Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  * * *

  —

  Etya, who’d never even let herself be persuaded to go for a walk with a man, turned red as a star.

  She caught her breath. For some reason she heard her mother shouting and recalled the morning when they’d passed Rabinovich’s shop together and she’d shown Valentina the red shoes with the medium-high heels. She’d had her eye on them for a while and asked her mother shyly whether she thought she might one day be able to own a pair like that if she saved up. Valentina had lashed out at her, only just missing her face, and shouted that there wouldn’t be any of that in her family, and Etina Natanovna had to walk down the street with her mother yelling all manner of things behind her, cursing her daughter for everything that hadn’t worked out in her own life—even her migraines, which had recently become more frequent.

  All this came back to Etinka as she stared at the parcel on top of her pile of textbooks, and tears rose to her eyes, but without brimming over. That lout, that uncouth ape, that farshtinkener was never going to see her cry, that was for sure—nobody was, for that matter, but him least of all. And calmly, almost too calmly, she took the parcel from the top of the pile, dropped it on the floor at his feet, turned heel in her medium-high brown shoes and strutted back down the corridor as if pulled along by a string, not too fast and not too slow. As if nothing had happened.

  * * *

  —

  From then on, things went downhill with Shura. He buried himself in his books and wrote and wrote and wrote, strictly forbidding himself from attempting love poems and telling himself over and over that he wasn’t a number two—wasn’t he a komsomol’skii vozhak, head of the student komsomol, the Communist Youth League, the youth organization of the CPSU? Hadn’t he been sent to Kiev to represent the entire region of southern Ukraine? One day he’d be the stuff of legends—why should he waste his time on women? That was for men with no other goals in life.

  He set up a drama group, wrote plays about Dzerzhinsky, called his comrades-in-arms enemies of the revolution if they turned up late to rehearsals or didn’t put enough pathos into the lines he’d written, and decided to become Russia’s most famous what-you-may-call-it. He wouldn’t settle for anything less.

  * * *

  —

  After the incident of the red-beribboned parcel, Etina could think of nothing but Shura and his (in her opinion) cynical smile. She told all her girlfriends what a rude unsocialist idiot that Farbarjevich was—someone to be avoided at all costs. Just the way he held himself told you he was sly and weak; he was clearly a bad loser and probably a misogynist too. She repeated all this so often that one day her friends asked if she was sure she didn’t feel something for this Farbarjevich. At that, Etina grabbed her things and stormed out of the library café into the fresh air, along Dvoryanskaya, along Primorskaya, and on to the harbor. She ran down all hundred and ninety-two steps of the Potemkin Stairs, only stopping once to look at a boy and girl in Pioneers’ uniforms sitting at the edge. They were swapping marbles, touching each other’s kneecaps rather more than was necessary.

  Months later, during a surgery lecture in which an operation was performed on a corpse to show the students how to close an abdominal wall, Shura noticed that Etina wasn’t looking at the choreography of hands and threads, or at the heads in their cylindrical surgical caps, but at him. Her green eyes flashed across the lecture theater to him, and she didn’t look away even when he turned his head so as not to have to squint at her.

  That night he lay awake. His pillow was drenched in sweat, his feet itched, his chest swelled, and he sat up and made a decision. He stumbled through the dark to his desk and ejaculated everything that had been pent up inside him onto sheet after sheet of white paper. He wrote all night.

  In the morning he didn’t go and wait in the corridor; he went looking for Etina. When he found her, he walked straight up to her and asked what she had against the poetry of the great Mayakovsky—what had the man done to deserve her disdain? Taken aback, Etina said nothing, and Shura quickly explained that the parcel with the red bow had contained precisely that: Mayakovsky’s poems. And practically in the same breath Alexander Isaakovich asked Etina Natanovna if she’d marry him and she, almost as quickly, answered yes. She felt ashamed, but didn’t lower her eyes, because she’d learned never to lower her eyes—a socialist citizen didn’t look down.

  * * *

  —

  In 1939 they both graduated with honors, then came the war. If Russia’s knocked out, England’s last hope will be dashed. Then Germany will be master of Europe and the Balkans. We all know what happened next.

  Shura and Etya didn’t want to speak to me about the war years. Whenever I asked, they’d tell me about how they met, giving a different version each time—a very different version. Most of the things I know about the war, I know from the memoirs Shura wrote years later. By that time he was having trouble telling a spoon from a Biro, but then he’d been on the go for more or less an entire century. No one could say exactly how long, because the birth certificates were tinkered around with so much, but I do know that we celebrated his hundredth birthday before he closed his eyes for the last time. Those eyes remained alert to the end, and to the end he was writing astonishingly lucid thoughts on the tablecloth with his spoon.

  On 22 July 1941 Shura stood at the window of a friend’s flat in Balta, Etina’s parents’ city, watching tanks make their way down the main thoroughfare. When he looked up, he saw reconnaissance aircraft. Not long after, the first bombs fell.

  Balta was a very leafy city, and the trees were burning within minutes. Soon chunks of wall were raining down too, but the house where Shura was staying wasn’t hit. He ran out and, climbing over writhing—and no longer writhing—bodies, he tried to reach the hospital where his doctor friend was on duty. Low overhead, a plane was shooting at anything that moved, including Shura. By the time he got to the hospital, it had been bombed, but the ambulance parked outside was still in one piece. Shura found the driver hiding in the bushes and shook him until he agreed to help gather up the injured people and take them to a hospital farther out of town.

  Once in the ambulance, the driver refused to get out, and Shura couldn’t lift the injured people on his own. He saw a man pressed against the side of a crater and ran over to ask him for help. They drove around the city together, loading and unloading wounded bodies, and in the polyclinic on the city outskirts they shook hands and promised to see each other again.

  That day’s dispatch was: The Germans are advancing. They are close to Balta. Anyone who didn’t want to be captured or trapped in the besieged city should evacuate Balta immediately, leaving all their possessions behind.

  Shura made it to Odessa on the open tray of an AMO-F-15. The man next to him lay with his head burrowed in Shura’s jacket for the entire journey. Shura walked to his flat without seeing the city; he couldn’t have said whether he recognized it, whether it had been bombed or destroyed. All he knew was that he must get there, collect his pregnant wife and leave with her—take her away, to relatives in the east. When he arrived, the flat was empty. All the furniture, all the things were in their places, but there was no sign of Etina.

  Shura went next door and dragged his neighbor out into the corridor by his collar. The man’s alcohol-soaked breath made his face smart and the man said he knew nothing, hadn’t seen Etya for days, no idea where she was, but the whole town was running for their lives—it was hardly surprising if she’d cleared off too. Shura almost threw him over the banisters, but then threw him back into his flat instead and went out into the street. He decided to call on all his friends, one by one. Etina could be anywhere—but perhaps it was no bad thing that she wasn’t here; why should a heavily pregnant woman wait around by herself in a city-center flat? He tried to run, but his legs were numb and with every step it seemed less clear to him what he was supposed to do with his feet. He walked more and more slowly. H
e’d had nothing to eat for more than forty-eight hours, and barely anything to drink; it wasn’t hard to diagnose the reason for his dizziness. He knew that he urgently needed water; he only had to find a shop or a public lavatory, but it was hopeless because he couldn’t see anything of his surroundings. Aiming for the farthest point he could focus, he dragged himself along a street that seemed to soften and fray as he walked. He felt wind around his head, but it didn’t cool him, only ruffled his hair and made his ears smart. He wasn’t sure whether the bombing had already started in Odessa or whether it was the sun beating down.

  When the road began to curve downhill like an overstretched bow, Shura sat on the sidewalk and stared in front of him. Pressing two fingers to his throat to take his pulse, he tried to breathe steadily, and the sharp stench of piss stung his nose and throat. Then there was a scratching at his calf, and something tugged at him and moved in his trouser leg. He heard a rustle beneath his feet. Rats, was his first clear thought.

  He looked down at himself. The ground was heaving with gray furry creatures, but they weren’t rats; they were tiny inch-long cats, swarming around him, crawling up him, getting under his trousers and shirt. He leaped to his feet and began to shake himself; then he noticed a woman standing on the sidewalk watching him—a woman draped in so many shawls, he could see neither her face nor her body. She was smaller than Shura, but beneath the mountain of cloth she looked like a giant caterpillar in a cocoon, inching her way toward him. She reached out a matted arm to him and slapped him on the back, beating him like a dusty cushion. “There, there, my boy,” she murmured—or something like that. Shura could hear only mumbling; even her mouth was swathed in cloth. When she’d knocked the last cat from his body, she grabbed his hand and said: “Come with me.” Shura looked at her hand, rough as oak bark, a gnarled root growing around his wrist—then into her clear blue eyes beneath the colorful shawls. For a second he thought he was going to faint, then a cat bit his calf and with a cry he tore himself free and ran off.

  * * *

  —

  Etina was at Khava and Roman’s. She was sitting calmly at their kitchen table drinking black tea with quince jam when Shura came charging in. His hair was all over the place, his clothes looked as if the entire German army had had a go at them, there was blood on his trouser leg. He couldn’t get a word out; only made noises, pointing his finger at the door, the window, Etina—then starting all over again, jabbing his finger around the room. It was a quiet, hot day. The sun stole through the window onto the kitchen table, the parquet floor, Etina’s cheeks. She put down her tea glass and told her husband to sit down and have something to eat, all the time stroking her belly with her left hand. She’d made up her mind that nothing was going to stop her from looking forward to this baby—not the war, not her clearly crazed husband, and not the advancing Germans.

  * * *

  —

  After the Wehrmacht’s invasion of the Soviet Union, doctors were in demand. When Shura was appointed head of the evacuation hospital, he was only twenty-five and urgently needed to acquire an air of authority if he didn’t want his patients to gun him down before he’d had a chance to stitch them up. He grew a beard and a big bushy mustache to make himself look older, and smoked as much as he could to make his voice rougher, more manly, coarser, harsher. It never worked.

  The drugs he took didn’t make him older or harsher or coarser either. He was soon supplementing his corrosive Caucasian tobacco with caffeine tablets, and he drank too, though not much, more as a kind of mouthwash. There weren’t many ways of deadening your senses. Painkillers weren’t available at the front—not for patients or doctors—but later, when Shura had access to pharmaceuticals of every description, he used them all. Still he remained a soft, rather slow fellow with a voice that was pleasant to listen to.

  He spoke quietly, but very clearly, enunciating every syllable of every word like an actor, stressing the final vowels and respecting the melody of the sentences. He’d trained himself to look knowledgeable, and the patients trusted his close-knit eyebrows, his prominent nose, his earnest, focused eyes. They couldn’t believe that a man who looked and spoke as if he were reciting a socialist poem would allow them to succumb to necrosis. Often he could only half fulfill their hopes, and sometimes not even that, but hope isn’t meant to be fulfilled. If anything, hope fulfills us—for as long as it lasts.

  * * *

  —

  As head of the evacuation hospital, Shura was in charge of a cohort of doctors and a whole army of nurses and volunteers who scurried about like ants, hardworking but afraid that they might at any moment be squashed underfoot. Not so Shura. Since he’d run away from the cat woman in her cocoon of shawls and found Etina at Khava and Roman’s kitchen table, since Balta and everything around him had burned, it felt as if a trapdoor had slammed shut inside him with a crash that rang in his ears. He’d heard the clang of a metal hatch somewhere behind his Adam’s apple, and tasted the echo under his tongue, and ever since, he’d been missing one of humanity’s most primitive instincts. Here, in the middle of the war, he realized he could no longer feel something that was paralyzing everyone else around him: fear.

  He felt no fear when he saw the injured dying under his hands. He felt no fear when his daughter Emma was born and declared clinically dead, and no fear of the aftereffects when she was resuscitated. He felt no fear when his wife was fleeing from the advancing Germans with her father and the baby, and sent word that his father-in-law had been fatally wounded by a bullet when he’d thrown himself over the newborn to protect her.

  Shura heard all about the war and the atrocities committed by the armies, and when he held the results in his hands and fixed them up, he radiated a calm that seemed almost dangerous. There was something unnerving and hypnotic about it; Shura’s reactions were out of all proportion to the apparently disintegrating world around him. His pupils never dilated—or rather, they were always dilated; they rested on the people he spoke to, as if eating them up whole, and who can say whether it was the drugs in his system or a psychopathological dysfunction—a trauma, a shock, or maybe a kind of paralysis.

  “It is perhaps important to note,” Shura wrote in his memoirs, “that being free from fear is by no means the same as being courageous.”

  He was only a short distance from the front. Trains of injured people arrived every day; on some days there were about twenty wagons full of screaming half corpses who had to be operated on then and there—with or without anaesthetic, depending on the rations situation. Afterward, those with some hope of survival were sent farther east in the same trains, into the hinterland—and anyone who made it that far became a war hero.

  * * *

  —

  Etina and Shura are said to have worked miracles. They are said to have healed children who had played with grenades—patching them up and stroking their heads and releasing them into a glorious future. Armed with penicillin, though not with painkillers, they are said to have been present at all the crucial battles against the Germans, operating day and night, and narrowly saving the most important snipers from certain death. In this way they had a decisive effect on the battle of Stalingrad and the fate of the Soviet Union—and with it, the fate of the entire world. It is even said that Shura, for whatever reason, treated and healed a German officer.

  There are photos of Shura with Afanasyev—not the collector and editor of Russian fairy tales, but the Afanasyev from Pavlov’s House, the building that was able to hold out against the German Sixth Army for two months, and whose bullet-pocked facade was left as a reminder and stands there to this day like a piece of rotten Swiss cheese. It’s possible, then, that my great-grandparents were instrumental in holding the world together on the front line while simultaneously guiding the hand of Afanasyev, the legendary sniper of Stalingrad. Possible. Another version of the story has it that Afanasyev didn’t come to Shura for treatment until after the war, by which time he
’d already been blind for twelve years. The operation was a success and Afanasyev, with his newfound sight, leapt straight off the operating table into Shura’s arms, shouting: “Ya vizhu! Vizhu!” I can see! I can see!

  Either way, they were friends. There are black-and-white photos to prove it, one of which I have on my mantelpiece. It shows them drawing on the ground with sticks, as if Afanasyev were demonstrating something very important to Shura, in the scant sand on the shore of the Volga. They are both wearing bowler hats and long coats, and stand stooping low over their sketch of the future. The photo is from the sixties and could be a scene from one of Shura’s plays.

  Other people say there were no miracles—not during the war at any rate. Afterward, perhaps—but not in the Soviet Union. No one was saved and no painkillers could have helped ease what they saw and went through—no painkillers, no penicillin and no magical powers. A lot of people died—most people. The story of Shura and Etya’s survival is made up of fragments of memories, mumbled into their black tea. They slurped their tea noisily and the air around us was heavy with bergamot.

  * * *

  —

  After the war, Shura’s company stayed in Sumy, not far from Kharkiv, but a very long way from Odessa. Here he was appointed to the ministry of health as consultant and senior doctor, and very soon followed the party’s call to Chernivtsi.

  The invitation went like this: Come to Chernivtsi and choose yourselves somewhere to live, anywhere; size is no object. You can have whatever you like, even one of the former generals’ period apartments with five rooms and high windows—something Etinka had always dreamed of. The magnificent prewar houses on the edge of town are all standing empty too. Come and help yourselves.