Alina Bronsky - Broken Glass Park

You never smoked because you placed so much value on your health. There was even a time when you decided you wanted to lose some weight and you started counting calories — for about three days. It cracked my mother up — but she assured you that she didn’t want to lose a single ounce of you.

You always thought women who smoked were vulgar. Which is exactly why I tried so hard to become a smoker; unfortunately it always made me feel ill.

I wouldn’t want to kill you with sleeping pills. There’s no way you should be allowed just to fall asleep.

Unless you ended up in the pond behind the oak trees — in broken glass park — where my mother took Anton in early spring to catch frog fry, which he put in our aquarium. We watched as they transformed into tadpoles and then were astonished as their number started to drastically shrink. There were fifty, then twenty, then ten, and finally a single cute frog hopped out onto the carpet and opened its mouth.

I don’t believe that you stepped on it by accident.

When your lungs fill with water, I want it to be very unpleasant — and the frogs should croak. And you should lie there for a long time before anyone finds you. And then, when you finally rise to the surface, like all waterlogged bodies eventually do, you will look exactly as you deserve to, greenish-gray, rotting, bloated.

I would love to identify you then and say, “Yes, of course it’s him — instantly recognizable, couldn’t be anyone else.” Others might not have seen it, but that’s what you always looked like to me.

Dissolving him in hydrochloric acid would also be a nice trick.

But to keep such a big container of hydrochloric acid on the balcony and put Vadim in piece by piece — Maria would definitely think it was unhygienic. And in this case, she would actually be right. And you are straying into the realm of the ridiculous, Ms. Naimann.

What are we singing now, Marshall?

And Hailie is big now, you should see her, she is beautiful.

But you’ll never see her; she won’t even be at your funeral.

Exactly. But not Hailie. Alissa.

Felix was so pissed off I wouldn’t come to Tenerife that he swore he wouldn’t send any postcards. He told me on the phone, and I could hear tears of anger in his voice. And I could hear Volker in the background saying, “I’ll send you one.”

Felix slammed down the phone, but Volker called back.

“We would have been thrilled,” he said. “But I can understand if you don’t want to go. Or if you have something else to do.”

“Maybe another time,” I said to him. “Maybe next year. If you still want me to go.”

“Next year I definitely won’t want anyone to go,” Volker said, sounding sad, not joking. “I already know I’m going to need a vacation after this vacation. Felix, I don’t want to hear language like that in this house.”

“My influence,” I told him. “See, it’s good that I’m staying home.” Then I wished him a safe flight and good weather.

I run to the mailbox every morning. But there haven’t been any postcards yet. There wouldn’t be even if they had sent one — the mail takes ages.

I still jump up every time I hear the sound of the postman’s bicycle through the open window.

I actually do have a job. But I only got it after I told Felix and Volker I couldn’t go. I tutor three kids, all boys, in French. I get five euros extra for going to their houses. I don’t feel like having them sit at my desk.

One of the boys, Kai-Julian, is even worse at his vocabulary words now than when I started. “I’m afraid,” whispered his mother out in the hallway, “that he has a crush on you. He always wants to put on a clean outfit before you arrive.”

She’s one of those women who looks as if she was born with perfectly coiffed hair and makeup on. She’s always at home when I go over. Sometimes she’s smoking, sometimes she’s writing out a shopping list, sometimes she’s painting her toenails. Other times she is smelling the lilies in her garden.

During the hour-long tutoring session she comes in at least five times — to bring us tea, to offer us cookies, to remove the tea cups, to water the cactus on the windowsill, to tell me what the teacher told her about Kai-Julian. Sometimes she’ll talk for fifteen minutes about Kai-Julian, and all the while he is sitting right there and his translucent ears are getting redder and redder. “He is poorly organized and is unable to concentrate,” she says. “Have you noticed that, too?”

“No,” I lie.

But I don’t care as long as I get my money.

I also help Angela every day. For free. Just for the sake of it. I saw her crying in the staircase, pressed against the green wall right where it says “Sascha! Loves! Anna!” She has to take an exam in the fall or else she will have to repeat. She’s already been left behind once — and she started school a year late. She was sobbing about how she couldn’t stand the little shits in her class who were three years younger than her but who could already do everything better. And they looked down her shirt. How awful.

“If you want,” I told her as she sat there with mascara smeared around her puffy red eyes, “I can help you prepare for the test.”

She didn’t understand at first.

“What do you mean — prepare?” she asked. We speak Russian to each other, but her Russian is almost as bad as her German. It’s strange, the gibberish people around here speak in. Okay, so they can’t learn the new language. But how do they manage to forget the old one?

“What do you mean — prepare?” I said, imitating her. “It’s simple. I come to your apartment, you open a book, I explain things, you solve the problems, and you start to understand more and more. Ever tried that?”

She shook her head morosely. So morosely that it was as if I had asked whether she started her day with group sex.

“But,” she asked, “why?”

“Maybe so you can pass your stupid exam?”

At this point she started crying again. I watched with fascination as the lumps of mascara stuck her eyelids together and she wiped them away with her hand and rubbed the black clumps between her fingers. Then she wiped her fingers off on the wall.

“I don’t know,” she said, which I found hilarious.

“We’re doing it,” I said. “A little bit of studying. It’s not fatal. You won’t get addicted. No chance of that.”

“And what if I still don’t pass the fucking exam?” she asked.

“Yeah?”

“You’ll get angry.”

I laughed. “You have no idea how angry I’ll get,” I said. “If you fail, you better steer clear of me.”

Then she laughed, too.

I go to her place every morning around ten. I get up a half an hour before that and shower and eat breakfast, while reading a book. Maria and Anton have already gone to the pool and Alissa is off at kindergarten. It’s the best part of the day.

Almost every second day I have to ring the bell for ages and kick the door just to wake Angela up. She always opens the door just as I’ve given up and am about to head back to our apartment. Then suddenly the door opens and she appears in her pajamas, with a teddy bear, her dyed blond hair sticking up, lines from the pillow pressed into her face.

“Huh?” she says. “Who is it?”

“Huh?” I say. “Integers?”

Then she snaps to. “Shit,” she says, depressed. “Fucking shit. I was having such a nice dream.”

She always takes off her pajamas as if I’m not there and puts on a miniskirt or something else along those lines. She has pale, milky-white skin and there are always bluish mother-of-pearl-like splotches on it. She changes in seconds flat and then makes a cup of instant lemon tea. Then she pulls out a slice of bread, toasts it, tops it with a piece of cheese, a thick slice of salami, and — struggling, her tongue out — squeezes a spiral of ketchup on top, and then sits down next to me with all the enthusiasm of a galley slave.