Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  Kostya stood outside the immigration office and smoked a cigarette. He smoked two cigarettes. After he’d had a few, he went in and sat down. The fluorescent lights whined like mosquitoes. He sat there rubbing his eyes for about an hour, then the man next to him tapped him on the shoulder with his index finger and pointed to the machine with numbered tickets assigning you a place in the queue. Kostya turned to the man and they fell to talking. The man spoke Turkish and Kostya Russian; they got on like a house on fire. The man told Kostya that he’d been a regular at the immigration office for seven years and the woman dealing with his case still pronounced his name as if it were a contagious disease. Kostya suggested going outside for a smoke and he never saw the inside of the building again.

  * * *

  —

  Food was topic number one in the home, even hotter than the who’s-with-whom stories. A lot of people couldn’t eat the stuff delivered to the canteen—this was before it occurred to anyone that the mishpochas that had come to the country giving “Jewish” as their reason for emigration, ought maybe to be offered kosher food. But the rejection of canteen food had nothing to do with religious beliefs; the truth was that people were scared of the fat pieces of Camembert melting on the table in front of them. They thought they’d been given rancid cheese from the morgue refrigerators, and saw only one way of dealing with such unfamiliar delicacies: everything must be refried or reboiled. That kept them busy half the day. Some said: “I don’t like the food here.” The others replied: “That’s because your wife can’t cook.”

  Valya spent her first months in Germany at the stove in the communal kitchen, swapping recipes and listening to the women with crosses in their cleavages agreeing with each other that the Jews lived like pigs—anyone could see that—and that the family responsible for distributing the food in the home hogged the best for themselves. Jews—what could you expect? They also agreed that the Germans weren’t the problem. True, they didn’t understand the first thing about life—the men can’t fuck, the women are useless, useless, useless—but the real problem was their own people who would do for you if you weren’t careful—your own kind hate you more than the Germans ever could.

  Valya felt as if she were in a postwar communal apartment and knew that wasn’t what she’d come to Germany for; it was time to go flat-hunting—flat-hunting with no German, no language, but with her friend Tanya and the shamorous husband she called “Schatz,” stretching the shrill “a” as if it were a cat having its tail pulled, and then adding under her breath in Russian that he should go to hell.

  So Tanya and Valya began to hunt for a flat for the four of them, and perhaps Valya’s father too if he could somehow be fitted in. Valya’s mother still hadn’t joined them; she rang from time to time and told them of the troubles she was having trying to sell the flat, and how lonely it made her to hear her spoon clink against the glass when she stirred her tea in the evenings. She said her parents didn’t want to pack, but would get down to it in the end; she’d just have to stay a little longer and talk them around—she couldn’t leave without them. And of course Valya had to find a flat for her first; she wasn’t going in a home, so why should she bother packing when Valya herself was still in a communal apartment?

  Tanya tried all the tricks in the book to find a place for the family in the small town, but people waved her away as soon as they heard the surname. Eventually she started to say: “They’re all doctors. With good employment prospects—this lady here’s already got work.” And she’d push Valya into the room like a chess piece.

  At the seventeenth flat, the undertaker, who owned not only the business on the ground floor, but also the entire brown-brick house, inspected Valya from head to toe and asked her what the hell she was doing in Germany.

  “We’re Jewish,” said Valya.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said the undertaker.

  So they moved in.

  * * *

  —

  The shift to the attic flat shrank the space in which the family moved, as if someone had pulled tight the drawstring on a sack. There were no longer eavesdroppers on the other side of the walls—or none who could understand what they were saying. There were no clothing vouchers, no warders in greasy shirts, no one to watch them—not even Grandfather had moved in with them—and so they dredged up old resentments and threw themselves into arguing. The built-up tension of the last years flung Konstantin and Valentina from one room to the next, in desperate search of something—deliverance, something promised, dreams they’d kept secret from one another because they knew that dreams only come true if you don’t tell them to anyone.

  The backdrop of sounds changed. Noise was no longer made up of individual sounds; it was a shock wave traveling through the flat. When the twins were together they didn’t hear their parents; they played as if under a soundproof bell jar. When the bell jar failed them, they got into bed, undressed and looked at each other, looked at where Ali was getting breasts and Anton wasn’t, and at the slight curve of their bellies. They interlocked their toes, pressed their pelvises together and smeared spit on each other’s faces. By then, at the latest, it was quiet around them.

  * * *

  —

  The first time Ali saw Anton kissing a girl in the schoolyard, she felt dizzy. The taste of chicken rose in her throat; something jabbed her between the eyes. The girl, Larissa, was older than Anton and Ali, old enough to buy cigarettes and ride a scooter; she wore skirts and had straight hair down to her shoulders, which were now turned toward Ali, while her pointy little nose was glued to Anton’s face. Anton noticed his sister watching him and without letting go of Larissa, he looked Ali in the eyes and put his hand under Larissa’s blouse. Ali ran to the girls’ toilets and banged her head against the wall. She didn’t tell anyone how she’d got the bump.

  Then Anton began to stay out in the evenings. Valya and Kostya’s screams pierced Ali’s body, clung to her neck, and she went and pounded at her parents’ bedroom door. Once, the room smelled strange and her mother sent her away laughing and told her everything was all right—but only once. Usually, Ali would fling open the door and go between her parents, lashing out at them herself, tearing their bodies apart.

  Anton didn’t want to hear about any of this and certainly didn’t want to raise a hand against his own father—until he got back from Larissa’s one evening, slightly drunk and very happy, and found his mother standing wide-eyed and motionless in the middle of the kitchen. He followed her gaze to the wall and saw Ali gasping for breath, Konstantin’s hands squeezing her throat.

  Ali had stepped between her parents again, and Kostya had swatted her against the wall like a fly. Her arms hung limp, her eyes were white, and Anton hit his father as hard as he could in the face. Kostya let go of Ali. She cowered on the floor. Valya threw herself at Ali and they all froze and stayed frozen for days.

  Words drained from the rooms, screams too, and arguments—everything drained away. Mother, father, child, child passed each other, their eyes fixed on the floor, the ceiling, the walls. If they happened to brush against one another, they mumbled something that nobody understood—and nobody stopped to ask. Kostya measured his walks in packets of cigarettes, puffing endlessly. The smoke stung his eyes and he thought how awful the weather was in this country—every bloody day too—and he thought about his parents and that he must fetch them over soon, not because he believed they’d be any better off here, but because it would mean that at last he wouldn’t be quite so alone in the world. He thought of Ali’s blue face that was Anton’s face and Valya’s too, in a way, and it occurred to him that none of them had a single red curl.

  He walked to the filling station to buy himself another packet of cigarettes and watched a family in a VW Golf at the gas pump. The children were unpacking sandwiches; their parents were rummaging in their bags. He went into the shop and found the magazine stand, pulled out the local listings magazine, and leafed
through it for so long that the woman at the register shouted at him: “If you get the pages damp or dog-eared, you’ll have to buy it!”

  He looked at her and smiled. He hadn’t understood a word she’d said, but he had a plan. He went home and told his family—his wife and his daughter and his son—that he’d like to take them to the theater, or rather, “To see a dance. You don’t have to understand the language and it’s pretty.” Valya looked at the children and flung her arms around Kostya’s neck. Anton looked at his parents. Ali stared at the floor.

  * * *

  —

  Valya spent an entire week wondering what to wear. She rummaged around in her wardrobe for hours and eventually strutted out of the bedroom in a dress of rough, hessian-like material, with a leather waistcoat buckled over the top.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” asked Kostya, who was sitting on the sofa in black suit trousers and a blue shirt, legs crossed, hands folded over his belly which bulged farther and farther toward his chin.

  “It’s a peasant dress. It’s what they wear here,” said Valya, beaming.

  Ali and Anton had been allowed to choose what they wore, so they were both dressed in jeans, T-shirts and denim jackets. Valya took one look at them, shook her head and sent them off to get changed. Ali put on Anton’s white shirt; Anton slipped on Ali’s low-cut silver top over his bare torso.

  “Look, I think I’m getting hairs on my chest,” he said, pressing his chin into his collarbone.

  “You don’t have any more than I do,” said Ali bad-temperedly.

  They presented themselves to their parents and Valya grabbed them by their ears and dragged them back to their room again.

  In the theater foyer, the children had pretzels, and Valya and Kostya drank sparkling wine and called it champagne. As they clinked glasses, Valya said: “Next I’d like to go to Paris.”

  “What? Now you want to see the Mona Lisa?” Kostya said, helping himself to a piece of Anton’s pretzel.

  “I’ve looked into it. There are cheap bus tickets. Takes less than a day.”

  “And café olé olé for breakfast?” asked Kostya, giggling.

  Valya slapped him on the shoulder and began to laugh herself.

  * * *

  —

  A male body crawled across the stage with a chair strapped to its back. It twisted and turned, stretching now one leg, now the other into the air, trying to sit on the chair behind it. Kostya closed his eyes and listened to the music. Was it Debussy? It could have been anything, so he decided it was Debussy, and smiled. Valya sat there with a dry mouth and moist eyes. She squeezed Alissa’s hand and Alissa pulled her hand away and slid under the seat. Anton clambered over to take her place and laid his head on Valya’s belly.

  When a female dancer began to stomp across the stage, lugging stones half the size of her body and sighing as if she were singing, Kostya got up and went outside for a smoke.

  He stared across the theater forecourt. It was fucking freezing; even Debussy couldn’t change that. He patted his jacket for a lighter, rummaged in his trouser pockets. Cursing, he decided to start saving for a piano right away, whether or not there was room for one in the flat. Once the piano was there, everything would sort itself out; he’d never be angry with Valya again—never be angry with anyone. He’d play to the children or, better still, he’d teach them to play themselves and they’d become musicians, playing duets and performing all over the country. One day, they’d go on tour. They’d travel to Russia and perform in the concert hall of the Gnessin Academy where he’d never been allowed to set foot, and his parents would come and watch, and finally realize where they’d gone wrong.

  A child’s hand was holding a lighter up to his face. Ali was standing beside him. “Did you pinch my lighter?” he asked.

  “It fell under your seat,” she said, staring across the theater forecourt like him. It was milky and blurred. She was shivering.

  “Do you smoke?” Kostya looked down at the child with the long brown curls, a tight, silver blouse over her no longer flat body. When had that happened? he wondered, taking off his jacket and laying it over her shoulders. She vanished beneath it. He passed her the cigarette and she took a few drags.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Ali—” Kostya began, but she interrupted him with a violent shake of her head, her curls flying so that he couldn’t see her face. After that he was quiet.

  * * *

  —

  Two years later Ali had moved out and had her hair cut. All Valya could say was: “Get yourself a wig next time I see you!”—but it was better than directly calling her a dyke. Something inside Valya snapped like matzo when Ali left home; her throat felt dry and dusty. She decided not to touch her daughter’s cold close-cropped head.

  Ali had joined the Black Tomcat Group, Tom for short, a commune that was somewhere between socialist, communist and anarchist—they didn’t want to pin themselves down. The name provoked various debates about sexism, which gave them plenty to discuss and a lot of reasons to get angry with each other and then have angry sex—or get drunk and smoke whole packs of cheap fags at a time. Why’s everything so fucked up, man?

  In the squat Ali had moved into, she had Internet connection for the first time and discovered that you really could find instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails with a click of the mouse. She practiced assiduously, experimenting first on building facades, then on rooftops. Once the Molotov flew into an empty baby stroller, and although she could see from the roof that it was empty, she chewed up her lip in shock and only threw stones after that.

  The first time she was arrested was on a demonstration. She threw stones at a policeman and when she was nicked she called the officer who was twisting her arms behind her back a fascist pig. He pulled the plastic handcuffs tighter, she thrashed about, and the deeper the plastic cut into her skin, the angrier she became and the more Russian the abuse she flung out. This surprised her; she found herself using words she hadn’t even realized she knew. Although things had often got loud between her parents, these expressions must have sprung from deep childhood memories, maybe from the kitchen in Chertanovo. One thing was sure—she hadn’t got them from the Russian eighties films she sometimes watched. No swearing there; only silence and weeping.

  “Khui, blyad’, pizda anal, yobanyi v rot ty menya zaebal, gvozd’ v podpizdok, chtob ty svernuvshegosya ezha ebal, blyadin syn, mat’ tvoyu poperek zhopy ebat’!”*

  * * *

  —

  Valya fetched her daughter from the police station and they sat at the kitchen table, the black-and-gold cake stand between them. They hadn’t spoken all the way home. For the first time in her life Valya understood why people smoked; she felt the urge to puff thick clouds out of her lungs, but she didn’t smoke, so the thick clouds stayed inside.

  “Do you think it’s funny?” she asked at length. “Do you think it’s all right to act like that? Is that how people behave in this country?”

  By then Ali had got up and gone to the door; she didn’t feel like staring in silence into her mother’s puffy cotton wool face; she felt like going back to the commune, creeping under the covers to Nana and smelling her armpits.

  “This country. You brought me here. What do you expect?”

  “Sorry I brought you here. Sorry your life’s so tough. Would you like to go back to socialism?”

  “I don’t want to go back; I want it here!”

  “And then?”

  “I’m not like you. I’m not content to crop my little patch of grass and take things as they come. I’m not interested in a life where everything’s available but nobody wants anything. I’m not interested in all that crap that makes people like you feel fulfilled because you’ve nothing else you can believe in.”

  Valya stared at the contorted, angry face of the person before her.

  Crap.


  Her dilated pupils, her thin lips.

  Crap. So that was it.

  Valya wasn’t in the mood for crying; she wasn’t in the mood for anything. Her thoughts spiraled down to her gut. Her shoulders pulled toward the floor. She suddenly felt as if she were made of concrete—concrete that softens and melts and grows rigid again. Maybe it’s heartburn, she thought, trying to withstand the gaze of her daughter, who’d sat back down at the other end of the kitchen table. It seemed impossibly long. Every time Ali sat down at this table, it grew longer.

  *String of obscenities along the lines of “Go and fuck a rolled-up hedgehog!”

  KATO

  Kato spread out the injecting gear on the table. He pulled a minute ampoule out of a wadge of cotton wool, held it up to his face, flicked down the liquid testosterone and snapped off the tip. The gel ran over his nails and he cursed; he didn’t have many left. It wasn’t that they were hard to get hold of; he got them on street corners from people who called him “my friend”—but these friends charged more than the pharmacists, so not a drop must be wasted. He rubbed the liquid into the tips of his fingers and looked about him. Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the water of the Bosporus glistened, pricking his eyes. Big terra-cotta pots of withered plants stood on the balcony. One of the skeletons must once have been an oleander, and he thought he also recognized a lemon tree and a bougainvillea among the dead; they’d dried up in the sun and now stood stooped over the cracked gray earth. The flat was big—too big for Ali by herself. “Belongs to my uncle,” she’d mumbled, disappearing into the kitchen to put on the samovar. There were three rooms, all with fully glazed outside walls; it was very bright. When the sun shone, you couldn’t breathe. You were floating over the city, looking out far into Sultanahmet. There was a big worn sofa covered with books and magazines and cushions, and everything was red, even the pictures on the walls and the lampshades. A faded rug lay on the tiles, trodden so thin that the flowers on it were no more than streaks. The air conditioner above Kato’s head coughed cold air into the room. Kato felt Ali’s eyes on him and loosened his belt; his jeans fell to his knees. Then he pulled his underpants down below his buttocks and braced his arms against the table top.