Beside Myself, page 18
There, on the beach at Odessa, the four of them decided to move to Volgograd, because Daniil had been offered a post there when he graduated and Shura held out hopes for a better job and a more decent salary. Every child born in Volgograd before perestroika was issued with a medal saying: Born in the City of Heroes. The year the young couple moved there with the in-laws, the city had just been renamed: Stalingrad was now Volgograd. The war had left a crumbled memory of a once magnificent town. Because it had been named after the great leader, there had been a rush to build it up again, and the colossal statue, The Motherland Calls, had been rammed into a hill in the middle of town. Chest out, mouth open, sword aloft, the Motherland was almost as tall as the Statue of Liberty, and down below, spread out at her feet, were the graves of fallen soldiers, the eternal flame, eternal remembrance—a Soviet Disneyland in several tons of concrete.
Emma and Daniil were given a room on the edge of town in a hall of residence belonging to the medical university, and when they first moved in, there was nothing in that room but a single bed and a window the exact same size as the bed. There are no photos of this room; only the story of how Daniil found Emma lying on the floor, curled up in pain, two months before she was due to give birth. He called for a doctor, who drove them from hospital to hospital looking for a free bed, only managing to get Emma admitted at the third attempt, by which time she was unconscious. It was assumed there was some problem with the foetus; Emma had been warned not to risk pregnancy with her frail health. Daniil held her hand all through the long hours spent driving from one hospital to the next, and later claimed that Emma had only been saved because the gynaecologists in the third clinic knew who her father was and were afraid it wouldn’t look too good if they allowed the daughter of the great Professor Farbarjevich to die on them on the operating table.
‘They wouldn’t even have examined her till the next day!’ Daniil said, his eyes moist. ‘I saw them—standing around on the corridor smoking, they were, touching each other under their doctors’ coats. They wouldn’t have lifted a finger if I hadn’t kicked up a fuss! And then—’
He stopped and began to cough. Emma pushed a glass of water towards him and said: ‘You never drink, you don’t drink enough, why won’t you drink?’
He shook his head, his hand in front of his mouth, laughing and giggling—it sounded like a dog panting. ‘Let me get on with the story,’ he said.
Emma looked out of the window, lost in thought, her broad-boned face as open as a butterfly’s wings.
‘Are you cold?’ Daniil asked her.
‘Yes, I am. Did you turn the heating down?’
‘No. Did you?’
‘No, but then why is it so cold in here?’
‘I don’t like you not eating, darling,’ said Daniil, leaning across the table to me. ‘Is there nothing in the flat you fancy? I could make you something. Let me have a look; there must be something in the fridge you’d like. How about some dried apricots?’
I swallowed. I saw my ten-year-old self sneaking dried apricots in the kitchen, balancing on a cardboard box to reach to the back of the cupboard where Emma hid them from me. ‘Don’t you go touching them. I bought them for Danya. They’re good for his heart. If you want something sweet, you can help yourself to a caramel.’
I realised that Emma and Daniil must have known all along that I’d stolen them, cramming into my trouser pockets what I couldn’t fit in my mouth.
‘Will you let me make you coffee?’ I asked Danya, looking up from the table that was strewn with photographs.
‘I’ll make it myself. Don’t get up.’ He shuffled into the kitchen. ‘Tell me some more about this book you’re reading,’ he called through the door.
I watched my grandparents moving slowly around the room, twiddling the knob on the radiator, opening and shutting the curtains, putting their hands on each other’s shoulders. Now that they’d opened up to me, arguing in front of me about the possible interpretations of their lives, muddling their way through the various phases and stages, I felt that I owed it to them to say something about myself—not sidetrack them again by talking about books. I wanted to tell them a bit about what I’d done in Istanbul, how I’d tried to find Anton. And about the stubble on my face. They knew nothing and I was to blame. For a long time, talking about myself had been as impossible as asking Daniil and Emma why socialism had failed—some things you don’t talk about. But the situation was different now. These polite, reserved people I’d grown up with had revealed something of themselves; these people I’d seen cry over politics and social security payments had forged a path for me, and now, with their broad, open faces and piercing anxious eyes, they sat naked before me, making me feel I was hiding behind their beliefs about who I was. I’d returned from the Bosporus as a version of myself they didn’t know and didn’t question—or if they had, they hadn’t ever let it show. They treated me like something familiar in a different guise. Did they think I’d followed a new trend and that the old me was still lurking somewhere underneath?
Or maybe I really was still the granddaughter they knew; maybe I looked no different to them. Close relatives always store a younger version of you in their memories, superimposing it on the aging, changing body that visits them once a month, once every six months. Perhaps they still saw me with shoulder-length hair, riding my bike in circles under their window, my left arm sticking out, my teeth gappy like in the photo in the cabinet behind them, the one next to the picture of their daughter that’s also several years out of date, on the same shelf as the two plastic hydrangeas and the menorah.
Back then, I was still used to thinking about myself from outside myself, in the third person—a story belonging to somebody else. So I told them a story, hoping they wouldn’t leave me there, at one remove, but pull me back in, hug me, or at least look at me—even that would mean a lot. I knew I couldn’t expect them to understand the story, but they listened as I told them about Ali and how she became Anton.
T
Ali had lived with Elyas ever since coming to Berlin—far from her divorced parents, far from her grown brother who’d moved back in with their mum, far from a father who was always leaving confused, drunk messages on her answerphone, which she sometimes deleted without hearing them through to the end.
They’d met at a party, both clutching glasses of vodka, both in a bad mood, both wearing well-fitting shirts. The other guests were a mass of fluorescent polyester tops, pink singlets, black leather open-toed shoes, faded trucker caps over unkempt hair, yellow faces with red lips, orange lips, black lips, glittery lips. Ali and Elyas had both, independently of one another, felt turned off. People rushed past them, asking questions, rolling cigarettes, taking sips from glasses that weren’t theirs and twisting their lips into grimaces learnt from the movies. They felt watched; they were watched; they stuttered and laughed. Ali and Elyas’s eyes met across the room; their gazes brushed. Elyas’s eyes were set close together, angled towards his nose like arrows. He was wearing square, horn-rimmed glasses and when he smiled, his ears shot up. Ali was sure he could waggle them.
The smoke from a bong got in her eyes, making her blink. She opened her lips, took a deep breath and coughed, looking across at the cloud of smoke around a mop top whose matted hair stuck up from his head like the legs of a fat spider. Then she turned back to Elyas; he was still looking at her. They headed towards one another, slowly, not purposefully—they had no purpose; they didn’t know what they wanted of each other, but not the usual, that was for sure. They danced sideways along the wall, heel-and-toeing it, closer and closer—and just as Elyas was about to turn to face Ali, a woman dived between them and Ali found herself with the woman’s bum in her hand, while the woman’s bare navel fitted itself around Elyas’s belt buckle. Ali’s hand jerked back; she wiped it on her trouser leg with a curse, put her glass down and looked about for the hostess to say goodbye. She pushed her way through the fluorescent polyester tops; out in the hall, a boy with no eyebrows squinted at her, barely of age, his head a polished wooden ball leaning against the door frame. When Ali felt for the door handle, he put his hand in her hair and closed his fingers to a fist, saying something Ali couldn’t make out. She raised an arm as well as she could in the crush, and slapped the boy in the face. He let out a yell and began to cry; someone shouted and took the lad into the bathroom, and someone else pushed Ali; she couldn’t see much now, but she saw Elyas’s eyes and felt his hand in hers, pulling her into an empty room. They lay down on the bed; they could hear people looking for Ali. Someone knocked on the bedroom door and without a word to each other, they rolled under the bed, pulling the sheets shut like curtains. Their eyes gleamed among the dust balls. Elyas’s glasses were slipping down his nose and he took them off. A dust ball settled on Ali’s face; she caught it between her fingers. Elyas grabbed another and tried to blow it away.
‘I like this stuff.’
‘What? Dust?’
‘Yes.’ Ali rolled onto her back and looked up at the bed slats and the bulging flesh of the mattress.
‘I’m allergic.’
‘I don’t do mouth-to-mouth.’
‘That’s okay.’
They lay there breathing, uncertain whether or not to kiss; their needs were so different, but they didn’t really know what else to do. Kissing would definitely have been easier than not.
‘When I was little, my dad often went to visit his parents in Russia, and the day he was due back from Moscow, my brother and I had to clean the entire flat till it shone. But he always found something. He went from room to room with his gloves still on, and we followed behind—my brother used to tremble like anything. And he ran his fucking finger down every groove—he even stood on tiptoe and felt all along the top of the doorframe.’ Ali ran her nails down the cracks between the floorboards. ‘Then he peered at his fingertips and held them up to our faces.’
She felt sharp grit and dried-up dust gathering under her nails. ‘The top of the doorframe—no child can reach that high.’ Her breathing was shallow, but the dust balls swirled all the same. ‘No child would even think of it. Would they?’
Elyas put his hands under his cheek and listened.
‘Don’t think I’ve done any dusting since I left home. No intention of starting either.’
Ali felt the blood rush to her head. She didn’t know why she was telling him this; she never talked about her father—not at parties, anyway, and certainly not under beds with strangers whose ears seemed to go on forever.
‘Can I ask you something?’
Elyas lay there without moving, his knees pulled up to his chest.
‘Can you waggle your ears?’
They parted early the next morning outside a photo booth where they’d pulled faces, muzzy with tiredness, and posed with a plastic pistol that Ali had grabbed on her way out of the flat to keep other people at bay. (Elyas had grabbed a pair of sunglasses.) There was room for only one person on the metal stool in the photo booth, so they sat on each other’s laps and held each other tight, kept awake by the flash of the camera. Then they tumbled out into the cold of the morning and stood looking at each other’s feet, their bodies bent forwards like blades of grass, their foreheads touching. They almost fell asleep like that, as the machine blow-dried their strip of photos. A week later Ali moved in with Elyas. Dust balls continued to be a topic.
Ali arrived with two bin bags full of clothes and comics. The flat was big and empty; you could shout into it and your voice would echo back at you. Elyas was sitting on the floor at the other end of the hall, tinkering with a door.
‘I’m just mending your door handle.’
The 150-square-foot box that was to be Ali’s room had a big window overlooking a kindergarten playground; the noise level was as high as if it opened out onto a motorway. Ali looked down at the little heads flitting across the grass, lit a cigarette, ashed out of the window, looked some more.
The room was empty except for a mattress, and she left it that way. She piled up cardboard boxes, crammed socks, shirts, underwear and trousers into their ripped-open bellies, hung a curtain in front—she didn’t want everyone seeing that her wardrobe was entirely dark blue and black—and ashed on the floor. Elyas was always offering to help her look for furniture, but a wooden board over two small chests of drawers did her as a table and she didn’t feel the need for more. On the table she put Elyas’s housewarming present to her: a cut-glass ashtray with a silver-plated stubber. The walls of her room were bare of any sign that she read, any sign that she had friends. She kept the mattress that had been lying on the floor when she moved in and loved the dependable emptiness the room exuded. When she was away, she didn’t miss the room; when she returned, they greeted each other politely, then fell into a passionate togetherness, like lovers meeting only for wordless sex. Ali threw herself onto the mattress, digging her shoulderblades almost through to the floor and grinding her back to and fro as if she were trying to bury herself in the room.
She had no objection to furniture on principle; she bought crockery for the flat, amassed a collection of chairs that had been put out for the dustmen and once pulled half a sofa through town on its castors and heaved it into the living room. She bought a kitchen table in a junkshop and even oiled the table top, though you could still see traces of their habits in the cracks—wax that had dripped down the empty whisky bottles that served them as candle sticks, crumbs of amaranth flakes and cigarette ash, and a black line that couldn’t be scrubbed clean even with a scourer and always reminded Ali of what she and Michal had been doing on the table the time that Elyas had come home unexpectedly. He’d hinted to her as tactfully as possible that she might at least close the door, and she’d said: ‘You have to mend the handle first.’
Elyas left for work early and came home late, and if Ali hadn’t budged from her room by then, he’d throw his car keys onto her belly.
‘Oh well, at least she’s nice and brown.’
There was a packet of profiteroles on the table. Cemal and Elyas were sitting at the ivy-covered window, drinking çay—Cemal smoking, Elyas peering through the smoke at Ali, who’d walked all the way from Karaköy because the rush-hour traffic had been at a deadlock. She’d been in the antique shops, putting photos of herself in the boxes of picture postcards and old photographs in the hope that Anton would come by at some point and rifle through them, recognise her on the photos and lose his mind.
Her temples throbbed in the heat; sweat ran down her forehead into her eyes.
‘What are you doing here?’ she yelled at Elyas when he got up and walked towards her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
‘Isn’t she wonderful? What did I tell you?’ Elyas looked at Cemal.
‘She’s nicer to me, I must say,’ said Cemal, smiling.
Elyas put his arms around Ali; she felt his hands on her back through her sweat-soaked shirt. He kissed her temples, and she wriggled free and blinked.
‘I had a sudden craving for profiteroles and this is the best place for them. So I thought I’d drop in.’ Elyas sat down and poured tea for Ali, his eyes telling her to sit down too. Ali looked at Cemal.
‘Can I roll myself a cigarette?’
Cemal pushed his crumpled packet of tobacco across the table and dug in his pocket for the papers that were so thin that Ali was always ripping them—she made the sticky strip too soggy when she licked it. The wrapper was marked with Arabic characters. Ali drew her eyes together and tried to concentrate on rolling.
‘It’s my fault that Elyas is here. I told him to come and check on you.’
Cemal looked at Ali, eyebrows raised, mouth open, as if he’d just given her the best news in the world. And because Ali said nothing—just lit up and kept looking at him—he added: ‘I told him you cry at night when you think everyone’s asleep.’
Elyas pushed his spoon into the chocolate-covered profiterole on the dish in front of him.
‘Uncle told on you. You can never trust family, you know,’ he said, champing choux pastry.
‘Cemal was only kidding. He can’t know what I do at night. I never sleep here.’ Ali spat tobacco on the floor and peeled the strip of wet paper from her tongue.
‘Yes, you do, kuşum, what are you on about? You lie here on this sofa and mew like a cat having its tail pulled.’
‘No, I don’t. I never sleep here because you have bed bugs that bring me out in a rash and give me red spots and make me scratch myself raw. It’s disgusting. This sofa’s disgusting. I’d never dream of sleeping here.’
Cemal let out a soft wheeze, sucked in a throatful of air and got up. ‘I’m going out,’ he said, coughing. ‘I’ll go and let your mum know you’ve arrived safely. Shouldn’t think you’ve got round to it yet, have you?’
Elyas looked up at his uncle, his cheeks puffed with cream. He shook his head and smiled, and Cemal smiled back. Ali jumped up and kissed Cemal on both cheeks, murmuring: ‘Say hello to Sibel from me.’
Ali knew Elyas’s mother from her visits to their shared flat, when she’d put cress sandwiches and stewed tea on the kitchen table for the children who weren’t children anymore, and expect them to eat up: ‘I don’t mind what you do, but you must eat.’ Apart from that, Sibel was the gentlest of mothers. She had clear bright eyes beneath papery lids and still held herself like a young girl. Ali had never been able to guess her age and had never asked. She’d been a real young girl when she’d come to West Germany to work in a factory, and being one of the first in the home to learn the foreign language, she was soon the official interpreter for all the other women on her floor. She went shopping with them and accompanied them to the local authorities and lawyers and doctors; she knew all their most intimate secrets and complaints—whether bowel movements or embarrassing rashes or husbands. Sibel and Ali often talked about this. Ali had done the same in her asylum-home years, taking the old people on her floor to the doctor and having to listen to all kinds of stories in the waiting room because they thought the little girl was too young to register the word ‘vaginismus’.
