On January 15, 1991, Russian troops gathered around Baku. The population grew nervous. Roadblocks and barriers were erected on roads leading to Baku and in front of Russian barracks. The Russian invasion had to be stopped. A few days later the radio and TV stations were blown up by a KGB unit. Static on all channels. Nobody knew anything anymore and we were prepared for everything. I heard the first tanks roll down the streets. Our neighbor stood in my parents’ kitchen and yelled: “All Russians are murderers.” Calm and composed, my father answered, “Please leave my house.”
Russian snipers shot at unarmed people. Tanks rolled over barricades, over people, over an ambulance. Hundreds died that night. A sixteen-year-old Jewish girl was shot in her living room because her shadow was visible on the window. She bled to death lying on a rug in colors and ornamentation typical of the Caucasus region.
The next morning tens of thousands demonstrated in front of the president’s palace. On January 23 there was a rally for the fallen martyrs and my parents tried to bury my grandfather at it. His corpse had been decaying in our apartment for days. The decision turned out to be a bad one. My parents’ car was stopped, they were accused of being Russian agents and murderers and almost dragged out of the car. The target of the hatred now was Russians. My parents were accompanied by a friend who spoke accent-free Azerbaijani and was a member of the National Front. This friend saved my parents’ lives that day.
A general strike marked the following forty days of mourning. The declaration of independence followed in October. Instruments for identification and classification were created; a new flag flew: blue, red, and green with a white crescent and a white eight-pointed star. Blue represented the sky, red freedom and the blood that was shed to gain the freedom, green the fertility of the land—all of which we learned at school. I didn’t start school until December. We kept our coats on in the classroom and wrote with gloves because the windows were broken. An unannounced curfew descended over Baku like fog and would remain there until our emigration.
Nagorno-Karabakh was at war. Our neighbor implored God five times a day: “Don’t let my son go.” It didn’t help. Farid was drafted two days after his eighteenth birthday. My mother gave him my father’s warm jacket. Farid didn’t return and his mother stopped praying.
Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh camped out in parks, wrapped in blankets. Some of them were mutilated. Many occupied Armenian apartments, by force if necessary. A million Azeris had fled from Nagorno-Karabakh. The schools with classes in Azerbaijani filled with new students from Karabakh, while the Russian-speaking ones emptied out. Meanwhile, I played with my dolls and practiced forgetting.
In the following years there was hardly any gas, hardly any electricity, hardly any water, at most for an hour a day. Every hospital treatment came at a price. Money couldn’t be printed fast enough and any semblance of comprehensible rules had gone out the window. The system had collapsed. People who recently had been well off now hurried along the streets, cowering, their expressions desperate. Many took to begging. A well-dressed woman rang our doorbell. Her twins were dying. Her hands shook as she took my mother’s money. The intelligentsia and the mafia left. Hardly anybody stayed in Baku: no doctors, no professors, no engineers; neither Armenians, nor Georgians, Jews, Russians, Tartars. The only thing left was graves. Relatives from abroad sent money for their upkeep.
We couldn’t stay in Azerbaijan.
My father refused to go to Israel. Every morning my mother spoke about the anti-Semitism in Russia, but in private couldn’t imagine my father living in a Jewish state either. Besides, the words Occupied Territories, army, and Jewish state didn’t quite fit her utopia.
In 1990 my aunt immigrated to Israel. My parents didn’t go along. Both had good jobs and decided to wait. At first there was the hope of getting into the United States or Canada, but those borders were the first to close. The remaining options were Germany and Israel, but only as a Jew, and thus the register in the synagogue filled up, as did the immigration applications at the German and Israeli embassies. The same people who were bribed to erase the word Jew from passports and birth certificates in the past were now bribed to do the opposite.
In the meantime, the Gulf War broke out. Iraq launched Scud missiles against Israel and my mother sat in front of the TV, desperate, telephone in hand. Of course that was useless as international calls had to be ordered weeks in advance.
My relatives spent their first Israeli winter in bunkers wearing gas masks. My mother decided that she wouldn’t under any circumstances follow them. Initially the idea to go to Germany of all places seemed just as absurd to my parents. In 1994 my mother still claimed that she would never set foot in this country—the ashes were still warm. My grandmother was a survivor. Nine months later, my parents filed an application for emigration at the German embassy. In 1995 the application was approved and we began selling our things: first household electronics and kitchen equipment, then the furniture. My mother didn’t have long to think about whom to leave her grand piano. Every sale was celebrated with a meal. Food was available again, if at exorbitant prices. Only the books didn’t find a new owner. The two thousand volumes made for a big heap of trash. In 1996 we were in Germany. In 1997, for the first time, I considered suicide.
Friedberg was the final stop. I got off. The weather was bad, the houses low and quiet. In front of the train station it smelled like urine and a twelve-year-old yelled “cunt” in my direction. As I turned around to face him, he laughed out loud and said something in Turkish to his friends, who wolfed down stir-fried noodles in front of a Chinese take-out shop. Now the whole group erupted in roaring laughter and I wished for them to choke on their food.
The bell gave three loud shrieks before my father opened the door. The corners of his mouth briefly twitched in surprise before resuming their usual disheartened expression. My father was a man who had understood that things would never be good. I tolerated his lips brushing my right cheek and carefully patted his back. He told me that my mother wasn’t home and wanted to know if I had eaten. Not awaiting my reply he went back up into the bedroom, to his computer and his Russian movies. I took one of my mother’s lactose-free yogurts from the fridge and sat down in front of the TV, but didn’t turn it on.
The dark brown leather sofa was covered with a beige throw. The remote control was wrapped in plastic foil. The wall shelves featured, next to the Russian edition of the complete works of Feuchtwanger, framed photos of better days: my mother and I at the beach in front of a sandcastle; my grandparents’ wedding picture; my father as a young man, at the gate of the Yuri Gagarin Training Center. All Russians wanted to be cosmonauts, but my father actually was one. Just one who never got to go into space. Father was a member of the Communist Party, just like Yuri Gagarin. He graduated from flight school with honors, studied—like Gagarin—at the military academy for air force engineers in Moscow, completed the cosmonaut training—like Gagarin—but that’s where their parallel story ends. Nobody knew why. Father returned to Baku, and nobody resented him for this setback, nobody saw his return as defeat. He got a post at the ministry and became a respected and very busy man. I think that and the collapse of the Soviet Union were the big surprises in his life.
Sometimes when he got home from work he took me up to the roof. There he set up a telescope and explained the constellations to me, whispered their names into my ear, as if we were the only two people who knew those names, as if they were a secret between us. I felt his warm breath, smelling of almonds, and if father had had a drink before, he’d bring me to bed, let me change into my nightgown, give me a kiss, his beard stubble brushing against my cheek, and stroke my hair. Then he’d lay his hand on the radiator just as gently as he had touched my head earlier and leave the room.
Germany had no use for my father. In his social Siberia he wore jogging pants and those undershirts that are called wife beaters (not that he ever did). From one day to the next, Father had given up. He didn’t befriend other people. He ra
rely left the house, and if so, it was mostly to compare prices at gas stations.
Mother went to the kitchen first. Father came down, took a seat at the table, and started stuffing cigarettes. In a sweeping action, Mother opened the fridge door. My job was to squeeze a lemon and dice an onion. She heated olive oil in a heavy cast iron pan and searched for rosemary. Father waited impatiently until the fish had gained a golden-brown crust and opened a bottle of wine. At the dinner table my mother sometimes talked about her piano students. My father and I took turns asking questions when the silence became unbearable. During dessert my father listed all his acquaintances who had ever broken a bone and my mother corrected him every time. Her eyes were as big and dangerous as headlights.
I had wanted to leave the next morning, but mother was already defrosting the lamb for dinner. I didn’t dare to go. The second evening got melancholic. My parents sat on the couch and reminisced about the glimmering surface of the water in the bay of Baku, the tour boats, and Rostropovich’s performances. Almost all the memories they’d kept were pleasant. They had intentionally forgotten about the corruption, the National Front, the lines in front of empty grocery stores and Western embassies, often stretching several kilometers long. On the other hand, the memories of the lines amused my mother, as did those of the home for asylum seekers and the Baltic herring. Back then, a major part of our diet consisted of the aforementioned Baltic herring as well as illegally fished and processed caviar. But you couldn’t get bread or anything else—just Baltic herring. I would stand in line with my mother for hours to get them. In candlelight—electricity had become rare, as had candles, actually—my mother gutted the fish with her pianist hands.
When I returned to Frankfurt two days later, I had three bottles of kosher wine in my bag. My mother never drank this wine. She ordered it through the synagogue, to do the rabbi and God a favor, only to then order twice the amount of Georgian wine from her friends. The market-based correlation between the sale of kosher wine through the synagogue and that of Georgian wine in the community center was striking.
7
Even the floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall couldn’t brighten the dark wood-paneled interior of the room. On the bar stood a vase with lilies. The wall to the right sported a flat-screen TV that showed CNN on mute. During lunch hour the bar was always crowded with bankers who spoke English with European accents, loosened their ties, and ordered sandwiches.
Cem stared at the TV. The cafe had only opened half an hour ago. The waiter stood listlessly behind the bar and polished glasses with a checkered dish towel. His jaw-length hair fell into his face.
“You look pale,” Cem said.
The top buttons of his shirt were open, a golden crescent glistened on his chest. Cem had an uneven growth of beard, with a hairless patch on his right cheek.
I sat down across from him. He was the first person in his family to go to university and speak better Turkish than his parents. Cem had been born in Frankfurt and raised bilingually. At least that’s what he thought. It wasn’t until a vacation in Istanbul that he realized that he had a strong dialect. He often had to search for words. And so he spent a year at Istanbul’s best university and acquired the refined accent of the city’s upper class. With his relatives he kept speaking in the dialect of the village they came from before moving to Germany. We spoke German with each other—two perfectly integrated model foreigners. As Azerbaijani and Turkish are similar enough that we could understand each other, I told him in my language of the practical jokes we played as kids, and he imitated his parents’ or aunts’ Turkish. Sometimes he laughed about the archaic terms that I used, deducing them from Azerbaijani.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
“Whiskey.”
“Isn’t it a little early for that?”
“Çüs.”
“When’s your exam?”
“In four days, but we’re partying tonight.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Of course you want to. You’ve been in the hospital all day. Tonight you’re going out with me. Come on, you need it just as much as I do.” He grinned and downed his drink. “But first, take a look at my translation.”
The waiter put two glasses and a bowl of peanuts on our table. Cem shot a longing glance at his unopened pack of cigarettes. The package warned of death. I knew that Cem was imagining the crackling noise of the plastic wrap, the tearing of the silver paper, the taste of the filter in his mouth, the click of the lighter, and the first inhale. But maybe he was just thinking of the waiter.
“How is he?” asked Cem.
“Elisha? Crappy. He’s in a lot of pain. I try to distract him, but it doesn’t work.”
“Does he get on your nerves?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“Well, does he?”
I took a peanut, felt the salty taste on my tongue, and chewed it up.
“I’m sorry,” said Cem.
CNN was reporting on the Middle East. A demonstration with angry men wearing keffiyehs and waving Palestinian flags marched through Gaza. Interspersed were sequences with destroyed houses and Israeli tanks. Cem shook his head and took a sip.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
He inhaled through his nose and answered: “War.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. Cem looked at me, amused. I added: “We won’t know if there’ll be war until there’s a long talk with a correspondent.”
“Looks like there will be. My father already talked about donating for refugees.”
“Doesn’t he say that every time?” My voice sounded more aggressive than I had intended.
“Exactly.” Cem stretched his back, turned his head left and right. His neck cracked loudly. He glanced at the TV, yawned. “Exactly,” he repeated. “In the end, Dad prefers to spend the money on lottery tickets anyway.” Cem laughed joylessly.
“They always show the same thing,” I said. “Just look at it. Pictures of victims and aggressors in a quick sequence. First the text: the Israeli actions are aggressive and disproportionate. And they go deep into Palestinian territory. Then pictures of victims: maltreated mothers crying for their martyrs on the sunbaked ground, blazing fires and Israeli tanks and checkpoints off in the distance.”
“And you? You think all of that isn’t real? Don’t be so naive,” he said. CNN showed a blond American journalist gesticulating with concern into the camera.
“The journalists aren’t even allowed to enter the territory. They stand on the hill in front of it.”
“And write whatever the Israeli military dictates,” came Cem’s cynical response.
“If they don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic—”
“Well, they should take you, then, shouldn’t they?” he interrupted.
“Asshole.”
“Don’t get so worked up over it. Not everybody’s underqualified just because they don’t have a double major.”
I got up and went to the bathroom. I held my hands under the warm water and tried to localize my anger. I felt like I had to defend something that under different circumstances I would criticize.
There was a knock on the bathroom door. Cem poked his head in and looked around carefully. His eyes were large and green, like a deep lake early in the morning. He said he didn’t want to come in, because it was the women’s bathroom. His voice was shaky. I said I didn’t care if he came in or not. He asked if other women were in the bathroom. I said that I cared even less. He came in.
“Come on.” Cem said. “Let’s go back. There are plenty of other wars on TV.” He put his arms around me. “I have an orange. Do you want it? Please stop. Did you know that there are tunnels underneath all of Gaza and that there are more Mercedes than here? Seriously, Gaza will soon get its own Goethestrasse.”
I buried my face in his shirt. Cem smelled like good intentions and expensive cologne. He held me tight and whispered, “It’s going to be OK. He’ll be back soon.”
The walls were cover
ed in silk tapestries, white flowers on scarlet red fabric, interwoven with gold strands. I stood in a former brothel in the area close to the central station and looked around. Heavy, artfully cast golden frames decorated the walls, couches and chairs were covered with red velvet. A bartender wore rouge and a tiara, another a nylon stocking on his head. Both served with demonstrative disinterest. Gorgeous girls with shiny mouths and sweet perfume danced to the beat of aggressive house music. The young beauties knew how to accessorize a fetish. Many wore masks and feathers. The men were scantily clad and tried to look like catamites. Everyone smiled, danced, flirted.
I adjusted my dress in front of a mirror. Sami casually leaned on a column. He wore dark jeans and a black leather jacket and was giving the girl next to him a light. The girl was very blond and the contours of her small breasts showed against the thin fabric of her tight dress.
I approached Sami from behind and placed my hand on his broad back. The gesture was both instinctive and surprising, and I stood there with my hand on his back, unsure what to do next. When he turned and smiled at me, I heard myself say, “I didn’t know you were in Frankfurt.”
The hug was friendly and when we came apart he rested his hand on my arm for a moment. I didn’t move until he let go.
“For a month now,” said Sami.
“How long are you staying?”
The girl in Sami’s company made a show of yawning. I looked at her condescendingly, trying to place all my hatred into this glance, but she ignored me.
“Not longer than necessary,” said Sami. “My student visa ran out and I’m waiting for it to get renewed. I’m crashing with my parents and visiting old friends.”
Both of us took an awkward sip of our beers. The other girl whispered something into Sami’s ear, ran her tongue across her teeth, and finally left.
All Russians Love Birch Trees Page 4
