Ali scooped up cold water in the brass dish and emptied it over her face, running her hand over her neck and breasts. A stout old woman with blue bruises under her buttocks, her thighs spongy from decades in these damp rooms, was washing a young girl on the hot stone. With a gloved hand, she scrubbed the soles of the girl’s feet, her legs, belly, face; then she turned her over and massaged her back and scalp, swung the foam bag to and fro until it billowed with damp air, and pressed a cloud of foam through the cloth onto the girl’s body. The girl’s eyes were black raisins in a mountain of soapsuds. She coughed, her mouth full of soapy water, and the old woman wiped her face with her broad hand and began to scrub her with the foam bag.
Ali glanced at Kato, who was rubbing the soles of his feet with a pumice stone, staring straight ahead into the steam. The curly black hairs on Kato’s breasts were growing thicker and thicker—he’d stopped plucking them—and a faint black trail ran from his belly button into the disposable plastic pants. His calves were already covered in black hairs.
“Kato, could I take some of that stuff too?”
Ali had got up and went to stand in front of him, her mons level with his nose. He looked up at her, past her flat breasts and pointy chin; her eyes, dark hollows in the steam, were turned on him.
“What stuff?”
“I want to start on testosterone too. Where do I get it?”
Kato pulled her down by her thighs and put his hands on her shoulders. “Everywhere,” he said. “The question is, what do you want it for?”
* * *
—
I hadn’t prepared an explanation. I didn’t have a speech ready, or a confession—not even a vaguely worded wish. Something in me had spoken and I followed the words that flew out of me like birds, assuming they knew where they were going. Migratory birds have compasses in their beaks that take their bearings from the Earth’s magnetic field; they know things with their eyes shut; they know everything as long as nobody breaks their beaks. So I trusted them. I let them fly and followed them and decided it must be right, more right than anything I could have come up with if I’d sat down and racked my brain for words.
It may sound strange, but what I was afraid of—or what I most clearly remember being afraid of—wasn’t the injections, or hearing my voice break, or going bald, or growing hair on my back. It wasn’t the looks on the street or the looks inside myself. What I distinctly remember being afraid of—and continue to fear to this day—is that being a son would mean turning into my father. Sometimes I wake with this thought even today; I hear his voice in mine when I get loud, and see his face before me when I inspect my thinning hair and my thickening chin. He never taught me how to shave—of course he didn’t—but today, when I stand at the bathroom mirror, I often see him beside me, telling me what to do. My razor has five blades, which he thinks ridiculous. He only had two blades when he was my age, he tells me, breathing out noisily as if to say there’s no hope for me. Then we both laugh and lift our razors to our left cheeks. I don’t dare take the aloe vera shaving foam for sensitive men when he’s around; I don’t want him thinking I’m a wimp, so it’s a wet shave—the bare blades along the cheekbones—and afterward, when we slap aftershave on our faces, we both close our eyes. When I open mine, he’s gone. And of course I wish he could see me now, though I know it’s impossible that he’d ever understand who I am. I expect the same goes for most fathers. Most people from other worlds. And I know too that it’s just as impossible that I’ll ever know who he was, or who exactly I was so afraid of. I can only imagine him—can only piece together words and pictures to try to get some idea of his last weeks. To work out who he was before he plummeted off Vika’s balcony.
* Fuck off!
KOSTYA
Kostya dialed the number for the eighth time that day, and for the eighth time an electronic voice told him that the person he was calling didn’t feel like going to the phone. He hadn’t thought he’d left any room on his daughter’s voice mail and was surprised that the same announcement was still asking him to leave a message. All he could think of was: “God, you’re such a cunt.” He recorded the words and flung his phone down on the table.
His foot was swollen, but didn’t hurt half as much as his head. He should have given the booze a miss yesterday; he should give the booze a miss altogether. He wasn’t a drinker. He didn’t like the smell; he didn’t like the taste; he didn’t like what it did to him and the people around him—especially the women. If she smokes, she’ll drink; if she drinks, she’ll yield, went an old Russian proverb—he’d tried to din that into his daughter, who’d smoked at a very early age; she’d had fags in her mouth and filched his lighters even before she filled a bra. Over and over he’d said it to her: “Esli kurit, znachit p’et, esli n’et znachit daet.” But the girl didn’t understand; she must have been too young, and he was damned if he was going to explain it to her. She’d see soon enough what came of it—a flat chest for one thing.
He lit up and spat on the floor. He should quit smoking too—another thing he didn’t actually like. He’d started because everyone else had—same as with almost everything he’d started, except for making music.
His fingers itched and he squeezed them into a fist and then flexed them, looking at the hairs on the backs of his hands, coppery and gray. Real man’s hands they were now, with thick calloused fingers. His mother would have liked them, he thought. His mother who, all his childhood, had shouted at him for being so skinny. “Bloody hell, boy, are you anorexic? Eat up your dessert! You can’t even lift a chair with those noodles you’ve got hanging from your shoulders, and you want a bleeding accordion!”
Kostya didn’t like the dessert his mother put in front of him—apple gratin with matzo and raisins, slippery as custard; it tasted of eggs and butter and sugar, and the raisins swam in it like melon pips—but he applied himself to it diligently because he loved his mother and because she was shouting at him.
Now he’d have given his fingers to eat that mush and hear his mother’s voice.
* * *
—
He picked up his phone again and called Vova. There was always a party at Vova’s; you could always call him when your sense of male pride flipped over into naked loneliness—and Vova had a keyboard that Kostya was allowed to play whenever he liked, or at least until Vova’s wife, Galina, decided it was time for Russian pop songs and put on a CD. Kostya hated those songs. They all sounded the same, like a never-ending advertising jingle—not that the people flinging their arms and legs about on the music videos looked as if they were about to smile into the camera to advertise anti-aging moisturizer. The climax usually came at around midnight when Galina put on Verka Serduchka’s “Vsyo budet khorosho” and everyone sang along hysterically as if they believed it. Everything will be fine—that’s what he sang, that guy in drag who sounded like he had his mouth full of Vaseline—that fat scarecrow, round as a fucking disco ball, in that silver-starred cap of his—that lying Ukrainian queen. Everything will be fine. In his music videos he knocked back shots with policemen and kissed men and women. Yeah sure, everything will be fine. Everything will be just great. First he’d been banned from entering Russia, then he’d been banned from singing, but still his paean to optimism blared out of the speakers at every Russian party.
“Vovchik, why do you put up with this gay music?” Kostya asked Vova as they lay in each other’s arms, their clothes damp from the vodka and the muggy air. The ceiling was only a little way above them and seemed to be coming closer and closer.
“You can’t talk, Kostya. I’ve seen you jumping up and down to this song.” Vova buried his sweaty forehead in Kostya’s armpit and fell asleep with his arms around him. Vova was always there for Kostya.
* * *
—
He picked up straightaway.
“How’s your foot?” he asked cheerily.
“Stinky. How about yours?”
>
“I was looking at this men’s magazine at the garage the other day and apparently—you’re not going to believe this—women like it when men wear foot deodorant. It turns them on.”
“Was this a German magazine?”
“Think so.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“What are you up to? Do you want to come around? I’ve got fresh vobla. Semön’s just back from Moscow and he’s brought heaps of the stuff; it took a whole newspaper to wrap all the fish.”
Kostya surprised himself by wincing at the word Moscow. Then he thought, no, that’s not why I winced. The pain in his foot felt like fire.
“Yeah, okay, why not? I’ll come around.”
* * *
—
There were no photos on the walls of Kostya’s flat; he didn’t even have one of his mother, who’d died the year before. She’d had diabetes for as long as he could remember, but it hadn’t kept her from eating sugar from the bowl with her fingers; she’d carried on even when she started to go blind. Valya had begged her to stop: “Please, I’ll get you medicine, good medicine, but you must eat less sugar or it’s no use.” Kostya’s mother had squinted at the floor and crunched a sugar lump between her few remaining teeth.
Then came the gangrene on her feet. First her toes turned scaly, then green and furry like seaweed, then black as a root and eventually they rotted away altogether. She could hardly walk, and dragged herself around the flat, holding onto the furniture. When Kostya saw his mother’s feet on one of his last visits to her and watched her inch her way along a chest of drawers, he began to shout at her: he’d had enough; he was going to take her to Germany to see some proper doctors who treated people like human beings. He knew there was no point in yelling and crying and pleading with her, but that only made him louder. His mother was rotting away in Flat 120 on the fourth floor of this block in Chertanovo—the very flat he’d grown up in—and he was powerless to help. His father spent most of the day lying in the bedroom on his two mattresses and staring at the ceiling. When he wasn’t doing that, he was at the kitchen table with his abacus, his fingers darting over the clacking wooden beads as he mumbled to himself, staring at the table as if in delirium.
Kostya had sent money—money that Valya had earned and a little that he’d earned himself—and he went on sending money until he found it all in preserving jars under the sink—fine, green dollar bills, scrunched up into a kind of compote in tightly sealed jars, beneath the packet of laundry powder and a box of chocolates that had been past their best-before date even before Kostya had brought them from Germany. From then on, he and Valya sent medicine, food and even clothes, knowing full well that they too would end up stashed away in cupboards. By the time Kostya’s mother was hospitalized, her body had been eaten away right up to her hips. He wanted to call Semön immediately to book flights, but didn’t know how many tickets to buy. He rang his son who didn’t pick up, but sent a text asking what he wanted. Kostya wrote back: “Your grandmother’s dying.” Anton called and they argued for half an hour, then Anton hung up, or rather, he threw his phone at the wall. That was one of the last times he spoke to his father.
Then Kostya phoned his daughter. She didn’t pick up or text him or call him back, although he left messages until her voice mail was full. He didn’t even bother trying Valya.
It was fucking freezing at the funeral, a merciless Moscow autumn. There was no one at the cemetery but him, his father and his cousin Misha—and Misha had only come out of politeness. They stood there with red noses and their hands in their coat pockets at the side of a freshly dug hole that looked as if it might be empty; they couldn’t really see anything in the biting wind, and shifted, shivering, from one leg to the other until eventually Kostya said: “Nu ladno. Khvatit.” All right then. That’s enough.
They piled into Misha’s old Lada and drove home.
* * *
—
They drove at twenty kilometers an hour; the white mud-spattered jeep in front kept braking, as if it were sinking; behind, a Volvo with a dented roof tooted its horn. Kostya could see the driver’s twisted face in the rearview mirror. They were stuck for hours until eventually Kostya’s anger erupted. He yelled all the expletives he knew, and when he ran out, he began to invent some more.
At home the air was stale; the central heating had been turned on for the winter. The men flung open all the windows and went into the kitchen. Sitting on the table were a handful of sushki and a forlorn-looking jar of jam. With Kostya’s mother dead, the kitchen table felt like something of a challenge and none of the men knew what to do; they stared into the corners of the room or up at the ceiling. Nobody spoke. Then Kostya got up and went to the fridge. He took out white bread, sausage and butter, laid three knives and opened a tin of homemade salty dill gherkins from under the sink.
They drank, but not a lot. Kostya was the first to puke on the table; bits of gherkin flew all over the walls. He couldn’t hold his drink; he knew he couldn’t.
* * *
—
The flat that Kostya had moved into after the divorce had three rooms—more than he needed, more than he’d ever thought he’d have. There was a living room, a bedroom and another room, which he didn’t know what to do with. At first he’d thought it could be a spare room, for when people came to stay. After all, he wouldn’t be on his own all the time; the children or whoever would come and see him, wouldn’t they? It was ages since he’d last set foot in there, except to fetch the ironing board or the drying rack—and they were right by the door; he didn’t even have to turn the light on. He’d taken the flat furnished; his daughter had found it for him and filled out all the papers. She’d looked after him to begin with, even interpreting for him at the divorce proceedings.
Kostya hadn’t organized an interpreter for himself. “They should be glad if I turn up at all,” he’d said to Semön, who’d kept topping up his glass. Kostya felt that it was his children’s duty to help him—why had he had children, if not to get him out of the shit when he was in it? He’d slogged himself half to death so they could learn this foreign language; now it was only fair that they did their bit, not some lousy German bureaucrat who knew nothing about life. Semön could understand that. Ali agreed right away to act as interpreter; she guessed what was coming. Kostya had no idea.
Outside the courthouse they shook hands. Kostya greeted Valya as if she were a stranger and offered around cigarettes. Valya didn’t even look at him, but stared at her daughter’s shaved-off eyebrows, and tried to make sense of it all. Kostya and Ali smoked in the drizzle. Valya and her lawyer stood pressed up against the door and looked at their watches.
The echo of footsteps hung in the corridors like stale air. The rubber soles of Ali’s sneakers squeaked. In the courtroom, they sat facing each other—the judge on Kostya’s left; Ali on his right, and Valya opposite, next to her lawyer. Kostya understood nothing, or only very little, of what was said. He did notice that Ali, close to his ear, translated rather less than the judge seemed to be saying, but he was too confused to question it. Ali summed up the essentials, and after a while she whispered: “You must say you agree.”
“But I don’t,” Kostya said. He began to get loud. He was scared and agitated; he suddenly had no idea what was going on and what consequences it would have for him. It was as if he’d just woken up. He screamed like a child and began to utter words that Ali couldn’t have translated even if she’d wanted to, because her fund of Russian expletives was limited at that time. She didn’t tell him to stop; she just kept saying: “Dad, you must speak more slowly. You’re stammering. I can’t understand what you’re saying.” Across the room, she saw the color drain from her mother’s face as if someone had pulled the stopper from a pouch of blood. The judge asked what Kostya wanted and Ali said: “Nothing. He’s just asking about the maintenance settlement.”
“Vsyo budet khorosho,” sings Verka Ser
duchka. Everything will be all right. Kostya, of course, had no idea that his own daughter was lying to him, translating things he hadn’t said at all, for fear he might put the divorce off even longer than he already had. Valya, listening to Ali juggling words between the judge and her father, understood all too well and sat there motionless. It was as if she were frozen, like that time in the kitchen when Anton had come in and seen his sister struggling at the wall—except that this time, Valya’s mouth wasn’t as wide open.
Kostya left the courtroom a divorced man. Ali went with him to Vova’s place where he’d been living since moving out. She drank three shots with him and said: “Dad, I’m going to help you.”
And she had. She’d found him the flat, read through his applications and even helped him practice phrases for a job interview, which turned out to be a waste of time because after a polite “Thank you for coming,” the department manager at the VW factory had switched into Russian. Kostya had put on his best shirt. His eyes were swollen shut, it’s true, but you had to give it to him, he had a charming smile and laughed like one of those cocky young men you might expect to see leaning against the wall in a Moscow bar, one leg bent, a fag in the corner of the mouth. Kostya had never been in those bars—his parents would never have let him—but he had the smile and it was wonderful.
He got the job. All his colleagues spoke his mother tongue, or near enough—Ukrainian, Circassian. They got on well, laughed together, smoked together, touched each other’s shoulders when they passed in the corridors. Ali came to see Kostya regularly to begin with, and he told her what it had been like to leave his parents and find himself on his own—only his fucking work and the fucking weekends when nobody spoke to him and nobody cared about his backache. No one had thought to ask how he was, although they all knew he’d worn a back brace for years. Put his back out for good, he had, but nobody was there for him. Not even Ali, in the end.
Beside Myself Page 21
