by Dohra Ahmad
* * *
—
Outside the radio valve factory all the doors of the bus opened, the snow came into the bus with the wind and got out again with the women’s hair, eyelashes and coats. The factory yard swallowed us in the darkness. It was snowing more heavily; the women crowded more closely together, walked through the bright snowflakes, as if someone was shaking out stars on to them. Their coats, skirts fluttered and made quiet noises amidst the factory hooters. The snow went with them as far as the time clock, with one wet hand tink tink tink they pushed the cards in, with the other they shook the snow from their coats. The snow made the cards and the floor in front of the porter’s lodge wet. The porter rose a little from his chair, that was his job. I tried out my German sentence, which I had learned from today’s newspaper headline, on him: ‘Hewasnoangel’—‘Morningmorning,’ he said.
* * *
—
On the factory floor there were only women. Each one sat alone at a green-painted iron table. Each face looked at another woman’s back. While one was working, one forgot the faces of the other women. One saw nothing but hair, beautiful hair, tired hair, old hair, young hair, combed hair, falling-out hair. We saw only one woman’s face, the face of the only woman who was standing, Frau Mischel. Forewoman. When the machines of the Greek women workers broke down, they called out to her: ‘Frau Missel, comere.’ Their tongues couldn’t pronounce a ‘sch’. When we, our magnifying glasses in our right eyes, looked at Frau Missel, we always saw one half of Frau Missel bigger than the other half. Just as she always saw our right eyes bigger than our left eyes. That’s why Frau Missel always looked at our right eyes. All day her shadow fell on the green iron workbenches.
Only in the toilet room could I see the women’s faces. There women stood against the white tiled walls under strip lights and smoked. They rested their right elbow in their left hand, and the right hand with the cigarette moved in the air in front of their mouths. Because the toilet had such strong strip lights, smoking looked like work, too. At the time one could buy a cigarette from German women workers for ten pfennigs. Stuyvesant—HB.
Sometimes Frau Missel came, opened the door and looked into the toilet room, said nothing, shut the door, went. Then, as if the lights had gone out, the last smokers dropped their cigarettes in the toilet bowls and flushed the toilet water down. On quiet feet we then went from the toilet room into the factory hall, but the toilet water noises followed us for a while. When we sat down our hair was always a little more nervous than the hair of the women who never left their green tables for a smoke.
For the first few weeks we lived between hossel door, Hertie door, bus door, radio valve factory door, factory toilet door, hossel room table and factory green iron table. Once all the women could find the things they were looking for in Hertie and had learned to say bread, once they had remembered the proper name of their bus stop—at first they had noted the name of the stop as ‘stop’—the women one day switched on the television in the hossel lounge.
The TV had been there from the start. ‘Let’s see what’s on,’ said one woman. From that day many women watched figure skating on TV in the hossel lounge in the evening. There, too, I saw the women from behind again, as in the factory. When they returned to the hossel from the radio valve factory, they changed into their nightshirts, boiled potatoes, macaroni, fried potatoes, eggs in the kitchen. The sound of boiling water, hissing frying pans mixed with their thin, thick voices, and everything rose in the kitchen air, their words, their faces, their different dialects, the gleam of knives in their hands, the bodies waiting for the shared pots and pans, nervously running kitchen tap water, a stranger’s spit on a plate.
It looked like the shadow plays in traditional Turkish theatre. In it figures came on to the stage, each speaking their own dialect—Turkish Greeks, Turkish Armenians, Turkish Jews, different Turks from different towns and classes and with different dialects—they all misunderstood each other, but kept on talking and playing, like the women in the hossel, they misunderstood each other in the kitchen, but handed each other the knives or pots, or one rolled up another’s pullover sleeve, so that it didn’t hang into the pot. Then the hossel warden came, the only one who could speak German, and checked that everything in the kitchen was clean. After the meal the women took off their nightdresses, put on their clothes, some also put on make-up, as if they were going to the cinema, and came into the hossel lounge, turned the light off and sat down in front of the figure skaters. While the older women sat like that in the cinema, we, the three youngest girls—we were all virgins and loved our mothers—went to the snack bar opposite the hossel. The man made meatballs out of horses—we didn’t know that, because we couldn’t speak any German. Meat balls were our mothers’ favourite food. The horse meatballs in our hands, we went to our offended station, ate the horses and looked at the weakly illuminated Turkish women’s hossel windows. The offended station was no more than a battered wall and a projecting front section with three gateways. If we made a noise in the night with the meatball paper bags, we held our breath and didn’t know whether it was us or someone else. There on the ground of the offended station we lost sense of time. Every morning this dead station had woken up, people had been walking there who were no longer there. When the three of us walked there, it was as if my life had already been lived. We went through a hole, walked to the end of the plot of land without speaking. Then, without saying anything to one another, we walked backwards to the hole that once had perhaps been the door of the offended station. And as we walked backwards we loudly blew out our breath. It was cold, the night and the cold took our loud breath and turned it into thick smoke. Then we went back to the street again, I looked behind me to see the remainder of our breath still in the air behind the door space. It was as if the station was in a quite different time. In front of the offended station there was a phone booth. When the three of us walked past it, we talked loudly, as if our parents in Turkey could hear us.
(TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY MARTIN CHALMERS)
MARJANE SATRAPI
From
PERSEPOLIS 2: THE STORY OF A RETURN
(TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY ANJALI SINGH)
MARINA LEWYCKA
From
STRAWBERRY FIELDS
“Irina, my baby, you can still change your mind! You don’t have to go!”
Mother was wailing and dabbing at her pinky eyes with a tissue, causing an embarrassing scene at the Kiev bus station.
“Mother, please! I’m not a baby!”
You expect your mother to cry at a moment like this. But when my craggy old Papa turned up too, his shirt all crumpled and his silver hair sticking up like an old-age porcupine, okay, I admit it rattled me. I hadn’t expected him to come to see me off.
“Irina, little one, take care.”
“Shcho ti, Papa. What’s all this about? Do you think I’m not coming back?”
“Just take care, my little one.” Sniffle. Sigh.
“I’m not little, Papa. I’m nineteen. Do you think I can’t look after myself?”
“Ah, my little pigeon.” Sigh. Sniffle. Then Mother started up again. Then—I couldn’t help myself—I started up too, sighing and sniffling and dabbing my eyes, until the bus driver told us to get a move on, and Mother shoved a bag of bread and salami and a poppy seed cake into my hands, and we were off. From Kiev to Kent in forty-two hours.
Okay, I admit, forty-two hours on a bus is not amusing. By the time we reached Lviv, the bread and salami were all gone. In Poland, I noticed that my ankles were starting to swell. When we stopped for fuel somewhere in Germany, I stuffed the last crumbs of the poppy-seed cake into my mouth and washed it down with nasty metallic-tasting water from a tap that was marked not for drinking. In Belgium my period started, but I didn’t notice until the dark stain of blood seeped through my jeans onto the seat. In France I lost all sensation in my feet. On the ferry to Dover I found a
toilet and cleaned myself up. Looking into the cloudy mirror above the washbasin I hardly recognized the wan dark-eyed face that stared back at me—was that me, that scruffy straggly-haired girl with bags under her eyes? I walked around to restore the circulation in my legs, and, standing on the deck at dawn, I watched the white cliffs of England materialize in the pale watery light, beautiful, mysterious, the land of my dreams.
In Dover I was met off the boat by Vulk, waving a bit of card with my name on it—Irina Blazkho. Typical—he’d gotten the spelling wrong. He was the type Mother would describe as a person of minimum culture, wearing a horrible black fake-leather jacket, like a comic-strip gangster—what a koshmar!—it creaked as he walked. All he needed was a gun.
He greeted me with a grunt. “Hrr. You heff passport? Peppers?”
His voice was deep and sludgy, with a nasty whiff of cigarette smoke and tooth decay on his breath.
This gangster-type should brush his teeth. I fumbled in my bag, and before I could say anything, he grabbed my passport and Seasonal Agricultural Worker papers and stowed them in the breast pocket of his koshmar jacket.
“I keep for you. Is many bed people in England. Can stealing from you.”
He patted the pocket and winked. I could see straightaway that there was no point in arguing with a person of his type, so I hoisted my bag onto my shoulder and followed him across the car park to a huge shiny black vehicle that looked like a cross between a tank and a Zill, with darkened windows and gleaming chrome bars in the front—a typical mafia-machine. These high-status cars are popular with primitive types and social undesirables. In fact he looked quite a bit like his car: overweight, built like a tank, with a gleaming silver front tooth, a shiny black jacket, and a straggle of hair tied in a ponytail hanging down his back like an exhaust pipe. Ha ha.
He gripped my elbow, which was quite unnecessary—stupid man, did he think I might try to escape?—and pushed me onto the backseat with a shove, which was also unnecessary. Inside, the mafia-machine stank of tobacco. I sat in silence looking nonchalantly out the window while he scrutinized me rudely through the rearview mirror. What did he think he was staring at? Then he lit up one of those thick vile-smelling cigars—Mother calls them New Russian cigarettes—what a stink! and started puffing away. Puff. Stink.
I didn’t take in the scenery that flashed past through the black-tinted glass—I was too tired—but my body registered every twist in the lane, and the sudden jerks and jolts when he braked and turned. This gangster-type needs some driving lessons.
He had some potato chips wrapped in a paper bundle on the passenger seat beside him, and every now and then he would plunge his left fist in, grab a handful of chips, and cram them into his mouth. Grab. Cram. Chomp. Grab. Cram. Chomp. Not very refined. The chips smelled fantastic, though. The smell of the cigar, the lurching motion as he steered with one hand and stuffed his mouth with the other, the low, dragging pain from my period—it was all making me feel queasy and hungry at the same time. In the end, hunger won out. I wondered what language this gangster-type would talk. Belarusian? He looked too dark for a Belarus. Ukrainian? He didn’t look Ukrainian. Maybe from somewhere out east? Chechnya? Georgia? What do Georgians look like? The Balkans? Taking a guess, I asked in Russian, “Please, Mr. Vulk, may I have something to eat?”
He looked up. Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. He had real gangster-type eyes—poisonous black berries in eyebrows as straggly as an overgrown hedge. He studied me in that offensive way, sliding his eyes all over me.
“Little flovver vants eating?” He spoke in English, though he must have understood my Russian. Probably he came from one of those newly independent nations of the former Soviet Union where everyone can speak Russian but nobody does. Okay, so he wanted to talk English? I’d show him.
“Yes indeed, Mr. Vulk. If you could oblige me, if it does not inconvenience you, I would appreciate something to eat.”
“No problema, little flovver!”
He helped himself to one more mouthful of chips—grab, cram, chomp—then scrunched up the remnants in the oily paper and passed them over the back of the seat. As I reached forward to take them, I saw something else nestled down on the seat beneath where the chips had been. Something small, black, and scary. Shcho to! Was that a real gun?
My heart started hammering. What did he need a gun for? Mama, Papa, help me! Okay, just pretend not to notice. Maybe it’s not loaded. Maybe it’s just one of those cigar lighters. So I unfolded the crumpled paper—it was like a snug, greasy nest. The chips inside were fat, soft, and still warm. There were only about six left, and some scraps. I savored them one at a time. They were lightly salty, with a touch of vinegar, and they were just—mmm!—indescribably delicious. The fat clung to the edges of my lips and hardened on my fingers, so I had no choice but to lick it off, but I tried to do it discreetly.
“Thank you,” I said politely, for rudeness is a sign of minimum culture.
“No problema. No problema.” He waved his fist about as if to show how generous he was. “Food for eat in transit. All vill be add to your living expense.”
Living expense? I didn’t need any more nasty surprises. I studied his back, the creaky stretched-at-the-seams jacket, the ragged ponytail, the thick, yellowish neck, the flecks of dandruff on the fake-leather collar. I was starting to feel queasy again.
“What is this, expense?”
“Expense. Expense. Foods. Transports. Accommodations.” He took both hands off the steering wheel and waved them in the air. “Life in vest is too much expensive, little flovver. Who you think vill be pay for all such luxury?”
Although his English was appalling, those words came rolling out like a prepared speech. “You think this vill be providing all for free?”
So Mother had been right. “Anybody can see this agency is run by crooks. Anybody but you, Irina.” (See how Mother has this annoying habit of putting me down?) “And if you tell them lies, Irina, if you pretend to be student of agriculture when you are nothing of the sort, who will help you if something goes wrong?”
Then she went on in her hysterical way about all the things that go wrong for Ukrainian girls who go west—all those rumors and stories in the papers.
“But everyone knows these things only happened to stupid and uneducated girls, Mother. They’re not going to happen to me.”
“If you will please say me what are the expenses, I will try to meet them.”
I kept my voice civilized and polite. The chrome-bar tooth gleamed.
“Little flovver, the expense vill be first to pay, and then you vill be pay. Nothing to be discuss. No problema.”
“And you will give me back my passport?”
“Exact. You verk, you get passport. You no verk, you no passport. Someone mekka visit in you Mama in Kiev, say Irina no good verk, is mek big problem for her.”
“I have heard that in England—”
“England is a change, little flovver. Now England is land of possibility. England is not like in you school book.”
I thought of dashing Mr. Brown from Let’s Talk English—if only he were here!
“You have an excellent command of English. And of Russian maybe?”
“English. Russian. Serbo-Croat. German. All languages.”
So he sees himself as a linguist; okay, keep him talking.
“You are not a native of these shores, I think, Mr. Vulk?”
“Think everything vat you like, little flovver.” He gave me a leering wink in the mirror, and a flash of silver tooth. Then he started tossing his head from side to side as if to shake out his dandruff.
“This, you like? Is voman attract?”
It took me a moment to realize he was referring to his ponytail. Was this his idea of flirtation? On the scale of attractiveness, I would give him a zero. For a person of minimum culture he certainly had some pretensions. What a pity Mother wasn
’t here to put him right.
“It is absolutely irresistible, Mr. Vulk.”
“You like? Eh, little flovver? You vant touch?”
The ponytail jumped up and down. I held my breath.
“Go on. Hrr. You can touch him. Go on,” he said with horrible oily enthusiasm.
I reached out my hand, which was still greasy and smelled of chips.
“Go on. Is pleasure for you.”
I touched it—it felt like a rat’s tail. Then he flicked his head, and it twitched beneath my fingers like a live rat.
“I heff hear that voman is cannot resisting such a hair it reminding her of men’s oggan.”
What on earth was he talking about now?
“Oggan?”
He made a crude gesture with his fingers.
“Be not afraid, little flovver. It reminding you of boyfriend. Hah?”
“No, Mr. Vulk, because I do not have a boyfriend.”
I knew straightaway it was the wrong thing to say, but it was too late. The words just slipped out, and I couldn’t bring them back.
“Not boyfriend? How is this little flovver not boyfriend?” His voice was like warm chip fat. “Hrr. Maybe in this case is good possibility for me?”
That was a stupid mistake. He’s got you now. You’re cornered.
“Is perhaps sometime we make good possibility, eh?” He breathed cigar smoke and tooth decay. “Little flovver?”
Through the darkened glass, I could see woods flashing past, all sunlight and dappled leaves. If only I could throw myself out of the vehicle, roll down the grassy bank, and run in among the trees. But we were going too fast. I shut my eyes and pretended to be asleep.