Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

I took my suitcase from her and climbed onto the train with Marlon in tow. “Watch it, steps,” I said too late, when Marlon was already cursing and had let go of me for a second. Janne’s mother hoisted Marlon’s fallen duffel bag. I turned around: apparently she was trying to decide whether she dared to give Marlon a push from behind. Luckily she decided against it.

We stood panting in the railcar and the door snapped shut in our faces. I waved to Janne’s mother. Her smile was pained and relieved at the same time. She crumpled a tissue in her hand. Friedrich’s Hitler-grandpa went over to her quickly, taking broad strides, and patted her elbow. Then the platform disappeared from view.

I pushed open the door to the compartment. It was already full. Janne was sitting next to Richard. Friedrich and Kevin had taken the seats opposite her. The last free seats had luggage on them. Janne looked at us and I could see in her eyes that she would like to have swapped us for some of the people sitting near her. But maybe it was only Marlon she wanted to swap in.

He was lucky he hadn’t seen how easily Richard had lifted Janne on the platform. After I had such difficulty handling the wheelchair, I looked at Richard differently. And it was clear that Janne must have as well. There’s no way I could have lifted a girl up and into a train with my own two legs. I looked skeptically at Richard’s upper arm, but there wasn’t much to see under his loose-fitting checkered sleeves.

She probably didn’t weigh much, I decided. Maybe her legs didn’t weigh anything. Legs must make up a significant portion of a person’s weight. I just needed to exercise a bit more and I’d be able to carry her.

The guru waved from the next compartment.

Marlon stood there like a statue that someone had accidently unveiled in the wrong place. His face didn’t show any emotion. I said to him, “It’s full here. The guru is waving to us from the next compartment,” so he wouldn’t wonder why we still hadn’t sat down and were just standing around like idiots. I wondered how Marlon got around the city and whether he ever went to areas he didn’t know. Maybe a cane or a dog would really have come in handy. I’d had all sorts of impressions of Marlon — but that he was helpless had never occurred to me.

We sat down with the guru after I stowed my suitcase and Marlon’s duffel bag on the luggage rack. It suddenly hit me that I was the least impaired person in the group. Though I was still the ugliest.

The guru had put his cap in his lap and was flipping through a stack of documents. Between nondescript slips of paper were ticket printouts and entire sheets of handwritten notes. I craned my neck because I thought I recognized Claudia’s handwriting on one of the sheets.

The guru had two deep lines running across his forehead. His face was flushed.

“Problem?” I asked. Marlon sat casually next to me, facing the window as if watching the landscape fly past.

The guru shrugged his shoulders. “Depends on how you see it.”

“Where’s the camera?” I asked.

“What camera? Oh.” He pointed to a blue bag in the luggage rack.

“May I?”

He obviously didn’t have the slightest desire to give me his camera, but he stood up anyway and reached for the bag and pulled the camera out with both hands and handed it to me. I turned it all around. It looked cheap.

“Can you really work with something like this?” I asked. “Can you make a real movie on it?”

“Of course,” said the guru without looking up at me. “Should I show you how it works?”

“I can figure it out,” I said, testing a few buttons.

Marlon still hadn’t moved. I turned on the camera, started recording, and pointed the lens at Marlon. No idea what he picked up on but all of a sudden he said, “I’m going to punch you in the face.” He’ll have to find my face first, I thought, somewhere in his perpetual darkness, but I didn’t say it. I also didn’t say that I could have left him standing there on the platform earlier. I took the camera out into the hall and started shooting the little gardens passing by.

They were laughing in the other compartment. I couldn’t understand it. In our compartment the atmosphere was like a funeral and here they were laughing like they were on a school field trip. I pointed the camera at the door to the compartment. They had drawn the curtain. No chance to get a candid shot. I felt locked out and knocked on the door.

The laughing stopped. I pushed open the door and pulled the curtain aside. Friedrich’s chuckles were the last to die down. They looked at me as if I was the ghost of their dead aunt. I looked at them through the viewfinder. They were playing cards. A bag of gummi bears was being passed around.

I pointed the camera at Janne. She was shuffling the cards and looking at her hands as she did. I had the impression that she was trembling slightly. Maybe it was just the vibrations of the old train. Her wheelchair was folded up and propped between the seat bench and the door.

“You guys are having fun, eh?” I asked in a funereal tone and filmed as guilty looks spread across their faces.

There were fewer and fewer buildings and people outside. I stood in the corridor and filmed the birch trees racing past and the long lakes. The guru turned up next to me and took the camera away.

“The battery doesn’t last forever,” he said.

He stood next to me and leaned on the handrail exactly the same way I was. I didn’t look at him. I felt like getting out at the next station and hopping on the next train back to Berlin. These local trains stopped in the most godforsaken places. The isolated figures who got on at those places looked somehow deformed. As if I of all people could complain about that. Behind me bubbled Janne’s laughter. I would really like to have taken a machine gun to the whole scene, and I wasn’t even embarrassed by that thought. I should have learned a lesson from Marlon: disgraced down to the last bone in his body and yet still cool.

“This week is going to change lives,” said the guru from next to me.

To be honest I wasn’t the slightest bit interested what the guru hoped to gain from this week. But I still asked, “Yours or ours?”

“Both,” he said.

I tried not to smile too broadly. “Inflated expectations have never helped anyone.”

“I’m a little bit scared,” said the guru.

“Of what?” I stifled a yawn. “Of us? It’s too late for that.”

He exhaled loudly and looked really depressed as he did.

“It could still end up being some interesting footage,” I said with a sudden flash of sympathy.

He nodded again. His face betrayed the fact that he was assuming the opposite would be true.

Getting off the train, unlike getting on it, went pretty smoothly. Taking a cue from Richard, we had formed a line in the corridor in advance. Everyone listened to him, and the guru seemed grateful that somebody who was up to the job was taking over the steering wheel. Friedrich carried Janne’s wheelchair and looked really proud. The guru shouldered Friedrich and Marlon’s luggage in addition to his own.

Marlon’s hand was on my upper arm again. I could barely stand it. I hated being touched. The sudden solidarity of our disabled troop made me want to escape. All for one and one for all. I didn’t want that. Not with these people or anyone else. I was already sick of it.

In no time at all we had lined up on one of the two platforms of the tiny little station. The only thing missing was for us to be put into pairs and told to hold our line buddy’s hand. The guru counted heads. Sweat dripped from his forehead. Friedrich opened the wheelchair as if he had been doing it his entire life. Janne smiled down at us from Richard’s arms. The sun shone.