Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

As for Evgenija, I resented her because it suddenly turned out that she could speak German. Much better than I could speak English, not to mentioned Russian or Ukrainian.

“Laughable-but-passable,” is how she described her ability. I stared at her like a talking donkey. “I had a German lover,” she explained.

“I get it, it’s a family tradition,” I said in a polite tone. If everything was going to go off the rails, the least I could be was polite. Everyone was having fun and I didn’t want to be the one they talked about later, the guy who showed no style at his father’s funeral. The other person biding her time was Claudia. But she was only concerned with the guru, shadowing his every move; twice I caught them talking and falling silent as soon as I appeared. At least I didn’t see the camera in his hand anymore.

Claudia was nice to everyone else. Too nice, I thought. She directed everything, counted rooms, pillows, and bodies, had cots moved into the study, and created a right mess. Tammy ran around with stacks of bedding. It turned out the guru had fibbed, as well. They hadn’t checked into the hotel, he had just said that so as not to put any pressure on us.

I said very politely and clinically that it would be absolutely impossible for me to share the double bed in the attic with Marlon, as if we were a gay couple. I said that without my own room I would turn into a mass murderer. They all laughed. Janne and Tammy laughed the loudest. What I said interested them to a limited extent. What I wanted, not at all.

“Now pull yourself together,” hissed Claudia after she’d plucked me out of the crowd and shoved me up against a wall. “I don’t want my son of all people to act like a diva.”

I gasped.

“Who’s the diva here? I’m a diva? Have you seen the others? Do you have any…?”

She punched me in the stomach, it was probably meant as an affectionate gesture, and all the breath still left in my lungs from my little speech rushed out into her face with a whistle. She turned away like I had bad breath.

“You can’t mourn in peace around here anymore,” I said. “There’s a cripple in every corner.”

“You’re the only one here who’s crippled.” She pointed her finger at me like a pistol. “In your head.”

“I’ve never denied that.”

Claudia looked around as if she was afraid she’d be overheard.

“What I don’t understand,” I said with poorly disguised rage, “is why you all think it’s so great. Especially you. At home you like to have your peace and quiet, too.”

“I do not like to have my peace and quiet!” she shouted.

“Why isn’t there ever anyone at our place then?”

“Because you and your carrying on have scared everyone off!” She no longer seemed to care whether anyone could hear her. “As long as we’re living under one roof, I can’t invite people over without you treating them in a way that I have to be ashamed of. None of them ever did anything to you, and you don’t have to walk around like weltschmerz personified just because of a few scratches on your cheek. Yes, I like the fact that there are people here who want to be there for you even though you are the way you are. Let me finish,” she said as I opened my mouth to object. “I know every word you’re going to say before you say it. Naturally you want nothing to do with them. Naturally you’re the only one out of all of them who isn’t deranged. Naturally… ” She ground to a halt mid-sentence and threw me a pitying look, as if I was no match for the clever words of her monologue. “And now shut your mouth and offer the guests something to drink.”

We walked to the cemetery. It was nine in the morning and the church bells were ringing. The morning was autumnally cold and our feet waded through fog. Ferdi walked between Tammy and Evgenija. He kept lifting his legs and hanging from their hands. I watched them from behind, how heavy he was, how the arms of the two women tensed and their backs stiffened in order to keep him in the air. But they didn’t say anything to him or to each other. Everyone looked straight ahead.

I’d been startled when I looked into Tammy’s face early that morning. I was one of the first awake because it drove me crazy lying in bed next to a panting man. Claudia, who’d made coffee in industrial volume, sent me back upstairs to wake Tammy. I hadn’t even knocked on Tammy’s door before she suddenly opened it. I looked at the woman standing in the room, in a black dress and black tights, on skyscraper heels, who seemed to show no age at all but did have a certain facial expression. I wanted to have one just like it: serious and solemn and all-knowing. I felt like a kitchen knave who had just disturbed the queen. The wires crossed in my head and I choked back a “congratulations” before it very nearly escaped my lips. Then, just to be sure, I put my hand over my mouth.

She arched her eyebrows royally. A tiny hint of a smile hid on the right side of her mouth and I would really have liked to kiss it.

“Breakfast,” I said hoarsely. “May I?” I offered an elbow and we went down the stairs side by side, and suddenly I thought: My father is a lucky son of a bitch. Living or dead — what difference did that make.

I looked at Tammy’s straight back and the steady steps she took with her never-ending legs. I pushed Janne’s wheelchair and knew she was looking at Tammy’s legs, too. Her perspective allowed her to really scrutinize legs. Janne’s black Snow White hair was up, held together by a hairclip made of dark horn with matte cut stones. I had no doubt that she hated Tammy. And I admired her for not showing it. The view of Janne’s delicate, white, frail neck was unobstructed, and suddenly, for the first time in my life, I thought that people were more than their shells.

The thought was so striking that I turned to Friedrich, who was bringing up the rear. I’d already forgotten how his voice sounded. As soon as he arrived he’d gone up and built castles with Ferdi. I had hardly even noticed that he was there. I looked at him intently and realized that something about him had changed. I’d never experienced him silent. And he’d never worn a black leather jacket before. Had he gone shopping before the funeral? Or had he had that hidden in his suitcase the whole time?

He noticed that I was staring at him, and returned my gaze, serious and calm. I nodded to him — I hadn’t really greeted him since his arrival — and kept walking.

“You see, good thing,” said Claudia when we reached the cemetery walls.

“What’s a good thing?”

“That we came on foot.” She pointed at the cars lined up along the street. Countless limousines crawled down the street one after the next, and the long herky-jerky column went on and on without end. Our troop had already wound its way onto the pedestrian pathway to make way for the cars, only Janne and I were still blocking traffic.

“Excuse me,” I said and shoved her onto the sidewalk as well.

She briefly rubbed her cheek against my hand on the grip.

The parking lot in front of the chapel had long since filled up and cars were parked two deep along the street. People were walking from every direction toward the entrance, in black dresses and long coats, and with their heads hanging. Some carried small bunches of flowers, others were lugging giant arrangements. I realized with a scalding hot flash that I didn’t have a single flower with me. I wanted to ask Claudia why we were all assembled here — for a moment I actually forgot — and to remind her that we’d shown up empty-handed, all of us. But she had already reached the entrance to the chapel with Tammy and I could no longer make her out in the crowd of black dresses.

Obviously I’d been wrong. Obviously flowers had been prepared. On our chairs in the front row were little arrangements, three white roses bound together with a black ribbon, all the way across the entire row. In order to sit down you had to first pick up the flowers. One of my roses still had a thorn and I immediately cut myself on it. I stuck my finger in my mouth and licked the drops of blood as I heard Lucy’s warnings echo in my ear about how all roses these days were treated with highly toxic pesticides. Lucy was interested in that sort of thing, genetically modified food and animal testing and poor farmers in South America. I had always pretended that I too was interested in that stuff. In reality I’d only been interested in myself, even back then. My vision started to blur so I shut my eyes and concentrated on the salty taste in my mouth.