The Blackberry Bush (3 page)

Mutti, unlike Opa, loves to talk about growing up, and how wonderful everything was then. It’s fun to hear the stories—and to see her smile while she tells them. We take the train to visit her Dutch parents often. It takes only a few hours to reach Rotterdam. I love riding through Cologne, past the blackened dual-spired cathedral. I have another grandfather in Holland who is kind of funny and crabby at the same time. I only have one grandmother, because my German Oma died of cancer before I was born.

I love Rotterdam. My Dutch grandfather (my other Opa) takes me on bike rides through the tunnel, under the big river, and to my favorite place—the Hotel New York in the heart of the port. He buys me a chocolate milk every time, and we watch the big ships come and go. He doesn’t like to talk about Germans, even though he reminds me that they built the bike tunnel and highway under the river. Every now and then someone mentions the War. I’ve always known my Dutch grandparents don’t like my father. They say it’s not because Papa’s German, but I think it is. He never comes along on our visits to Rotterdam.

Now I’m looking out the farm-facing window, still waiting for Opa. At the end of our backyard, the blackberry bushes start and wander off into the countryside in lots of directions. I could swear they get bigger every year. I love to play back there—especially with Johanna. I don’t ever remember a time when I didn’t have a few scrapes on my arms and legs from the thorns. The farmers in the fields work so hard to raise crops, but blackberry bushes grow all by themselves without any help.

I’m getting impatient, so I enter Opa’s study to wait there. In his left second drawer is his drawing kit. Precise instruments to make perfect circles and angles. Papa tells me Opa designed this house with that kit.

Opa lets me play with everything in his desk. Using the compass, I draw a perfect circle. Then I draw myself in it. I’ve done this so many times. But I’m older in the picture than in real life. And my hair isn’t short. But I can’t stop drawing circles with slightly different sizes. Once I caught myself drawing dozens of overlapping circles around the picture of me. I’m not smiling in any of these pictures. I think a lot when I’m drawing the circles.

To me, getting older just means harder jobs. Johanna works harder than I do, and I know I’ll have to be like her soon. She even makes dinner sometimes. Math problems get harder. Books lose their pictures and are more challenging to read. I learn so much better with Opa, because there’s no pressure.

My parents fight about me when they think I’m asleep. Papa was angry with Mutti because she yelled at me about my school grades. Mutti shot back with, “She has to get good grades because she’s not pretty.” My whole body froze in bed when I heard that. I’m not really sure what grades have to do with being pretty, but it’s very bad somehow. I think Papa would like to be more like Opa, but he can’t make it happen.

They don’t know how good I am at English. I speak it a lot better than they do. I have to keep from laughing when they try. There’s an American couple down in the village with a new baby, living in an old, crooked apartment. I heard them speaking English and jumped in to their conversation. They asked me where in America I was from. I fibbed and said, “Seattle.”

I think about America a lot. Maybe I could be a different person there.

Johanna’s pretty; even I can see that. It makes people, all kinds of people, happy to look at her, and they look at her longer than they mean to. I, on the other hand, make people nervous. Except for Opa, people don’t like to look right at me.

And everyone always wants me to do better than I am doing. They say it’s because they want the best for me. But it doesn’t feel good. The older I get, the further behind I am. I don’t have enough friends. I haven’t finished enough homework. My room is not clean enough. I wasn’t polite enough to my parents’ guests. And the hardest of all: people don’t like me enough.

It’s really hard work to get people to like you. Or maybe I’m especially easy to dislike.

Opa’s study has a big mirror on the door. Standing in front of it, I’m surprised by how white my skin is. My hair is black, and I have a big nose. Opa says that’s because most of the families in town have Roman heritage, and that I must have ended up with the local hair and nose. Opa tells me this town has been around for at least a hundred generations. We go for walks in the hills around the village, and he shows me where the Roman roads, walls, and vineyards were. How can anyone know so much?

Even better, Opa is the one person who knows
me.
Last week he brought me a present from Bonn. I opened up the long, little box and removed a black, elegant Pelikan fountain pen. It came with a bottle of ink.

He then pulled out a fresh new ledger. I had to laugh. Opa knows how much I hate math at school. It doesn’t feel real—like somebody got paid to think up a bunch of problems to drive kids like me crazy. But Opa keeps telling me how important math is for real life, even if I don’t think so now.

For the rest of that afternoon, Opa taught me double-entry book-keeping in ink. Real-life stuff I can actually use even now, when I’m nine years old, to keep track of the little money I earn and spend. He told me that reckoning in German marks was only for practice, because they were going to disappear in a few years, replaced by the euro.

He also taught me that money is magic, and that if you give a lot of it away to improve the world, you’ll always have more left over than you started with. That’s not what my teacher says about subtraction, but I know, without a doubt, that Opa is right, as usual.

He showed me his accounting books, going back to the 1940s. The numbers got bigger and bigger over the years.

“How does that work?” I asked.

He showed me the number in a special column telling how much he gave away last year. I gasped, and my hand came to my mouth. “That’s how,” he answered.

I asked him what I would do if I made a bookkeeping mistake with the pen.

“You won’t,” he said and smiled.

Opa believes in God. My parents are not so sure. This confuses me all the time. Opa takes me to church on Sundays. We walk down the hill together. He and I are
evangelisch
—Protestant or Evangelical. It’s hard to translate the term into English. Most of our neighbors in Oberwinter are Catholic. Our stone Protestant church is very small, very old, and musty smelling. The temperature is always cooler inside than outside. I sometimes fall asleep there on Opa’s shoulder, and he likes that.

The organist is amazing. She plays on national radio. And the organ is very old: 1722 is painted on the pipes. For the rest of my life, I’m going to make sure I can listen to organ music. My imagination can go almost anywhere when she’s playing. After every Sunday service, the organist gives a little concert from the rear balcony where she sits. We stand, lean on the pews behind us, and watch her. We always clap when she’s done.

Johanna comes with us sometimes, but Opa says it’s important to go to church only when you want to. For whatever reason, Opa and I always want to. Maybe it’s just so we can spend Sundays together, but I know Opa would go even if I didn’t exist. It seems to help him be happy all the time and everywhere. I hope he’ll teach me this magic when I’m old enough.

I don’t understand much about what goes on in church, but I love it when they read the Bible stories for children’s worship, and the littler kids come and plop right down on my lap, as if they belong there. This Sunday was the story about Joshua and the walls of Jericho. The German Bible says the Israelites were blowing trombones, and Opa’s English Bible says trumpets. Things like that make me think.

I hear the door.

Opa’s home.

1999
Zarzamora, California

Josh

A
N HOUR AGO
, I
RODE MY BIKE
up to our home at 119 Mure Street and left it lying there in the front yard. It’s not like anyone is going to steal it—everyone knows everyone in our town, and everyone knows that my bike is my bike.

I left in the middle of Little League baseball practice because I got this picture in my mind of an image I had to put on paper. No one saw me sneak out.

I’m so tired of organized sports. I’ve been on teams since before I can remember. My room is full of trophies I don’t care about and didn’t put up. My father, Michael, was on the German Olympic basketball team and came to California to try to break into the NBA. He rode the bench for several years, and somehow we ended up here in Zarzamora.

He says we’re moving back to Europe someday, where my parents are from, but I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon. My mom would love it, but we’ll see. Dad is pretty important in town and goes to a lot of chamber of commerce and youth sports meetings. He has an insurance office on Water Street (not sure why they call it that—it’s really a main street, and there’s not a lot of water around).

Northern Europe is freezing cold. I’d rather be outside, and it’s harder to do that there. It gets so dark there in the winter that you’d never believe it. My grandparents have a vacation place in Hossegor, France, which is kinda like California, and I’d much rather be there than up North—I love the beach. Mom’s folks are rich…at least I think so.

Our own beach is forty-five minutes away—at the end of a winding road that goes downhill through lots of tunnels to Santa Barbara. I think about being there all the time.

Our town looks like it’s about to fall apart, but it never quite does. My school looks especially bad. My drawings have a shape to them; our town does not. It looks like everything in it was all put here by accident.

I’m drawing that image from my “vision” at baseball practice as I tell you all this. I draw all the time.

And I love to read. My mom tells me to help myself to her bookshelf. I’ve read all of the Dutch-language Thea Beckman teen novels. My mom taught me to speak and read Dutch. My dad’s German books are for grown-ups and they’re too hard, at least for now. But he never speaks English to me at home. So I guess I speak three languages. It’s also useful to speak Spanish around town—nobody my age or younger uses it, but a lot of their Mexican parents do.

My dad says my endless hours on a skateboard are a waste of time, but I always think about skating as I’m falling asleep. The parking lot at the abandoned Dairy Queen is my own private skate park.

Mom is really into church. She grew up in Ommoord, Holland, just outside of Rotterdam. Her mom and grandparents live on the top floor of an apartment building when they are in Holland. She talks about her little church there all the time. I’ve been there, and they meet in a warehouse. They sing with their hands in the air and get a little strange. They all have a certain look in their eyes that I don’t fully understand. I always draw designs in my notebook when I sit there with Mom.

We go to an independent nondenominational church in Zarzamora. It meets on Sunday nights in the old Methodist church built in 1906. The Methodists who meet on Sunday morning seem really elderly to me, but they are nice to us.

I keep trying to find ways not to suit up for sports teams, but it hasn’t worked. When Dad’s not coaching, I can usually skip out, grab my board, and skate somewhere. Dad wants me to learn how to ski, but as you can guess, I just want to snowboard. Dad is so old-school. Our town is the gateway to Gold Mine Ski Resort, uphill a little ways from here. A lot of traffic comes through here on winter weekends. We’re used to the musical clanking of chained tires going up and down Water Street.

I hang out with my best friend, Sam, and his dad at their pizza place Friday and Saturday nights. It’s against some rules, because we’re too young to work, but Sam’s dad pays us cash to help out when it’s busy. You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve saved up.

I’m tall for my age, like Dad was as a kid, except he’s clumsier than I am. There’s a big wall behind our neighborhood, and behind that is an abandoned orchard filled with coyotes, blackberry thickets, and rabbits. I’ve been walking along the top of that stone wall for as long as I can remember. Parts of it are broken down—it’s a shortcut to school that no one else my age has the guts to take.

I’m sitting in my room at my drafting table (found it in an abandoned building behind the wall). I draw designs for my skateboards and hope to draw comics someday. Sam has access to his dad’s massive collection of late-1960s Marvel Comics editions, and we sit over there for hours, making up stories and characters while we browse through the dry, yellowing pages. I like
Daredevil
best.

When the weather’s bad, I can draw for hours. The window on my right looks out on the long wall I walk along on the way to school.

I’m drawing a heart. Not like the one you’d see in a Valentine card. One like an
X-Men
comics artist would draw. First I lay down the light pencil work. Then I go over it with ink. When it’s finished, I erase the pencil lines. There are lots of ways to add color if I want to. This heart is edgy looking. Now to finish drawing the image that came to me earlier, when I was at baseball practice…

I had stopped focusing on where I was standing (first base), and a pale girl, who looked familiar somehow, handed me this heart design. It was circled with gnarly blackberry vines with big thorns. She had climbed over the broken wall behind our house to give it to me. She was even thinner than I am.