Do you know how beautiful your granddaughters look when they're running around the park? Susanne is wearing a purple flowered dress and swinging with her best friend on a horse that works like a crane. It was my favorite pose on the playground. When Sara lands, my beautiful daughter soars like a laughing angel. She has a chubby face and is missing a first number, which only adds to her character. Meanwhile, Ania plays next to me in the sandbox with the other children. Ania loves making sand cakes and gets terribly upset when one doesn't turn out right. After that, she's completely unconcerned with the other children destroying them. The important thing is that they turn out well. I have to constantly watch her because every now and then, her hands, completely dirty, unconsciously go to her mouth.
You know why I'm writing, right? Fifteen years old. Death has already matured. As a fully educated girl, she already has breasts and a mind of her own. I suppose this is the perfect time for her to break through the wall and emerge from me. Any day now, she'll turn into an old maid, too tired to leave. So I'm writing. You'll get this letter, sit in a chair, put on those ugly, oversized glasses with slightly red glass frames. Maybe you'll be eating soup or drinking milk. And you'll read it until you believe it.
Last winter, over dinner, Susanne told me about a boy who every day takes bottles out of paper bags and throws them into the glass container. I'm sure it would be much less humiliating for him to throw them into a regular trash can, without publicly revealing the contents. Except there's no perfectly regular container here where he could toss them completely anonymously. So he's undergoing this embarrassing segregation of his parents' privacy. Susanne doesn't know what bottles for individual spirits look like. She only knows the bottles for the wines we drink.
"Those were a bit like these"—she points to a rack of red Burgundies and a white Rhinelander—"only transparent, like Coke."
And suddenly it all came back. I'd seen alcoholics so many times during that time. Dirty, unwashed, sleeping in underground passages and corners of metro stations. And when I emerged, I'd see others. Completely clean addicts in well-tailored suits, or with bags of crafting tools slung over their shoulders. I'd seen drunk society women, described as "DRINKERS." The front pages of the tabloids were filled with scary headlines about celebrities with problems. But I'd almost forgotten about the vodka bottles wrapped in newspapers that I'd toss into the trash when Mommy was talking to you, even though you knew everything anyway, right? It was pure kindness on your part to pretend you didn't see. I'm just not sure you know that Mommy explained to me that it was a game. A bit like hide-and-seek. I was to discreetly remove the bottles and toss them into the container as quietly as possible. I was convinced it was the best game in the world, and what's more, I was a master of stealth. I was like a child who, playing Dodgeball, finds himself alone on his own turf because he's faster than the eyes and movements of the other players.
For the first time in this foreign country, I saw myself. I asked Susanne to show me the boy. He was just as I'd imagined him. In his corduroy jacket and black cap, he didn't stand out from the rest. He was completely ordinary; he didn't even have sad eyes, and I thought that my eyes weren't any sadder than my friends'. Perhaps he, too, hadn't yet grasped, even at the age of eight or nine, that these bottles were part of a depressing family display. The boy's name is Thomas, and Susanne knows it from his younger sister, with whom she goes to kindergarten. Initially, I planned to learn a few interesting facts about these people. However, I gave up when I realized that my knowledge was insufficient to sympathize with them, but sufficient to associate them with our family.
It was Saturday morning when Matthias and I first arrived home. You were pruning the rose that climbed up the back of the house. Thanks to that, it bloomed for the second time at the end of the summer. I called to you, and you shielded your face from the sun with your hand to look at us. At dinner, you asked Matthias in a tone that suggested you were asking about the weather in Germany, or whether his ancestors were Nazis. A dead silence fell in the room. "Don't you think I expect an answer, boy? As far as I'm concerned, you could even be Hitler's grandson. As long as you're not a communist!" A terrified Matthias still can't understand the point of the question. Over time, the desire to explain your behavior completely vanished. Last night, however, I did something that shocked him. I quoted to him the exact words you used to describe him after that first visit. They haven't lost any of their relevance, and today they are no longer just hypotheses, because I can support them with arguments from our everyday lives. That evening in the bedroom, the conversation degenerated into what I would describe as a "quiet argument." At the climax of the argument, I explained to him why he was a loser, an idiot, a henpecked man, and a coward. I backed it up with some really solid facts, from his avoidance of military service to his pathetic betrayal
. He didn't even want to deny it. I asked him if he wanted to leave. I believe that after seven years, I owed him the right to choose. He didn't want to. The argument was the girls.
"If you want, you can take them and leave. Maybe I'll leave. I could go back to Poland and work in real estate. I've always wanted to do that. I'd see them often. And then there are the holidays, the vacations. It's not the end of the world, just one limit."
He lowered his gaze, as if searching for words between the parquet floorboards.
"Of course, it's humiliating for me, but I have no intention of forcing you to stay. After all, we were never a good match."
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