Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

I opened my mouth but the key jangled in the lock right at that moment.

“I picked out a nice big urn,” called Ferdi.

We could have all been in something approaching a good mood except that Frau Meyerling seemed to work against it at every opportunity. She put on a mournful face. Then she walked with her hand extended toward Tamara, who wasn’t expecting to find a visitor at home and didn’t even know who she was. Tamara met the handshake with her jaw hanging open. In her other hand she was holding her left shoe, which she had already slipped off. The tall heel pointed aggressively in Frau Meyerling’s direction.

Frau Meyerling took this as the perfect moment to break into tears. I thanked my stars that she hadn’t put so much effort into her performance for me. Now with a groan she squatted down in front of Ferdi. He took a few steps back, shocked.

“Can I hug you, Frederic?”

“No,” said Ferdi, and his eyes, too, filled with tears.

“We’re all sad.” Frau Meyerling sniffled as proof. “The entire kindergarten is crying with you, Fred. I really liked your father.”

I leaned against the doorframe and put my hands in my pockets so as not to use them to grab Frau Meyerling around the throat.

“Don’t be ashamed if you need to cry.” She stood up slowly. As she did, she braced herself on Ferdi’s little shoulder, nearly causing him to buckle. Now she had him really wound up and he started sobbing loudly; my fists itched to be used. If I were a Rottweiler, I would have been in desperate need of a muzzle.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “Cry with adults if you feel like you need to.”

“Young man.” She turned to me and pushed her glasses further up the bridge of her nose. “I have given seminars about helping children deal with grief. Do you really wish to tell me how to act?”

She was still holding Ferdi by the shoulder. My throat caught as I tried to come up with an answer. Claudia got there first.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” She nudged Tamara, who immediately got to work. “Please sit down. I’m the ex-wife of the deceased, and the young man with the fashionable sunglasses is my son Marek, and I thank you for taking the time to pay us a visit.”

Frau Meyerling had to let go of Ferdi to shake Claudia’s hand, and that was probably Claudia’s intent. Ferdi scurried off like a shot as Tamara pushed on the buttons of her spaceship. I wanted to follow Ferdi but he had already disappeared into his room and slammed the door shut. Then it sounded as if a bunch of matchbox cars were being thrown against the wall. Feeling like a coward I went up the stairs to my room on the floor above and didn’t go back downstairs until the door had been locked behind Frau Meyerling.

Her sweet perfume still hung in the air, and there were pamphlets with candles and angels scattered all over the place. I picked one up, it was about a grief support group for children. I gathered them up and stacked them neatly, and turned around to go look for a wastepaper basket.

“Everyone deals with things their own way,” said Claudia quietly.

“She’s a vulture,” I said. “She doesn’t really give a shit.”

Claudia shook her head and tossed a thick catalogue onto the coffee table. I looked at it for a second, it was an urn catalogue. Ferdi had already taken care of picking one out. Tamara was rattling things around over in the refrigerator. She was pulling out all the moldy stuff and stacking it up on the windowsill.

“By the way, we have a problem.” Claudia was flipping through the catalogue again, urns made of mahogany and marble.

“Really?”

“Yes. The Swiss authorities now say they can’t release the body until somebody has identified it.”

“Is it possible that they made a mistake?” asked Tamara.

My heart leapt. That’s exactly what I had been thinking the whole time.

“Impossible. It’s just a formality. But there’s still no way around it.”

“And that just occurred to them now?!” Tamara yelled shrilly. “The funeral is already scheduled.”

A jar of pickles fell from her hand and shattered on the tiles. The brine splattered in every direction. Tamara slid down the wall and slumped to the floor, covering her face with her hands.

The smashing glass had done something to me. I was unable to settle back down. Tamara’s shoulders trembled, her sobs reached me on a time-delay, like thunder after the lightning. Claudia pushed me out of the way and squatted down next to her, put her arm around Tamara’s shoulders, and rocked back and forth with her. Then something exploded over my head. Up in his room Ferdi had thrown my entire carefully constructed Lego parking garage against the wall.

“I can do it,” I said.

Tamara said she wasn’t up to it, and couldn’t leave Ferdi alone anyway. Claudia dialed the phone with a stone face and turned away from Tamara, who continued to talk to her the whole time. The Swiss police were hard to reach, in trying to find the responsible party she was transferred ten different times only to end up back at the first person who’d answered. A body apparently couldn’t be legally identified using photographs or a description; the only exception was if the dead party’s dentist could certify the identity of the corpse by dental records.

“Is it really so complicated?” I asked. “I mean, who else could the body be? Can’t they just use identifiable scars…?”

“In-person identification or dental records,” hissed Claudia with the phone wedged between her shoulder and ear as music tinkled from the earpiece. “There’s no point in arguing over the logic, Marek, it’s the law. Stop annoying me with stupid questions. Dental records would work, but it takes two weeks.”

“That won’t work.” Tamara shook her head. “I can’t take it for another two weeks.”

“What can’t you take? He’ll be dead a good bit longer than two weeks,” I said.

Claudia tried to stop me from speaking and nearly knocked my glasses off my face. Tamara stared blankly at a spot on the opposite wall. “One of us can go there with the funeral director when he goes to pick him… or, the body… up.”

The soles of my feet stuck to the tile. They hadn’t wiped up the pickle brine and there were pieces of broken glass all over the place. I found a bucket under the sink and gathered up the shards.

“I can do it,” I said. “I’ll go with the funeral director. I can identify him.”

I hoped so anyway. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time, but the Swiss police didn’t need to know that. I’d get a recent photo from Tamara beforehand.

“You’re still a child,” said Tamara with a tear-streaked face. It seemed to me that if anyone here looked like a child — and was acting like one — it was her.

Nobody could tell my age now anyway, I said. That was never going to change.

“You’ll have to show identification there,” said Claudia wearily. But she didn’t immediately reject the idea. On the contrary, she thought about my suggestion and something like hope flickered across her face. We’d all had a feeling who the job would fall to — fourteen hours in the car, half of them in the company of a corpse.

I fished a pickle out from under the kitchen cabinet, rinsed it off in the sink, and stuck it in my mouth.

And thought about Janne for the first time since I’d arrived.

Claudia was to be picked up at six in the morning by the funeral director to drive to Switzerland.

“You have to help Tamara, okay?” she said, pinching my cheek. In her other hand she had a cup of coffee that she kept perilously tilting. “While I’m gone you are the man of the house.”

“And who am I when you are here?” I thought of Dirk again, Claudia hadn’t said a word about him in the last two days and I wondered whether I needed to be worried. She looked tired and spent, her short hair standing up, dark rings beneath her eyes, only her lipstick was still its usual garish color and her skirt as short as ever. I kissed her on the cheek and saw the red veins shimmering through the skin.