She said: “Mother-in-law wouldn’t let me take photos of you; she said the devil would take your souls. That’s why there are so few baby photos of the two of you…only the ones I developed myself…I’d cover up the kitchen window and close the door to make it dark enough. Then Mother-in-law would come in and rummage around in the fridge, saying she really felt like a bit of ham…by the time she’d found what she wanted, the negatives were overexposed.”
In the first photo of me, you see my bare baby’s body—almond-shaped eyes wide open, pointy chin—lying on a white sheet, arms and legs thrust out as I try to push myself from my tummy onto my back. It looks as if I’m flying.
In another photo that for a long time was on the chest of drawers at my grandparents’ in Moscow, you see my almost fully grown, flat body in a floral waistcoat that hangs undone from my bare shoulders. I’m holding an apple in one hand; the other hand is empty and clenched to a fist. On my head is a white cap that comes down over my ears, and I’m looking into the camera as if I’d lost something. And I don’t know—maybe I’m imagining things, but I seem to recall a color photo of my brother and me: me in leggings and a vest, my arms folded, and Anton next to me in a golden dress, dancing.
I forced myself to listen to Valya again. I felt I owed it to her and began to stitch the half sentences back together. It didn’t hurt to listen, up here.
Valya said: “Did you know that the Russians say if you can’t prevent a rape, you must learn to relax? That’s something I never learned. I practically lived in the hospital, hardly ever left if I could help it, did overtime, organized conferences, talked to patients into the small hours—anything I could think of to avoid having to go back there. Kostya always waited for me—parked outside the clinic and left the engine running. Sometimes I didn’t even bother going out, and sometimes I’d go out and say I was busy and then go straight back in again.”
She said: “I remember the first Edam cheese Kostya brought home for me, with its thick red wax rind. I remember the taste. I only knew two kinds of cheese until I was twenty-five—kolbasnyi and rossiyskiy—and this was something exotic. I was so delighted, I threw my arms around Kostya’s neck. He called me his little monkey and often brought me cheese after that—though God knows where he got it.
“I think he was the first to come up with the idea of emigrating. He was the first to talk about it, anyway. There were tanks on Red Square; we were expecting civil war any day, or a coup or whatever—and we knew who’d be the first to take a battering. A whole wave of people left for Israel; there were countless invitations along the lines of: where you are, things are troubled and dangerous; where we are, there are mangoes on the trees. They took all comers, whether genuine Jews or Russians who’d bought themselves names ending in -berg or -man or -stein—whatever sounded Jewish—and dreamed of the desert. I remember Mother-in-law saying: ‘It’s all a trick! The Russians want to find out where the Jews are living! They’ll take your details and haul you away! You don’t really think they’ll take them to Israel, do you? How stupid can you be? The gulags—that’s where they’ll send them.’ ”
Valya laughed suddenly, surprising herself. She clapped her hand to her mouth, feeling for something on her desk with the other hand. The gurgling sound came from deep in her throat and mingled with something shriller.
“At the embassy we were told we needed our parents’ signatures if we wanted to leave the country. They had to give their consent. Children were people’s retirement provision—why else do you think they had so many? The state pension was only enough to keep you in bread and milk till the end of your life, so the old folks had to sign to say they were prepared to do without their children. Mine were willing, but Kostya’s said: ‘No way.’
“We could, of course, have faked the signatures. You only had to slip someone something and they’d issue you with whatever you wanted. But Kostya’s parents knew that and threatened to report us—and that would have been it for us; the door to the West would have been shut forever.
“Kostya made several attempts to talk his father around, but the old man just came up with all these stories about his life in the village—what an awful time they’d had of it, how much they’d sacrificed for us, and that we must be off our heads to want to go to Germany where our blood—Soviet blood—was barely dry on the sidewalks. I tried too. I talked calmly to him and said if it didn’t work out, we’d come back—we could always come back; it wasn’t far; you could fly or take the train and we’d be there right away if anything happened. He interrupted me—I can see his face now. ‘I’m the one who decides things around here,’ he said. Then he picked up the knife.
“There was more to my father-in-law than you might think. He may have been so short and puny, you had the impression you could crush him in your armpit, but apparently he did stuff in the army—tortured the other soldiers, poured hot oil in their eyes. I couldn’t help thinking of that when I saw him standing there with that knife. Kostya, of course, immediately picked up the table and…
“I screamed. Mother-in-law screamed. You and Anton were standing in the door; I remember, I saw your faces and stopped screaming straight away. Then Mother-in-law saw you, then Kostya, then his father: we all turned to look at you, standing there looking at us.”
A knife floated before my eyes. I saw my dad hurl a table across the kitchen; I saw the frozen faces I knew from photographs; I called up images that seemed to fit.
Valya said: “I knew nothing about Germany, nothing about anything—I had no picture of the place, no idea what I wanted from it. You say you want your children to have a golden future—yes, all right, that’s what you say, but it isn’t what you think. You don’t think anything at all. You feel like a rolling stone.”
I was floating above us, watching that other self of mine listen to my mother talking about the move. My other self was sitting up very straight and so was she. I couldn’t quite catch what we were saying; our words were strangely staggered. I saw Shura’s purple eyes again, level with my forehead. Are you talking to me, old man? Talk to me. Say something. I miss you. I miss talking to you. But Shura said nothing and his eyes weren’t purple in the painting. I looked down once more at mother and child, sitting, mirroring one another, and again I saw clearly how similar we were, especially in the way we let our arms dangle at our sides, slightly bent at the elbows.
I saw Ali and, suddenly, sitting there opposite his mother, it could have been Alissa. It was the familiar surroundings that did it; he was hovering between times and bodies; he was empty. I heard Valya say that the walls were damp in the first flat in Germany; I heard her tell Ali about the time her mother-in-law came to visit from Moscow and she, Valya, had a stroke. Her father, Daniil, had pushed her around the little West German town we lived in at that time in a wheelchair, because she couldn’t walk for weeks. The patches of sunlight in the small park he sometimes took her to were full of old people asleep in wheelchairs. Valya wasn’t yet forty then. I heard her say that the right-hand corner of her mouth never quite recovered from the stroke, and saw Ali lean forward slightly, discreetly examining the corner of his mother’s mouth to see if he could see anything. But all he could make out were the hundreds of little wrinkles on her upper lip, like shredded paper.
Valya said she’d had to move to her parents’ and that her husband had come and taken the children away. He didn’t bring them back until she threatened to divorce him. From diagonally above, I looked down into Ali’s motionless face with his big nose and pointy chin; between his chin and lower lip, a deep dimple sprouted black hairs. He looked at Valya in silence as she told him about her daughter, who’d been so disturbed after seeing her father drag her red-eyed mother out of the flat that she hadn’t spoken for weeks. Ali blinked without understanding.
I hung in the air. Time slowed, then tumbled past my nose in a rush. Floating up there next to Shura’s picture, I stretched out an arm, ran a hand over the frame ar
ound his face and peered at my fingertips. I saw fine gray streaks of dust and rubbed my fingers together; the dust formed tiny globules that I flicked away over the heads below me. Nothing made any sense. I heard Valya reproach Ali for coming to ask questions—but in her own way. She didn’t say it was presumptuous of him, or that he’d never understand the world she came from; she didn’t even say that it was more than she could manage to explain everything. She said something very Russian like: “Memory’s a parasite. It’s best to leave well enough alone if you don’t want to end up like me, unable to stop. I—”
“I” in Russian is “Я,” the last of thirty-three letters. People say: “Я” is the last letter of the alphabet, so put yourself last, forget you exist, don’t rate yourself too highly, melt into the background. It seemed to me that Valya had taken this adage to heart; it made sense to her that she should be last; it was logical. Valya believed that there was a logic to things; she believed in a chain of events, each following the other, ineluctably. When she told me her life—or the part of it that she wanted to pass on to me—she described a chain of causal relations that seemed to her entirely natural, but that somehow, in spite of the firmness of her voice, failed to convince me. My thoughts were playing hopscotch, trying not to land on the lines. I couldn’t think a “Я,” I realized, as my mother drew her picture for me. I didn’t know how to place it.
My name begins with the first letter of the alphabet and it’s a scream, a faltering, a falling, a promise of a B and a C that can’t exist in the absence of historical causality. It’s a mistake to think that people who go through the same things will come out together on the other side. I know a lot of people whose lives have followed the same path as mine, but their faces are differently hewn; they wear different clothes, play musical instruments, eat pickled herrings at their parents’ every Sunday and manage to sleep through the night afterward; they have jobs, buy flats, vacation in the south and return at the end of the summer to a place they call home. I’m not like that; I feel unable to state anything with certainty, to adopt a point of view, develop a voice of my own, a voice that would speak for me. A clear-cut “Я.”
For me, time is a turntable. Images blur before my eyes, and over and over I guess how things might have looked, guess the names of streets I’ve never set foot in, of city stairways and empty boats. I try not to mix up the people whose names repeat themselves down the centuries.
I make up new characters in the same way that I piece together old ones. I imagine my brother’s life, imagine him doing all the things I can’t do, see him setting off into the world because he has the courage I’ve always lacked. I miss him.
And what did I do when I thought he was calling me, when I got this sign? I misread all the signals. I hung back, pussyfooted around, did all I could to numb my tension and bury it inside me. I lay down on a sofa, willing it to eat me up. I hardly moved; I waited—for what is waiting if not hope?
TWO
“HOME”
I always get taken along; nobody ever asks me and I wouldn’t say no if they did. Of course I want to go back. Of course I want to go and stay with Gran and Grandad, and see the boys again, Valera and Petya—Kirill too. I’ve got such a lot to tell them. I wrap presents for them—all stuff that Mum’s bought. Much too much, Dad says—“Don’t want them to think we’re showing off.” Mum says, “Shut up,” and crams even more into the bag: plastic robots and cars and a Lego box with a pirate ship. A few books too, for learning German. “You never know.”
I try to lift the bag; it’s far too heavy, but I don’t say a word. I climb inside, dig out the pirate ship and push it under my bed.
“The blouses are for Angela, Nadya and Kitsa. The cream must go to Marina, do you hear?” Dad nods obediently without looking up, but kisses Mum on his way past. His hands are sweating, which means he’s happy.
My sister’s standing in the hall, looking at us all through jam jars, as if she had a thousand eyes, turning her head from one shoulder to the other. Mum loads her with even more jars and lays a loaf of bread on top so I can’t see her at all—“something proper for you to eat on the journey. You can be in charge of the provisions.” My sister hugs everything tight like a teddy bear and doesn’t put any of it in her bag; her knuckles turn white from gripping the jars.
Somehow we make it downstairs and out onto the sidewalk, where we stop and look up. Mum waves a hand out of the window, then slams it shut, and Dad starts to sing a song from the film about the three musketeers. Something about good times.
* * *
—
Thirteen-Krasny-Mayak-Block-Two-Flat-One-Two-O. I know the address by heart—always will. It bubbles up from deep in my belly even when I’m asleep; you can shake me awake in the middle of the night and even before I’ve remembered my own name, I’ll know where I’m to be taken if I get lost. If ever I’m in the Moscow metro and slip free of the grip on my hand to prevent my arm being ripped out of its socket in the crush, I’ll know what to say when I find myself all alone in the station, and Marx and Lenin and Stalin look down at me from their columns and ask where I live: Thirteen-Krasny-Mayak-Block-Two-Flat-One-Two-O. That’s where I go every year. I get taken along.
* * *
—
The first time they take me, I think everything’s going to be all right now, forever and ever. Gran feeds me up as if it’s her last duty on Earth. Grandad already has a walking stick and shuffles around the flat in his oversized slippers, as if he’s ice skating. He’s got so thin, I’m sure he’d snap in two if he fell over. Dad sits all day at the kitchen table, drinking tea with Gran and Grandad and crying. They all sob loudly.
I give them a quick wave as I pass the kitchen, and head for the front door. It’s upholstered. I’d forgotten how thick the dark red padding is; you can run at it headfirst and you won’t hurt yourself, no bump, no gash. Everything else seems smaller, flimsier—the cupboards, the rugs on the walls. It occurs to me that I’ve never gone out through this upholstered door alone before; I wasn’t allowed. Now, for whatever reason, I am. Dad’s busy talking and crying; Gran and Grandad are listening to him; my sister’s curled up with a comic in the corner of the sofa that Mum and Dad used to sleep on, and doesn’t want to go anywhere. She’s a great big fleecy toweling worm.
I take the elevator. The light flickers; it always did and, like now, I was always scared the elevator would get stuck. The emergency button has been ripped out—I can’t remember ever having seen it—but they tell me it’s more dangerous to take the stairs. I get to the bottom and kick open first one door, then another. The benches under the ground-floor windows look like huge toadstools with moldering caps; nobody’s sitting on them; nobody calls after me to be careful. The metal bars of the climbing frame on the playground were once blue—I remember that. I pull myself up in my usual three moves—right foot, pull, left foot, pull, right again—and sit at the top of the latticed cube, looking down over the yard. It looks as big as a soccer stadium and beyond it, the world comes to an end—you can see where it stops. On the left there are willows, a curtain to the nothingness on the other side. Otherwise there are just the same gray tower-block walls everywhere, dotted with dark eyes. The sky’s the same color as the walls. Through my jeans, at the backs of my knees, I feel the metal bars vibrate.
Valera and Petya are squinting up at me, kicking the climbing frame. I’m so pleased to see them, I almost fall off. “Hey!” I shout. “Hey!” I hang upside down and reach out my arms to them. “Where’s Kirill?”
“Kirill’s moved away,” they say. “You’ve been gone a long time—you’re out of touch.”
I scuttle down the climbing frame like a spider. I’d like to hug them, but I know we don’t do babyish things like that anymore, so I hold out my hand. They don’t take it; they’re looking at my shoes. Valera walks around me, clicking his tongue. Petya stands with his face close to mine and stares at me in silence. His lips are all chappe
d; so are the outer corners of his eyes. He’s so pale I feel like taking a handful of snow and rubbing it into his cheeks. I tell them I have presents for them, upstairs in the flat; they can come and get them if they like—or stop by later, if they’d rather stay outside for a bit.
Petya twists one side of his face into a grin. Valera comes to a halt behind me and runs his hand over the back of my head, as if he’s shaving off my hair. I jump to the side and look at the pair of them; they’re so similar that for a moment I can’t tell them apart. They don’t laugh or even breathe—just stand there shoulder to shoulder in their white puffer jackets, and stare. You’d think they were looking through me, but they’re looking at me, I can feel it. Valera’s the first to say the word: zhid.
It’s a word I’ve often heard before, but without knowing it referred to me, and without knowing what it meant: fucking Jew. They explain this to me—that it’s what I am, and why. We stand there, our arms dangling at our sides. The two of them have grown together into a single barking beast.
They explain to me that I’m a fucking Jew because, like all fucking Jews, I got to leave the country, while they had to stay here and see off Kirill when his father was transferred and see off Dima—he got run over, by the way, by a cretin with slitty eyes like mine. One after the other, they’ve all moved away—or else they’re about to—like me and my filthy clan, and now I’ve come back to visit with my white Nikes, and can shove my Western gifts up my dick, or something like that.
Beside Myself Page 24
