Kino (19 page)

“I'll be home soon, I promise.”

“You promised before, Mina. This is no good. I want you to come home. I want you here, I need you here, and I hate that I have to ask. I've never seen anyone so stubborn in my life. You're making me feel awful, having to yell at you about this. I defended you against your dad, but now you're in California and I just don't know anymore.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means–I don't know–if you can't even be here for me now, when we just got married and I'm deadly sick, how do you think that makes me feel? Nobody understands, Mina. Everybody I talk to, they all tell me the same thing.”

That stung. Who was he talking to? Was he threatening her? “Oh yeah,” she said weakly. “And what's that?”

“Mina, you know I love you. I just don't understand why you're not here. I've been so alone–” There was a pause, and then, over the din at baggage claim, she heard a little sound and realized Sam was crying.

“Baby, you'll understand once you see the movie, once you read his journals. You have to trust me. Isn't that what marriage is all about?”

But Sam was done talking. Mina was eager to get off the phone. There was nothing else she could say. She knew he'd understand eventually.

“Here comes my bag,” she lied. “I'll call you later tonight, okay? At least we're almost in the same time zone again, right? I love you, baby.”

Gently, she hung up on her husband. She wanted to see him, be with him, make him feel better–but not yet, not until she'd met her grandmother and asked about the past, about Kino and Lilly, about Goebbels and
Pirates
. Her grandmother, who'd been a movie star. Besides, she really was in danger. Mysterious goons were after Mina, there'd been a bomb threat, a rooftop chase, and a car crash. Mina faintly understood she was testing something, the limits of their love perhaps, and she didn't know how to turn around now. She couldn't turn around now.

The truth was, finding her grandfather's movie was the most exciting thing that had happened to Mina in a long time. She had panicked, having to take care of Sam like that, when they were supposed to be on their honeymoon. The first day, when his temperature had just begun to rise, she left him in the hotel room with a fresh fruit juice, hitting the beach by herself.

The fight at the wedding reception was a bad omen, but Mina realized that her favorite moment of what was billed as the best day of her life wasn't when she said “I do” or when they leaned in to kiss, pronounced husband and wife. It wasn't when they had sex, hours later in their Caribbean hotel, tired and groggy after the flight. No: the best moment of Mina's wedding day was when she leapt up on the lip of the stage, grabbed the neck of the wedding band's electric guitar, lifted it high over her head, and, in front of all her family and friends and husband of two hours, brought it down hard on a speaker's edge. That crunch and pop, the kickback in her arms and the sudden shocked silence, the electric surge of freedom and courage–that was the part she'd never forget.

More than anything, Mina wanted to keep moving. She switched the car to manual transmission and geared down to pass a station wagon. As she shot past, she could see a father at the wheel, the mother turned in her seat to face children in the back, a toddler in a baby seat and an older girl with pigtails holding a sandwich dripping jelly. One of the girl's eyes was covered with an eye patch, white gauze stuck to her face with band aids. Her other eye looked straight at Mina. With a chill, Mina recognized it as the exact look Lilly gives the sailor at the end of
Tulpendiebe
.

By the time Mina found her grandmother's house, up in the Hollywood hills, it was dusk. She'd been there before, when she was a child, but the two-story Mediterranean house wasn't anywhere near as grand as the mansion of her memories. Mina took the journal out of the glove compartment, stuffed it into her back pocket, and walked up to ring the door bell. When she realized the door was ajar, she gave a half-hearted knock and pushed it open.

For most of her life, Mina's father had been preoccupied with making heaps of money on Wall Street. He talked to his mother only on birthdays and holidays. But the year Mina was ten, a strange invitation arrived: on gold-embroidered stationery covered in thin, spidery handwriting, Penny asked them to come out to California for Christmas.

Here's what Mina remembered from that trip: the musty smell, the pool you could swim in even though it was December, the broken glass on the kitchen floor, and the creepy old woman with matchstick limbs who swung back and forth between morose stupor and howling fury, who threw tantrums unlike anything Mina had witnessed in her parents' polite household. That's where the broken glass came from.

Mina spent most of the holiday in the safety of the pool, and on Christmas day, Detlef moved his family to a hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard. They spent New Year's at Disneyland and Mina had her picture taken with Minnie Mouse. When they got home, Mina told her friends that her grandmother was a horrid old witch, nothing like her other grandmother, the one who brought homemade cookies in Tupperware bins.

Years later, her mother told her what had really happened that week. Penny had run up enormous debts and would have to sell the house unless her son bailed her out. It was a large sum of money even by a successful stock broker's standards, and Mina's parents fought bitterly about it. In the end, Detlef gave in, but they never visited Oma Penny again.

Now Mina looked down a dark, narrow hallway crammed with stacks of old newspapers, broken furniture turned toward the walls, and impressive rows of empty vodka bottles. The smell of stale cigarette smoke hung in the air, and from the far side of the house, she heard the blare of a television. Carefully side-stepping the hurdles, Mina was making her way past an unadorned staircase when she noticed a side table displaying framed photographs. As she turned to take a closer look, her backpack knocked an overflowing ashtray to the floor with a clang. Startled, she took a step back and sent a row of empty two-liter wine jugs rolling across the floor.

A man's voice: “Don, is that you?”

Mina didn't respond.

“Come on in, man. We been waiting for you.”

Then she heard footsteps, and before her stood a black man in his sixties wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. He was bald, barefoot, and frowning.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Mina definitely didn't remember any bald black men from her childhood visit.

“Who are you?” she said. “I'm here to see my grandmother, Penelope Greifenau. Is she here?”

He was still frowning. “Chester Burwell. I'm her nurse. I'm afraid this is not a good time. Were we expecting you?”

“It's important that I see her.”

Chester hesitated, searching Mina's face.

“It's not Don,” he shouted.

A voice answered, hollow and wheezing: “
Wo bleibt er denn? Wie lange soll ich denn noch ohne auskommen?
Verdammte Kacke
!”

Chester looked over his shoulder and told Mina to wait. She didn't and followed him down the hall, into a dark, cluttered den where a shriveled old woman sat in an armchair. Heavy curtains were drawn tight and the only light came from an enormous plasma screen showing a black-and-white movie, Gary Cooper in cowboy getup. The coffee table in front of the couch was covered with bottles of whiskey, cans of Diet Coke, pill containers, and pieces of an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. The old woman glared. Mina struggled to reconcile the ravaged face in front of her with the spotless features in
Tulpendiebe
. Could this really be the same person?

“Oma?” she said. “It's Mina. Do you remember me? I'm your granddaughter.”

“Please,” Chester said, taking Mina by the elbow. “You can't be in here. She's in poor health.”

Penny waved a thin arm holding a lit cigarette. “You think just because I'm old I must be senile? I wish I'd lose my memory every day but when I check, it's still there, all ninety-two fucking years of it. I know exactly who you are.”

She took a long drag.

“Good,” Mina said, taken aback. She had wondered if she was supposed to hug her grandmother, but she would not go near this woman.

“You're the brat who pissed in my pool and couldn't keep her hands off my things.” She took another drag. “I would've thought you'd grow up taller than this. What's this outfit you're wearing, anyway? A turtleneck sweater? This is Hollywood, girl.
Verkackt nochmal
, whaddaya want already? Close your mouth, child, it makes you look like a fucking imbecile. I am watching a movie.”

She had almost pushed herself out of her chair. With a sigh, she fell back into the cushions. She stubbed out her cigarette and lit another. The flaccid skin that hung from her spidery arms was nearly translucent, showing red, blue, and purple veins. On the screen, Gary Cooper put on the sheriff's star. The movie was
High Noon
. Chester cleared his throat.

“I'm not an imbecile,” Mina said. “I came here straight from Berlin. I need to talk to you.”

Penny turned up the volume on the TV. “I have nothing to say to you. Chester, would you show the little twat to the door?”

“No,” Mina said. She sat down in an empty armchair. “I won't leave until you answer my questions.”

“
Gottverfluchte Scheisse
,” Penny cursed. She reached for a half-empty gallon of Dewars and tried to throw it at Mina, but Chester caught her arm in the backswing.

“Penny darling,” Chester cooed. “You're going to want to drink that later.”

Mina had ducked, but now she froze. What exactly was her grandmother's relationship to this barefoot, bald, black nurse? Penny let Chester take the bottle from her hand and instead grabbed a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie and flung it at Mina. It missed Mina's head and bounced off the bookshelf.

“What's all the shouting? Is there a problem?”

A man with a bushy beard and a white lab coat came through the hallway door. He had a hip bag in one hand, a handgun in the other. He aimed it at everyone in the room before settling on Mina.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Chester said. “It's okay. Don. So glad you're here. Put the gun down. This is...Mina, was it? She's family. Put the gun down. There's no problem.”

“About time!” Penny snarled.

Don gave Mina a hard nod, shoved the gun back into his lab coat, and removed a number of prescription bottles from his bag. There was also a brown powder in a Ziploc baggie. Chester gave Don a wad of cash held together by a rubber band. Without counting it or saying another word, Don slid the money in his pocket, kissed Penny's hand, shook Chester's, and saw himself to the door.

“Did I just witness a drug deal?” Mina asked.

Penny pointedly ignored her and rubbed her hands together in a parody of glee. “Chester darling, I need a huff, a puff, and a fix. Would you please?” She lit another cigarette and spit on the carpet to her right, where Mina could make out a dark spot. Chester obligingly produced a jade mortar and matching pestle, counted out a handful of pills from one of the bottles, and began to grind them to a powder.

“Thanks for the lovely visit, young Wilhemina,” Penny said, “but there's no time for nostalgia–I have drugs to take and movies to watch. Why are you still here?”

“What is all this?” Mina said, picking up the prescription bottles Don had left: Percocet. Xanax. Oxycodone. “I don't think that man was a real
Dokter
, Oma. That could be dangerous, self-medicating like this, mixing and matching?”

“Oh kid, I been doing this for decades, and today you walk in here and tell me it's dangerous? Why the sudden worry, princess?”

Chester delivered the powder to Penny on a silver tray. Through a short plastic straw, she sucked it up her nostrils. Then she looked at Mina. “Wait. Say that again. What did you just call him?”

“I called him a
Dokter
. That's what Kino used to call them, isn't it? He hated them ever since they took his leg off.”

“How would you know any of this?” Penny demanded. She was trembling, and Mina realized that she had no idea if Penny always trembled, or if she was in a special trembling state right now.

“I read his journal.”

“Pardon?”

“I read the journal that Kino wrote when you had him committed–in 1963, was it?” Mina pulled her grandfather's notebook out of her back pocket and threw it on the cluttered table. “I know you didn't always used to be this way. You were happy once. You were beautiful and famous and in love. I know you were Lilly, I know about the Braukeller, and about
Jagd zu den Sternen
. I know about your father, too, and Goebbels, and the burning of Kino's movies.”

Penny was silent. She reached for the straw to do another line but instead knocked the tray off her lap. “
Scheisse
,” she said. Chester hurried to set it back on the table and began grinding more pills.

“That
Dokter
was a real pompous ass,” Penny said, trying to calm her shaking fingers enough to pull another cigarette from the pack. She smoked a long thin brand Mina didn't recognize. “The nonsense in fashion then was narrative therapy, a combination of creative prompts and pharmaceuticals. I didn't care as long as it kept him out of harm's way. Kino hated the
Dokters
. Can't blame him for that.”