“I had no idea you had a little brother,” she said after a pause.
“I didn’t really.”
“But now you do.”
“Now I do,” I agreed halfheartedly.
“Can I come to the funeral?”
“No,” I said quickly. “Definitely not. You didn’t even know him, my father I mean.” I kept talking quickly since she wasn’t saying anything. “It’s a hole, this town where I grew up. Everything is weird here. My stepmother is a ridiculously young Ukrainian girl, and Claudia is slowly going crazy, and so am I . . . ”
“I’d love to help,” said Lucy. “At the very least I could babysit or something. Is your little brother a sweetheart?”
“A total sweetheart.” Suddenly I got angry at her. I couldn’t believe she was using the circumstances to slime her way back into my life. She’d found a moment of weakness, a moment when I had the feeling that things could perhaps be like they used to be. I thought it was insidious, and if anyone had said she meant well it would have just made me angrier.
“He’s very sweet, but you’re never going to babysit him, Lucy.” I heard the way she was taken aback by my change in tone—she hadn’t reckoned with such a rejection after I’d sounded so promisingly open, almost like it used to be. I could sense how her breathing changed at the other end of the line. I didn’t think she deserved any better.
“Don’t you understand that I feel guilty,” came blurting out of her. “Can’t you get it through your head that I was there, too? That nothing will ever be the same for me either?”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” I said wearily. She’d already made this case in countless tiresome letters. I didn’t need her feelings of guilt. I didn’t have any choice then and couldn’t do anything differently now. “I didn’t step between you and the animal because I’m so unbelievably chivalrous,” I said. “You can call me a superhero for all I care, but just bear in mind that I never was one. You’re confusing me with somebody else. It was first and foremost a reflex, and secondly an accident. I was shitting myself and often wished afterwards that I hadn’t done it, in which case it would have been you instead of me. That’s why I don’t want to talk to you, Lucy. I don’t want to have to keep thinking over and over again about deciding between my face and my honor.”
I didn’t hear her crying, but I knew she was, and it pissed me off.
“I’ve told you once and for all that I don’t want to see you anymore,” I said. “Never again. It’s nothing to do with you, I just don’t want to see anyone. I don’t exist anymore, get used to it. My other friends already have. Don’t call me anymore and have a nice life.”
She hung up without answering and I threw the phone against the wall. It popped apart into two pieces, the battery fell out. I shoved all the pieces under the bed and lay back down under the covers. Then I thought of Janne again. I would have talked to Janne because she was different from Lucy. She didn’t come from the world of the undamaged. She was marked like me. You didn’t have to explain things to her. I wanted to talk to her, see her, kiss her. But she didn’t call. Maybe she was trying at this very moment and couldn’t reach me. I got up again, put my phone back together, and turned it on. But it didn’t ring.
There’s going to be a Ukrainian funeral reception,” said Claudia to me when, a little later, I came downstairs staggering slightly as if I were drunk. I sat down on the couch, put my feet up on the ugly two-level glass side table, and listened to the menu. Chicken soup, pierogis with fish, some slimy oatmeal kind of thing, and a never-ending supply of vodka.
“Very nice,” I said.
“It’s heartwarming,” said Claudia. “They have written a shopping list and are off to buy everything in a few minutes. I thought perhaps you would like to accompany them and help them carry everything.”
“Nothing I would rather do,” I said, taking my feet off the table. Then I exploded. “Why would you say that, perhaps you would like to accompany them? I don’t have the slightest desire to, and you know that. If you want to ask me, if you expect it of me and insist on it, then put it that way. I’m sick of all the sugarcoating.”
“It’s the downside of functioning in polite society,” said Claudia unmoved. “To give you another example, I’d love to smack you right now but I’m not going to do so out of the same considerations.”
“Me? Smack me? Why?”
“Because your self-absorption and that look on your face that says I’m-so-superior-and-sick-of-it-all gets on my nerves,” said Claudia flatly.
“That’s not the look on my face, it’s just the way it was sewn together.”
“Don’t talk to me about your face,” said Claudia. “I know it a lot better than you at this point.”
We had to break off the conversation because Evgenija popped in with the shopping list, the length of which made me woozy. She sat down with Claudia and they both went over the list and conferred about a few items. I listened to them in amazement. They really looked like sisters. And what exasperated Claudia about Tammy’s plan yesterday was no longer an issue today. The reception didn’t seem to bother her at all even though yesterday she’d said that normal people in Swinehausen hired a caterer, a specific caterer, one who had specialized in such things for generations. The town was aging, lots of people died regularly, and if you wanted to belong you didn’t break ranks when it came to the funeral arrangements. Now Claudia voiced nothing but enthusiasm for putting together the food, and she seemed to be sincere—I recognized the tone of her voice.
Must be a generational thing, I thought as I saw Tammy coming down the stairs with Ferdi on her back.
“You’re coming shopping with us?” she asked instead of a greeting.
“Good morning to you, too, dear stepmother,” I said. An inopportune thought occurred to me at that moment, about how insistent my father was about sticking to certain rules when I was young, including the importance of greetings and goodbyes and all sorts of common courtesies, and also of washing your hands.
She frowned at me. At least her mother looked like a woman with a good sense of humor, I thought, and suddenly I realized I would never have to worry about Claudia. A funny woman would never be alone. No matter what happened, you never had to worry about a funny woman. Someone would always want a woman like that. And as time passed the way she looked was less and less important.
I thought of Janne, who hadn’t betrayed any particularly distinguished sense of humor up to now. I didn’t want to think about how funny a man would have to be to deflect attention from his face.
I carried shopping bags—frozen salmon that had thawed out during the drive and was now dripping on the flagstones, buckwheat, packets of millet, a year’s supply of grain, a bunch of small bottles of clear liquid that were knocking against each other, deep-frozen berries that like the fish had also begun to drip blood-colored drops, and other foodstuffs that I didn’t recognize but that were inconceivably heavy. When I tried to say that I couldn’t carry twenty full bags in one go, Tammy looked me up and down and said, “Are you a man or what? Your father . . . ”
“ . . . is dead,” I interrupted. “Maybe he carried too many shopping . . . ” At this point Tammy’s mother took at least three bags from me.
I followed her with my eyes as she balanced herself on the gravel walk in her high heels. Her back was very straight and her neck looked muscular. She probably lifted weights every day.
“Did she ever hit you when you were young?” I asked Tammy.
She looked at me with Janne’s disdainful look, grabbed one of the parcels from me, and followed her mother. Still heavily laden down, I shuffled toward the front door.
Inside, everything was cheerful. I caught laughter and snippets of conversation and it seemed as if a new voice had somehow emerged from one of the shopping bags. And it was an unambiguously male voice. For one crazy second I imagined that my father was back. To figu
re out the riddle I went on in. The bags slid off my cramped fingers. I picked them up and arranged them in an orderly row. Then I rubbed my hands, straightened my glasses, and looked into the living room. And I saw the guru.
He was sitting on the couch, sipping at a cup of coffee and joking around with Claudia. She laughed along as if they had forgotten why we were all assembled here. The blue camera bag sat in his lap, his free hand was sitting on top of it.
I stood there and watched him. He flirted to his left in German with Claudia and to his right in English with Evgenija, as if his whole life he had never done anything else. He was calling her Jenny already. I felt like grabbing him by the collar and throwing him out—he hadn’t suffered any loss there.
He spotted me and the smile froze on his face. Had enough already, have you, I thought viciously. The next thought that occurred to me was a desire to accidentally trip on the strap of the camera bag and make it fall to the ground. We had good insurance. But he was sitting too far away and there was a rug at his feet.
He got up, put the camera in Mama Jenny’s hands, and came over to me. He put out his hand. I thought for a second then shook it so as not to look like the most neurotic person around. He put his other hand on my shoulder. That really wasn’t necessary.
“My condolences.” He pulled me close and put an arm around me while his right hand continued to hold mine stuck between our stomachs.
“You already offered your condolences.” I spoke in a formal tone. “Before I left, remember?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He finally let go of me. “Some things bear repeating.”
“What are you doing here?”
“We decided to pay our respects to you and your family.”
“Why didn’t you call beforehand?”
“We kept calling your cell but nobody answered.”
“That can’t be true.”
“That’s what we thought. Which is why at some point I called your mother”—he took a bow in Claudia’s direction—“only to find out that we had the number wrong on our telephone list the whole time. Then we decided to make a surprise visit.”
“Who exactly is we?” My throat was raw, and my heart was pounding in my chest.
“All of us.” He nodded to the side and smiled at me. “We all came to be here for you at the funeral.”
“Who is all of us?” I wasn’t stupid, I just couldn’t believe it. I knew of no “we” that had anything to do with me. We had briefly created a little world together, us six cripples and the guru, but that time was over—I’d dropped out and was living in a completely different world now, one that revolved around death. I couldn’t see where the two worlds could meet or why they even should. I felt as if someone I’d met on vacation had suddenly turned up at my home and asked me in front of everyone to rub sunscreen on her back.
“I didn’t invite you.” I stared at the camera.
“It’s a funeral, you don’t need an invitation,” said a voice from behind me.
I turned around abruptly. Marlon was standing in the door to the patio.
“Were you sniffing the magnolias out there?” I asked full of hatred.
“The roses,” he said with a polite smile. “The magnolias have already withered.”
“And where are the rest of them? In the garage? In the closet?”
The guru was set on not losing his calm. “Why the closet? They’re at the hotel,” he said evenly, smiling. “It means a lot to us to be able to support you.”
Tammy hurried down the stairs, slipped, nearly fell, caught herself, straightened her back, and threw her head back. Her gaze fell with interest on Marlon.
“Why a hotel? We have enough rooms,” she said.
I learned something important about myself in that moment. You could bite off my face and make me kiss my dead father but you had to leave me in peace otherwise, like in an attic room that nobody had access to except me. All that was over now, and I couldn’t decide if I’d rather jump off the roof or smash all the dishes in the house.
Evgenija and Tammy, Janne and Kevin had sat down at the kitchen table and were cutting vegetables. I had lipstick on my cheek after Kevin’s hello kiss; Richard took pity on me and told me. I tried to wipe it off but without a mirror it was tough, I probably just smeared it, in any event everyone just laughed themselves silly at me.
Janne had kissed me too. I bent down to her, she put her arm around my neck and brushed my cheek with her lips while I took a deep breath. It wasn’t clear to me why I had missed her so little. I immediately forgave her for the fact that, compared to Claudia, she was pretty damn humorless. Anyone with eyes like hers didn’t owe the world a thing. I looked at her with a mix of admiration and deep sympathy. The latter had to do with the conversation I’d had with Claudia in my room.
“Do you really think they came to support me?” I said. “You’re all so naïve. The guru has other plans. Have you noticed his camera? He’s making a movie. And a funeral like this makes a perfect scene.”
“A movie?” asked Claudia curiously.
“I guess it’s some sort of documentary,” I explained. I didn’t see any reason why I should cover for anyone. “He films at every opportunity. In the end some big secret will be revealed. Haven’t you wondered why Janne is so nice to me? She thinks we make a perfect couple. She wants to be on the big screen, get it. She bounces back and forth between me and Marlon. Though I’m not sure if she’s still doing that, maybe it was just part of the plan.”
“Documentary film? Perfect couple?” Claudia sat down on my bed. Two lines formed across her forehead. I remembered that I used to put my fingers on those lines when I was a kid. “For what TV station?”
“No idea.”
“Who’s financing it?”
“No idea.”
“Is there a treatment?”
“I haven’t seen one.”
“Did he tell you that he wanted to release it?”
“Um . . . no.” I searched inside myself, trying to remember the things the guru had said to us. He himself had never actually said anything about a film. Friedrich had gushed about it right at the start, and I never doubted it because it sounded logical to me.
“I don’t know what you all imagined,” said Claudia. “He’s making a few recordings, but they are definitely for private use, at the most for you guys to remember everything. But at your age everybody just wants to be famous. But now can you please explain to me again who is supposed to make a perfect couple?”
I felt as if somebody had just poured a bucket of ice-cold water over my head.
“Just forget it, please,” I said. “It’s just another misunderstanding.”
The biggest misunderstanding of all, however, was the fact that they were all here. It was a nightmare. I resented Tammy’s hospitality—at the end of the day I knew better than anyone that she was no nice little girl. And I couldn’t understand why she suddenly had to act like one. Maybe she felt obligated to play the role of the widow.
As for Evgenija, I resented her because it suddenly turned out that she could speak German. Much better than I could speak English, not to mentioned Russian or Ukrainian.
“Laughable-but-passable,” is how she described her ability. I stared at her like a talking donkey. “I had a German lover,” she explained.
“I get it, it’s a family tradition,” I said in a polite tone. If everything was going to go off the rails, the least I could be was polite. Everyone was having fun and I didn’t want to be the one they talked about later, the guy who showed no style at his father’s funeral. The other person biding her time was Claudia. But she was only concerned with the guru, shadowing his every move; twice I caught them talking and falling silent as soon as I appeared. At least I didn’t see the camera in his hand anymore.
Claudia was nice to everyone else. Too nice, I thought. She directed everythin
g, counted rooms, pillows, and bodies, had cots moved into the study, and created a right mess. Tammy ran around with stacks of bedding. It turned out the guru had fibbed, as well. They hadn’t checked into the hotel, he had just said that so as not to put any pressure on us.
I said very politely and clinically that it would be absolutely impossible for me to share the double bed in the attic with Marlon, as if we were a gay couple. I said that without my own room I would turn into a mass murderer. They all laughed. Janne and Tammy laughed the loudest. What I said interested them to a limited extent. What I wanted, not at all.
“Now pull yourself together,” hissed Claudia after she’d plucked me out of the crowd and shoved me up against a wall. “I don’t want my son of all people to act like a diva.”
I gasped.
“Who’s the diva here? I’m a diva? Have you seen the others? Do you have any . . . ?”
She punched me in the stomach, it was probably meant as an affectionate gesture, and all the breath still left in my lungs from my little speech rushed out into her face with a whistle. She turned away like I had bad breath.
“You can’t mourn in peace around here anymore,” I said. “There’s a cripple in every corner.”
“You’re the only one here who’s crippled.” She pointed her finger at me like a pistol. “In your head.”
“I’ve never denied that.”
Claudia looked around as if she was afraid she’d be overheard.
“What I don’t understand,” I said with poorly disguised rage, “is why you all think it’s so great. Especially you. At home you like to have your peace and quiet, too.”
“I do not like to have my peace and quiet!” she shouted.
“Why isn’t there ever anyone at our place then?”
“Because you and your carrying on have scared everyone off!” She no longer seemed to care whether anyone could hear her. “As long as we’re living under one roof, I can’t invite people over without you treating them in a way that I have to be ashamed of. None of them ever did anything to you, and you don’t have to walk around like weltschmerz personified just because of a few scratches on your cheek. Yes, I like the fact that there are people here who want to be there for you even though you are the way you are. Let me finish,” she said as I opened my mouth to object. “I know every word you’re going to say before you say it. Naturally you want nothing to do with them. Naturally you’re the only one out of all of them who isn’t deranged. Naturally . . . ” She ground to a halt mid-sentence and threw me a pitying look, as if I was no match for the clever words of her monologue. “And now shut your mouth and offer the guests something to drink.”
Just Call Me Superhero Page 16
