All Russians Love Birch Trees

by Olga Grjasnowa

“Masha, I wanted to call you, but I didn’t quite know …”

  Sami came closer, so that his mouth was close to mine. I stood up on the tips of my toes, stroked his hair out of his face, and kissed his forehead.

  “I missed you.” Sami breathed into my ear as he had done in the past when we made love. We breathed heavily and almost in the same rhythm. Sami looked like someone who knew exactly what constituted a good life, where to get it, how to hold on to it, and, in the end, how to cast it out before it got too boring. In short: he had the air of something dangerous without being daunting. His gaze was always a little too serious. I found his nose very erotic. It had a little bump that he’d acquired in a fight in a rural disco that he had started himself.

  Even though it had been a long time since we broke up, from time to time I reflexively reached out for him. Sometimes when I felt his body close or when I looked at him for too long, everything was back: love and lust and hunger and greed. Besides, we’d hurt each other so deeply that there was no going back.

  In the line in front of the bathroom I spotted Daniel, who looked like a famished, offended rabbit. Daniel called himself anti-German, by which he meant Judeophile, pro-American, and somehow radical left. He was of the type who constantly wanted to save the world through one project or another. First it was nuclear energy, then the rain forest, organic food, and finally the Jews. He especially had a thing for them.

  Every time I saw Daniel he laid out his plans—unprompted—for his magnificent future as a gentlemen’s tailor in London. Herzl said that if only we wanted to want, it wasn’t just a dream, and Daniel wanted and wanted and in the meantime sewed tighter and tighter briefs. I already had three Aperol Spritzes down and tried to avoid him. I looked for Cem, but he was talking on his cellphone in a corner. He was probably talking with his boyfriend, a cook who’d been working in France for three weeks. I didn’t understand why Cem was so insistent on attending parties. He hated loud music and people who went to parties. For him, every bash was a battle he fought against himself for every minute he made himself stay.

  Daniel had stupidly waved at me. I ignored him, but he started to shout my name across the room, which over time got embarrassing. He made his way toward me hastily, taking large, awkward steps, his hand reaching out for mine, without me extending it. He fidgeted with my sleeve, his breath smelled of beer and bad digestion.

  “I’m backing you guys all the way,” he said.

  “Backing whom?”

  “Well, you guys.”

  Daniel licked his chops and I got angry that he had a clear point of view and all I had was doubts.

  “Which you guys?” I was practically yelling, and a few people turned their heads.

  “Israel, of course.”

  “Good save.”

  “You’re mean. So, what do you make of the situation? I mean you, as a Jew.”

  “Daniel, leave me alone with this crap. What do you want from me? I live in Germany. I have a German passport. I’m not Israel. I don’t even live there. I don’t vote there and I don’t feel any particular connection to the Israeli government.”

  Daniel always reminded me of my great-aunt, who sat in her Israeli living room—which was an exact replica of her former Soviet living room—drinking tea with a splash of lemon and intently studying Westi, the newspaper of the Russian-speaking immigrant population in Israel. Westi reported in detail on attacks carried out by Arabs in Israel, desecration of graves carried out by Arabs in France, and everybody’s publicly broadcast opinion on Jews.

  Daniel thought of Sami as an anti-Semite, Sami thought of Daniel as a Judeophile, and both were right. I would have preferred if they’d not bother me. But during a group project at school Daniel had said that my Arab lover was oppressing me and sucking me dry. An Egyptian plague—those were his words. Thereupon I had hit Daniel and knocked out a tooth and would’ve been expelled if Daniel hadn’t taken all the blame. Of course the blame was his. And not just in a third-generation-since-the-Holocaust kind of way. Ever since his missing tooth he treated me like his personal pet Jew. My only flaw was that I didn’t come straight from a German concentration camp.

  “I know, I know.” Daniel sighed deeply and pulled my sleeve. “The Jews are protected only by governmental force. You know, back in his day, my grandfather was part of a governmental force too, and if your governmental force had existed back then, the whole thing with our governmental force would never have happened. Just because of your collective trauma—” He took a little break. I’d nearly reached the stall, where I could finally lock the door behind me. “I don’t want to start a totalitarian discourse with broad abstract terms, don’t get me wrong. But it does make sense that many Jews see Israel primarily as a safe haven from genocide. And Auschwitz can happen again anytime. But now you are here, the materialized consequence of the anti-Semitic annihilation fury. Its executive, so to speak. After Auschwitz the Jews have to be able to defend themselves against those who wanted to kill them. My uncle Günther always wanted to kill Jews, but he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t fight, he was a paramedic. Nobody from our family actually fought. We’re from a small island. There you only fight with the levee. But this …”

  Daniel took a short deep breath and motioned toward the toilets.

  “This is the practical emancipation of the Jews from the permanent threat of destruction. You defend your hard-fought, functioning state with your life. The Israeli army is not an object of discussion, it’s not an object at all, but made out of flesh and blood. It’s you, your arms and legs, your feet and toes and fingers and hair and night-vision goggles and—”

  “Daniel, I am not Israel.”

  He ran his tongue across his thin lips, looking at me, dumbfounded. “I can’t win with you! But you’re lucky that I’m well-tempered and go along with everything if I’m into someone.” He smiled to himself and sighed. “I’m going to Israel. I booked my ticket today.”

  “What do you want there?”

  He looked at me, shocked, as if he hadn’t considered this until now.

  “Sunshine.”

  “What?”

  “I spent ten years studying the country. Does that count for nothing?”

  The urge to hit him welled up in me again and I had already made a fist when Cem dragged me away. “Come on, let’s go. I’ve had enough. Shit party.”

  The Main River lay black and calm in front of us. It was almost windless. On the other riverside somebody was fishing in the dark.

  “I swear, it was the first porn film we got. In Holland. We’d been looking forward to that vacation for months and the first thing my brother and I did was go into a coffee shop and then search for a porn film. We wanted hard-core and didn’t understand a word. We took a tape from the very back, top shelf, of course. Real hard. And then, finally, we put the tape into the VCR and the only thing we saw was feet. A woman was walking alongside a creek, but we only saw up to her knees. We fast-forwarded, but nothing aside from the feet and the creek. There we were in Holland, liberal country and all; our father had warned us, as had the mullah. We were really horny. And then that. Feet. My brother lost his shit, set the tape on fire and threw it out of the hostel window. He was already doing pretty poorly. Half a year later he died. Did I ever tell you how my brother died? How it took him half a year to kick the bucket?” Cem threw his empty beer bottle into the river and for a moment covered his face with his fingers.

  He had told neither Sami nor me how his brother had died. We only knew that it had been a long time ago and that it had been cancer. Often, when Cem was drunk, he cursingly and threateningly promised to tell us how his brother had died. But he never did and we didn’t ask, because we, too, had our secrets.

  Sami rolled a joint. I reached out for Cem. Cem took my hand and pulled me closer. He said, “Masha, I don’t know how to tell you, but all evening I’ve been getting texts from my cousin telling me not to shop at Aldi over the next few days. Supposedly the profits will go straight to buying arms
for the Israeli air force.”

  “Me too,” said Sami.

  “You got them too?” Cem asked.

  “Yeah. No idea who they’re from. I don’t even know the numbers.”

  “And you were afraid of Masha as well?”

  “Totally, man. I thought, now she’s going to kill me.” Sami laughed.

  “If you knew what a scene she made today. In the ladies’ room.”

  I placed my head in Sami’s lap and Cem leaned over me and said that it’s a shame we’re no longer together. His best friends.

  Sami was hungry, and Cem and I trudged after him. Most shops on the Kaiserstrasse were already closed. A few older women with bleached, stringy hair were still out and about. We passed a twenty-four-hour Laundromat. Inside sat an older couple. Both looked like junkies. He was doing a crossword puzzle, she was clutching a plastic cup, fixated on the swirling laundry with an empty gaze. Their bodies didn’t touch.

  It had become difficult to go anywhere at night. In the area around the train station everything slowly morphed into grocery stores and fish shops. Granted, it was hard to get cheaper and fresher groceries anywhere, and at noon long lines formed, populated by tired women in tight dresses or ample hijabs, guarded by pimps or other male watchdogs. Sami pulled us into a kebab place and he and Cem ordered. The floor was sticky. A rat skittered across the room. The rotating skewered meat glistened. I ate baklava while everything spun around me. The air was sweet and my body melted into the honey.

  8

  My head was buzzing. I was lying naked in a dark room. Behind the bed hung posters of horses and pubescents who either sang or acted and were shot in similar poses and colors as the horses. Sami’s cellphone was on the nightstand, my dress hung neatly over the back of a chair, Sami’s shoes stood in front of the chair. He had always had the habit of tidiness. Even in our relationship everything had been orderly to a fault, but with time the memories of who had left and humiliated whom had faded. What remained were the memories of a few good moments, of a diffuse happiness and of desire. Back then it had been physical desire, now it was more the desire to be desired as one had been before.

  I quickly got dressed and went into the hallway. In the kitchen, Minna was humming an unfamiliar melody. The air was heavy with the smell of food. It was as if somebody had just deleted the last three years of my life. I saw it all in front of me again. The afternoons shared with Sami, when his little sister never left us alone and Minna constantly told her to do just that. The dinners with Sami’s parents, when we spoke a mishmash of French and Arabic, the CDs of Fairuz, that in the morning were accompanied by Minna’s song, the feeling of being drunk with love, Sami’s touches and the emptiness following the high.

  “Salam alaikum.” Minna cframe and smiled at me. I was happy to see her, even though I would have preferred not to run into her. I wanted to get to the bathroom quickly to wash off last night and Sami.

  “Alaikum salam,” I greeted Minna.

  She gave me a big hug and urged me into the kitchen, where she poured me a flower-decorated mug of Turkish coffee. The breakfast table had already been set.

  Minna sat down across from me and curiously examined my face. Her gaze didn’t bear the slightest trace of accusation. In the past I had admired her the way you admire other mothers more than your own. When I met her for the first time I swore to become just like her: cheerful and full of warmth. A small Palestinian flag was affixed to the fridge with a black magnet. Minna had been born in a refugee camp in Lebanon.

  Sami came out of the bathroom wearing shorts and a worn-out white T-shirt. He didn’t look me in the eyes and I glanced away, too. He wore Adilette slippers that were at least two sizes too big for him.

  “Habibi, what a sight you are!” Minna said.

  Sami gave her a kiss and looked at me, embarrassed.

  “Where is Leyla?” I asked.

  Leyla was Sami’s little sister, and it was her bed I’d woken up in.

  “At the Vogelsberg. On a class trip.” Sami piled food on his plate that he then didn’t touch. Instead he nervously played with his fork. “Abu is at a conference in Switzerland.”

  “It’s a pity he doesn’t get to see you. I know he would have loved to. We miss you around here.”

  “Mom.”

  I still avoided looking at Sami directly.

  “Kullo min Allah.” All comes from God. Minna smiled at Sami and me encouragingly, as if to say, It doesn’t matter. Nevertheless we both felt uncomfortable. Minna understood, straightened her large body, hugged me, and said, “I hope you’ll come back.” With these words she left the room.

  “Alors,” I said and took a bite of the pancake that had been sitting on my plate.

  “How are you?” Sami asked after a while.

  “Hungover.”

  Sami stirred his coffee noisily. He stood up, opened the fridge, took out some jam and put it on the table. He stopped behind my chair and massaged my shoulders. I didn’t move. Sami kissed the part in my hair, gentle and exploratory. I felt his warm breath on my neck and tightened all my muscles to keep from reacting. His hands left my back and he returned to his seat across from me.

  I stayed where I was, paralyzed, unable to say anything. Sami took the jam and looked at the back of the jar, his bushy eyebrows furrowed. He read: “ ‘Arabic Dream—Peach fruit spread with vanilla and a hint of coffee. Our fruit spreads are made from handpicked fresh fruit from the garden, the local region or mixed orchards.’ What are mixed orchards?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “ ‘… which are then turned into exquisite compositions by partially blending them with exotic fruit.’ Do you think the exotic fruit are also grown on local mixed orchards? ‘A high fruit rate, a pleasant sweetness without artificial additives mark the hand-stirred specialty of our artisanal jam production.’ Something is not right about the grammar here.”

  I wished he would stop reading out loud, but he seemed to enjoy it: “ ‘Not only breakfast, but many other meals are enriched by fruit spreads. Indulge in the delights of our exquisite compositions.’ What the fuck?”

  “OK. Let’s talk,” I said.

  “Do you want coffee?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “I could make some. No trouble at all.”

  “Sami.”

  “You could add a spoonful of the Arabic Dream to it.”

  I stood up. He looked at me. “OK, you want to talk.”

  Sami jumped up, poured two cups of coffee, full to the brim. Then he started searching through the drawers, turning his back to me.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked.

  “Sugar,” he said.

  “I don’t take any. As you know.”

  “But I do.”

  “You don’t take sugar in your coffee.”

  He turned around briefly and said, “I do.” Then he resumed digging through the cupboards.

  “No you don’t.”

  “In the States I got into the habit.”

  “You used to find that disgusting. You can’t suddenly like sugar.”

  “Everything there is way too sweet. Why should coffee be an exception?”

  “I can’t imagine that Minna wouldn’t have any sugar,” I said.

  “Maybe she used it up, or I can’t find it. What do I know?”

  “Let’s talk.”

  “Now?”

  “Preferably.”

  “Fuck, I think I have to go to the gas station. We’re all out of sugar.”

  Sami ran out of the kitchen, then I heard the door slam. I raced back into the room, grabbed my things, fell over my own feet, landed flat on the floor in the hallway, and then tried to leave the apartment as quietly as possible. In the stairwell I did my best to avoid another encounter with Sami by climbing up the stairs and waiting one floor up, crouching down while monitoring the staircase. When Sami returned and closed the door behind him, I left my hideout and fled th
e building.

  9

  My subway was late. The stream of pedestrians on the opposite track reminded me of a viscous trail of honey, embedded with a few lonely raisins. The woman across from me was wearing a burka. I could only guess her shape. The veil left a thin slit for her eyes. She was following behind a small man who repeatedly turned to her and the child—a chubby-cheeked boy—seated in the stroller she was pushing. The boy clung to a plastic airplane. I leaned on a blue campaign poster for the conservative party: STOP YPSILANTI, AL-WAZIR AND THE COMMUNISTS!

  When I arrived they were just handing out dinner. A plastic bowl full of brown soup and two slices of wholegrain bread. From the shared bathroom came the sounds of a thundering flush, followed by violent snorts and farts. Elias looked bad: his face was haggard and pale, his eyes red. His hands rested flat on the bed. I asked if he was doing better and he nodded, which again was a lie.

  His stubble prickled me as I kissed him. Silently we drank the hospital tea and I climbed into bed next to him and he held me. We had not made love in a long time and now, lying next to him, I remembered the lust and thought that he felt it, too, and I felt guilty. The fall in Minna’s apartment had left a big purple bruise on my knee and I hoped that he wouldn’t see it. Then I realized that he was crying, without making a sound, just his chest trembling a little. I clung to him tighter, slipped my hands under his pajamas, and kissed him on the mouth. He looked at me apologetically, his eyes full of tenderness and love.

  Elias had gotten a new roommate—a small, burly man, artificial hip, Jewish quota–immigrant from Ukraine, presumably demented. He thought Elisha was his grandson Stasik and called for help all night long: “POMOGITE, boze moi, da POMOGITE mne.” HELP, for God’s sake, HELP me. When Elias got up, despite the pain, and walked over to the man’s bed, asking what was the matter, the man replied: “Stasik, adjust my right leg. It’s hurting so much.” Once Elias had finished this task, hobbled back to his bed, and had almost fallen asleep again, the screams would start all over. “POMOGITE, boze moi, da POMOGITE mne.” Of course Elias got up again and helped. The procedure went on like this all night. After two nights and three days Elias was done with the world. His eyes were bloodshot and his leg swollen from constantly getting up.