“Is he German?” asked Grandmother after she’d listened to my tales with her nose turned up. “Probably. They’re upstanding, like your grandfather.”
“No idea,” I said.
“I’ll tell you something, Maxi: these things don’t last for long.”
We were in the second grade when Vera stopped pinching me and kicking me under the table. I had put up with her wrath without fighting back because for one thing it didn’t hurt as much as she probably wished it did, and for another it fascinated me that Vera could look so much like her mother and at the same time be so different.
Nina was the gentlest person I’d ever come across. I felt all the tension inside me melt away as soon as I entered her apartment. I assumed it was the same for Grandfather. Since I couldn’t practice much at home, Nina kept me busy with scales or sang the Internationale with me, a song that Grandmother also treasured, and which, when she was in a good mood, she demanded I play a plastic version of on my keyboard, the sound of which I could barely stand.
As soon as I was able to play the first few easy melodies, Grandmother remarked on my abilities. She wanted more hits from her youth: “Millionen blutroter Rosen” and “Bella Ciao,” which she was convinced the Italians had stolen from the Soviets, just like the Americans stole the Russian classic the Wizard of the Emerald City. Nina shook her head when I insisted on these songs, but she made easy arrangements for me and asked me with a smile not to tell anyone I was taking lessons from her.
I relished every second in her apartment, as if with the step across her threshold I was released from gravity, weightless. I could make mistakes, ask stupid questions, look out the window. I could go to the bathroom and not prove afterwards that I’d washed my hands twice. Sometimes I hugged Nina, and I never figured out whether it was related to the piano lessons or her temperament, maybe both. I begrudged Vera her mother, but would never have admitted it because it would have seemed like a betrayal of my pretty blonde freckled mother whom I’d never seen because Grandmother didn’t believe in photos.
It gradually began to make me sad that in front of me, Grandfather and Nina still acted as if they had nothing to say to each other, as if the third toothbrush in the bathroom really did belong to the faceless man I’d made up, as if the familiar cigarette pack next to the tea cannister in Nina’s kitchen had been forgotten by a visitor. The more Nina’s apartment felt like my grandfather’s second home, the more my thoughts revolved dizzyingly around the fact that there was more than one version of every life.
Maybe it was possible, in theory, for me to do something other than slurp pureed cauliflower while watching Grandmother redo her braid.
The piano lessons felt like a short trip to a world I wasn’t allowed to live in. After the lesson Nina sent me to the kitchen where there were cookies and tea on the table. Grandfather smoked on the balcony and she went out and stood with him for a while every time. From behind the fluttering curtain the contours of their shoulders seemed to blend together, one entity with two heads with smoke hovering above. Normally I enjoyed the fifteen minutes alone, dunking cookies in black tea and then letting them dissolve on my tongue. But suddenly I couldn’t sit still anymore. I grabbed a cookie and went down the hall, standing in front of Vera’s half-open door.
Vera was lying on her stomach reading a comic. She sat up immediately and stared at me with her big, light-brown eyes.
“You play wrong notes all the time.”
“I know.” I went into her room and sat on the edge of the bed, amazed that she didn’t immediately shrink away from me.
“She cries every night,” said Vera, and she didn’t sound as indignant as usual, she sounded quiet and unsure. “Does he do the same thing?”
“He’s a man,” I said. “He’s just silent.”
“Why on earth are they doing this?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I’m going to tell your grandmother.”
I choked on the cookie in horror.
“You can’t do that,” I coughed as Vera struck me between the shoulder blades. “You can never do that. She’d kill him. And Nina. And me. And maybe even you!”
“Nonsense.”
“Yes she would. She already tried to poison him once.”
Vera stared at me with her mouth open: “With what?”
“Rat poison,” I said. “But she grabbed the cup from him and poured it down the drain.”
“But why?”
“Because she still needs him.”
“No, I mean why did she want to poison him?”
“I don’t remember,” I said. There’d been so many incidents that had gotten jumbled together in my head.
Vera made a face. I saw her foot move in my direction like in the good old days, but then she held back. I rubbed my shin anyway, which throbbed with phantom pain.
HALF-AND-HALF
Grandmother often chided Grandfather about us being poor.
“What is the point of dragging the child to the West if we can’t feed him properly and are dependent on German charity?” she ranted as if it had been my grandfather’s idea to emigrate. I’d never understood what profession he’d practiced before, Grandmother mostly referred to his occupation as “not worth talking about.” At the home he’d begun to fix leaky faucets and heaters because the building’s maintenance man preferred to tinker on his own car than on the building. Soon Grandmother printed fifty sheets of paper saying “All Jobs Done Cheap” with our phone number and stuck them up on lampposts.
Now Grandfather spent much less time on the cot in the adjoining room. There were days when he left the apartment at dawn, while I sat at the table and choked down chicken broth, and only came back when I was already half asleep on the pull-out couch and Grandmother was oiling her heels with goose fat. He pushed carefully through the narrow gap between the door and the bed, whispered hello, and disappeared into the adjoining room, as my grandmother said in a low voice: “Where were you all day? I spend twenty-four hours a day dancing around the sick child and he gallivants around, and the piddling amount of money he brings in just makes you want to cry.”
Grandfather said nothing. I lay next to Grandmother and pretended to be asleep.
The next morning, after being yanked from sleep by the alarm, I saw Grandmother sitting at the table counting money. She smoothed the bills and stacked them neatly. She never seemed to be happy with the height of the stack. She shook her head and clicked her tongue scornfully. “It’s as if he’s paying for the privilege of painting a fence,” she mumbled as soon as she noticed I was awake. “Any normal man would have made at least twice as much.”
I lay in bed and marveled at how close to the truth she had come. I was sure that Grandfather was giving exactly half of his earnings to Nina, once he’d taken out a small sum to cover his cigarettes and newspapers. Like Grandmother, who was sure Nina was being supported by someone, I didn’t believe that Nina earned enough to live off by teaching piano, either. Once Nina stood up in the middle of a lesson, as if she couldn’t wait a second longer, and went into the adjoining room. Through the open door I saw her throw bills in Grandfather’s face.
“As if I need your charity! Shall I also cut half of you off, an arm, a leg?”
Grandfather got on his knees, collected the twenties, and pressed them into her hand. He held her right hand tightly in his two hands. That day I plonked away on the same few chords of my children’s version of “Schwarzen Augen” all alone. Nina never returned to the piano. My grandfather’s shirt had wet spots on the shoulder which dried in the wind on the way home.
My warning not to tell Grandmother about Nina and Grandfather seemed to have made an impression on Vera. She spoke more to me now, which wasn’t always a good thing.
She asked questions. Lots of questions. In her style of talking things out, which felt like a punch to the gut, Vera resembled Grandmother. She
asked me why, even now, Grandmother watched over me when I went to the playground. Why she carried my schoolbag and why she brought a thermos of medicinal herb brew to the school door, why she fell to the ground in front of everyone on the street one time with a scream so loud it rattled the neighborhood just because I was holding a soda can in my hand that actually belonged to her, Vera, and from which I’d only taken a sip to see whether my stomach would really disintegrate. (It didn’t, but I had also spat out the soda straight away.) Whether my grandmother was really the witch she was seen as, whether she was totally off in her head or only a bit, why I washed my hands before and after eating, whether I really was allergic to animal and human hair, whether my mother had possibly sold me to my grandmother or if perhaps I’d been kidnapped. Vera’s tactlessness fascinated me, and I put genuine effort into satisfying her curiosity.
Grandmother continued to regard the foreign children with a mix of fascination, envy, and suspicion. The blond German children steadfastly refused to understand her, which even led to her saying one time that there were apparently children who were more idiotic than me. They spurned the waffle candies, the shortbread with nuts and condensed milk filling, and other goodies from the nearby Russian supermarket that Grandmother bought in moments of nostalgia, the wrappers of which she let me smell. Vera, on the other hand, not only accepted the sweets, she also now sat willingly at our kitchen table, supposedly to help me with my homework. Unlike my grandmother I knew what was on her mind: if Grandfather came home and glimpsed Vera, she enjoyed the brief pained spasm of bad conscience that animated his otherwise expressionless face.
“Explain it to the idiot, dear child, explain it to him,” Grandmother said, hovering over us as Vera and I bent over our notebooks and nudged each other with our feet. The kicks of her earlier phase had given way to tentative and sometimes almost caressing movements that tickled like crazy.
“I used to be so good at math, but German math is different somehow, and he doesn’t believe his grandmother knows how to do it properly. He takes his grandmother for stupid, that’s how it goes for the elderly. At some point I’ll no longer be needed at all, and then he can dance on my grave. Doesn’t matter, I’m still going to leave him my gold tooth. Would you like to see it, too, dear child?”
“You’re not old at all,” Vera responded and took a bite of the sweet Grandmother had pressed into her hand.
“I am old, dear girl, every year counts double for me. If you look at it that way I’m over a hundred. And in that case I still look good for my age, eh?” As Vera continued to chew, I got an affectionate smack on the back of the head from Grandmother.
“Your mother must be thankful to have such a clever daughter, independent and healthy, spit three times over your shoulder, break a leg. How’s Nina? Is she healthy? She’s single, the lucky woman, though sometimes one can feel abandoned in a strange land.”
Vera mumbled something and clamped her teeth onto the chewed end of her pencil.
“Take that thing out of your mouth, dear child, you’ll get splinters, they’ll puncture your esophagus, it’s an excruciating way to die.”
Vera ignored the advice. Instead of explaining the homework to me, as Grandmother asked, she had long since put my notebook next to hers and copied my answers. Then she sharpened her pencil with my sharpener and didn’t empty it. The ticking of the clock grew louder when Vera disappeared into the bathroom forever and didn’t wash her hands afterwards and I asked myself why Grandmother didn’t notice despite the fact that she lectured total strangers about the dangers of cholera and dysentery. I would have loved to watch that argument with Vera, but the hours went by and always ended the same way: when Grandfather opened the door in the evening, she was always sitting there and smiled at him.
“Here comes the old man, hungry as always, spent more money than he earned, wash your hands. No, don’t sit down at the table, you’re old and can wait. This girl here needs to get home first, there’s a lot of Turks on her street and you can see the Jew in her, I don’t mean that as an insult, dear child, surely you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror. Accompany her to her door, we’re not animals, after all. Shall I make you a sandwich for the road?”
Grandfather demurred with a turn of the chin. He looked at Vera and in his gaze was a plea for forgiveness that I didn’t like: he was my grandfather after all, not hers.
I didn’t begrudge Grandfather his increasing absence and rarely thought about whether he really needed to stay elsewhere for nights on end for work and how much of that time was being funneled to Nina. I was less generous when I realized he was being guided by some strange sense of fairness with regard to Vera. When he came home from a few days away he brought me little gifts—one of the few expenditures he allowed himself beyond his cigarettes. At least I thought so, until I noticed too many similar things in Vera’s room for it to be a coincidence.
If my grandfather gave me bubbles, there would be an identical bottle on Vera’s desk. If he brought me a teddy bear, its twin jumped into view on Vera’s bed. The fact that he drew so little distinction between a strange girl and his grandson confirmed what my grandmother always claimed: nobody in the whole world would ever care as much about me as she did.
“And perhaps the red-haired Jew,” she added reliably.
“There’s no such thing,” I tried to object sometimes.
“Don’t believe your Oma, huh,” scoffed Grandmother. “But what do you say to this: when you were five months old, he stole you from your stroller. Fact. I parked you in front of the bakery, the stoop was too high and not a soul would help me. And he went straight for you and grabbed you. I ran after him, yelled for the militia, and ripped you away from him.”
“And what happened to him?” My grandmother’s power of persuasion was enormous: I really had the feeling that a blurry memory would suddenly emerge in my mind’s eye, a contorted face with a twitchy eye, the relentless pulling on my limbs from the opposite direction.
“Ran off, the coward,” Grandmother said with disdain.
“But what did he want?”
“Nothing good, that’s for sure.”
“But did he want me? Maybe he didn’t have any children of his own?”
Grandmother snorted. “What’s with all the questions? Don’t believe your Oma? Maybe one day you will grow up after all. And then you’ll stop orbiting me. Leave me to croak without so much as a glass of water. Just forget me. Humans are ungrateful animals.”
It seemed impossible that I could ever forget Grandmother. She took away the teddy bear that I got from Grandfather because she said it stank of chemicals and she gave it to one of the snot-nosed neighbor children. A comic book I got from Grandfather ended up in the garbage because it was trash that would destroy my brain. I mourned it and finished reading it in Vera’s room. I also found out that my grandfather had taken her and Nina out for ice cream. On the way home from piano lessons I demanded Grandfather apply his fairness principle consistently. I wanted ice cream, too.
Grandfather looked at me. I withered beneath his abysmal gaze. I felt a bit ashamed for my demand and was surprised when Grandfather slowly nodded.
My hand in his, we entered the ice cream shop. It wasn’t that I’d never been in one before. Grandmother loved ice cream. When she bought ice cream and I was with her, she sometimes let me hold the waffle cone while she disinfected her hands with wet wipes. But now, when the person behind the counter asked me personally what kind I would like, my head was abuzz. Overwhelmed from the offerings I pointed to a container filled with a pink mass while Grandfather ordered peppermint. We took our cones out into the fresh air and sat on a bench.
Only when Grandfather had finished his ice cream did he notice that I’d not even tried mine. “Doesn’t it taste good?” he asked, stretching out his hand to dip his finger in a pink drip. I shook my head. The ice cream was melting in my hands, and I felt as if I were holding a live gre
nade with the pin pulled.
Sometimes on nights when I couldn’t fall asleep because my stomach was rumbling with frustration at rice gruel and oatmeal, I would imagine what all I’d devour if I had only a week left to live. With the end in sight, I thought about chocolate cake with frosting, pancakes oozing with Nutella, the fried dough balls filled with jam that I’d seen once in a while in the window at bakeries. I tossed and turned with those images in my head until Grandmother got up, groaning, and went to find a sedative in her bottomless medicine bag. I remembered nothing about the following two days.
The viscous pink mass dripped down my fingers. My grandfather figured out what was going on in my mind and reached out his hand to release me from my agony. But I held on tight to the sticky cone. He went back inside the ice cream shop to get a few napkins, and in this moment I decided it was worth it: I would lick my fingers and then fall over dead.
When Grandfather returned with a stack of napkins I was just busying myself chewing up the last of the cone. When melted there was ridiculously little ice cream. He correctly interpreted the look on my face and got me a second cone.
When I was dead and gone he could finally move in forever with Nina and buy Vera comics and bubblegum, I thought, as I bit into the second ice cream cone, which hurt my teeth. Then I waited for something to happen to me.
We walked to the tram station. Along the way, Grandfather stopped to moisten the paper napkins at a fountain and helped me wipe off my hands and mouth. It was as if we were getting rid of the evidence of a crime, and I thought for a second about the aggressive German fountain water germs and the fact that they’d immediately colonize my guts and lungs and cause me a torturous death.
My Grandmother's Braid Page 4
