Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  Etinka felt tears in her eyes. Even she hadn’t expected that.

  * * *

  —

  With Etinka’s help—Valya’s parents had gone somewhere for another rest cure—the girl was swiftly divorced. It wasn’t to be, was it? Some called it fate, and the kid with the even shorter hair that she now cut herself, the flared jeans, roll-neck sweater and a suitcase so small you’d think there was nothing in it but a gramophone, moved back into the walk-through room at her parents’ where her father had his study. Her parents didn’t say a lot; they asked how she was getting along at university, praised her good grades and told her she could do even better, and Valya lay down on the spring mattress that made her feel fifteen again, put a book over her face—The Woes of Wit by Griboyedov, who had died a far too early, far too stupid death in Tehran (“Just think how much more he could have written,” Etinka would say)—and didn’t stir until her parents left their plotting at the kitchen table to come and tell her that in Moscow! Moscow! Moscow! dream city of all the Soviet Republic—no, what were they saying, of all the world—in Moscow, there was a distant cousin who wasn’t yet spoken for and, more important, he was Jewish. He’d never hit her or call her a Jewish bitch.

  That’s what they thought. They were wrong.

  What Valya’s parents didn’t seem to realize was that despite the distant kinship between the families (Konstantin’s father’s cousin’s brother was the cousin of a brother, et cetera, et cetera), Kostya came from a very different background from his future wife, the future mother of his children, the woman with whom he would one day decide to leave the country when tanks rolled through Red Square in the early nineties. (The name of the square has nothing to do with the color of blood, but came about because “red” and “beautiful” are one and the same word in Russian.) Valya’s parents gave little thought to such matters; they wanted to see their daughter provided for, and who could have guessed that the day would come when tanks would roll through Beautiful Square and the family would apply for American visas and end up in Germany, with Uncle Leonid and his puke-covered shoes.

  * * *

  —

  Kostya’s parents came from a village—not a shtetl, there was no such thing so near to Moscow, but a good Soviet village, where men had beards down to their waists, and women wore floral head scarves and floral housecoats; where you tossed a vodka down your throat every morning before setting off for work, and where all work was manual work and all hands were strong, men and women’s alike. Only Kostya’s father’s hands weren’t strong, though there was no skimping on butter in the porridge in his family. They didn’t grow strong either, not like Kostya’s mother’s hands, which could do the work of two, and no bad thing because it’s what they’d end up doing. Both his parents had the kind of surname that got you beaten up in a good Soviet village—at any rate, they both had to do a fair amount of running, and it brought them together, all that running did, not that Kostya’s father was ever much good at that either.

  “Look at the dirty Jew! Runs like a fag!”

  Kostya’s father was short and gangly and ran as if he had stones in his shoes, his toes turned in, like a small limping animal about to stumble and fall. Neither the butter in his porridge nor the fat in his soup could make a difference to the way he ran, and he sure as hell couldn’t put up a fight, so before long he was the butt of the whole village—especially the boys, when they were done poking out cats’ eyes. That changed when Kostya’s father did a stint in the military; he learned a few tricks there and was soon defending himself by pouring canfuls of hot oil in the others’ faces.

  Kostya’s mother was a sturdy young woman who’d never really been a child. She was only six when she began to take care of her drink-ravaged mother and her five brothers and sisters, and ever since she could stand, she’d known how to bathe babies, make soup, extract splinters and bury relatives. It was a mystery why she agreed to marry Kostya’s father; she’d always been keen on the idea of security so you’d have thought she’d have chosen a proper Russian peasant, taken a proper Russian surname and forgotten all about the Torah in the cupboard—that way her children, at least, would have had a chance of a decent life. But she decided differently—or perhaps she had no choice; after all, the only dowry she had to offer was that Torah in the cupboard and a large family full of diabetes and dementia. There was never any butter in their porridge—nor, indeed, was there always porridge; Kostya’s mother made up her mind all by herself to grow strong in spite of everything and get away fast—away from her family, away from the quietly crumbling house, away to Moscow, where she knew no one and would never again have to wipe the asses of semi-putrefied corpses. Realizing that she wouldn’t manage alone, or with a Russian peasant who had no reason to leave his birthplace, she married the only other Yid in the village.

  Kostya’s parents decided to move to Moscow even before the wedding. The city was only thirty miles away—more or less on the doorstep by Russian standards. Later, Kostya would ask them about the village where they’d grown up—couldn’t they go and have a look at it together; it was so close. But they always said no and Kostya didn’t persist; he realized that the subject pained his parents, and he loved them.

  His father became a tailor. Shaky and clumsy though the rest of his body was, he was deft and precise with his hands, and had soon worked his way up—maybe the business instinct he had developed as a survival strategy in the military also played a part—and before long he was sewing suits for important men, as he liked to stress, maybe even men in the Kremlin. Although he never learned to read or write, he made it to department manager and would walk up and down the corridors, rattling his abacus like a tambourine and sending the wooden beads clacking as he calculated his employees’ deficits out loud to them. Kostya’s mother stayed at home after the boy’s birth, making him soup with butter and spooning up a fair amount of it herself. Kostya was a thin baby, as thin as his father, which wouldn’t do at all; you couldn’t go bringing invalids into the world. I can see your ribs, it’s a disgrace. Are you trying to tell me I’m a bad cook? Kostya’s mother was a very purposeful woman and made sure that her son put on fat from an early age.

  Kostya loved his food and he loved toy guns. He also loved music. When Uncle Vasya dropped in on the young family in their tiny cardboard-walled flat on the fourth floor of a thirteen-story block on the edge of the woods, he would heave his accordion onto his shoulders, and Kostya’s ears would waggle, his mouth would water. There, in the district of Chertanovo, on the outskirts of Moscow, Uncle Vasya sang as if they were still in the country, out in those wide open spaces where songs are belted across the fields and come echoing back like a breath of wind—he sang as if nobody cared about the noise, as if there were no one downstairs to bang on the ceiling with a broom handle and shout: “You fucking your mothers up there or something?”

  And afterward, when Uncle Vasya set down his accordion to drink and eat and discuss things with Kostya’s father—the sorry state of the world, mainly, and wages that weren’t even enough for tobacco and decent booze—you can go blind drinking the rotgut here—and the thighs of the cashier in the shop across the road, and the awful, overpowering, bittersweet stench of the dump behind the flats—stinks all the way up to the fourth floor—don’t open the window; you’re better rotting in your own filth—when, that is, the men were being men and no one was looking, Kostya would crawl behind Uncle Vasya’s accordion, stick his skinny arms through the broad leather straps, and press his little potbelly against the instrument. He couldn’t lift it, so he lay behind it, hidden from view, running his fingers over the shiny black buttons that felt like marbles. After a while, the family noticed that the boy was always nestling up to the accordion, so Uncle Vasya took him on his lap, heaved up the monster of an instrument, placed his fleshy fingers on Kostya’s little ones and pressed his nephew’s fingers down on the keys.

  What Kostya’s parents didn’t know
was that two things were going on when this happened, things they couldn’t know about because they didn’t exist in their world. The first was that Kostya began to feel the stirrings of a passion for music. Another eight years, and the sixteen-year-old Kostya would declare his intention to become a musician—a pianist and accordionist: “Mum and Dad, this is what I want to be. I’ll go to the military and I’ll learn a trade, but I’m going to be a musician and perform all over the country.” His mother’s laughter was so loud that it echoed in Kostya’s ears until his premature end.

  The second thing was that something else stirred when Uncle Vasya took Kostya on his lap; the man was not entirely selfless. Nor was he ashamed to do what he did in front of the child’s parents; they couldn’t know what Kostya felt moving under his tailbone; such a thought would never have occurred to them. As Uncle Vasya pushed the weight of the accordion down on Kostya’s lap, he made gentle circling movements with his hips and rubbed his trousers against the boy’s bony little bum. Squeezing both accordion and Kostya tight, he breathed heavily, his mouth open, and the acrid smell confused Kostya because he knew it wasn’t alcohol, a smell he knew well; it was sour and eggy. Still, he continued to climb onto Uncle Vasya’s lap to push down the keys and feel the puff of cold air on his cheeks when the heavy accordion was pressed shut. Neither the acrid smell nor his uncle’s soft groans could stop Kostya’s resolve to spend his life with the instrument. But Kostya was now familiar with a feeling he’d never shake, a sulphurous-smelling feeling that would often return. It tasted sour on his tongue and he blamed everyone and everything for it—socialism, politicians, the state, his parents, his wife, and all those other bastards-may-they-rot-in-hell. The feeling of abuse.

  * * *

  —

  Kostya and Valya were brought together, as people said then—and still say today, although these days matchmaking is made to sound more like wedding planning than arranged marriage. Back then in the real-life socialism of the eighties—not bad years, Valya’s parents would say, in retrospect—back then, it was no big deal, a simple matter of survival, perhaps, coupled with the feeling that it was a good idea to cover up the disgrace of a daughter who was getting a divorce though she wasn’t yet twenty—and who knows if she’ll ever find anyone now, with her looks. Not that she was ugly, but she was quite—you know, what was the word—unusual.

  Kostya’s parents didn’t care who he married, just as long as he stopped whoring around with the goy next door—waiting for him to knock her up, she is. You could bet the girl had her eye on the gold watches and growing pile of Adidas tracksuits in the cupboard; it was even possible she knew about the jewelry that had been bought under the counter—but never worn, of course. Wear it? What? Strut around in the yard in it, in front of all the other grannies? One thing was clear, though: that blond nympho wanted to get her claws into their only son, and as if that wasn’t bad enough, he’d set his mind on becoming a musician; swift action was called for. Just as Kostya’s parents had no idea what was going on in Uncle Vasya’s crotch under their son’s tailbone, they had no idea about many other things that had no place in their world, such as the notion that making music was different from eating onions and getting drunk and holding tearful conversations about your sorrows until you fell into each other’s arms in a brotherly (and not remotely gay) embrace—or that there was such a thing as love, and that Kostya and the supposedly dowry-mad goy might actually be in love with each other. That, Kostya realized, was something else he wasn’t going to get into their heads. Ever since his mother had fallen off her chair laughing at him when he’d mentioned his plans of a career in music, he’d known he was better off keeping his mouth shut. It didn’t stop him from being in love.

  The girl was called Oksana and had hair down to where her wings would have sprouted, if she’d had any. Kostya once tried to tell her this, as a compliment, but she didn’t understand until he was brave enough to put his hand on her wing stubs. Feel that? That’s where they’d grow. It was a wonder to him that Oksana deigned to look at him. He had red hair; his face, neck and shoulders were strewn with freckles, and although he’d inherited his dad’s gangly build, he was already getting a belly—so determined had his mother been to stamp out his father’s legacy. He had a slight stutter, though less and less; it was only when he looked into Oksana’s face that he had to stop talking for a moment and wait for the consonants to sort themselves out. But there was one thing he wasn’t, and that was shy.

  He walked straight up to her in the rhombus-shaped yard between the tower blocks where she was sitting with a few girlfriends, drawing in the dirt with her finger.

  “Privet,” he said. “Kak dela?”

  Hi, how are you? And they all stared—Oksana least of all, but that was before Western television, let alone the Internet, had taught young people how to approach and reject one another, how to take the piss and then show an interest—the whole gamut of tricks for making a good impression and not selling yourself short. Long before any of that, Kostya walked up to Oksana and said: “Hi, how are you?” and when eventually she looked at him, she knew that even the flicker of attention he gave her in that moment was precious and not to be scorned. So she smiled and from then on they were a couple—to the outrage of Kostya’s parents, who saw those Adidas tracksuits disappearing before their very eyes, sold at Chertanovskaya metro station for a ticket to Leningrad at a fraction of their value.

  But it wasn’t only Kostya’s parents; Oksana’s parents, too, considered the relationship a total mistake, an absolute disaster. That Yid must not be allowed to have their girl, most beautiful and best of daughters, the jewel here on this pile of shit, here on this edge-of-town estate—I mean, just look how stunning she is, skin like on TV. With that skin and hair of hers, she could work her way to the center of town. With her perfect profile, she had chances of a good match. She might end up in a city-center apartment; she might marry a man who’d take her on business trips with him—but she didn’t want to get involved with a redheaded village Yid and his meshchanin parents (a good Russian word that translates as something like “filthy petty bourgeois with bad breath”). In short, both sets of parents were against the match, and since the children were still living at home—that was free human life under socialism; it was not uncommon to live at home until well into your thirties—since they were still at home, it was their parents who got to decide what constituted free. If Oksana were to get pregnant, she’d just have to have an abortion—that tried and tested contraceptive. But before it could come to that, Kostya’s parents called the relatives in Volgograd—or perhaps the relatives called them—either way, providence intervened: here were two families—distantly related, Jewish, as they put it, through and through, and desperate to see their children out of harm’s way. So it was that Valya came to Moscow.

  * * *

  —

  When Kostya met Valya, he knew he’d end up proposing. In spite of his expectations—or hopes—of never managing to like the girl from the distant town on the Volga, as long as he had this warm Oksanary feeling in his belly, he did notice that she was extraordinarily pretty in a way quite unlike Oksana, and, what’s more, that she looked familiar, she looked like someone he’d seen before. It was this sense of familiarity that gripped him, more even than her big earth-colored eyes, as round as her curls. Does such a sense of familiarity strike out of the blue, or is it something you feel because your parents spent the first twenty years of your life telling you you’re best sticking to your own kind if you want to be let alone—been through quite enough as it is; time we were left in peace. Who knows. The fact is that something about Valya made her look like someone in Kostya’s family. Not his mother or father, and not Uncle Vasya either, who wasn’t actually related—it’s even possible that the person this frizzy-haired girl resembled was known to Kostya only from photographs. But what can you do about feelings? If they’re there, they’re there. Kostya and Valya started going out and
on the fourth night they slept together.

  Jumping into bed with someone was nothing unusual. Despite the lack of rooms for performing the act, there were frequent opportunities: a friend would be flat-sitting for people who were barbecuing at their dacha, or one or other set of parents would be away—and for the truly tough (which excluded Valya and Kostya) there were always park benches at night. The first time Valya and Kostya slept together was at Misha’s place. Misha was Kostya’s cousin, had a beard like Trotsky even back then, and spent every spare moment drawing caricatures because he wanted to become a famous Russian cartoonist—an ambition he would eventually fulfill, with broadcasts on state television and seven children by enthusiastic female fans who all came and demanded alimony. He would, despite his considerable success, eventually have to abandon his dream in order to provide for his numerous progeny by taking a sensible job like all sensible people—but that wasn’t until later; at this point he was still in the process of becoming a cartoonist, and lent Kostya and Valya his flat so that they could conceive twins.

  The second wedding was less spectacular than Valya’s first, but the preparations were more exciting, for the simple reason that there were preparations. Kostya’s parents took Valya to Beriozka, the department store, to let her choose a dress—a risky undertaking, because everyone knew that you couldn’t simply buy things in the Univermag Beriozka; you had to pay in vouchers that stood for money that didn’t exist in the Soviet Union. Being caught with green banknotes in Russia meant jail, but Valya’s in-laws didn’t have actual dollars; they had little slips of paper to represent them.

  Kostya’s mother dragged Valya behind her, up and down the rows of gorgeous dresses, Valya’s heart beating so loud, she hardly heard Kostya’s father comment on the cloth and guess the prices as they passed. She was bundled into a changing room where she stripped to her underwear and looked in the mirror. She’d put on weight around the hips, and her thighs seemed to be growing softer. Her waist was still flat and high, but the twins were pressing themselves out of her flat belly, her breasts swelled upward and she already had backache. Her hair curled from the roots and the curls bobbed up and down like a doll’s hair when she raised or lowered her head. She looked at her swollen feet; thick veins were bulging out of her reddened skin. She’d have to wear flat shoes.