* * *
—
The day after the wedding, Uncle Pavel rang to say he needed someone to take down the rug from Auntie Polina’s door—couldn’t Daniil come around? He’d do it himself, but it was more than he could manage these days; he was tired and done in, and a war veteran, too, don’t forget, with only an arm and a half. Daniil had known Polina Ismailovna when his grandparents were alive, and he was happy to see her—or rather, he thought it his duty; he made no distinction between the two sentiments. He liked the old crone with her misshapen head. Thick white hair covered her face and seemed to sprout out of every pore; only her crazy eyes penetrated the thick growth. He was glad to be able to help her.
Auntie Polina was lying on her mattresses, swathed in faded blankets of many colors and cursing like a trooper. At her snugly wrapped feet sat a creature that Daniil did not at first notice. It seemed so slight that he took it for a child to begin with—a child swaddled in layers of wool. The creature seemed to belong to the true working class, for she was dressed in their particular uniform, whose distinguishing feature was a cap with earflaps that came almost to the floor.
There are various opinions as to why Emma was wearing this uniform on the day in question. Some say her parents wanted to teach her to be modest and keep her head out of the clouds. Others say she was actually wearing a long skirt over woolen leggings and a thick khaki parka with a finely knitted wool scarf and rabbit-fur gloves and looked just the same as any other girl who spent her days sitting in unheated rooms. Either way, Daniil paid her no attention, but turned straight back to Auntie Polina after a polite “How do you do.”
He devoted himself entirely to the old auntie who gave him, from beneath her thicket of hair, a full and detailed account of her ailments, embellishing them as only a woman like that knows how. Daniil’s sense of duty began to wane; soon he was sick and tired of these seemingly never-ending stories that unspooled from the old auntie like an endless tapeworm. Besides, he was cold. So when Auntie Polina paused to swallow—her throat quite dry from the excitement of at last finding a new audience for the stories that had been so many lonely hours in the making—he took advantage of the pause to tell her to take life by the horns, to get up and live in spite of everything, in spite of diabetes and gangrene and whatever else.
“To hell with all that! Get up and go for a walk, Auntie Polina! It’s fine weather—cold but bracing; the fresh air will blow away your cobwebs.”
At this, the small creature at the foot of the mattress exploded beneath its many layers of clothes, making a noise like a beehive that’s been knocked to the ground: “What do you mean, to hell with everything? Auntie’s sick, very sick indeed. She needs peace and quiet and medicine, and you want to send her into the cold to a certain death! What gives you the right, you bully? Who do you think you are?” Emma still had the voice of a young girl, though it would one day be as powerful as her mother Etina’s.
Daniil and Polina stared at the young thing. Her cap had slipped down over her face; they could see only her lips quivering, maybe with anger, maybe with cold.
Emma pushed her cap off her forehead with a rabbit-fur hand and glared at Daniil. He said nothing. Then he reached inside his jacket, took a rolled-up cigarette out of his pocket and put in in his mouth.
“Don’t do that, I’m sick. No smoking in here,” said Auntie Polina, entering into the spirit of things.
Daniil put the cigarette away again, still silent, and the old auntie took the opportunity to resume her tales. Daniil was so mortified that he couldn’t listen. He didn’t know where to put himself, but he was too well brought up to leave the room. It was all his father’s doing.
After a while, the old auntie, who had been sitting up in bed and practically dancing on the mattresses, so invigorated had she been by her own stories, dropped back onto the pillows as if all her lifeblood had drained out of her. Softly, already half asleep, she murmured: “It’s late, take the girl home.”
Emma and Daniil trudged through the snow, not looking at one another. Emma didn’t think she needed accompanying, but pressed her lips together and said nothing, and Daniil didn’t think they needed to be silent, but had no idea what to say. They walked to Emma’s front door without exchanging a word, and there they shook hands.
* * *
—
Others say it was no chance that they met at Auntie Polina’s and that Emma was sitting at the foot of the bed in her long-eared cap, fluttering her eyes at Daniil. They say it was good old Jewish matchmaking—nothing unusual in those days—and that the family had examined young Pinkenzon very carefully, made inquiries and judged him acceptable. He was, after all, prettier than most, with his nice broad nose—not that Etina Natanovna approved of good looks. She said a man should be no more handsome than an ape; he’d only run away from you otherwise.
“You’re a fine one to talk,” Emma retorted. “You took the best-looking of them all!”
What could Etina say to that? Her daughter was right. Shura remained to his death a better version of Frank Sinatra.
In the end Etinka yielded. “The important thing,” she said, “is to marry someone you’re not embarrassed to divorce when the time comes.”
Shura was more laid-back about the whole thing—or else he simply didn’t care. When Daniil at last summoned the courage to drop in to tea with his future father-in-law together with his friend Genediy, who’d come from Grozny to spend his vacation in Chernivtsi, Alexander Isaakovich voiced enthusiasm over the young men’s decision to become geologists and asked what they thought of Fersman’s latest book Reminiscences about Stones. The young men looked at each other and then at the floor. The Chernivtsi flat betrayed nothing of Shura’s lowly origins in the gangster district of Moldavanka; now that his picture hung in the National Museum, he always wore a suit and a dark tie, even at home, even at teatime. Daniil too had donned a tie, but knew he couldn’t deceive anyone with the shirt he’d ironed himself and his filthy shoes—he’d cleaned them before setting off, but just try going anywhere in the Soviet Union without getting dirty. In his head, his mother’s voice was saying: “You can always judge a man by his shoes!” He looked into Shura’s dilated eyes, decided not to lie and confessed to not knowing the book—or indeed Fersman. Shura leaned toward Daniil, placed a hand on his shirt which was sweaty from all the excitement, and said: “I envy you young men. You have so much ahead of you.”
The verdict had been delivered. From then on, Daniil was always welcome, and each time he sweated a little less.
* * *
—
Orchestrated or not, the incident at Auntie Polina’s marked the beginning of a tentative courtship. Daniil would meet Emma from university and they’d debate about the advantages of classical medicine over the homeopathy practiced by the old village folk, about the films of Grigori Alexandrov, Emma’s father’s inventions, Emma’s decision to become a doctor like her parents, and the future of Communism. But the only topic they were really able to agree on was, can you believe it, the poetry of Nikolai Alexeyevich Nekrasov, and eventually Daniil said something about Emma’s eyes, and her face opened up like a butterfly and gleamed.
Later, when Emma was pregnant, Daniil confessed to her that when he’d found out who her father was, he’d thought of running away and never coming back, but by then he was already lost to that gleam in her face, a gleam that she managed to preserve in spite of Volgograd’s industrial smog, and all through perestroika—even after resettling in another country where she was changed forever more into a migrant woman in a pink beret and a yellow puffer jacket, unable to make herself understood in the supermarket.
* * *
—
During their student years they wrote each other letters. Daniil returned to Grozny full of the urge to write poems, something he’d previously thought of as a woman’s thing. He sent Emma observations from his walks in the steppe and Emma devoured
his letters, learning them all by heart and later recalling the lovely things in them—especially during arguments with her husband.
“Who wrote all those beautiful letters, you monster? Did you get your friends to do it for you—or one of your females?” She’d had a strict upbringing; coarser insults had no place in her vocabulary.
But Daniil had written every letter himself, for three whole years. During those three years he visited his future wife every winter and every summer—he couldn’t afford to see her more often.
They married in the summer of the fourth year. Etina took care of the invitations, and hordes of relatives came and processed through the streets of Chernivtsi with them to the registry office. Even before the marriage ceremony, the restless crowd began to dance and shout “Gor’ko! Gor’ko!” which means “Bitter! Bitter!” and is what Ukrainian wedding guests chant to get the bride and groom to kiss. Two photographers—one of them Shura—went on ahead. Emma and Daniil posed in front of the brass sign of the registry office, pointing at it with their be-ringed fingers and laughing. Daniil couldn’t stop kissing Emma’s temples and she kept having to straighten her cream felt melusine that slipped down over her face every time. In the photos she showed me, she is on the right, holding a bouquet of petrol-blue delphiniums, and Daniil is on the left, holding her arm. In the next photos, they’re on their honeymoon on the beach at Odessa. Emma, a Huck Finn hat on her head, is wearing a striped bathing suit cut low at the back and, in some pictures, a white cotton shirt over the top. She laughs into the camera, her face cupped in Daniil’s hands. Shura took the photos; the in-laws had tagged along to Odessa to wallow in reminiscences. Shura photographed Etina too, mainly from behind—mainly the back of her neck. In the photos that Emma and Daniil kept, the four of them look like sixties film stars. Move over Grigori Alexandrov! They stretch their bodies in the sun more provocatively than film stars of the time were allowed, and smile more broadly than I ever saw any of them smile.
There, on the beach at Odessa, the four of them decided to move to Volgograd, because Daniil had been offered a post there when he graduated and Shura held out hopes for a better job and a more decent salary. Every child born in Volgograd before perestroika was issued with a medal saying: Born in the City of Heroes. The year the young couple moved there with the in-laws, the city had just been renamed: Stalingrad was now Volgograd. The war had left a crumbled memory of a once magnificent town. Because it had been named after the great leader, there had been a rush to build it up again, and the colossal statue, The Motherland Calls, had been rammed into a hill in the middle of town. Chest out, mouth open, sword aloft, the Motherland was almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and down below, spread out at her feet, were the graves of fallen soldiers, the eternal flame, eternal remembrance—a Soviet Disneyland in several tons of concrete.
* * *
—
Emma and Daniil were given a room on the edge of town in a hall of residence belonging to the medical university, and when they first moved in, there was nothing in that room but a single bed and a window the exact same size as the bed. There are no photos of this room; only the story of how Daniil found Emma lying on the floor, curled up in pain, two months before she was due to give birth. He called for a doctor, who drove them from hospital to hospital looking for a free bed, only managing to get Emma admitted at the third attempt, by which time she was unconscious. It was assumed there was some problem with the fetus; Emma had been warned not to risk pregnancy with her frail health. Daniil held her hand all through the long hours spent driving from one hospital to the next, and later claimed that Emma had only been saved because the gynecologists in the third clinic knew who her father was and were afraid it wouldn’t look too good if they allowed the daughter of the great Professor Farbarjevich to die on them on the operating table.
“They wouldn’t even have examined her till the next day!” Daniil said, his eyes moist. “I saw them—standing around in the corridor smoking, they were, touching each other under their doctors’ coats. They wouldn’t have lifted a finger if I hadn’t kicked up a fuss! And then—”
He stopped and began to cough. Emma pushed a glass of water toward him and said: “You never drink, you don’t drink enough, why won’t you drink?”
He shook his head, his hand in front of his mouth, laughing and giggling—it sounded like a dog panting. “Let me get on with the story,” he said.
Emma looked out of the window, lost in thought, her broad-boned face as open as a butterfly’s wings.
“Are you cold?” Daniil asked her.
“Yes, I am. Did you turn the heating down?”
“No. Did you?”
“No, but then why is it so cold in here?”
“I don’t like you not eating, darling,” said Daniil, leaning across the table to me. “Is there nothing in the flat you fancy? I could make you something. Let me have a look; there must be something in the fridge you’d like. How about some dried apricots?”
I swallowed. I saw my ten-year-old self sneaking dried apricots in the kitchen, balancing on a cardboard box to reach to the back of the cupboard where Emma hid them from me. “Don’t you go touching them. I bought them for Danya. They’re good for his heart. If you want something sweet, you can help yourself to a caramel.”
I realized that Emma and Daniil must have known all along that I’d stolen them, cramming into my trouser pockets what I couldn’t fit in my mouth.
“Will you let me make you coffee?” I asked Danya, looking up from the table that was strewn with photographs.
“I’ll make it myself. Don’t get up.” He shuffled into the kitchen. “Tell me some more about this book you’re reading,” he called through the door.
* * *
—
I watched my grandparents moving slowly around the room, twiddling the knob on the radiator, opening and shutting the curtains, putting their hands on each other’s shoulders. Now that they’d opened up to me, arguing in front of me about the possible interpretations of their lives, muddling their way through the various phases and stages, I felt that I owed it to them to say something about myself—not sidetrack them again by talking about books. I wanted to tell them a bit about what I’d done in Istanbul, how I’d tried to find Anton. And about the stubble on my face. They knew nothing and I was to blame. For a long time, talking about myself had been as impossible as asking Daniil and Emma why socialism had failed—some things you don’t talk about. But the situation was different now. These polite, reserved people I’d grown up with had revealed something of themselves; these people I’d seen cry over politics and social security payments had forged a path for me, and now, with their broad, open faces and piercing anxious eyes, they sat naked before me, making me feel I was hiding behind their beliefs about who I was. I’d returned from the Bosporus as a version of myself they didn’t know and didn’t question—or if they had, they hadn’t ever let it show. They treated me like something familiar in a different guise. Did they think I’d followed a new trend and that the old me was still lurking somewhere underneath?
Or maybe I really was still the granddaughter they knew; maybe I looked no different to them. Close relatives always store a younger version of you in their memories, superimposing it on the aging, changing body that visits them once a month, once every six months. Perhaps they still saw me with shoulder-length hair, riding my bike in circles under their window, my left arm sticking out, my teeth gappy like in the photo in the cabinet behind them, the one next to the picture of their daughter that’s also several years out of date, on the same shelf as the two plastic hydrangeas and the menorah.
Back then, I was still used to thinking about myself from outside myself, in the third person—a story belonging to somebody else. So I told them a story, hoping they wouldn’t leave me there, at one remove, but pull me back in, hug me, or at least look at me—even that would mean a lot. I knew I couldn’t expect the
m to understand the story, but they listened as I told them about Ali and how she became Anton.
T
Ali had lived with Elyas ever since coming to Berlin—far from her divorced parents, far from her grown brother who’d moved back in with their mum, far from a father who was always leaving confused, drunk messages on her answering machine, which she sometimes deleted without hearing them through to the end.
They’d met at a party, both clutching glasses of vodka, both in a bad mood, both wearing well-fitting shirts. The other guests were a mass of fluorescent polyester tops, pink undershirts, black leather open-toed shoes, faded trucker caps over unkempt hair, yellow faces with red lips, orange lips, black lips, glittery lips. Ali and Elyas had both, independently of one another, felt turned off. People rushed past them, asking questions, rolling cigarettes, taking sips from glasses that weren’t theirs and twisting their lips into grimaces learned from the movies. They felt watched; they were watched; they stuttered and laughed. Ali and Elyas’s eyes met across the room; their gazes brushed. Elyas’s eyes were set close together, angled toward his nose like arrows. He was wearing square, horn-rimmed glasses and when he smiled, his ears shot up. Ali was sure he could waggle them.
Beside Myself Page 18
