“You’re probably a fag now, and all,” they say. Pederast. “Just have to look at your Western jacket,” says Petya. “What kind of a faggoty fag’s jacket is that? What kind of faggoty colors are they?”
“Is that what you fags wear?” Valera asks in the same voice. And before I can say anything—I don’t even have time to get out Thirteen-Krasny-Mayak-Block-Two-Flat-One-Two-O—they push me, both at once, and I fall and go careening into the climbing frame. Something clangs and echoes in my head. When I open my eyes again, the pair of them are gone, as if I’d imagined them. I lie on the ground, and above me the sky is crisscrossed with bars that were once blue.
I get up, a fucking Jew and a fag, and stroll across the yard, the broken rhombus of the tower blocks looming in on me. I put a hand to the back of my head, but feel nothing, no bump, no gash. I try to remember where I broke my leg, all those years ago, somewhere here, in the middle of the empty plot of land that the boys—the ones I was always too young for—used as a soccer field. The sheds on either side served as goals. I walk across to the shed with the junction boxes; it’s the one I remember best, a low, flat building that the neighbors suspected was squatted: “There are ten, twenty, a hundred of them in there. There’s no electricity; it stinks too much for that.”
Mum’s friends came around and said: “Just think, Valya, they’re living in there like animals!”
The reason I remember this shed so well is that it was here on the wall that I saw and copied my first swastika. I didn’t know what it meant, but I liked the look of the thing. Now, looking at the shed through my faggoty Western eyes I see: Only the dead have seen the end of war. There’s chalk lying on the ground, as usual. I pick it up and write: KHUI. Prick.
* * *
—
Gran gives me a good brushing down; I’m covered in filthy snow and chalk dust after drawing on my corduroy trousers, then banging them to watch the white powder fly into my nose. Gran looks like a troll under her shock of hair and has almost no teeth left; I can’t understand what she’s mumbling. Dad and Grandad watch us from the kitchen without getting up—sit and stare like dolls, their steaming teacups so big they have to hold them in both hands. My sister’s lying on the sofa, asleep inside a comic, Batman and Robin sticking to her cheek, dribble on her open lips. I lie down beside her, the tip of my nose touching hers. Batman and Robin rustle at my ear; the back of my head is throbbing.
* * *
—
We’re taken to see the family we used to go and see before we left the country. Our dad liked drinking chacha with their dad and we kids liked the same games.
When Tato opens the door to us, I almost keel over. He’s taller than me—almost a whole head taller—and he has a beard where I don’t even have downy stubble. Spots too—huge pimples like a real man. Since his father’s liver exploded at the age of fifty because of all the chacha, an uncle’s been taking care of the family. Uncle Giso was brother to the dad with the burst liver and has wife, children and liver of his own to provide for.
“Giso’s no help,” says the mother, whose face has fallen in on itself like a sandcastle. She puts tea on the table and a gâteau that’s drowning in lemon cream. “Tato’s the man of the house now.”
She says it loud enough for Tato to hear and his nostrils flutter.
Sari’s even prettier than she used to be. She’s shot up too—overtaken me. Her ass is half an apple; it wobbles past my face as if I wasn’t there. The other half apple is stuck on her front and has a little gold cross resting on it. I’d like to be that cross.
Sari’s starting at the police next year. She’s going to be a militia-woman, she says; she’s already been to the uniform fitting. The interview wasn’t hard at all; they just wanted to know if she could speak fluent Georgian, then got her to sign straightaway.
“So you’re going to be a traitor,” I say, hoping she’ll come closer. She doesn’t, and my dad clouts me one on the back of my head which was painful enough as it was. I try not to let it show.
“Tato takes care of us,” says his mother. “He sells tracksuits in the market—and cigarettes and spirits.”
“Homemade spirits,” says Tato, beaming.
I look at him. It’s not possible the boy makes his own chacha.
“Last week he fixed the car for me, and sometimes the fridge gives up on us and he mends that too.” There follows a list of Tato’s accomplishments and his daily good deeds to save the world. Tato’s fourteen and his voice has already broken, while I still sing higher than my sister. She’s sitting at the table as if she wasn’t there, staring through us all, reading comics in her head.
I try to imagine Tato at Prazhskaya metro station, in the market that my sister and I sometimes dashed through with Gran—she’d hold our hands firmly grasped in hers and warn us not to look left or right. I try to imagine him behind a pile of plastic-wrapped clothes, a fag in the corner of his mouth, crying out: “Tracksuits, tracksuits, fresh Adidas tracksuits! Come on and have a look!” Every now and then, to keep himself warm, he takes a little gulp of homemade chacha from the small metal hip flask he carries inside his sheepskin waistcoat.
My eyes drift back to Sari. I stare at her as openly as I can and try to smile, waiting for her to glance up from her tea. She doesn’t. All through the stories of Tato’s acts of heroism, she watches the billowing, rainbow-colored steam above her cup. It looks like soapsuds. She blows over the gilt edge of the cup without even moving her lips. I stare at the dark opening between the pale pillows of her lips and feel myself being sucked in. I’d like to jump right in, feet first.
There was never anything between us. The last time we saw each other, I wasn’t even aware of all the things that would one day be possible between us, but at that point she wasn’t yet two halves of an apple, connected by a long, silky black stalk. I try to work out whether I’m in with a chance with her and imagine all kinds of stuff—I see my hands vanish inside her, one into her soft mouth, the other between her soft thighs, and I think about where I’d kiss her when my hands met inside her, under that little gold cross.
“Tell us, what’s it like over there?” the mother asks, and I’m startled out of the handshake I was giving myself in Sari’s body. I look away from her walnut-colored skin and gawp at the colorful tablecloth as I wait for my father to deliver his spiel. I saw him rehearsing it in the little mirror in our train compartment—he wasn’t embarrassed to be caught. As the train swayed from side to side, he tried out different pitched voices—once he even burst out laughing and said: “Oh, that question!” He drew his eyebrows together and pushed them apart again; he didn’t get far with his speech, but he had one. Meanwhile, I looked at him in the mirror. Every now and then he’d look back and our eyes would meet, and I understood that he needed someone to tell it all to. When he tried his spiel out on Gran and Grandad, they just burst into tears whatever he said, and then he ended up crying too, because crying is contagious. So that didn’t count. But now his moment had come. The question. “That question!”
I can see the words bouncing around in his throat like rubber balls, but nothing comes out. He falters at the first syllables, dragging them out haltingly and then falling silent. We all look at him.
Later, when his friends ask him, he’ll reply without stuttering. He’ll produce a whole pack of jokes and anecdotes—most of them invented—and like a true gambler, he’ll let the tension mount with his poker-face smile before saying anything. But this is the first time. “You want to know what it’s like, over in Germania?” he says, and blushes. We blush too. He sputters. We listen.
“They have this word, Langeweile,” he says at length, as if he’s been speaking for a very long time and has finally reached the punch line. “We’d say ‘boredom,’ but they mean something different.”
The mother nods. We hear the hum of the fridge and move our eyes about the room, tracking the invisible flies th
at are circling above us. Sari crosses her legs under the table; I feel it and try to think of her thighs again and forget about my father, whose face is getting damper by the second.
“And do you know, the children say to your face, ‘I’m not doing anything today, I’m taking the day off, I have to relax, I’ve got this awful headache,’ or, ‘I’m so tired’—or they come with this Langeweile. They’re always bored; they think everything’s really boring. Fifteen-year-old brats say that to your face. I can’t remember us ever being bored. Can you?”
I get up, reach across the table and help myself to another slice of lemon cream gâteau, trying to brush Sari’s shoulder or at least get a whiff of her hair. She shrinks back and glares at me, sparks flying from the corners of her eyes.
“And another thing,” my father says. “I’ve heard that if parents forget themselves and lash out at their children, the kids can take them to court. They can do that over there. That kind of thing happens. Can you imagine? Their own children?” He bites into a slice of gâteau, licking the cream from between thumb and finger with his greasy tongue. The mother looks at him and then out of the window. I look out of the window too: everything’s white; it’s snowing again. Sari puts her cup down and folds her arms. Tato shuffles his feet back and forth on the floor like a small child. His big teeth stick out a long way, even when he isn’t smiling. We eat in silence until we can see that the plate under the gâteau is black with a gold edge and a pattern of red cherries.
When it’s time for us to go, Tato holds the door open for us and offers to walk us to the metro station. My father says no, but takes him to one side and talks to him with his hands on his shoulders, and I try to guess how much he’s slipped him.
I say: “See you!” and give everyone my hand. Sari doesn’t even look. Nor do I.
We go out onto the street. It’s cold—colder than it ever is anywhere else. The tip of my nose turns to ice and a white film coats my lips, making the skin tighten and crack. I feel my Nikes soaking up slush—the bottoms of my trousers too; the filth works its way up to my knees, and my eyes smart so much I can’t close them. I twist my head; it rolls from one side to the other, but I can’t see anything because of my big hood. I stare at the lining of my faggoty Western jacket, then pull off the hood, undo the zipper and chuck the jacket into the snow. I see my father, trying to work out why I’ve let go of his hand. He looks at my jacket lying in the dirty snow.
As he chases me home through the streets, I grow warm; my cheeks are burning. I look back, fixing his puce face on my mind, and I know: from now on, he’s always going to be running after me.
ANTON
I didn’t have any real plan when I got off the train at Istanbul. I wanted someone in my compartment to say: “Here’s where you get out. Here’s where it’s going to happen. This is the place. Thus it is written.” But no one said anything like that. My compartment was full of sweaty mountains of flesh, all looking through me or staring at the floor—and when they did fix their eyes on me, I wished I was invisible. Eventually, though, I got off. I heard the word “Istanbul,” picked up my bag, jumped onto the platform and began to walk. I left the station, wandered around Sultanahmet, followed the tramlines alongside the bazaar to a mosque that looked like a mass of interlocking building blocks. A flock of pigeons flew toward me like a huge gray sheet, and I ducked. I crossed a bridge so tightly packed with fishermen that the tips of their rods touched; I went down streets where the shop walls were covered in knives and hoses, bike tires and wet suits. I walked through rubber-boot tunnels and the fumes of gloss paint, forcing myself to keep going. I walked down a street without a sidewalk, my hands in my pockets; the side mirror of a car brushed my elbow and the driver yelled something out of the window, but I couldn’t work out if he was yelling at me or to himself. I walked and walked, until the streets were so steep I was afraid I’d start to slide backward. I sat down on the ground, squinting. Better take a bit of a breather, I thought—and I could do with something to drink. I smelled cat piss; the stench made me feel sick. I looked at the ground and everything was a blur. I thought: I’m sinking, then a young guy pulled me up, grabbed hold of me and said: “Come with me.”
Barış gave me water and showed me around. He’d found himself a place with a few other boys in a building on Çıkmazı Sokak. The flat below had been gutted by fire; you had to walk up blackened stairs to get to it, and you got the feeling that underneath, below the soot, was nothingness. The boys who lived with Barış knew how to tap electricity; they lay around on mattresses, and there was always somebody playing tavla and somebody else making a hash of playing the guitar—I ended up having to cut the strings to get him to stop. Apparently the house had been sold and the owner was in Austria—it sounded as if we could stay forever. After a few days, I started to steal things for the flat: pans for the hot plate in the passage and slippers for Barış. He laughed when he saw the slippers, but pulled them on and put his hand on the back of my neck.
Farther down the road was a soccer stadium. We climbed the trees in front of our house and had a bird’s-eye view of the matchstick men running around the field. Barış was the most obsessed; whenever his team lost, he’d cry and tell me stories about his dad. I’d take him along on my walks through the city and as he talked and cried, I’d watch the mussel sellers kicking empty plastic bottles back and forth, heads down, eyes on the ground.
Barış’s dad was someone high-ranking in the Turkish military, and when I heard that, I wasn’t too keen to hear any more. Barış had run away from home. He made several attempts to explain why, but our languages didn’t always overlap, and anyway, I couldn’t hear what he was saying; the city was louder than anywhere I’d ever been. I’d open my eyes and find myself in shops with alarm clocks from the Soviet Union, lipstick from Cuba, records from the forties and openmouthed rubber sex dolls that stared down at us from the ceiling. Pictures of Che Guevara, Hitler and Lenin started at two hundred lira. The shopkeeper explained to Barış and me that business was good—not because he ever sold much of the junk, but because the tourists knocked over the china goods with their rucksacks as they pushed their way up and down the tightly-packed aisles, and he made them pay up. Barış hummed away next to me and I walked through the city, watching men in battered old suits smoking their cigarettes at the roadside. At dusk, the smoke in the air hardened like amber, and for a moment it felt as if even Barış was quiet.
Everyone spoke of the impending earthquake, but at the same time nobody really seemed to care. You could sometimes feel the tectonic plates rubbing up against one another if you took the ferry. I spent days traveling back and forth between Kadıkoy and Karaköy—Asia, Europe, Asia, Europe, sunrise, sunshine, sunshine, sunset, lights and lights and more lights—days drinking tea and watching people whose faces looked like wax in the glow of the neon and whose hands in their laps were a strange shade of green. The to-ing and fro-ing made me hungry—and shaky on my legs; my knees buckled. The boys at the hot-chestnut stall down by the synagogue soon knew me; they rolled cones of newspaper for me when they saw me coming, and since I’d never stolen from them and they liked me, they gave me the bursting, charred brown nuts for free.
It was food that guided me through Istanbul and got me through the year. Everything was a blur; only the fruit and veggies told of the passing of time. There was what there was, and if there wasn’t, it wasn’t the season. When I arrived in the city, it was watermelon time, and every day I ate half a watermelon in the morning and half in the evening, crumbling white cheese over the flesh and mashing it to a pink pulp—and sometimes Barış would stuff a fish roll in my mouth as we crossed the bridge where the fishing rods touched. Then it was plum time and I boiled the fruit up to make jam. You don’t need much—I’d already stolen the pans and you can always find sugar—and it wasn’t long before the black mixture was sweet and bitter enough. I spread it on bread and gave some to the boys. Then it was kaki time. The kakis wer
e soft and sweet; they melted between my fingers like honey and left stains on my trousers and T-shirts—washing was tricky without running water—but the fruits tasted as if someone had made jam out of them and then poured it back into their firm skins. I couldn’t keep away from them. Then it was leek time and when I was in a good mood, I’d cook them up with a carrot or two and the stew would last Barış and me for a couple of days. Orange time wasn’t so good because the oranges tasted of sour rubber; you had to cut the skin open with a knife to get at the flesh. Then came the grapefruits—the ground beneath the market stalls was littered with them; it made no sense not to take them. After that, it began to get cold.
When the first snow fell, it fell meters deep. In the streets of Tarlabaşı, boys knocked the white stuff into statues and carved faces in them with butterfly knives. When I asked if I could join in, they chucked a snowman’s head at me and it was hard as stone.
The world turned white, making your eyes smart. The streetwalkers’ bright umbrellas on Balo Sokak were all you could see on the snowy streets, and the thick hairy flakes that fell on the city left it fuzzy and shapeless. I bumped into buildings, groped my way along the sidewalks a millimeter at a time, and when I tried to stick my hand in a street seller’s cart to warm my fingers on a boiled cob of corn—the man was looking the other way, warbling like a bird—I found myself grasping something synthetic and realized that yılbaşı süsü was the Turkish for “New Year’s Eve decorations.” I hadn’t realized until then that the last day of the year had any particular significance; I didn’t even know when the year came to an end—why should it make any difference to me when one year ended and the next began? But the boys in Çıkmazı Sokak wanted a party. I teetered up the blackened stairs to our flat and found myself face-to-face with a fir tree. I asked them what was going on and they said they’d stolen it. I said they didn’t have to schlep home every piece of rubbish they saw; they said I should shut up moaning and contribute something myself instead. I went back to Balo Sokak and sat down next to Deniz. Her face was long and narrow; her lower jaw veered to one side and she had the highest shoes of them all, platforms with blue-and-white-striped heels.
Beside Myself Page 25
