She settled the hotel bill, took Nina, Vera, and the baby back to the apartment and left money and food for them. A little later she went back again and took the baby with her. Nina was lying in bed and didn’t react.
Against his normal practice, Grandfather opened his mouth and asked whether they should get a doctor. Grandmother shook her head. “She’s gone nuts, don’t you see that? Do you know what they do with the mentally ill? If she’s committed you’ll never see her again.”
Ever since, my uncle has lived in the moving box at our place because according to Grandmother, when faced with the suggestion that the crib be transported to our place, Nina “had acted irrational.” For years afterwards, I never understood why in those weeks Nina gave up her child but not the crib. Grandmother went over to Nina’s daily to collect the mother’s milk she pumped, and scolded her for her lack of diligence in this matter. Nina lay with her face to the wall. She didn’t react as Grandmother sterilized the bottles and held forth on the feeding of infants. “Hygiene is everything, Nina. Look at Maxi. His intestinal flora was completely ruined. It cost me may years of my life to reestablish it.” It surprised me that she spoke of me now in the past tense, as if I was no longer a problem case and could live, eat, and breathe like a normal person. Nina didn’t stir.
Grandmother had less and less time for me, too. Only seldom did I find boiled and pureed dishes made just for me. Grandmother was too busy with the care of the baby and with transporting the precious drops of mother’s milk through the city. She took to cursing only in a sweet, high-pitched tone.
“How can Tschingis stand it?” asked Vera at school when I nodded asleep into my notebook because the baby had woken up all night again only to be fed and shushed to sleep by Grandmother. For a fraction of a second I wondered if she meant my grandfather or the baby. I found it annoying to use the same first name for such an old person and such a young one. Grandmother also hadn’t been pleased with the name selection, after all my grandfather wasn’t even dead, and there was no need to mess up the kid’s life right from the start by giving him a slit-eyed name. But Nina had refused to even consider Grandmother’s suggestion—Boris. With the registration of the name, Nina had presented it to everyone as a done deal.
I liked the fact that Grandmother’s new problems had nothing to do with me and she sometimes seemed to forget that I even existed. Vera seemed less happy with the changes. She had grown so much in the past few months that even I noticed despite the fact that I saw her every day. Her pants were suddenly tighter and her ankles were visible, her arms stuck out of her sleeves, and even her expressions seemed to have changed: her once round, brown eyes were now narrow and skeptical, and her lower lip had become fuller and more sullen.
“How can Tschingis stand it?” Vera repeated, and this time I wondered about the arrogance it took for her to refer to my grandfather by his first name.
“He’s good at suffering through,” I muttered. Grandfather was the only one who hadn’t changed. Only the palms of his hands had gotten softer, even if the skin was peeling in several places.
“Wash your hands!” yelled Grandmother every time as soon as Grandfather returned home from his construction site. “Wait, I’ll come with you, you never really learned to do it properly, you didn’t even have toilet paper growing up. You scrub for such a short amount of time? It doesn’t surprise me. You need more foam. Look how black the soap is. You wanted to touch the baby like that? With all that construction grime? Soap up again. See, better, the foam’s gray. Again. Dry off well. Hold out your hands. The rough stuff’s gone, but without disinfectant there are still germs.” I heard the hiss of the spray.
Grandfather sat down on a chair holding little Tschingis. In his free time he no longer lay on the cot, he sat for hours and stared at his son’s face.
“Does he look like me?” I asked one afternoon when my lunch had been completely forgotten and I’d made myself a fried egg and two for Grandmother.
“Nonsense,” said Grandmother. “He looks like your grandfather.”
“But I look like Grandfather. You call me Asian gob, too.”
“I’d never say something like that.” Grandmother kissed the baby’s dark tuft of hair, stealthily rubbed the spot with a boiled cloth, and muttered: “Thank god I don’t have herpes.”
“What did I look like as a baby?” I asked.
“Like the most annoying child in the world, which you became, too,” my grandmother exploded. “Am I supposed to remember everything? What’s with the family history? If you’re itching so much with curiosity go look in the suitcase and compare yourself.”
She didn’t have to tell me twice. I ran into the adjoining room, fell to my knees, and pulled the suitcase out from under the cot. I carried it with surprising ease back into the living room and dropped it on the couch. The latch, too, was laughably easy to open.
I shoved aside the heavy clothes, carefully put the worn-out ballet slippers on the floor, and pulled out the thick envelope where the photos and documents were stored. Inside was a smaller envelope, I’d never been permitted to touch it because the negatives of the photos were lost and my hands destroyed everything they touched.
I spread the photos out in front of me like a card game. One photo showed a crying child on the potty who was so ugly that it could only have been me. In another one was my grandfather in a soldier’s uniform, next to him a bride whom I recognized as the somewhat more mature version of the swan from the ballet photo. My grandmother smiled at the camera and seemed perfectly happy. Grandfather was somewhat thinner than now and had smoother skin. But I couldn’t spot any more serious changes despite all the decades.
In another picture he was holding little Tschingis in his arms. The image stung me, because there were no photos of me and Grandfather, only one of me and Grandmother where she was holding me on a swing. I must have been two or three and looked panicky, covered except for my eyes in a fur coat, hat, and scarf.
I picked up another photo that I had a hard time deciphering. It showed a girl in a Soviet school uniform, and since it was yellowed like the others were, I assumed from the facial features that it was of a sister of my grandfather. I didn’t know anything about his family. Grandmother always hinted that Grandfather hadn’t had running water or electricity during his childhood, and that the powerful hand of civilization only reached him in the saving form of Grandmother.
“Who’s this girl, Oma?” I asked.
“Quiet!” She was standing in the doorway rocking little Tschingis in her arms. “Don’t worry, my little treasure, everyone yells here like in the forest. Grandmother might be old, but she’s not deaf.”
She leaned over my shoulder and got very quiet. “Maya,” she said, not to me but to the photo.
“Dear Maya?”
“Dear Maya,” echoed Grandmother.
“Aha,” I said. “Why is the picture of Opa and little Tschingis also so yellow?” I held the photo out to her.
“That’s not little Tschingis, idiot. That’s Maya, too. All of your grandfather’s children look like carbon copies.”
“If not for Maya, Grandfather wouldn’t be here anymore,” I suddenly said as if someone had whispered the sentence in my ear.
“If not for Maya, none of us would be here,” said Grandmother dully.
The words floated past me, and I didn’t even want to think about them. But then they turned, just as the wind sometimes changes direction, and they bored their way into my brain.
“If not for Maya, I wouldn’t exist at all,” I said and wished so badly that Grandmother would correct me. But Grandmother looked at the photo and nodded again and again as if she were talking to it.
“Why did you never tell me?” I asked, fighting rising disappointment because it became clear to me at that moment that in my mind Maya, too, had been a blonde princess with soft features and delicate hands.
“
What?”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me outright that Maya’s my mother?”
“So confused, the boy, all the hormones,” Grandmother complained impassively to the girl in the photo. “Now he’s constantly accusing me, the old lady is always at fault, how convenient. What was I supposed to have told him instead? Who was his mother supposed to be, Mary Poppins?”
I turned away, I didn’t want to see her or her photos. At the same time I feared Grandmother would never stop being right. She was even right when she was wrong. She knew me better than any other person, and she knew something about this world that nobody else had a clue about.
Grandmother steadfastly refused to talk more about Maya. She continued to insist that her heart would conk out if she did.
“What happened to her?” I pushed anyway. “Who killed her?”
“Shut your filthy mouth. Divert yourself by doing something useful. Go out, take the tram, look in on Nina.”
“You look in on her.”
“Listen, my little piece of gold, to how this little freak talks about your good-for-nothing mother. He’s not entitled to talk that way, even if she doesn’t deserve any better.”
“Why won’t you tell me?!” I lost control.
“Don’t shout in here, boy, you’re not in the forest. I know the hormones are beginning to rage in you, but I’m old and deserve respect. I’ve invested so many years of my life in you, and now what’s come of that is an ungrateful swine who inconsiderately shouts awake a little angel.”
“He does the same thing to me.”
“Because he doesn’t know any better, do you understand, birdbrain?”
“I understand plenty,” I say, suddenly calm again. “You can’t let him out of your hands because the baby looks like Maya.”
The silence that descended made it feel as if somebody had put a pillow over my face. My grandmother’s look reduced me to ashes. And while I collapsed inside, I continued to stare at her face. “What happened to Maya, Oma,” I said. “What did you do with her?”
She began to sob and turned her broad back to me. She held little Tschingis tighter. He looked at me over her shoulder. For a moment I forgot my cares, lost pondering whether he could already recognize me. I wished I’d never heard Grandmother whisper, “It was Opa.”
THE SWORD
I had my hands full of henna at the moment the doorbell rang. For a while now I’d had the honor of helping Grandmother dye her hair. At first I’d been fascinated as I watched the way she stirred boiling water into the brown powder, poured in a touch of red wine, and covered the floor of the bathroom with newspapers. She had a comb and brush at the ready for me, sat down on a stool, and took the hair tie out of her braid.
The braid was already immensely long. When it was unbraided the hair was even longer, and in the light of the bathroom lamp it shone bright red with silver shimmering roots.
Grandmother combed her hair with a coarse-pronged comb. She smeared the skin at the roots with Vaseline so it wouldn’t take on the hair color. I put on rubber gloves, picked up the brush, and went through the heavy hair strand by strand.
At first she yelled at me constantly because she suspected I wasn’t working carefully enough and just wanted to get through the job as quickly as possible. But that wasn’t true: I liked tasks that consisted of the endless repetition of small, simple steps. I felt like a painter who just had to make a few last strokes before his work achieved perfection. I loved dipping the silver hair in henna, the brown goop stunk like a swamp and gave me the feeling of being part of a magic ritual.
I had just finished the left side of the head when the doorbell rang. It was Saturday, and Grandfather was out with little Tschingis getting some fresh air and giving Grandmother a chance for beauty care. I took off my right glove and went with the brush in my left hand to the door.
I’d last seen Nina shortly after little Tschingis’s birth. I’d nearly forgotten that she used to live here in this complex, too. I wondered why her light blue eyes had once seemed so warm to me. Her empty and exhausted gaze took in the smeared kitchen apron that was supposed to protect my clothes from henna stains. The momentary irritation made her look for a split second like the Nina who had once taught me soldiers’ songs at Grandmother’s request.
“Where is he?”
“Taking a walk,” I said, assuming she meant my grandfather. Nina took a step to the side, and I saw that she wasn’t alone. Behind her stood a woman in jeans and a leather jacket with short blonde hair and a little tear tattoo on her temple, who calmly shoved her foot into the doorway when I went to close it.
I was pushed aside with embarrassing ease, and Nina stepped into our apartment with her new acquaintance. The leather-jacketed woman crossed the room in a few steps. She gestured to Tschingis’s freshly washed romper drying on the laundry line my grandfather had strung across the room. The boiled milk bottles stood upside-down on a sterilized washcloth on the kitchenette counter.
“Anytime soon?” Grandmother, who had already shown an uncharacteristic degree of patience, called from the bathroom. “The only thing you can be sent out to get is one’s death!”
The stranger picked up a baby rattle from the couch with a meaningful look, pressed it into Nina’s hand, and opened the bathroom door. The view of my grandmother, with half of her head covered with a greenish mass, left her stunned. For a moment it seemed as if she wanted to excuse herself, but then she said: “Where’s the baby?”
Grandmother squinted, with her glasses set aside because of the dyeing process. “Do I know you, dearest?” she asked in her most friendly Russian.
The stranger turned to Nina: “What is she saying?”
“Please be so kind as to leave my bathroom, particularly in outdoor shoes,” Grandmother continued before Nina could open her mouth.
“I won’t put up with it any longer, Margarita Ivanovna,” said Nina with a frail voice. “Give me my son back and we can part ways in peace.”
“I can’t follow the conversation,” whispered the leather-jacketed stranger.
“What’s the lesbian saying, Maxi?”
“You can’t do this, Margarita Ivanovna. You are . . . you were a mother yourself.”
“Burglar! Police!” yelled my grandmother.
The voices crackled in my ear. I noticed that Nina seemed more exhausted by the minute, she was already leaning against the wall. In the middle of the chaos I heard with relief my grandfather, who must have just come through the door: “Rita dear, he’s wet!”
Nina, the leather-jacketed stranger, and I pushed our way out of the bathroom, leaving Grandmother on her stool. Grandfather was standing there holding little Tschingis in outstretched arms waiting for a helping female hand. Although he hadn’t reckoned on Nina’s appearance, he smiled happily when he saw her. At that moment I understood that I still had no clue about the adult world.
“Look, Mommy’s here!” said Grandfather, handing the baby to Nina. “Finally she’s back with us. Didn’t I tell you? They always come back, mommies.”
Nina squeezed her son to herself, and little Tschingis let out a deafening scream of protest. Grandmother appeared with a towel over her shoulders.
“You came here with a sword?” she said to Nina. “Got it. From now on you can get by on your own. I don’t want to see you or him,” her voice trembled as she gestured toward the baby, “ever again.”
From that day until her next hair-dye session two weeks later, she walked around with silver shimmers on the right side of her head that reminded me of a halved halo.
SPAIN
Every time Grandfather took a turn a little too sharply, Vera let herself purposefully fall over onto me. I sat between her and her mother, bathed in sweat that was running from the roots of my hair down my neck and back, some of it oozing into the waistband of my pants and some of it dripping down my calves into my sandals.
I did everything I could to avoid letting Vera’s body cause me to bump into Nina, and knew that I’d have sore muscles the next day from the effort. The air conditioning in Grandfather’s old VW had never worked, and Grandmother always opened the window just a tiny crack, and even that for only a few minutes. Drafts had been the cause of many children’s demise, and Tschingis was a weak if genial one-year-old. If anything happened to him it really would be a shame, unlike with some other babies.
He was sitting in my lap, which according to Grandmother was the safest place in the car for an infant. The belt pressed us together, and I worried that we might be forever stuck together with sweat if we were to stay this way while driving through Austria and France all the way to the Spanish coast. Before we passed the abandoned border checkpoints a light scarf was thrown over Tschingis because Grandmother suspected the Europeans might jump out of the bushes and demand proof that the baby was ours. In my opinion the family resemblance was obvious, but nobody listened to me. The fact that Tschingis stayed quiet at these moments was taken by Grandmother as further proof of his genial nature.
She didn’t believe in child seats, and Nina had admitted defeat on this issue astonishingly quickly. Any other seating arrangement would have meant we were one spot short, and the journey together wouldn’t have been possible.
Grandfather didn’t say a word during the entire drive, which had nothing to do with the driving conditions. When we stopped at a rest stop, he did some exercises and took hardboiled eggs and pickles from Grandmother’s hand. Once in a while, on her orders, he sat down in the shade and closed his eyes to gather energy for the rest of the drive. Grandmother viewed steering a car as most demanding work, requiring appropriate attention and also rest. For this reason Grandfather was relieved of looking after genial Tschingis during the breaks. Nina and Grandmother took turns watching over him, so that the other could go, armed with disinfectant spray, to the bathroom. Vera and I were given the tasks of not being a burden on anyone and behaving in a way so as to be invisible. Unlike Vera, I accomplished this easily until we finally reached our hotel.
My Grandmother's Braid Page 8
