And I answered automatically, “Don’t exaggerate. He didn’t even touch Anton.”
“I’m not talking about Anton,” said my mother. “He hit you. He dared to hit you.”
And as I sat down next to them and took a piece of chocolate for myself, she said, “He’s never coming back here.”
And fifteen minutes later she said, “Where did you get the nerve, Sascha? Are you not afraid of anything at all? How is that possible? How did you get that way?”
I felt the chocolate melting in my hand. I didn’t even want to eat it. So I wiped it off on my pants.
“Never again,” my mother said, hugging Anton. “Never again, it’s over, done.”
“Me!” shrieked Alissa. I could clearly hear her from the staircase. “Me, me, me!”
I’m not worried about Alissa. She’s been good to go since she came into this world. She was born in the ambulance because my mother didn’t make it to the hospital in time. A screaming red bundle with a head of pitch-black hair and a startlingly observant look in her dark blue eyes. Pretty as a picture and full of energy. I held her, newly born, in my arms as my mother, no longer pregnant, took the elevator back up to our place and got into her bed. I never saw her so happy again.
“A girl, Sascha,” she kept saying. She hadn’t let them tell her in advance what she was having. She was drunk with joy. “You know what, Sascha? I never said anything, but I really wanted it to be a girl. Girls have it so much easier in life.”
“I’m not sure about that,” I said, looking at Alissa’s wrinkled red face. Alissa looked at me, too, studying, skeptical. And when we put her in her crib, she would close her eyes and open her mouth and scream until the walls of the entire Emerald shook.
“It’s all right,” I said, “No need to get out of bed. I can handle it. I can hold her. She likes it in my arms.”
“I want to hold her, too,” said my mother. “Give her to me. Give her to me, I said. Who gave birth to her—you or me?”
My little sister never wanted to be put down. Within a few days, we were all doing her bidding. Even Vadim overcame his disappointment at not getting a son worthy of carrying on his name, turned down the TV, and carried Alissa around until her diapers were full—“baby shit is not something for a man to handle.” He even said he saw his grandfather in her tiny features, started calling her “his princess” and “snuggle-bunny,” and bought her a doll in a red dress.
I blow on my pointer finger and put it on the doorbell.
I’m excited to see Alissa again.
Peter the Great comes to the door. I haven’t forgotten that little Katja is his sister. I just didn’t think about it.
“Hi,” I say. He nods and lets me into the apartment.
“Your little sister,” he says instead of a greeting, “is like a siren. My ears are ringing.”
He stretches out his arm, leans against the wall, and looks me up and down. His facial expression is hard to read.
I don’t look away. It doesn’t go unnoticed.
He really is gigantic. Six and a half feet of muscle and acne, adrenalin, and testosterone, and whatever it is you get when you sniff glue, all packed into oddly tight jeans and a white T-shirt. The Marlon Brando of our Russian Ghetto. Long black eyelashes that give his face a feminine note. Which is probably why he lifts weights so obsessively. Light blue eyes, red lips that crinkle easily, a thick gold chain around his neck, and an even thicker one around his wrist. A fat ring on his pinkie and tattoos on his upper arm. There’s the obligatory naked woman—with no head—as well as an eagle and some symbol I don’t recognize.
No, he doesn’t sniff glue, I think. His eyes are too clear and observant. Maybe a couple of beers and a joint, but only on weekends. He can restrain himself. Probably drinks protein shakes and pops vitamins.
I think he’s younger than me. I’m pretty sure he’s only sixteen.
There sure are a lot of sixteen-year-old boys in this world.
“How’s it going?” he says.
“Fine,” I say. “You?”
A door flies open and Alissa comes stumbling out. She’s pulling a toy wagon with three Barbies lying in it. She sees me, shouts a greeting, and pulls the wagon past me and Peter and on into another room.
“Come on, Katja,” she screams. “Where are you?”
Katja comes out of the doorway. She’s a year older than Alissa, already five. Her face is round. Her pink tights are twisted around. And too small. Katja’s one of those chubby kids who can’t help bringing attention on herself—the wrong kind. For instance, I have rarely seen her without a chocolate bar in her mouth. Even now her mouth is smeared brown. So is Alissa’s.
“Hi, Katja,” I say. She jumps, startled, and stares at me. “What are you playing?”
“I don’t know,” she mumbles.
“What do you mean you don’t know? You’re one of the ones playing it.”
“Formula One,” shrieks Alissa from the next room. “We’re playing Formula One racing. Come on, Katja.”
Katja sticks her thumb in her mouth. Her eyes are the color of water, like Peter’s. There must be twenty-six barrettes in her hair.
I wink at her. She takes her thumb out of her mouth and hides her hand behind her back.
“How come you never come up to our place?” I ask. “I think Alissa would like it.”
Katja says nothing and looks over at Peter. Peter looks at me from above and likewise says nothing.
“I’m not allowed,” mumbles Katja.
“Why aren’t you allowed?” I ask. “Who said you weren’t allowed?”
“Mommy,” she says.
I raise my face to look directly at Peter.
“Why isn’t she allowed?” I ask. “Does your mother think we eat children?”
The corners of Peter’s mouth turn up. “How should I know,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned she can visit you anytime she wants. I’d enjoy the peace and quiet.”
“I’m not allowed,” Katja says more stridently.
I kneel down in front of her. “I’ll ask your mother if you can, okay?”
She nods. Then she nods again, more vigorously. “I want to see Alissa’s robots,” she says.
“I’ll ask your mother,” I repeat. “When will she be home?” I ask, this time directing the question to Peter.
“Forget it,” Peter says, stretching and touching the ceiling as he does. “She comes home at seven, but you can save yourself the trouble.”
I stand up. I stretch, too, but I only reach the level of his shoulders. “What do you mean?” I ask angrily. “What did we ever do to your mother?”
“You know how they are around here,” says Peter. “She’s afraid. She was home the night it all went down at your place. I can hardly believe she lets the little runt come over here even. The adults are all so spineless and stupid.”
“It was Vadim,” I say. “Vadim did the shooting. Not me. Not Maria. Why shouldn’t Katja be allowed to come over?”
Peter shrugs his massive shoulders.
“Look, personally I don’t give a shit,” he says. “But my mother says you can still smell tragedy up on the eleventh floor. She’s a bit out there. When she sees a black cat she spits three times over her left shoulder so nothing bad happens to her.”
“Is that it?” I ask. “She’s just superstitious?”
“I’ve never asked her,” he says, “but if I were in your position, I’d want to move out of that apartment.”
“Why?”
“It’s poisoned. Somebody was stabbed nine years ago on the eighth floor—you weren’t here yet—and to this day there’s only one apartment rented out on the entire floor.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“You can still see the blood stains on the floor in front of your apartment.”
“That’s just dirt.”
“Right.”
“If your father killed your mother,” I say, “would you want to move out of here? The apartment where you lived together with her? The place you call home? And her last home? Would you really split?”
“That would never happen to my mother,” Peter says.
That hurts. I only realize after a few seconds that I’ve clenched my fists so tightly that my fingernails have pierced the skin on my hands. There are several red, crescent-shaped cuts.
“Your mother?” I say. “No, you’re right, it would never happen to her.”
“What?” says Peter. “What do you mean by that?”
“What did you mean?”
And then I realize Peter is smarter than I thought—he doesn’t answer.
The children’s voices have gone quiet. And I can now hear the music coming out of the open door to Peter’s room. I know the song.
The drunken doctor
Told you
That you
No longer exist.
The fire department says
Your house
Has burned down.
“No way,” I say. “You listen to Nautilus Pompilius?”
“What else am I supposed to listen to?” says Peter, annoyed. “The Lollipops? What’s your problem?”
I have no problem. I stand there, try to breathe. Everything swims in front of my eyes.
“You listen to that?” I say pointlessly.
“For god’s sake,” Peter says, pissed off. “No, I don’t listen to it. I eat it.”
The song hits me like a punch in the gut.
There’s no way Peter really listens to the music of this long-forgotten Russian goth band. My mother liked them. She listened to a lot of rock and pop, as well as chansons and musicals and opera. She never got stuck in any one genre.
How is it possible, I wonder, that here—in an apartment that reeks of coal, that’s scrubbed spic and span, a place where every piece of furniture is draped with a doily, where there are plastic flowers in vases on the windowsills, where the walls are covered with the type of horrible pictures of pink children that you can get three-for-ten-bucks at the supermarket, where red-checkered curtains flutter in the wind—that here of all places, this music is played?
In a strange room
With a white ceiling
A right to hope
And a belief
In love.
I stare at the checkered curtains.
We never had curtains. My mother hated them. It might be the one thing she categorically ruled out. She always wanted to have the windows open. The sun should come in. “Let the sun in and the rain will follow.” That’s a line from Die Fantischen Vier my mother liked. Yep, she even liked German hip-hop. The first thing Maria did when she arrived was to sew curtains—loudly colored, with giant flowers all over them. She put them up and pulled them closed.
Then I came home from school and she took them down again. Real fast. She made a blouse for herself out of the fabric. And one for Alissa.
Then she quickly took apart Alissa’s and turned it into three tops for Alissa’s dolls instead.
The drunken doctor
Told you
That you
No longer exist.
Peter reaches out with a bulging arm and taps me on the shoulder.
“What?” I say, taking a step back.
“Why don’t you come out to Broken Glass Park sometime?” he asks without looking at me. “You know, back in the woods.”
“What—where you guys drink and smoke weed and tag-team girls three at a time in the bushes? What would I want to do there?”
“Well, you just explained that yourself.”
“I’ll pass.”
“It’s not true about three guys doing girls at the same time. Where did you hear that? That only happened twice—and the girls wanted it.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t want it.”
“Are you scared?”
I go right up to him and stand on my tiptoes.
“Get something straight,” I say. “I. Am. Not. Scared. Of. Anything.”
“Then come along. What’s the problem?”
“You guys make me sick. That’s the problem.”
“Aha,” he says calmly, lowering his head. “You want something better.”
“Exactly,” I say, and watch as his face changes. As if he’s been stung.
Then he gets his facial expression under control again.
“I wouldn’t be saying that kind of thing if I were in your situation,” he says slowly. “It could come back to haunt you.”
“I’m shitting myself. With fear.”
“Wise of you.”
“Alissa,” I say loudly. “How long do I have to wait for you? Let’s go home.”
No answer.
“Is he a good fuck?” asks Peter suddenly, looking me directly in the eyes.
“Who?” I say, stunned.
“The sugar daddy I saw here, the one who dropped you off. Some old guy with gray hair. I know how you are. You think we’re nothing but trash. But in reality you’re the worst of all, just a miserable slut. So is he a good fuck?”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Amazing. I can hardly wait for the next round. Alissa! I’m leaving.”
She comes shooting around the corner and grabs my hand with her hot, sticky fingers.