Beside Myself, page 22
Soon the funeral was out of the way and Kostya was sitting at Misha’s kitchen table, while Misha doodled on loose sheets of paper.
‘Still the old cartoons?’
‘What else? It’s the only thing that stops me.’
‘Stops you what?’
‘From smashing in my wife and children’s heads.’
‘I see.’
‘What about yours?’
Kostya looked at Misha’s doodles.
‘Can you help me find a buyer for the flat?’ he said.
‘I’ll ask around,’ said Misha.
•
Kostya knew what he wanted. He didn’t want a Mercedes, he didn’t want Vika in high heels to fuck on the backseat, he didn’t want his furnished flat and his shitty factory job—and what he really, really didn’t want was to have to hear the German language ever again; it had given him nothing but grief. Kostya had made up his mind to go back.
He wasn’t good at making plans. He didn’t really know what it meant to move to another country; Valya had seen to everything when they’d left for Germany and it wouldn’t have occurred to him to think of moving to Moscow as moving to another country; to him it was just going back—going home. He didn’t realise there’s no such thing.
His plan was to rent a little city-centre flat. They were expensive, of course, but he thought he’d be making money—and not just from the sale of his parents’ flat. After all, the cupboards were full of Adidas tracksuits and gold watches and chains; it was quite possible that the place was so jam-packed with valuables that the contents were worth as much as the flat itself. He thought, too, of those preserving jars full of dollar bills under the sink.
Kostya began to sell off the valuables, then he bought more—he started to invest, to speculate, something he was particularly bad at; the money slipped through his fingers. Still, he was happy. He walked around the city, got stuck in traffic jams, lost his temper at the jeweller’s, gave his father’s suits away to visiting friends. One of the friends who’d helped carry his piano up to the fourth floor all those years ago promised Kostya to help move the same piano to his new city-centre flat as soon he’d found one. When he left, Kostya gave him a gold watch. He lay on his father’s two mattresses, listening to the upstairs neighbours shouting at each other, and grinning to himself because he understood every word. When a buyer was found who was prepared to shell out half a million for the flat, Kostya laughed hysterically. He wanted to ring Valya right away to tell her, then he remembered that those days were over.
Documents were drawn up and certified, hands were shaken, a notary recorded everything and asked for cash in hand. When the money didn’t appear and didn’t appear in Kostya’s account, he sat at Misha’s kitchen table, smoking cigarette after cigarette, jiggling his feet up and down and stuttering to himself. ‘It’ll come,’ Misha said. ‘Don’t worry.’
But when Kostya took a taxi to the notary’s office, a journey of four hours in that part of town, spent, as usual, stuck between honking Volvos and jeeps (the fare almost bankrupted him, but he no longer had a car of his own), and when, on his arrival, he found the office shut up and no one around who could tell him where the supposed notary might be, there was no use pretending he didn’t know what had happened.
He returned one last time to Krasnyi Mayak 13, Block 2, Flat 120. He went into the living room, flung open the window, hung out over the windowsill and shouted. He left the window open, walked through the almost empty rooms and knelt down by the burn holes his children had left in the carpet, then went into the hall, leant against the kitchen doorframe and stared at the plastic tablecloth with the pattern of blue flowers that his father had scored with a knife, at the little television set that was still sitting on top of the fridge even though it hadn’t had any picture or sound for years, and at the cooker that was as spotless as if it had never been cooked on. Then Kostya’s eyes fell on the improvised growth chart marked on the doorframe in blue biro. It stopped at 132 centimetres. Two almost straight lines were labelled vertically in his own handwriting, one marked Anton, the other Alissa, and beside the names were numbers:
1987—82 cm
1988—91 cm
1991—110 cm
1994—126 cm
1995—132 cm
Kostya ran first his eyes along the lines, then his fingers. He scraped them with his fingernail; he spat on them and tried to wipe them off with his thumb; he rubbed and rubbed with the flat of his hand, but the biro had gnawed its way into the white paint, so he yanked at the doorframe, took the door off its hinges, prised the growth chart off the wall, carried it into the bedroom, put it on the two mattresses and lay down beside it.
For three days he lay in his childhood flat and cried. He puked in the bathtub, smeared the windows with shit, pissed on the Turkish carpet, aiming for the burn holes, smashed all the light bulbs and made sure he left the place as he wished it to be found.
He didn’t say goodbye to anyone. Misha drove him to the airport; they hardly spoke. Kostya boarded the plane with the taste of salty dill gherkins on his tongue. On the flight, he looked at brochures of Germany and leafed through glossy catalogues, and when he got back to Vika with her long raspberry-coloured nails and her long-fingered hands, he saw that those long fingers of hers were stained yellow from nicotine. He hadn’t noticed before.
VALYA
‘I met Kostya the day he brought home his engineering degree, and that’s how he was presented to me: a qualified man with a certified degree—job guaranteed. All that was wanting was a wife, and not just any wife, but a proper Jewish one—and there I was at the door. You can imagine, can’t you? They’d got their teeth in me; I still have the marks. On the fourth day, Kostya said: “You’re my wife.” Just like that. Didn’t ask. Nobody asked. Nobody waited for an answer either. And all this time he was in love with another woman, a regular goy. The love of his life, she was. Shame he didn’t have the balls to marry her.’
That was the moment I realised I had been deluding myself into thinking I’d want to hear what Valya had to tell me, no matter what it was.
Today she was wearing a discreetly checked green blouse that hugged her shoulders and flowed over her body—a body that looked imposing when she held herself straight. She wasn’t looking at me, but right through me, reading a script off my face, like a newsreader following a teleprompter—except that in her case it was yesterday’s news and had already left lines at the corners of her mouth. A slight protuberance pulled her upper lip down; I don’t think she ever smiled much, but not because she wasn’t a cheerful person—on the contrary, my mother was more given to laughing than anyone else in the family; it was just that there was no place for laughter in the time that had spawned her—no place for laughter in that land called Socialism; it wasn’t part of normal social behaviour over there. Deep down inside, though, she laughed a lot; I could see it in her eyes.
She was speaking several languages at once, putting them together in different combinations to fit the colour and flavour of her memories, making sentences that told a story different from the sum of their words. When she spoke, it sounded like an amorphous medley of all the things she was—things that could never have been reduced to one version of a story, or told in only one language.
She said: ‘I wouldn’t have married him if I hadn’t got pregnant. I’d have left after the first argument, the first wallop, the first time I saw his face all red and puffy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret it—don’t regret having you, I mean. But you have to have children quickly before you’ve had time to get to know each other and be disappointed. No one would ever have children otherwise; the human race would die out—would’ve done in the Soviet Union, anyway.
‘We had no word for love, no notion of what it meant, no mental picture of it. We had nothing to…what’s the word…to compare it to. And we didn’t have time for broken hearts. We were too busy building up socialism.
‘Of course, you did see girls with tear-stained faces in the university toilets. It was always a mystery to me—that they could go around like that with their make-up all smudged and feel no shame. I’d have given myself a good slap in the face. Then again, I suppose I’d have cried and beaten my breast if I’d had anything to cry for. Anyone.’
I could feel soundwaves flinging my brain from one side of my head to the other and wasn’t sure whether it was because Valya’s voice had suddenly shot up, or whether I was just being sensitive. Something furry was creeping up my throat, my temples felt as if they might burst and, as my mother pieced herself together, a little bit of story at a time, she became more and more of a blur to me. This wasn’t a good time for a migraine. We always put off breakdowns in our family—postpone them to the solitude of empty rooms. I knew, too, that Valya was only just getting going.
I’d come without expecting anything in particular, stepping into a flat I had more memories of than I’d thought. Only the dimensions were different from what I remembered—the height of the ceilings, the size of the rooms and furniture. And Valya wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table, where I always imagined her, but at the desk in her bedroom, her back pressed against the glass tabletop behind her, her hands resting on the plastic arms of the swivel chair, and Shura above her, looking down at us from one of his oil paintings. I suddenly loved her so much that I felt an urge to slide off the edge of the bed and rest my head on her lap—but I stayed put because I didn’t want to interrupt her.
‘Really, I should have stayed firm and refused to leave Volgograd. I didn’t want to go to Moscow. Everyone thought you had to marry your way to Moscow—not me. I was the only one, but I knew it was a stupid idea. Moscow’s evil; it stinks. Did then and it does now, maybe worse than ever now—a snakepit of a city. You can’t even buy milk there without the shop woman spitting in your face. I didn’t want to move; I wanted to stay in Volgograd, but they talked me into it. My girlfriends all screamed at me: “What? Are you crazy? It’ll mean you’ll be registered in Moscow. I’d marry an unemployed alcoholic for that, if I had the chance, and yours actually has a job.” One of them, Dasha, had gone there to be mistress to a man thirty years older than her—he was married, with children and all—and do you know, she was happy—she was just happy to be in Moscow. So I thought the place must have something going for it.’
I tried to imagine the picture those eighties women must have had of Moscow, but saw only swings buried deep in snow, their rusty frame sticking up into a sky criss-crossed with white streaks. What a shame, I thought, that I can’t imagine more. I was having trouble thinking straight.
It was the light that alerted me to the onset of the migraine. It sliced through my eyeballs, although the room was relatively dark—Valya liked it dim and the curtains were drawn. Then everything seemed too loud. I tried to ignore it; I didn’t want to have to leave Valya, but already the smells in the room were keener too; Valya’s perfume stung my nose.
‘When I got to Moscow, they put on this act for me—I still can’t believe the trouble they went to. Or that I fell for it. Actually I thought Kostya was ugly—he was covered in freckles and had a big belly, even in those days, and skinny little arms and red hair—but then he sat down at the piano and began to play, looking into my eyes and pressing his lips together and flaring his nostrils, and his parents sang his praises and told me about the hidden qualities of this sensitive young man—how well read he was, how considerate towards his parents and neighbours, how much he liked the theatre and the opera.
‘To begin with, Kostya took me out—museums during the day and the theatre in the evening. Can you imagine—Kostya in a museum? And do you know something funny? He was a big eater, even in those days, and every time we went to the theatre he’d stuff himself first, shovelling it all in, any old how, sour cream and beef with onions and whatever, and then he’d have wind all through the play—and I don’t just mean on one occasion; this was every time he took me out. The orchestra in his belly would start up just as the lights went down, and either he’d belch or he’d fart, and it pained me—I felt for him; I was sorry for him, you know? I thought how awkward it must be for him; the poor thing’s trying to make advances to me and ends up making a public spectacle of himself. But looking back on it, I don’t think he gave a damn. In fact, I’m sure he didn’t.’
Hearing people talk of the world as if they could rely on it always makes me feel lonely and helpless. They speak of being sure about things; they tell you how something was or even how it’s going to be, and it always makes me acutely aware of how little I know about what might happen next. I don’t even know what I’ll be addressed as when I go to buy cigarettes—a he or a she? Each morning I’m surprised by my own face in the mirror, and I’m sceptical about any attempts to predict the future. My temples ache a lot; it lays me low for days. But I didn’t want to burden Valya with the ins and outs of my emotions, which were on a rollercoaster ride from the testosterone, like a permanent adolescence. I was here to listen.
‘I remember my mother ringing while I was there—she was off somewhere again, Hungary or Czechoslovakia, and wanted to know whether Kostya had proposed yet. And I said: “Mum, I don’t even know him. We’ve only just met.” And she said: “Feelings come with time, daughter.”’
I was afraid of suddenly turning deaf again, like the time I realised that Anton was gone. Something inside me had started to run—it was charging against the inner walls of my body, desperate to get out.
Valya said: ‘I got pregnant quickly. Russian men don’t do contraception. Abortion was the standard contraceptive, but after two abortions during my marriage to Ivan, I’d had enough and had a one-hundred-and-fifty-per-cent reliable Soviet-tested coil put in. I got pregnant with you almost immediately.’
Since seeing me with designer stubble, Valya had stopped asking when I was going to give her grandchildren, and for that I was grateful. Grandchildren had been topic number two, second only to my bad eating habits. My uninterested uterus. The western way of living only for yourself rather than bringing something into the world that had even worse chances than you. But now that my shoulders had grown broader and the muscles in my arms more prominent—now that I could pick my mother up and lift her in the air—she’d given up asking.
‘I wasn’t prepared for that. I couldn’t cope; it was all too fast for me. I didn’t know where I was or who these people were, and of course we had to get married even more quickly than planned. The idea had been to do everything on the Volga in the summer, but because I was already pregnant, the wedding had to be in the winter. In the filthy, slushy Moscow winter. My white tights were a complete mess by the time we got to the registry office. Do you know how hard it was to get white tights in those days? They were my first nylons. I went to the ladies and tried to scratch off the muck with my fingernails, speck by speck, splash by splash, without ripping them. Didn’t do much good; I look like a Dalmatian on the wedding photos. Mother-in-law teased me about it for years. And then things went even faster—too fast. The next thing I knew, along came you two. You were early.’
I hadn’t expected her to talk about that. And she didn’t really—only in her own way, leaving out all the things I’d never have dared ask about. All she said was: ‘It was Kostya’s birthday. I’d wanted to go to Etinka’s in Volgograd and give birth there, but it wasn’t to be. Kostya had this party and—’
Valya was a blur—I sensed her rather than seeing her—and the air was dry; it was only now that I realised she must have the heating turned right up. Valya was always cold. Like me. And before anything could burst in my ears again, I did a bunk. I went out of my body. It stayed there, sitting stiffly in front of Valya, and I leapt out of myself. I was on the outside; I could listen with impunity now.
‘He had this birthday party and…anyway…premature labour…no petrol in the car…Kostya still completely pissed…the ambulance took two hours to come—or was it three or four?…Then it was off to the maternity ward, where fifteen other cows were already lying mooing with their legs spread. And in I march, with bruises all over my body and it felt as if the head was already sticking out—yours, it was your head, I know that now.’
Valya looked at the wall behind me. She didn’t notice that I’d dodged her again, absconded; she was talking through my body, on and on.
‘There was no bed for me at first and I wanted someone to pick me up and carry me, because I was scared that if I kept walking, I’d crush the head that was coming out of me—and then I split open completely; you ripped me open. I thought either I’d crush you to a pulp or you’d rip me to shreds. Push, crush, rip. But here we are today. We made it. I wasn’t so sure at the time.’
I wouldn’t be so sure now, I thought, looking on from outside. I left my stiff body sitting there and rose in the air, not breathing out until I was floating above the glass desktop. My empty shell was careful to keep blinking at regular intervals, so as not to arouse suspicion.
‘So there we were: Mr and Mrs Chepanov. Kostya was fed up with being called Berman; he said it had given him nothing but hassle at work, and I had no trouble believing him; I’d grown up a Pinkenzon, after all. Don’t ask me where the name came from—bought or invented, I suppose; someone had married someone at some point; it was floating around somewhere in the family. Kostya’s parents approved. The only one who didn’t was his grandad; he kicked up a row and said we were selling our souls to the Christians. He’d lived under the Germans, you see, and nothing had been quite right with him ever since; giving your own name away was like being sent to the gas chambers, as far as he was concerned.
‘He came to see us once a month from Podmoskovye, the part of the country they all came from. Kostya’s mother gave him food to take home so he wouldn’t go hungry, but she had a good look at the best-before dates first and only ever gave him things that had long outlived their shelf life.’
The self beneath me laughed mechanically. Valya looked at it, not yet used to the tinny sound of my breaking voice—and who could blame her? She didn’t laugh.
