Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  Ali got up and went to the bread box that was hand-carved by her grandfather and said khleb on the lid in curly writing. Bread. Even that had come to Germany as a souvenir of the dacha on the Volga, though it was empty now, just a surface to put things on. Ali went to the fridge and rummaged for white bread. Everything edible in the flat was kept in the fridge: butter, tomatoes, gherkins, plums, an empty Emmental packet that she threw out, a net of Gala apples, an open pot of cottage cheese, a can of sprats, a dead-looking lettuce—that, too, she dispatched to the garbage—a pear, jam, honey, even a loaf of Borodinsky, the black bread with coriander seeds on top.

  The white bread was at the back, frozen fast; Ali had to prise it off. She cut two doorsteps, sliced butter as thick as her finger, laid it on the bread without spreading it, found the sugar basin where it always was, and strewed the butter with sugar until you could hardly see the bread on the small plate beneath the white crystals. She put the plate down in front of Valya.

  “Eat.”

  Valentina nodded, looked up from the plate, nodded again and smiled.

  “You must eat. I can tell you haven’t eaten for days.”

  Valya smiled again, a proper smile this time.

  “It’s bad for your head.” Ali sat down opposite Valya again. “Low blood sugar.”

  “So now you’re trying to kill me with a sugar shock?”

  Ali watched her mother reluctantly move her hand toward the plate. Valentina looked out of the window, then at Ali, then at the glinting sugar crystals. Her eyes grew more alert. She reached for the bread with her right hand and her teacup with her left hand. For a moment she froze, arms outstretched, and Ali clearly saw Anton’s face smile in Valya’s.

  * * *

  —

  Anton had taught Ali to read. Not that he could read when he was three, but he’d explained the letters to her as if he’d invented them himself. He ran his finger over the pile of the red-and-green Turkish carpet in the living room and made sounds, and Ali repeated them, staring at his lips, watching them forming objects—an apple, a crescent moon hanging points down, a wide-open window sticking out its tongue. She grabbed his face as he traced the imaginary letters on the carpet; she ran her fingers over his lips and crawled her fingertips into his mouth. Like sticking your fingers in blancmange, she thought. Anton drew alphabet patterns on her legs. Like drawing on blancmange, he thought. Gran came and pulled them apart, scolding loudly about something the three-year-olds didn’t understand.

  The twins slept on the foldout sofa; their grandmother often sat beside them, stroking Anton’s head, and Ali would lie there, her eyes half-closed, watching the sinewy hand with the veins sticking out of the skin like bones. She too would thrust her hand into Anton’s hair and rub it between her fingers, until Gran’s big gray hand knocked her little one away and hissed: “Go to sleep now!” But eventually the hand disappeared along with the hiss, and Ali sank eight of her ten fingers into Anton’s curls and fell asleep with the feeling of fine wool tickling her palms.

  Because they had hardly any toys, they played with one another, moving each other’s arms at the shoulders and elbows, turning each other’s heads like balls, grabbing hold of each other’s ribs, comparing each other’s movements, freezing and mirroring one another. It wasn’t that nobody bought them toys, but the toys they were given always went straight to the top of their grandparents’ wardrobe, whose smooth walnut surface was too slippery to climb. They weren’t supposed to play with toys; they were supposed to do homework and then they were supposed to do the extra work that Valya set them—reading books, improving themselves. “Only stupid children with time to waste play with toys,” said Valya, but they didn’t know what their mother meant; they were only five when they started preschool.

  Valya was driven by the fear of not having enough time to cram her children with all the knowledge they needed if they were to get out; you had to move so fast—quick, quick, out of here! Read, learn, or you’re lost! She was convinced that the only thing really worth instilling in children was a dogged ambition oblivious to health and self-respect, to make sure they didn’t end up where she’d ended, in Chertanovo.

  She’d say to Anton: “You must be the best in school, much better than the Russians. If you can be three times as good as them, you might end up half as good, then you can be a good Russian doctor. If not, you’ll be a poor put-upon Jew for the rest of your life.” In Germany, she said the same, replacing the Russians with Germans.

  Anton didn’t understand, so he made nodding movements with his head, because even a child knows that’s the thing to do when a mother gets that look of panic in her eyes. He nodded and thought of her breasts, comparing them with the breasts of the woman upstairs, which were even bigger.

  Alissa was told: “You don’t want to be the most beautiful; you want to be the cleverest. Beauty does you no good and doesn’t last. But if you’re the cleverest you can always convince everyone that you’re the most beautiful, and you’ll get a husband who’ll buy you whatever you want, even good looks.”

  This made no sense to Ali; she couldn’t follow her mother’s logic and, unlike Anton, she didn’t nod. Valya had little confidence that her children were adaptable enough to get the better of the Soviet Union with its unjust natural laws. They were too quiet for that, too wrapped up in themselves; they cleaved to each other and tumbled over one another, as if there were no outside world. Kostya wasn’t much help either, but she was determined not to leave her children’s future—or lack of future—to chance. She didn’t want her son in the army with the highest suicide rate and her daughter playing whore to some banker. She wanted them to make something of themselves, so she got them out, with an application for settlement, twelve suitcases crammed into a train compartment, and even more boxes. The toys stayed behind on top of the walnut wardrobe, but the children were allowed to pack as many books as they liked.

  * * *

  —

  The Chepanov family’s first room in a German asylum home was at the top of a converted hotel, on the sixth floor. At first Grandfather had one of the bunks, then he was moved down to the second floor to share with an elderly man who told himself work-camp stories in his sleep, waking Grandfather who would go and sit on the man’s bed and put his hand over his trembling mouth. Valentina and Konstantin attended language classes and did their homework in the communal kitchen, along with twenty-five other emigrant couples, enveloped in the greasy smell of broth. The smell made Ali feel sick. She roamed the corridors, going in other families’ rooms, opening ceramic jars filled with jewelry, peeping in bags of terry bed linen, sniffing at the bottles of Red Moscow perfume she sometimes found in the bathrooms, and filching cigarettes whenever she found an open packet lying around. Anton didn’t accompany her on these prowls; he was too busy pursuing his own passion for balancing on narrow metal rails.

  He’d climb onto the banisters and stand there, bobbing up and down, white-sneakered feet at an angle, knees bent. He stretched out his arms like a skateboarder and looked straight ahead, his eyes fixed on the wall opposite as if he were challenging it. The first time his mother saw him on the banister rail, she froze. Suppressing the instinct to cry out in fear and risk startling her child, she crept up to him, wrapped her arms around his tummy and pulled him down. From then on she followed Anton on tiptoe wherever he went, arms extended, fingers like claws, and when she sat in the language class, trying to conjugate verbs, she’d see her son plummeting down the stairwell.

  Every week she went to the home manager and asked to be moved to the ground floor or into the basement, next to the kitchen. It might stink of broth, but at least there were no banister rails down there. She explained the situation to the manager—the two small children she couldn’t control: one of them was always trying to jump off things, while the other smoked under the covers in their room. She only had one pair of hands and there was the language class to practice for too
. She begged him, but the mustached guy with the grease stains on his collar only said: “You must learn to take better care of your children, Mamasha; moving into the basement won’t change that.”

  * * *

  —

  This mustached guy in a stained shirt cropped up in every asylum home. The family of grandfather, mother, father, child, child was sent from one home to another so often, they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. Before each move Daniil would ask the name of the next dump the Germans were sending them to and say that it was a good thing his wife didn’t have to go through this, but would soon be able to take the plane and plenty of money and come straight to a well-feathered nest. Valya was sick of packing suitcases. Kostya would go out for a smoke and come back in a good mood, rubbing his hands and saying “Let’s go” like Gagarin.

  Ali took her bearings by Anton. When he began to pack, she began to pack; when he began to shout around, she set up a yell too. In every home, Anton played soccer in the yard with the other kids. Ali thought soccer boring, but joined in anyway, blasting the half-pumped-up plastic balls into the walls of the home as hard as she could. She filched one for herself and stowed it in her bag for the next home.

  “I don’t understand soccer,” Valya would say, shaking her head. “I don’t understand why millions of poor people would want to watch a small group of millionaires running after a ball.” Konstantin waved this aside. “Because you don’t understand anything about life.”

  Valya looked at him. “Yes, you may be right.”

  Anton came running up, nestled to his mother’s belly, put his head between her breasts. “Soccer’s great because you don’t have to think of anything when you’re playing,” he said, looking at his mother’s double chin.

  “Nonsense,” said Ali, who was sitting cross-legged on the bed, stuffing comics into the bag alongside the plastic ball. “The whole time I’m playing, I’m thinking about how I can thrash you.”

  * * *

  —

  It was always noisy in the homes—in the rooms, in the corridors. People flung open windows and shouted into the yard; the rattle of crockery in the kitchen echoed up the stairs; the alarm tones of Soviet wristwatches pierced the ceilings. When you argued, everyone knew about it—when you made love, they knew about that too. The walls melted away. You got used to a permanent clatter.

  In school, though, it was quiet. Only the sound of the bell cut through the vacuum surrounding Ali and Anton. They understood nothing of what was going on around them. The others were a distant roar; nobody spoke to the twins and the twins didn’t want to speak to them. The teachers wrote letters on the board, different from the ones they knew, and ignored Ali and Anton. They played alone, twisting themselves in knots like a pair of tussling cats, rolling over the schoolyard, pulling each other’s hair, biting each other’s shoulder blades, trying to leave marks on one another—and they shouted at each other, so as not to forget the sound of their own voices. They needed nothing and nobody. The other children were afraid of the twins, afraid of the determination with which they set on one another. They didn’t like their clothes either; they pointed at the jeans Valya had bought with vouchers and laughed. “Where d’you get them? In the dustbin?”

  A few weeks after school had started, little groups formed on the yard. The twins weren’t in any of these groups and paid no attention to the others—until the stones began to fly. Four or five boys closed in on them, shouting something. Anton went up to them and asked in Russian if they were looking for trouble. They replied in German:

  “Russki, Russki, fucky fucky.”

  Anton didn’t understand the words, but he took note of them. That evening he went to Valya, who was poring over her exercise books like a schoolgirl, and asked why the others teased him for being Russian when she’d taught him to be proud that he was Jewish.

  Valya put down her pen and looked at her son—his pink nose, his matted curls. She stroked the curls and said: “We’ll talk about it later.”

  “When’s later?”

  “When you’re grownup.”

  Anton got on Valya’s lap and looked at her books.

  “Can you read that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You will.”

  “When?”

  “Anton, what is it?”

  He looked into his mother’s eyes. He could feel the blood pounding in his head and pressed himself to her breast.

  “Come on, down you get, I’ve got to do my homework. Don’t you have homework to do?”

  He climbed down from her lap, clenched his teeth and ambled to the door.

  “You mustn’t tell anyone here,” Valya called after him. “That you’re Jewish. You mustn’t mention it. Please.”

  Anton pushed open the door with both hands and ran down the corridor to the stairs. He took them several steps at a time. On the third floor he jumped onto the banister rail and stood there with dangling arms, staring at the wall, thinking.

  * * *

  —

  When more stones flew a few days later, Anton went up to the four or five boys and said: “Stones okay. But I’m not Russian.”

  The boys gawped, craning their necks.

  “I’m Jewish.”

  He didn’t say it quite clearly. He’d tried to memorize the phrases; he’d collected a few words in the home, and Auntie Zoya, of all people, with that big fat cross around her neck, had helped him to put them in some kind of order. But now his tongue failed him, looping the loop in his mouth; he got everything muddled up and the rubberneckers laughed. They looked at each other and laughed, pointed at his clothes, grabbed him by the hair, dragged him across the yard, pushed him into the boys’ toilets and played dodgeball with his body. When Ali finally found Anton and he explained why he looked so mangled, her face flushed crimson. She wanted to go straight to the teacher, but Anton gripped her by the arm. “No way!”

  She went anyway, shouted and cried and pointed at her brother. Ali’s teacher understood little of her Russian yammering. She shrugged, said words Ali didn’t recognize and vanished into the staff room. Something must have got through to her, though, because when the four or five boys ambushed the twins on the way home, they looked as if they’d been in big trouble.

  This time they didn’t throw stones, but grabbed the two of them—Anton by the shoulders and Ali by the hips—and dragged them into the bushes where they punched their eyes deeper into their sockets, pulled their tongues and kicked them in the ribs. When they were done, the twins had melted into one body. It happened very quietly. They didn’t scream or curse; the boys’ fists and feet beat down on soft flesh; you heard only their panting breath as they drove the kicks home. When they ran away, the silence was complete. Ali and Anton lay in the bushes, listening to each other breathe. They lay in each other’s arms, looking up at the sky—no clouds, no cracks. Dribble ran out of Ali’s mouth onto Anton’s forehead; he wiped it away with his shirtsleeve, pushed himself level with her and pressed the tip of his nose against hers. Their eyelashes meshed, their mouths were open, they were breathing into one another. It was only when Anton kissed Ali that she began to cry.

  * * *

  —

  Valya wanted to go to the headmaster to report the attack on her children, but her German wasn’t good enough. A woman she knew called Tanya was visiting when it happened. She was already out of the home because she’d entered into a sham marriage with a German who had no idea it was a sham marriage and seemed happy; Tanya was in the middle of telling everyone all about it when the twins appeared in the communal kitchen. Tanya screamed first; she was the first to see the children. Then Valya screamed, and soon the entire kitchen was shrieking as if a siren had gone off. The home was transformed into a coop of startled chickens. People said things like “Nazis”; they kept saying “Nazis” and “They’ve got it in for o
ur children.” The fathers banged the tables, so did the mothers. Nobody felt equal to talking to the headmaster, but everyone was willing to give it a go. Since Tanya’s German had recently come on in leaps and bounds thanks to her happy sham marriage, she was the one who marched out of the home with Valya and Kostya, and raised a ruckus in the primary-school staff room. A few furious neighbors followed, letting out wails of lament as if it were a shivah.

  The four or five boys were found; their parents were called in. Kostya had to be pulled off one of the fathers because he almost strangled him in his wrath, and when the tussle was over, everyone was sent home and nothing happened. Anton and Ali continued to go to school with the rubberneckers, first primary school then secondary school, and nothing changed, except that the group surrounding the rubberneckers grew larger—but then so did the group surrounding Ali and Anton.

  * * *

  —

  In this, their last home, the Chepanov family were to spend a year, surrounded by people with big fat crosses on their chests.

  “What are all these Christians doing here?” hissed Kostya.

  “Well, you know,” said his neighbor Valera, “strictly speaking my wife’s Christian, but she’s sucked so much blood out of me that she must be at least half Jewish by now.”

  They’d all come with papers bearing the words quota refugee, which meant they’d searched their family trees for Jewish branches, and if they hadn’t found any, they’d invented some—the precise number depended on the content of their wallets. People would do anything to leave the beloved Soviet land—they were even prepared to become Jewish.

  In this last home, the refugees were given five deutsche marks per head per week for “personal expenses.” Food was delivered; “clothes and sundries” were distributed in the form of vouchers. For all additional desires, you had to apply to the immigration office, and Valya sent Kostya along, knowing he wouldn’t be able to make himself understood and hoping to shame him into doing his own German homework.