Broken Glass Park (3 page)

When she’s shopping anywhere but the Russian grocery store, she has to point to whatever she wants and then write out the number she needs. She always carries a little notepad with her for exactly that purpose. Every time she comes back from the discount market she’s bathed in sweat. When she’s spoken to on the street, she whimpers and she gets red blotches on her face. I tried for two weeks to help her master the sentence “I only speak Russian.” She carries it around on a slip of paper in her wallet, transcribed phonetically into Cyrillic letters.

We’re visited regularly by the hyphenated names from the department of family services. Maria freaks out every time, and I have to spend a long time before and after their visits convincing her she is doing a good job and that she won’t have to go back to her job in the cafeteria.

Because as unhappy as she is here in the Emerald, you couldn’t get her to go back to Novosibirsk—not even by force. She does dream of one day returning there, but later, with a thin waist and fancy makeup, with a suitcase full of nice clothes, and preferably accompanied by a German husband with a perfectly groomed mustache. He should also be kind and rich and speak Russian—because German, Maria says, is tougher than Chinese. As if she knows.

When I do my homework, she sometimes sighs behind me, muttering, “Studying is important, studying is good. I never used to study, always worked. Even as a little kid. And look at me now. Where did all that drudgery get me?”

“Read something, dumpling,” I say. “It doesn’t have to be War and Peace right off the bat. Try a mystery.”

“I’m always so tired in the evening, sunshine,” she says. “I forget what I’ve just read and have to keep starting over. It just takes too much effort.”

So every day she reads the latest sheet of her page-a-day calendar—one for Russian Orthodox housewives—with a recipe on it, maybe a diet tip, and once in a while a joke, and that suffices. It makes me roll my eyes, but I make sure she doesn’t see me. After all, she can’t help the fact that she got too few synapses and that she lost two-thirds of the ones she did get working at the cafeteria.

I just worry a little about Alissa. At the moment Maria has a slight intellectual edge over my not quite four-year-old sister, but that won’t be the case for long. I have made reading books aloud a mandatory part of Maria’s schedule. After the first time she read a picture book to Alissa, she said, amazed, “I never knew such interesting books existed.”

She has nothing but love for Alissa. So much so that she was against sending her off to kindergarten at the age of three. She pictured nothing but illnesses and deep-frozen foods. I had to threaten to get the family services department involved to break down Maria’s resistance to the idea of kindergarten. She constantly cuddles and pats my sister and can barely keep herself from sputtering the pathetic phrase I’ve strictly banned from our household: “My poor little orphan.” When Alissa’s not sitting in her lap, she’s standing on a footstool in the kitchen watching meatballs sizzle. She already knows a lot of recipes by heart. Recently she explained to me what fresh coriander looks like and how it smells. “It makes you want to puke,” she said.

Maria’s fear of being shipped back to Novosibirsk has a lot to do with Alissa, too. Separating the two of them would not only break my sister’s heart but Maria’s as well. “When little Ally is all grown up, only then will I feel comfortable leaving,” she says. “I want to raise her and make sure she’s happy and healthy (my poor little orphan).”

Other times Maria says she’ll feel comfortable leaving only once Alissa has found a decent man to marry.

“You’re not a servant,” I say. “And besides, it’s possible she won’t find a decent man to marry until she’s in her late thirties—if she’s lucky.”

“Okay, then when she gets her diploma,” she says. “That will be a happy day for me, too.”

For her “diploma” is a magic term—like “capital gains tax” or “paracetamol.”

She would die for Alissa. That’s not to say she has anything against Anton. She tries to cuddle him, too, but Anton won’t let anyone touch him. He just keeps retreating until his back is against the wall. And at that point Maria realizes she should let go of him. A few months ago I watched as he told Maria about his day at school. She sat at the kitchen table with her chin in her hand shaking her head in amazement.

Maria’s afraid of me and that has its advantages.

From her perspective, there are plenty of reasons to be in awe of me. Not only can I speak Latin and French—which are about as relevant to her life as speaking Martian—but I can also speak—and this is something much more concrete—the language in this damn country. I explain the lay of the land to her and take her shopping, where an interpreter comes in very handy. I know how to fill out all the paperwork to apply for welfare and for children’s benefits. I’m usually around when workers from the family services department are scheduled to visit. I always offer her the highest praise. When I have to translate a question for her, I always start thinking up the answer to it immediately.

Maria is paralyzed with fear anytime she has to deal with officialdom. Faced with anyone who gives off even a whiff of government authority, she feels as insignificant as an ant. She’s even deferential to machines that dispense tickets for the public transportation system. And whenever a plainclothes ticket controller comes through the bus and announces a ticket check, she rushes to rip hers out of her purse so quickly that she sends her lipstick and tampons flying around the nearby seats, an awkward smile plastered on her face all the while.

“Take it easy,” I say, if I happen to be there when it happens. Then I crawl around on the floor to collect her things as Maria sits there frozen, the fake smile still on her face after the ticket controller has walked past her.

“I would never have guessed he was a ticket controller,” she says, amazed. “With long hair and an earring—like a member of the Beatles. I can’t believe the way they are allowed to dress. What did he have hanging from his ears?”

“An MP3 player,” I explain.

“A what?”

“For music.”

“You’re going to be just like your mother,” she says one time during an incident like this.

“What did you say?”

She puts her hand over her mouth. She starts to shake, her bloated body quivering beneath her flower-print blouse, terror in her eyes, tears starting to drip down her cheeks—or is it sweat?

“What did you say?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she says. “Nothing.”

I lift my hand. I’m not sure what I’m about to do. My fingers curl into a fist. But there’s no more sense in hitting Maria than in taking a whip to pudding. So I slam my fist against the window.

Nobody turns around. Not even the bus driver, despite the fact that normally they shout at anyone who so much as touches a seat with their foot.

The window doesn’t break, but it hurts my fist and I let out a howl.

Suddenly my face is buried in Maria’s chest and I can barely breathe. She wraps me up with both arms and also manages to rub my head and back. Her hands feel big and warm.

I close my eyes.

“It’s okay,” she says as my lungs fill with her perfume. “Everything’s going to be fine. Everything is all right. Don’t cry, my precious. You’re my strong little girl.”

“Shut your mouth,” I shout, but it comes out as a groan. Maria stops talking.

We get out of the bus downtown to exchange the watch Maria bought two days ago for five euros. It had stopped after one day.

After that I buy a bus ticket for Maria for the return trip and wait as she gets into the bus.

I don’t get on with her. Instead I hop on a tram with no ticket—I’m not afraid of the ticket controllers—and go to visit Ingrid and Hans.

It pains me to see their house. I could never tell them why—and wouldn’t want to. It’s a beautiful two-story house surrounded by a garden that’s gone to seed, which would be reason enough to like it.

But what makes visiting them difficult is the fact that my mother loved this house and its garden. She visited it many times, and once, when Ingrid and Hans went to a spa for a month, she and Harry house-sat here together. Actually all of us moved in here for those four weeks—my mother, me, Anton, and Alissa. And Harry, who beamed during those weeks in a way he never did otherwise. We were all his guests, sort of, and hosting us made him proud.

Of course, it wasn’t really his home anymore. Finally, in his early thirties he had managed to move out of his parents’ place. Must have been about a year and a half before he met my mother. After he left home he lived in a studio apartment in a student neighborhood—a fourth-floor walkup. I went there twice. It was a nice little place.

Both times I visited were a bit stressful, though, because Harry was ashamed of the place and spent the whole time apologizing for everything—for the fact that his kitchen was messy and because he had run out of coffee, for the pair of underpants lying in the floor. He seemed particularly bothered about the underpants on the floor. I told him a thousand times I didn’t care, that I was used to much worse. But his embarrassment didn’t subside for the rest of the time I was there. It didn’t help that my mother couldn’t stop laughing.

She sat on a chair and laughed at everything: Harry scrambling to scoop up his underpants and shove them into a drawer only to have paperwork fly out of the drawer, me tripping over his sneakers, Harry knocking over bottles as he tried to find cookies in the kitchen. I didn’t think she should laugh so loudly—it just made poor Harry blush, leaving him even more embarrassed. I even told her that—in Russian—but she just brushed me off and said I didn’t know anything. As Harry ran around, she followed him with her gaze, and there was tenderness and affection in her look.

Harry didn’t speak to her at all during that visit. He was too busy trying to make sure I was happy, despite the fact that I didn’t need anything. He looked intently at my face, searching for any sign of an emotion that might spell trouble for him, and occasionally turned to my mother to give her a look or a shy smile.

I sat on his couch, drank rose hip tea—which I can’t stand—and nibbled on stale cookies, trying as best I could to seem comfortable so he would settle down. At some point he finally did. He stopped running around and sat down next to me. He told me about his studies and whatever job he was doing then—which, it goes without saying, wasn’t going well.

He was exactly as my mother had described. A little difficult to be around at first because he was so unsure of himself. But as he gained confidence, he was kind and thoughtful.

“So?” my mother asked as we were winding our way down the stairs toward the door of his building.

“He’s definitely okay,” I said. “You can bring him over to our place.”

“He’s a prince among men,” she said. She hadn’t worried at all about what I would think of him. Unlike him, she was usually sure of herself.

“I could never go to bed with a guy like that,” I said gruffly to counter the uncharacteristically warm feeling the meeting had left me with. A lover who got on well with his new girlfriend’s kids was not part of the usual drill. “He’s kind of frantic.”

“I don’t think he’d be into you either,” said my mother, with a bit of venom.

“Do you find him at all handsome?” I asked.

My mother huffed.

“Tell him he should do something else with his hair,” I grumbled.

“Tell him yourself,” she muttered. “Tell him exactly how he should do it.”

“Then he’ll be insulted. And he wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”

“You’re wrong there.”

And she was right.

He never moved in with us because our place was too small. But he slept there regularly. His toothbrush stayed in the bathroom and his slippers under the coat rack in the hall. He kept his robe in my mother’s closet. And I had no qualms about using the hair gel he did in fact buy on my advice and stored in our bathroom.

He looked really cute once he stopped parting his hair. Light brown hair sticking up, funny eyes, a bashful grin. Alissa loved him, as did Anton—Anton most of all, in fact. A man who practically lived here, helped with the dishes, never shouted, held hands with mom and played memory games with the kids, a man who listened, buttered our bread for us, and happily stepped in as a babysitter if anything ever came up.

And yet still not a man Anna would go for.

Because he was a loser—and that’s just an objective fact. He was one because he felt like one. He had studied literature for twelve years and was still no closer to finishing his degree. He bounced from job to job because he wasn’t cutthroat enough to succeed at anything. He’d lived too long with his parents—even by local standards. He mumbled. And whenever he was nervous or unsure of himself—which was almost all the time—he talked so hurriedly and unclearly that you always had to ask him to repeat whatever he said. Which would in turn startle him and he’d start to stutter.

When I was younger, I would never have believed a German man like this existed. So meek, so helpless. Never thinking of himself. Broke but still generous. Instead of a driver’s license a rickety girl’s bike. In his checkered shirt and bowl cut—until he met me, that is.

My mother’s great love.

I never asked either of them, but I am sure she was Harry’s first. At most his second. He was seven years younger than she was and would have been more inexperienced even if he’d lived two hundred years. What sane woman would take up with someone who was the very embodiment of helplessness? My mother. Nobody else would. I could certainly never imagine myself with someone like that.