warnings for rape, domestic and child abuse, and graphic depictions of violence.
My father was a monster. And so are you. And so am I.
Wolfgang's earliest memory is of the taste of blood in his mouth and the throb of a bruise blooming across his cheekbone. His whole life has been defined by moments like these: the ache of a broken tooth and the simultaneous relief and horror as he spat it out onto the pavement; the sharp and familiar sound of a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun; the heavier, duller, weightier sound of a closed fist meeting skin stretched tightly over bone. He has muscle memory in his fingers, his hands, his fists; they clench instinctively, and these days he swings almost without looking, without thinking.
When someone else's bones crack under the weight of his bloody knuckles, it's not a good feeling, but it's not a bad one, either.
His mother always told him to be proud of his name. "Mein kleiner Wolfgang," she would say, brushing the hair from his eyes. "Mein kleiner Wolf."The makeup she was wearing couldn't quite hide the darkness of the skin around her right eye, and there was nothing she could do about her split and swelling upper lip. Wolfgang would look at her, and think about the way his father would stumble home after a job gone south, stinking drunk and screaming her name. "Liesl!" he would shout, "Komm her, du Schlampe!" Wolfgang would pull the covers over his ears and screw his eyes shut tight and pray to God for sleep, but nothing he did could drown out the sickening, wet slap of his father's hand across his mother's cheek, or the caustic sound of her cotton nightgown as it tore right down the middle, or the muffled grunts from his father and sobs from his mother as he raped her on their kitchen floor.
When he was six, Wolfgang lay in bed and listened to his father beat his mother to death. He didn't know what was happening at the time, didn't see his mother's head split open against the corner of the china cabinet and the blood spill out like the blooming of a flower in fast forward. Wolfgang didn't see this until the following morning, when he lay in bed for an extra five minutes waiting for his mother to wake him up, before walking into the kitchen and staring at the dried bloodstain on the floorboards his father hadn't been able to scrub away.
His mother's body was gone, probably weighed down by rocks in the harsh waters of the Spree, but Wolfgang knew what had happened to her, just as easily as he knew his own name. He wondered what would have happened if he'd been brave enough to get out of bed last night and walk into the kitchen, like he'd thought about doing for months now. He wondered if she'd still be alive.
His father came into the kitchen then, as Wolfgang was staring at the blood. Their gazes met. His father had a wild, hunted look in his eyes, and his forehead was beaded with sweat. "Keine Schule heute," he said, handing Wolfgang a mop and bucket. "Mach den Scheiß da sauber."
Wolfgang spent the rest of the day becoming an accessory to his mother's murder. A week later he and his father crossed the Wall into West Berlin.
In some ways, life was easier on this side of the Wall. In others, not so much.
Wolfgang met Felix in detention and Felix taught him what it was like to be a kid. He showed Wolfgang his favourite movies, mouthing the lines along with homemade popcorn kernels stuck between his teeth, elbowing Wolfgang in the stomach whenever a good part was coming up. There were a lot of favourite movies, and a lot of good parts. Wolfgang's bruises weren't only from his father.
In return, Wolfgang showed Felix how to fight. How to throw a punch, how to dodge someone else's fists, and how to play dirty in case you were losing. Felix didn't ask where Wolfgang had learned how to do this, or about the bruises that appeared, disappeared and reappeared across Wolfgang's pale skin. Only once, when Wolfgang came to school in a scarf in the middle of summer, and Felix had laughed at him and tugged it off, and seen the red imprints of two big, meaty hands around Wolfgang's neck, had he looked as though he wanted to speak. He turned to Wolfgang with huge eyes, for once absent of words, and Wolfgang had simply snatched the scarf back and wound it around his neck again and that was that.
The next time Felix came over after school to hang out, he hit Wolfgang's father over the head with a glass vase the elder Bogdanow had stolen from the widow of an SS officer. Wolfgang had hugged Felix for the first time that day, with his father's unconscious body at their feet, and was grateful that Felix either didn't notice or pretended not to feel the shudder of a sob as it wracked its way through Wolfgang's bones.
Wolfgang killed his father when he was nine years old, and it was the easiest thing he's ever done.
Fighting's easy. Fighting's what I do.
translations:
mein kleines herz - my little heart
mein kleiner wolfgang - my little wolfgang
mein kleiner wolf - my little wolf
komm her, du schlampe - come here, you b*tch
keine schule heute - no school today
mach den scheiß da sauber - clean this shit up