Beside Myself, page 8
‘What if I’m not a woman?’
‘What are you then, an elephant?’
Everyone laughed, especially the visiting aunts with their spoonfuls of jam and their glasses of black tea and lemon. They shook their heads; one day the little thing would understand—it’s her age…head stuffed full of nonsense…not good for her to play out on the street… running around with the boys all the time…refusing to wear a bra.
Ali stood in the doorway, leaning against the improvised growth chart that was marked on the wall in blue biro. The habit of measuring the children at the living-room door was one they’d brought with them from Moscow: the year alongside the height and then ever upwards, always measuring, always remarking on how time flies—one metre twenty, one metre forty-seven, one metre sixty—goodness me, slow down a bit, won’t you! But Ali and Anton were less interested in the passing of time and their own growth than in the pretty pattern these made on the doorframe. They tried to join up the lines; Anton in particular was always trying to extend them into loops and curves, and getting cuffed on the head for it. ‘How often do I have to tell you not to draw on the walls?’ Kostya would shout, tearing the pen out of his hand.
‘Why can’t I draw? You do!’
The growth chart Ali was leaning against began at 1996—141 cm. Running her fingernail over the lines Anton had drawn, connecting her height and his into constellations, she glanced over at her mother in the kitchen. There was nothing new here and Ali shrank once again to the child at the growth chart and smelt the old smell of naphthalene clinging to her hair. It seemed to linger no matter how short she cut it, as if her scalp began to exude the stuff as soon as she entered the flat. A trickle ran down her face; nothing had changed. All right, so her hair was gone, but nobody here noticed. To her mother, this woman sitting at the window staring at a biscuit on the cake stand in front of her, she was a transfer picture of a memory with long hair and a different smell—maybe her glands produced naphthalene so that her mother recognised her.
Maybe I’ll get a face job, Ali thought. I’ll have my nose enlarged and see if she notices. Valya didn’t move. She was looking neither at her daughter nor at the biscuits, but at the cake stand itself, gold-edged black china painted with red cherries. She wondered why she hadn’t chucked the tawdry thing ages ago. How long had it been there? Maybe fifteen years—definitely ten. It was old, that was for sure. So was the tablecloth. I should chuck the lot, she thought.
The skin on her cheeks was taut with dryness; she’d forgotten to moisturise after her shower. She’d stood under the water crying for a long time, then she’d dried herself and come and sat at the kitchen table—and here she was now, wondering, as she waited for Ali, whether she shouldn’t do something about her face, inject a bit of poison into her cheeks, have the corners of her eyes lifted, or just some permanent make-up to be going on with. Then she felt panic—what if the doctors made a mistake? What if she ended up looking so different that her own daughter no longer recognised her?
When Ali had cut her curls off, Valya had felt every snip as if someone had been chopping away at her. She’d wanted to gather up the hair and keep it for better times when Alissa would finally change her mind and stop running about like a boy—even more of a boy than Anton. Is that what it was about—being more of a boy than her brother? What was she trying to prove? If she was a dyke, she could be one with long hair, couldn’t she? There were no rules against looking nice.
‘They the biscuits I brought you last time?’ Ali asked. The question tumbled out of her and came to rest on the lino.
Valya smiled. She wanted to reach out her hand to Ali and ask her to sit down and talk about herself; instead, she pressed her fingers into the postcard on the table.
‘Yes, it’s possible, I don’t know.’
Alissa edged along the wall, cupboard by cupboard, looking at the crooked hands on the clock that had stopped years ago, counting her steps. When she’d made it to the benchtop, she clutched the kettle in both hands and flicked up the switch. Splashes of red and brown had dried on the kettle’s white plastic belly: red splashes of pomegranate juice (there were still a few squashed seeds on the marble surface); brown splashes of tea. The hiss of water coming to the boil was a damp jet in front of Ali’s face; she inhaled deeply and began to press the air slowly through her closed mouth, making her lips vibrate, bubbling along with the kettle, trying to keep pace. Then she opened the cupboard above the sink and took out a mug. It was navy blue with a cartoonlike sketch of a map of the Black Sea.
‘Look, Crimea’s on here.’ Ali turned to her mother, holding the mug in the air.
‘Course it is. Where else would it be?’
Ali turned back round again and pulled open the drawer where the tea was kept. There was a strong whiff of bergamot.
‘Uncle Misha painted that; it’s old,’ Valya said to Ali’s back.
‘Who was Uncle Misha again?’ Ali rummaged in the drawer, feeling her mother’s gaze on her body. She was wearing a men’s grey jumper over a baggy white shirt, both tucked into men’s black trousers. Her body vanished beneath the layers. Ali saw Valya close her eyes and then open them. She poured water over the teabag and sat down opposite her. Valya folded her hands and pursed her lips slightly.
‘Shall we go and get you some new clothes?’
Ali pulled down the sleeves of her jumper, burying her fingers in the wool. She clasped the handle of the mug. ‘Do I know Uncle Misha?’
‘He drew all the children’s cartoons you used to watch. Why do you dress like that?’
‘Can I have this mug?’
Valya stared long into her face.
‘You can have anything. Take what you like.’
Ali pondered what she’d take from this flat—her grandmother’s earrings that she’d never wear? The photos that would lie yellowing in removal boxes just like at her mother’s if she took them home? All the toys had been sold or given away years ago; the pictures on the walls were poor-quality reproductions. Maybe her father’s shirts, but she couldn’t suggest that to Valya. She looked through the open door into the hall and her eyes fell on the door frame with the growth chart. That was what she wanted—to carry the door jamb with the growth chart out of here on her shoulder and lean it against the wall in her own flat. Ali opened her mouth and said:
‘It’s dark there now.’
‘Where?’
‘In Crimea. Pitch dark. They’ve cut the power lines. The trolley buses aren’t running. Wonder what they’re doing there now, in the dark.’
Ali glanced across the table; the other side seemed miles away.
‘You can have the mug.’
Ali pushed her fingers into her curls and looked out of the window onto the street of this dried-up West German town where the neighbours knew whether or not you watered the flowers in your front garden and who’d stabbed next-door’s cat. She’d learnt to ride a bike on this street. Her father had given her a push and shouted after her to look straight ahead and not back at him. She fell off a lot and was always grazing her knees, while Anton rode around her in circles, laughing.
‘You do know, if the idea behind your clothes is to stop people looking at you, they have the opposite effect.’
Ali stared out of the window.
‘You look like a scarecrow. Did you get the things from the Red Cross?’
‘Yes, Mum.’
‘Can you explain it to me?’
‘I’m not in the mood for this discussion.’
‘I’m sorry. What would you like to talk about?’
About the gravel path down there—my knees still remember. About mugs painted by people I don’t know, but who mean something to you. About the way you’re waiting for me to fling my arms round your neck as a faint compensation for everything you couldn’t have in life because you had me instead. About our need for intimacy and what we should do with it. About teeth discoloured by cigarettes and black tea. About why you still haven’t moved out of this museum here—do you need this fug? Why not just burn everything, rather than buy new furniture to cover up old burn holes? Why not give away your clothes—donate them to the Red Cross for all I care—move to another town, move in with me, no, not in with me, please, but not too far away either, come and look for your son with me—but don’t let’s talk about it; let’s just pretend we’re going on holiday together. About this sense of lack I can’t stop feeling. And nor can you, it flashed into Ali’s mind. She said nothing.
She saw Valya bite her lower lip and breathe out through her nose.
It wasn’t all the same old stuff here in this flat that Ali had run away from at the age of sixteen—first run away and then come back to pick up her things—and Valentina wasn’t the same either, or perhaps she was gradually reverting to some old self Ali knew nothing of. Ali had no idea that the boys on the Arbat had once twisted their necks to look at her mother; she couldn’t imagine them begging to be allowed to paint her. Ali had once found oil portraits of Valya in a cardboard box, but she hadn’t made the connection with the swollen face that nagged her to school every day and wasn’t there when she got home. She hadn’t stopped to wonder who the young woman was with the broad cheekbones, the boyish smile, the pointy chin, the piercing eyes. For Ali, these pictures of her mother were as fictional as postcards at a kiosk. The face she knew was like a ball of cottonwool that had soaked up the lousy food of asylum-home canteens, the musty smell of dorms, the lack of sleep and decent cosmetics. It had shrivelled up on her short neck and looked as if it were digesting itself. Since her divorce from Konstantin, though, there was movement in the ball of cottonwool; the cheekbones were visible again, the eyes were once more deeper in their sockets; Valentina was a step closer to the beautiful young woman who had strolled along the Arbat, that small pedestrian precinct that Europeans talked about as if it were a big cosmopolitan street, though in fact it was narrow and lined with buskers and street artists and women selling woollen scarves. Her mother had liked the Arbat; she’d bought books there and got herself in trouble with her in-laws for wasting money, because if she had time to read books, she could just as well do the dusting instead—and Valentina had to lock herself in the loo to read. Now everything was possible—everything; she could read and go for walks and do whatever she liked. It was too much. All that Valentina had once been was squeezing itself slowly back into her face, through the moles and broken veins on her cheeks—but how was Ali to know all that? She’d never even been to the Arbat.
‘Anton’s written.’
Valentina held out the postcard her hands had been resting on. Ali grabbed it with as much control as she could muster.
‘When did it come?’
‘Yesterday.’
No writing. No greeting. The address was written in a nine-year-old’s scrawl. Not so much as an I’m well. Anton or a Hope you all rot in hell. I don’t give a fuck how you are.
Ali looked up from the blank card into her mother’s face.
‘Maybe he’s touring the world.’ Ali clicked her tongue.
Valentina nodded. She looked as if she hadn’t slept; the bags under her eyes were stained blue. She might even have been crying, but that was hard for Ali to imagine. She’d never seen her mother cry.
An image flashed into Ali’s head of Valya’s face the day she’d rung round the relatives in Moscow to ask whether Anton had turned up at theirs. That was after the police had been called in and said that if he’d had the time and leisure to pack his bags properly, things couldn’t be so bad; he’d turn up somewhere, sometime—though he hadn’t. Ali couldn’t hear what the relatives were saying; she couldn’t even hear what Valya was saying, only saw her face, switched to mute, and realised that of all the situations her mother had ever been in, this was the most humiliating. Ali stopped hearing altogether that day. At first she’d only felt pressure in her left ear, then it had spread, opening out like a flower behind her forehead and bursting. The doctors diagnosed acute hearing loss; they couldn’t say how long it would last. Ali wasn’t afraid it would stay; she was afraid it might one day go away. That happened three weeks later.
‘Tell me, when did you last eat?’ asked Ali, laying the postcard aside.
Valya nodded.
‘Have you eaten?’
‘Drink your tea, it’ll go cold.’
Ali got up and went to the breadbin that was hand-carved by her grandfather and said khleb on the lid in curly writing. Bread. Even that had come to Germany as a souvenir of the dacha on the Volga, though it was empty now, just a surface to put things on. Ali went to the fridge and rummaged for white bread. Everything edible in the flat was kept in the fridge: butter, tomatoes, gherkins, plums, an empty Emmental packet that she chucked out, a net of Gala apples, an open pot of cottage cheese, a tin of sprats, a dead-looking lettuce—that, too, she dispatched to the bin—a pear, jam, honey, even a loaf of Borodinsky, the black bread with coriander seeds on top.
The white bread was at the back, frozen fast; Ali had to prise it off. She cut two doorsteps, sliced butter as thick as her finger, laid it on the bread without spreading it, found the sugar basin where it always was, and strewed the butter with sugar until you could hardly see the bread on the small plate beneath the white crystals. She put the plate down in front of Valya.
‘Eat.’
Valentina nodded, looked up from the plate, nodded again and smiled.
‘You must eat. I can tell you haven’t eaten for days.’
Valya smiled again, a proper smile this time.
‘It’s bad for your head.’ Ali sat down opposite Valya again. ‘Low blood sugar.’
‘So now you’re trying to kill me with a sugar shock?’
Ali watched her mother reluctantly move her hand towards the plate. Valentina looked out of the window, then at Ali, then at the glinting sugar crystals. Her eyes grew more alert. She reached for the bread with her right hand and her teacup with her left hand. For a moment she froze, arms outstretched, and Ali clearly saw Anton’s face smile in Valya’s.
Anton had taught Ali to read. Not that he could read when he was three, but he’d explained the letters to her as if he’d invented them himself. He ran his finger over the pile of the red-and-green Turkish carpet in the living room and made sounds, and Ali repeated them, staring at his lips, watching them forming objects—an apple, a crescent moon hanging points down, a wide-open window sticking out its tongue. She grabbed his face as he traced the imaginary letters on the carpet; she ran her fingers over his lips and crawled her fingertips into his mouth. Like sticking your fingers in blancmange, she thought. Anton drew alphabet patterns on her legs. Like drawing on blancmange, he thought. Gran came and pulled them apart, scolding loudly about something the three-year-olds didn’t understand.
The twins slept on the fold-out sofa; their grandmother often sat beside them, stroking Anton’s head, and Ali would lie there, her eyes half-closed, watching the sinewy hand with the veins sticking out of the skin like bones. She too would thrust her hand into Anton’s hair and rub it between her fingers, until Gran’s big grey hand knocked her little one away and hissed: ‘Go to sleep now!’ But eventually the hand disappeared along with the hiss, and Ali sank eight of her ten fingers into Anton’s curls and fell asleep with the feeling of fine wool tickling her palms.
Because they had hardly any toys, they played with one another, moving each other’s arms at the shoulders and elbows, turning each other’s heads like balls, grabbing hold of each other’s ribs, comparing each other’s movements, freezing and mirroring one another. It wasn’t that nobody bought them toys, but the toys they were given always went straight to the top of their grandparents’ wardrobe, whose smooth walnut surface was too slippery to climb. They weren’t supposed to play with toys; they were supposed to do homework and then they were supposed to do the extra work that Valya set them—reading books, improving themselves. ‘Only stupid children with time to waste play with toys,’ said Valya, but they didn’t know what their mother meant; they were only five when they started preschool.
Valya was driven by the fear of not having enough time to cram her children with all the knowledge they needed if they were to get out; you had to move so fast—quick, quick, out of here! Read, learn, or you’re lost! She was convinced that the only thing really worth instilling in children was a dogged ambition oblivious to health and self-respect, to make sure they didn’t end up where she’d ended, in Chertanovo.
She’d say to Anton: ‘You must be the best in school, much better than the Russians. If you can be three times as good as them, you might end up half as good, then you can be a good Russian doctor. If not, you’ll be a poor put-upon Jew for the rest of your life.’ In Germany, she said the same, replacing the Russians with Germans.
Anton didn’t understand, so he made nodding movements with his head, because even a child knows that’s the thing to do when a mother gets that look of panic in her eyes. He nodded and thought of her breasts, comparing them with the breasts of the woman upstairs, which were even bigger.
Alissa was told: ‘You don’t want to be the most beautiful; you want to be the cleverest. Beauty does you no good and doesn’t last. But if you’re the cleverest you can always convince everyone that you’re the most beautiful, and you’ll get a husband who’ll buy you whatever you want, even good looks.’
This made no sense to Ali; she couldn’t follow her mother’s logic and, unlike Anton, she didn’t nod. Valya had little confidence that her children were adaptable enough to get the better of the Soviet Union with its unjust natural laws. They were too quiet for that, too wrapped up in themselves; they cleaved to each other and tumbled over one another, as if there were no outside world. Kostya wasn’t much help either, but she was determined not to leave her children’s future—or lack of future—to chance. She didn’t want her son in the army with the highest suicide rate and her daughter playing whore to some banker. She wanted them to make something of themselves, so she got them out, with an application for settlement, twelve suitcases crammed into a train compartment, and even more boxes. The toys stayed behind on top of the walnut wardrobe, but the children were allowed to pack as many books as they liked.
