A Handful of Sand. Marinko Koscec
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of course. When making the major alterations, the tradesmen ingeniously found other small things that absolutely needed doing, so there was no money left for the new staircase up to the first floor.
‘That’s all right, I can wait, I’ve got a heart,’ the contractor consoled us. And then proposed: ‘Look, it’s fine if you just pay me for the material…’
So, that same day, the workmen demolished the old staircase which led nowhere. But they didn’t come the next day and no one answered the phone at the number given in the telephone directory.
As a temporary solution, we placed a ladder against the wall of the house. As with most temporary solutions, this one proved to be long-lasting. But Mother soon stopped using it after she lost her balance, fell and broke her arm. Not only did she no longer climb up to the upper storey, but from that day it ceased to exist for her.
When I started Year 12, she summoned the courage for the desperate step of joining a ‘lonely hearts agency’. After several dubious offers, she hit a bull’s eye: a retired German industrialist of Jewish origin by the name of Jakob Steinhammer. They began corresponding, facilitated by the agency, because Mother didn’t speak German. The first letter was accompanied by a photograph of a greying gentleman with a neatly-trimmed moustache and metal-rimmed glasses on a slightly crooked nose. When he visited us, three letters later, we realised the photo hadn’t been quite up to date and that Mr Steinhammer had made the acquaintance of Mr Alzheimer. But the wheels were turning and scenes of salvation spun before Mother’s eyes.
Reduced mainly to smiles and gestures of mutual enthusiasm, the rapprochement didn’t go smoothly. But soon a one-way ticket arrived nevertheless, and Mother didn’t vacillate; the offer of marriage involved me joining the newly-weds as soon as I finished high school. Mr and Mrs Steinhammer settled down in a country house in green and peaceful southwestern Germany. Mother wrote to me almost every day and soon showed great skill at inserting mangled German expressions into her sentences, which most foreigners take years to master. She enthusiastically described all the wonders of the house with its underfloor heating, gold-plated fixtures in the bathroom, wallpaper with life-size woodland animals, or the breakfasts they had at the nearby lake. Never mind the spelling; she evidently had enormous potential for assimilation. I must admit, I too started to feel I was becoming German.
All the more because all my clothes soon had German labels. Not one of the garments and pieces of apparel which arrived in the parcels, from shoes to sunglasses, would have been my choice in a shop, but I told myself it was a different country and a different taste, and I had to get used to it. Mother didn’t choose them either, but rather Uncle Jakob, who was better informed about fashion in Germany, and even more importantly about the difference between quality merchandise and junk. Mother illuminated each individual item with an assurance of the quality of the material, its water-resistant qualities or the enormous saving made due to the excellent value for money.
Mr Steinhammer was unable to have children–a consequence of his internment in Auschwitz, but to have a son as an heir was his great unfulfilled desire. The death of his wife had left him alone in the world, since he’d lost all his relatives in the concentration camps together with the fortune his family had gained through manufacturing mine-shaft frames; but he was able to regain and redouble this fortune after the war owing to his business talent. Now he was looking forward to my arrival so he could enrol me in university. My studies, of course, would be to prepare me for a position in the management of the firm, because he remained its majority shareholder.
And no sooner had Mother settled in and got up the courage to leave the house by herself and was entering the local supermarket one day, than a frenzied dog came bolting around the corner and went like a projectile for her buttocks, as if it had been waiting just for her–as if it had been sent down to Earth with exactly that mission; it sank its teeth into her several times and disappeared again in a flash, just like it had come.
The wounds healed relatively quickly, but something in her heart shifted irreversibly. When they brought her back from hospital, she wouldn’t hear a word about staying. No pleading and promises would help, nor pointing out the difference between what she had there and what she said she wanted to go back to, nor the fact that no such incident had been recorded in the area for decades. She interpreted this last aspect as a sign from God showing her where she really belonged. Until her last days she remained broken and timid, always more or less on pins and needles, but passive, forever awaiting the next blow of fate.
But rapid flourishing and abrupt end of the Steinhammer episode was nothing compared to what had happened a few years earlier, straight after we returned from Gabrek’s for the second time. The boy I sat next to in class was called Božidar. Also an only child, from even poorer circumstances than mine, he had a hard time keeping up with lessons. I whispered him the answers in tests. We didn’t meet outside of school, but since our way home was in the same direction we usually walked together. There was one hundred metres of poorly illuminated footpath down to the first intersection and compacted snow had turned it into a veritable ice rink that day. It was 24th December and the Christmas-tree vendors were selling off the last of their wares cheaply in front of the school. Božidar pushed off with one leg and skated in front of me to the very edge of the cross street, where he turned to wait for me. At that instant the cabin of a large truck and trailer appeared from behind the building on the corner. I only just managed to yell Watch out! before the truck, winding around the tight bend, collected Božidar with its veering rear end and sucked him under its wheels.
Even today, that is the only plausible version of the event for me. According to the forensic report, Božidar died from a skull fracture caused by a blow to the back of his head and can’t possibly have been run over by the wheels because the weight of the trailer, loaded with sacks of potting soil, would have crushed his body. But I kept telling the investigators what I’d seen–an image which visited me for years afterwards, especially in the middle of the night: of Božidar being swallowed up by wheels bigger than himself and thrown out like a rag doll, and of him lying on his belly, eyes wide open, with the blood from his nostrils conquering the snow in a starlike stain. The only other thing I remember is the man who shook me and yelled to me that I should go home, which I finally did, still believing that Božidar would just blink, wipe his nose and get up.
That man, who had been at the other side of the intersection, was the only witness, and he stated at the inquest that he’d seen me and Božidar standing together at the curb. That was enough for different stories to spread through the school and the neighbourhood suggesting that I’d pushed Božidar onto the street or tripped him while he was running. And it was enough to make Božidar’s father come to our door, distraught, with his distress further fuelled by alcohol. What the hell are you hiding him for? he cried and swore, Let me ask him what bloody well happened! Mother managed to stop him at the doorstep and send him away, with tears of both sympathy and determination to protect me, and threatened to make heavy weather to anyone who needled me by alluding to the event. Moreover, she stopped the investigators molesting me and taking me to court as a witness, and also prevented the psychiatrists from poking around in my head. She spent many nights by my bed watching over me in the months which followed.
From then on I always detoured Božidar’s street as if it were cursed. The seat next to me in class remained empty until the end of primary school.
* * *
Father’s condition was stable. That meant he couldn’t think of a single part of his body which didn’t hurt, but no pain was excruciating enough to make him forget the others.
It was incomprehensible that I’d lived with him for so many years. I would rather have gone to have a wisdom tooth pulled out than visit him, and yet the whole time I was rankled by an emptiness I seemed to have left there. So I forced myself to go once a week. I showed up, that was all I could do for him. That cheered him up, for three or four seconds. Then it would be back to moping. We don’t hug, not even when we say goodbye. Basically we avoid physical contact. We’re full of respect for the air between us and careful not to infringe it. We don’t touch on difficult topics, in fact hardly any at all, because when he runs into a gap in his ever more impoverished vocabulary he doesn’t know how to get round it. He stays all frowning and stares