The rocking of the train was comforting, deep breathing lulling them to sleep, and the hot tea that the guard brought them was comforting too: “Here you are, my darlings,” she said. “Nice hot tea with lemon and sugar. Wouldn’t want you feeling cold.” Mother stuck a hand in her bra and pulled out a note. “Thank you, thank you, my sweethearts”—and the guard vanished again. Ali peered after her and just glimpsed a man in a white undershirt, his hips as broad as the corridor, trot along behind and disappear into a compartment with her.
If it hadn’t been for customs, the journey would only have taken thirty-six hours. Customs was when the train shuddered in the night and the bed frames were bashed so hard that the thick chains fixing them to the walls rattled like bars being shaken. You had to get up and pretend you’d been asleep. You had to put your hand to your heart, into your bra where the two hundred dollars were waiting for the customs officer, an unshaven man with bloodshot eyes who stared so hard at Valya that she was glad to have her husband in the compartment with her, even if he was cowering nervously in the corner. She knew what would have happened if he hadn’t been there. And she knew what would have happened if she hadn’t had those two hundred dollars next to her skin for just this situation: they’d have been turfed out onto the platform in the freezing cold, along with all the others, the have-nots or the know-nots—it was all the same in subzero temperatures. She looked out at them through the steamed-up glass, then at old Bloodshot in front of her, then at her children, two pairs of eyes peeping out from under a blanket on the bed above the window. Bloodshot spat something through his teeth, but she wasn’t listening; she knew her papers were in order. She stared out at the platform again, counting the people gathered there: three, four, five, seven…more and more of them, families with children and even babies, young men, a lone woman—and as if a conductor had raised his baton, they all made the same gesture at the same time: they all reached into their jacket pockets and pulled out cigarettes, and watery smoke rose above their heads. Then the compartment door fell shut, the grown-ups fell back into their beds and the twins clawed each other’s shoulder blades and held each other tight to make sure they didn’t fall off the bunk with all the rocking—or that if they did, they’d fall together.
* * *
—
When the Chepanov family got off the train the next morning, the world pretended to stay still, but beneath Ali’s little body the rocking continued. The chicken fat trembled in her throat, climbed back out of her stomach and into her mouth. Maybe the food had gone off in the warm carriage—Anton grinned, right as rain, but the chicken was determined to get out of Ali and onto the shoes of the man helping Father with the suitcases. Uncle Leonid, who’d come to collect the emigrants (or immigrants, depending how you looked at things) and take them home to his place and then on to the authorities—the wonderful Uncle Leonid stood before them and spread out his arms, and Ali puked all over his shoes, puked up the whole half chicken she’d eaten, and then fell over.
“Alissa? What’s the matter? Alissa!”
Alissa lay in the vomit next to Uncle Leonid’s black sneakers and saw his shoelaces crawling toward her. Outside her head, time passed more quickly; things moved at lightning speed—shoes snapping about them like snakes; otters and giant insects pouncing at her. She gave a scream and felt as if she’d shrunk and been put in a picture she’d once seen on the wall at McDonald’s—all jungle and bright colors and scary; she didn’t know if she was lying on the ground or had fallen down a hole.
“Say sorry,” she heard, the words echoing down from the sky.
Her father picked her up from the ground, held her in front of Uncle Leonid’s face and said: “Say sorry.”
“You don’t know where to put your feet, do you?” Mother asked, dabbing at Alissa’s puke-soaked little T-shirt. “Do you know, Leo, we were thirty-six hours on the train—”
“Longer!” Father interrupted.
“Longer. And the ground still feels wobbly. My knees are shaking too. Are yours?”
“Mine? No.”
“Nor are mine,” said Anton. Ali shot a glance at him, but he dodged it. Father jiggled Ali from side to side in front of Leonid and told her again to say sorry.
“Come on. What are you waiting for?”
“Izvinite.” Ali burst into tears.
“No, say it properly.” Father gave her a shake. Mother said: “Leave her.”
“Izvinite,” Ali squeaked through her tears.
Uncle Leonid wiped the bile off his sneakers with a handkerchief, a paper handkerchief from a plastic packet—Ali had never seen such a thing before; she only knew cloth hankies in trouser pockets with snot on the corners. Leonid mumbled something like: “Not to worry,” and looking into Ali’s teary face, he gave a laugh and said: “Do you know how to say sorry in German?”
Ali shook her head, everyone shook their heads, the whole family shook one big head; none of them knew any German except for Mother’s father, who’d gone for a smoke—Valya and Kostya’s language lessons were yet to come. They might, at a pinch, have managed eins, zwei, drei and maybe Hände hoch, but you couldn’t go around saying that; it was nothing to joke about.
“Entschuldigung,” said Uncle Leonid, saying the German word slowly and clearly. “Izvinite in German is Entschuldigung.”
“Aha.”
“That’s the word. You say it. Say it in German. Izvinite in German.”
Ali stared. Everyone stared.
“Say it. Say it in German. Entschuldigung. Izvinite in German. Go on.”
Ali smelled vomit and wrinkled her nose.
Mother helped, shaping the word E-ntschu-ldi-gung with her lips: “Go on, my little one, say it. E—”
Father rocked Ali gently to and fro, whispering the word into her curls, her first German word. “Come on, say it, don’t be awkward, what’s the matter with you? Just say the word—E-ntschu-ldi-gung. Izvinite in German.”
Ali felt like crying again, but instead she looked from Mother to Anton to the uncle with the paper hankies, said: “Izvinite in German,” and buried her face in Father’s neck.
There was a pause, glances were exchanged, everyone was so relieved to have arrived, one way or another, all the suitcases intact, the bags too, and the children—ach, what was a little bit of sick? We’re here!—and the grown-ups burst out laughing, laughed till their throats were sore—Izvinite in German!—and the child’s face red and confused. They laughed and laughed, and Ali looked at Anton running to and fro between the grown-ups and tugging at their clothes, as clueless as she was, but aware that something seemed to need laughing at. So he laughed. And Ali threw up again.
And the grown-ups laughed on and on without stopping—laughed at the shy gurgle from their child’s throat that sounded almost like a hiccup, like a sigh.
* * *
—
Valentina and Konstantin—what names! Why would you give someone a name like that, unless you were trying to hide the fact that they were Jewish and ought really to be called Esther and Shmuel or something? Certainly in the Soviet Union in the sixties you didn’t give your children names like that unless you hated them—or hated yourself.
In the case of Valentina, known as Valya, there was at least some reason to give the girl an ugly, honest-to-God socialist name, because the day on which her mother catapulted her into the world, almost losing her life, was also the day on which the first woman in the world was launched into space. Valentina Tereshkova broke through the Earth’s atmosphere at five miles a second and flew to the stars—and Valentina Pinkenzon tore through the tissue between her mother’s vulva and anus, and landed in the hands of a thoroughly masked doctor who gave orders through the green paper over his mouth that her mother undergo immediate surgery.
Konstantin’s parents had no such excuse. Konstantin was called Konstantin, Kostya for short, Kissa affectionately, end of discussion. Bu
t excuse or no, these two Russified people were brought together, as if love were something you could order—and, indeed, something that was best ordered, if you didn’t want to be beaten black and blue, like Valya in her first marriage.
Valya had made her first mistake when she was young—too young to think, though not too young to marry. Where, you might ask, were her parents, when their daughter decided to marry a goy, their black-haired daughter, so much more beautiful than the astronaut Valentina Tereshkova—and with Pinkenzon as a surname, she might just as well have been called Esther Rahel to begin with (what use was “Valentina” with a surname like that?), but her parents hadn’t been very careful, not when it came to naming her and not when it came to the bridegroom either. They were staring at the mountains of Kislovodsk, where they’d gone for a rest cure, when little Valya decided that a school-leaving certificate wasn’t complete without a husband. It wasn’t the boy’s big mustache that appealed to her (she didn’t like mustaches) or his persuasive skills as a trumpeter, though that made him such a favorite with the others—a favorite of the girls at any rate, and the envy of the boys: “What’s he showing off for like that? Does he think he’s Armstrong or something?” No, jazz wasn’t Valya’s thing at all; it got on her nerves. What appealed to Valya was the prospect of finally being able to leave home, and in that respect she resembled many girls—or even all.
So she watched a few Soviet films about love, to find out how it went—what kind of looks you had to give, maybe even how you kissed, though there wasn’t a lot of that in the films—usually not until the end, when the couple pressed their lips together, the man gripping the woman’s shoulders and crushing her to his face while the woman looked surprised and desperate. It bore little resemblance to what really happened when you kissed, or to all that followed. It was only later that Valya realized the significance of that fat tongue in her mouth.
When her parents were out, she rehearsed looks and gestures. Good pupil that she was, she would sit cross-legged on the floral carpet and take notes, inches from the television. She liked school and loved reading; Tolstoy and Akhmatova were carefully hidden between her exercise books. But she found nothing in her reading telling her what to do when a man gripped your shoulders—not, at least, in the books on the Pinkenzons’ shelves.
It helped that Valya was unusual looking—you could say unusually pretty, but more important, she looked different from the other girls, with their long straight hair. Her hair was thick and curly and cropped short; ever since she was little, her mother had made sure that her daughter had a proper socialist haircut, more or less the same as the boys. Then there was her straight nose and her firm mouth, and some would say that her hips, too, deserve a mention—at any rate, the mustachioed trumpeter thought it worth his while to watch Valya’s black curls crawl across the white sheet and out of bed every morning.
Neither of them asked their parents; ignoring all words of wisdom they shut themselves in the bedroom and soon it was clear that the maid was a maid no longer and must get married. The wedding dress was made by the groom’s mother out of a tulip-patterned tulle she’d bought too much of for the living-room curtains. The headdress was made by the bride herself out of papier-mâché; she fashioned a kind of pudding basin and covered it in white silk, and though the white of this wedding bonnet didn’t quite match the white of her dress, Valya looked as stunning as a photo model and crackled like a pavlova at every step.
The marriage lasted nearly a year. After seven months and a few days, the nineteen-year-old Valya had bruises on her face when she got in her grandmother’s car to drive with her to the family dacha. Etina, known to those who loved her as Etinka, grabbed her granddaughter by the chin; the girl looked neither distressed nor sad—nor even surprised and desperate. Far from it; she smiled because she was pleased to see her darling grandmother whom she missed more than all her other relations. Valya beamed at Etinka, almost forgetting that her grandmother’s very dark worried eyes could read a bit more in her face than her delight at the prospect of the days on the Volga and the homemade jam. She’d tried to conceal the bruises with makeup, but she was surrounded by doctors; everyone in the family would know exactly what was shimmering under her pale skin—there was no point trying to hide it. Etinka’s eyes grew darker still and she ran her rough fingertips over the blue marks on Valya’s face.
“You’re getting a divorce,” was all she said before starting the engine.
Valya caught her breath. Perhaps it was shock at the sudden roar as the car revved up, its tires spinning—an old Lada, what could you expect? Or perhaps it was because Etinka had sounded so firm—but then everything that came from Etinka’s mouth sounded firm; she hated unnecessary words (above all, she hated garrulous males). Etinka firmly believed that the less you said, the cleverer it made you look, and so when she did say something, it almost always turned out to be right—in this case, that Valya would get a divorce. Valya found the whole thing embarrassing more than anything. She didn’t want her family to see her covered in bruises—but what she really didn’t want was to have to move back in with them. Still holding her breath, she realized that Etinka wasn’t going to probe.
She’d have liked to talk, to tell her grandmother that the trumpeter with the ridiculous name—and only now did she realize quite how ridiculous it was, so much so that she didn’t ever want to have to say it again: Ivan, that was his name, like the Russian fairy-tale hero, the folk hero, the idiot—she’d have liked to tell her grandmother that Ivan had watched films too, to find out how to be a man. The kind of man he wanted to be. Then he’d learned a bit more from watching and listening to his father and uncles, and two things had become clear to this very young man—he was twenty at the time. First of all, a man drinks. A man drinks before he speaks and after he’s spoken. In between, he might shed a tear or two—but only if he’s drinking. If he cries without drinking, he’s either a fag or a Yid—and that brought Ivan to point number two. Because, you see, it hadn’t escaped his attention that the black curls that Valya tossed over her white sheets, and the surname that she’d kept rather than take his, were possibly the reason she was to blame for everything that had ever happened to him. In his vodka-drenched brain, this insight led him to such well thought-through conclusions as: “You Jewish bitch, go and rot in that Israel of yours; you won’t destroy me—”
But yelling such gems of wisdoms was soon not enough to satisfy Ivan or make up for all that he’d been through, and the terrified Valya had never heard such things as now left his mouth—well, she had; she’d grown up with all kinds of playground rhymes about Yids—but not like this, not so close, the breath hot on her cheek.
Dva evreya tretii zhid po verevochke bezhit. Verevochka lopnet i zhida prikhlopnet. There’d been plenty of that kind of thing, but the vehemence with which Ivan the Trumpeter shouted down Valya’s neck as she pored over the History of Medicine left her speechless. She was studying to be a medic; Akhmatova would just have to wait. She’d been wrong on several counts anyway, Valya now decided—either Valya had missed something, or else Akhmatova had lied.
Valya had missed something.
There was no shouting in Valya’s family. That was unusual for families, but Valya couldn’t know that. Her parents loved one another; if her father made her mother breakfast, it was because he wanted to, not because he had to. Valya’s father had changed her diapers when she was a baby and taken her to school when she was a little girl; her mother had gone for massages while he coached Valya for university, and no harsh words were spoken—or not that Valya could remember. She didn’t know that people hit each other. She knew that wars were waged and that the woman next door often screamed after midnight, but all that seemed a long way away to young Valya and nothing to do with her own life—until, that is, Ivan started to behave like a real Russian.
Esli b’et—znachit lyubit: an old Russian proverb. If he hits you, he loves you. Valya would remember the adage when s
he saw her husband staggering toward her; she sometimes muttered the words to herself.
Neither in the films she’d watched nor in the books she read was there anything telling you what to do if you were beaten, other than put up with it. Another Russian proverb that sometimes came to Valya was: If you can’t stop the rape, relax and try to enjoy it. Plenty of women were, apparently, in the same boat; it was normal and Valya was part of the club, one of the loved ones. Maybe she really did mean so much to Ivan that he had to shout in despair; maybe he really was trying to make sense of the world. Valya, at any rate, tried to relax; she didn’t think of the future, didn’t ask herself if the rest of her life was going to be like this. She was too young for that; she couldn’t even begin to think about things like the rest of her life. She didn’t think at all; she crammed for her medical studies, feeling grown-up and important because she had a secret, and a weight settled on her face—the weight of adulthood, she told herself, and it was true; adulthood had lodged itself in the skin under Valya’s eyes. But before it could gnaw and distort Valya’s face like that of her namesake Tereshkova, Etinka had ordered her to leave that pig of a man—and if he dared lay hands on Valya again, she’d call in a butcher to settle the matter. All that and more Etinka would say later, outside the court building, where the couple had a hearing, but now, in the car with the spinning tires, she said nothing, and her firmness filled the small blue Lada, leaving no room for contradiction. Valya thought Etinka didn’t probe because she was afraid her granddaughter would start to cry and say things like: “but I do love him” or: “he’s not really like that,” but Etinka had images of her own to distract her. She felt a sudden pain in her jaw and in her right cheekbone, and forced as much air into her gullet as the stuffy Lada would yield. She mustn’t say anything now, mustn’t ask Valya any questions.
Beside Myself Page 5
