Broken Glass Park (24 page)

“Marina!” I shout. “You’re never there when I need you!”

The taxi driver walks to the car. But instead of getting in, he starts rummaging through the trunk.

He comes back, leans over me, still cursing incomprehensibly under his breath, holding a bottle of the same brand of vodka Peter had. He unscrews the top and dumps the contents fizzing over my legs. My screams shatter the eerie silence on the street.

“Aaaah! Have you lost your mind?” I shout. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Disinfection,” he says, lifting me to my feet. “Otherwise infection.”

But I can’t keep my balance.

I sit back down and free my poor feet from the skates for the final time of the night.

“Where do you live?” the taxi driver asks acidly.

“Right around the corner,” I say. “Thanks.”

I put a skate under each arm and stagger barefoot to the Emerald. The asphalt is warm. My legs feel as if someone is holding a red-hot iron to them. I’m standing in front of my apartment door when I finally hear a siren in the distance.

About time, I think.

I fall into bed without undressing. Thoughts race through my head. I’ll never be able to fall asleep with my legs scraped open and these images in my head. I can’t let the sheets touch the wounds. I can’t lie on my stomach. I can’t think about all that happened today. I don’t want to toss and turn, but I can’t lie still, either. I’m going to lose my mind.

Then I am swallowed by the great, merciful darkness of nothingness, and I don’t dream at all.

When I wake up it’s noon.

I have to think for a while about why I can’t seem to move. Then I remember. I sit up and look at my legs. They are swollen in places and raw and red.

The skin will grow back, I think. There’s nothing I can do.

I try to stand up. It works. I can walk, too, though it’s difficult.

Sitting back down is harder. It feels as if the scabs will rip open again.

Oh man, I think, I can’t stand around all day.

I make the mistake of leaving my room in just a long T-shirt. I run into Maria right in front of the door to my room. She’s probably been waiting there. Maybe she wanted to ask me a question or tell me something.

But she forgets about it as soon as she sees me.

And I thought it wasn’t that noticeable.

I brush aside her horror, her sympathy, her complaints, her iodine tincture, her entreaties to go immediately to the doctor, her praying that I never go skating again without kneepads—as if they would have done anything. The best one is her asking me not to go rollerblading ever again at all, and her wanting to keep Anton from ever doing it again, as well. She knew all along that something like this was going to happen.

“It’s not so bad,” I lie.

“How could you get so badly hurt?” she asks three times.

“I was drinking,” I say curtly.

“You?”

I go into the bathroom and lock the door. From there I repeat that yes, yes, yes, it’s already been disinfected. “Leave me alone,” I say. It’s not an order. I’m begging. Showering would be a bad idea, I think. I do have nerves, after all, and they’ll relay the pain. I’m made of nothing but nerves. If only I didn’t have any. That would be great.

Since I can only stand or lie down, I lie down in bed and read the Robert White interviews. Every half an hour, Maria brings tea with milk along with some pastries. The baked goods stick in my throat, but the tea I drink thirstily until I realize each cup is sweeter than the last.

“Are you putting an extra spoon of sugar in each time or what?” I ask gruffly. “Tell me. I won’t yell at you.”

“A half spoon more in each cup,” Maria says, cowering in the doorway. She’s afraid to come any closer. “It’s all I can do for you.” She tries to smile.

I don’t know what to say.

The second day is worse. I have to take aspirin. The third day I’m feeling better again, much better. So good, in fact, that I hobble out to the kitchen and ask Maria how things are going.

She looks at me, startled, and says, “I don’t know, why?”

I get pissed off by this highly intelligent answer.

Then I compliment her on the chicken in walnut sauce she’s just made. You can eat it hot or cold. It’s the best dish from the Caucuses.

“I wish I could cook,” I lie, without any real inspiration. “But I don’t think I’ll ever learn how. Marina couldn’t really cook, either, and never really wanted to. I guess I inherited that from her. I mean, I guess I have other talents. Anyway, do you think you could teach me?”

Panic spreads across Maria’s face. She looks back and forth between my face and the sage plant on the windowsill. She looks a bit like Angela as she does.

I can see the wheels turning feverishly in her head as she tries to figure out what kind of trap I’m setting and what consequences it will have for her.

“Me teach you something?” she stutters helplessly at the sage.

But I’m not listening anymore because a funny thought has occurred to me: if Maria became Angela’s stepmother, people who didn’t know their story would instantly think they saw the similarities between mother and daughter, and both of them would want to shoot themselves as a result.

I find this amusing and start to chuckle. Maria, meanwhile, is on the verge of tears.

I take pity on myself and get up and go out for a walk. I know that back behind the closed door, Maria will shake her head for a while and then talk to her kitchen herbs about me—do they have any idea what’s going on with Sascha?

Sitting on the bench in front of the building’s main entrance is Oleg, who lives with his mother on the second floor. Alissa is sitting on his lap. I don’t like it.

I’m not sure how old Oleg is. But he’s probably already celebrated a fortieth birthday. Ever since I’ve lived here, he’s been there every day sitting for hours on that bench. And why not—his legs don’t work. He was hit by a car as a kid. Not sure how I know that. It’s just part of the general knowledge here. He has red hair and rusty brown eyes, but he looks completely different from Felix. It might have something to do with the fact that Felix’s face isn’t covered with patchy stubble of varying shades of red.

I go closer and notice a lot of his stubble’s gone gray since the last time I looked at him this closely.

Oleg always has a chess board next to him. He used to keep stacks of newspapers there, too, open to the chess column. But all the columns have migrated from the print editions to the web. The Internet is probably also why Oleg isn’t outside as often as he used to be. When he’s alone on the bench, he moves the chess pieces around. And if somebody sits down with him, he talks about whatever books he’s just read.

Well, actually he doesn’t talk about the books. He reads from them. But not from the book. From memory. Once I sat there next to him with the book he was reciting from and checked his memory against the printed copy. He never got more than five words wrong per page.

When somebody is that good at something, I’m not jealous. I’m awed.

My first year here at the Emerald I spent a lot of time on the bench with Oleg. Not to hear him recite stories. I don’t have the patience to be read aloud to. I prefer to read things at my own much faster pace.

Nope. I played chess. He was damn good. He probably still is. I don’t know anyone who has ever beaten him. He instantly solves any scenario in the newspaper chess columns.

No wonder he can’t get anyone to play him anymore. Back then I was the only one who didn’t get discouraged by the constant losses. I kept trying. I would take pride in the fact that I forced him to make fourteen moves instead of ten to reach checkmate. And he always explained afterwards exactly what I had done wrong. Each and every thing.

That first year I dreamed at night about rooks and knights and black and white squares. After school I would toss my backpack on the stairs and arrange the pieces on the bench even before I’d had a snack or done my homework.

I didn’t listen to Oleg when he talked. I just stared at the board, looking up in amazement when after a while I would notice a group of boys had gathered around us. They listened to Oleg. And their ears were always flushed red. He talked to them while he casually made moves on the board and once in a while made some comment about one of my moves—those comments were the only words that got through to me during the games. He made those comments a bit louder, and I would say, “What? Yeah, yeah,” and then shut my ears off again.

And then came the day I realized he was describing in minute detail scenes from the porn films he rented from a nearby video store. Each week the shop would pick up the previous week’s videos and deliver a new batch to his apartment. And I realized he had probably been doing that all along as I sat there next to him thinking about strategies and attacks.

I was ten years old and it took me a while to connect the words delivered in Oleg’s gentle voice with the giggling of his pimply-faced audience. I forgot about the game and listened with my mouth open in shock to the images he described with such precision. Some of the words he used sounded as mysterious as the chess terminology had before I learned it. With me Oleg talked of gambits, skewers, and castling. The things he talked about with the boys didn’t sound much different. That certain number combinations and things like French openings existed not only in my favorite game but apparently also in his porn films seemed like a huge and particularly cruel betrayal.

It took some effort to close my hanging jaw. Then I gathered up my things and pushed my way through the circle of panting boys without saying goodbye. And since that day I’ve hated not only Oleg but also the checkered board. That was our last game, and that was almost seven years ago.

He’s still sitting there and now my little sister is frolicking on his lap. For the first time in ages I sit down next to him on the bench. He still has the same chess pieces. The dirty white queen was the same one I used to use, and there was already a piece of the black king’s crown missing back then.

“Watch,” says Alissa happily to me, grabbing Oleg’s thick wrist. “He can’t break my hand!”

“What?” I ask, looking with annoyance at Oleg. He doesn’t look any less sheepish.

“I told him to try to crush my hand until it hurt, but he can’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do it,” Alissa orders Oleg. “As hard as you can.”

Oleg’s giant fist closes around her hand and his face goes red with feigned effort. Alissa squeals with delight: “It doesn’t hurt! It doesn’t hurt!”

Oleg smiles at me as if to ask forgiveness and shifts Alissa off his lap.

I’m speechless. I’ve just realized I used to play the same game with him during my first year at the Emerald. Even then he had enormous arms, as if to compensate for the powerlessness of his legs. The idea of testing that strength excited me, too.

And I celebrated the same way when I withstood his grip without pain.

“Let him do it to you,” says Alissa.

I remain gloomily silent.

“Long time,” says Oleg. His voice is more gravelly than it used to be.

“What do you mean?” I say. “I see you every day.”

“But not close up. What happened to your legs?”

I shrug my shoulders. I’ve never forgotten what he was talking about that time during our last game together. I can still see the images he was able to create in my head. And the stupid thing is that I didn’t understand everything back then and ever since it’s bugged me what he meant by this or that term.

“What are you doing with my sister?” I ask, gingerly feeling a scab on my shin as I do.

Oleg sits up straight and fidgets with his crutches.

“Nothing,” he says, taken aback perhaps by my tone or by the look on my face. “What do you think I’m doing? I showed her a few chess moves. She’s so bright. It’s funny.”

“Yes, she is,” I say. “Who else are you playing against?”

“Nobody,” he says, smiling his I’m-so-sorry smile again. “I have a chess computer game now. But other than that, the general interest around here has dropped off. My three favorite retirees are all dead. And there’s no younger generation. I mean, there is one, but they would rather shoot at monsters or grope Lara Croft.”

It suddenly occurs to me that Vadim used to sit and listen to Oleg, too, with a disgustingly sleazy look on his face. And I’m sure Oleg wasn’t reciting the latest Nabokov biography to him. And afterwards Vadim would come home and put his arm around my mother. Of course.

An evil thought enters my mind: I’m not the slightest bit sorry about his broken spine.

But then I remember that my mother often used to sit with Oleg, too. She would laugh. He would recite her favorite passage to her—from Mikhail Bulgakov. In a white cape with blood-red lining, shuffling with a cavalryman’s gait, the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, emerged on a covered colonnade between the two wings of Herod the Great’s palace, with a terrible headache, o gods, ye gods, why do you punish me so?

This was after I had sworn off chess. Once I asked my mother angrily how she could talk to Oleg—didn’t she know what his favorite hobby was?