Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  * * *

  —

  Kostya got his first job in a factory just after the Chepanov family had moved out of the home; it was so grueling that it was a struggle for him to get back to the flat at knocking-off time. He had to drag himself up to the attic by the banister rail and once inside, he crawled onto the sofa, too tired to talk. When the children squabbled or got up to God knows what else, he’d summon up the last of his strength to yell at them, but other than that he was quiet. He usually worked night shifts and came home when it was getting light and the flat was already empty. His wife would be out working—she was always working—and the children would be at school. He’d fall asleep immediately, his arm over his face, and be woken by the racket when the children came in. Nothing is as loud as children coming home from school. He’d heave himself up, drag himself into the kitchen and make chicken broth and buckwheat porridge which he’d mix together and then eat himself, the whole pot, because he knew his children wouldn’t touch it, and his wife wouldn’t be back till late. For Ali and Anton there were shrink-wrapped hamburgers in the fridge, a pack of two, stuck together along their cheesy edges. Kostya heated them up in the microwave and the twins stood in the kitchen, wide-eyed, watching the buns swell like balloons as they went around and around on the turntable.

  But their eyes grew wider still when Kostya bundled them into the car and drove them to McDonald’s. They fought over the passenger seat and then both had to sit in the back. They played with the seat belts, cranked down the windows and stuck out their heads, squealing with delight, like kittens. Kostya told them to close the windows, but it was pointless—this was before he had a car with an automatic window lock—and he told them to strap themselves in, something he’d never done himself before having children. When the two of them were in the car with him, he lowered the rearview mirror so he could keep an eye on them, and sometimes the sight of the pair of them biting each other’s shoulders brought tears to his eyes.

  He bought them everything they wanted, everything he could afford—extra hamburgers on top of their Happy Meals, crispy chicken wings that Anton had all to himself, Coke and Fanta—and when Ali cried because she was missing a figurine from the Happy Meal collection, Kostya went up to the spotty boy at the deep fryer and talked a mishmash of all the languages that came into his head until the boy went off and came back with the missing toy. All this was restricted to Sundays, when Kostya had the day off—until he got wind of the fact that Jews were allowed to take Fridays and Saturdays off without being fired.

  “Shabbos,” he said, laughing like mad. “Shabbos! Can you believe it?” He slapped Valya on the back like an old friend. “They really mean it—I can work less because Shabbat shalom!”

  “The children want to go on Klassenfahrt,” said Valya who was filling out the application for leave.

  “What’s that?” Kostya stopped laughing and looked fierce at the sound of the German word.

  “The whole class is taking a trip up north and staying three nights. It’s all organized by the school.”

  “Why?”

  “What do I know? It’s what they do here.”

  “And I have to pay?”

  “They’ll never make friends otherwise. They go about dressed like schleps, never go out, eat all that crap you stuff into them. Soon they’ll look like us—is that what you want?”

  Kostya looked at his wife’s face, which seemed to be pitted all over, even her forehead. Her skin and eyes were covered in an unhealthy sheen, and her legs and upper arms had puffed up like the white burger buns in the microwave.

  Kostya ripped up the application for religious leave and put in extra shifts to scrape together the money for the school journey. Although Valya had work in the hospital at that point, she wasn’t yet being paid. She’d been told she’d never get any kind of job, not even part-time, if she didn’t do some sort of internship first—a bit of unpaid slave labor. But six months later she really did end up getting a job, and not long after that she had a grant too, and her boss did what he could to help, and so it went on until Valya was earning good money—unimaginably good for a doctor used to socialism, where no one had any idea that it was even possible to earn that much. Where Valya had trained, doctors were paid the same as builders—and less, if they didn’t accept the envelopes that were slipped into the pockets of their white coats—but here Valya’s salary would soar to heights that neither Valya nor Kostya could ever have imagined. They went up and down the supermarket aisles, pushing the world’s biggest shopping cart and chucking things in until jars of frankfurters were cascading down the sides of a mountain of groceries.

  But that wasn’t until later. For the moment, Kostya was putting in extra shifts in spite of Shabbat shalom, so that the children could go on a school trip to Lake Steinhude. Ali and Anton came back early with fever and diarrhea and Valya made them chew black charcoal tablets that she’d brought from home.

  “That’s what comes of sending them away,” muttered Kostya, standing helplessly next to the twins’ bed. He’d have liked to hug them and hold them tight to stop them crying, but Valya was lying half on top of them, stroking their cheeks.

  * * *

  —

  Kostya took a cigarette, lit it, stubbed it out again, had a shower, shaved (with his two-blade razor), put on a clean shirt and picked up a bottle of Yeltsin vodka at the filling station.

  He was the first to arrive. Vova took his jacket and the bottle.

  “Come in! Come in!”

  “Do you mind if I—?” Kostya asked, the second he was in the flat.

  “Go ahead.”

  Kostya sat down at the keyboard. He tested the pedals and the sound, then ran his fingers over the black plastic surface, peered at his fingertips and got up and went into the kitchen.

  “Hello, Galina.”

  “Hello, Kostya.”

  Galina was standing at the stove in a brightly colored apron, frying something sweet and sickly smelling. He walked past her and took a cloth from the sink, then returned to the keyboard and gave it a thorough wipe before sitting down and pressing Beethoven into the keys, his swollen foot pumping the damper pedal. Vova and Galina let him play undisturbed until the room was full of guests and they decided they’d had enough of “that tinkling of yours” and put on a CD.

  A mountain of vobla lay on a spread of newspaper. Vova nimbly scraped off the dry, silvery gray scales, pulled the salty flesh off the backbone, teased it into shreds and piled it onto a plate that the guests instantly fell upon; he could only just keep up. The dried fish stared at Kostya with their red eyes; he stared back and then began to help Vova, grabbing a fish by its fins and pulling them off.

  “So how’s life?” asked Vova, helping himself to a big piece of fish and beginning to chew. Kostya did the same; the salty crust made his tongue tingle.

  “Azohen vey. Makes me want to puke.”

  “That good?” said Vova.

  “Oh, you know, the usual, but if my foot isn’t soon—”

  “You’re being paid not to work. What are you complaining about? Does it hurt?”

  “No, it doesn’t hurt—just gets me down. Can’t help thinking of my mother.”

  “How Jewish of you.”

  Vova looked across the room at a cluster of women, smoking at the window.

  “Who’s the girl over there at the window?”

  “My wife.”

  “Ha ha. I can see that. I meant the one next to her, with the black hair.”

  “That’s Vika. She’s Chechen.”

  “No!”

  “But one of ours.”

  “How do you mean, one of ours? Jewish black widow or what?”

  “Never heard of Jewish terrorists?”

  “Chechen, eh? But she’s got some ass on her, my God, and if she smokes, she’ll drink—”

  Kostya gulped down the vobla in h
is mouth like a boiled sweet, breathed into the hollow of his hand to smell his breath, wished he hadn’t, chased the salt fish with a slug of Yeltsin, belched softly, hiked up his jeans, hobbled over to the Chechen woman and got Galina to introduce him.

  “What’s the matter with your foot?” Vika asked. “Do you always walk like that?”

  “Stupid business. Got my bones mashed up by a generator.”

  “A generator. I see. What happened?” Vika dragged on her cigarette and Kostya noticed her long fingers and her long, raspberry-colored nails.

  “Maybe I took a running kick at it.”

  Vika gave a loud laugh. He lit a cigarette for her and they talked about waiting for better weather and how it was better to wait for that than for nothing at all. They dragged on their cigarettes, inhaling and exhaling together, and two weeks later she moved in with him.

  He was still on sick leave, so they had time to drive to the “dacha,” as they called the allotment shed that had once belonged to Vika’s husband. He wasn’t around anymore; he’d gone back—back to the mountains, back to the steppe, back to another woman, whatever.

  “Really gone?” asked Kostya, because he didn’t want the husband appearing at the door with an axe, while he was having it off with Vika on the bench in the shed.

  “Really gone,” said Vika, pulling him toward the bench.

  * * *

  —

  At first everything was all right. Then everything was the same as ever.

  Kostya came home with a net of miniature cheeses in red wax shells, stuttering excitedly: “Look what I’ve got.” Vika didn’t understand what he was so thrilled about; she found Babybel revolting. She hadn’t been there when Kostya had seen his first red-wax-coated Edam in the chilled-food section of a shop in Chertanovo and carried it home like a piece of expensive jewelry. Kostya remembered Valya’s face as they cut the cheese; he remembered the sound of the wax rind as it cracked open. The little balls of cheese he’d bought this time had tiny wax tongues you could pull to make the cheese fall out of the rind all by itself. He ate the whole net alone at the kitchen table. Vika was somewhere else.

  More and more often, he dreamed of his children—that he saw them in a crowd on the street, but they didn’t recognize him or pretended not to—and once that he chucked a shoe at them. He sometimes called Vika “Valya” in bed, and his belly grew bigger and bigger, until he wondered whether he couldn’t just have it chopped off—cut away with an enormous saw. Then came the call from Misha, telling him that his father had died. That meant one thing: there was now a flat belonging to him in Moscow.

  Moscow was one of the most expensive cities in the world. Kostya saw a gloopy mass of brown banknotes swimming before his eyes like honey. He pictured himself in a new Mercedes and Vika in new clothes and high-heeled shoes. He saw himself fucking her on the backseat of the car, parked right in front of the factory so that the boys inside would hear the screams. He told Vika about his father, but didn’t mention the flat; she said she’d go to the funeral with him if he liked and he said: “Whatever.” He lay awake for nights on end, dreaming about how much he’d get for the flat and all the things he could do with the money—like buy himself a trip to America—and then one night, it came to him in a flash. He woke with a jolt, twisted his face into a smile, opened his eyes wide. Suddenly everything was clear to him and he started to cry. Vika was lying beside him on her belly, her open lips pressed into the pillow and pushed toward him in a pout, like a fish’s; she let out a deep breath through her mouth. Kostya looked at her, then past her, and got out of bed, still crying.

  At work, he explained that his father had died. Then he bought himself a ticket, one-way only. He wouldn’t let Vika join him. “I must do this alone,” he said.

  Soon the funeral was out of the way and Kostya was sitting at Misha’s kitchen table, while Misha doodled on loose sheets of paper.

  “Still the old cartoons?”

  “What else? It’s the only thing that stops me.”

  “Stops you what?”

  “From smashing in my wife and children’s heads.”

  “I see.”

  “What about yours?”

  Kostya looked at Misha’s doodles.

  “Can you help me find a buyer for the flat?” he said.

  “I’ll ask around,” said Misha.

  * * *

  —

  Kostya knew what he wanted. He didn’t want a Mercedes, he didn’t want Vika in high heels to fuck on the backseat, he didn’t want his furnished flat and his shitty factory job—and what he really, really didn’t want was to have to hear the German language ever again; it had given him nothing but grief. Kostya had made up his mind to go back.

  He wasn’t good at making plans. He didn’t really know what it meant to move to another country; Valya had seen to everything when they’d left for Germany and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to think of moving to Moscow as moving to another country; to him it was just going back—going home. He didn’t realize there’s no such thing.

  His plan was to rent a little city-center flat. They were expensive, of course, but he thought he’d be making money—and not just from the sale of his parents’ flat. After all, the cupboards were full of Adidas tracksuits and gold watches and chains; it was quite possible that the place was so jam-packed with valuables that the contents were worth as much as the flat itself. He thought, too, of those preserving jars full of dollar bills under the sink.

  Kostya began to sell off the valuables, then he bought more—he started to invest, to speculate, something he was particularly bad at; the money slipped through his fingers. Still, he was happy. He walked around the city, got stuck in traffic jams, lost his temper at the jeweler’s, gave his father’s suits away to visiting friends. One of the friends who’d helped carry his piano up to the fourth floor all those years ago promised Kostya to help move the same piano to his new city-center flat as soon he’d found one. When he left, Kostya gave him a gold watch. He lay on his father’s two mattresses, listening to the upstairs neighbors shouting at each other, and grinning to himself because he understood every word. When a buyer was found who was prepared to shell out half a million for the flat, Kostya laughed hysterically. He wanted to ring Valya right away to tell her, then he remembered that those days were over.

  Documents were drawn up and certified, hands were shaken, a notary recorded everything and asked for cash in hand. When the money didn’t appear and didn’t appear in Kostya’s account, he sat at Misha’s kitchen table, smoking cigarette after cigarette, jiggling his feet up and down and stuttering to himself. “It’ll come,” Misha said. “Don’t worry.”

  But when Kostya took a taxi to the notary’s office, a journey of four hours in that part of town, spent, as usual, stuck between honking Volvos and jeeps (the fare almost bankrupted him, but he no longer had a car of his own), and when, on his arrival, he found the office shut up and no one around who could tell him where the supposed notary might be, there was no use pretending he didn’t know what had happened.

  He returned one last time to Krasnyi Mayak 13, Block 2, Flat 120. He went into the living room, flung open the window, hung out over the windowsill and shouted. He left the window open, walked through the almost empty rooms and knelt down by the burn holes his children had left in the carpet, then went into the hall, leaned against the kitchen doorframe and stared at the plastic tablecloth with the pattern of blue flowers that his father had scored with a knife, at the little television set that was still sitting on top of the fridge even though it hadn’t had any picture or sound for years, and at the stove that was as spotless as if it had never been cooked on. Then Kostya’s eyes fell on the improvised growth chart marked on the doorframe in blue Biro. It stopped at 132 centimeters. Two almost straight lines were labeled vertically in his own handwriting, one marked Anton, the other Alissa, and beside the names were numbers:
/>   1987—82 cm

  1988—91 cm

  1991—110 cm

  1994—126 cm

  1995—132 cm

  Kostya ran first his eyes along the lines, then his fingers. He scraped them with his fingernail; he spat on them and tried to wipe them off with his thumb; he rubbed and rubbed with the flat of his hand, but the Biro had gnawed its way into the white paint, so he yanked at the doorframe, took the door off its hinges, prized the growth chart off the wall, carried it into the bedroom, put it on the two mattresses and lay down beside it.

  For three days he lay in his childhood flat and cried. He puked in the bathtub, smeared the windows with shit, pissed on the Turkish carpet, aiming for the burn holes, smashed all the lightbulbs and made sure he left the place as he wished it to be found.

  He didn’t say goodbye to anyone. Misha drove him to the airport; they hardly spoke. Kostya boarded the plane with the taste of salty dill gherkins on his tongue. On the flight, he looked at brochures of Germany and leafed through glossy catalogues, and when he got back to Vika with her long raspberry-colored nails and her long-fingered hands, he saw that those long fingers of hers were stained yellow from nicotine. He hadn’t noticed before.

  VALYA

  “I met Kostya the day he brought home his engineering degree, and that’s how he was presented to me: a qualified man with a certified degree—job guaranteed. All that was wanting was a wife, and not just any wife, but a proper Jewish one—and there I was at the door. You can imagine, can’t you? They’d got their teeth in me; I still have the marks. On the fourth day, Kostya said: ‘You’re my wife.’ Just like that. Didn’t ask. Nobody asked. Nobody waited for an answer either. And all this time he was in love with another woman, a regular goy. The love of his life, she was. Shame he didn’t have the balls to marry her.”