Grandmother no longer trusted me. When she didn’t need my assistance with Nina, she wanted to know about every second of my life. When I came home late from school, she greeted me drowned in tears.
“I thought he’d snatched you again.”
“Who would want me?”
“Now that you’re no longer an idiot, maybe he does want you. Any moron would take such a fully formed boy. He should have seen you three years ago!”
“He tried the whole time. He wanted to support you guys. He sent me Christmas gifts that you hid from me. You just cursed his name. You told me about him only because I was allowed into Germany because of him, and you with me.”
“Aha! I knew it! You met him again and he told you lies about your grandmother.”
I’d seen my father three times since the funeral. He’d given me another business card, but I had long since committed his phone number and address to memory, and Vera had, too. Suddenly I had a father about whom I knew some key things: he no longer looked like he used to, and I could assign a place on the map and a telephone number to him. I repeated the number to myself every night before falling asleep. Sometimes I wrote it down and blotted it out immediately so Grandmother didn’t get suspicious. When I lay in bed at night, I also repeated the things he’d said to me during our second meeting.
Your grandmother is a sick woman. She’s mentally disturbed, she never recovered from the blow fate dealt her back then. One appearance in family court is all it would take and the rest would be child’s play for me. But we don’t want it to come to that. We want to try to settle it amicably. Your grandfather is dead, I always considered him the more sensible of the two. I don’t want to think about what must be going on with you guys now.
I remembered the feeling, as if something had lodged in my throat, even though I hadn’t touched the cake that he’d ordered for me. An invisible rope had constricted my ribs and tightened with every breath while I tried to explain my view of things to him. He was a stranger to me, I’d been afraid of him my entire childhood, and I couldn’t get used to the fact that he was just a person. I met him and felt like a criminal every time because he thought only of me and not about my grandmother’s well-being. “She won’t survive it. I’m the man of the house.”
“You’re still a child.” He tried to put his hand on mine, I pulled it back. “You can call me anytime. You’re always welcome. Soon you’ll be able to make up your own mind anyway about who you want to live with. Why are you shaking your head? You don’t have to do this to yourself. You’re still a child.”
Nina continued to cry every day, and Grandmother felt guilty, as if she had killed Grandfather with her own hands. They went together to the cemetery, Nina kneeled down and cleaned the brass letters on the gravestone with a toothbrush while Grandmother braced herself by linking arms with me and then pointed with her free hand at spots Nina had missed.
“You have to give up this Eastern thing, Nina. We can’t go around planting lilacs everywhere. The only people who do that are Russian women who’ve never seen roses. We need roses, Nina. Our Tschingis shouldn’t remain the eternal slit-eyed Jew here, he should be one of them. How did you put it recently, Maxi? That absurd word? Integration. O.K., dry your eyes now, for all I care a lilac bush would be fine. You’re lucky old Margo has a soft heart. The old man, just to get this on record, wouldn’t have liked your flower ideas. Isn’t that right, Maxi?”
I held Tschingis with my free hand and said nothing.
“You know what? I’ll buy the woman some jewelry,” Grandmother said later, when Nina had gone back to bed again. “A nice necklace. I always wanted jewelry. Once I had a suitor who gave me lots of it. I had to sell it all later so I could buy bread. But Tschingis Tschingisovich had no taste, so I was happy that he never gave me jewelry. But I was left without jewelry.” She laughed, and her gold tooth blinded me. “I’ll buy the depressed woman jewelry. She’s certainly never gotten any before. She’ll get the first piece ever in her life from Margo.”
THE BRAID
I needed to sleep a lot during those days. I had crazy dreams: about a giant red-haired clown jiggling me while I was lying in a stroller, and about Grandmother wearing my grandfather’s suit and getting married to Nina. I stood next to them and threw rice. My father was there, too, this time without the red clown wig, and he clapped his hands, which was difficult because his hands were trembling. A thought shot through my head: how can he drill teeth with hands like that? I heard a voice from above, thundering through the clouds: “YOU DIDN’T KILL MAYA. YOU JUST GOT THERE TOO LATE TO HELP HER. YOU HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING THAT SHE HAD A RUPTURED APPENDIX.”
“It’s called murder!” Grandmother screamed back.
“IT’S CALLED STUPIDITY AND STUBBORNNESS,” thundered from the clouds.
“I thought it was the milk coming in!” yelled Grandmother, her face raised to the sky, her eyes closed so as not to be blinded by the light. “I told Tschingis Tschingisovich that a daughter who sleeps with a married Jew cannot expect any support, and he should relay that to her over the phone! He always did whatever I wanted! I had no way of knowing that she’d suddenly get so sick out of the blue, she never complained! But I was always alone in my damn life! And you don’t even exist!”
One day when I was on my way home from school and nearly walked into traffic without noticing, Grandmother met me at the door. “You’re too late. Were you at his place?”
“Whose place?”
“The Jew’s place.”
“Stop calling him that.”
“You always have to pick a fight with Oma. Come here and help. The woman can’t do anything again today.”
She led me into the bathroom. Next to the tub was the chair she always sat on to dye her hair. The newspapers she usually spread out on the floor were missing, and besides, I’d just dyed her hair ten days before.
She sat down and handed me the large household scissors.
“What are you doing?”
“It has to go.”
“Why?!” I felt panic rising, as if she were asking me to cut off her arm.
“Don’t ask stupid questions. I can’t work with it. Just gets in the way. There are men at the construction sites. There’s no dancing at the construction sites.”
“But why cut it off? Just put a scarf over it.”
“Don’t be an idiot. What kind of man would I be with a scarf on my head? Don’t you want to help Oma?” She grabbed the braid with her left hand and started to hack at it with the scissors in her right hand. The stubborn hair wasn’t easily cut, even when some individual strands escaped the braid.
“Don’t!” I yelled.
“I’m going to build a house the way Tschingis Tschingisovich wanted to build it. White, clean, like the Germans. I already know where.” She said the name of the most bourgeois development in the city. “Woods, a baker. No foreigners. Tschingis will have his own room and that fat ill-bred girl can have one, too, for all I care.”
“And me?” My throat was dry. Grandmother had managed to do it by this point. The braid fell into my hands like a dead animal.
“Put a rubber band around the loose end,” she ordered. “Wrap it in newspaper. Take it with you as a remembrance. You’re going to leave me soon. I can sense a traitor from kilometers away.”
“Why would you say something like that?” I was nearly crying.
“The same thing will happen to you one day.” She waved the scissors at me threateningly, pulled on the leftover fringe of henna-dyed hair, and shook her head disapprovingly. “You hang your heart on someone, do everything for him, sacrifice your life, and then he leaves you, newly widowed, with a depressed woman and two innocent children.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You. You don’t love Oma anymore. You’re practically already gone.”
“That’s not true!”
“I can see it.” She put her face close to mine so that I could see my own reflection in her pupils. “I see it,” she repeated emphatically, and pushed me away.
And even though I was slow on the uptake, I understood what she wanted from me even before she said it: “Get out of here already!”
Obviously I didn’t take the braid with me. I wrapped it in newspaper as instructed and put it in the drawer with my T-shirts. I was a little disgusted by it.
I took barely anything with me, not even a toothbrush.
You’re always welcome, my father’s voice echoed in my ears. We have everything. Anything missing we will get.
I went extra slowly even though I wanted to run. Down the stairs, to the tram that took me to the U-Bahn. I didn’t run up the escalator, instead I stood still, then at the top I crossed the road. I’d looked at it on the map often enough. Even so, the trip to the white building was astonishingly short, the whole time it was so much closer than I’d ever imagined.
What would I do if he wasn’t there? What would I say to his beautiful wife? His daughters? Would they send me away?
But he opened the door himself.
“I’m here,” I said. His eyelid twitched.
The phone rang shortly before Christmas.
“Traitor,” said Grandmother. “You never call.”
“I have called and every time you’ve hung up.”
“Uncle Jegor has died,” said Grandmother.
“I’m sorry.” I had no idea who she was talking about.
“I’m not. He was a liar and a miser. Wait. Stay on the line.”
Something rattled and fell. Then came the sound of a piano. Grandmother played several wrong notes, and I heard her swear.
“What was that?” she asked when she finally finished.
“Waltz number two.”
“You can recognize it, right?”
“Of course.”
“You probably hoped otherwise but the old lady isn’t dead yet. I’m going to live a long time yet, you hear? Longer than all of you put together.”
“I believe you,” I said, and it was the absolute truth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alina Bronsky is the author of Broken Glass Park, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, which was named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly, Just Call Me Superhero, and Baba Dunja’s Last Love, all published by Europa Editions. Born in Yekaterinburg, an industrial town at the foot of the Ural Mountains in central Russia, Bronsky now lives in Berlin.
My Grandmother's Braid Page 14
