My stomach cramped up, but the pain didn’t come from what I had eaten but from my panicked, slumped posture and frantic breathing. Grandfather lit a cigarette even though I was right next to him.
It was naïve to believe that a crime like that could escape notice by my grandmother. When we entered the apartment, she was sitting cheerfully at the kitchen table knitting wool socks for me. Grandfather tried to slip past her into the adjoining room. Grandmother took a loud breath. Her nostrils quivered.
“Did you smoke in front of the child? Have you completely lost your mind?”
“It was at the tram stop,” I blurted desperately. “There was a strange man there! He was the one who smoked a cigarette!”
“What was the point of having your grandfather with you? Couldn’t he grab the cigarette out of the pig’s mouth and shove up his backside?”
Excited at the choice of words, I forgot my fear for a moment.
“Opa is too old to fight,” I said quietly.
“Too old? This stallion? Have you seen how he carries boards and pipes around? Asians don’t get old. I’m the only one getting old here.”
I put out my hand and patted my grandmother on the arm. For a moment her face softened, but then her eyebrows came together menacingly. She grabbed my hand, turned it over, sniffed it. My heart stood still.
She shoved me away with surprising force—I fell backwards and hit my head against the wall. She ran into the adjoining room, where Grandfather was just putting his shirt over the back of the chair. Like a crazed pit bull Grandmother fell upon him, ripping at his undershirt, pounding him with her fists.
“All sense pounded out of you or what?” she screamed while my grandfather tried to shield his face with his hands. “What did you give the child? Why not just give him rat poison? Do you care about the child at all? Killed Maya and now get rid of the kid as quickly as possible? Not with me around. I’ll put you behind bars.”
I leaned my throbbing head against the wall and closed my eyes. Grandfather didn’t answer. My grandmother’s punches became less frequent and hollower. Suddenly it got very quiet. I looked cautiously into the adjoining room.
Grandmother had her eyes closed and was leaning against Grandfather. He was holding her in his arms, his cheek nestled against her temple. His shoulders and upper arms were scratched, as if he’d run through a blackberry bramble.
They stood there for what seemed like an eternity. I held my breath, unable to move.
TWO CRIMINALS
The strawberry ice cream that I’d unexpectedly survived taught me two things: Grandmother was wrong more often than I’d suspected, and happiness was easier to find than I’d thought. The colorful world of forbidden foods suddenly opened up to me. Of course, for ages I’d looked at all the sweets on the supermarket shelves, in the window at the bakeries and the downtown food stalls, but only now did I realize all I needed to do was to reach out my hand. I told Grandmother that from now on I needed pocket money. She looked at me over the rim of her glasses: “What for? Naked girls?”
“What naked girls?” I asked, confused.
“In the papers.”
“Which papers?”
“At the newsstand!” Grandmother roared. “How can anyone be so stupid? Ask your grandfather.”
I didn’t think for a second about doing that. And I didn’t get any pocket money. “Money doesn’t come for free,” Grandmother said. “If you don’t work, you don’t eat.”
“But you don’t work.”
Grandmother calmly put down her knitting, picked up a teacup, and threw it against the wall. It was the wall I was standing against, and I assumed she hadn’t meant to hit me. But one of the shards did hit me and I yelled, “Ow!” loudly even though it hadn’t hurt. I wanted her to regret her outburst. But anytime I intentionally tried to stoke fears about my physical well-being, it never worked.
Grandmother stood up with a sad look on her face and retrieved a brush, which she pressed into my hand.
“So I don’t work? And who caters to you day and night?”
I began to sweep up the shards.
“Give it me, said Grandmother without moving. “You’ll cut yourself, the wound will get infected, your finger will have to come off, and what use will you be then?”
“Nobody needs me anyway,” I mumbled, on my knees to appease her.
“True,” said Grandmother.
For a moment I wondered whether she would pay me to work. I could take on some of the daily chores and receive an allowance in exchange. But as hard as I thought, I couldn’t come up with any suitable tasks. My grandmother, as I realized through this exercise, didn’t do much around the house. It was mostly Grandfather who mopped the floors and cleaned the bathroom. She really just looked after me, and I could hardly relieve her of that.
That’s how I became a thief. I helped myself to her purse from time to time. I pulled out her wallet, took a few coins and one of the small bills, and quickly put it back. The first time I was worried she’d notice. But she didn’t seem to keep close track of the contents of her wallet. That also explained all the useless bits of paper that made it difficult to find money at all, the telephone numbers of Russian doctors written on receipts and ripped scraps of newspaper, tattered pickup slips for laundry or repaired shoes, never-used prescriptions for glasses.
With the stolen money in hand, I was a free man, and bliss could be bought. During the lunch break, unlike my fellow students I didn’t go into the shop across from school that sold soap and insecticide where you could also pick out gummi worms from a big plastic bin. I went directly to the discount shop around the corner where I bought a large chocolate bar or a packet of chocolate-covered marshmallows. I sat back on a park bench and ate everything up in minutes, until my gums stuck together and I had a sugar rush. Afterwards I slunk back to school, thoroughly washed my hands, and rinsed out my mouth. I felt better than ever during the next few classes.
My happy buzz dissipated when Vera caught me on the park bench with one of my treasures. I tried to wipe my chocolate-smeared mouth clean, as it was too full to get out an excuse. Vera was still getting money from Grandmother to spy on me. I held out half of the chocolate bar to her silently. She sat down next to me, broke off a small piece, let it dissolve on her tongue, and then stuck the rest in the pocket of her jacket.
“You’re disgusting,” she said. But she didn’t tell on me.
Not long afterwards Grandfather caught me with Grandmother’s wallet in my hands. The frantic way I tried to stuff the wallet back in the purse was more embarrassing to me than the fact that I’d been exposed as a thief. Grandfather shook his head. Then he put his hand in his pocket, pulled out a tenner, and handed it to me. I took it with trembling fingers and put it in the waist of my pants. I tried not to look him in the eyes. We were both criminals and covered for each other.
DANCING GIRL
Over time I realized that Grandmother felt lonely. Grandfather was gone more and more often, almost every day and sometimes at night, and he didn’t draw a distinction between workdays and the weekend. I had no idea whether he was distributing advertising circulars or selling drugs. Even if I’d turned into Vera for a moment and asked him directly—I couldn’t imagine getting a straight answer out of him.
My mornings at school were straightforward, but sometimes I made up additional activities, claiming for instance that I attended a special class for foreign students where homework was done under pedagogical supervision. There was nothing like that at our school, but Grandmother believed me straight away and even somewhat begrudgingly praised the German school system for the first time. In reality I did my homework during breaks while sitting on a heater.
That’s also where I spent afternoons reading all the books I could take out of the school library and was reluctant to bring home because Grandmother would always insist I translate the first few sentences fo
r her to make sure the book had literary merit.
Since Grandmother now had plenty of time, the laborious overcooking and pureeing of vegetables gained the upper hand. She prepared cauliflower and broccoli in a steamer and crushed the vegetables with a fork, as if I had no teeth. Sometimes she was already cooking before I got up and filling plastic containers with unsalted vegetables and buckwheat to give me for my ever longer school days. Sandwiches were only for alcoholic bachelors, neglected latchkey kids, and Germans.
Since I flushed the contents of the containers down the toilet and stuffed myself with sweets instead, I gradually grew not only taller but also wider. At some stage Grandmother stopped calling me Sack of Bones.
“Finally he’s beginning to digest,” she said to my grandfather, pinching my fat rolls.
It didn’t help much to combat the loneliness. In her desperation, Grandmother began to address strangers on the street. She sat down in her tracksuit next to young mothers at the playground and told them they should put hats on their children. She looked into strollers and made faces that made the babies start to cry. Grandmother caught in midair pacifiers that had been spit out, but refused to give them back because they were no longer sterile. The mothers switched benches and after a while they left the playground, while my grandmother called valuable advice after them in Russian. She knocked on the neighbors’ door to ask them about the weather in Moscow, but they didn’t have the faintest interest in the topic.
“Typical Jews,” Grandmother commented with frustration. “Sold their home for a better life. But if things go poorly for them in Germany, I’ll tell you something, Maxi: they’ll turn their back on the place without a thought, the disloyal people.”
I was choking down a helping of celery that Grandmother had served me as a snack between lunch and dinner. She’d sat down across from me, her chin resting on her folded hands, greeting every gulp of mine with a nod of her head. She asked me whether I’d understood anything in school today. The devil must’ve gotten into me when I pulled a vegetable fiber out of my mouth, put it down on the edge of my plate, and said: “Nina is directing the choir club now.”
I hadn’t even finished the sentence before it was clear to me what a mistake it was. Grandmother’s eyes lit up.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“No idea,” I sputtered unconvincingly.
“Idiot,” said Grandmother. “I’ll call Vera.”
“It’s a sort of school club, in the afternoon, where everybody sings,” I said eventually.
Grandmother was silent, and, full of misgivings about what the future might hold, I ate every last bite of the vegetables and slipped away.
Later that night in bed I heard Grandmother lay everything that had been fermenting inside her for the past few hours at Grandfather’s feet. “I’m not so old that I’m no longer useful. I’ve molded that little cripple from a maggot into a calf, he hasn’t failed a grade yet even in Germany, and who deserves the credit for that? I was a good dancer, and have talent as a teacher. I’m going to make sure that these fat German girls no longer lumber around like sailors, I can teach them a thing or two. I can, can’t I, Tschingis?”
Her voice sounded pleading, and she said my grandfather’s name almost tenderly. On the way to the bathroom I cast a glance into the adjoining room to assure myself that nobody had switched my grandmother with a stranger.
“Get in bed, you tadpole,” she yelled as soon as I stuck my nose into the doorway. Relieved, I went back to bed.
The fact that Grandmother had once been a dancer I’d always taken for a joke. Though she sometimes pointed to the television screen when a famous politician or actor popped up and claimed to have once met the person. She’d crossed paths with Muhammad Ali when during a visit to the Soviet Union he’d slipped his many guides and minders and was strolling all alone down the street, and she also met this singer who looked a bit like a woman and who had asked her for directions and she fixed his tie, which was all askew. Later I found out that this must have been David Bowie. In any event I usually just looked at my feet whenever Grandmother talked about her stage career, and she smacked me on the back of the head. “Don’t believe your Oma, eh? Do you think the old lady was always unhappy and ugly?”
I did indeed think that, until one day Grandmother pulled a suitcase out from under Grandfather’s cot, a suitcase that had been there since our arrival as if to be ready at any moment to pack up and move on. I wasn’t allowed to touch it, and sometimes I wondered if perhaps my mother’s bones were stored inside. Now Grandmother opened it, shoved aside some moth-eaten things, pulled open the zipper of an inner pouch, and pulled out an envelope. A half dozen photos and several tattered newspaper clippings fanned out before my eyes.
“What do you say now, doubting Thomas?”
I picked up a picture and held it in front of my nose.
“Nearsighted!” bellowed Grandmother. “Look, Opa, he’s blind, and we didn’t notice.”
I quickly moved the photo farther from my face. In it were four girls who were a few years older than me. They held each other by the waists and looked at the camera. They were standing on their tiptoes, and their feet were in what to me were magical ballet slippers, and the starched skirts offered a view of four sets of slim girls’ legs on which the muscles stood out.
“Did you recognize me straight away?” asked Grandmother.
I nodded even though I spotted no resemblance in any of the girls. One had a pouty mouth, another looked sad, the third smiled, and the fourth was laughing as if somebody had tickled her. I studied the three thoroughly before coming to the fourth. She had high cheekbones and the perfect lines of her neck and waist left my throat dry.
Astonished, I looked at my grandmother then again at the girl. If this is real, then anything is possible, I thought. In that case then Boris Yeltsin really did have her over for coffee. And perhaps other things were true, too, that I had taken for, if not bold-faced lies, then at least distortions.
“Can I have this photo?” I asked hoarsely.
Grandmother nodded, flattered.
I put the photo down in front of me and tried to draw the face of the girl. I didn’t know myself why it was so important to me. Of late I’d only used my colored pencils to add horns and stuck-out tongues to the faces in the photos of the Russian newspaper Grandmother took from the supermarket. Now it seemed to matter that I transfer the face from the snapshot as exactly as possible onto paper, as if I could deliver the girl from a destiny she didn’t foresee at the time of the photo.
Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Grandmother throw first the jacket and then the pants of her tracksuit onto the chair and squeeze herself into something that looked like a bathing suit that she’d dug out of a nondescript bag inside the suitcase. I’d only rarely seen her without long sleeves on, and I’d never paid any attention to her legs. I’d have suspected that beneath the tracksuit her body was soft and flabby. But in reality she looked like one of those heavy athletes I’d seen during sports broadcasts on television. Beneath the creased skin moved muscles, and I realized, shocked, that Grandmother was also a strong person physically. If she decided to, she could easily break my slim grandfather’s neck, not to mention mine or delicate Nina’s.
She spun around, straightened her back, lifted her arm. I had my head leaned down over the paper, now I lowered my gaze to her feet and gulped. Grandmother was standing on her big toe.
“You’re staring, eh?” she said with satisfaction. “What are you drawing? Show me. Is it a rabbit?” I looked at her face and could have nearly screamed: suddenly I couldn’t deny recognizing in her face the traits of the girl in the photo, as if my grandmother had devoured her alive, as if she were still sitting somewhere inside her body, begging to be let out.
Grandmother hadn’t let me in on her plans. So I was horribly startled when I ran into her in front of the school office.
I didn’t recognize her right away. Instead of the tracksuit she was wearing a long sequined dress that brightly reflected the sunlight. She had festive blue-green eyeshadow around her eyes. Her henna red hair wasn’t restrained in the usual braid but put up in a bun and decorated with an artificial rose. In her hand she had an envelope with something crackling inside.
My first impulse was to run away immediately, but she’d already seen me. I approached her with weak knees, my gaze fixed on her high-heeled shoes.
I asked if she had gotten lost.
“Only if you’re lost up your own arse,” she responded, and I noticed her lips were trembling.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, shifting my weight from one leg to the other. She hadn’t come to school in quite a while, which had been a great relief to me. Now the bell was ringing for the end of the break, everyone was running to their classrooms and making a wide berth around Grandmother and me.
“Your Oma wants to offer her services,” she said. “A ballet troupe. For all the fat girls at your school. You’ll also take part.”
At that moment the door to the office opened, and Grandmother floated inside. Appalled, I pulled a half-melted chocolate bar from my pants pocket and stuffed the whole thing into my mouth.
That afternoon Grandmother didn’t come home. I didn’t have a key, that way I couldn’t lose it. I waited on the doormat in front of the locked door. Neighbors passed, newcomers, who gave me sympathetic glances and asked if I wanted their old children’s books as their children were supposed to read German. But nobody offered to have me wait in their apartment.
My Grandmother's Braid Page 5
