on either of his kids, or on the woman, the older daughter would go straight to the cops.
“One day the woman met a prince. But he was disguised and nobody realized he was a prince. She was happy for a while, and so were her children. He really was a prince. When he was around, everything was good.
“But the ex-husband wasn’t happy about this. He saw how well his old family was doing without him. And he saw that his former children loved the prince, too. He was worried they would realize what an asshole their father really was. He wanted to stop this from happening. He wanted to do something about it and came up with a plan.
“He bought candy for the kids. He went to see his old family and none of them realized that on this day he had a pistol beneath his jacket. He gave the kids the chocolate. The woman was home, too. Along with her prince. And the man began to curse them out—until they asked him to leave.
“And he left. But he didn’t go far. Instead he turned around. He rang the doorbell. The woman let him back in. The older daughter arrived home just then, too.
“‘What do you want now?’ she asked. ‘Come back when you’ve calmed down.’
“That’s when he lifted the pistol and fired it. Once, twice, three times, four.
“The older daughter began to scream. She screamed so loud that one of the windowpanes shattered. She tried to prop up her mother, but she weighed too much and was limp and lying in a pool of blood. Then the daughter jumped on the man with the pistol in his hand. She punched him and even managed to break his nose.
“She still doesn’t know to this day why he didn’t shoot her.
“He threw her to the floor and snarled, ‘Where is he?’ He meant the prince, who was sitting in the kitchen with the children. The prince came running out, shaking with fear and horror. The children came running, too, and saw their mother and began to scream. The man lifted the pistol again and the prince attempted to save himself, running into the bedroom. He closed the door behind him but the man shot through the door.
“The older daughter ran out of the apartment with the other two children and rang the neighbor’s doorbell. From the hall they heard two more shots. The neighbor jerked the children inside and slammed the door shut again.
“Soon the man with the pistol came out of the apartment and also rang the neighbors’ doorbell. But they wouldn’t let him in. The man said to call the police. Which was exactly what they were already thinking.
“The man waited on the stairs until he was arrested. He gave up the pistol without any protest and confessed. In court he said his wife had annoyed him forever.
“Felix, are you asleep?”
I run my hand along the goosebumps on his forearms. He doesn’t say a word. His breathing is silent. Maybe he’s holding his breath.
“Were you even listening?”
“Where’s your father?” he asks suddenly, startling me.
“Don’t know. Maybe here somewhere.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know anything about him. I don’t want to know. My mother tried to talk about him a few times, but I always stopped her.”
“I don’t understand,” he whispers in my ear.
“Little Felix,” I say, “how could you possibly understand? He didn’t want me to be born. That’s the only thing my mother ever got out before I shut her up once and for all. He wanted my mother to have an abortion. And he gave her quite a bit of money so she could have it done privately at a doctor’s office instead of at one of those clinics where women were practically put on an assembly line and not given any anesthesia. My mother always said he was a respectable man who was able to set up a respectable abortion for his girlfriend—she said that again and again, only half-joking. She went to the doctor’s office and was told to undress. Then she thought—or at least she says she did—‘But I want to have a little girl, and I want to call her Sascha, and I’m not going to end this life, this thing’s alive no matter what this man says. I want to have it.’ So she got dressed again, took the envelope of money back, and walked out. The doctor thought she’d gone crazy. My mother ran the whole way home because she thought the doctor would come after her. She never wanted to see the man who had impregnated her again because she was afraid he might try to induce an abortion by violent means. There had been a few recent cases like that. At first she was going to give him back the money, but then she bought baby things with it instead.
“That’s why I don’t want to know his name. He’s not even on my birth certificate. There’s nobody to ask, either, now that my mother is dead. He could have won the Nobel Prize for all I know.
&
nbsp; “But I don’t care. What do you think, Felix?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s very quiet. There’s just a soft whistling sound in my ear. I’m not sure what it is. Could be from a mobile phone somewhere, I think.
Then I fall asleep.
I wake up in the middle of the night.
I can’t understand what’s happening. Felix is lying next to me on his back, trying to say something. He feels funny and looks strange. I hold his hand. It’s cold and shaking.
“What is it?” I say. “What’s wrong?”
He opens his mouth and wheezes.
I get nervous. “What’s wrong?” I ask. “Say something!”
His hands fall to his chest and start to feel weakly around. His fingertips hop up and down on his T-shirt as if he’s typing on an invisible keyboard. His lips move. I lean down to him and he breathes in my ear.
“Volker,” he gasps. “Get Volker.”
I sit up, jump over Felix onto the floor and run out into the hall. I race to the door I think is the one to Volker’s room. I yank it open but there’s no bed in the room, just a table and several armoires.
“Volker!” I cry. “Where are you? Volker!”
I run through the house, pulling open doors and yelling. It seems to go on forever. Behind all the doors is darkness and a musty smell. An ironing board falls out of one doorway and hits me hard on the head. I barely notice. I feel like I’m lost in a labyrinth. Everything starts to spin. I brace myself against a wall but it seems to recede from my hand.
“Volker, god damn it! Something’s wrong with Felix. Where are you?”
I begin to weep loudly.
Volker appears at the end of the hall. He’s barefoot. His upper body is naked. He’s buttoning his pants. He runs by without looking at me.
“Not in there!” I yell. “He’s in my room.”
Volker stops, turns around, and bounds down the stairs. I follow him. He’s faster than I am. I lurch down the stairs and nearly fall over.
In the guest room, he tries to sit Felix up. I turn on the light. Felix’s face is white and his lips are blue. There’s panic in his eyes. Volker braces him by his shoulders.
“Water,” he yells over his shoulder. “Get some cold water.”
I run to the kitchen and throw open the refrigerator door. I look for a glass, find one, and fill it with water. Half of it sloshes out as I run back. Felix tries to drink. His teeth clank against the rim of the glass.
Broken Glass Park Page 10