Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  “To frighten off the men,” she said, “make sure they leave me alone.”

  “And do they?”

  “Course not.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the bar without taking her eyes off Ali. “But who cares? Everything that could happen to me already has.”

  “I hope not, Katyusha.”

  They’d stopped counting the vodkas. Out of the corner of her eye, Ali saw Mustafa approach and then recede again, like a pendulum. The ceiling seemed to be sinking lower and lower too; the crystals jangled overhead.

  “Can I ask you something? That accordion player, does she—”

  * * *

  —

  Ali felt dizzy. Katarina took her by the arm and pulled her off the stool; they staggered out onto the stairs where Katarina left Ali and vanished into the changing room. Ali leaned against the Ulrike Meinhof graffiti and smoked; she managed to start a conversation with the bouncer. When he decided it was time to put his hand on her thigh, Katarina appeared in jeans and a T-shirt and led her down the stairs. Ali didn’t know how, but she found the way home, Katarina squeezing her arm. They kept ducking into doorways to suck each other’s faces out of their heads, pressing their pelvises against each other and stopping when they heard footsteps—then Ali pulled Katarina on down the steep streets, stumbling over gray cats, fumbling for the key—it took her forever, but at last they were in and she threw Katarina on the bed—or Katarina threw her—and time stood still.

  * * *

  —

  The moon hung over Süleymaniye Mosque, shining on the slender body stretched out on the bed beside her, pale toes sticking out over the end of the mattress, shaven head pressed against the wooden frame. Like a marble-colored line she lay there on the sheet—like an elongated question mark. Her breasts rose and fell; her face was turned away.

  Katarina’s nipples gleamed in the moonlight. Ali was tempted to touch them with her forehead, but resisted for fear of waking the body, of making it move, making it wriggle out of its question-mark position and begin to talk. Her phone had slipped under the bed when Katarina pushed her onto the mattress—or had it been the other way around? The rest of the night was a series of flashing images in Ali’s memory. She put her feet down on the cold linoleum and pulled the curtain aside. It was night.

  Katarina was cooing softly, her mouth half open, her eyes moving beneath the lids—Ali couldn’t see them, but she was sure that was what they were doing. The muezzin was saying his morning prayer. Ali’s eyes were throbbing; the moon confused her. She let go of the curtain, knelt down, laid her forehead on the floor and groped for her phone among the dust balls under the bed. As far as the vodka in her brain would allow, she tried to remember what Katyusha (now breathing softly on the mattress above her) had said to her—who she was, what stories she’d told. But she recalled only a few Russian proverbs that Katyusha had let fall somewhere between the fourth shot and the seventh.

  Lying on the floor under the bed with her head among the dust balls, Ali didn’t know what she’d lost of the words and images of the previous night—the previous few nights, the previous weeks. She got to her feet, banging her head on the edge of the bed, and stared helplessly at her phone. The display had got a crack in it the night before; she stared at the time and had trouble making sense of it. In her jeans pocket she found a half-empty packet of P&S. Amazing that it still worked—slap a packet of German cigarettes on the table and people will come and talk to you—like Katarina, this question mark on her bed—probably, Ali guessed, an au pair girl from Ukraine, or a politics student from Romania—they all spoke Russian.

  Ali lit a Player’s and stared at Katarina’s body. It looked like pure oxygen—oxygen and a bit of moon—and she wondered what she was really called—Anna, Elvira, Zemfira, Petka—could be anything; Ali found no name to fit her face. She looked out of the window again. The muezzins interrupted one another unrhythmically.

  The muezzin to the left of her balcony had a cold; he whined today rather than sang, and the other always came in a little after him, relishing his superiority. Ali imagined an Elvis look-alike adjusting glittery silver sunglasses, smiling to reveal two rows of white teeth and perhaps a single gold incisor, then tapping his mike before launching into the morning prayer. He sang well. He knew he was the best for miles around. God is great. And prayer better than sleep.

  * * *

  —

  At the smell of the cigarette, Katarina screwed up her pale face and opened her eyes, squinting slightly. Her cheeks were puffed out, her lips puckered into a chrysanthemum, and she blinked several times before she understood where she was—or that she didn’t know where she was. She curled into a half moon, her head cocked to one side. Ali handed her a cigarette.

  “What’s the time?” she asked, sitting up.

  “The clock says five. Can’t be right, can it? Look out of the window—the moon’s shining as if it were the middle of the night, but the muezzin’s singing the morning prayer. Everything’s mixed up.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ve done away with time.”

  “Have you slept?”

  Ali had slept. She could even remember her dream, which was happening to her more and more since she’d come to Turkey. In this particular dream she’d been dancing with Uncle Cemal in a crowd so dense that their bodies had moved to the music of a seventies film as if by themselves. They’d stood locked in an embrace and the crowd had rocked them to and fro. Then Cemal had caught sight of someone, and staring over the sea of heads, he’d fixed his gaze on a shock of red hair at the back of the room, and letting go of Ali’s hips, he’d gone off and left her—pushed past the other couples and left her standing there, swaying to and fro on her own. For a few seconds, Ali had continued to hold her arms where Cemal’s shoulders had been a moment before, her head bent forward as if it were resting on his chest. Then she’d melted to a puddle in the crowd.

  “No, I don’t like sleeping.”

  “I do,” said Katarina with a yawn. “I love sleep. I wish I could sleep all my life.”

  “Oh, Katyusha.”

  Katarina wrapped her arms around her knees and suddenly looked serious and almost mean; she cut the room with her eyes and said in a voice that was perhaps more her own than the one she’d used earlier to vie with Ali in Russian vulgarities—a voice deeper than the one that had whimpered and shrieked as she’d come in Ali’s mouth: “I have to tell you something.”

  It flashed into Ali’s mind that she was in the exact situation of which her mother had always warned.

  “I’m not Katyusha.”

  “No, I didn’t think you were,” said Ali with a nervous laugh, hoping that was it. If it was only the name, that was okay, but she was afraid of more revelations—contagious diseases or feigned financial difficulties.

  “I’m Kato.”

  “Okay,” said Ali, thinking that she desperately needed other words beside this “okay.” She didn’t even know what exactly was okay.

  “I’m not a she.”

  “Aha.”

  “I’m a he.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you understand?”

  “Do you need money?”

  “What? Why would I need money?”

  Ali couldn’t work it out—had she forgotten her Russian, or was she still drunk, or had she just not understood? Kato got up, reached for the packet of cigarettes and left the room. Ali stayed sitting on the floor and looked out of the window. The lights of the city tugged at her eyelids. The windows of the gecekondular cut through the froth of colors, and a chain of lights around a rooftop parking lot drew a white line across a little piece of black in a sky that was otherwise made up of yellow, orange, red and violet oblongs, some of them flickering with synthetic television light. Above the nearest row of houses, three minarets, loamy gray by day, rose up, illuminated yellow, bristling with loudspeakers like
tiny thorns, too small for such thick stems.

  Kato came back with the glowing cigarette and sat down on the edge of the bed, planting his legs square on the floor.

  “Funny, the moon always lies on its back here. It never stands up like the crescent on their flag; it lies there like a segment of orange—look at it.”

  Kato didn’t look at the moon, but down at Ali who turned her head to him.

  “Do you want breakfast?”

  He stubbed out his cigarette on the window frame, pulled up his legs, crawled under the covers and mumbled through the sheet: “It’s nighttime. Let’s sleep.”

  The blood ticked in Ali’s throat. She looked up at where Kato’s body must be, though she couldn’t see it, and climbed onto the bed in search of him.

  * * *

  —

  She squeezed her eyes shut and waited until it was light enough to get up. Red curls and a tongue sticking out at a mirrored ceiling kept popping up on the back of her eyelids; she opened her mouth and snapped at them. A sudden taste of salt made her open her eyes. Kato’s lips had worked their way up from her neck and pressed themselves on hers. Ali started up, spun around and jumped out of bed. The linoleum was so cold it burned her feet. Kato turned onto his belly and said something into the pillow. Ali slid into her slippers and locked herself in the bathroom. The boiler gave off a whistling sound; lukewarm water trickled over her shivering limbs. She looked down at herself and examined the hairs on her arms; they were pale as pale, long and soft, almost invisible. Then she squatted to inspect her calves—furry white cat’s hind legs. Shampooing her head, she thought about what Kato had told her in the night—that she was a he. Kato was a he. Her scalp itched; she scratched her temple with the inside of her lower arm. Shampoo ran down her face and back, and she stuck out her tongue, opening her mouth wide, trying to flush the vodka out of her head. Just as the scent of the accordionist was rising to her nose again, the smell of freesia and bergamot, pineapple, oranges, cedarwood and vanilla, the boiler stopped whistling and the lights went out. The water promptly ran cold and all at once Ali was awake. She jumped out of the bath, wrapped a towel around her and staggered out into the arms of Kato who was standing in the hall looking about him in bemusement.

  “Power cut. Often happens when I have a shower.”

  With the towel tucked under her armpits, she went down to the cellar. On the stairs she met her next-door neighbor and said good morning, the shampoo still in her eyes, the blood throbbing at her temples. He avoided looking at her. She wasn’t sure if he’d heard them yesterday, but judging by his face he had, and now here she was, walking around the communal areas half naked. She flicked the flat black switch in the fuse box and ran back upstairs. Kato was standing in the kitchen, his shorn head illuminated by the light from the fridge.

  “I wanted to make breakfast, but there’s only a lump of old butter.”

  “And a bottle of tonic water.”

  “And a bottle of tonic water.”

  “Come on, let’s go out.”

  * * *

  —

  The streets were empty, as empty as in the summer, as empty as in the holiday season, when people fled the hot city—but it was November and the light wasn’t in sync with the clock or the muezzins. It was strangely still, the air tense. The crumbling facades looked like a frozen stage set; there were still chairs in the deserted bars on the ground floor; a lot of houses were in ruins, but not all. It was as if a wrecking ball had struck once and then moved on. Some flats were still lived in; the curtains were closed, but they couldn’t cover the gaping walls spewing cables. Two cats crawled out of a burned-out car, a single tangle of fur. At the greengrocer’s, balloons hung on a post next to boxes of brown bananas, and there was a flag bearing the symbol of the People’s Democratic Party: a tree, its trunk two purple hands, its green leaves interspersed with stars——Vote, Vote, Vote—the whole neighborhood was full of it.

  There was a smell of detergent and paint. When they turned off at the Armenian church, Ali stopped in front of old red graffiti of a woman with birds coming out of her head. She stepped closer to examine it, but Kato pulled her on. In the half dark, boys were kicking a leather ball against the church doors; it bounced off and Kato stopped it and kicked it back. The boys’ teasing voices echoed down the streets after them; Ali and Kato heard them all the way to the park, where they sat down on the damp grass.

  The fountains were dry, the motorway made a loop over their heads; that too was deserted. Ali stretched out on her back, her stomach rumbling. Kato talked and his voice sounded tinny, like the echoing voices of the boys.

  He told Ali about the hormones he was taking; soon he’d be covered in black hair. You couldn’t tell from his shorn head what color his hair was, and his arms and legs were still smooth—but his square eyebrows were drawn on with a black kohl pencil. Ali imagined the line of his eyebrows extending to his chin and tried to picture him with a beard, drawing a frame around his broad, open face. The face reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t think who.

  Kato said he’d soon lose his job—because of the beard, and because of the hairy legs—they didn’t look so good in gold hot pants, so someone else would have to wear them and he’d go back to Ukraine and show himself to his parents—his father in particular. Look, Dad, this is me now. He told her about his alcoholic father. Ali hardly listened; her mind wandered and she asked herself why all fathers had to be alcoholics—couldn’t they be chess players or compulsive yerba mate drinkers and, whatever else they did, couldn’t they keep quiet? Couldn’t they just keep quiet and never talk? Kato’s mother, it seemed, was a heroine—a heroine of labor, of the kind envisaged by Lenin—and there were two little brothers and sisters as well. He didn’t send them money; he never sent anyone anything, but he sometimes thought of them and wondered if they were thinking of him. Kato talked and talked, and the sky above their heads turned as white as dishwater.

  I’ve missed Russian, Ali thought. But missing wasn’t something you could think. She didn’t know exactly what she missed, and if she began to think about it she’d only make room for a sense of missing, so why bother? Her mother had once said something about thoughts being parasites, but she couldn’t remember the exact words.

  Kato had gone quiet and was looking at Ali. She realized he’d asked her something. He leaned over her and repeated the question.

  “A ty?”

  And you?

  There was no expectation in his face. He wasn’t going to kiss her; it was a serious question; he really wanted to know. And you? Ali looked past him and thought: Tarlabaşı is going to be pulled down. Everything’s going to be pulled down. I’ll never find Anton.

  A street vendor pushed his barrow past them, behind the glass a gleaming layer of greasy rice, big mother-of-pearl-colored chickpeas, then more rice and on top, a brown layer of boiled chicken.

  “Pilav! Tavuklu pilav!” he cried. “Want some, girls?”

  Kato looked away. Ali shook her head. She stared at the oily layer of chicken meat and tasted bile.

  “Fresh chicken. Pilaf is comfort food, sisters!” The vendor stood over them, fists on hips, little head nodding down to them on its thin neck.

  The chicken stared at them. Ali tried to withstand its gaze.

  THIRTY-SIX HOURS

  The pieces of meat slid down her throat like liquid. The dead bird lay naked and half demolished on the small table between them, in the fourth carriage of the Moscow–Berlin train. She and Anton had window seats. Their hands sticky with chicken fat and potatoes and tomatoes, they pushed each other and drew letters on the window-pane, while their parents swayed on twelve suitcases and even more boxes. Inside the boxes and cases were bedclothes and Adidas tracksuits in plastic wrappers, maybe to sell, you never knew—there were gold-plated watches too. But mainly there were bedclothes and socks and pants and books. “Why are you taking so many boo
ks with you?” their father’s father had asked, shaking his head. “Are you out of your minds? You can’t sell them over there.” Mother and Father sat in the carriage, their lips pressed together and their knees pressed together, watching the children gnawing their chicken drumsticks with big grins on their little faces. They hadn’t been told they were leaving for good, and all that stuff about children knowing everything without being told is a load of nonsense; all children know is how to play, so they played and horsed around and paid no attention to their parents who were shitting themselves. This made them scream at each other all the time—but so what, the children didn’t notice; their parents were always screaming at each other and the kids weren’t to know that if they were always screaming at each other it was because they were always shitting themselves. Mother’s father sat in the next compartment pretending not to hear and smoking out of the window; now and then he looked in on Valya and Kostya and Ali and Anton to ask if Valya had Analgin for him, and Valya dug around in her handbag for the foil packet that crackled and popped open, spitting rust-brown pellets onto the waiting hand which made the twins stare because it was so big and yellow with such dark blue lines. Valya pressed a plastic beaker of water into her father’s other hand and he disappeared again. The smell of nicotine lingered.

  His wife, Mother’s mother, hadn’t come with them; she had to wait a bit, had to sell the flat they’d never live in again, say goodbye to her friends, prepare her own parents’ move—because they were coming too, Mother’s mother’s mother and the father to match; everyone had to be packed up, no one left behind—you weren’t asked if you wanted to go. Ali and Anton hadn’t been asked, nor had their parents’ parents’ parents. Some were taken straight away and others had to be fetched later—that’s just the way it was. Mother’s mother would follow in the airplane with a suitcase full of money from the sale of the flat, and these five here were going on ahead with suitcases full of things you couldn’t sell over there.