Beside Myself, page 23
‘Chertanovo was the outer crust of the city; you only had to walk through one wood and you were in Podmoskovye. But try walking that as an old man. He’d arrive all out of puff, sit straight down at table and fall on the food.
‘We lived in this filthy part of town—an out-of-bounds zone—even the taxi drivers only went there if they had to. I didn’t know that when I first came to Moscow, of course—that there was a death or a rape in the block every other day. You think I’m exaggerating—it’s a blessing you can think that. That’s why I brought you here—so you wouldn’t believe all these awful stories. So you think I’m exaggerating when I tell you that the sixteen-year-old girl next door was found raped and murdered on the stairs. Or that the cobbler who lived opposite, a vast man, two metres by two metres, got a bottle smashed over his head by muggers, just outside our block, and bled to death on the spot. He’d no money on him, of course. And there was a child who fell out of the seventh floor—if he wasn’t thrown. There were so many stories like that.’
I hung cross-legged over our heads, enjoying the new perspective; I’d never been up here before, never seen the room like this. The surface of Valya’s face was constantly changing: one moment it looked like a ball of cottonwool, the next like the face of a Pioneer girl flying into space. Seen from above, her haircut was a strange mushroom shape, and I asked myself when she’d started to dye her hair. I should have asked her—and I should have asked too how she’d lost so much weight so quickly and what she liked to eat—I could cook for us.
She said: ‘I never understood my in-laws. I don’t know what they made of themselves. He was short and puny, a bristly worm—and that impossible cloth cap, like a street urchin; he even kept it on for his afternoon nap. When he wasn’t working, he’d lie on the bed for days on end, just staring at the ceiling. He might have a drink of water every now and then, but that was it. Didn’t move, didn’t speak; all he did was breathe. Mother-in-law was a doer, though—always knew exactly what she wanted. If I hadn’t got pregnant, she’d have carried on working. She liked working; I don’t think she wanted to be a housewife, but you didn’t have a choice in those days; somebody had to stay at home with the children. You couldn’t send them to kindergarten—might as well poison them yourself and get it over with; if they didn’t come home sick, they came home dead. So Mother-in-law stayed with you and I went to work. She cleaned and cooked and looked after you and washed all your nappies by hand. A maid of all work.’
I looked at the corners of the walls and the stucco on the ceiling—or the marks where it had once been.
‘I think I felt sorry for her.’
From somewhere down below, I heard Valya say: ‘My in-laws only had one friend—a man who’d moved to Moscow from their village. He was the only visitor we ever had; he came round a lot, and if I hadn’t known they had no truck with beggars, I’d have thought that’s what he was. It’s what he looked like, and it’s what he smelt like too. A quiet man he was, almost gentle to the pair of them—I never heard anyone else speak to them like that, least of all their own son—and they were almost human towards him, this one friend of theirs. I’ve forgotten his name. It’s possible, though, that he only came so often because his wife was always drinking urine.’
The self below laughed again. Valya ignored the strange, tinny noise.
‘She did this urine therapy, for years, and he was always telling us about the smell and how unbearable it was, having to live with it. It wasn’t that you peed and then drank the urine; it had to stand around a bit. Fresh urine’s no good, apparently. The poor thing was always desperate to get away from home. You can imagine.
‘Their only real friend. I liked him.’
She went on talking about her in-laws and their friends and their friends’ friends, and I understood. If I was asked about myself, I always talked about other people too, pretending that the stories I told revealed something about me, and knowing at the same time how hopeless it is to try to cover your tracks.
I only caught snatches now of what Valya was saying. ‘This friend moved to America. When he came and told them he was emigrating, the friendship was over. They started some argument—said he’d stolen from them, taken something from the flat…he kissed their feet, ate out of their hands…apparently he’d nicked a radio of theirs—as you do, when you’re emigrating to the States—just what you need in America, a Soviet radio…at some point they said he’d made it over there and now he was dead…’
I glanced to the side. Shura looked me straight in the eye. That painting had always unnerved me because the oil made it look as if his pupils were throbbing. I looked back questioningly.
Valya said: ‘We always had a lot to eat—so much that I put on thirty kilos in my first year in Moscow. They fed me up as if it was an embarrassment to them that the professor’s granddaughter was so skinny. They were war children; they had to have heaps of fat and potatoes with everything.
‘Mother-in-law rubbed butter on her hands to stop them getting chapped; I’ll never forget the smell of Soviet butter on her skin. I once bought her some hand cream from my savings, rose-scented, but she never opened it—just hid it away at the back of the cupboard. I bet she waited till it was past its use-by date, then gave it to someone as a present.’
I tore my eyes away from Shura’s face and looked down at Valya’s hands, thinking how I’d love to rub cream on them—feel her fingers, and the skin between them, and her nails. Then I thought of the hands of my other self down there, growing gradually rougher. I was sometimes startled by my own calluses, usually when I was in bed, half asleep, and laid one curled hand in the other beside my head. But perhaps it was only the strange feeling of holding my own hand. Valya, I thought, would never notice how rough my skin was growing, because we never shook hands and only touched each other through our clothes when we hugged.
She said: ‘Mother-in-law wouldn’t let me take photos of you; she said the devil would take your souls. That’s why there are so few baby photos of the two of you…only the ones I developed myself…I’d cover up the kitchen window and close the door to make it dark enough. Then Mother-in-law would come in and rummage around in the fridge, saying she really felt like a bit of ham…by the time she’d found what she wanted, the negatives were overexposed.’
On the first photo of me, you see my bare baby’s body—almond-shaped eyes wide open, pointy chin—lying on a white sheet, arms and legs thrust out as I try to push myself from my tummy onto my back. It looks as if I’m flying.
On another photo that for a long time was on the chest of drawers at my grandparents’ in Moscow, you see my almost fully grown, flat body in a floral waistcoat that hangs undone from my bare shoulders. I’m holding an apple in one hand; the other hand is empty and clenched to a fist. On my head is a white cap that comes down over my ears, and I’m looking into the camera as if I’d lost something. And I don’t know—maybe I’m imagining things, but I seem to recall a colour photo of my brother and me: me in leggings and a vest, my arms folded, and Anton next to me in a golden dress, dancing.
I forced myself to listen to Valya again. I felt I owed it to her and began to stitch the half-sentences back together. It didn’t hurt to listen, up here.
Valya said: ‘Did you know that the Russians say if you can’t prevent a rape, you must learn to relax? That’s something I never learnt. I practically lived in the hospital, hardly ever left if I could help it, did overtime, organised conferences, talked to patients into the small hours—anything I could think of to avoid having to go back there. Kostya always waited for me—parked outside the clinic and left the engine running. Sometimes I didn’t even bother going out, and sometimes I’d go out and say I was busy and then go straight back in again.’
She said: ‘I remember the first Edam cheese Kostya brought home for me, with its thick red wax rind. I remember the taste. I only knew two kinds of cheese until I was twenty-five—kolbasnyi and rossiyskiy—and this was something exotic. I was so delighted, I threw my arms round Kostya’s neck. He called me his little monkey and often brought me cheese after that—though God knows where he got it.
‘I think he was the first to come up with the idea of emigrating. He was the first to talk about it, anyway. There were tanks on Red Square; we were expecting civil war any day, or a coup or whatever—and we knew who’d be the first to take a battering. A whole wave of people left for Israel; there were countless invitations along the lines of: where you are, things are troubled and dangerous; where we are, there are mangoes on the trees. They took all comers, whether genuine Jews or Russians who’d bought themselves names ending in -berg or -man or -stein—whatever sounded Jewish and dreamed of the desert. I remember Mother-in-law saying: “It’s all a trick! The Russians want to find out where the Jews are living! They’ll take your details and haul you away! You don’t really think they’ll take them to Israel, do you? How stupid can you be? The gulags—that’s where they’ll send them.”’
Valya laughed suddenly, surprising herself. She clapped her hand to her mouth, feeling for something on her desk with the other hand. The gurgling sound came from deep in her throat and mingled with something shriller.
‘At the embassy we were told we needed our parents’ signatures if we wanted to leave the country. They had to give their consent. Children were people’s retirement provision—why else do you think they had so many? The state pension was only enough to keep you in bread and milk till the end of your life, so the old folks had to sign to say they were prepared to do without their children. Mine were willing, but Kostya’s said: “No way.”
‘We could, of course, have faked the signatures. You only had to slip someone something and they’d issue you with whatever you wanted. But Kostya’s parents knew that and threatened to report us—and that would have been it for us; the door to the west would have been shut forever.
‘Kostya made several attempts to talk his father round, but the old man just came up with all these stories about his life in the village—what an awful time they’d had of it, how much they’d sacrificed for us, and that we must be off our heads to want to go to Germany where our blood—Soviet blood—was barely dry on the pavements. I tried too. I talked calmly to him and said if it didn’t work out, we’d come back—we could always come back; it wasn’t far; you could fly or take the train and we’d be there right away if anything happened. He interrupted me—I can see his face now. “I’m the one who decides things round here,” he said. Then he picked up the knife.
‘There was more to my father-in-law than you might think. He may have been so short and puny, you had the impression you could crush him in your armpit, but apparently he did stuff in the army—tortured the other soldiers, poured hot oil in their eyes. I couldn’t help thinking of that when I saw him standing there with that knife. Kostya, of course, immediately picked up the table and…
‘I screamed. Mother-in-law screamed. You and Anton were standing in the door; I remember, I saw your faces and stopped screaming straight away. Then Mother-in-law saw you, then Kostya, then his father: we all turned to look at you, standing there looking at us.’
A knife floated before my eyes. I saw my dad hurl a table across the kitchen; I saw the frozen faces I knew from photographs; I called up images that seemed to fit.
Valya said: ‘I knew nothing about Germany, nothing about anything—I had no picture of the place, no idea what I wanted from it. You say you want your children to have a golden future—yes, all right, that’s what you say, but it isn’t what you think. You don’t think anything at all. You feel like a rolling stone.’
I was floating above us, watching that other self of mine listen to my mother talking about the move. My other self was sitting up very straight and so was she. I couldn’t quite catch what we were saying; our words were strangely staggered. I saw Shura’s purple eyes again, level with my forehead. Are you talking to me, old man? Talk to me. Say something. I miss you. I miss talking to you. But Shura said nothing and his eyes weren’t purple in the painting. I looked down once more at mother and child, sitting, mirroring one another, and again I saw clearly how similar we were, especially in the way we let our arms dangle at our sides, slightly bent at the elbows.
I saw Ali and, suddenly, sitting there opposite his mother, it could have been Alissa. It was the familiar surroundings that did it; he was hovering between times and bodies; he was empty. I heard Valya say that the walls were damp in the first flat in Germany; I heard her tell Ali about the time her mother-in-law came to visit from Moscow and she, Valya, had a stroke. Her father, Daniil, had pushed her around the little West German town we lived in at that time in a wheelchair, because she couldn’t walk for weeks. The patches of sunlight in the small park he sometimes took her to were full of old people asleep in wheelchairs. Valya wasn’t yet forty then. I heard her say that the right-hand corner of her mouth never quite recovered from the stroke, and saw Ali lean forwards slightly, discreetly examining the corner of his mother’s mouth to see if he could see anything. But all he could make out were the hundreds of little wrinkles on her upper lip, like shredded paper.
Valya said she’d had to move to her parents’ and that her husband had come and taken the children away. He didn’t bring them back until she threatened to divorce him. From diagonally above, I looked down into Ali’s motionless face with his big nose and pointy chin; between his chin and lower lip, a deep dimple sprouted black hairs. He looked at Valya in silence as she told him about her daughter, who’d been so disturbed after seeing her father drag her red-eyed mother out of the flat that she hadn’t spoken for weeks. Ali blinked without understanding.
I hung in the air. Time slowed, then tumbled past my nose in a rush. Floating up there next to Shura’s picture, I stretched out an arm, ran a hand over the frame around his face and peered at my fingertips. I saw fine grey streaks of dust and rubbed my fingers together; the dust formed tiny globules that I flicked away over the heads below me. Nothing made any sense. I heard Valya reproach Ali for coming to ask questions—but in her own way. She didn’t say it was presumptuous of him, or that he’d never understand the world she came from; she didn’t even say that it was more than she could manage to explain everything. She said something very Russian like: ‘Memory’s a parasite. It’s best to leave well alone if you don’t want to end up like me, unable to stop. I—’
‘I’ in Russian is ‘Я’, the last of thirty-three letters. People say: ‘Я’ is the last letter of the alphabet, so put yourself last, forget you exist, don’t rate yourself too highly, melt into the background. It seemed to me that Valya had taken this adage to heart; it made sense to her that she should be last; it was logical. Valya believed that there was a logic to things; she believed in a chain of events, each following the other, ineluctably. When she told me her life—or the part of it that she wanted to pass on to me—she described a chain of causal relations that seemed to her entirely natural, but that somehow, in spite of the firmness of her voice, failed to convince me. My thoughts were playing hopscotch, trying not to land on the lines. I couldn’t think a ‘Я’, I realised, as my mother drew her picture for me. I didn’t know how to place it.
My name begins with the first letter of the alphabet and it’s a scream, a faltering, a falling, a promise of a B and a C that can’t exist in the absence of historical causality. It’s a mistake to think that people who go through the same things will come out together on the other side. I know a lot of people whose lives have followed the same path as mine, but their faces are differently hewn; they wear different clothes, play musical instruments, eat pickled herrings at their parents’ every Sunday and manage to sleep through the night afterwards; they have jobs, buy flats, holiday in the south and return at the end of the summer to a place they call home. I’m not like that; I feel unable to state anything with certainty, to adopt a point of view, develop a voice of my own, a voice that would speak for me. A clear-cut ‘Я’.
For me, time is a turntable. Images blur before my eyes, and over and over I guess how things might have looked, guess the names of streets I’ve never set foot in, of city stairways and empty boats. I try not to mix up the people whose names repeat themselves down the centuries.
I make up new characters in the same way that I piece together old ones. I imagine my brother’s life, imagine him doing all the things I can’t do, see him setting off into the world because he has the courage I’ve always lacked. I miss him.
And what did I do when I thought he was calling me, when I got this sign? I misread all the signals. I hung back, pussy-footed around, did all I could to numb my tension and bury it inside me. I lay down on a sofa, willing it to eat me up. I hardly moved; I waited—for what is waiting if not hope?
‘HOME’
I always get taken along; nobody ever asks me and I wouldn’t say no if they did. Of course I want to go back. Of course I want to go and stay with Gran and Grandad, and see the boys again, Valera and Petya—Kirill too. I’ve got such a lot to tell them. I wrap presents for them—all stuff that Mum’s bought. Much too much, Dad says—‘don’t want them to think we’re showing off.’ Mum says, ‘Shut up,’ and crams even more into the bag: plastic robots and cars and a Lego box with a pirate ship. A few books too, for learning German. ‘You never know.’
I try to lift the bag; it’s far too heavy, but I don’t say a word. I climb inside, dig out the pirate ship and push it under my bed.
‘The blouses are for Angela, Nadya and Kitsa. The cream must go to Marina, do you hear?’ Dad nods obediently without looking up, but kisses Mum on his way past. His hands are sweating, which means he’s happy.
My sister’s standing in the hall, looking at us all through jam jars, as if she had a thousand eyes, turning her head from one shoulder to the other. Mum loads her with even more jars and lays a loaf of bread on top so I can’t see her at all—‘something proper for you to eat on the journey. You can be in charge of the provisions.’ My sister hugs everything tight like a teddy bear and doesn’t put any of it in her bag; her knuckles turn white from gripping the jars.
