My mother got herself a German boyfriend and pretty soon things got serious so we ended up moving from Spain to Germany. From Arroyo de la Miel to Kiel. It was a huge change, not just the language but the culture and a thousand things nobody ever really explains.
On our street, toys were scattered everywhere on the sidewalks. Bikes, tricycles, plastic guns. As soon as I arrived I thought, “Are these kids stupid or what?” I grabbed the first bike I saw and rode it full speed, threw it down, grabbed another one, kept going until someone told me I couldn’t do that. People left them out, but nobody touched what wasn’t theirs. “If more people from my hometown show up here, this is going to end real quick,” I thought.
The neighborhood was so safe the German boyfriend left his car keys in the door overnight and they were still there in the morning. And he had a new Mercedes.
At school, the kids were annoying as hell because they always wanted to prove Germans were better. They tested me constantly. “Come on, kick a goal from here, let’s see if people from Spain are as good as they say.” Even the teachers were like that. In class they’d make me compete with the best kid in math, compare my drawings with whoever drew best. I’d pretend I didn’t understand German very well to have an edge but I knew exactly what they were saying.
The German’s house was pretty nice. We had a big room with a large window overlooking a meadow with cows, and we’d sometimes go out exploring. Once we even found a dead pink fetus and thought it was human.
Things were going well at first until my mother noticed the first red flag. The German had an office and on weekends he’d spend hours in there planning how to screw over his ex. He was divorced, and his two daughters now lived with his ex and her new husband. He’d obsess over the trial, strategizing how to really destroy her.
One night we went to a dinner party to introduce my mother to his old circle of friends. After we ate, they all sat around a table on a sofa and started drinking. Really drinking. They made jokes in German I didn’t fully grasp but they seemed sexual. After a while a woman wanted to get up and since she was wedged between the sofa and table, she had to squeeze past the men. One of them grabbed her by the butt and pulled her toward him. The woman started laughing, straddled the guy, and started grinding on him. Right there in front of everyone, in front of me, a kid. After that they took me out to the car to sleep.
After what felt like a thousand hours sleeping in that Mercedes with the cold upholstery, I heard my mother; she came to the car all worked up, arguing with the German about something. He was super drunk so my mother got behind the wheel of his precious Mercedes. Since she doesn’t drive well, plus the anxiety, she started revving it, pushing it to a thousand RPMs. The German was pissed, yelling that she was going to ruin his car. My mother was hysterical because she didn’t want to crash and didn’t know the way back. At one point we stopped at a completely deserted four-way intersection and they just sat there arguing and yelling.
Then came the teacup incident.
One afternoon the German’s mother came to visit. You could tell he had a lot of respect for her. It was like an official, super formal visit. My sister and I were told not to leave our room, and if we had to use the bathroom, we better not even think about going near the living room. Of course I went out to spy. I could see the mother sitting there having tea. “How fun,” I thought. After an hour or so the German’s mother said goodbye. Still very formal, distant but not cold enough to hate her. Then bedtime, or so we thought.
An hour or so later, I heard screaming from the living room. My mother yelling at the German. Who did he think he was, who did his mother think she was, how dare he treat us like that. My sister and I ran to the living room. My mother was standing there yelling. The German was sitting in an armchair with his legs crossed, looking down. My mother told us to go back to our room but we didn’t listen. “Who does that old woman think she is!” she yelled at him. “Who does she think she is!” The German had some teacups on a shelf on the wall. He kept them on display like museum pieces, probably expensive or something, and we weren’t allowed to touch them. My mother grabbed one and bam! smashed it on the floor, grabbed another and bam! smashed it too. The German didn’t even blink. Seriously, didn’t move a muscle. That made my mother a hundred times angrier, so she went to the shelf and started smashing all the teacups one by one. The German still didn’t flinch, so she went right up to him and smashed one next to his ear. Shards flew into his face. That made him flinch. The phone rang. A neighbor who’d heard the screaming and teacup explosions. My mother, out of breath, said it was nothing.
The next day at breakfast my mother told us what happened. The German kept those cups as decoration and wouldn’t let us use them. But when his mother came to visit, he took them out. They used the fancy cups and gave my mother, sitting right there with them, a cheap cup from the kitchen. That’s why he ended up with no teacups.
To be fair, he wasn’t all bad. Once he gave me a gift I still like, this steam-powered toy, all metal. You know, the way good toys used to be made. You’d plug it in and it would show how evaporation worked or something like that. The machine was beautiful and shiny with silver metal tubes and copper-colored ones. And sometimes he’d take me to buy new shoes I actually liked, wouldn’t just grab the cheapest ones like my father did.
One day our cat Misha disappeared.
We’d brought him from Spain on the plane in a broken travel bag. My mother gave him sleeping pills but he vomited them up, so instead of falling asleep he spent the whole flight half-zombie walking up and down the aisle. You could do anything on planes back then.
We loved that cat, but one day he disappeared and my sister and I were devastated. “Poor Misha,” we thought. “He’ll be wandering these German streets and it’s going to get cold soon. He’s going to die if we don’t find him.” The German would sometimes drive us around to look for him but nothing, no trace. My mother told us it was because he was horny. Cats go looking for female cats and go crazy. “Misha went crazy,” I thought. “Poor Misha.”
After three months in Germany, we went to visit my father in Spain. I was happy to leave because I hated the whole school thing. How strict they were, how they didn’t have white bread and you had to eat bitter black bread every morning. And constantly competing with those little German assholes was exhausting.
My sister and I flew down alone and my father picked us up, took us to his apartment in El Palo, Málaga. He and my uncle lived there by themselves. Talk about two different worlds. Two guys in a place with no food in the fridge, sticky floors, my uncle with his sexy collection of “Man” magazines and a Kama Sutra poster in his bedroom. It lacked, shall we say, a feminine touch. And besides, damn, we were in El Palo neighborhood, which means “The Stick”. If it sounds trashy, it’s because it is. It was a shithole twenty years ago and it’s still a shithole now.
The apartment had a tiny terrace overlooking the road where my father and uncle ran a gym together. No trees, no forests, no meadows, no cows like in Germany. My entertainment options: go to the video store and rent “Critters” or “Friday the 13th” or whatever I wanted. I could watch anything in that house.
Then one day my mother showed up and said we were staying in Spain. We’d be living with her. She’d found an apartment in Benalmádena, a nearby town. An apartment complex with a pool and gardens. It was way better than living with my father.
But what happened with the German? Well, he had a plan. It just went wrong.
Before we went to Germany for the first time, he and my father had made a deal. We would live there for a few months, then the German would send us back to Spain. Permanently. To live with my father.
My mother knew nothing about this.
When she found out, she almost died. The German tried to convince her to forget about us, we’d be fine with my father. They could start fresh, have new kids.
My mother packed her bags, begged her old boss for her job back at the hotel, and left Germany. She came back and took us to a different town without telling anyone where we were.
My father always told me his version. How my mother kidnapped us and vanished, and how he spent three months searching every development on the Costa del Sol.
The way I see it, his plan backfired. Tough luck.
And my mother? She gave up Germany to be with us. She came back to Spain and worked twenty years at a hotel, six days a week till midnight, entertaining tourists.
And Misha the cat? The poor cat stayed in Germany somewhere. A few years ago I asked my mother how he got lost. She confessed. He didn’t get lost. The German forced her to get rid of him. First the cat, then the kids. Turns out he was a son of a bitch after all.
