Beside Myself

by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

  I saw Aglaja’s name in the papers. Not that I ever read the papers, but I recognized her in a photo when I was boning a fish on the newspaper it had come wrapped in. Her face was covered in gunk. I found the hospital and took her flowers and a tesbih made of a tourmaline-like stone that could change color. I lied to the nurses—told them I was a relative. They asked if I was her son and I was a second too slow off the mark; the question caught me off guard. The woman in the white hospital uniform shook her head, but jerked it toward Aglaja’s door at the same time.

  I felt slightly ashamed to be bringing Aglaja a tesbih—didn’t want her getting the wrong impression and thinking I was religious or anything. I’d been given it by this rich guy on the Büyük Londra terrace—he was allowed down my boxer shorts in exchange—and I thought it was a beautiful stone and just right for her, though I didn’t know at that point if she’d ever wake up and see it. She was in a coma when we got to know each other. I put the flowers in a vase and the tesbih on the sheet next to her warm hand and watched to see if the stone changed color. Then I pushed the worry beads under her hand and closed her fingers around them, but still nothing happened. I waited a bit, looking into her cracked-up face—her mouth was all swollen, as if an animal had forced its way out of it—and then I left. When I asked later, she knew nothing of a tesbih that changed color; she’d woken up alone in the room, with nothing in her hands.

  * * *

  —

  The city smelled sour and it was quiet, as though someone had slapped me around the ears. I drifted slowly down empty streets, as if underwater; noises sounded like their own echoes; I could feel them on my skin. I looked down at my feet, but couldn’t see them. A man came toward me—impossible to say how old he was. His face was half-covered with a white material that had something scribbled on it. He walked past me very slowly; I saw him bend his arms and legs in slow motion. When he was level with me, he looked at me and I stared at his face mask; it had a letter A on it, circled with a wobbly line.

  Then everything was suddenly very loud and fast, like a flock of attacking birds. An old woman’s lips flew around me as she tugged at me; a pack of policemen charged down the road; bloody shirts beat their wings; dislocated joints fluttered through the air; green goggles whirred past, filled with tears. The swarm rushed right through me, almost pulling me over, then suddenly a girl with a blond ponytail and a camera in her hand was standing in front of me, asking me to take her photo outside a gutted Starbucks. I took the camera and the girl posed, one hand on her hip, the other thrust into the spider’s web of splintered glass. I put the camera in focus, zoomed in on the shattered window and then out again, looked through the lens at the damaged facades around me, at the blackened shop doors and the banners in the windows calling the president names. I twiddled the lens in and out of focus, heard the girl with the ponytail shout something, angled the camera down alleyways—in one, a cat was sitting, staring straight into the lens. I threw the camera on the ground and ran off after the cat.

  No idea if it was hunger or anger, but my stomach was spinning like a top. I wasn’t thinking straight and couldn’t get Ali out of my head—Ali, for God’s sake. It’s not that I’d never thought of her before—I’d never done anything but think of her—but just then, in those sour-smelling streets, I could really have done with something else in my head. She was suddenly there, in front of me, looking at me; it was like learning pain all over again.

  I did something that always helped, and decided to run her out of my system. I ran and ran, all through the city—away from Gezi Park, away from İstiklal, away from the tourists and grannies and demonstrators. I ran down to the water. I thought about taking a ferry, but they weren’t sailing. I ran over Galata Bridge and back again, past the fishermen who were still standing there as if nothing had happened; I stumbled over the jumble of fishing rods, took a running jump and leaped onto the railings of the bridge. The men started to shout, just like my mother when I was little; they didn’t understand any more than she had and pulled me down. As they tugged at me, I realized that my face was wet. I screamed, pushed the men away and carried on running. I ran until the air in my lungs was coming out of my mouth in red lumps, then I climbed a tree by the soccer stadium. The field was empty and above it was the whole of Fatih with its mosques, scraps of cloud in the sky like dried sage.

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I saw Ali reach for me the way she did when we were little; I saw her lash out at me the way she did when we thought we weren’t little anymore. I saw her run away when I kissed Larissa—saw her tears and wanted to go after her. I saw Ali next to me on the bare boards of her empty room, her breasts bound, her slim hips naked, her legs twisted, her pale, bluish skin melting on the floorboards.

  Something flew into my shin—once, and then again. I looked down and there was this kid throwing stones at me. I shouted at him and he laughed and said something in Arabic. I pulled off a twig and threw it at him, but missed and the little prankster laughed again and waved. I was about to climb down and give him a good spanking, when all at once he scrambled up the trunk and came and sat next to me. I could hardly push him off, so we sat there side by side looking down at the empty soccer field, and he began to tell me some story I couldn’t understand. Then suddenly the clouds were shot through with grapefruit red and the boy pinched my thigh and pointed at the sky, almost screaming. I suppose he must have said something like “Look! Look! Look!” And I looked. The tip of the boy’s nose was red, and under it was a dry, yellowish crust. I wanted him to lean up against me, but he didn’t move and I was afraid to reach out to him; I didn’t want to startle him into falling off. I sat huddled there on that branch, hugging my knees, and I thought to myself: I badly need someone to hold me tight.

  * * *

  —

  Aglaja was the second child of a Romanian circus acrobat and a Hungarian clown; from the age of three she performed in circus rings all over the world—she talked of Germany, Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal, Argentina and sometimes of New York, but most of her memories were of Argentina and Spain, where she’d been a child star and a big attraction; her little body had been plastered on posters at every street corner, in colors that looked as if they’d come faded off the press. The posters showed her sitting naked on a swing with yellow and red ropes, a triangular toupee between her legs; her mother and aunt had thought it best to protect the girl’s nakedness with fake hair. The child on the swing was grinning, legs splayed, hands in the air.

  Aglaja had been in Spain soon after Franco. She remembered the clubs where she’d performed and the men’s heavy breathing. Whenever she felt afraid of them, she simply lowered her head and looked at the floor of the ring, and her hair turned into red seaweed and fell over her face and protected her. She spoke in childish metaphors, and believed in fairy tales and ghosts of all kinds. Superstition was part of her body language; she could hardly open her mouth without touching wood or tugging at her earlobe or pretending to spit three times.

  All she remembered about Germany was the cold. In Switzerland she once ran off with a boy who promised to teach her to climb rocks, and the pair of them got eight meters up without ropes before anyone discovered them. Aglaja didn’t break a single one of her precious bones, but her incensed father did his best to make up for that by beating her into the corner of their caravan. She couldn’t remember a thing about France, but she remembered living at the seaside in Portugal and watching her mother practice her stunts over and over. It was at about that time that Aglaja learned to fear death. She learned it too early.

  Her mother’s tour de force was to hang from the roof of the big top by her long hair, and juggle. Why her hair didn’t come out by the roots, her scalp peel off her skull, and her face stretch at the jaws like chewing gum, remained her secret. Not even Aglaja knew how she did it, but she combed her mother’s hair every morning, and chanted spells over it so it wouldn’t rip during the evening performan
ce.

  In Porto, her mother had the idea of advertising the show by hovering over the harbor with a big poster in her hands saying Circus in Town. She persuaded a ship’s crane driver to suspend her over the water by her hair, showing him her breasts to get what she wanted—Aglaja saw this with her own eyes and her father was standing next to them. The hovering act was a success and gawping passers-by gathered at the pier. Aglaja stood at the harbor’s edge, whispering spells to the crane. Her father walked through the crowd distributing flyers.

  * * *

  —

  When the time came for Aglaja’s mother to be hoisted back on deck, the crane gave out and she was left dangling helplessly over the water, screaming like mad. She spat out her tongue and her eyes turned red.

  They did eventually manage to get her down before her head was ripped from her body in front of the cheering crowd, but from that day on, Aglaja refused to work for the circus. She took the scissors to her long hair, tied it up like a bunch of flowers and gave it to her mother, who put it in a vase.

  “My mother did all these things with me in her belly,” she said. “I walked the tightrope on my head for eight months before I was born. I lay inside my mother doing the splits on the high wire.”

  Aglaja sometimes scratched her head till the hair stood on end. Her scalp seemed to smart; she’d rub it and tear at it with her nails, making her hair stick up like prickles. “In Romania,” she’d say, “all children are born old.”

  That’s how she talked—like an old child—and it’s the way she looked too. She was older than me—twenty, twenty-five years older—but when we walked around the city together, we looked like brother and sister, and I felt like her big brother. She had stayed the little Aglaja of her memories, the child who was sat in front of an accordion so that she was at least good for something in the circus, if she wasn’t prepared to flaunt her little body anymore. She pushed the buttons down with her fingers and toes and liked the sound, especially the breathiness of the bellows when she pulled the instrument out with her hands and feet. She’d soon learned a few sea shanties and went up and down the rows in the big top, playing and singing. Men pushed money into the slits in her costume; once a man put his fingers in too far and she brought the accordion down on his head. Her parents decided to send her to an aunt in Zurich where, aged thirteen, she learned to read and write at a boarding school. She was always running away from the boarding school, back to her aunt’s, where she’d wait on the doormat until she let her in. Aglaja never saw her mother again.

  She did see her father once more, but not until she was in her late twenties. He was touring southern Germany with Circus Roncalli and she recognized him on the posters. She went to the circus grounds before the show, found his caravan and knocked on the door. An old bad clown opened up to her; he was just the way she remembered him. The clown recognized his daughter at once and greeted her with a nursery rhyme:

  “Era un răţoi posac, Toată ziua sta pe lac, Şi trecând striga aşa: Mac! Mac! Mac! Mac! Era singur, singurel, Nici o raţă după el, Apa nu învolbura, Mac! Mac! Mac! Mac!”

  He said he was glad to see her because he’d been wondering what to do with all his Super 8 films; there was no one else he could entrust with the precious things. When she was little, her father had made trashy horror movies starring all the family; in most of them, he rescued Aglaja and her sister and their mother from monsters played by dolls. Aglaja’s role in these films was to scream: “Help! Help!”

  He thrust more than twenty Super 8 films into her hands; then he took his black hat from the hatstand and put it on her head. They hugged goodbye and her father promised to write and let her know if he was ever in the area. It wasn’t clear where he was thinking of writing, so they both knew it wasn’t really going to happen. But Aglaja was glad; she said the one meeting was enough for her. Just knowing she’d made peace with her father was enough to make her feel human again—though she put it slightly differently; she said: “It makes me feel humanly again.”

  I thought that was a silly way of speaking, but decided I’d better not say so and filled my mouth with cigarette smoke.

  She didn’t talk much about her mother and sister. Her aunt had been her family; she’d taught Aglaja everything she knew, from reading coffee grounds to dressmaking to managing money. The only thing neither of them liked was cooking; they were both happiest eating porridge with milk and a layer of sugar. When Aglaja was little, she didn’t know what this diabetes thing was that had caused her aunt to have both feet off, but she was amused by the silicone prostheses she could feel in her aunt’s shoes; sometimes she stole them and stomped around the flat with them. When her aunt died, Aglaja took the shoes, silicone feet and all, and ran away. Since then, she said, she’d been all over the place. And now she was here. She looked out over the rooftops of Bayrampaşa.

  We were sitting on a sloping tiled roof, looking out over a ragged sea of colored houses—yellow and orange and red and violet squares. I didn’t often manage to persuade Aglaja to go for a walk in town or sit in a café—there was more sun higher up, she said, so why stay down there? She always found a way onto the roofs. Below us, a whole horde of hungry cats was scampering over a street dog. It was lying in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes and mouth open, tongue hanging out.

  “They poison the dogs in this city instead of feeding them,” said Aglaja, stretching to get a better view. I too leaned forward and looked at the dog; it was lying on its side like a person, its paws under its nose.

  “In Moscow there’s a monument to a street dog. Malchik, the bastard’s called. At Mendeleyevskaya metro station.”

  “Why?”

  “No idea. Maybe so they don’t have to worry about the people. Who knows.”

  “As if anyone ever worried about them,” said Aglaja after a silence. “Istanbul is a whore, an old whore with long, filthy hair. A whore that gets fucked to pieces, then stitched together, then fucked to pieces again. People can’t take any more.”

  I looked at Aglaja’s feet dangling over the street. Her toenails were painted a color that some would call “Chanel red” and others “Pioneer red,” depending. I let my eyes travel up her. She was wearing baggy men’s trousers with broad black and gray stripes, and suspenders over a black shirt. Under the shirt, her arm muscles were tense; her whole body was braced against the air and she was swaying back and forth on her toes over the city, as if she were on a swing. I fought back my fear that she might lose her balance or simply let herself fall—or what if she had another epileptic seizure?—but I said nothing, lit a cigarette and looked down at Malchik, panting on the street below.

  * * *

  —

  The first time I saw Aglaja having a seizure was on a date, soon after we’d got to know each other. I’m not sure that she’d have called it a date, but whatever it was, I was busy trying to work out how I could get around to kissing her at last—and then it started. I didn’t understand what was going on at first. She just stared through me—for thirty seconds or so, she just stared, as if someone had stopped the clocks. I almost kissed her—now, I thought, now’s the moment. Then I saw that her hands had tensed into claws and a second later her head jerked back, and white foam came out of her mouth—a lot of foam, as if she’d swallowed a cup of detergent. Her eyes were wide open and fixed in a stare. Maybe she’s dead, I thought, looks as if she might be—but her body was thrashing from side to side, up and down, and when I put my arms around her, I realized she’d wet herself. I’d heard somewhere that you should put a stick or a piece of wood in their mouths, so they don’t bite their tongues off, but I didn’t have a stick; we were up on a roof at the time and there weren’t even any of those gnawed bones lying around that cats sometimes drag onto roofs. I tried wedging my forearm between her jaws, but the skin at the corners of her mouth tore and I pulled my arm out quickly, afraid I might break her teeth. I held her arms tight and pushed my shin ag
ainst her thighs, thinking, don’t break her ribs, don’t break her ribs; her lungs are in there—and at some point, without warning, it was over. She lay there on my knees, breathing peacefully, her eyes closed, her trousers full of pee, her chest flecked with foam.

  I thought she might never speak again, after her body had been given such a thorough shake-up—or maybe she wouldn’t be able to stand; I geared myself up to carry her somewhere. The muezzin began to sing and when he was done, Aglaja said: “I have a scar in my brain that won’t go away; it’s there forever. I can remember your name today, but I can’t promise I’ll know it tomorrow.” She wasn’t even looking at me, nor was she looking at the sky; she was looking farther than I could ever have looked. “I was clever once,” she said. “Now I’m just stupid.” Then she knocked her red curls with a tight little fist and it made a noise like someone knocking on a door. “But I have a metal plate in my head that makes a funny sound. Want to feel?”

  She grabbed my hand and laid it on her sweaty curls. I didn’t move. I didn’t want to knock on her head, or even stroke it. I looked down at her and she said she needed sugar—tulumba tatlısı. “Those things are so sweet! Nothing but sugar syrup and flour and butter and oil. When I first got to Istanbul, I lived off them—didn’t eat anything else for weeks.”