Grandmother had booked the accommodations after she’d found a pamphlet in our mailbox. “The children need to get to the seaside,” she’d told Grandfather. “It’s too late for Maxi, but Tschingis will be rickety otherwise. His brain is still developing. Do you remember, Maxi, how you were put under UV lights at the polyclinic as a toddler so your bones didn’t get too weak? Didn’t help. Too little sun is simply too little sun.”
Now she sat on her lounge chair beneath a large hat every day. Unlike us she wasn’t afraid of sunburn, which is why she refused to put on sunblock. She was bronze by the third day.
Me, on the other hand, I had a bright red back on the first day already, and the next morning the skin had begun to peel. Grandmother realized the extent of the damage immediately and sent Grandfather to the breakfast buffet to get yoghurt. He had to go back a second time because the first time he brought fruit-flavored yoghurt. Nina and Vera stood by my bed as Grandmother spread the cool goop around my back with her fingers. I felt with horror that her fingers were trembling.
“It’s okay, Oma,” I said. The trembling got worse. A big glob landed on my shoulder and an even bigger one on the pillow. I twisted my arm and wiped up the yoghurt with a finger and licked it off.
“It’s not so bad,” I whispered.
It was Vera who caught the half empty yoghurt container that fell from my grandmother’s hand. Grandmother slumped sobbing to the floor, hammering on the threadbare carpet with her fists.
“What have I done!” she screamed into the barely visible pattern of the carpet.
“I’m fine!” I yelled, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
I jumped up, the yoghurt tickling me as it ran down my back. Together we mustered the strength to lift Grandmother and put her on the bed. Nina and I each held one of her hands because she was now trying to scratch her own face.
“It’s just a measly sunburn!” shouted Vera.
Grandmother raised her head noisily. She stood up, went unsteadily into the bathroom, and straightened her hair. Vera sat down next to me, breathing heavily. I realized that she’d been overwhelmed by the scene and put my arm around her. She moved closer to me and leaned her head on my shoulder, and now we were both covered in yoghurt. Nina looked at us shaking her head.
I had expected Grandmother to follow my every step with a bottle of sunscreen after that, but I was wrong: she only halfheartedly reminded me to stay in the shade and keep a T-shirt on. Most of the time she stretched out in her beach chair next to Nina. From a distance it looked as if the two of them were engrossed in a discussion, but I didn’t believe that impression. Nina looked as if somebody had sucked out all her previous warmth and buoyancy, and for reasons that were incomprehensible to me, I feared I was at fault for it. I remembered unhappily the moment when, a few weeks after she’d taken Tschingis back and Grandmother had fallen into despair, she was suddenly at our apartment door again, crying. For some reason I was the one who opened the door. Months later I couldn’t shake the feeling that I could have changed something if I’d only managed to find the right words at that moment, but Grandmother suddenly came up behind me and stretched out her arms for little Tschingis. I wondered why one of the two of them always had to be unhappy whenever the other one wasn’t.
The past few weeks seemed to have been a good time for Grandmother.
“Just no preschool, Nina,” she lectured from her beach chair, one leg crossed atop the other. “Is our boy an orphan? Margo is here, she’ll take care of everything. When I said before that the devil should take you and rip you into bits and roast you, I meant it in a loving way.” I didn’t catch Nina’s answer; for the most part she just held her book tightly.
I suggested to Vera that we build a sandcastle for Tschingis. Vera followed me grudgingly. We went far enough away that Grandmother could still see us but we could no longer hear her.
“So boring,” said Vera as I dug out the moat of the castle. “Why do we have to stick around here? Can’t two old women manage to look after one little child on their own?”
“No idea.”
“And anyway, your grandfather is here, too.”
Grandfather sat a bit off to the side reading a newspaper beneath a palm tree. Sometimes he lay beneath a palm tree and slept.
“Leave him be,” I said.
“Will you be like that, too?” asked Vera.
I shrugged and then took off my T-shirt. Vera moved closer.
“Doesn’t look bad at all, your sunburn.”
“My grandmother knows her way around emergencies.”
“Why don’t you ever defend yourself? Against anyone?”
I couldn’t come up with anything.
At the breakfast buffet Grandmother eyed the plates that other hotel guests were carrying to their tables critically and assessed their selection and portion sizes. Once she followed a French vacationer through the entire room to ask whether he really needed five slices of watermelon and whether her children should starve on his behalf. She called him a fascist and returned to our table with his plate.
“Don’t touch it,” she said. “He breathed on it.”
“Why did you take it away from him then?” I asked.
“It’s a matter of principle, Maxi.”
From then on Vera and I tried to avoid the group breakfast. While Vera just ignored the grandmotherly directions, I pretended that the buffet made my stomach sick. Grandmother nodded with satisfaction and from then on made me gruel every morning in a toothbrush cup with the help of an immersion heater. Most of the time I was able to duck into the breakfast room on the way to the beach and secretly gulp down some leftover pieces of cake. Despite the gruel, I enjoyed the ten days at the seaside because everyone except Nina seemed to be in a good mood.
On the day of our departure, of all days, Grandmother overslept. I woke up before her, she lay snoring on the double bed she was sharing with me, while Grandfather had gotten the portable cot, though I’d never seen him sleeping on it. Today, too, he was already gone, supposedly he took long walks on the beach or sat with a cup of tea at the bar. I shifted Grandmother’s braid off her face so she could breathe better. Then I hopped into my pants and ran down to the dining room, relishing a last chance to have breakfast undisturbed by Grandmother.
I was pleased to find Grandfather and Vera at our table. Grandfather had Tschingis in his lap and was feeding him cornflakes. I sat down next to him.
“My mother says that in your culture lots of men had multiple wives,” said Vera with her mouth full, without acknowledging my presence. Apparently the conversation was going to continue for a while.
Grandfather took a sip of tea. The teabag was still in the cup. I stared at it the whole time, tormented by the desire to pull it out, as my grandmother would have done immediately. Unlike Vera, I knew she wouldn’t get an answer. This time I found that a shame. I didn’t have the slightest hint about my grandfather’s culture, and it began to dawn on me that I’d missed out on something important.
“Where’s Nina?” I asked.
“Mama and Margarita Ivanovna got drunk last night.” Vera said it casually, but seemed ready to pounce on my reaction.
“Not funny,” I said.
“Not a joke. They were at the hotel bar together. Mama stumbled into bed at nearly dawn.”
“Don’t talk about your mother that way,” said Grandfather. Vera choked on her hot chocolate and started to cough.
Grandmother suddenly popped up behind Vera and clapped her hard between her shoulder blades. She must have just braided her hair but she looked unkempt, as if she’d just rolled out of bed, and yet she seemed to be in a bright mood. “Dear girl, move over a little. Save yourself the poisonous glare, I don’t even see it. Tschingis, listen. The woman thinks I should open a dance school. At my age! Crazy, right? What do you think?”
“What? Who?” Vera and I asked at the s
ame time as Grandfather got up to get Grandmother a glass of orange juice.
“It’s the craziest thing, right Tschingis?” Grandmother held his sleeve and tried to look him in the eyes. “Do the Germans have any knowledge whatsoever of beauty and elegance? I don’t think so.”
Grandfather put the orange juice down in front of her. He looked as if he was solving a complicated math problem in his head.
“Where’s my mother?” asked Vera.
“How should I know? She can’t drink, dear girl. I don’t know why she insists on doing it anyway. Maxi, go to the room, pack your bag, I’m not your slave. Take this little treasure here and wash out his sweet mouth. We’re leaving in an hour.”
On the way home Nina had a green face and three times she asked Grandfather to stop. She didn’t manage to make it to the bathroom and threw up twice in the bushes and once on the side of the road. Without comment, Grandmother handed her disinfectant and a thermos with hot water. Grandfather looked off into the distance, probably to avoid embarrassing Nina.
“Sometimes I think my mother is married to your grandmother,” Vera whispered in my ear.
“No, they hate each other,” I said, as if that would rule out marriage.
DO NOT SPEAK WITH RED-HAIRED STRANGERS
Back home Grandmother suddenly began again to warn me again about strangers who might try to talk to me on the street. Sometimes it was gypsies, sometimes American pederasts, once in a while Chinese organ dealers, but whoever it was, things always ended badly.
Even so, I already had the impression that despite herself Grandmother had begun to relax. She was amazed that a man who looked Mediterranean had brought one of the neighbor’s children back to the home in top health after finding the child on the street, lost. Another person, who likewise had traces of a violent ethnicity in his face, had gone to great pains to bring back Grandmother’s wallet, which she had left somewhere while shopping and had complained it had been underhandedly stolen. He’d turned down a reward as well as a package of chocolates, and Grandmother couldn’t get over it for days: “An Arab, and yet upstanding.” During this time she stopped locking the door every night with a chain.
When she suddenly started again to warn me, I tried to act dumb: “What if the stranger just asks for directions?”
“Get away. Especially if he knows you name.”
“How could a stranger know my name?”
“How should I know?” Despite all the practice she was still not a good liar.
“What if it’s a woman?”
“It won’t be a woman. Definitely not with you. In any case, just get away.”
“But then she’d think I was weird.”
“She’ll think that either way.”
“And what if she says I’ve inherited a million?”
Grandmother’s facial expression irritated me. I’d already forgotten a little what it was like when she worried about me.
“What does he look like, your stranger I’m not to answer?” I asked placatingly.
She avoided looking at me. “I don’t know what he looks like now.”
“Now? What did this guy used to look like?”
“I’ve forgotten.”
“You never forget anything.”
“Red hair,” said my grandmother wearily. “Nose. Glasses. Ugly as the night. Leave me alone, I really don’t know anything more.”
FAT GIRLS IN TUTUS
Meanwhile the phone was ringing constantly at our place. The time when we would cringe at the sound was long gone. The phone sat on the nightstand next to the couch so Grandmother needed only reach out her hand to answer it.
“How old?” she asked over the phone. “Three? She’ll cry. Four? She’ll cry, too. You can come, the first lesson is free. One-year contract. No, not month to month. If that’s the way it is at the German ballet school take your child there. All the fat Turkish girls are there, in pink tutus. If that’s what you want. I’ve warned you at no charge. With me, three times a week. Yes, even at four years old. Anyone who doesn’t come regularly won’t have any right to a role in the Nutcracker. And kindly console your child yourself in that case.”
Shortly after getting home from Spain she’d discovered a space next to the new Russian supermarket. A produce shop had just gone out of business. Grandmother had tracked down the owner and gotten a fixed lease. Grandfather renovated the space exactly to Grandmother’s specifications: wood floor, mirror, barre. The walls were painted wine red. Then Grandmother rejected the color as “hooker red” and had them painted birch green. In the end they were oxblood, which I could barely distinguish from hooker red. Grandfather had brought two workers with him to whom he talked in a language I didn’t understand. They were small men who didn’t look you in the eye. Their stained overalls flapped around their gaunt bodies.
“Who are these people?” I asked.
“Slaves,” said my grandmother.
“That’s a joke, right? He is paying them, isn’t he?”
“I’m a woman, I don’t have to know everything,” said Grandmother.
I witnessed, for the first time, people taking orders from my grandfather. Up to now I’d only ever seen him at the bottom of the chain of command. At the top of our family pyramid was little Tschingis, sitting atop Grandmother’s shoulders, of course. Now I saw with amazement that these men at least feared my grandfather. As soon as he opened his mouth they listened with intense looks on their faces and nodded eagerly.
“Do you beat them?” I asked during a break during which Grandmother brought by soljanka and plastic plates and tried in vain to suggest to the workers that they use wet wipes to clean their hands.
Grandfather looked at me from beneath his heavy eyelids. “You don’t have to.”
“Where did you find them?”
“I own a company.”
“Does that mean you have even more people working for you?”
“I own a company.”
“For how long?”
“The less you know, the easier you sleep,” Grandmother interrupted. She put a piece of black bread into the unwashed hand of each worker. Ever since she’d been working on starting the ballet school, the girl from the photo—which for a while I’d kept safely under my pillow—flashed across her face time and time again. By this point I’d hidden it in a German-English dictionary and rarely pulled it out.
Grandmother smiled more, and it was no longer the grimace that used to make people cross the street. She no longer called Grandfather “old bag” or “Opa,” and instead she said respectfully, “Father,” and it made me feel as if I had been transported back to a time that I could never actually have witnessed.
“Look at him, look how Father gets the men to work,” she said admiringly. And, “Father, I peeled you an apple for vitamins.”
At the opening she was everything in one person: the owner, the director, the accountant, and the dance instructor. She let me write some text and take a photo of her at the barre. Vera and I went off after school to distribute flyers in the neighborhood postboxes. Amazingly, the number of registrations from Russian émigrés with little daughters skyrocketed even before the local paper ran virtually unaltered my text beneath the headline “Russian Ballet Star Brings Beauty to Troubled Neighborhood.” Grandmother had the article framed and hung it on the wall of her tiny office.
That summer a young woman named Anastassia moved into the home; she was nothing but sinews and slender muscles and she applied to Grandmother’s school with a formal resumé and certificates. My grandmother hired her as a dance instructor. From then on I liked to visit the school, which Grandmother took as a compliment, since she assumed that I missed her amidst all the confusion of my early onset puberty.
I drank tea from Grandmother’s thermos and watched Anastassia through the two-way mirror, as Eastern European parents and grandparents dried their childr
en’s eyes and sent them back into the mirrored studio. The tea tasted and smelled particularly strong, and after I emptied the thermos I could no longer walk straight. Smoking a cigarette, Grandmother strolled out of the office during the lesson and into the changing room, where she nodded at parents.
“It’s coming along,” she said. Or: “I can’t perform magic, you know.” Sometimes also: “See my grandson over there? I nursed him back to health, willed him through his first years of life, fed him with a spoon, kept every speck of dust off him. And look at the way he carries himself. I should have sent him to ballet school. He’s gay anyway.”
On one of these afternoons, I was leaning over my homework in Grandmother’s office, wedged between a desk, a coatrack, and an electric stove. Anastassia had nearly reached the end of her lessons, and was teaching the five-year-olds to bow elegantly. There was a knock, and a man entered and stood in front of Grandmother’s desk.
“The owner isn’t here,” I said, trying to look past him into the studio. “Would you like to take a registration form? How old is your daughter?”
“I’m not here about my daughter,” said the man.
I gestured with my pencil behind him. “Anastassia also has two boys in class. If any of the girls laugh at them, they get a smacking. Male honor is maintained here, after all every boy is a future defender of the Vaterland.”
I didn’t know myself why exactly I had quoted Anastassia word for word at that moment, maybe because she had smiled at me beforehand. I’d had too much of the tea, and my tongue felt unusually large and unwieldy. The man looked at me as if I was crazy.
My Grandmother's Braid Page 9
