Broken Glass Park (26 page)

“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.”

I hit the gleaming asphalt. There’s nobody else out here at the moment. In the beating sun. It burns right through the soles of your shoes.

But the heat doesn’t affect me.

I’m cold.

To the left of the building entrance a low stone wall is being built around a garden. It’s about a third of the way done. Next year tulips are supposed to bloom there in front of the building. That’s what the super explained to Maria when she stood there wondering why a pile of rocks had been dumped on the sidewalk and why as a result Alissa had to swerve out into the street on her scooter to avoid them.

I pick up a rock. It’s quite heavy. I weigh it in my hand. A rock like this on Vadim’s head—that would have been great. His skull would have cracked like a raw egg.

Too late.

I wheel back and throw the rock. It doesn’t reach the window. I’m no good at throwing things.

Gym is the only subject I get a B in.

I pick up a smaller one. This time it hits with a crash.

I pause, fascinated.

The window shatters into a thousand glittering shards. For a fraction of a second they all hang in the air, a giant, weightless piece of art. Then they all plummet to the asphalt and break into even smaller pieces.

I chuck another. This one I throw higher. The window on the second floor is up. I hit it, barely. This time it doesn’t shatter as nicely. Just an ugly hole. I look for another rock. I’m meticulous about it—it has to be the right size.

I’m getting better. Another windowpane explodes and crashes to the ground.

It feels as if I’m tossing rocks for a long time before anyone arrives.

I throw two more before the first scream rings out. Then the front door of the building flies open and people come streaming out. I take aim at them with another rock and they surge back inside, jostling each other to get in. Then they slam the door shut.

I laugh.

Everyone is scared of Sascha!

My muscles are starting to ache. I’ve blackened a dozen of the Emerald’s eyes. But it has hundreds.

I have a lot of work to do.

I see Valentin lean around the corner of the building. He’s sweating, his face is contorted and red, his hair is standing up. He runs toward me and I wheel back to throw one at him. He ducks and runs back around the corner.

I can’t tell who the person is who comes from the other side. He hides as soon as I turn in his direction.