Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  She started when her mother-in-law burst into the changing room as if they were in a great rush, and began to pull a dress on over Valya’s head, two more hanging ready on her arm. She didn’t wait for Valya’s opinion, but pulled off and put on, tugged at fastenings, popped snaps, held up hems, grabbed Valya’s bum, turned her neck this way and that, examined her breasts, apparently never satisfied. Valya was too nervous to hear what she was muttering—and would, in any case, have been happy to accept anything. So Kostya’s mother decided on a dress, while Valya stood there with her arms sticking out, a smile fixed on her face from the adrenaline coursing through her body. When she peeped out of the changing room and saw her father-in-law putting vouchers on the counter with a meaningful look at the cashier—and when she saw the cashier nod slowly in response and pile the white mountain of cloth into a big bag, rather than call the militiamen, Valya had to bite her lower lip to stop herself from screaming.

  This shopping trip remained one of the most exciting moments of Valya’s life, certainly more exciting than the wedding itself, where she couldn’t drink and was, in spite of her flat shoes, afraid to dance with that life—those two lives—in her belly. Before the wedding she’d had to spend a couple of months in the hospital because her body had threatened to reject the babies—two long months munching sweets from the girl in the next bed, another medicine student, only this one was brought daily supplies by her parents. Valya’s parents were in Volgograd and had a lot of work to do—that’s what they told her over the phone. Etinka dropped in twice; she brought flowers and sat on the edge of the bed and told Valya about the dead children in the tuberculosis clinic that she ran. For the first time, Valya noticed how old her grandmother was.

  When she was let out of the hospital, she was warned not to move too much or overexert herself; there was still a risk of premature birth. And so Valya spent her wedding sitting quietly at table, watching her husband kick his legs out in front of him, the sleeves of his blue shirt rolled up to his elbows, the sweat pouring off him.

  And as he hadn’t spoken to her since saying yes in the registry office, and no one else was paying her any attention either, because they were all too busy partying, she spoke to herself, recalling all the nice things Kostya had repeated to her:

  “You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’ll lip-read your every desire.”

  “When I close my eyes, I see you lying in a big bathtub surrounded by precious stones and silk and gold watches, and I’m going to get you everything, absolutely everything you want.”

  * * *

  —

  So Valya moved into Kostya’s khrushchevka, one of those masterpieces of Soviet architecture, those tower blocks named after Nikita Sergeyevich Khruschchev, the man who’d taken off his black leather shoe in the crammed United Nations General Assembly Hall and whacked the rubber sole against the mahogany table top, crying: “My vam pokazhem kuz’kinu mat’!”

  The UN interpreters had no idea what the man was on about and translated the words literally: Nikita Sergeyevich was going to show them Kuzkin’s mother. It doesn’t bear thinking about what would have happened back then in 1960, if the translators had relayed the true message of the Soviet leader to the United Nations over their microphones: “We’re going to clobber the lot of you!” It was the speaker of these great words who’d given his name to the block where Kostya had grown up, the block his children would be born into. Their flat had two rooms: Kostya’s parents had kept the living room; the newlyweds were given the bedroom. Kostya’s mother inspected Valya and decided she had promising hips. She thought it all right that her daughter-in-law was studying medicine. Doctors didn’t earn anything, of course, but it was good to have one in the house—though that didn’t mean she should think herself better than the rest of them, or leave her books all over the kitchen table.

  Books were about all that Valya had brought to Moscow. Kostya’s family had harbored vague hopes that, coming from an educated family, all of them doctors, she’d arrive laden with fine and serviceable things: good cloth, perhaps, a gold watch, family jewelry—and that at the very least she’d wear something more sensible than all this hippie stuff. But the bride turned up in flared jeans and a leather jacket, bringing almost nothing but books. This was highly suspicious, so while Valya was out at university, Kostya’s mother went through those books, shaking them to see if she hadn’t hidden any claret-colored banknotes—or any other color of banknotes—between the pages or in the dust covers. She found nothing, but Valya remained suspicious to her in-laws.

  “Where have you been?”

  “At university.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “We had a chemistry study group.”

  “Don’t treat me like an idiot.”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “You’ve been to the theater, I can smell it.”

  “You can’t smell the theater.”

  “Ah, so you have!”

  * * *

  —

  Valya’s body swelled, demanding double quantities of everything: buckwheat, butter, white bread with sugar, chocolate—lots of chocolate and cookies, and luckily her mother-in-law didn’t scrimp on the cream in her gâteaux. But there was no fruit in the market and Valya’s parents didn’t think it healthy for her to eat nothing but wheat and yeast products.

  “Then send me something. Father-in-law refuses to shop on the black market. He says the fruit there comes straight from the morgue—that they store it alongside the corpses.”

  Her parents promised to send her something, but when Valya asked when they’d come and see her, they were hazy. Soon—they couldn’t say exactly.

  A week later, Valya went to Paveletsky Station and waited on the platform for the blue train from Volgograd to arrive. It had been traveling across the steppe for days and Valya envied it. She watched the clouds of smoke rise to the top of the high station dome and felt a sudden yearning to read Conan Doyle and the other books of her childhood. It all seemed so far away now and she had nothing with her but a newspaper, and couldn’t read that because she needed it to sit on and stop her bum from freezing on the cold bench. She stared into the big eyes of the engine, then at the legs leaping out of the carriages—everything blue and beige. No one stopped for a second; everyone was running somewhere. Elena Vladimirovna, the guard on the Volgograd–Moscow line and an old and valued family acquaintance, got out and came toward Valya, pulling a familiar-looking cardboard box behind her on a length of sturdy red tape.

  “Your parents are crazy. I think there are watermelons in here.”

  “Thank you. How are your children?”

  “Ach, they’d like to see me in my grave.” Elena Vladimirovna lit a cigarette, offering one to Valya, who shook her head.

  “How many months pregnant are you?”

  “Seven.”

  “And how were you thinking of schlepping the watermelons home?”

  “I’ll ask someone.”

  “Daughter, daughter, take care of yourself.”

  Valya took hold of the red tape and pulled the parcel along behind her like a dead dog. When she reached the metro station, she rang Kostya and asked him to come and pick her up. Kostya’s speech was slurred, but he came.

  * * *

  —

  It was months before Valya found out that Kostya drank. He didn’t drink like a Russian Orthodox, nor did he drink like a Yid; he was more like a little boy who’s been told he can’t join in a game until he’s licked every last drop of mucky water out of a puddle. He hated it and couldn’t stand the taste, but he knew he had no choice, so he drank clumsily and nervously, his puny body struggling to cope with the alcohol in his veins, always staggering between two extremes: sleep and rage.

  At first he directed all his rage at his father. He had ample reason; it was already quite enough that
he lived under the same roof as this man who ran a knife over the plastic tablecloth, tracing the red and blue flowers with the blade and sending spittle flying through his stubble as he hissed: “You’ll do as I say.” This father, this small, clumsy village creature who could barely set one foot in front of the other and had spent half his life being the butt of anyone stronger than him, had only just managed to walk tall, and already his son had outgrown him and got what few hugs his wife distributed—and goodness knows, she wasn’t generous with them—leaving him compelled to exert his authority with cutlery from the kitchen drawer. He thought it was entirely thanks to him that the family survived—nothing to do with his wife who worked in a factory, did the cooking, kept house and then got into bed with him every night to make him feel like a man. And seeing as how his only son Konstantin didn’t understand the first thing about life—he still wanted to be a musician, got thrown out a few weeks into every apprenticeship after flying into a rage or falling asleep, and had to be bought out of the military after God knows what happened to him because he couldn’t look after himself—look at him, he’s only half a man, he let them skewer him with a broom handle—he had a lot to teach the boy, and the way his father saw it, the only way to get Kostya to listen was with a knife in his hand.

  Konstantin wasn’t afraid of the blade in his father’s hand; he thought it almost funny. It would have been easy to knock it out of his bony hand, if the worst came to the worst, which it never did—or only once, when they were talking about leaving for good, emigratsia, emigration. What did frighten Kostya was what his father was doing to his mother. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he saw the deepening lines on her face, the drooping corners of her mouth etched into her skin, the red threads in her bulging eyes, and he preferred not to give the matter too much thought. His mother had once been a beautiful woman, he was sure of that, but you wouldn’t have known it to look at her furrowed skin and the tattered housecoat she was forever mending. She had at least ten new dresses hanging in the wardrobe, still in their wrappings, but why touch them as long as she could use this one? Kostya was at home a lot because he was always losing his work, so he saw all this—and had plenty of time to give himself over to his emotions.

  Valya came home to find Adidas tracksuits in rustling plastic wrappers flying through the air and crashing into the rug on the wall. Valya came home to find Kostya hanging halfway out of the window, stripped to the waist, thrusting his curly red chest hair toward Chertanavo, and yelling that life had a meaning: “Yes! It does, it does, it does!” Valya came home to find Kostya lying huddled in front of the sofa, giggling like a child and going on about how much he’d missed her and how she must never leave him. Valya came home to find Kostya saying the whole world was burning—by which he meant he had heartburn. He reeked so strongly of homemade schnapps that she couldn’t bear to sit next to him; just the smell was enough to leave you with a headache for days.

  It was in this atmosphere that the twins grew under Valya’s heart, and Valya guessed that it wouldn’t be long before she too—and not just the state of the world—would be blamed for Konstantin’s heartburn.

  The first person to hit her, though, was her mother-in-law. Valya got back from university later than usual. She was in a good mood; a fellow student had spent hours discussing Solzhenitsyn with her, then told her, looking deep into her eyes, that her belly suited her very well indeed. She threw back her hair that now came all the way to her shoulders, and put her head around the kitchen door with a smile. Her mother-in-law, who was stirring something on the stove, looked her up and down, threw the ladle in the sink, walked up to her and slapped her in the face. Valya let out a short, dull sound. She felt no pain, though her mother-in-law was very strong. She felt nothing at all.

  She stared into the wan face of this woman who had once, for nine months, carried in her belly what was now Valya’s husband, and presumably suffered a whole string of miscarriages and abortions and rapes before and afterward—did you even call it “rape” in those days? It was a face like a hollow wall, behind which, deep down below the plaster and fungus and mold, someone was said to have lived once. Valya looked and looked, trying to find some sign of life. Tears welled in her eyes. She rubbed her cheek and asked: “Why?”

  “Because you’re a whore, always whoring around with other whores. You can see that a mile off. You reek of expensive perfume. Where did you get the money? Where do you hide it, you little slut? Where have you been? Do you think I don’t have eyes in my head? Do you think I don’t know what you’re up to? God curse the day I gave my only son to you, you whore. Do you think you’re better than the rest of us just because you study? Do you think you’re better than the rest of us just because your cretin of a mother is a doctor, along with all the other bastards in your clan? Do you think you can destroy my only son? Look at him. Look at the state he’s in. Look where you’ve driven him—”

  It is idle to speculate whether this outburst from Kostya’s adoring mother was triggered by the loss of yet another apprenticeship that day, or because tension inevitably mounts when girls like Valya—their jeans flared, their curls all over the place, their bags full of books rather than silkworms—come and live with people who not long ago were being chased around the village like animals for half a loaf of bread. It was the first blow Valya had been dealt since her divorce from Ivan, and it was quite different, maybe because it came from a woman—and a mother at that. Valya didn’t say a thing, she didn’t cry. She went in the bedroom, sat down at her desk under the window and unpacked her books.

  * * *

  —

  Kostya didn’t want to hit his wife. He didn’t want to hit anyone. He was a peaceable man who only wanted to make music. With money that he’d saved and begged, he bought himself a small piano for the room where he and Valya slept. His parents were horrified, but though they berated him, they were powerless to stop the piano from coming up the stairs, carried by three of Kostya’s friends. His mother even poured the boys a few shots and had one herself, which was unusual for her. She laid a heavy hand on one of the friend’s shoulders.

  “Tell me, what am I to do with my boy?”

  “What can you do? It’s too late to do anything.”

  “But you’ll keep an eye on him, eh?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “If I sold the piano, would you come and take it away?”

  Kostya enrolled at music school and really did seem to possess talent, even if he didn’t learn any Schumann or Schubert or Rameau. He played only what he wanted to play, which was Russian pop music, cabaret songs and hits—music everyone could join in and have a laugh over. That’s what he liked. He liked it when his friends met up and were happy together. He liked entertaining them. He loved their exuberance, the sound and cadence of their voices, their different intervals and keys. Secretly, he also loved Schumann, but he knew he’d never be able to play him well enough to whip up any enthusiasm in his friends, so he didn’t even bother trying. Whenever he experimented with the foreign Romantics, his nostrils flared, his eyes grew moist, he sweated heavily, even by his standards—it wasn’t worth the effort. He did, it’s true, have a feeling that this mysterious world of music had the power to carry him off to spheres where he might see the universe or God—preferably the universe and the stars and a meteorite trail or two—but all those things remained shut off to him, because he didn’t dare take risks, awed by the world of classical music, where there was no room, he thought, for people like him.

  * * *

  —

  He didn’t know why he hit Valya the first time. He didn’t hit her directly—hadn’t intended to, anyway. The blow wasn’t meant for her; she’d got in the way—got between him and his father. She’d come in the kitchen to ask for a bit of peace, a bit of quiet, or maybe just to fetch a slice of watermelon from her parents’ parcel, when Kostya raised his arm and hit her for the first time. Something hard bounced off his h
and and when he saw that it was Valya’s head, and not his father’s bald pate, he hit again, because he felt a sudden tingling in his throat muscles; hitting Valya seemed to give him greater satisfaction than attacking his father. Valya fell to the floor and he kicked her and she didn’t scream.

  With bruises on her face and hands and rib cage, she couldn’t go to university. Valya spent a week in bed, taking deep breaths and thinking. Pedagogy, histology and clinical embryology would be tough exams, but she’d manage. Marxism-Leninism and party history were rather trickier.

  And the modern language—what modern language?—the course where they pretended to be taught English, the hour a week when they pretended that the Iron Curtain had opened a chink, but in fact only sketched a door on it in chalk and ran into it—Valya wasn’t sure she’d pass the English exam. She felt her gorge rise and her eyes mist over.

  Then she went back to thinking. Chemistry, no problem. Anatomy, Latin, psychology, no problem.

  * * *

  —

  I see her lying on the checkered quilt in jeans and a roll-neck sweater and socks darned at the toes, her hands on her domed belly. Behind her head, the big brown wardrobe forms a kind of wall; then comes the piano with the window above it, the drawn curtains resting on the closed lid. To the right of the piano is the desk with a stack of Valya’s medical tomes and two faded turquoise exercise books, and next to that is the bed again, where Valya lies, breathing shallowly and staring at the ceiling, eight feet above her and clamped shut like the lid of a preserving jar. Perhaps I felt her shallow breathing back then, but there’s no way of knowing now. I string my perhapses together, one by one, rough glass beads—not enough to make a presentable necklace. Apart from Valya’s exam plans, nothing of what she thought or smelled or felt in those moments will ever penetrate to me.