Broken Glass Park

by Alina Bronsky

  “Not that way, Sascha. Take it back.”

  “Not again. It’s no fun that way. I want to play on my own.”

  “Accept the help. You’re just a few details away from being a really good player. You’re just too tense.”

  “What a dumb idea to want to play you. If I were your chess computer, I would have exploded long ago,” I say, taking the move back. I spend another six minutes thinking while Oleg whistles an annoying melody. He’s probably having an incredibly hard time resisting telling the alien love story word for word.

  “See,” he says in a praising tone, “sometimes you only get it right on the second try.”

  I’m flattered that he now stops whistling and takes a full minute to think about his next move.

  Then I dither again, unsure of myself, sacrificing pieces, attacking, get praised, cursed, and taunted. Then he stops whistling and begins to sing, “I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block.”

  I try to decide which pawn to advance to take his queen. I’ve never managed that against Oleg. I’m even dreaming grandly of a stalemate.

  “Take the move back,” Oleg says as I’m happily buzzing about my chances. “That was moronic. Think about it. For a change.”

  “Kiss my ass.”

  “Think. Spread your wings. You are looking in the wrong direction. Leave your pawns alone. The main attraction is up in front.”

  “I can’t see it, god damn it. This is all I can do.”

  “What’s the aim of this game?” Oleg asks. Then he sings, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina . . . ”

  “What?” I roll my eyes.

  “The goal.”

  And then I suddenly see it and shove my rook forward and shout “check” so loud that a fat pigeon pecking at sunflower seed shells nearby takes off in a huff and flies a few circles high above us.

  I watch it go. I wouldn’t have thought it could fly.

  Then I look back down at the board, wait for Oleg’s move, shift my king, and put Oleg in checkmate.

  He’s as happy as if I had just healed him with a wonder cure.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, though inside I don’t totally agree, “I didn’t win. Not on my own. It doesn’t count.”

  “Of course you did,” says Oleg, beaming. “I barely helped you at all. Great game.”

  “We won,” Alissa is singing. She climbs back onto Oleg’s lap. “We won. We did it, not anybody else.”

  “I’m off,” I say, putting the pieces back into the white box, closing it up, and handing it to Oleg. I get up. It’s difficult to admit to myself how proud I am. And how close I am to feeling that things are going to work out from here on.

  But I still don’t like seeing Alissa on Oleg’s lap.

  The bomb goes off the next day.

  I have bad dreams all night, as if I sense it. In my dream I’m thirteen again and am having my first try of an odorless liquid down in a moldy basement. It’s a time when I still have friends here in the Emerald, and one of my friends’ parents used to make up and mix what they called cocktails.

  After just two sips, my throat feels like it’s numb. I push the cup away and grab my neck. It feels as if I’ll never be able to swallow again, to breathe again, and I wake up gripped with fear but still able to wonder at the fact that this long-forgotten memory has somehow been exhumed deep within my brain. I hadn’t thought about it for years. I’ve also learned in the meantime that cocktails aren’t drunk in basements and that you don’t automatically see orange clouds and a dozen red suns after you drink a normal cocktail.

  But the feeling of the edge of that cup on my lips is so realistic that I almost throw up.

  I lie on my back and breathe carefully in and out. It’s no longer involuntary. I breathe until I fall asleep again. This time I’m haunted by Grigorij, who is crawling on all fours to a taxi. Then he gets in and starts driving it straight at me. But instead of running, I stand still and wait for the car to hit me. It doesn’t hurt at all. I make a fist and flatten Grigorij’s face through the windshield.

  I punch and punch and wake up from the pain in my hand. My knuckles are skinned.

  Is it possible to punch the wall in your sleep?

  Why can’t I dream about Volker, I think angrily. Or at least Felix?

  After that I don’t want to risk falling asleep again. I sit up in bed, lean against the wall, and freeze. When it starts to get light, I pull a sweater on over my pajamas, creep out of the apartment, and walk down to the mailbox.

  It’s much too early for the postman to have come, and once again there’s nothing in the box. Of course. Only the paper, which I pull out.

  I scan the front page. I don’t notice anything of interest.

  In the elevator I look over the headlines. I still don’t see it. A boring news day, and it puts me at ease.

  I love boring things. They’re comfortable.

  I lie down in bed with the paper. But instead of reading it, I fall right to sleep. I’m awoken by the phone. It makes me jump—it’s already after nine.

  I brace the phone between my ear and my shoulder and gather up the pages of the paper. They’re scattered around the bed and floor.

  “There’s no point in canceling, Angela,” I say. “I’m going to come anyway.”

  But it’s Anna.

  “Is it true?” she asks without so much as a hello.

  “What?”

  “That he’s dead.”

  “Who?” I ask. I don’t know why she’s asking me—I left broken glass park before she did that night. “Are you crazy, asking me that?”

  But it’s not Anna who doesn’t get it, it’s me.

  “Him,” says Anna. “Vadim. I heard that. My mother said . . . ”

  The phone slips and falls to the floor. The back comes off and the battery flies out.

  “No,” I say. “It can’t be true. I didn’t . . . ”

  Then I see it in the paper. A little box at the top of the page. “Emerald murderer dead.”

  “No,” I say to the paper. “Where did you hear that shit?”

  Vadim E. is dead, the paper says. I don’t suppose they care that my head is spinning, that I feel nauseated.

  “It can’t be,” I say. “I didn’t kill him yet. I still have that ahead of me. I have so many good ideas for how to do it. I’m definitely going to do it. Kill him and write a book about my mother. Before he manages to do it. He’ll never beat me to it. NEVER!”

  I pull out the local section and spread it on the floor, holding it open with my knees so the breeze doesn’t rustle it.

  It takes some time for me to find it. Here, too, it’s just a small item.

  “Vadim E. has hanged himself in his cell.”

  “He left a letter.”

  I just can’t comprehend the words in this blurb.

  “No,” I say. “It must be a mistake. They would have informed us. Somebody would have told us. There’s no way they would let us hear about it in the paper first. No way. They must have made it up.”

  What a stupid article. A canard. Why is it called that?

  I’ll ask Volker.

  I pick up the phone, put the battery back in, and click the housing back together.

  The phone starts ringing immediately. The ringtone sounds somehow hysterical, I think. I should change it.

  “Naimann,” I say calmly.

  Someone is whimpering on the other end.

  “What?” I say. “Who’s there?” Suddenly I’m completely disoriented. It’s Vadim, I think. Despite his love for AK-47s, he had a pretty high-pitched voice, the old eunuch. Or maybe it’s Maria and she’s just heard about Vadim’s death at the pool. Even though it can’t be true.

  Or it’s my mother. The voice sounds so familiar. It could be her. It sounds as if she’s hurt herself.

  She’s not dead, just injured, I think. Crashed her bicycle or something. How can she be dead? I got it wrong. It was all a nightmare. A horribly long one. And the night isn’t over yet.

 
I don’t say anything. I wait.

  “Sascha? Are you there?”

  Yes,” I say. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Please come. Please come now. Please.”

  “Where?” I ask. I don’t know what kind of instructions to expect. Go around the Emerald; there will be a white winged horse—get on and hold on tight. Or go around the Emerald to the broken phone booth; don’t worry that it’s not connected—pick up the receiver. Or go to the front of the building; a black car with no license plate will stop . . .

  I would do anything right now.

  “What do you mean, where? You know where I live. Take the elevator.”

  It’s Angela.

  “I don’t want to right now,” I say. “Leave me alone. Everyone just leave me alone.”

  “Please, Sascha. Please, please, please.”

  “Grigorij?” I ask. “Is something wrong with him?”

  “What? Yes!”

  Since I imagine Angela would make a cup of instant lemon tea before calling an ambulance even in an emergency, I run up to her place without waiting for the elevator.

  I burst through the open door. I’m in the hall again, and all the doors are closed except Angela’s. There are sobs coming from her room.

  “Where is he?” I ask, standing there helplessly. Angela is lying on her bed in Mickey Mouse pajamas, crying uncontrollably into her pillow.

  “Where is Grigorij?” I ask.

  “He’s snoring,” Angela says into her pillow. “I only said it so you’d come. Would you have come otherwise?”

  “No. Not today.”

  “See.”

  She starts crying again. I can’t believe how much water a crying person can produce. She’s spraying all over the place. I step back so as not to get hit. Then I hand Angela a pocket pack of tissues. She gingerly takes it, lays it on the bed, and wipes her nose on her sleeve.

  I sigh.

  “You should be glad he left you,” I say. “He’s not worth crying over.”

  “Who?” Angela asks, surprised.

  “Mohammed or whatever his name is.”

  “Murat,” Angela says with a smile. Her face is red and puffy. Tears are running down her face. The smile makes her look kind of crazy.

  “Okay, Murat, whatever.”

  “He didn’t leave me,” says Angela. “Just the opposite. Tell me—what should I do? I just don’t know. I’m . . . ” She turns away ashamed. As if she’s just correctly solved a math problem.

  “Yes? You’re . . . ?”

  “I’m . . . ” She rolls her eyes and bites her lower lip.

  “ . . . Dumb as a box of rocks?” I ask.

  “No. Well, I am that, too. But no. I’m pregnant.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Since when?”

  “That’s all you can think to say?” Angela asks, looking at a new blue spot on her upper arm. It’s a strange-looking one. It’s actually four round marks next to each other.

  It looks like the imprint of a set of fingers.

  Angela spits on the end of her index finger and rubs off the mark.

  Why are her eyes so bright, I wonder. Is it because of the tears?

  “What am I supposed to say?” I ask, clueless.

  “Something.”

  “Should I say congratulations?”

  Suddenly Angela becomes very matter-of-fact. “No idea,” she says, sitting up and frowning. “What do you think?”

  “Me? Why me? Why should I have an opinion about it at all?”

  “You know everything. Everything’s easy for you to figure out. What would you do in my position?”

  “Use condoms,” I say quickly. “Before it happened.”

  Angela sticks out her lower lip.

  “What do I do now?” she says pensively. “Do you think Murat would marry me?”

  “If Murat is anything like Mohammed, he’ll be cracking jokes about the blond slut he nailed. He’ll marry an imported virgin. And you’re lucky there. Didn’t I already say that?”

  “Yep,” says Angela, and I wonder—not for the first time—how she can listen to all of this and not defend herself.

  “When did you find out?” I ask. “You weren’t pregnant yesterday.”

  “Today,” she says.

  “Where’s the test? Let me have a look at it. Maybe you didn’t read it correctly.”

  “I didn’t do a test.”

  “How do you know then?”

  “I threw up. I felt really ill.”

  “Doesn’t that always happen when you drink a lot the night before?”

  “Yes,” Angela says with a smile. “But it was different today.”

  “How?”

  “It was a different kind of sick. Somehow a nice sick. I just couldn’t stop puking. And afterwards I still felt nauseated. And by the way, we do use condoms. Most of the time. Until three nights ago, actually. The condom dispenser was empty. So fucked up.”

  “Three days ago?” I say, incredulous.

  “Yes.”

  “And you think you’re pregnant from . . . ”

  “Obviously. The night before that there were still condoms in the dispenser.”

  “Oh, man,” I say. “You belong in the zoo, Angela. You can’t be pregnant yet.”

  “Why not?” she says, confused. “Of course I could be.”

  «But you wouldn’t know it yet. Your supposed child would still be a cell making its way down the fallopian tube. It wouldn’t be implanted yet. There would be no way to tell. What did you eat yesterday?»

  “I don’t know,” says Angela. “All kinds of stuff. Jam. Something in tomato sauce.”

  I get ready to go. I’m afraid to ask whether she’s heard anything about Vadim.

  I wish I had her problems, I think. Actually, no, I don’t.

  “How do you know that?” asks Angela suspiciously, watching as I move toward the door. “That it’s not attached yet. That I can’t be pregnant. Yet.”

  “If you’re worried, you can take a morning after pill,” I say. “You should try to take it today. So it doesn’t imbed. Just in case Murat did slip one past the goalie.”

  “What do you mean, doesn’t imbed?” she asks, shocked. “I don’t want that.”

  “You don’t want what?”

  “I don’t want it not to attach.”

  “You want a kid?” I ask, dumbfounded. “You?”

  “Not a kid,” she says. “A baby.”

  “Well, you might just get one,” I say. “It takes them ages to refill that condom dispenser.”

  I slam the door behind me.

  The door to our apartment is half open. I go in and see the newspaper on the floor. Next to it, the phone. I kneel down.

  It’s still there. Vadim E. is dead.

  And it wasn’t Sascha N. that killed him.

  That’s when I begin to scream.

  I scream like on that night more than two years ago. So loud that the windows rattle. So loud that echoes bounce around the staircase. So loud that people wonder whether they should call the police because somebody’s been killed here again.

  But nobody’s been killed. He’s already dead. He did it himself. And nobody warned me that I might be too late.

  I stagger out of the apartment. There are already a few people hovering around. They step aside and talk amongst themselves. I walk past them without looking at their faces. Faces don’t interest me. They’re all interested in just one thing—getting off on whatever’s happening at our place. Then they can call friends and tell them, and then those friends call their friends.

  And then there is another hoarse scream and the sound of something heavy falling over. I jump and look up—the sound is coming from above—and my first thought is, Was that me?

  A tremor goes through the people gathered in the hall—it’s a soft sound, like a breeze stirring a field of grain. All faces look up. It sounds as if something is falling down the stairs. Or someone.

  I hold tight until I see Grigorij in front of me, very
close and all contorted. He’s falling toward me and automatically I take a step to the side so I don’t get buried beneath him. The noise he makes when he hits the bottom of the stairs is dull but ugly.

  The people all gather around him with a chorus of “oh”s and “ah”s. One of them puts ice on his face, another pours clear liquid into his mouth from a small bottle. Oddly, a third person unlaces his shoes. I go closer and see someone open his eyelids and look with consternation into his eyes. Two women debate what number to use for an ambulance, though the assembled group is against calling one—“He’s probably got a BAC of 0.4 again!” They’re all afraid of the drunk tank.

  I want to say something but Vera from the fifth floor (a trained engineer who these days works as a fortune teller at the train station—she’s small, with dark hair and a fake tan) steps authoritatively in my way.

  “Get out of here,” she says. “And leave him alone.”

  “What?” I say, confused. “You want me to do what?”

  “You people have already done enough harm here,” she says. “Just get away from us, you. Keep walking, don’t say a word, don’t address us, leave our men in peace, leave our boys in peace . . . ”

  “Me? In peace?” I ask, but she won’t be stopped.

  “And if you really want to do a good deed . . . ,” this part she delivers with an appallingly friendly smile plastered across her face, “a Christian deed, then gather up your entire clan and move—and go somewhere far away, got it? Then we’ll finally be able to sleep in peace around here again.”

  “What?” I ask, looking at her little hand, with six fat rings on it, waving me past. It’s this casual motion that causes something in me to start burning, racing, and knocking again. Apparently she notices that and steps back, lifting up her hand in warning.

  «Uh-uh,» she says, and they all look at me. As they do, Grigorij, unobserved, rolls onto his side, puts his hand under his head, and seems to go to sleep—though there are still wheezing and rattling noises coming from deep within him.

  “Move along,” Vera repeats from a safer distance. The sudden tandem crying of the two-year-old twins on seven, Heinrich and Franz, is the only thing that stops me from going over and strangling her with my own hands.

  “Okay,” I say. “I’m going.”