Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

“He doesn’t have any anymore,” said Claudia insensitively.

“What? Where did they go?”

“He destroyed them all. Last year.”

“Really? Why?” Tamara turned to me. I acted as if I hadn’t heard her. I was pissed off at Claudia.

I leafed through the heavy pages. Ferdi in a stroller, Ferdi in a high chair, Ferdi in a baby carrier. Where was my father? Here, at the beach. He was building a sand castle, and Ferdi was crawling away from it. He had built sand castles with me, too. And he probably wasn’t in the other photos because he had taken them all.

“What was he like?” I asked Tamara.

She waved her hand. “You know yourself.”

Only I didn’t know anymore. When my parents were still together, Claudia usually stayed with me, and she’d always been in a bad mood. My father had worked day and night but despite that he was always in a good mood as far as I could remember. He had loved his work. I liked to hear his stories while we cooked Sunday dinner, stories about murders without bodies, crooked witnesses who were too stupid to keep their stories straight, and judges he’d made livid by making sixty accusations of judicial bias per session. I kind of worshipped him for having such an exciting job. Not like Claudia, who just helped wives negotiate more money out of their divorces and never talked about her clients on principle.

Suddenly the memories overwhelmed me and took my breath away. I hadn’t known that they were all still there. How my father and I would go shopping in Einhausen on Saturday if for a change he didn’t have to disappear to his office. He carefully picked out stalks of rhubarb and talked with people at the weekly market. Everyone knew him. He asked the sellers about their families, they told him about their daughters-in-law and grandchildren. He was constantly greeted, people called him “Herr Barrister”; it didn’t bother him that he constantly had to stop and shake hands, on the contrary. They knew his parents and grandparents and in the unofficial rankings he was somewhere between the mayor and the parish minister and he basked in the recognition. I walked along holding his hand, looking at the shoes of the people who interrupted us while we were shopping, and I was unaware how much rubbed off on me. The only one who seemed troubled by the majestic appearance of Herr Barrister and his crown prince was Claudia. She also missed Berlin and called Einhausen “Swinehausen.”

And for the first time I realized that everything could have been totally different than I’d always believed. Maybe my father took up with Tamara only after Claudia decided she wanted to split up with him. What did I know. I had never asked her and didn’t think this was exactly the right moment either. No idea if there would ever be a better moment.

At dinner, Ferdi sat with us at the table for the first time. Tamara had probably bribed him. His blond hair was standing up like the wet feathers of a newly hatched chick, and his eyes were glued to the contents of his plate. It didn’t seem like the right time to discuss the correct usages of died and dead with him. Tamara had cooked cream of wheat for everyone, a quick meal, and, as she explained to Claudia, in her homeland, “oddly enough, a mourning dish.”

Ferdi sprinkled sugar and cinnamon over his bowl by the spoonful. A puff of powder went up as he began to stir it in.

“Ferdi, perestan ,” said Tamara. Perestan was apparently something like a second name for him.

“Ferdi, have you shown your cool older brother with the unbelievably nice sunglasses your toy cars?”

Ferdi shook his head and shoved an empty spoon into his mouth.

“Marek would really like to see them. Isn’t that right, Marek, you want to see Ferdi’s toy cars?”

“Oh yes.” I straightened my glasses. “That’s why I came here, actually.”

Ferdi risked a quick glance at me. There was a bottomless horror in his eyes.

“I have plenty of my own at home,” I quickly added. “But will you show me yours?”

He shook his head quickly and adamantly.

“ Fu, nekrasivo , Ferdi.”

“Leave him alone,” said Claudia flatly.

“Why do you look like that?” Ferdi suddenly asked, shoving a full spoon into his mouth this time, chewing the bite busily, and looking around as if he hadn’t said anything.

“It was a Rottweiler,” I said with the usual melancholy. And when he looked up uncomprehendingly, “A Rottweiler is a big, mean dog with really sharp teeth.”

“See, Ferdi,” said Tamara. “Do you still want a dog?”

He nodded just as quickly and decisively as he had shaken his head just before.

“Papa promised me a dog,” he said, slumping closer to the table. And then I saw that he was crying.

Maybe I had never really seen a child crying before. Maybe I had never really understood why on earth they would be crying. But now, as I looked at Ferdi’s little wet, contorted face, I suddenly had a lump in my throat. I was ready to do anything to get him to stop crying. I didn’t want him ever to cry again.

“Ferdi,” I said. “Stop crying. I hate dogs more than anything else in the world, but I’ll get you one.”

Claudia put down her spoon and looked at me.

“Actually I need two dogs,” I mused aloud. “I recently promised a girl a dog as well.”

Ferdi stopped chewing. For the first time, his dark eyes rested on my face for a bit of time. Probably all he saw was his future dog because suddenly he started smiling. I had never seen him smile before. I was amazed that he even could. I stared at him with my mouth open until Tamara tried to pinch my thigh under the table and missed the mark.

That evening Ferdi, at Tamara’s prompting, loudly said “goodnight”—first to Claudia and then also to me. He looked at his toes in his red no-slip socks as he did.

“Sleep well, my dear,” Claudia answered sweetly. I looked at her. She had never spoken to me in such an artificially sweet tone.

“Sleep well, gnome,” I said.

Tamara blew us both kisses.

“She likes being the center of attention, don’t you think?” asked Claudia after Tamara had disappeared upstairs with Ferdi riding her piggyback.

“She’s still a child herself,” said Claudia.

“She’s at least twenty-four years old.”

“Exactly.”

Claudia sat on the leather sofa, snuggled a throw pillow, and looked somehow lost. Upstairs Tamara began to sing. A few minutes later Ferdi joined in. Claudia looked up at the ceiling and stealthily wiped her face.

Maybe she was thinking about how nice it was when I was Ferdi’s age, sweet, blond, and with a real face.

“Is he really gone? Forever?” I asked.

“No idea,” said Claudia. “I can’t get rid of the feeling that this is all a farce. I just can’t believe it. I keep thinking the door is going to open any minute and he’ll walk in.” She covered her face with her hands.

I had to think about how one day in the hospital, after the pain had subsided, I looked in the mirror and imagined that everything was the same way it had always been.

I had the guest room in the attic, with angled walls and a skylight window through which you could definitely have seen the stars on a cloudless night. The house was gigantic, Claudia was on a floor below that I hadn’t even seen yet. Ferdi’s room must have been there, too, and Tamara’s, which she had until a few days ago shared with my father. There was also a sauna, a huge wine cellar, and a fitness room full of machines.

“Was it like this for us before, too?” I had asked Claudia, but she hadn’t realized I meant it approvingly. “Not quite this bad,” she had said. “I can show you our old house at some point if you’d like.”