Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

“My sweetie,” said Claudia, her lips trembling as she stretched out her arms to me.

I didn’t understand whatever it was she whispered in my ear. She probably passed on her condolences, too. I said, “Likewise,” and looked at her so as not to have to look at Tamara or at the decor inside this concrete grotto. The stone floor beneath my feet was black with white specks, and somewhere farther back a fireplace with a curved mantel crept into my field of vision.

But I couldn’t count the lines on my mother’s face forever, so I turned back to Tamara with a sigh. Everything that had happened to me leading up to this moment suddenly rushed through my head and I wanted to turn away to spare the young widow’s nerves.

But Tamara walked around me so she was standing directly in front of me. She grabbed my chin with her hand. Spellbound, she scanned my face, but when she went to remove my sunglasses I shoved her hand aside. I broke out in a sweat. I saved myself by staring once again at her cleavage.

“You look… ” Tamara exhaled. My cheeks began to tingle. Claudia coughed quietly.

“Tammy,” she said, “I think you need to check on the little one.”

I sat on the leather sofa next to Claudia, who was looking through some folder as if her life depended on it. On the floor above us, war had broken out. Tamara screamed in a language I took for Ukrainian, and Ferdi answered in German.

“I AM NOT GOING DOWNSTAIRS!!”

Ukrainian chatter.

“I’M SCARED ANYWAY!”

Ukrainian chatter.

“I DON’T BELIEVE YOU! PAPA NEEDS TO COME HOME!!”

Claudia looked at the ceiling and wiped a tear from her cheek.

“Leave the boy alone,” I shouted. “He’s not the only person who’s afraid of me.”

Tamara’s Ukrainian rose to a pitch that rattled my bones.

“HE IS NOT AND NEVER WAS MY BROTHER!” the child screamed.

“Marek, come upstairs so you can meet each other,” shouted Tamara.

“NOOOOOOO!! PLEASE NO!! PLEASE NO!!!”

There was nothing else I could do, so I covered my ears with my hands. My nerves weren’t so strong at the moment either. Claudia played as if she was just continuing to read something in her folder. Though it had been a long time since she flipped the page. I wondered whether it was her heartbeat or mine that I was hearing. I took one hand off my ear and took another apple from the glass bowl. I’d already eaten four just out of nervousness. There were three left. The hard chewing was calming.

Tamara came running down the stairs and made another attempt at hugging me.

“I’m sorry, Marek. Ferdi is stubborn. You were the same way once, heaven knows. I apologize. It’ll get better.”

“Hmmmhmmm.” My mouth was stuffed.

“The boy has just lost his father,” Claudia said almost as an aside.

“Which one?”

“Both.” Claudia looked at Tamara over her glasses. “Presumably both boys.”

Two hours later I was pining for the villa in Marenitz. It was unbearable. I had no idea what I was supposed to do here. Claudia made it easy on herself by keeping her nose buried in the paperwork and pulling something out every once in a while for Tamara.

“You need to copy this. This needs to be filed. This is for the life insurance.”

“Okay,” answered Tamara without looking at the documents.

Ferdi refused to come downstairs as long as I was in the living room. He shouted something about frightening glasses. Claudia assured Tamara not very convincingly that it wasn’t so bad. I said I was used to children crossing the street because of me. Adults, too. Tamara looked at me. “Why?”

I wasn’t sure whether she was pretending or she was really that stupid. I couldn’t remember anymore what she’d been like in the brains department. I watched as she fumed around her tiled home, changed outfits, called somebody, broke down crying, screamed at Ferdi, made tea and left it sitting around, went out to the postbox to get the latest condolence cards. The entire town of Einhausen seemed in a hurry to proclaim their sorrow over Father in writing. In some envelopes was money that made its way into Tamara’s jeans.

“You should write it all down,” said Claudia. “You need to keep track so you can send personal thank you notes to everyone.”

“I will.” Tamara tossed the envelopes behind the sofa.

I had to admit that my father had chosen a death that you didn’t need to be ashamed of. He didn’t die miserably of cancer or just keel over, leaving me to worry about what health problems he’d passed on to me. He died while climbing a mountain in Switzerland.

“He climbed mountains?” I asked, pleasantly surprised. The father I remembered had a big belly and hamster cheeks, and everything on him drooped. The idea of him outfitted for a climb, on the side of a mountain, exceeded my powers of imagination.

“He had just started.” Tamara didn’t bother to try to wipe away the steady stream of tears. “And now he’s fallen!” She buried her face in a sofa cushion.

I patted her back awkwardly. “At least it was a cool way to die.”

“It’s an idiotic way to die,” groaned Tamara through the pillow. “Why does someone who’s nearly sixty suddenly need to start climbing mountains?”

“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.