I held my breath, thought for a while, then said, “I’ve told you already.”
Elias struggled to sit up.
“You have to start trusting me,” he said.
“It’s not about that.” My voice sounded harsh.
“What’s it about then?”
I sat up too, and turned on the bedside light.
“What’s up with your father?” I asked.
His expression became even more tense.
“What do you mean?” he asked hesitantly.
“Did he ever beat you?”
Elias stared at me, shocked by the turn our conversation had just taken. “What do you mean?” he asked again.
“When he was drunk, did he beat you?” My voice broke. Remorse crept in.
“Sometimes he drank for days on end, and then for months he didn’t touch a sip. It was a toss-up. I never knew what state he would be in. Mostly he drank at night, when my mother was at work. I brought him to bed and cleared away the bottles and vomit before my mother came home in the morning.
“She left you alone with him?”
“What choice did she have? She worked, put up with his moods and self-importance without saying a word. Right after the Wall came down he lost his job. But he’d started drinking long before that. Well, what do I know?” Elias fell silent. I waited, although I knew that he wouldn’t say anything more. But after a while he continued and I asked myself what I knew about Elias and if I really knew him at all.
“On the days when he couldn’t speak in coherent sentences anymore, I would sometimes take pictures of him. One day he found the box with the photographs.”
“And then?”
Elias turned off the light and buried his face in the cushion. I reached underneath his T-shirt and stroked his back and covered his neck with kisses. But he didn’t move. Still, in the following days Elias would tell me even more. It was as if a dam had burst inside him.
12
When I was a child I often went for walks to the park with my mother. In the afternoon, and sometimes in the mornings, too. In the park there were rides, katcheli, that were all broken. Or they lacked the electricity to get them going. Mother often told me scary stories about the Katchelchik.
My favorite game at the time was News, and it went sort of like this: Divide up the park and try to take over the others’ territories. By any means necessary. Just like on the news that aired on TV after the cartoons. We played National Front. We played war.
I don’t remember his name, but the boy had red hair. Even his feet and knees were covered in freckles. He was my enemy. My personal Nagorno-Karabakh. We fought. One of us always cried. Which probably was because we battered each other with sticks and stones. And then the boy entrenched himself in a tree. It was a large, beautiful tree at the edge of the park, far away from our mothers. From a high branch he threw stones and nails, and when I’d almost conquered the tree—just as the Armenian forces had done with Shusha—our mothers decided we should reconcile. The redheaded boy’s father was the chief of police and had excellent access to the black market. The enemy’s mother was a small woman with long red hair. In the park she always bragged about marital love—every day her husband returned home during his lunch break to make fervent love to her. She confuses sex with love, I heard my mother say—not without a trace of jealousy in her voice.
The mothers negotiated in the kitchen. My enemy and I stood in the parents’ bedroom, in front of the mirror of a large wardrobe. He chose a silken dress and I a white dress shirt. Above our heads hung a framed photograph of Saddam Hussein. The enemy assumed a Napoleonic pose and quoted his father. Said that Saddam was a real man. The only real man far and wide. Except for his dad, of course. Saddam’s dad? The redhead thought for a moment. No, his own father. Saddam is also the only one who can contend with the Jews. When I told him that I was a Jew, too, he wasn’t surprised.
Only a few weeks later he and his mother had to flee. The husband had told his wife that he could no longer guarantee her safety, nor the safety of their children. They had to leave the city immediately. He stayed in the apartment, even though it belonged to his Armenian father-in-law.
My mother tried to save a few things from the apartment, to send them to the woman who was now in hiding. His new wife had already moved in. An Azeri woman. While my mother packed up books and sheet music, the woman didn’t protest. She only cast around contemptuous glances, as if she was the one who was being robbed. When my mother started packing up the silverware that had been part of the dowry alongside the apartment, the new one perched her hands on her hips and threatened, “That you’ll leave here. Or else I call for my husband.”
The most difficult thing was to get home with the suitcase. Everyone carrying a suitcase was taken for an Armenian by the angry mob and instantly lynched. My father hid in the next driveway with the suitcase, while my mother stood at the entrance to the driveway and waited for a group of pogromchiki to pass by. Only then would he leave and run to the next driveway.
Elias was busy with the pots. I approached from behind, put my arms around his waist, and leaned onto his back. He didn’t turn around and I let go.
“Elias?”
He remained standing with his back to me. I put my hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off. For a while I studied his back, then I sat down at the table.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He turned around. His nose was red and his eyes were shiny. Then he asked unflinchingly: “Is anything going on between you and Sami?”
I took a plate from the table, smashed it against the wall with full force and only missed his head by a little.
I saw the uncertainty well up in his eyes and yelled: “Do you think I fuck him while you’re in the hospital?”
He shook his head.
“How’d you get that idea in the first place?” I asked.
“All this lying around is driving me crazy.”
“You’re full of shit.” My hands shook and I continued yelling: “Everyone loves within their limits. If that’s not enough for you …”
Elias looked at me, distressed, and I knew that I had gone too far. Now the ease between us was over. I turned to face the window and opened it. Tears filled my eyes. I shouldn’t have said anything. I had never before threatened Elias. Never exerted power and had hoped that we would never reach this point in our relationship. But now we had, and I was to blame. I heard Elias try to bend over to pick up the shards.
“Stop it!” I said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Elias murmured, and I couldn’t bear his pitiful glance.
“I said stop it.”
“No, I’ll take care of it.”
“But you can’t.”
Elias put the gathered shards on the table and hobbled into the bedroom. When he tried to open the door, he slipped. His body hit the floor with a dull thud. I ran over, tried to help him up, but he pushed me away.
13
I turned on the light. Elias sat upright against the headboard. His breath was labored, his hair drenched with sweat. All of a sudden I was wide awake.
“What’s going on?”
“Cramps,” he said.
“In your leg?”
“Yes.”
He shivered. Arms, legs, hands. The teeth, too, chattered. Pearls of sweat gathered on his upper lip. I opened the bandage. The leg didn’t look noticeably swollen, but the wound was red around the edges and pus-filled in the center.
“I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I don’t want to go back to the hospital. Let’s wait until tomorrow.”
“No.”
“It’s only cramps. That happens. Tomorrow we’ll go back. I’m sure they couldn’t do much in the ER now anyway. I might just as well stay here. Get me some water, please.”
I went into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. Up to the brim. Then I washed my hands, took two clean t
owels and poured cold water over one and boiling hot water over the other. Back in the bedroom, I tried to appear calm, to smile at Elias, but I didn’t succeed. I placed the cold compress on Elias’s forehead, and then with the disinfected towel went on to dab the pus from the wound. As soon as I touched the wound Elias screamed, jerked up, back bent, and then fell back with a groan. I dialed the number for the ambulance and wiped Elias’s face with the wet towel. The windows of the house across the street slowly lit up, one by one.
His entire body was shivering. I tried holding on to him, hugged him, but one cramp chased the other in increasingly short intervals. The wound dripped. I lay down next to him. Elias hit the headboard full force, cursed and whimpered. An eternity passed before I heard the siren in front of our house. From the window I yelled down the floor number and begged them to hurry up. Finally I heard the heavy steps of the emergency doctor and the paramedic on the stairs. I led them into the bedroom, where Elias was writhing in the sheets. I rattled off Elias’s medical history. The doctor nodded and put on white rubber gloves.
“Calm down,” he said to me while taking Elias’s pulse and patting down the wound. Elias screamed in agony. I tried to soothe him, put my hand in his. Nothing worked. The doctor took a syringe from his case and gave Elias the injection. Then he continued the examination. He studied the wound pensively and started patting it again.
Elias broke out in a cold sweat. “Stop!” he yelled. His hand clawed into mine and he turned his head away. At first I assumed he didn’t want to watch, but it turned out to be a cramp in his neck. For a couple of minutes, Elias convulsed in pain, hardly able to breathe.
“How long has there been pus in the wound?” the physician asked.
“Maybe a couple of hours. I don’t know. I slept through it. Can’t you give him something?”
“I already did.”
When the seizure ended, the doctor gave the paramedic a signal. Without a word the paramedic went down to the ambulance and a few minutes later came back with another colleague and a stretcher. Elias had calmed down a bit. His groans were quieter and he could breathe again. The neighbors peered out of their windows curiously.
As soon as we arrived at the hospital a nurse asked me when Elias had last eaten.
part two
1
I knew it as soon I saw the doctor approaching. He was tired and pale and took me by the elbow and guided me into a separate room, where he had me sit down on an examination table. I only understood bits and pieces: emergency surgery, complications, outflow of bone marrow, complications, fat embolism, not rare, complications, drop in blood pressure, cardiac arrhythmia, cardiac arrest.
He took off his glasses and wiped his forehead.
“He couldn’t be revived. Do you want to see his body?”
Elisha lay on the bed. His body was cold, but not yet stiff. His eyes were shut. They had dressed him in a hospital gown. I opened it. The surgery wound on his thigh had been carelessly stitched. His chest had been closed in the same coarse fashion. I sat down on the edge of the bed. A nurse opened the door a crack, apologized, and came in. I waited until she had left, then locked the door. He couldn’t die. Only a few meters away. He should have waited for me. We could have died together. I wouldn’t have minded. I sang nursery rhymes for him, as if I wanted to cradle him to sleep. I sang badly and hoped something would move in his face, a brief twitch at the corners of his mouth, a flared nostril, a blink, a flick of his hand, but I knew that he was dead. With the nail of my index finger I traced his skin, at first with more pressure, then softly. He was motionless, cold. A ray of light divided the room in two halves. I lay down next to him on the bed as his body became increasingly stiff. There was no glowing sunrise. The sky was completely white. Elisha had always said that such light meant it was going to be a hot day. Somebody knocked. Morning came and the knocking became a hammering.
According to Jewish faith the soul leaves the body at the time of death, but sticks around nearby until the body has been buried. Therefore the body must not be left alone. But Elisha wasn’t Jewish, and I wasn’t religious. Somebody yelled my name. At some point the nurse and two doctors, whom I didn’t know, were standing in front of me. I hadn’t even heard them unlock the door. One of them had a broad back and a weathered face and reminded me of the Russian swimmer Alexander Popov. I’d been sitting next to my mother in front of the TV when Popov won gold at the Olympics in Barcelona. The doctor pushed me into a chair.
I left the hospital, crossed the narrow street, and waited at the bus stop. Birds were chirping and the bus was on time. The bus driver said hello and I sat down in the last row and pressed my face against the scratched window. The landscape was still there. Long rows of parked cars, small houses, well-tended gardens. Here and there a tree.
I got off at the first subway stop. Went down, threw the trash from my pockets into an overflowing bin that was swarming with flies. I threw up. I wiped my mouth. A few punks took a piss onto the tracks and laughed. The subway came and the punks lifted their backpacks and got on, one after the other. The air in the car was stuffy. The stops cycled in and out, and along with them the passengers, most of whom had their backs turned to me. I was in front of my door and then in the hallway of the apartment. I hung my keys on the hook next to the door and took off my shoes. In the bathroom I was hit by a wall of warm, moist air. The water was scalding hot. The drain cover was full of blond hair. His hair. There were unopened letters on the kitchen table that were addressed to Elisha. Under the pillow was his T-shirt. There was a smell of his sweat and of milk in the air, although Elisha had very rarely smelled sweaty and never smelled like milk. After a while, only the scent of sour milk would remain. I coiled up and everything around me began to spin. I could feel the sickness rising. I staggered into the bathroom and threw up next to the toilet. My circulatory system, my knees and palms, all signaled that my body was throwing in the towel. I trembled and lay back down in bed, and nothing seemed more urgent to me than sleeping.
2
My mother took care of everything. She took care of Horst and Elke, the phone, the formalities and the rest. She lit a candle next to Elisha’s photo and covered the mirrors. I lay in bed, didn’t change my clothes, and stared at the ceiling. Sometimes Mother came in, sat down next to me, and emptied out the bucket next to the bed. Since I couldn’t eat, I only threw up bile.
The Talmud demands that one remember the dead. If I’d had it on hand I would have thrown it into a fireplace. But it was in some box next to a Schindler’s List videotape. I wanted to remember everything. His face and his body. Under no circumstances did I want to forget how he held me in his arms, how his lips felt on my skin, how he smiled and how we fell asleep next to each other. How we talked on the phone in the evening when we were apart. Forgetting became my biggest fear. I lay in bed, the curtains drawn, and on the nightstand there was the lit candle in front of his photo. If I closed my eyes I saw his face and if I kept them closed for too long I saw the face of a young corpse in a light blue gown. Her cavernous eyes, blood dripping from her abdomen. Before the images could merge, I blinked and took a sip of water. Then I could see Elias again. I remembered the way my body fit perfectly into his. I thought of his voice, his hands, and how I had found him in a small, smoky apartment.
The Croatian hosts had slowly bobbed their heads in sync with the Slavic hip-hop. I had a cigarette and a glass of vodka in hand and combed through the rooms searching for people I knew. A recent high school graduate pulled me into the kitchen, wanted me to touch his biceps. The food spoke of the hosts’ loyalty to the Balkan snack bar owned by their aunt. The living room was bursting with people. Elias sat on the sofa, flirting aggressively with Tuba. He had a girly face with sunken cheeks and high cheekbones. Dimples formed at the edges of his smile. A harmless-little-boy haircut. His clear, even skin and a delicate net of freckles around his finely cut nose completed the picture. I liked tall, slender men and faces dominated by noses, and had spent far too long wat
ching him already.
Tuba brushed her hair out of her face, bracelets rattling, and took another swig from the beer bottle. In the process, she stuck out her tongue a little and briefly licked the bottleneck. Suddenly she waved.
“Masha!”
I slowly wove my way through the dancing crowd. Somebody spilled beer on my shoe and apologized with a nod.
“Sweetheart, how are you? This is Elias.” Tuba looked at me and Elias, alternatingly, and played with her hair—seemingly lost in thought. She twirled a strand of hair around her index finger, tightened it, and let it bounce again. Then she asked me, “Are you here with Cem?”
“Yes, but I haven’t seen him in an hour.”
“I’ll go look for him.” Tuba disappeared. I sat down next to Elias and sat up straight. The situation was a little awkward for both of us. At first we just sat there in silence. Then I asked him where he was from. He spoke of Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin, of fishing and architecture, of French films, the new exhibition at the modern art museum, of soccer and the mole behind my left ear.
We left the party together. It was drizzling and Elias asked me whether he could give me a ride home on his bike. He studied me so intensely and seriously, as if he wanted to learn me by heart. I took the night bus. As I was regretting my decision in solitude at the bus stop, it began to hail.
Three weeks later I ran into Elias on the tram. Next to us stood a boy with a transparent bag in his hand. In the bag swam a goldfish. Elias and I looked at the boy, puzzled, but he paid no attention to us. I wanted to slip Elias my number, but he got off too soon.
Over the next weeks I constantly thought of him. Then I read in the newspaper about an exhibition in the Staedel school. I even bought a new dress, but it was too cold to take off my coat. Elias stood in the corner, leaning on the bar, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Next to him was a girl. Red short skirt, coralline lips. A pretty girl, with immaculate skin and immaculate legs. When I saw her, I knew I had no choice but to accept our German girl and her immaculate legs. I stormed out. He caught me at the entrance, by the sleeve. We went back in. He bought me a beer and I was afraid of saying something stupid. And then he said the only thing that most pictures need to become art is empty walls. I grew increasingly nervous. I liked his nose and wasn’t thinking anymore about Sami, who had returned to California a couple of months ago.
All Russians Love Birch Trees Page 7