Alina Bronsky - Broken Glass Park

“Do you know why I’m crying?” I say. “Listen to me. I didn’t save her. Not her and not Harry. But I could have. If I had gotten between them. If I hadn’t just stood there in the door with my arms crossed, annoyed. I should have done something.”

“You’re crazy,” says Volker. “If you had, we wouldn’t be on the phone right now.”

“I could have done it. I could do anything. I could. Before. I wasn’t afraid of anything. Until tonight. Now I’m afraid again. I’m afraid of being afraid.”

“Thank god,” says Volker muffled.

“I’m so afraid.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

“I can’t take it here anymore.”

“Where?”

“Here at the Emerald. I’ve always been attached to this apartment. But I just can’t take it any longer. I want to get out of here. Maybe I’ll move downtown — I need to finish school. I hate the Emerald. I hate the people here. There’s nothing I can do about it, and nothing they can do either. They’re a bunch of impoverished pigs. And they are only getting poorer. I provoke them. They let it slide, but secretly they hate me. I hate the way it smells here, the stench. I hate the laundry hanging from the balconies. I hate the satellite dishes. . ”

“Those are everywhere. Please don’t cry. I can’t comfort you from afar. We’ll take care of it, okay? As soon as we’re back from vacation. It’s no problem at all. I’ll be happy when you’re out of there. And speaking of vacation, are you coming with us?”

“Better not,” I say.

“Why not?”

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t. Think about it.”

I love you, I think to myself, are the saddest words in the world.

He’s gone during July. With Felix. It’s scorching hot. The Emerald holds the heat into the wee hours until it starts to get light again.

Maria complains every morning that she won’t make it through the day. The daily calendar for Russian Orthodox housewives supplies her with new recipes for cold soups and warm facial masks. One big cucumber suffices for both.

She found a broad straw hat on the street, only slightly crumpled, and wears it whenever she leaves the house. It makes her look like a giant mushroom.

I’ve shown her the way to the public pool and gotten her a season pass. In the morning she packs a cooler with buttered rolls and mineral water and grapes and watermelon and sour pickles and apple cake and heads off to the pool with Anton, who’s on summer break. He dives and swims with his school friends while Maria sits with her straw hat on in the shadow of an oak tree, fans herself with the pages of an advertising circular, and wonders at the fact that every wasp in the city seems to be buzzing around her cooler. In the middle of the day Anton and Maria come home, eat cold soup, pick up Alissa from kindergarten, and then they go back to the pool all together.

I’m a lot friendlier to Maria now — I think she’s a real martyr. I even complimented her on her turquoise bathing suit once; it was the only one in the outlet store that wasn’t too small for her. I worry about her a little in the evenings, when she sits sweating in front of the TV, her face bright red, wheezing like a hippo. “Us people from Novosibirsk just weren’t made for this kind of weather,” she says. “We just melt.”

And that’s what it looks like.

“Don’t forget to drink a lot of water,” I say, wondering silently whether Vadim has any more cousins if this one expires.

I’m happy that Anton has finally earned his swimming certification — the “little seahorse” badge, they call it — meaning I don’t have to stay with him in the kiddie pool.

It’s too loud and shrill there. As soon as I smell the chlorine, my feet start to itch. I have no more desire to sit on the “family” lawn, where little kids will drip their ice cream on my towel and bigger kids will kick their soccer ball in my face, than I do to hang out on the lawn where all the recent graduates of the local high school and trade school smoke, spit in the grass, and tussle with their squeaky girlfriends.

It all makes me sick.

Peter’s there, too. He doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at him. Even when we occasionally pass each other on stairs back at the Emerald.

When I’m home alone, I pull down the shades and listen to Eminem. I turn it up really loud. I don’t care if the entire building can hear it.

I used to be embarrassed to like Eminem. I would never have admitted it. In the event someone asked me about it, I always had an answer at the ready: it was Anton’s music.

But of course nobody ever asked me. All sorts of stuff blasts through the Emerald and blends together in the staircases — military marches, techno, easy listening, old Russian songs, the Moonlight Sonata, “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Bizet’s “Carmen,” static-filled radio shows (“and now a beautiful song for faithful listener Lydia, from Irkutsk — happy fifty-third birthday”), heavy metal. That along with all kinds of live noises — shattered dishes, stifled gasps, laughs, political discussions, and first and foremost fights, which drown out everything else. “Shut the hell up, you bitch, you’ve ruined my entire life. . ”—“Me? Your life? Did you all hear that?”

And Eminem.

And me.

Because the rapper from Detroit and I often sing duets. And these days I’m comfortable with the fact that I like him. I even wear a T-shirt sometimes with an image of him on it — he’s loading a revolver, grimacing, bleached hair, tattoos, yes sir.

He’s the only artist I’ve been able to listen to in the last two years — for hours on end. And the only one I really believe, the only one who has lived what he describes in his music. I like the fact that he became a father at a young age, and that he has adopted children. I get emotional following his saga in the media, his divorces and marriages, all with the one woman, and his battle with his own family. And I feel sorry for him, because in comparison to the 8 Mile area where he grew up, the Emerald is a palace. I’d rather live here than in a trailer park.

Anyway, we sing together a lot, him singing his lyrics and me singing mine. But the melody is the same, and so is the basic feeling. But we each have our own themes, and like parallel lines we’ll never intersect.

I’m sorry, Mama, says Eminem.

You’ll be sorry, Vadim, says Sascha.

I never meant to hurt you.

I’m really going to hurt you.

I never meant to make you cry.

I promise I will make you cry.

But tonight I’m cleaning out my closet.

What are you cleaning out, Marshall? Your cabinet?

I’m cleaning mine out, too — my cabinet of poisons.

I don’t have much in it beyond my hatred and a few tidbits I’ve read. Arsenic, for instance, is deadly for an adult in a dose as small as a tenth of a gram. It has no smell or taste. The only thing missing from the book was whether or not you can buy it at the pharmacy. Or I could put yew seeds in your eggs. I think twenty would do the trick. A little while back a little kid was killed by a huge dose of regular old salt put into his pudding. I read about it in the paper. That could be something for you, Vadim — and the parents of that kid should get some, too.

But there are also so many lovely poisonous plants you can just pluck by the roadside. Lily of the valley, laburnum, meadow saffron. You can get cramps, hallucinations, respiratory failure, and even heart failure from meadow saffron.

I’m not sure you’ve earned such a pleasant death, Vadim. Probably not. Spoiled, canned fish would be more fitting. That way you’ll have convulsions and suffocate and on your death certificate it will say the cause was botulism. You’ll eat any old shit. I could put twenty cigarette stubs in your noodles, put a bunch of pepper on it, and you wouldn’t know the difference.