Just Call Me Superhero (15 page)

Somewhat surprised, I stepped slightly to the side. Ferdi was out with his mother, I said, and wanted to close the door again and get back to my eggs, but she pushed me gently but determinedly out of the way and was suddenly standing in the house. There was nothing else I could do but close the door even though she was now on the wrong side of it. Then I repeated that neither Ferdi nor his mother were home in case she was a bit hard of hearing.

“No problem, I have time.” To my horror, she slipped her patent leather shoes off her feet and looked at me as if sizing me up. “Who are you?”

“The brother,” I mumbled.

“What brother?” She seesawed back and forth on her feet uncomfortably.

I explained—the look on her face said she was perplexed.

“A Rottweiler,” I said before she asked.

“Did you wind him up?”

“I bit him first,” I said.

“You’ll ruin your eyes wearing sunglasses indoors.”

“My mother says the same thing.”

“Listen to your mother.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes out of her bag, turned them wistfully in her hand, and then tossed them back into the bag.

“It’s a no-smoking household, is it?” she asked in a kind of demanding tone. She probably thought that if I could wear sunglasses inside this was the type of place where anything was permitted.

“There’s a small child living here,” I said with as much disdain as if I worked for the national cancer society.

“I know, I know,” she answered, sounding irritated. “Why do you think I’m here. I’m nervous.”

I was nervous, too. I was also hungry, and my eggs were going to be as cold as the pseudo-cappuccino. But eating while this woman was sitting on the leather couch watching me was beyond my powers. Disappearing upstairs with the plate seemed impolite, and I had even less desire to offer her some of my painstakingly composed breakfast.

“Can I help you?” I finally asked. “I really have no idea how long they will be.”

“It always takes a long time,” she said. “Cases of death are time-consuming, you don’t have to tell me. But I still need to speak to your mother.”

What about, I wondered. She read the question on my face.

“It’s about the little one.”

“Did he get up to something?”

“Get up to something? No. He’s an unobtrusive child. Supposedly he can write already, but I don’t believe it. Boys pick it up more slowly. I need to tell your sister about the grief work we’ve arranged at the school. A death like this doesn’t affect only the relatives.”

“Hmm,” I said.

“We’re unsettled.” She pulled out a folded and ironed handkerchief and held it up to the bags under her eyes. “I can still picture your brother-in-law . . . ”

I interrupted her to explain once again how we were all related to each other. Maybe Tamara had the same sunglasses and the woman took us for blood relations on that basis.

“But these days there’s a lot you can do to help a family absorb such a shock.” She tucked away her handkerchief again and her businesslike demeanor returned. “Our entire team wishes to support your sister during this difficult time. She should know that she is not alone, and neither is Frederic.”

“Ferdinand.”

“Just as I said. Can I assume that material concerns are not a worry?” She looked at me with an attentiveness I didn’t like.

“No idea,” I said. “Maybe my father left nothing but debts behind.”

“Your father?” she asked. “Is he dead as well?”

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.

H
er 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.

C
laudia 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.

“Take care of yourself,” I said.

“Take care of her,” she said. “And of the little one.”

“Let’s not go overboard,” I said. “She stole your husband.”

“What’s she got for it now?” She pulled on my undamaged earlobe.

I stood and watched the long dark car pull up to the door. She waved before she climbed in.

I could have gone back to sleep for a few more hours, but instead I went to the coffee-spaceship and pushed on a couple of buttons. The indicator lights came on and once again it started to steam, but this time it didn’t stop me. I pulled out the round filter like I’d seen Tamara do the day before and emptied it out over the trashcan. I found the bag of beans and poured some into the coffee mill. I hadn’t expected the mill to be quite so loud. A noise like that would have made any normal person jump out of bed, but everything remained silent upstairs.

I no longer wondered why Claudia seemed in such a hurry to get down here once she’d heard the news of the death. Without her nothing happened in Swinehausen. Now, with her traveling for an entire day, I could see in my mind the way everything was immediately falling apart. How Ferdi would cry, hungry, unkempt, and totally neglected, how Tamara wouldn’t even think she had to get out of bed, how the folder of important documents would end up in the wastepaper basket and the house would collapse and bury us all beneath marble slabs. I was the man of the house, that’s what Claudia said to me, and that didn’t sound like fun.

I sat down on a kitchen chair after I’d gotten rid of some more brochures about grief support groups. Somehow I didn’t think Ferdi needed that sort of thing. I myself had rejected all kinds of offers for therapy in my time. Claudia had tried to bribe me with a home video system and a trip to America if only I’d been willing to dump my psychological junk onto a specialist, but I remained as steadfast as a stake. Until I’d landed in the arms of the guru, taken in by the most idiotic of lies: that I would see my life with completely different eyes in a week’s time.

I took a similarly dim view of grief puppets and of painting nightmare images and of group arts and crafts projects. I was very conservative about such things. And I’d promised Ferdi a puppy even though I hated dogs.

I drank my espresso, which was passable, and thought again about Janne. The feeling of having forgotten her was baffling. Now she was here again, all I had to do was close my eyes in order to see her on the inside of my eyelids in her long dress, with a look on her face that said she’d like to bite my ear, too, and giving off a subtle smell of lime that was so fresh and so good and so bad at the same time that it suited her.

I knocked back the espresso, spat some coffee grounds that had strayed into my mouth into the sink, and went upstairs on tiptoes. Suddenly I just knew she had sent me a text message, maybe right at that moment, maybe during the night. Maybe she’d sat up the entire night, unable to sleep because she was so worried about me, waiting for an answer. I felt guilty and swore to myself never to let either Janne or my phone out of my sight again.