Grandfather came home in the evening and let me in. Equally annoyed as I was, he searched the apartment for signs of Grandmother. Her suitcase was pulled out from under the cot, the lid open. Some certificates and documents had slid out of a brown envelope. I kneeled down and put out my hand, but Grandfather gathered everything together, shut the suitcase, and shoved it back under the bed. His secretive manner took away my desire to tell him about Grandmother’s visit to the school.
I stayed on my knees and leaned down further, inhaling the dust of the too rarely cleaned corners. The unusual perspective puzzled me: it was new to me that under the cot wasn’t just the suitcase but also various packages. I grabbed one of them and pulled it out, and my name in the address field sprang into my eye.
“This is for me?!” My hand reached for another package.
“Put it back.” Grandfather’s voice sounded dull, as if he was speaking into a bucket.
“But maybe all of them are for me?!”
“Get out of this room.”
I was hurt. I was accustomed to being ordered about by Grandmother. Grandfather had never done anything like this before. In his dark gaze I felt like a piece of brittle, dried-out clay.
My stomach growled. I should have eaten and gone to bed long ago. Every deviation from the normal daily routine resulted in well-known health implications. Grandfather surveyed the contents of the refrigerator and the kitchen cabinets. I watched him. He hadn’t even washed his hands beforehand. We would starve miserably if Grandmother didn’t show up soon.
“Noodles or buckwheat?” he asked over his shoulder in my direction. My stomach growled again. Noodles were an inferior food, only adults ate them because what they ate no longer mattered. But I was sick and tired of buckwheat.
“Noodles,” I said.
A little while later Grandfather put a plate of spaghetti in front of me. It was a huge steaming mountain with a gigantic pat of butter in the middle. He held a ketchup bottle over my plate and looked at me inquisitively. I’d never been allowed to eat ketchup and nodded enthusiastically. Grandfather squirted a generous red trail on my mountain of noodles and stirred it up with a fork. I pounced on it, using my fingers to assist.
Grandfather sat opposite me, spinning his noodles onto his fork and smiling. I was fascinated by the sparing but also deft motion of his fingers, which were nearly black at the tips. The deep satisfaction of the moment made something in my stomach melt like a chocolate bar forgotten in a pocket.
Grandmother came home just after I had brushed my teeth. It was already late, and Grandfather made no attempt to check that I’d really managed to get all the spaces between the teeth clean. I ran into Grandmother, but she pushed me away and slumped into the chair.
Her lipstick and mascara were smeared and made her look simultaneously terribly sad and horribly funny. Despite my shock I was very careful not to burst out laughing. Her bun had fallen apart, strands of hair hung in her face. She took off one of her high-heeled shoes and threw it against the wall.
“Check my teeth, Grandma,” I said in the hope that the familiar task would bring her back to our normality.
“Shut your mouth, they’re going to rot anyway,” she said. “Leave Oma alone, Maxim. Nobody wants the old lady. You hear that, Tschingis? Nobody. I might as well climb into a coffin and you can nail it shut.”
Grandfather came closer and slowly fell to his knees.
“I used to be good, Tschingis! Do you remember?”
He took Grandmother’s second shoe off and put it down carefully. He gently stroked her feet.
“The stupid cow of a director said I have no qualifications. I didn’t want money from her, I just wanted to volunteer my knowledge to the school. Whatever Nina is doing I can do, too. A bit of piano, please, half of Russia plays piano, and all the Jews. The little cripple is getting bigger, he needs me less, I can start teaching, I said. When I stopped dancing I did stage design, that sheep of a school principal wouldn’t even get a ticket to it, do you remember, Tschingis? And she said that if I have so much time on my hands I can sell cake at the summer festival.”
“And what did you say?” I asked with a pounding heart.
“I put my name on the list,” Grandmother said. “Do you stink of ketchup? Ketchup corrodes your esophagus.”
DISGRACED WOMAN
On the day of the summer festival, Grandmother got up at five. After her usual morning bathroom routine she disinfected her hands and put a spray bottle and wet wipes in her bag. She left unsalted cream of rice on the table for me and instructed Grandfather to check on my eating and then to bring me to the festival. Grandfather also got the task of watching over me and throwing me over the fence of the schoolyard at the slightest sign of danger. In my grandmother’s eyes, large events were as risky as a flu epidemic, but she was too morally debilitated to fight over that, too, with Germany: “Fascists, what do you expect from them.”
I would have far preferred to stay by myself in the apartment. Using a threadbare excuse I had in the presence of my grandparents squatted next to the cot, but the packages had disappeared. I asked myself if perhaps it had only been a dream.
The schoolyard was swarming with screaming children and balls flying around, and above the din came irregular cheers from the game stalls. But I could still hear Grandmother from a long way away. “Get in line!” she yelled. “Don’t push! There’s a million of you and I’m all by myself! That’s your fourth piece, where are your parents? This coffee is too strong for someone your age, I’ll add some milk. And sugar. Don’t touch the cake, you haven’t paid for it yet!”
Fortunately Grandmother yelled mostly in Russian. She looked spectacular: a short red dress offered a view of her muscular legs, her braid was coiled around her head and dazzlingly bright.
“Nina, my sunshine,” thundered Grandmother’s voice from the cake stand, and a shiver ran down my spine. “Help yourself to the last three pieces of crumb cake, you can get away with it with your figure. I’d give you the cake if it were mine, but it belongs to the community, and . . .” Grandmother paused as if someone had just muted her. As much as tried, I couldn’t hear her anymore.
We walked home, the three of us, silent. I marveled at my forearm, dotted with stamps that I’d gotten at the various stands. It was sunny and warm, my T-shirt clung to my back. I relished the strange sensation of the evaporating moisture, something I’d rarely experienced in the past as Grandmother had tried to avoid my breaking out in a sweat. But now she wasn’t paying any attention to me, while Grandfather probably wouldn’t even have noticed if I’d lost my pants on the way home.
Lost in deep thought he carried the leftovers from the cake stand in tinfoil. Grandmother held a rose in her hand, a thank you to the volunteers that first generated girlish excitement in her only to quickly change into frustration.
“I made 243 rubles,” she muttered as if she’d also baked all the cakes herself. “It was a slog. Nina is knocked up, Tschingis, did you see that?” She grabbed him on the arm and stopped him.
I saw the foil bundle slip out of his hands and went to try to catch it. But he was able to corral it himself at the last second, though his knuckles went white.
“She’s old,” said Grandmother. “She’s . . . how old? Forty for sure. Older. In that case I could almost get pregnant again.”
“You’re not forty,” I croaked from the side.
“And there are enough creatures on the earth,” she interrupted me sharply. “Is the father present?”
I looked at Grandfather, unsure who the question was directed to.
“I thought so,” said Grandmother more to herself.
I feared something bad would happen right there on the spot. I was surprised by Grandmother’s discovery. Now I shared her distress, because I’d never experienced a child as grounds for happiness. But maybe Nina would be lucky and have a good, healthy baby, not a
plague like me. The question of what Grandfather had to do with the whole thing was eating at the back of my mind, but I wouldn’t let it make any further inroads.
“Poor woman,” said Grandmother. “Being pregnant will make her ugly. Tschingis, be a good Christian and take the disgraced woman a sack of potatoes.”
Nina’s precarious condition had Grandmother on edge. When Grandfather had to go to a construction site on one of my piano days, she decided to accompany me to the lesson. I resisted mightily and assured her that, as an exception, I could make my own way to the piano lesson even in Grandfather’s absence. Grandmother told a horrible story from her youth about a little boy and a tram. These days I easily recognized such stories as lies, and anyway Grandmother contradicted herself many times and transformed the original boy into a girl over the course of telling the story. To my surprise, however, this time she wouldn’t be shaken off.
“What have you got there?” I asked in the tram, gesturing to two bulky plastic bags Grandmother wedged between us so they wouldn’t be stolen by the other foreigners. She waved aside my question: “You wouldn’t understand.” She looked out the window and commented loudly about the clothing and distinctive features of people on the sidewalk. I would have liked to change seats. It occurred to me that something was happening that should never have been allowed to happen, and I thought despairingly of Grandfather, who hadn’t made any arrangements for this situation and had left me alone to deal with his problems.
Suddenly I had a grand idea. The only catch was that it had occurred to me so late.
“We can’t go there,” I yelled as soon as the tram had stopped at a station. I jumped up, grabbed Grandmother by the hand, and pulled her out of the tram car. She grabbed frantically for the bags, stumbled, and cursed at me in a particularly refined fashion. I acted hurt even though I was celebrating inside.
“What’s gotten into you?” she asked. “Do you need to go to the bathroom? Here in the bushes? I have newspaper here.”
“No,” I wheezed, still taken with my daring move. “I completely forgot that today there’s no lesson.”
“Why not?” Grandmother’s eyebrows drew together to form an obtuse but grim angle.
“Nina is sick.”
“Of course she’s sick! You know what’s wrong with her! A pregnancy like this is nothing at her age. I was twenty-seven, old for a first-time birth, and do you know how the doctor treated me? Like dirt. Why would I do this at my age, they asked me, and said that everyone would get sick, the mother, the child, nothing good would come of it. One doctor was nice, though, he told me straight away: You’ve done well, Margarita, you’ve basically hopped aboard the last wagon. For some people things go fine even at nearly thirty.”
I said nothing, struck by the unwanted information.
“Tell me the address quickly,” Grandmother ordered. “I bought buckthorn juice for Nina, she needs vitamins, she and her bastard.”
“I don’t have the address.”
“I know you’re an idiot, but you must know the address.”
“I don’t know it.” I nearly started to cry. If I’d been able I would have taken out my idiocy and thrown it on the ground as evidence, or I’d have barked, just so she’d stop interrogating me.
“How do you always get there if you don’t have any idea where it is?”
“Grandfather takes me,” I muttered. The Soviet children’s literature that my grandmother so treasured swarmed with brave partisans who wouldn’t give up any secrets even under Nazi torture. Not even when the lives of their family members were on the line did important information pass their lips. I remembered my grandmother commenting at particularly disturbing passages: “You see, there used to be upstanding people. They had wills of steel. They weren’t gobs of snot like you.”
“What tram stop?” she asked now, and she began to take on the shape of a hangman. I blinked and saw Grandmother again, with her indignant eyebrows drawn together and vestiges of misguided eye shadow.
I closed my eyes with a sigh. I didn’t want to be a gob of snot. But I didn’t want to be tortured or threatened like the partisans, either. “One with trees. There’s always people standing around.”
“Aha. What else?”
“Then one block to the left. Or the right. And around another corner and three more blocks. The building is gray, with balconies.”
My grandmother spat angrily on the ground. “Helpful as ever. Doesn’t matter, I’ll figure it out.”
She didn’t figure it out so quickly. The emergency lies that prevented at the last minute the encounter between Grandmother and Nina turned out to be prophetic. Nina canceled one piano lesson after the next. I didn’t know if she was really doing that poorly or if she didn’t want to see me anymore, and so I assumed it was a combination of the two.
Grandmother acknowledged every cancellation with a knowing nod.
She discussed Nina’s bleak situation regularly with Grandfather. Every time I waited for the bomb to drop, for something to be said that would irretrievably cleave our life into two parts, one before and one afterward. But Grandfather’s silence was ironclad. Once I even wondered if he wasn’t actually cowardly rather than tight-lipped. He let my grandmother curse him as a heartless man if he didn’t set out immediately to take Nina food and make sure she didn’t need anything, water, medicine, lightbulbs. Oddly enough, she no longer tried to get to Nina either through him or through me, as if she had accepted our opposition even if she didn’t understand it.
When Grandfather had to work at a construction site in the Harz for two weeks, Grandmother came home late one evening. She dropped onto the chair, unzipped the jacket of her tracksuit, and stretched out her legs, and in so doing hyperextended her feet in a way I couldn’t even dream of doing. I asked her if I should take her shoes off for her. She held out first one foot and then the other.
“Where were you, Oma?” I asked after I’d placed her sneakers neatly in the foyer.
“Your Oma was slogging away,” she said. “Unlike you all, I have a Christian heart. The poor woman was lying there in bed bloated, green in the face, and not a soul is looking after her.”
“What? Who?” I asked, feeling a chill in my chest.
“Who else,” said Grandmother. “That’s how it is with us women. At first we’re naïve and believe some shitty fellow. Then we’re left alone with our problems.”
“What did you do, Oma?” I asked hoarsely.
“Cleaned up is what I did! Her entire god damned apartment, on my knees like a Neger.” She mimicked Nina: “Please don’t, please don’t. I told her: Nina, you already have an older child, you can’t let yourself go. I’ll help you, but you also have to do something yourself. When I was in your condition I even missed a transfusion and still went to work, at the theater. You can’t prematurely declare yourself dead, Nina, I told her, a pregnancy ends at some point, but life goes on.”
“You cleaned her whole place?” I asked, stunned.
“Do you think your Oma would only clean half?”
“Even the bathroom?” That’s where my grandfather’s toothbrush and razor were.
“The bathroom is the worst germ incubator in an apartment. If you don’t keep it clean, you might as well just abandon the newborn baby in a dumpster.”
“And did you open the wardrobes?”
“Should I have?” asked my grandmother. “Yes, I should have. Next time. You’re an idiot, but sometimes wise.”
That night she seemed happy and relaxed and even acted as if she didn’t notice that I salted my mashed potatoes. She let me turn on the television. I sat down next to her on the couch and tried to concentrate on the plot of the crime story but gave up quickly. Grandmother asked after every scene who the people were and what they had just said. If there was no dialogue in the movie, she talked about the clothes and the furniture.
“Let’s turn it
off and go to sleep, I have a headache,” I said.
“You see!” she said triumphantly. “Television rots your brain.”
A BOY
By this time I’d managed to completely extricate Grandmother from all school business. I let invitations to parent-teacher nights slip by the wayside and signed everything that needed a signature from a legal guardian, scrawling it in Cyrillic, which eliminated any doubts the teachers may have had about the authenticity.
To my surprise, I was accepted at a good school, the same one as Vera. I nearly forgot to tell my grandparents that I was moving to another school. Grandmother still assumed that all German schools took ten years and that the upper grade students were taught in the same building as the lower grade students, just in the afternoons.
Switching schools felt as if a time machine had catapulted me back to the first year of school. We were the littlest ones again, I didn’t know my way around the new school building, and had to figure out on my own which of the new students were out for my scalp.
Vera no longer left bruises and scratches on me anymore, but instead she never missed a chance to embarrass me, as if better times between us had never happened. She had sham laughing fits as soon as I raised my hand in class. When I was chosen and didn’t immediately know the answer, she fed me the wrong answer, and I fell for it every time. She called me a butterball and a moron, made fun of my walk and accent, and told everyone that I had a crazy grandmother and took after her one hundred percent.
I let it all slide in the strong conviction that I had for some reason earned it. But after a few weeks I sought Vera out after class and grabbed her sleeve.
“Leave me alone,” she said, pulling herself free, as if I was the one making her life difficult.
“It’s not my fault,” I said. “Do you understand? I can’t do anything about it.”
“It’s all your fault,” she said. “If you didn’t exist, everything would be better.”
My Grandmother's Braid Page 6
