My Grandmother's Braid

by Alina Bronsky

  “Is he homesick?”

  “What kind of question is that. Who among us isn’t homesick? You don’t have to beat a dead horse.”

  “He never talked much to me.”

  “Maybe he’s become deaf and dumb over the years?” Grandmother speculated aloud. “You know what, Nina, you should go back to your filthy crime-infested city. Do you think I don’t know you have a lover waiting in your apartment? You’re just incapable of making up your mind, that’s your problem. You’re fickle. When I was younger, I was the same way. But the fun of that will pass when you eventually get to be as old as I am.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll make it that long,” said Nina. “In your company every year counts for two, or what was it again?”

  It was lucky for her that she ended up staying for a few more nights anyway. She’d certainly never have forgiven herself for it is she hadn’t.

  I regretted having revealed my father’s address to Vera. She called me and told me about the building he lived in.

  “It’s giant,” she whispered into the phone while Grandmother talked in my other ear because she thought I was discussing my homework with a classmate.

  “The fence is so high. I think there’s a pool behind the building, but I’m not sure. Should I have rung the doorbell? The balcony is pretty, with a palm tree on it. If I could, I would move in there immediately. You should do that. Then we can sit on the balcony and drink hot chocolate. Or swim in the pool.”

  “You don’t even know if there is a pool.”

  “There is one. I have a feeling.” I got goose bumps. Grandmother was simultaneously asking me questions that I answered with random nods or shakes of the head.

  “He has a pretty wife. Long blond hair, like out of a commercial,” said Vera.

  “You’re just making that up.”

  “He has two daughters.”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “Whatever you say,” Vera answered, hanging up.

  That night I didn’t hear any footsteps. I woke up because I had to go to the bathroom. I walked past the two sleeping women into the bathroom until I felt a draft. The door to the staircase was open, much wider than the last time.

  It didn’t occur to me to wake up Grandmother or Nina. I slipped into my boots, barefoot, threw my jacket on over my pajamas, and ran out. First I went up the stairs because I couldn’t shake the image of my grandfather on the roof. But the door that went to the roof was locked. I ran downstairs and out of the building.

  It was cold, I slipped down on the wet sidewalk, got back up, and kept running. The playground looked spooky in the sickly light of the streetlamps. I searched park benches because I hoped he’d sat down somewhere to catch his breath. Every few minutes the headlights of a passing car shone on me. Despite the cold I was sweating beneath my jacket.

  I felt as if I’d been looking for hours, but a glance at the time corrected me: not even thirty minutes. I decided to turn around, maybe he had long since gone back home. The beads of sweat on my forehead felt icy.

  Back at the door to the building, I realized I had done everything wrong. I should have gone in the other direction. At first I took him for a shadow at the side of the road, until I got closer and leaned over him. Like me he was wearing a jacket over his pajamas, he had his eyes closed and was smiling.

  THE MAN OF THE HOUSE

  Leave your eyes closed, Father,” said Grandmother. “I know that you hear me. Look, how you’re lying there, like an angel, like Maya. You were always a good husband to me. Golden hands, we say. All your offspring have your slit eyes, even the little Jew, probably for seven generations. There’s something of you still on this earth, Father. The boys have your thick Asian skin, you looked younger than me with every passing year, soon people would probably have taken me for your mother. Why did you do it? Why did you leave me like this? I’ve gotten through other things, but Nina there in the corner, she’s weak. You’ve dumped all your baggage on me and then taken off. What does she have, anyway, that I don’t have, those slim piano fingers or maybe the doe eyes? If somebody had treated me like a doe, then I would have had a look like that, but there was no deer where I was concerned. I was the exhausted racehorse, after that a beaten pack animal, but I won’t let them make soap out of me. Stop crying, Nina, otherwise he won’t be able to understand what I’m saying. And it is my request that he hear it.

  “If there is one thing I regret, Father, then it’s what I said about Maya. You didn’t kill Maya. It was both of us. And you’ll soon be with her. You’ve never since let down your loved ones again.”

  The floor slipped out from under my feet, and I only came to again when Grandmother bored into my upper arm with her pointer finger.

  “Get up,” she said.

  I jumped up immediately.

  “You’re the man of the house now.”

  I had feared that Grandmother and Nina would be at each other’s throats over the details of the funeral, but I was surprised.

  “Nina, you are a musical person and have something like taste. I’m overwhelmed picking out the right coffin. My dead husband Tschingis Tschingisovich, peace upon his soul and may the earth be like down feathers to him, was a humble man and would certainly have chosen the simplest one for himself. On the other hand, I fear that might be construed by outsiders as a sign of disrespect or, god forbid, greed. I ask for your opinion.”

  “Just do what you want, Margarita Ivanovna. Like always. What outsiders are you talking about anyway? Are you expecting family?”

  “A boil upon your tongue. Tschingis Tschingisovich’s family is beyond me. They wanted nothing more to do with him after he’d decided upon me. Can you imagine that, his aunts called me old back then. I could have been his mother, they said.”

  “How impolite.”

  For the funeral, Nina lent Grandmother a black turtleneck, and for her part she was able to spare an unworn pair of black nylons. The funeral party consisted of the two of them, Vera, Tschingis, and me. Anastassia represented the rest of the world, and she looked breathtaking in her short black dress. Unfortunately I didn’t have much of an opportunity to look at her because Vera kept trying to put her hand in my jacket pocket the whole time, supposedly because she was cold. She whispered something in my ear at the same time.

  “Do you remember?” she asked, as if there was nothing more important in the world at that moment.

  “Remember what?”

  “When we were little and not here yet. We didn’t know each other yet. All the snow in winter. Higher than I was tall. You walked along and didn’t see anything but snow.”

  I nodded. “It was tough to walk. You were boxed in from head to foot.”

  “And those felt boots. As ugly as night.”

  “At least they didn’t pinch.”

  “Mama always pulled me in a sled,” said Vera.

  Somewhere in her sentence a barely visible arrow was concealed. It stuck in me, and I had difficulty breathing.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Didn’t your grandmother pull you along on a sled? In the morning, to preschool?”

  “I wasn’t in preschool,” I whispered back. “I was an idiot with no life expectancy.”

  “And did you ever lick a metal pole during the winter?”

  “What pole?”

  “Any. Swing set. Scaffolding.”

  I shook my head.

  “Mama poured hot water over my tongue,” said Vera, lost in thought.

  I noticed belatedly that we were already standing at the side of an open grave and Grandmother was saying to a man in black: “You going to get on with it, or are you being paid by the minute?”

  “Others wish to join.” The man made a solemn gesture.

  We all turned around simultaneously. The gate of the cemetery was open, and a mass of people streamed toward us. It was exclusively men, predomina
ntly small ones, with dark faces, tanned skin, hair combed back. A few of them wore poorly fitting black suits, others wore overalls over which they’d thrown dark jackets or sweaters. They nodded to my grandmother from a distance, and with a precise delay of two seconds they repeated the gesture in Nina’s direction. They lined up next to each other in several rows, and the little cemetery was suddenly full.

  Nina cast a worried look at Grandmother. Grandmother squinted.

  “Now let’s finally get going, your honor,” she said in Russian, and the funeral speaker closed his eyes and gave a brief speech, during which he pronounced my grandfather’s name wrong.

  With numb fingers we tossed a few clumps of moist dirt onto the coffin and stood to the side to let the men come forward.

  They all watched silently as the grave was filled in. After that the men went past us. They stopped in front of me one by one and put out their hands. I shook all the hands extended to me. One pair of eyes after the next looked me in the face, and I had the feeling that it was my grandfather who wanted to tell me something that I didn’t understand because I’d never learned the language of these men. I basically only now realized that it was even a language.

  The men left without dignifying the women with so much as one more glance.

  “Look!” said Grandmother full of amazement. “That’s how you treat a widow. Asian mugs, I don’t mean that as an insult, my dead husband was one himself, but they do have manners.”

  The cemetery emptied, we stood there just the six of us again. Anastassia looked furtively at her watch.

  “Should we go to McDonald’s?” asked Vera. Nina’s enraged look, which was actually intended for her daughter, cut through me as well.

  “Why not,” said Grandmother. “Nastenka, dear child, I thank you for being part of this. You can go. Don’t want the dance lessons to start too late. Your husband hasn’t died. Oh my God, sweet Jesus Christ, I’m already talking like the dying Jew from that joke. Do you know it? Is everyone here? Really, everyone? So who is manning the shop? It’s rubbing off on me.”

  Anastassia kissed each of us three times on the cheek, wiped her lipstick from the corner of my mouth, and made her exit.

  Grandmother turned to me. “Speak of the devil. To the left of the gate.”

  She linked arms with Nina and headed toward the exit. Vera and Tschingis followed, I trailed after them. I saw him standing there, hands buried deep in his pockets. My grandmother strutted right past him without so much as a glance at him.

  I stopped in front of him and also stuck my hands in my pockets, only to take them out again immediately. The last thing I needed was to start mimicking his gestures.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  His lips moved, and his eyelid twitched. He said something, but the wind whooshed in my ears. My family continued on, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to catch up to them because of him.

  TRAITOR

  Grandmother was worried about Nina.

  “Still crying,” was the first thing she reported to me when I came home from school. “I’ve got the little one on my lap night and day because she’s incapable of doing anything. She’s acting as if her husband died. I’m afraid she’ll get depressed. First depression, then cancer, that’s the way it always goes. And you? Able to understand something in school today?”

  She paused for a second as if she really expected an answer, but then kept talking before I could open my mouth.

  “All that crying won’t bring him back, you know. I told her that, but it didn’t help. Just cried more. I could tell her that he didn’t really care much about her in the last few years. You could see that. But that wouldn’t console her, do you think?”

  This time the pause was long enough for an answer: “I don’t think so.”

  “I mean, it’s not as if I won’t miss him. I look at those poor devils he works with . . . worked with, and I think: they’re just like him and also somehow different. Their faces are expressionless, their gazes empty. Tschingis was a quiet man, but smart. He loved me so much, did everything for me, kneeled down in front of me just to get me to agree to marriage. I left the stage for him. Not because I was too old. Not because of the broken toes. Because of him. Everything for the family. Always the family that drags you down and breaks you. You know, I can’t do everything—three children and a depressed woman and all the construction sites. Everyone has limits.”

  I’d taken Vera to the train station because none of the adults had thought of it. I’d asked her to stay, but she just snorted at the idea. “Where? In this hole? Without your grandfather it makes no sense.”

  I felt guilty because I couldn’t offer her anything better, and because unlike her, I hadn’t cried over Grandfather. When Vera called me uncaring and weird, I didn’t contradict her. I could have said I just didn’t have time to mourn because I could barely find a moment of peace. I’d seen how important it was for Grandmother to stay busy. Under Grandmother’s watchful, unwavering gaze I did the cleaning, played with little Tschingis, even cut his toenails. Silence came only when she remembered I was a traitor, that I had embraced the enemy. Then she stopped talking to me for a while. I enjoyed it so much that I couldn’t be sad during those moments, either.

  Grandmother never maintained her silence for long, though. First she gave me angry looks. Later she mumbled into her knitting: “No wonder he sold out Grandmother. After all that I’ve done for him. He’s caught up physically but inside everything is still a mess. No backbone, no character. What does the red-haired Jew have that allows him to buy you?”

  I said nothing.

  “Just refuse to talk, you. Of course he has a nice place. Given how many people’s teeth he’s pulled out. I’ve seen his business card. He didn’t even keep his real name. He used to be named Maltchik and now all of a sudden he’s Herr Doctor Mahl! Ridiculous. He sold his soul, so what should one expect from his spawn? You can work so much on a child, but it’s all for nothing if the genes are bad.”

  “All we did was have cake together.”

  “What kind?”

  “Chocolate mousse cake.”

  “I knew it. Raw eggs, salmonella. I’m sure your stomach hurt afterwards.”

  That wasn’t the case, but I didn’t correct her.

  “Next time he’ll put something in the cake, then you’ll wake up at his place, in the basement, locked in with seven locks. Do you know the story of the father who kept his daughter locked up for fourteen years?”

  I thought of my father’s twitchy eyelid, the unbearable conscience-stricken look on his face. He was so happy when I’d finally called him. He’d shown me a photo of two girls at the café and said they were my sisters, two and four years older than me. They had strawberry blonde hair and were holding each other tight. They were gorgeous, and I had asked him if I could keep the picture. He gave it to me with obvious unease.

  When I told Vera about the meeting, she asked: “Did you go out on the balcony? Is the palm tree real?” and was disappointed at my lack of progress.

  “Just wait and see,” grumbled Grandmother into a cooking pot where an indistinguishable substance was bubbling. “Tomorrow, no, maybe the day after he’ll come again. He’ll ask you all innocently: shall I buy you a puppy, Maxi? A real Great Dane? Do you want to come on vacation with me? Would you like a million? Dentists are rich because they always swindle people. Maybe you’ll become one. When you were still little you were dependable. You were the best child in the world, a golden boy, my great hope. I gave you my life, and when you leave me, Maxi, I will no longer exist. I can endure a lot, but not that. Then I’ll be on your conscience.”

  “Why would you say something like that?”

  “Be quiet. I’m not speaking to you.”

  I was almost thankful to Nina for running Grandmother so ragged. Grandmother had to get her out of bed every day. “I know you’re prone
to depression, madam. But you can’t do this to me. We have children.” She took Nina tea in bed, sometimes also a moist washcloth: “Freshen up your face, my dear, then you’ll feel human again and look a bit more human, too.”

  She would have made a corpse get out of bed. Nina gave in and staggered into the bath. When she came out, Grandmother was already waiting for her. “I’ve ironed this blouse for you, put it on, soon you won’t have the figure for it anymore. We’re not getting any younger. You can’t hang about in your bathrobe all day, we’re raising young men here, do you want Max to end up gay for good? That’s better, brave girl. Where’s your brush? Here, I cleaned it specially. Margo will do your hair nicely for you. And now a couple spoons of oatmeal, and then help Margo with the chores, I can’t always slog away on my own.”

  She worked her way through Grandfather’s belongings, washed the clothes, ironed them, and with Nina in tow gave everything away to the construction workers. Grandfather hadn’t owned much, a few shirts and pants, a warm sweater, but his jacket and winter coat were, according to Grandmother, “of good quality. I bought inexpensive things, but never cheap things.” She was pleased to find takers for all the clothing items, even the socks and underwear. Even years later, whenever I saw a man who reminded me of one of my grandfather’s workers, I wondered whether he might be wearing one of his undershirts.

  Once Grandmother had forgotten that I was a traitor, she consulted with me on questions concerning Nina’s condition or our future.

  “Why are you asking me?” I said every time. “Just give her a pill from the pill pouch, like you used to do for me.”

  “You are now the man of the house. Why do I have to decide everything on my own?”

  “Grandfather never had to decide things, he always just did what you wanted.”

  “Is the red-haired Jew talking through you? What has he been telling you about us? Did you sit there eating cake, listening to your Oma get dragged through the mud?”