“What is it?” she asked calmly. I looked at my feet and mumbled something. She understood somehow what I meant.
“Sweetie,” she said, “he’s handicapped.”
“So?” I answered angrily. “Serves him right. You should have seen how worked up all those little wankers were from his stories.”
“You should be more understanding. He’s handicapped,” repeated my mother. I found it maddening back then. But now, looking at his aged face, it occurs to me that he wore sunglasses to my mother’s funeral. He kept them on in the dim funeral home. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him in sunglasses. Right now, for instance, the sun is beating down and he’s not wearing any.
“Shall we?” I ask before I think about it too much and change my mind.
He looks at me and raises his eyebrows questioningly.
“What?” I ask. “I haven’t played for six years. And you? How many grand masters have you beaten in that time?”
“Four,” he says meekly. “Online.”
I take the white queen and move her to E8.
“You’ve forgotten everything,” Oleg says. “Turn the board around. D1. But there are missing pieces. I have a new set at home.”
He touches the keys hanging from a chain around his neck and looks at me hopefully.
“Give them to me,” I say. “I’ll go get them. Where are they?”
“White box on the bookshelf,” he says, putting the keys in my hand. “Can you also bring something to drink?”
“Anything else?” I ask.
He smiles.
“Beer?” I ask.
“Soda,” he says. “Or iced tea. Whatever you can find.”
“Is your mother home?”
“My mother?” he says, shocked. “She died last year.”
“What? That’s impossible.” I sit back down next to him.
“I think the same thing sometimes,” says Oleg. “That it’s impossible. But it’s true. I’m not surprised you didn’t hear about it. What did you say?”
“Welcome to the club.”
“I thought I had misheard you.”
I unlock his apartment and open the door. I almost pass out from the stench. The place is a dumpster. First, I go into a room where a messy bed is surrounded by stacks of papers, books, and newspapers, piles of cassettes, and dumbbells. I find the white box of chess pieces.
I find myself standing in front of three color photos thumb-tacked to the wall. They are newspaper clippings. In one photo a little Japanese girl is sitting on her father’s shoulders. Above her is a blossoming cherry tree. The caption reads, “The earliest cherry blossoms since 1953 in Tokyo’s Ueno Park.” The second photo is of two sumo wrestlers during a match. And the third shows a smiling, red-haired woman.
My mother.
Nothing surprises me anymore.
I can’t manage to go into the kitchen, even with my sleeve covering my nose. Instead I stop off for two glasses and a bottle of apple juice from our apartment.
Oleg doesn’t say anything about it. Neither do I.
“Should I play without my queen?” Oleg asks.
“Why?” I ask, annoyed. “No way.”
“Then at least with two fewer pawns? Or with no pawns?”
“Cut it out. I want to lose on my own. Without any help from you. It’s enough that I’m playing the white pieces. Alissa, give me that.”
I opt for the Sicilian opening despite the fact that I always found it awkward. It’s the only one I can remember off the top of my head. I try to concentrate. But I just end up staring at the board while Oleg chats away nonstop and barely pays attention to the game.
“I’m reading a cool book right now,” he says. “It’s set in Moscow. Bombs are going off all over the place. Like what’s happening there these days, just ramped up a bit. A young married woman with a daughter cheats on her husband with a guy who claims he’s an alien. He wants to free her from her personal hell, take her back to his planet, where everything will be better.”
“Aha,” I say, annoyed that I can’t come up with a strategy, that I’m following stupid rules for beginners, and that Oleg’s chatter is getting in the way of the few thoughts I do have.
“And the best part is that right up to the end, you are wondering whether he is for real or whether it’s just a fantasy. They both toy with each other the whole time and then, man, it’s so sad.”
“What’s it called?” I ask because I don’t want to be rude.
“The Evacuator,” Oleg says, his voice full of emotion. “It’s so great. I got it on the Internet. I get all my books online now. There are a couple of good sites. I download them and print them out. I just need to get them bound—my place is so messy. Are you nuts? What are you doing?”
Then I too see what a stupid move I’ve just made.
“It’s because of all your blabbering,” I say angrily. “I can’t concentrate anymore the way I used to be able to.”
“Take it back.”
“No.”
“I’m telling you, take it back. You can do better than that.”
“Leave me alone. I’ll play how I want to. And I’m not taking back any moves.”
“You’ve played great up to now. But there’s a much better move to be made there.”
“Take the pawn in front of the king,” Alissa says suddenly.
“I think I can do without your tips,” I say bitterly. “It’s a trap. He’ll just take my knight. Can’t you see that?”
I stare at the pieces on the board, still no good ideas occurring me. Then I realize Alissa is right, and that my knight would be protected by a bishop. And for the first time in my life, I take back a move. It goes against all the rules—and against every fiber of my being.
“Well done,” says Oleg. “Pretend you’re a bird. Take off and fly over the board. Don’t just stare at a piece, see the whole game. Let your soul stretch out its wings . . . ”
“Shut up. It’s chess.”
“Aha, bold, risky, you want to attack, but we strike back, eh? What do you think?”
I chew on my fingernails and find myself unable to see the whole game.
“Not that way, Sascha. Take it back.”
“Not again. It’s no fun that way. I want to play on my own.”
“Accept the help. You’re just a few details away from being a really good player. You’re just too tense.”
“What a dumb idea to want to play you. If I were your chess computer, I would have exploded long ago,” I say, taking the move back. I spend another six minutes thinking while Oleg whistles an annoying melody. He’s probably having an incredibly hard time resisting telling the alien love story word for word.
“See,” he says in a praising tone, “sometimes you only get it right on the second try.”
I’m flattered that he now stops whistling and takes a full minute to think about his next move.
Then I dither again, unsure of myself, sacrificing pieces, attacking, get praised, cursed, and taunted. Then he stops whistling and begins to sing, “I’m still, I’m still Jenny from the block.”
I try to decide which pawn to advance to take his queen. I’ve never managed that against Oleg. I’m even dreaming grandly of a stalemate.
“Take the move back,” Oleg says as I’m happily buzzing about my chances. “That was moronic. Think about it. For a change.”
“Kiss my ass.”
“Think. Spread your wings. You are looking in the wrong direction. Leave your pawns alone. The main attraction is up in front.”
“I can’t see it, god damn it. This is all I can do.”
“What’s the aim of this game?” Oleg asks. Then he sings, “Don’t cry for me, Argentina . . . ”
“What?” I roll my eyes.
“The goal.”
And then I suddenly see it and shove my rook forward and shout “check” so loud that a fat pigeon pecking at sunflower seed shells nearby takes off in a huff and flies a few circles high above us.
I watch it go. I wouldn’t have thought it could fly.
Then I look back down at the board, wait for Oleg’s move, shift my king, and put Oleg in checkmate.
He’s as happy as if I had just healed him with a wonder cure.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I say, though inside I don’t totally agree, “I didn’t win. Not on my own. It doesn’t count.”
“Of course you did,” says Oleg, beaming. “I barely helped you at all. Great game.”
“We won,” Alissa is singing. She climbs back onto Oleg’s lap. “We won. We did it, not anybody else.”
“I’m off,” I say, putting the pieces back into the white box, closing it up, and handing it to Oleg. I get up. It’s difficult to admit to myself how proud I am. And how close I am to feeling that things are going to work out from here on.
But I still don’t like seeing Alissa on Oleg’s lap.
The bomb goes off the next day.
I have bad dreams all night, as if I sense it. In my dream I’m thirteen again and am having my first try of an odorless liquid down in a moldy basement. It’s a time when I still have friends here in the Emerald, and one of my friends’ parents used to make up and mix what they called cocktails.
After just two sips, my throat feels like it’s numb. I push the cup away and grab my neck. It feels as if I’ll never be able to swallow again, to breathe again, and I wake up gripped with fear but still able to wonder at the fact that this long-forgotten memory has somehow been exhumed deep within my brain. I hadn’t thought about it for years. I’ve also learned in the meantime that cocktails aren’t drunk in basements and that you don’t automatically see orange clouds and a dozen red suns after you drink a normal cocktail.
But the feeling of the edge of that cup on my lips is so realistic that I almost throw up.
I lie on my back and breathe carefully in and out. It’s no longer involuntary. I breathe until I fall asleep again. This time I’m haunted by Grigorij, who is crawling on all fours to a taxi. Then he gets in and starts driving it straight at me. But instead of running, I stand still and wait for the car to hit me. It doesn’t hurt at all. I make a fist and flatten Grigorij’s face through the windshield.
I punch and punch and wake up from the pain in my hand. My knuckles are skinned.
Is it possible to punch the wall in your sleep?
Why can’t I dream about Volker, I think angrily. Or at least Felix?
After that I don’t want to risk falling asleep again. I sit up in bed, lean against the wall, and freeze. When it starts to get light, I pull a sweater on over my pajamas, creep out of the apartment, and walk down to the mailbox.
It’s much too early for the postman to have come, and once again there’s nothing in the box. Of course. Only the paper, which I pull out.
I scan the front page. I don’t notice anything of interest.
In the elevator I look over the headlines. I still don’t see it. A boring news day, and it puts me at ease.
I love boring things. They’re comfortable.
I lie down in bed with the paper. But instead of reading it, I fall right to sleep. I’m awoken by the phone. It makes me jump—it’s already after nine.
I brace the phone between my ear and my shoulder and gather up the pages of the paper. They’re scattered around the bed and floor.
“There’s no point in canceling, Angela,” I say. “I’m going to come anyway.”
But it’s Anna.
“Is it true?” she asks without so much as a hello.
“What?”
“That he’s dead.”
“Who?” I ask. I don’t know why she’s asking me—I left broken glass park before she did that night. “Are you crazy, asking me that?”
But it’s not Anna who doesn’t get it, it’s me.
“Him,” says Anna. “Vadim. I heard that. My mother said . . . ”
The phone slips and falls to the floor. The back comes off and the battery flies out.
“No,” I say. “It can’t be true. I didn’t . . . ”
Then I see it in the paper. A little box at the top of the page. “Emerald murderer dead.”
“No,” I say to the paper. “Where did you hear that shit?”
Vadim E. is dead, the paper says. I don’t suppose they care that my head is spinning, that I feel nauseated.
“It can’t be,” I say. “I didn’t kill him yet. I still have that ahead of me. I have so many good ideas for how to do it. I’m definitely going to do it. Kill him and write a book about my mother. Before he manages to do it. He’ll never beat me to it. NEVER!”
I pull out the local section and spread it on the floor, holding it open with my knees so the breeze doesn’t rustle it.
It takes some time for me to find it. Here, too, it’s just a small item.
“Vadim E. has hanged himself in his cell.”
“He left a letter.”
I just can’t comprehend the words in this blurb.
“No,” I say. “It must be a mistake. They would have informed us. Somebody would have told us. There’s no way they would let us hear about it in the paper first. No way. They must have made it up.”
What a stupid article. A canard. Why is it called that?
I’ll ask Volker.
I pick up the phone, put the battery back in, and click the housing back together.
The phone starts ringing immediately. The ringtone sounds somehow hysterical, I think. I should change it.