Broken Glass Park

by Alina Bronsky

  “You’re crazy,” says Volker. “If you had, we wouldn’t be on the phone right now.”

  “I could have done it. I could do anything. I could. Before. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Until tonight. Now I’m afraid again. I’m afraid of being afraid.”

  “Thank god,” says Volker muffled.

  “I’m so afraid.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.”

  “I can’t take it here anymore.”

  “Where?”

  “Here at the Emerald. I’ve always been attached to this apartment. But I just can’t take it any longer. I want to get out of here. Maybe I’ll move downtown—I need to finish school. I hate the Emerald. I hate the people here. There’s nothing I can do about it, and nothing they can do either. They’re a bunch of impoverished pigs. And they are only getting poorer. I provoke them. They let it slide, but secretly they hate me. I hate the way it smells here, the stench. I hate the laundry hanging from the balconies. I hate the satellite dishes . . . ”

  “Those are everywhere. Please don’t cry. I can’t comfort you from afar. We’ll take care of it, okay? As soon as we’re back from vacation. It’s no problem at all. I’ll be happy when you’re out of there. And speaking of vacation, are you coming with us?”

  “Better not,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “You know why.”

  “No, I don’t. Think about it.”

  I love you, I think to myself, are the saddest words in the world.

  He’s gone during July. With Felix. It’s scorching hot. The Emerald holds the heat into the wee hours until it starts to get light again.

  Maria complains every morning that she won’t make it through the day. The daily calendar for Russian Orthodox housewives supplies her with new recipes for cold soups and warm facial masks. One big cucumber suffices for both.

  She found a broad straw hat on the street, only slightly crumpled, and wears it whenever she leaves the house. It makes her look like a giant mushroom.

  I’ve shown her the way to the public pool and gotten her a season pass. In the morning she packs a cooler with buttered rolls and mineral water and grapes and watermelon and sour pickles and apple cake and heads off to the pool with Anton, who’s on summer break. He dives and swims with his school friends while Maria sits with her straw hat on in the shadow of an oak tree, fans herself with the pages of an advertising circular, and wonders at the fact that every wasp in the city seems to be buzzing around her cooler. In the middle of the day Anton and Maria come home, eat cold soup, pick up Alissa from kindergarten, and then they go back to the pool all together.

  I’m a lot friendlier to Maria now—I think she’s a real martyr. I even complimented her on her turquoise bathing suit once; it was the only one in the outlet store that wasn’t too small for her. I worry about her a little in the evenings, when she sits sweating in front of the TV, her face bright red, wheezing like a hippo. “Us people from Novosibirsk just weren’t made for this kind of weather,” she says. “We just melt.”

  And that’s what it looks like.

  “Don’t forget to drink a lot of water,” I say, wondering silently whether Vadim has any more cousins if this one expires.

  I’m happy that Anton has finally earned his swimming certification—the “little seahorse” badge, they call it—meaning I don’t have to stay with him in the kiddie pool.

  It’s too loud and shrill there. As soon as I smell the chlorine, my feet start to itch. I have no more desire to sit on the “family” lawn, where little kids will drip their ice cream on my towel and bigger kids will kick their soccer ball in my face, than I do to hang out on the lawn where all the recent graduates of the local high school and trade school smoke, spit in the grass, and tussle with their squeaky girlfriends.

  It all makes me sick.

  Peter’s there, too. He doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at him. Even when we occasionally pass each other on stairs back at the Emerald.

  When I’m home alone, I pull down the shades and listen to Eminem. I turn it up really loud. I don’t care if the entire building can hear it.

  I used to be embarrassed to like Eminem. I would never have admitted it. In the event someone asked me about it, I always had an answer at the ready: it was Anton’s music.

  But of course nobody ever asked me. All sorts of stuff blasts through the Emerald and blends together in the staircases—military marches, techno, easy listening, old Russian songs, the Moonlight Sonata, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Bizet’s “Carmen,” static-filled radio shows (“and now a beautiful song for faithful listener Lydia, from Irkutsk—happy fifty-third birthday”), heavy metal. That along with all kinds of live noises—shattered dishes, stifled gasps, laughs, political discussions, and first and foremost fights, which drown out everything else. “Shut the hell up, you bitch, you’ve ruined my entire life . . . ”—“Me? Your life? Did you all hear that?”

  And Eminem.

  And me.

  Because the rapper from Detroit and I often sing duets. And these days I’m comfortable with the fact that I like him. I even wear a T-shirt sometimes with an image of him on it—he’s loading a revolver, grimacing, bleached hair, tattoos, yes sir.

  He’s the only artist I’ve been able to listen to in the last two years—for hours on end. And the only one I really believe, the only one who has lived what he describes in his music. I like the fact that he became a father at a young age, and that he has adopted children. I get emotional following his saga in the media, his divorces and marriages, all with the one woman, and his battle with his own family. And I feel sorry for him, because in comparison to the 8 Mile area where he grew up, the Emerald is a palace. I’d rather live here than in a trailer park.

  Anyway, we sing together a lot, him singing his lyrics and me singing mine. But the melody is the same, and so is the basic feeling. But we each have our own themes, and like parallel lines we’ll never intersect.

  I’m sorry, Mama, says Eminem.

  You’ll be sorry, Vadim, says Sascha.

  I never meant to hurt you.

  I’m really going to hurt you.

  I never meant to make you cry.

  I promise I will make you cry.

  But tonight I’m cleaning out my closet.

  What are you cleaning out, Marshall? Your cabinet?

  I’m cleaning mine out, too—my cabinet of poisons.

  I don’t have much in it beyond my hatred and a few tidbits I’ve read. Arsenic, for instance, is deadly for an adult in a dose as small as a tenth of a gram. It has no smell or taste. The only thing missing from the book was whether or not you can buy it at the pharmacy. Or I could put yew seeds in your eggs. I think twenty would do the trick. A little while back a little kid was killed by a huge dose of regular old salt put into his pudding. I read about it in the paper. That could be something for you, Vadim—and the parents of that kid should get some, too.

  But there are also so many lovely poisonous plants you can just pluck by the roadside. Lily of the valley, laburnum, meadow saffron. You can get cramps, hallucinations, respiratory failure, and even heart failure from meadow saffron.

  I’m not sure you’ve earned such a pleasant death, Vadim. Probably not. Spoiled, canned fish would be more fitting. That way you’ll have convulsions and suffocate and on your death certificate it will say the cause was botulism. You’ll eat any old shit. I could put twenty cigarette stubs in your noodles, put a bunch of pepper on it, and you wouldn’t know the difference.

  You never smoked because you placed so much value on your health. There was even a time when you decided you wanted to lose some weight and you started counting calories—for about three days. It cracked my mother up—but she assured you that she didn’t want to lose a single ounce of you.

  You always thought women who smoked were vulgar. Which is exactly why I tried so hard to become a smoker; unfortunately it always made me feel ill.

  I wouldn’t want to kill you with sleeping pills. There’s no way you
should be allowed just to fall asleep.

  Unless you ended up in the pond behind the oak trees—in broken glass park—where my mother took Anton in early spring to catch frog fry, which he put in our aquarium. We watched as they transformed into tadpoles and then were astonished as their number started to drastically shrink. There were fifty, then twenty, then ten, and finally a single cute frog hopped out onto the carpet and opened its mouth.

  I don’t believe that you stepped on it by accident.

  When your lungs fill with water, I want it to be very unpleasant—and the frogs should croak. And you should lie there for a long time before anyone finds you. And then, when you finally rise to the surface, like all waterlogged bodies eventually do, you will look exactly as you deserve to, greenish-gray, rotting, bloated.

  I would love to identify you then and say, “Yes, of course it’s him—instantly recognizable, couldn’t be anyone else.” Others might not have seen it, but that’s what you always looked like to me.

  Dissolving him in hydrochloric acid would also be a nice trick.

  But to keep such a big container of hydrochloric acid on the balcony and put Vadim in piece by piece—Maria would definitely think it was unhygienic. And in this case, she would actually be right. And you are straying into the realm of the ridiculous, Ms. Naimann.

  What are we singing now, Marshall?

  And Hailie is big now, you should see her, she is beautiful.

  But you’ll never see her; she won’t even be at your funeral.

  Exactly. But not Hailie. Alissa.

  Felix was so pissed off I wouldn’t come to Tenerife that he swore he wouldn’t send any postcards. He told me on the phone, and I could hear tears of anger in his voice. And I could hear Volker in the background saying, “I’ll send you one.”

  Felix slammed down the phone, but Volker called back.

  “We would have been thrilled,” he said. “But I can understand if you don’t want to go. Or if you have something else to do.”

  “Maybe another time,” I said to him. “Maybe next year. If you still want me to go.”

  “Next year I definitely won’t want anyone to go,” Volker said, sounding sad, not joking. “I already know I’m going to need a vacation after this vacation. Felix, I don’t want to hear language like that in this house.”

  “My influence,” I told him. “See, it’s good that I’m staying home.” Then I wished him a safe flight and good weather.

  I run to the mailbox every morning. But there haven’t been any postcards yet. There wouldn’t be even if they had sent one—the mail takes ages.

  I still jump up every time I hear the sound of the postman’s bicycle through the open window.

  I actually do have a job. But I only got it after I told Felix and Volker I couldn’t go. I tutor three kids, all boys, in French. I get five euros extra for going to their houses. I don’t feel like having them sit at my desk.

  One of the boys, Kai-Julian, is even worse at his vocabulary words now than when I started. “I’m afraid,” whispered his mother out in the hallway, “that he has a crush on you. He always wants to put on a clean outfit before you arrive.”

  She’s one of those women who looks as if she was born with perfectly coiffed hair and makeup on. She’s always at home when I go over. Sometimes she’s smoking, sometimes she’s writing out a shopping list, sometimes she’s painting her toenails. Other times she is smelling the lilies in her garden.

  During the hour-long tutoring session she comes in at least five times—to bring us tea, to offer us cookies, to remove the tea cups, to water the cactus on the windowsill, to tell me what the teacher told her about Kai-Julian. Sometimes she’ll talk for fifteen minutes about Kai-Julian, and all the while he is sitting right there and his translucent ears are getting redder and redder. “He is poorly organized and is unable to concentrate,” she says. “Have you noticed that, too?”

  “No,” I lie.

  But I don’t care as long as I get my money.

  I also help Angela every day. For free. Just for the sake of it. I saw her crying in the staircase, pressed against the green wall right where it says “Sascha! Loves! Anna!” She has to take an exam in the fall or else she will have to repeat. She’s already been left behind once—and she started school a year late. She was sobbing about how she couldn’t stand the little shits in her class who were three years younger than her but who could already do everything better. And they looked down her shirt. How awful.

  “If you want,” I told her as she sat there with mascara smeared around her puffy red eyes, “I can help you prepare for the test.”

  She didn’t understand at first.

  “What do you mean—prepare?” she asked. We speak Russian to each other, but her Russian is almost as bad as her German. It’s strange, the gibberish people around here speak in. Okay, so they can’t learn the new language. But how do they manage to forget the old one?

  “What do you mean—prepare?” I said, imitating her. “It’s simple. I come to your apartment, you open a book, I explain things, you solve the problems, and you start to understand more and more. Ever tried that?”

  She shook her head morosely. So morosely that it was as if I had asked whether she started her day with group sex.

  “But,” she asked, “why?”

  “Maybe so you can pass your stupid exam?”

  At this point she started crying again. I watched with fascination as the lumps of mascara stuck her eyelids together and she wiped them away with her hand and rubbed the black clumps between her fingers. Then she wiped her fingers off on the wall.

  “I don’t know,” she said, which I found hilarious.

  “We’re doing it,” I said. “A little bit of studying. It’s not fatal. You won’t get addicted. No chance of that.”

  “And what if I still don’t pass the fucking exam?” she asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “You’ll get angry.”

  I laughed. “You have no idea how angry I’ll get,” I said. “If you fail, you better steer clear of me.”

  Then she laughed, too.

  I go to her place every morning around ten. I get up a half an hour before that and shower and eat breakfast, while reading a book. Maria and Anton have already gone to the pool and Alissa is off at kindergarten. It’s the best part of the day.

  Almost every second day I have to ring the bell for ages and kick the door just to wake Angela up. She always opens the door just as I’ve given up and am about to head back to our apartment. Then suddenly the door opens and she appears in her pajamas, with a teddy bear, her dyed blond hair sticking up, lines from the pillow pressed into her face.

  “Huh?” she says. “Who is it?”

  “Huh?” I say. “Integers?”

  Then she snaps to. “Shit,” she says, depressed. “Fucking shit. I was having such a nice dream.”

  She always takes off her pajamas as if I’m not there and puts on a miniskirt or something else along those lines. She has pale, milky-white skin and there are always bluish mother-of-pearl-like splotches on it. She changes in seconds flat and then makes a cup of instant lemon tea. Then she pulls out a slice of bread, toasts it, tops it with a piece of cheese, a thick slice of salami, and—struggling, her tongue out—squeezes a spiral of ketchup on top, and then sits down next to me with all the enthusiasm of a galley slave.

  It’s a shame nobody has ever videotaped us. Angela’s not completely idiotic, just in spurts. Sometimes she understands things, though most of the time she’s completely lost. She needs her fingers to help count. She often holds up her hands in front of her face as if to shield herself from a math problem she’s just glimpsed.

  “They’re just numbers,” I say. “They don’t bite. You have to play with them.”

  “Play?” she asks, looking at me horrified. She’s afraid of me, like Maria. I try to remain patient with her, but I’ve yelled at her a few times.

  But that’s not the only reason she cries. She’s plagued by f
undamental doubt. She cries at some point during almost every session.

  “I don’t understand anything,” she often says. “Why do they want to torture me with this stuff?”

  “So your pretty little head doesn’t just float away because it’s so light and empty,” I say. “Or maybe you think you wouldn’t even miss it?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m going to fail,” Angela says. “I know it. Do you really think my head is pretty?”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “But I’m not a boy.”

  Still, it’s not as if our sessions are worthless. She is getting a little better. When she understands something, she flushes with happiness. She looks down and waits with rosy cheeks for my praise.

  “See,” I say, “you can do it if you just set your mind to it.”

  “It was just luck,” she says. “I’m telling you, I can’t do math.”

  “But you just got that right.”

  “Like I said, it was by accident.”

  “You don’t have to be coy with me. I know how much trouble you have with this stuff. But you got that right.”

  She leans back over the books with a look on her face as if she’s about to throw up.

  It’s strange that I never see Grigorij in the apartment.

  “Where’s your father hiding?” I ask one time. “Does he work mornings now? I haven’t seen him in ages.”

  “He’s in his room,” says Angela.

  “Why—is he sick?”

  “He’s drinking,” Angela says casually. “He usually drinks all night long. Then he sleeps like a log all morning.”

  A chill runs through me.

  “Is that something new?”

  “What?”

  “That he’s so hardcore.”

  Angela shrugs her shoulders. “He used to do it once in a while,” she says. “But it used to be rare. After three weeks he’d be clear-headed again and wouldn’t drink at all for six months or so. It was no big deal. But it’s been two months straight now with just a couple of days off.”