Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  “What are you doing on New Year’s Eve?” I asked. Deniz laughed. A blob of flesh hung down in the big gap between her front teeth. I almost kissed her.

  “Aren’t you cold, sitting in the snow in that short skirt?” I added, when she didn’t reply.

  She took my hand and slid it under her bum. Her skirt was like liquid plastic; I could feel her buttocks.

  “It’s funny,” I said, more to myself than to Deniz. “You come to a place where fir trees aren’t part of the culture, and then you get home and find a fucking scarecrow of a Christmas tree in your room.” I kept talking; I suddenly couldn’t stop. I think I mentioned my family too; I think I mentioned burn holes in Turkish carpets. Deniz put her head on my shoulder and I heard her wig rustle at my ear.

  I went back to the warbling street seller and bought some of his yılbaşı süsü. I took Deniz a thick gold garland and put it around her neck; for the boys I got confetti and tinsel. On New Year’s Eve they danced in a circle, clapping their hands. Barış cried and talked about his mum for a change. I lay on my mattress, biting the back of my hand.

  I got through my first Istanbul winter by eating bread and sugar every night before I went to sleep—white doorsteps spread with butter, and so thick with sugar crystals that you couldn’t see the bread anymore. And by keeping warm at an electric heater that Barış got hold of somewhere and stood next to our mattresses. Now and then the other boys unplugged it when they wanted to cook—the tapped electricity didn’t run to both—and forgot to plug it in again. I’d wake up, drenched in cold sweat, as if I’d jumped into the Bosporus with my clothes on. Then I’d sit with my back to the boarded-up window, nibbling sunflower seeds until the salt numbed my taste buds.

  Sometimes I went out and stood in the doorway and saw Ali wandering around on the street or scuttling past me like a hedgehog in the snow; sometimes I saw her sitting on the blackened stairs, cracking sunflower seeds like me and staring in front of her. Once she looked up at me and said, “Where are you?” and I didn’t know. I looked down at the back of my left hand and saw Istanbul scrawled in Biro between thumb and forefinger. I held out my hand to her, spreading my fingers so she could read what it said, but she was already gone.

  * * *

  —

  Everything went pear-shaped when my old man went sailing off the balcony in a state of inebriation—I mean, who does a thing like that these days? Of all my Red Army relatives (and that’s including the ones with a Shoah or perestroika background), he was the only one to die a death that wasn’t natural, only embarrassing.

  When he died, they stopped the clock. I’m not talking about some higher powers; I’m talking about my mum and sister. They did it all by themselves; I saw them. Their faces suddenly froze, their lips dried up, their eyelashes were full of gunk. They acted as if Dad’s death had left a gap in their lives, which seemed strange to me, because I hadn’t realized the old man had ever filled anything. I’d always felt it had been the other way round—that he used up all the oxygen in a room. But suddenly they were carrying on as if there was something to grieve, and part of their grief involved playing dead themselves. Guilt has its own way of deadening.

  None of this happened immediately after the divorce—another reason I didn’t understand why they thought we were all to blame for his death. But then Jews don’t take painkillers, just in case the pain goes away by itself—there was no point trying to discuss or explain anything, and no escaping the guilt.

  After the divorce, it was clear how the roles were going to be divided: Ali would look after Dad and I’d look after Mum. Then, when Dad flew off the balcony at that party and Ali was out of action for weeks—not eating and not talking, and when she did talk, I wished she hadn’t bothered—I thought it best if Ali looked after herself and I looked after Mum. So I moved back in with her. It wasn’t something I’d been planning; I didn’t want to give up my room at Larissa’s, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to have to explain anything to her either; I could do without that blank, everything-will-be-fine face of hers. So I packed my bag and went to Mum’s, and told her I was going to make it my personal duty to bring her black tea with jam in bed every morning and every night. She laughed, but she really didn’t look great, with those craters all over her forehead, and mumbling all this stuff to herself—she shouldn’t have brought me here, it was all her own fault, look how it had turned out. Then she said: “Migration kills.” It sounded like a warning on a packet of cigarettes: “Migration seriously harms you and others around you.” You can say that again. I crammed plenty of biscuits and jam into her mouth and turned up the electric blanket, hoping she’d get to sleep before she had time to do any more thinking.

  Sometimes she talked about this young goy Dad had apparently been in love with. I asked if she meant the one he’d been with at the party—the party he’d left by the window—but she shook her head and said something about a girl with long blond hair Dad had loved before he met Mum—and how she, Mum, should never have intervened, because this goy was the love of Dad’s life, and Mum had ruined his life—killed him. She’d never loved him—wasn’t capable of love. She was an animal, a monster, and he, my dad, my old man, had always been so good to her—never whored around and always brought money home. I put an arm around her and she burst into tears, but not so that you saw it; in our family, we always cry on the inside—an inner shower that rinses our lungs. If you hold us tight, you might feel us tremble a bit, but maybe not even that.

  I realized it was going to take some time for her to recover, so I unpacked my stuff and told Larissa I didn’t know when I’d be back, and then there I was in the stranglehold of not just one woman, but two—my mother and her cook. My mother paid the cook to make sure I had everything I needed, while she was soon back at work, leaving in the dark every morning and coming home in the same dark every evening, kissing me on the forehead and settling down next to me on the sofa. Sitting there, holding my hand, she seemed to have everything she needed, and I forgot all about the tea and jam I’d promised. I could have cooked for myself, but why bother when I had someone bringing me kefir pancakes in bed? I sat with the remote control in one hand and Mum in the other, and she snuggled up to me. Like that, though, I only ever saw her after dark, so I started taking her flowers at work and going out to eat with her on her lunch breaks. On Sundays, we walked around the market hand in hand. She wouldn’t let me buy her anything—it would have been her money, anyway, though I told myself it was the thought that counted—but she treated me to something every time: roasted chestnuts or a new notebook, not that I ever used the notebooks much—didn’t even come close to filling one of them; I was too busy lying in and reading and talking to the cook. Zofa came up to my waist and when she clattered around the flat with her broom, in her black housecoat, she reminded me of one of the Oprichniks in the book I was holding. Only the dog’s head under her arm was missing. She talked without drawing breath—didn’t stop even when she left the room where I was stretched out on the sofa, pretending to read Sorokin—just turned up the volume, and the Dolby Surround of her voice rang in my brain: “Anton, Anton, don’t you think it’s time you got yourself some decent clothes? Your mum’s ashamed to go out with you.”

  “I’m not her husband!” I called back through four walls. Zofa laughed as loudly as if she were standing over me, and the imaginary dog’s head laughed too.

  I went into the bathroom and looked at my clothes. Then I undressed and twisted in front of the mirror. I’d only moved in a few weeks ago and already my belly was bulging over the elastic of my underpants. I saw my old man and tried to imagine him lying in a puddle of blood and piss, somewhere out in the sticks in southern Germany, surrounded by spruce trees, in the yard of the eight-story building he’d just dropped out of onto his big fat belly—and I decided I had to stop this.

  I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to find Ali to make things right again. If I could just see her
face, something would go click and everything would fall into place.

  I looked for her in all the bars she hung out in back then; I even went to her boxing club. Her coach gave me a funny look—must have thought I was her for a moment—and when I asked if he knew where my sister was, he said he’d no idea, but when I found her I was to tell her he didn’t ever want to see her again. I went to Ali’s flat last of all. She was lying on a mattress, staring at the ceiling, digging her shoulder blades into the floorboards.

  She turned to look at me and smiled. Her face was all matt, like blotting paper. I sat down cross-legged next to her and we stared at each other for a while; then she stretched out her arms and pulled me down to her, pushing her hand up the sleeves of my sweater and knotting her calves with mine. I lay there, pressed against her flat breast and didn’t know if she was crying onto my forehead, or dribbling. We stared at the ceiling. She said something about stars and asked if I remembered the afternoons in Volgograd when Daniil had parked us in the planetarium and gone off God knows where. I remembered how I’d always cried at first because I thought he was going to abandon us, but then fell asleep in exhaustion every time. When I opened my eyes again, Ali would still be sitting there, gawping at the little lights on the dome above us. Back at home in the evenings, she’d annoy me by reciting the constellations: Orion’s Belt, Monoceros, Canis Minor, Ursa Major, the whole zoo, she knew them all, and Daniil would stroke her head.

  Ali’s chin tickled my scalp; she said something about the Charioteer in the sky. I stared at the white ceiling looking for pictures. Daniil’s face pushed its way out of the stucco, then I saw the others’ faces too. I sniffed Ali’s neck, pulled myself level with her and pressed the tip of my nose against hers. Her face blurred and melted.

  “Do you remember, when we were little, we always used to wonder how you’re supposed to kiss without your noses getting in the way?”

  Her pupils were almost as big as her eyeballs—no idea what she was on. I kissed her.

  Her lips tasted sour and cold; it was like kissing metal. She didn’t move at first, but her eyes grew suddenly clear—purple circles around the black of her pupils. She blinked a few times and held her breath. I kissed her again and felt her fingers digging deeper into my forearms; it hurt. I shook her hands out of my sleeves and pulled my sweater over my head and hers over her head. Her breasts were bandaged as if she’d been boxing. She pressed her head into my belly, grabbed my curls and pulled my face over her belly button like a huge paintbrush. I could smell her. A faint milky smell came from her navel and I thought: That belly button is mine.

  I pulled off her trousers. Her toenails were flecked with white. I pushed my tongue into the spaces between the toes, and she sat up, suddenly alert, and looked at me. She pushed me away with her foot, knocking me backward onto the floorboards, sat on top of me and leaned over me. I wanted to undo her bandages, but she pinned my wrists to the floor, ran her open lips over my nose, sucked my eyebrows, bit my right earlobe, tugged at it with her teeth, then bit her way down me. She let go of my wrists, sunk her fingernails into my hips and turned me on my belly. I breathed through my mouth into the cracks in the floorboards and she licked the backs of my knees. I felt her hand between my buttocks, her finger inside me, burying deeper and deeper, thrusting fast. I reached for her and pulled her up by her hair; her pelvis pushed her hand deeper inside me, and the cloth of the bandage chafed my shoulders. I wanted to say something, but she pushed my head down with her head, and held my nose, and I needed my mouth to breathe. I was panting and heard her above me, pressing air out through her teeth.

  I turned to her, grabbed her thighs and pulled her over me—over my belly, over my shoulders, over my face. Gripping her tight, I ran the tip of my nose along her labia and pushed my tongue inside her. She threw back her head and tensed her thighs. I scratched her shoulders. She leaned backward and felt for my cock, then rolled over on top of me and took it in her mouth. Her lips were still cold. I pushed a hand between her legs until she arched her neck and began to scream. She screamed and screamed and fell on my belly and thighs, banging her chin on the floor. It was as if she’d stopped breathing.

  We lay on the floorboards—they were cold now—and she carved constellations into my shoulders with her fingernail. She was still wearing the bandages; I was naked and felt with my foot for a sheet to cover us, then sat up and stared into the empty room that suddenly seemed to have no walls, no ceiling, no mattress, no window—nothing I could grasp hold of or open or shut. I turned to Ali and wanted to ask something, but didn’t know what.

  “Got any grass?”

  We smoked up the room, two hedgehogs in the fog, snuggling down for the winter, and as I lay there, peering through the haze, I suddenly saw everything clear before me.

  * * *

  —

  I packed my things and decided to go somewhere; I think I wanted to see how far I’d get. I hitchhiked to Maribor, Zagreb, Niš and Skopje, aiming for aimlessness and maybe, eventually, for New Zealand, where I had friends who grew vegetables and had kids, loads of kids—I could babysit for them, I thought; I loved kids, especially babies, and I’d stay there till my hair grew back into my head. I wanted to be in a place where everything was new and strange and I didn’t know the language—and where the few friends who spoke my language would be quiet. The money lasted me as far as Istanbul.

  Most of the time I survived by hanging out in the bars around Tarlabaşı Bulvarı, nestling up to the boys until all they could think of was my wet mouth at their ears, and then pulling their wallets out of their pockets, or their phones, or both. Incredible how close people will let you get for a bit of hot breath under their earlobes.

  In Tarlabaşı, I always got a fair price for the phones; at one point I even had enough to take a room in the Büyük Londra for a bit, just for the hell of it. I wanted to see inside that colonial-era coffin and Barış’s crying was getting on my nerves; I’d had enough of his sob stories about his dad. And anyway, I wanted a warm shower, with soap, so I sauntered in at the heavy glass door of the Grand Hotel de Londres and slammed my money down on the counter. The gold curlicues on the wallpaper made me grin. The porter looked at me as if I was taking the piss; I returned the look and we took it from there. The rooms weren’t half as pricey as I’d expected—seventy lira a night for spooky corridors and dank ceilings. Seemed fair to me. Amazing what a difference hot water can make to your outlook on life.

  After an hour sitting in the shower, splashing about like a toddler, I walked down the marble stairs into the lobby, my hair dripping onto the burgundy-colored carpet. The sofas and armchairs reminded me of the three-piece suite at my grandparents,” similarly misshapen, over-the-top and extremely comfortable. I’d only just sat down when, in the corner by the window, I saw something move in a cage that was as tall as me. I went over to it; a parrot’s gnarled claws crawled toward me out of the darkness and I pressed my nose up against the bars of the cage. The bird cocked its beak at me; the cere was crusted over and the beak snapped open to reveal a small, wormlike tongue. I opened my mouth, summoning a sound from my throat in the hope that we might be able to communicate, but the parrot only looked at me, turned away and scrabbled up the flimsy ladder into the high dome of the cage.

  I wandered about the lobby. I tried out the row of phones hanging on a brick wall, but there was no signal; they were purely decorative. Opposite them were a few computer tables. A little girl was sitting at one of them, engaged in a noisy, clanging battle with some enemy nation, cursing under her breath. I stopped in front of the jukebox. On the start button it said: Sie hören jetzt…You are listening to…I wanted to put on a record; you could choose between songs like “Green, Green Grass of Home,” “Let’s Twist Again,” “Ben Buyum” and “Drei Matrosen aus Marseille.” I ran my fingers over the buttons, then realized that the porter must have been staring at me for some time, and moved on.

  There was a tar
antula on display in a glass case and I fancied it was looking at me. In the middle of the room were two motorbikes, one BMW and another I couldn’t identify. A huge china pug dog was sitting in front of a mirror in a cowboy hat; something about it reminded me of Dad. There were red plastic flowers growing above it and the mirror took up an entire wall. I stood in front of it in my only white shirt, hands behind my back, and thought: I’ve made it.

  In Russian you say: “I want to feel like a white man.” Kak belyi chelovek. My mother used to say: “What is this? Don’t you want to sleep like a white man? Have another pillow,” or: “What is this? Don’t you want to dress like a white man? Here’s a clean shirt.” And here I was. I’d escaped. I was far away, in the famous Grand Hotel de Londres, wearing a white shirt.

  I spent the days asleep in the stuffy air of the Londra, and the nights on the terrace. I couldn’t get enough of the view—the black Bosporus, the golden yellow of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, the countless gecekondular. The light flowed into the Golden Horn like the juice of a bleeding pomegranate. Feit, the barman, told me he’d heard that the Japanese wanted to buy that sewer of a river, and clean it up, return it to its former glory, but then it would be theirs forever more, a Japanese Golden Horn. They couldn’t have that, of course—better to leave the sewer a sewer. “Don’t go swimming in there—you’ll be skinned alive.” I nodded. Then he told me the porter was rumored to be a faggot; the idea seemed to revolt him. As he was telling me all this, I watched a couple of elderly gentlemen peering into their glasses with red eyes. Most of them were German; I’d already begun to feel that the hotel was a kind of Darby and Joan club home for the Berlin-weary. I psyched myself up to approach one of them; at first he thought I was Turkish and grabbed my ass, then he was glad I spoke his language, and put his hand on my breastbone. I leaned down to him and talked about the beautiful sea of light in the mountains and about pomegranates and suchlike—then I switched into Russian. When I was sure he was on the point of coming, I put my hand on his belt and let it drift to the wallet in his pocket. Then I noticed Feit watching us. I pulled the wallet out anyway. Later I went to Feit, put the cash on the counter and suggested we go shares. He pocketed the entire wad of money without taking his eyes off me and said: “Fuck off.”