Beside Myself by Sasha Marianna Salzmann

This year’s Festival Neue Literatur runs from November 11th to 14th. To reserve your seat, click here. The following excerpt was translated by Imogen Taylor.

__________________________________________

The Beginning

Anton had written a postcard. Well, “written” was going a bit far. A postcard had come to the house, a black-and-white photograph of a narrow street lined with dilapidated buildings that leaned crookedly against one another—and printed on the photo in red and white letters, the word: Istanbul.

His way of saying he’s all right, thought Valya.

She was holding the card balanced on one corner when Ali came into the kitchen, steadying it with her index finger and flicking it back and forth with her thumb, her eyes fixed on the tiered cake stand. She’d heard her daughter come in. Ali had kept a key when she moved out nine years ago and made use of it every six months or so; this was the first time she’d dropped in since Anton had disappeared. The key jammed slightly and only the initiated knew that you had to lift the door and push against the frame to get the lock to budge. Ali shoved open the door, muttering something that Valya didn’t catch, but was pretty sure wasn’t a greeting. Valya heard the sound of shoes on the hall linoleum, and the smack of rubber as Ali kicked off her sneakers. She crept into the flat and had soon disappeared, turning off into a room and leaving the place silent again.

*

Roditel’skii dom nachalo nachal, ty v zhizni moei nadezhnyi prichal, crooned the black-and-white image of Leshchenko in Ali’s head. You’re a safe haven to me, my parents’ house, beginning of all beginnings. The legendary Russian musician sang with bloated face and twisted mouth, his eyebrows leaping into his forehead, his arms waving about, urging the audience to join in. And join in they did; the entire Soviet Union sang along. It was a mystery, though, what he was doing in Ali’s head.

She’d forced herself to tread firmly before entering the flat where she’d kind of grown up, or at least spent an important part of her childhood. She remembered the corner where she’d been made to stand in disgrace after biting Anton’s thigh—there on the left when you came into the living room. She used to hide her toy car in here so her brother wouldn’t find it, and over there by the window, the plastic fir tree they had at New Year’s, not at Christmas, had wobbled when the pair of them pulled at it.

Ali’s eyes were drawn to the spot on the floor where she and Anton had singed the carpet trying to fetch the big red star down from the top of the plastic fir. They’d buried each other in tinsel, pulling it off the tree like spiders’ webs, pouring it over each other’s heads, crushing the colored foil between their fingers, nibbling at it with their teeth. The burned place was now covered by a new leather sofa. Ali pushed it aside and squatted down to examine the tiny brown hairs around the hole. Then she remembered the burn hole in her parents’ flat in Moscow and wondered if it looked the same as this one. It had been the same game they’d played—the same chewing around on the tinsel, the same attempt to topple the red star, the same drunk father who’d wept and then taken himself off to bed.

The pale brown of the new sofa made her eyes itch. The chipboard TV table was still there, the imitation oak scuffed now from all the dusting and the constant shunting back and forth of the TV magazines. No one read books here anymore.

The finely woven cotton curtains were also new, and too long; they trailed on the floor, stirring slightly when you passed. Ali reached out a hand and rubbed a corner of the cloth between finger and thumb. The wallpaper was polystyrene white with an embossed pattern of roses. Anton had traced over the roses behind the door, and Ali had told on him. The glass-fronted cabinets were filled with the busts of strangers and unframed photos leaning against cheap cut-glass vases—photos of Shura, Etya, Danya, Emma, Valya and Valya again, photographs of the children. All the photos of Ali showed her with hair down to her waist; nothing here told you she’d had her head circumcised. Beside her, Anton smiled broadly, his hair combed in a way that was unfamiliar to Ali, but then she’d never been able to resist mussing it up. She’d wanted hair like that too, but cutting hers was out of the question; hair was a woman’s honor—and you wouldn’t throw your honor in the trash heap, would you?

“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 upward, always measuring, always remarking on how time flies—one meter twenty, one meter forty-seven, one meter 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 smelled 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 cookie 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 recognized 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 cookies, 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 moisturize 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 makeup for the time being. 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 recognized 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 cookies I brought you last time?” Ali asked. The question tumbled out of her and came to rest on the linoleum.

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 around 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 gray sweater 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 tea bag 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 sweater, 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 cardboard 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 doorframe with the growth chart. That was what she wanted—to carry the doorjamb 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 neighbors knew whether or not you watered the flowers in your front garden and who’d stabbed next-door’s cat. She’d learned 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 around 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 discolored 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 vacation 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 cotton wool 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 shriveled 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 cotton wool; 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 woolen 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 john 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 called the relatives in Moscow to ask whether Anton had turned up at their homes. 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 realized 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 bread box 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 threw out, a net of Gala apples, an open pot of cottage cheese, a can of sprats, a dead-looking lettuce—that, too, she dispatched to the garbage—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 toward 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 foldout 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 gray 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.

*

The Chepanov family’s first room in a German asylum home was at the top of a converted hotel, on the sixth floor. At first Grandfather had one of the bunks, then he was moved down to the second floor to share with an elderly man who told himself work-camp stories in his sleep, waking Grandfather who would go and sit on the man’s bed and put his hand over his trembling mouth. Valentina and Konstantin attended language classes and did their homework in the communal kitchen, along with twenty-five other emigrant couples, enveloped in the greasy smell of broth. The smell made Ali feel sick. She roamed the corridors, going in other families’ rooms, opening ceramic jars filled with jewelry, peeping in bags of terry bed linen, sniffing at the bottles of Red Moscow perfume she sometimes found in the bathrooms, and filching cigarettes whenever she found an open packet lying around. Anton didn’t accompany her on these prowls; he was too busy pursuing his own passion for balancing on narrow metal rails.

He’d climb onto the banisters and stand there, bobbing up and down, white-sneakered feet at an angle, knees bent. He stretched out his arms like a skateboarder and looked straight ahead, his eyes fixed on the wall opposite as if he were challenging it. The first time his mother saw him on the banister rail, she froze. Suppressing the instinct to cry out in fear and risk startling her child, she crept up to him, wrapped her arms around his tummy and pulled him down. From then on she followed Anton on tiptoe wherever he went, arms extended, fingers like claws, and when she sat in the language class, trying to conjugate verbs, she’d see her son plummeting down the stairwell.

Every week she went to the home manager and asked to be moved to the ground floor or into the basement, next to the kitchen. It might stink of broth, but at least there were no banister rails down there. She explained the situation to the manager—the two small children she couldn’t control: one of them was always trying to jump off things, while the other smoked under the covers in their room. She only had one pair of hands and there was the language class to practice for too. She begged him, but the mustached guy with the grease stains on his collar only said: “You must learn to take better care of your children, Mamasha; moving into the basement won’t change that.”

________________________________________

About the author

Sasha Marianna Salzmann is a playwright, essayist, curator, and writer in residence of the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. She is a cofounder of the culture magazine freitext and was the artistic director of Studio Я from 2013 to 2015. She also cofounded NIDS—New Institute for Drama, where she gives workshops on political writing. Her work has been translated, performed, and bestowed awards in more than twenty countries. Her first novel, Beside Myself, won the Mara Cassens Prize and the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung Prize for best debut novel, and was short-listed for the 2017 German Book Prize.