Just Call Me Superhero (14 page)

“What do you mean nearly sixty? He was only two years older than me.” Claudia looked up from her folder for a moment.

Tamara gave her a look that said to her it didn’t make much of a difference.

Ferdi sat under the table. He’d been hiding under there since I’d left the guest room and come downstairs. The tablecloth hung down and sometimes rippled. Now and then I saw the flash of a dark eye.

“Ferdi,
durak
,
perestan
,” said Tamara.

“Not in front of the child,” Claudia said.

Tamara reached out her arm and pushed my hair to the side.

“Your sunglasses make a monster out of you,” she said without acknowledging Claudia’s comment. “Otherwise you’re totally sweet. You always were. I would like to have adopted you. I thought it was awful that you left here straight away.”

I looked over at Claudia. She continued to study the folder. Her chin looked a little more square than usual.

There wasn’t another moment of peace.

The village mortician came, a man who looked like he had just stepped out of a Viagra commercial, with silver hair and a tailored suit, his face so serious it made you sick. He shook my hand and said he couldn’t find adequate words to express his feelings about my loss. I nodded.

He also had a thick folder under his arm and exchanged it for the even thicker one Claudia had prepared for him. The three of them sat at the table and talked, that is, Claudia and the mortician talked and Tamara sniffled into her handkerchief. They had invited me to join their roundtable but I declined. I had nothing to say anyway, and I had no desire to sniffle.

I sat with a photo album in my lap but couldn’t bring myself to open it. Tamara had insisted that I look at it. Claudia agreed that it could be helpful. Oddly enough, she herself had no desire to sit with me while I did. The album began shortly before Ferdi’s birth and took in his first year. Five more albums waited in a stack on the coffee table.

I didn’t want to snub Tamara, and anyway I was a little curious. But I wasn’t prepared for the naked photo of the two of them, Tamara heavily pregnant, my father presumably not. I covered his nakedness with my thumb and peered over at Claudia. I had no idea that my father had been so frisky. There certainly weren’t any photos like that in
my
baby album.

I flipped quickly past the first shots of the slop-covered, purple thing, too.

“You can compare them to your baby pictures,” Tamara had suggested as she’d dug out the albums.

“He doesn’t have any anymore,” said Claudia insensitively.

“What? Where did they go?”

“He destroyed them all. Last year.”

“Really? Why?” Tamara turned to me. I acted as if I hadn’t heard her. I was pissed off at Claudia.

I leafed through the heavy pages. Ferdi in a stroller, Ferdi in a high chair, Ferdi in a baby carrier. Where was my father? Here, at the beach. He was building a sand castle, and Ferdi was crawling away from it. He had built sand castles with me, too. And he probably wasn’t in the other photos because he had taken them all.

“What was he like?” I asked Tamara.

She waved her hand. “You know yourself.”

Only I didn’t know anymore. When my parents were still together, Claudia usually stayed with me, and she’d always been in a bad mood. My father had worked day and night but despite that he was always in a good mood as far as I could remember. He had loved his work. I liked to hear his stories while we cooked Sunday dinner, stories about murders without bodies, crooked witnesses who were too stupid to keep their stories straight, and judges he’d made livid by making sixty accusations of judicial bias per session. I kind of worshipped him for having such an exciting job. Not like Claudia, who just helped wives negotiate more money out of their divorces and never talked about her clients on principle.

Suddenly the memories overwhelmed me and took my breath away. I hadn’t known that they were all still there. How my father and I would go shopping in Einhausen on Saturday if for a change he didn’t have to disappear to his office. He carefully picked out stalks of rhubarb and talked with people at the weekly market. Everyone knew him. He asked the sellers about their families, they told him about their daughters-in-law and grandchildren. He was constantly greeted, people called him “Herr Barrister”; it didn’t bother him that he constantly had to stop and shake hands, on the contrary. They knew his parents and grandparents and in the unofficial rankings he was somewhere between the mayor and the parish minister and he basked in the recognition. I walked along holding his hand, looking at the shoes of the people who interrupted us while we were shopping, and I was unaware how much rubbed off on me. The only one who seemed troubled by the majestic appearance of Herr Barrister and his crown prince was Claudia. She also missed Berlin and called Einhausen “Swinehausen.”

And for the first time I realized that everything could have been totally different than I’d always believed. Maybe my father took up with Tamara only after Claudia decided she wanted to split up with him. What did I know. I had never asked her and didn’t think this was exactly the right moment either. No idea if there would ever be a better moment.

A
t dinner, Ferdi sat with us at the table for the first time. Tamara had probably bribed him. His blond hair was standing up like the wet feathers of a newly hatched chick, and his eyes were glued to the contents of his plate. It didn’t seem like the right time to discuss the correct usages of died and dead with him. Tamara had cooked cream of wheat for everyone, a quick meal, and, as she explained to Claudia, in her homeland, “oddly enough, a mourning dish.”

Ferdi sprinkled sugar and cinnamon over his bowl by the spoonful. A puff of powder went up as he began to stir it in.

“Ferdi,
perestan
,” said Tamara.
Perestan
was apparently something like a second name for him.

“Ferdi, have you shown your cool older brother with the unbelievably nice sunglasses your toy cars?”

Ferdi shook his head and shoved an empty spoon into his mouth.

“Marek would really like to see them. Isn’t that right, Marek, you want to see Ferdi’s toy cars?”

“Oh yes.” I straightened my glasses. “That’s why I came here, actually.”

Ferdi risked a quick glance at me. There was a bottomless horror in his eyes.

“I have plenty of my own at home,” I quickly added. “But will you show me yours?”

He shook his head quickly and adamantly.

“
Fu, nekrasivo
, Ferdi.”

“Leave him alone,” said Claudia flatly.

“Why do you look like that?” Ferdi suddenly asked, shoving a full spoon into his mouth this time, chewing the bite busily, and looking around as if he hadn’t said anything.

“It was a Rottweiler,” I said with the usual melancholy. And when he looked up uncomprehendingly, “A Rottweiler is a big, mean dog with really sharp teeth.”

“See, Ferdi,” said Tamara. “Do you still want a dog?”

He nodded just as quickly and decisively as he had shaken his head just before.

“Papa promised me a dog,” he said, slumping closer to the table. And then I saw that he was crying.

Maybe I had never really seen a child crying before. Maybe I had never really understood why on earth they would be crying. But now, as I looked at Ferdi’s little wet, contorted face, I suddenly had a lump in my throat. I was ready to do anything to get him to stop crying. I didn’t want him ever to cry again.

“Ferdi,” I said. “Stop crying. I hate dogs more than anything else in the world, but I’ll get you one.”

Claudia put down her spoon and looked at me.

“Actually I need two dogs,” I mused aloud. “I recently promised a girl a dog as well.”

Ferdi stopped chewing. For the first time, his dark eyes rested on my face for a bit of time. Probably all he saw was his future dog because suddenly he started smiling. I had never seen him smile before. I was amazed that he even could. I stared at him with my mouth open until Tamara tried to pinch my thigh under the table and missed the mark.

That evening Ferdi, at Tamara’s prompting, loudly said “goodnight”—first to Claudia and then also to me. He looked at his toes in his red no-slip socks as he did.

“Sleep well, my dear,” Claudia answered sweetly. I looked at her. She had never spoken to me in such an artificially sweet tone.

“Sleep well, gnome,” I said.

Tamara blew us both kisses.

“She likes being the center of attention, don’t you think?” asked Claudia after Tamara had disappeared upstairs with Ferdi riding her piggyback.

“She’s still a child herself,” said Claudia.

“She’s at least twenty-four years old.”

“Exactly.”

Claudia sat on the leather sofa, snuggled a throw pillow, and looked somehow lost. Upstairs Tamara began to sing. A few minutes later Ferdi joined in. Claudia looked up at the ceiling and stealthily wiped her face.

Maybe she was thinking about how nice it was when I was Ferdi’s age, sweet, blond, and with a real face.

“Is he really gone? Forever?” I asked.

“No idea,” said Claudia. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that this is all a farce. I just can’t believe it. I keep thinking the door is going to open any minute and he’ll walk in.” She covered her face with her hands.

I had to think about how one day in the hospital, after the pain had subsided, I looked in the mirror and imagined that everything was the same way it had always been.

I
had the guest room in the attic, with angled walls and a skylight window through which you could definitely have seen the stars on a cloudless night. The house was gigantic, Claudia was on a floor below that I hadn’t even seen yet. Ferdi’s room must have been there, too, and Tamara’s, which she had until a few days ago shared with my father. There was also a sauna, a huge wine cellar, and a fitness room full of machines.

“Was it like this for us before, too?” I had asked Claudia, but she hadn’t realized I meant it approvingly. “Not quite this bad,” she had said. “I can show you our old house at some point if you’d like.”

I gratefully declined.

I put on my jeans and opened the bedroom door. A note was stuck to the outside of the door. “
Maritschek, we have a lot of things to take care of. Help yourself to breakfast. Kisses, T
.” I ripped off the note and stuck it in my pocket.

I walked down the stairs to the next floor. The bathroom door was open, I looked in, and I saw a colorful little toilet seat and a plastic stool in front of the sink, which was smeared with toothpaste. There were bras hanging everywhere with cats and mice and roses on them. I picked one up and let it dangle from my pointer finger, averting my eyes as usual from the bathroom mirror. I couldn’t help thinking of my father and how such a momentous wife-swap really could give you a heart attack.

On the door next to the bathroom were dancing wooden letters that spelled out FERDINAD. The second N must have been dancing at another party somewhere. I opened the door and peeked in. I tried to ignore the sting I felt as I looked at the dark wooden pirate ship bed with a giant captain’s wheel on it. There was a big Ikea rug with street markings on it that reminded me of one I’d had in my room not so long ago. On it a multi-car pileup had been staged. Flying Lego debris probably symbolized a natural disaster.

I pushed the cars aside with my foot and sat down in the middle of the rug. I picked up a little convertible and drove it along one of the streets printed on the rug. Then I began to put together the Lego pieces. The ones within my immediate reach weren’t always what I wanted. I looked around the room for the right pieces until I found a big container of Legos.

When I was finished I had built a parking garage with a fence around it and had parked all the cars inside. In front of the garage I built an avenue lined with trees and flowerbeds. When I was done I looked up at the ceiling, which was covered with a mixed-up array of clouds and stars, and then I let my eyes drop to the documents and photos the walls were papered with.

I stood up, brushed some construction materials off my pants, and went closer. Ferdi had received a commendation from the tooth fairy for good brushing and a certificate for finishing third in a ski race at a Swiss ski school. In a photo nearby he was holding up the medal he’d won and looked as if he felt personally insulted. In the photo to the right of that he was smiling in Tamara’s arms, and when my eyes lit on the next photo my heart stood still. At first I thought it was another shot of Ferdi, only looking weirdly a bit older and taller than now. And then I realized it was me.

I flew out of Ferdi’s room and closed the door a little harder than necessary. Down in the kitchen I opened the refrigerator with trembling hands. I examined rows of pickle jars, moldy cheese rinds, and cold cuts that had gone green. I tried to count how many days my father had been dead and how long he must have been traveling before that. I didn’t come to any conclusive number. I sniffed the open milk suspiciously and looked for a while for the expiration date on the egg carton.

On the stove was a pot with the dried out oatmeal leftovers. I put it in the sink, grabbed another pan from a hook on the wall, and just to be safe, washed it.

The coffee machine was as big as a spaceship and about as easy to operate. I pushed a few buttons and several things lit up red and steam came out the side. Before it could explode I pulled out the plug and opted for instant cappuccino powder and a couple slices of toast from a loaf of bread I spotted up in a cabinet.

I
had just put the fork with fried egg to my mouth when the doorbell rang. I gulped down the bite of egg and hurried upstairs since my sunglasses were still sitting somewhere in my room in the attic. As I looked for them, put them on, took them off so I could pull on a T-shirt, and then ran back downstairs, it rang a few more times. I threw open the door.

On the front step was a solid woman with a strikingly small head, or maybe just a too-short haircut. I could tell she was a pro by the fact that she didn’t flinch at the sight of me. The only people who were so firm and persistent were those who had their eyes on a specific goal. I was about to learn hers. She was the headmistress of Ferdi’s school, Frau Meyerling.