“Where should I have left him?”
“There are germs in the hospital, if he touches anything here he’ll be contaminated down to his bones!”
“Was I supposed to leave him alone? Or with his not exactly helpful sister? I don’t have anybody else.”
“Is that my fault?!”
“What do you want from me, Margarita Ivanovna?”
I listened and watched Nina and Grandmother through half-closed eyes, pushed into the chair by the weight of Tschingis, who had fallen asleep on the way and had been handed to me immediately upon arrival. Grandfather lay in the hospital bed with his head wrapped in bandages, smiling. His eyes were closed, I wasn’t sure whether he was awake the entire time, listening and finding it amusing, or whether he was dreaming of something particularly nice.
Nina and Grandmother leaned over the bed from opposite sides. Grandmother fussed worriedly over him the whole time, adjusting the pillows, the sheets, even the bandages. Nina held back, sometimes she winced as if trying to choke back tears. Her motions seemed harder and older. She hadn’t hugged me when greeting me, instead she’d briefly patted my arm as if I, too, might have something to do with the share of misfortune she’d managed to foist back in my grandmother’s direction.
“Nothing is sacred to you young women anymore,” said Grandmother bitterly. “Though you’re not so young anymore, either, Nina!”
Grandfather opened his eyes, his smile broadened. A gorgeous dark-skinned nurse brought in food on a tray. Grandmother lifted the plastic cover and eyed the gray slice of bread, sausage, and slice of pickle alongside a container of vanilla pudding laid out on the tray.
“What is this?” she asked, and the feigned calmness in her voice portended a storm on the horizon.
“General diet meal.”
“Send this muck back to Africa.” Grandmother shoved the tray away. She still spoke half in Russian.
“Give it to me,” said Nina. The nurse retreated after giving me a pitying smile, and Grandmother shook her head.
Nina chewed with purposeful indifference while Grandmother retrieved the pot-bellied glass jars in which she’d transported chicken soup and steamed broccoli. Grandfather let a few spoonfuls pass his lips. Nina glanced over at me.
“What’s new?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You?”
She shrugged. I ran my hand over Tschingis’s sweaty tuft of hair. “He’s gotten bigger. Has he got a rash on his face?”
“Probably dirt,” said Grandmother. “Or he ate something bad. Maxi would have been a wreck if he’d been brought up in the big city, I can tell you, Nina. That’s why I was happy we landed in this backwater. Nothing happening at all, you could kill yourself out of boredom, not even a river nearby, but at least there are no felonies committed in broad daylight. I’ve never opted for fun, but always opted instead to meet my responsibilities. We all declared ourselves Jews for the sake of the poor child, do you understand what kind of sacrifice that is, Nina? Nothing personal. Tschingis on the other hand is an extraordinary boy, never seen such an intelligent gaze. A bit like Maya. Give him to me to raise, Nina, I’ll make an American president out of him.”
“It’s plenty for you to support him with phone calls,” said Nina. “I can always cook noodles while you’re talking to him.”
“You know, of course, that noodles are nothing but flour, which clogs the digestive system. I always prepared fresh vegetables for my grandchild.”
“If I had a medal, I’d pin it on you.”
I made sure Tschingis didn’t slip out of my lap. I didn’t want him to be woken up because Grandmother and Nina, though still speaking in indoor voices, were talking more loudly now. Grandfather reached for the hands of the two women, who were still leaning on either side of the bed. He found them and caressed them simultaneously. “Psst, Maya,” he said. “Why so sad? Your mother loves you more than anything in the world.”
Nina gasped. “Maya?”
“You’ll never be able to compete with Maya, madam,” said Grandmother. “You’ll never overtake her, no matter how much piano you play.”
Tschingis stretched in my lap. He slid down from my lap and I made sure he landed softly on the floor. He paused for a few seconds kneeling between my legs and bracing himself on my thighs with his elbows. He stared at me. He had Grandfather’s eyes, the same severity and calm.
“Do you still recognize me?” I whispered, and he smiled.
He fell asleep immediately on the air mattress that had been set up in my room; he was a good sleeper. Me, on the other hand, I lay awake the whole time and listened to the voices in the kitchen. Grandmother was holding forth about the duties that came with being a woman. While she got quieter over the course of the evening, the urgency of Nina’s voice rose.
“Make less money than a cleaning woman,” I heard. “The monthly public transport pass eats up a fortune . . . Of course I blame myself . . . Therapy . . . alone with no family in the big city . . . doesn’t want to go to daycare. Cries.”
“Daycare is for children nobody wants,” said Grandmother, throwing grease on the fire.
“What’s left of my life . . .”
“You’ll be dead and buried one day, who’ll ask about your life then?”
“Vera despises me.”
“Tell me about it. I’ve done everything on my own for my entire life. Totally gray by the age of thirty. Every year counts triple for me.”
“Double,” I muttered under my breath. Tschingis turned over and sighed in his sleep.
Before getting ready for school the next morning, I cleaned up the bottles and empty glasses. Several coffee cups were filled with cigarette butts. I cast a glance into the living room, where Grandmother and Nina were sharing the couch, then I closed the door quietly.
From a phone booth I called the number at Nina’s new apartment. A man answered and I asked him to put Vera on the phone. I had to wait a suspiciously long time; there was cursing in the background.
“What do you want?” asked Vera hoarsely when she finally came to the phone. I told her that her mother and her brother had arrived safely and that I would look out for them.
“As if I wanted to know that,” said Vera and hung up.
The dismissal of my grandfather from the hospital couldn’t come quickly enough for Grandmother. She was afraid that the doctors would realize he wasn’t all there anymore. When they examined him or changed his bandages, she always tried to distract them whenever they directed any questions at Grandfather. Of course, she misunderstood most of what they said and talked in Russian to the medical staff. The nurses began to avoid Grandfather’s room.
Despite Grandmother’s fears, nobody tried to keep Grandfather in the hospital or commit him to a psychiatric ward. When I went to the hospital the nurses called me into their conference room and gave me cola and gummi bears and asked who the two women at Grandfather’s bedside were and which of them had adopted me and my cute little brother from Korea.
On the day Grandfather was released, Grandmother frantically packed his bag, tied his shoes, and accompanied him with Nina’s help to the parking lot and into his old VW, which one of Grandfather’s workers had driven there and left for us.
Grandfather sat at the steering wheel and waited patiently. Grandmother looked questioningly at Nina. Nina shrugged.
“How are you feeling, Father?” asked Grandmother unnecessarily loudly.
“Very well.”
“Do you think you are able to drive a car?”
“Of course.
“And you know who I am, right?”
“Margarita Ivanovna, I beg you!” whispered Nina reproachfully.
“Don’t tell him!” hissed Grandmother. “Do you at least know who this is here?” She gestured to Nina. Grandmother’s mood visibly changed at my grandfather’s sheepish grin. “And this person?” She pointed at me.
/> “My beloved grandchild.”
“And who is Maya?”
“I let her down,” said Grandfather under his breath.
“All clear. He’s fine today,” said Grandmother matter-of-factly and got into the passenger seat as I opened the back door for Nina.
SOMEWHERE IN THERE IS A HUMAN SOUL
Nina made many attempts to extricate herself from us. The first time Grandmother cursed her for seven generations, with the exception of little Tschingis and his offspring. The second time Grandmother just waved it aside: “I know that somewhere in there is a human soul. They’ll be back here soon.” On Nina’s third attempt to flee Grandmother just shrugged her shoulders. “Do whatever you want, Nina. I’m not your lover, chasing after you constantly.” That time Nina made it as far as the train station.
Grandmother was convinced that Grandfather couldn’t be left out of sight for a second, or else something would happen to him—he could walk in front of a car, get beat up, or climb over the railing of a bridge. Unsupervised, he was in greater danger than little Tschingis, she imagined. In principle, she said, little Tschingis could even look after the big one in an emergency, if for no other reason than pure mental capacity. In the end, it boiled down to one normal person—Grandmother herself, Nina, and to a somewhat lesser extent me—having to be at Grandfather’s side around the clock with little Tschingis in tow.
Grandfather left the apartment only to check to make sure things were going alright at the construction sites once in a while. He accepted his new chaperones placidly. I was sure that he was clearheaded and went along with the whole charade just to keep Grandmother busy and Nina placated. When I asked him if I could turn on the radio when we were driving, he said: “Ask Tschingis.”
The workers, too, got used to the new arrangement. They stopped taking off their paint-smeared baseball caps and went ahead and finished their smelly hand-rolled cigarettes when either of the alternating women appeared. In one corner, on a plastic tarp, waited an upturned bucket covered with an embroidered cushion. Sometimes there was a beer or dark-black coffee from a thermos for the madam, for little Tschingis pats on the head and gifts. The men seemed ageless, but I knew from Grandfather that nearly all of them had left large families back home. They looked at my little uncle with a mix of heartache and tenderness. One of them spent nights making him toys out of matchboxes and gave Tschingis piece by piece a train with many carriages, a street with skyscrapers, and pieces of furniture for a dollhouse.
When both Grandmother and Nina were unable to do it and I had Grandfather duty, I sat on the embroidered cushion and watched as with barely a word Grandfather made sure walls were torn down and new wires were installed. If I had to wait too long, out of boredom I sketched strange things I saw at the construction sites: newspapers I couldn’t understand even though they were in Cyrillic letters, tin cans that seemed to have come straight out of a black-and-white film, well-worn glossy magazines full of celebrities completely unknown to me, porn magazines that had been quickly stashed away from me but that I found anyway, homemade camping stoves, and a fish hung out to dry, which stank beyond belief. I helped myself from Grandmother’s wallet to buy stamps and sent the sketches to Vera. Although she never answered me, I was sure that she eagerly went to the mailbox every day.
Nina’s appearance brought Grandmother, as she was so fond of saying, a spark of relief and a bonfire of problems. The biggest of them she would never have admitted even under torture: in Nina’s presence she didn’t trust herself to play piano. It was the first time I ever experienced my grandmother feeling embarrassed. Sometimes she tried to send Nina out with Grandfather: “You need to take Father out for some fresh air!”
“I didn’t know that Tschingis Tschingisovich needed to be taken out for a walk like a dog.”
“Everybody needs to breathe!”
“What do you think he’s doing all the time?” asked Nina, and my grandfather called from the balcony, where he was watching the crows in the treetops: “I promise you, Rita dear, I am breathing just fine!”
But it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes before Nina threw on her jacket and helped my grandfather into his shoes. I had missed the moment at which they started to treat him not only as if he were crazy but also as if he were infirm. I couldn’t discern any change in him. While everything else was in flux, Tschingis getting bigger, Grandmother getting smaller, and Nina getting plumper, Grandfather always stayed the same. Nina linked arms with him, and I saw how much effort it took Grandmother not to yell, “Stop whoring around!” after them, even though she had just personally escorted the two of them out of the apartment.
“Are they gone?” she asked, recklessly leaning over the railing of the balcony. “And Maxi, wouldn’t you like to get some air as well?”
“Why?” I asked, sitting on the bed immersed in Stephen King’s It.
“To play. Other boys your age go out all the time and play. Perhaps there might also be a girl on the street who won’t run away from you?”
I took pity on her, grabbed my book, and left the apartment. I could have gone to see Anastassia at the dance school, but usually I sat on the staircase and read, leaning against the wall as the sound of awkward playing pressed into my ears. Grandmother had worked her way through the children’s piano book with the balloons on the cover, and I had secretly bought her one called For the Adult Piano Student and stashed it under her old medical textbooks. I could be sure that she wouldn’t know whether she might have bought it herself somewhere along the line.
Grandmother couldn’t decide whether she detested big or small cities more. She hated the place that had become our home, and since Nina’s move she no longer made any secret of it. I had internalized the idea that it was because of me that she had buried herself alive in the middle of nowhere, while other women dragged their families into the dangers of a metropolis on a whim. Grandmother knew a lot about big cities, and our emigration wasn’t only about fleeing the future, but also about escaping car exhaust and criminality, even though she herself absolutely knew the joys of an inspiring metropolis. The first year in Germany I totally believed that I wouldn’t have managed to stay alive for two minutes in Frankfurt.
I was ashamed by the sense of triumph I felt when I got out at the main train station.
Vera was standing on the platform, small and pale among the commuters scurrying about, and she didn’t see me until I was right in front of her. “Don’t grin so idiotically,” she said, grabbing my hand with her hot, rough fingers and pulling me along behind her until we reached a side street.
“Where should we go?” I asked. “Where do you guys live?”
“Are you nuts? We can’t go to our place.”
“Why not?”
“Too far,” said Vera, and I knew she was lying.
I stuck my hand in my jacket pocket and felt for the money I had stolen from Grandmother’s wallet. Then I opened the door of a small café. Maybe Grandmother had been right, and I would never become a man. But there was one thing I could do.
“What do you want to eat?” I asked.
We didn’t manage to tell each other anything. Vera gulped down two pieces of cake and a sandwich, drank two cups of hot chocolate, and demanded again, this time with a full mouth, that I stop grinning so idiotically. She didn’t ask about her mother, and even less about my grandparents. I tried to tell her about them, but she held her hot hand in front of my mouth. I briefly grazed her hand with my lips and asked whether there was anyone taking care of her now that she no longer had me. She mumbled: “If you only knew.”
She took me back to the platform. When the regional train entered the station, I took Vera’s hand. “My father also lives somewhere around here,” I said. “I have his address.”
“What?” Vera shouted. “You only tell me that now? Where exactly does he live?”
I boarded the train with the feeling that I had misse
d out on something important.
The first time I awoke with a start because I’d heard tentative footsteps in the apartment, I rolled over and quickly fell asleep again with the hope that somebody else would look into it. The second time, it was clear that nobody except me was hearing it. I got up, carefully climbed over sleeping Tschingis on the air mattress, and looked around for the source of the noise. Grandmother was sleeping with whistling breaths next to Nina on the couch, a sight that immediately chased me from the room. I still hadn’t gotten used to it.
The apartment door was ajar, and when I stepped barefoot onto the staircase, I discovered Grandfather on the stairs that led up. Above us was only the roof.
When Grandfather saw me, he smiled sheepishly. I acted as if it was the most normal thing in the world to meet him on the staircase in the middle of the night with toes contorted by the cold. I took his hand and led him back into the apartment, where I locked the door and secured it with the chain. When I saw him sitting at the kitchen table the next morning freshly shaved and dressed, the memory of the night before seemed like a dream, and I couldn’t make up my mind whether to tell Nina or Grandmother about it.
For months now, Grandfather had behaved unremarkably during the day. Once in a while I saw him out on the balcony staring into the sky.
Grandmother interpreted his behavior her own way. One morning she took the tram to a gourmet food shop and brought home figs, pomegranates, and stuffed grape leaves. She presented the purchases proudly to Grandfather. He smiled politely and turned away.
“Didn’t touch a thing,” Grandmother complained to Nina that evening. “I should have known. Back in the village they had figs as sweet as honey, pomegranates as big as a child’s head. The fruit here is a pale imitation. Since we’ve been in this country he’s not touched a single bite of melon.”
“The stuff’s really not that bad.” Nina helped herself to some of the grape leaves.
“You don’t have any sense of taste.”
My Grandmother's Braid Page 12
