Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  “Hey!” Kato shouted, running after the man. “Hey!” He tried to catch up with him, tripping over legs; all over the park, police were swarming like black flies. By the time he reached the man who was carrying Aglaja, he was almost out of the park and heading for the Divan Hotel. Kato tugged his arm so hard that the man almost dropped her and began to curse in Russian. Without thinking, Kato replied in Ukrainian, then switched to Russian. They shouted at each other until eventually Kato took Aglaja’s shoulders and the man took her legs and they carried her into the hotel lobby.

  The place was filled with screaming, weeping people, lying about or sitting, pouring water and milk and lemon juice over each other’s heads. An elderly woman emptied a plastic bottle over Aglaja’s face and Kato stared at the white liquid running into her mouth. Her lips didn’t move; he was sure she was dead.

  Paramedics appeared and bundled Aglaja’s body onto a stretcher. Kato couldn’t say whether minutes or hours had passed. He followed the gurney out, but wasn’t allowed in the ambulance. He asked where they were taking her and ran along behind. He didn’t have the money for a taxi on him, but a young man leaning against a yellow car recognized him from the club and offered to give him a lift. In the car they argued about what was going on in the city. The young man said sabotage; Kato said: “Bullshit.” The young man said: “These agitators want to destroy the republic.” Kato said: “Let me out here, please.”

  He somehow found his way to the right ward and sat at Aglaja’s bedside, not moving, only going out for a piss or a cigarette. His eyes flitted back and forth from Aglaja’s hands on the sheet to the screen of his phone. A wobbly camera showed burning barricades cut through by a jet from a water cannon. The picture kept cutting out. On TV there were penguins running across the screen. The next day, the doctors said Kato had to leave; they had new patients coming in and it was no good his sitting there like death; he wasn’t helping anyone. He refused. A nurse promised to give him a call when Aglaja woke up. “Will she wake up?” he asked, his fingers clawing his phone.

  “Bakalım yani,” said the nurse.

  He went straight from the hospital to the park and sat down to wait for another gas cartridge, but there weren’t any. Or rather, there were masses, but none of them hit him, although he was sitting there in the middle of the park, unprotected and powerless. He watched a dervish spinning like a compass needle, the pipe of his gas mask lashing the air.

  Kato held out until the chain of mothers broke his will. The authorities had appealed to demonstrators’ parents on television, calling on them to fetch their children from the park—there could be no guarantees now; public order had to be restored; from now on serious action would be taken and anyone staying on in the park would get what they were asking for. And the mothers came out in force, but not to fetch their children; they came to form a human chain around the park, shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, their eyes full of fear. The army might step in at any moment.

  Kato sat there surrounded by mothers who weren’t his, and burst into tears. Even without gas. He got to his feet, went home and dialed his mother’s number. His father picked up. Kato considered hanging up, but thought better of it. First they both shouted, then his father cried, then he shouted again, then he said Kato must come home right away, pack his bag this second, his mother was sick with worry, his brothers and sisters too—what kind of a daughter was he?

  “I’m not a daughter. I’m your son.”

  His father went on ranting as if he hadn’t heard. Kato repeated the words until it dropped quiet at the other end of the line.

  “Dad, I’m your son, do you understand?”

  When there was no reply, he said: “It doesn’t matter if you don’t.”

  And realizing that his father was going to remain silent, he said: “I know you love me. I know you’d never say so. You once told me we’re animals, that love’s an instinct—that’s enough for me, Dad. I understand. And I’m happy here. You haven’t asked, so I’m telling you: I think I’m getting along pretty well.”

  There was static down the line.

  “Dad, one more thing. Everyone knows you’re taking Gran’s jewelry into the yard a bit at a time and coming back with little bags of white powder. The bottom drawer in the kitchen isn’t a good place to hide it. Maybe you could keep Sina away from the stuff, stop her from sniffing it. Is she well? Are the others well?”

  He heard rapid pips.

  “Dad, I’m staying put for the time being. I’ll be in touch. Give my love to the others. Oh, and Dad…I got myself a tattoo.”

  * * *

  —

  Ali turned her eyes from the greenfinch on Kato’s thigh to the syringe in her hand. The testosterone had completely vanished into Kato.

  “I’m pulling it out now.”

  “Okay.”

  Kato pressed a piece of cotton wool to the red pinprick and rubbed it.

  Ali was still crouched in front of him. She looked up at him skeptically.

  “Who usually does it for you?”

  “Anyone in Lâleli will do it. There are experienced people on every corner.”

  “And you just go to the corner and ask?”

  Kato turned to face Ali, his pubes level with her head. Ali could see clearly into his sharply outlined pupils; there was a glimmer of green around them, then yellow. He opened his lips as if to reply, but instead put his hands in Ali’s curls and massaged the back of her head. She pressed her forehead into the black fuzz above his mons and took a deep breath. When she breathed out, she pushed her tongue inside him.

  * * *

  —

  Afterward they lay naked on the streaky floral pattern of the rug and Ali looked at Kato’s profile. He had two red spots close together on his jaw and another two farther down on his neck—soon they’d start to swell and itch. Fucking bed bugs. Ali wondered if Kato looked more like his mum or his dad—and whether you always had to look like someone. Hadn’t she had the feeling she knew his face that first time he’d spoken to her in the club? Quite possible that their great-grandparents had met on the Potemkin Stairs—that they’d bumped into one another on the overcrowded steps and shaken hands amid profuse beg pardons. Very likely even; Odessa wasn’t a big city. And then? They’d gone on their ways.

  And now their children’s children’s children lay side by side, hips touching, on a faded rug in Istanbul, mentally flicking through stacks of black-and-white photographs, imagining faces they didn’t know, seeing familiar faces in strangers. They wished they could say more about themselves than the names of the places they’d left behind. They wished for ancestors like them: uncles who’d shaved their legs and squeezed their bellies into corsages and dresses at night, aunts with shingled hair and black lipstick, strolling through the streets in suits. None of these stories had ever found its way into the annals of family history, but they must have existed, so what was wrong with inventing them?

  Ali rolled onto her side and ran her eyes over the shadow on Kato’s upper lip that for once he hadn’t shaved. Soon the shadow would be a square beard, framing half his face. It suited him.

  “Let’s go out,” whispered Kato.

  * * *

  —

  The streets were full of emaciated cats and squashed plastic bottles. The air smelled of cabbage, and of lentil soup with red pepper, and now and then Ali thought she caught Kato’s smell permeating the street too. They bought two simit and kaymak at Hassan Bey’s and when they came to the water, they stared past each other for a long time.

  “Sorry,” Kato said after a while, his mouth full of creamy butter. “It’s always happening to me.”

  Hassan Bey hadn’t looked at Ali; his eyes had fixed on Kato, piercing him from head to toe. Then he’d spat on the floor, stared at his calculator and said the price.

  “That had nothing to do with you.” Ali brushed sesame crumbs off her knee. “Th
e old man’s pissed off with me because he thinks I promised him a date. But I didn’t promise him anything—definitely not a date. All I did was scribble my number on a piece of paper when he asked me to.”

  “Well, that’s pretty much the same thing.”

  Ali didn’t herself know why she’d done it. She’d come down the street drunk early one morning, glad to have found the alleyway where she lived. The taste of vodka still in her mouth, she’d trembled like a balloon on the water; you could have popped her with a pin. She’d laughed. She had a craving for sugar and went into Hassan’s shop, and as she was piling her arms with squishy white bread and marmalade, he asked for her number and for some reason she wrote it on a scrap of paper, the right numbers in the right order, although afterward she couldn’t find her own front door and sat down at a crossroads to eat, tearing the end off the loaf and dunking it in the jar of marmalade. Since then, Hassan Bey had rung every morning and every evening—sometimes even in his lunch break—and she didn’t know how to tell him that he was giving himself false hopes.

  Ali thought of Hassan’s sandpaper skin and of his smile when he’d first seen her and offered her fresh plums—then of the baby stroller his wife had been pushing when she’d bumped into the two of them at the Sunday market. They’d pretended not to know each other. Ali would have liked to peep in the stroller, but didn’t dare. Instead she turned to look at the boys next to her who were standing in front of two cardboard boxes full of fluffy chicks you could buy by the bag. The chicks cheeped and wobbled about as if they ran on batteries, pecking each other and tumbling over one another. The boys stood cheek to cheek, drool running out of their mouths. Ali wondered if they were hungry—or hypnotized at seeing themselves in those cardboard boxes, at twelve lira a bag. Probably not. It was more likely that their dilated bloodshot eyes came from glue sniffing.

  She thought of the market criers who sang arias to their vegetables like muezzins, “domates, domates,” of the little girls in long colorful skirts who juggled with stolen pomegranates, of the woolly socks she’d bought but couldn’t wear because they smelled so strongly of washing powder that she’d decided to use them as pesticide for the bed bugs.

  She imagined what it would be like to walk around the market with Anton, buy him grapes, pull him between the fruit barrows into the narrow doorways that led like tunnels into the nowhere of Tarlabaşı. What it would be like to push green grapes into his mouth, press her hand to his lips and her mouth to her hand.

  Ali’s memories piled up like transparencies and slipped. They complemented and contradicted one another, making new images, but she couldn’t read them; even shaking her head was no use.

  She followed the straight lines in Kato’s face, soothed by them. She looked at his different-sized eyes, his high cheekbones, the curved shadow above his lip. Maybe she’d just stay here, she thought. Maybe she’d stay with him and they’d spend the rest of their days trying to make babies. The ring on Kato’s finger gleamed in the sun. Beneath his hand on the steps was red graffiti that looked as if it were melting. It must have been years old. Faded red lines with fuzzy edges showed a woman with a flock of birds shooting out of her head. Ali could have sworn she knew the woman, but from where? Another image she couldn’t place.

  “Kato, that accordion player in the club—”

  “Why do you think your brother left?”

  Kato’s voice broke mid-sentence; he cleared his throat.

  Ali suddenly remembered the cold of the parquet floor beneath her shoulder blades. Under the sheet, Anton’s body and hers hadn’t touched. They’d stared at the ceiling. The room was smoky; a white layer of haze hung above them like over a swamp. Only the tips of their noses stuck out, and their curls. Anton had come to tell her something, but they hadn’t talked. They’d passed the joint back and forth.

  “I’ve no idea. I’m looking for him so I can ask him.”

  “And then bring him back?”

  Ali chewed her lower lip; it tasted sour.

  “I’m not his wife. Or his mother.”

  “And why do you think he left?”

  Ali was missing so many memories; her brain looked like the toothless jaws of that old hag who used to beg at Chertanovskaya metro station. She was always there, hunchbacked and swathed in colorful shawls, a head scarf knotted under her chin; she held out her arm, stammering something, her hand shaped into a little dish. Whenever Ali and Anton passed the beggar woman with their gran, Ali clung to the woman’s legs and couldn’t be torn away. Anton would stand and watch the spectacle: a grannie tugging at the feet of her granddaughter who was clinging for dear life to the legs of a beggar woman, all three of them screaming. A self-destructing Russian doll—that’s how it looked in her memory.

  The transparencies shifted again. For a second she thought she knew what Anton had been going to tell her, but she didn’t dare speak the words. Instead she said: “Because he thinks we don’t need him.”

  “What about him? Does he need you?”

  Ali clicked her tongue and made one of those gestures that could mean anything, from “how should I know?” to “hold me in your arms.”

  She’d have liked to swim across the Golden Horn and lose herself between the narrow houses on the other side, lean against the wall of a house, take on its color and be sucked into the facade, rib by rib, bone by bone.

  Alongside a hut on the dock, four small ferries lay moored; at one of them a man with a voice bigger than himself was urging passersby to get on board. Ali and Kato sat on the broad steps of the quay in the sun, watching the families board the flimsy little vessel. Daughters helped mothers in long robes, so that they wouldn’t trip and fall in the water. There was no railing; the women clung to their children’s skinny arms. Men in worn checked suits put their pipes in their breast pockets, went below deck to find themselves corner seats and looked gloomily out at the water.

  “Odessa’s just a hop across the Black Sea,” said Kato, pointing at the Bosporus Bridge. “Practically around the corner.”

  Ali looked out across the Golden Horn, at the rickety boat full of people going to the bazaar to drink coffee at Mehmet Efendi’s, where the ground beans were wrapped in fine greaseproof paper by children, none of them older than fifteen. Their fingers twisted the bags so quickly, it looked as if they’d been fast-forwarded.

  “What’s it like there?” asked Ali. “In Odessa.”

  “Pretty much like here. Except that people have these ugly mugs.”

  “What kind of ugly?”

  “Droopy, you know what I mean. Like dough spilling out of a bowl.”

  Kato shifted closer to Ali and laid his shorn head in her lap. Ali continued to stare out at the Bosporus, digging in her trouser pockets for cigarettes under Kato’s head.

  “With evil, flashing eyes that look through you rather than at you.”

  “I know the type.” Ali lit a Player’s with her left hand, propping herself up on the step with her right hand. Gravel dug into her flesh.

  “Always look at the ground, never look you in the face.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the tea—the tea’s much better here. If you don’t know anything else, you think the piss you drink is tea, but since coming here, I know they can’t make tea over there; it tastes of soap.”

  Kato stretched out his legs. He put one arm under his head and wrapped the other around Ali.

  “There are crows screeching all over the place.”

  Ali looked down at Kato, then back at the boat that now, from a distance, seemed to be laden with mountains of black cloth. Several pairs of eyes stared out from the mountain, and right on top stood a little boy like a lightning conductor.

  “And it smells sour. Like puke and cherry vareniki.”

  “Stop it.”

  “What?”

  “Just stop.”

  Kato looked up.

&nb
sp; Ali blew smoke rings.

  “I’d like to go to Odessa sometime.”

  “Why?”

  * * *

  —

  I couldn’t answer that question. Why? I didn’t feel I had to know, not just then. I watched myself half-lying on the quay with a slim body stretched across my lap. I saw smoke come out of my mouth and get in my eyes. I knew that the heel of my hand was smarting from the sharp gravel, but I didn’t pull it away. I heard myself say things, saw myself kiss, get up, walk. I saw myself doing things that I hadn’t decided to do, but that carried me along—and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care where. I had a goal, but I wanted it to come and stumble on me.

  I don’t know how or when I began to see things differently—why I decided to put the transparencies and images in my head in some kind of order, why I began to think and speak and even write about myself as me—but I know when it happened. It was when my great-grandfather pulled a thin folder out of his bureau two years before he died, and put it on the table in front of me. No, that’s wrong—it was when I began to read what was in that folder. By then Shura was dead and I was back in Istanbul.

  ETYA AND SHURA

  Natan and Valentina were highly educated or practically illiterate; family opinion was divided. If the stories could be believed (and they were told with great feeling), the couple was either part of Odessa’s intellectual elite or else destitute—or something in between, or everything at once. Valentina, of course, was stunningly beautiful, so aristocratic-looking and clever with her hands that she was known to those who loved her as Catherine the Great. The clothes she sewed were better than what you got in the shops; her cooking was (you guessed it) better than in a restaurant, and she was deputy head of all the kindergartens in town. But before any of that, she was married to Natan and moved with him from Balta to the wealthy city of Odessa, the Paris of eastern Europe, a thriving harbor town where the living, as Natan said, was good.