That was the moment I realized I had been deluding myself into thinking I’d want to hear what Valya had to tell me, no matter what it was.
Today she was wearing a discreetly checked green blouse that hugged her shoulders and flowed over her body—a body that looked imposing when she held herself straight. She wasn’t looking at me, but right through me, reading a script off my face, like a newsreader following a teleprompter—except that in her case it was yesterday’s news and had already left lines at the corners of her mouth. A slight protuberance pulled her upper lip down; I don’t think she ever smiled much, but not because she wasn’t a cheerful person—on the contrary, my mother was more given to laughing than anyone else in the family; it was just that there was no place for laughter in the time that had spawned her—no place for laughter in that land called Socialism; it wasn’t part of normal social behavior over there. Deep down inside, though, she laughed a lot; I could see it in her eyes.
She was speaking several languages at once, putting them together in different combinations to fit the color and flavor of her memories, making sentences that told a story different from the sum of their words. When she spoke, it sounded like an amorphous medley of all the things she was—things that could never have been reduced to one version of a story, or told in only one language.
She said: “I wouldn’t have married him if I hadn’t got pregnant. I’d have left after the first argument, the first wallop, the first time I saw his face all red and puffy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret it—don’t regret having you, I mean. But you have to have children quickly before you’ve had time to get to know each other and be disappointed. No one would ever have children otherwise; the human race would die out—would’ve done in the Soviet Union, anyway.
“We had no word for love, no notion of what it meant, no mental picture of it. We had nothing to…what’s the word…to compare it to. And we didn’t have time for broken hearts. We were too busy building up socialism.
“Of course, you did see girls with tearstained faces in the university toilets. It was always a mystery to me—that they could go around like that with their makeup all smudged and feel no shame. I’d have given myself a good slap in the face. Then again, I suppose I’d have cried and beaten my breast if I’d had anything to cry for. Anyone.”
I could feel sound waves flinging my brain from one side of my head to the other and wasn’t sure whether it was because Valya’s voice had suddenly shot up, or whether I was just being sensitive. Something furry was creeping up my throat, my temples felt as if they might burst and, as my mother pieced herself together, a little bit of story at a time, she became more and more of a blur to me. This wasn’t a good time for a migraine. We always put off breakdowns in our family—postpone them to the solitude of empty rooms. I knew, too, that Valya was only just getting going.
I’d come without expecting anything in particular, stepping into a flat I had more memories of than I’d thought. Only the dimensions were different from what I remembered—the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms and furniture. And Valya wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table, where I always imagined her, but at the desk in her bedroom, her back pressed against the glass tabletop behind her, her hands resting on the plastic arms of the swivel chair, and Shura above her, looking down at us from one of his oil paintings. I suddenly loved her so much that I felt an urge to slide off the edge of the bed and rest my head on her lap—but I stayed put because I didn’t want to interrupt her.
“Really, I should have stayed firm and refused to leave Volgograd. I didn’t want to go to Moscow. Everyone thought you had to marry your way to Moscow—not me. I was the only one, but I knew it was a stupid idea. Moscow’s evil; it stinks. Did then and it does now, maybe worse than ever now—a snake pit of a city. You can’t even buy milk there without the shop woman spitting in your face. I didn’t want to move; I wanted to stay in Volgograd, but they talked me into it. My girlfriends all screamed at me: ‘What? Are you crazy? It’ll mean you’ll be registered in Moscow. I’d marry an unemployed alcoholic for that, if I had the chance, and yours actually has a job.’ One of them, Dasha, had gone there to be mistress to a man thirty years older than her—he was married, with children and all—and do you know, she was happy—she was just happy to be in Moscow. So I thought the place must have something going for it.”
I tried to imagine the picture those eighties women must have had of Moscow, but saw only swings buried deep in snow, their rusty frame sticking up into a sky crisscrossed with white streaks. What a shame, I thought, that I can’t imagine more. I was having trouble thinking straight.
It was the light that alerted me to the onset of the migraine. It sliced through my eyeballs, although the room was relatively dark—Valya liked it dim and the curtains were drawn. Then everything seemed too loud. I tried to ignore it; I didn’t want to have to leave Valya, but already the smells in the room were keener too; Valya’s perfume stung my nose.
“When I got to Moscow, they put on this act for me—I still can’t believe the trouble they went to. Or that I fell for it. Actually I thought Kostya was ugly—he was covered in freckles and had a big belly, even in those days, and skinny little arms and red hair—but then he sat down at the piano and began to play, looking into my eyes and pressing his lips together and flaring his nostrils, and his parents sang his praises and told me about the hidden qualities of this sensitive young man—how well-read he was, how considerate toward his parents and neighbors, how much he liked the theater and the opera.
“To begin with, Kostya took me out—museums during the day and the theater in the evening. Can you imagine—Kostya in a museum? And do you know something funny? He was a big eater, even in those days, and every time we went to the theater he’d stuff himself first, shoveling it all in, any old how, sour cream and beef with onions and whatever, and then he’d have wind all through the play—and I don’t just mean on one occasion; this was every time he took me out. The orchestra in his belly would start up just as the lights went down, and either he’d belch or he’d fart, and it pained me—I felt for him; I was sorry for him, you know? I thought how awkward it must be for him; the poor thing’s trying to make advances to me and ends up making a public spectacle of himself. But looking back on it, I don’t think he gave a damn. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t.”
Hearing people talk of the world as if they could rely on it always makes me feel lonely and helpless. They speak of being sure about things; they tell you how something was or even how it’s going to be, and it always makes me acutely aware of how little I know about what might happen next. I don’t even know what I’ll be addressed as when I go to buy cigarettes—a he or a she? Each morning I’m surprised by my own face in the mirror, and I’m skeptical about any attempts to predict the future. My temples ache a lot; it lays me low for days. But I didn’t want to burden Valya with the ins and outs of my emotions, which were on a roller-coaster ride from the testosterone, like a permanent adolescence. I was here to listen.
“I remember my mother calling while I was there—she was off somewhere again, Hungary or Czechoslovakia, and wanted to know whether Kostya had proposed yet. And I said: ‘Mum, I don’t even know him. We’ve only just met.’ And she said: ‘Feelings come with time, daughter.’ ”
I was afraid of suddenly turning deaf again, like the time I realized that Anton was gone. Something inside me had started to run—it was charging against the inner walls of my body, desperate to get out.
Valya said: “I got pregnant quickly. Russian men don’t do contraception. Abortion was the standard contraceptive, but after two abortions during my marriage to Ivan, I’d had enough and had a one-hundred-and-fifty-percent reliable Soviet-tested coil put in. I got pregnant with you almost immediately.”
Since seeing me with designer stubble, Valya had stopped asking when I was going to give her grandchildren, and for that I was grateful. Grandchildren had been topic numbe
r two, second only to my bad eating habits. My uninterested uterus. The Western way of living only for yourself rather than bringing something into the world that had even worse chances than you. But now that my shoulders had grown broader and the muscles in my arms more prominent—now that I could pick my mother up and lift her in the air—she’d given up asking.
“I wasn’t prepared for that. I couldn’t cope; it was all too fast for me. I didn’t know where I was or who these people were, and of course we had to get married even more quickly than planned. The idea had been to do everything on the Volga in the summer, but because I was already pregnant, the wedding had to be in the winter. In the filthy, slushy Moscow winter. My white tights were a complete mess by the time we got to the registry office. Do you know how hard it was to get white tights in those days? They were my first nylons. I went to the ladies’ room and tried to scratch off the muck with my fingernails, speck by speck, splash by splash, without ripping them. Didn’t do much good; I look like a Dalmatian on the wedding photos. Mother-in-law teased me about it for years. And then things went even faster—too fast. The next thing I knew, along came you two. You were early.”
I hadn’t expected her to talk about that. And she didn’t really—only in her own way, leaving out all the things I’d never have dared ask about. All she said was: “It was Kostya’s birthday. I’d wanted to go to Etinka’s in Volgograd and give birth there, but it wasn’t to be. Kostya had this party and—”
Valya was a blur—I sensed her rather than seeing her—and the air was dry; it was only now that I realized she must have the heating turned right up. Valya was always cold. Like me. And before anything could burst in my ears again, I fled. I went out of my body. It stayed there, sitting stiffly in front of Valya, and I leaped out of myself. I was on the outside; I could listen with impunity now.
“He had this birthday party and…anyway…premature labor…no gas in the car…Kostya still completely drunk…the ambulance took two hours to come—or was it three or four?…Then it was off to the maternity ward, where fifteen other cows were already lying mooing with their legs spread. And in I march, with bruises all over my body and it felt as if the head was already sticking out—yours, it was your head, I know that now.”
Valya looked at the wall behind me. She didn’t notice that I’d dodged her again, absconded; she was talking through my body, on and on.
“There was no bed for me at first and I wanted someone to pick me up and carry me, because I was scared that if I kept walking, I’d crush the head that was coming out of me—and then I split open completely; you ripped me open. I thought either I’d crush you to a pulp or you’d rip me to shreds. Push, crush, rip. But here we are today. We made it. I wasn’t so sure at the time.”
I wouldn’t be so sure now, I thought, looking on from outside. I left my stiff body sitting there and rose in the air, not breathing out until I was floating above the glass desktop. My empty shell was careful to keep blinking at regular intervals, so as not to arouse suspicion.
“So there we were: Mr. and Mrs. Chepanov. Kostya was fed up with being called Berman; he said it had given him nothing but hassle at work, and I had no trouble believing him; I’d grown up a Pinkenzon, after all. Don’t ask me where the name came from—bought or invented, I suppose; someone had married someone at some point; it was floating around somewhere in the family. Kostya’s parents approved. The only one who didn’t was his grandad; he kicked up a row and said we were selling our souls to the Christians. He’d lived under the Germans, you see, and nothing had been quite right with him ever since; giving your own name away was like being sent to the gas chambers, as far as he was concerned.
“He came to see us once a month from Podmoskovye, the part of the country they all came from. Kostya’s mother gave him food to take home so he wouldn’t go hungry, but she had a good look at the best-before dates first and only ever gave him things that had long outlived their shelf life.”
The self beneath me laughed mechanically. Valya looked at it, not yet used to the tinny sound of my breaking voice—and who could blame her? She didn’t laugh.
“Chertanovo was the outer crust of the city; you only had to walk through one wood and you were in Podmoskovye. But try walking that as an old man. He’d arrive all out of puff, sit straight down at table and fall on the food.
“We lived in this filthy part of town—an out-of-bounds zone—even the taxi drivers only went there if they had to. I didn’t know that when I first came to Moscow, of course—that there was a death or a rape on the block every other day. You think I’m exaggerating—it’s a blessing you can think that. That’s why I brought you here—so you wouldn’t believe all these awful stories. So you think I’m exaggerating when I tell you that the sixteen-year-old girl next door was found raped and murdered on the stairs. Or that the cobbler who lived opposite, a vast man, two meters by two meters, got a bottle smashed over his head by muggers, just outside our block, and bled to death on the spot. He’d no money on him, of course. And there was a child who fell out of the seventh floor—if he wasn’t thrown. There were so many stories like that.”
I hung cross-legged over our heads, enjoying the new perspective; I’d never been up here before, never seen the room like this. The surface of Valya’s face was constantly changing: one moment it looked like a ball of cotton wool, the next like the face of a Pioneer girl flying into space. Seen from above, her haircut was a strange mushroom shape, and I asked myself when she’d started to dye her hair. I should have asked her—and I should have asked too how she’d lost so much weight so quickly and what she liked to eat—I could cook for us.
She said: “I never understood my in-laws. I don’t know what they made of themselves. He was short and puny, a bristly worm—and that impossible cloth cap, like a street urchin; he even kept it on for his afternoon nap. When he wasn’t working, he’d lie on the bed for days on end, just staring at the ceiling. He might have a drink of water every now and then, but that was it. Didn’t move, didn’t speak; all he did was breathe. Mother-in-law was a doer, though—always knew exactly what she wanted. If I hadn’t got pregnant, she’d have carried on working. She liked working; I don’t think she wanted to be a housewife, but you didn’t have a choice in those days; somebody had to stay at home with the children. You couldn’t send them to kindergarten—might as well poison them yourself and get it over with; if they didn’t come home sick, they came home dead. So Mother-in-law stayed with you and I went to work. She cleaned and cooked and looked after you and washed all your diapers by hand. A maid of all work.”
I looked at the corners of the walls and the stucco on the ceiling—or the marks where it had once been.
“I think I felt sorry for her.”
From somewhere down below, I heard Valya say: “My in-laws only had one friend—a man who’d moved to Moscow from their village. He was the only visitor we ever had; he came around a lot, and if I hadn’t known they had no truck with beggars, I’d have thought that’s what he was. It’s what he looked like, and it’s what he smelled like too. A quiet man he was, almost gentle to the pair of them—I never heard anyone else speak to them like that, least of all their own son—and they were almost human toward him, this one friend of theirs. I’ve forgotten his name. It’s possible, though, that he only came so often because his wife was always drinking urine.”
The self below laughed again. Valya ignored the strange, tinny noise.
“She did this urine therapy, for years, and he was always telling us about the smell and how unbearable it was, having to live with it. It wasn’t that you peed and then drank the urine; it had to stand around a bit. Fresh urine’s no good, apparently. The poor thing was always desperate to get away from home. You can imagine.
“Their only real friend. I liked him.”
She went on talking about her in-laws and their friends and their friends’ friends, and I understood. If I was asked about myself, I alw
ays talked about other people too, pretending that the stories I told revealed something about me, and knowing at the same time how hopeless it is to try to cover your tracks.
I only caught snatches now of what Valya was saying. “This friend moved to America. When he came and told them he was emigrating, the friendship was over. They started some argument—said he’d stolen from them, taken something from the flat…he kissed their feet, ate out of their hands…apparently he’d filched a radio of theirs—as you do, when you’re emigrating to the States—just what you need in America, a Soviet radio…at some point they said he’d made it over there and now he was dead…”
I glanced to the side. Shura looked me straight in the eye. That painting had always unnerved me because the oil made it look as if his pupils were throbbing. I looked back questioningly.
Valya said: “We always had a lot to eat—so much that I put on thirty kilos in my first year in Moscow. They fed me up as if it was an embarrassment to them that the professor’s granddaughter was so skinny. They were war children; they had to have heaps of fat and potatoes with everything.
“Mother-in-law rubbed butter on her hands to stop them getting chapped; I’ll never forget the smell of Soviet butter on her skin. I once bought her some hand cream from my savings, rose-scented, but she never opened it—just hid it away at the back of the cupboard. I bet she waited till it was past its use-by date, then gave it to someone as a present.”
I tore my eyes away from Shura’s face and looked down at Valya’s hands, thinking how I’d love to rub cream on them—feel her fingers, and the skin between them, and her nails. Then I thought of the hands of my other self down there, growing gradually rougher. I was sometimes startled by my own calluses, usually when I was in bed, half asleep, and laid one curled hand in the other beside my head. But perhaps it was only the strange feeling of holding my own hand. Valya, I thought, would never notice how rough my skin was growing, because we never shook hands and only touched each other through our clothes when we hugged.
Beside Myself Page 23
