3
My mother kept calling and asking whether I wanted her to visit, and I kept saying no. She came on Sunday and brought the leftovers of my father’s birthday dinner. I put two plates out, as well as forks and knives. I left the food itself in the Tupperware containers, not bothering to reheat it. Mother gave me a concerned look and I stared back wearily. She wanted to know everything about Elisha’s diagnosis. My parents had long agonized over how to Russify Elias’s name, to impose both their love and an affectionate diminutive on him. When my father finally exclaimed “Elisha,” my mother applauded in delight—Elisha it was.
We ate in silence. I didn’t mind it, but my mother couldn’t bear the quiet and started talking about her job. She was a piano teacher—first at a music school, then at an academy. She, too, initially struggled with the new system: trained at a Soviet conservatory, she had professional standards which she couldn’t just leave behind. When the father of one of her students, a priest, complained to her that his daughter didn’t have fun in class, my mother’s heart started racing and her hands grew sweaty. Thus far she had not been aware that the purpose of art was fun. And she would’ve least expected to hear it from a priest. Music had been taken very seriously in the USSR, as were ballet and the visual arts. Unlike in Germany, every child had the opportunity to get not only a school education, but also a highly professional and—on top of that—free artistic education, as long as the child was willing to work hard. And it was completely unfathomable to my mother how somebody could not want that.
Back in the day, when she was still young, gorgeous, and successful, and before she married my father on a whim, our living room had held a grand piano. Preparing for a performance, my mother would practice for days on end. Because of hygienic concerns and the General Situation, I’d only gone to kindergarten for a few weeks. Instead, I’d stayed in the living room, sitting under the grand piano and listening to my mother play. Whenever I saw my parents now, I always assured them that I was fine. I talked about my stipends, summer academies, internships, and stays abroad. I told them about my plans; where I would work and how much I would earn. I told them about Sami and then about Elias, and my parents believed every single word because I played my role well. When we got around to the meat dish, lamb with steamed chestnuts, dried fruit, and dolma (those grape leaves stuffed with rice, ground lamb, finely minced onions, and nuts), my mother laughed. I told her hospital anecdotes that I made up as I went along.
She finally left, leaving behind pomegranates, oranges, pears, bananas, stuffed puff pastry, and the last piece of chocolate cake. I turned on the TV. A rerun episode of Tatort flickered across the screen. All signs pointed toward the detective spending a hot night with a Southern European. I cranked up the volume and went off to take a shower. I thoroughly scrubbed away dead skin cells and the faint smell of hospital. I tried to recall Elias’s body without the screws and the long scar on his thigh. Then I imagined kissing a woman in the staircase, in the midst of banging doors, cooking smells, and screaming children, and how I would slip my hands between her thighs. I was back on the couch, putting cream on my legs, before the murderer was caught. I had a suspicion and awaited the solution.
The digital display on the clock radio showed four a.m. My stomach cramped, I had a bad taste in my mouth, my neck ached. Grudgingly I schlepped myself to the bathroom and looked for the tampon box. Under the warm stream of the shower I washed off the blood, then wrapped myself in a mint green towel and went back to bed.
It was quiet in the apartment. I wondered whether I had locked the front door, whether it was normal that the fridge made such dubious noises and why the neighbors were already awake, stomping down the stairs. At five a.m. I decided that staying in bed was pointless. I picked up the first piece of clothing I found, a red-and-white-checkered summer dress that barely covered my hips so that I looked like a child that had grown too quickly. I tied my hair back and went into the kitchen. I tried to imagine all the things I could do now that Elias wasn’t there, but couldn’t come up with any. And therefore I also stopped doing the things I used to do in his presence: every surface was cluttered with open packaging, newspapers, used mugs, bowls; the trash was overflowing and of course I’d not bothered to separate out paper, plastic, compost, metal, electronic appliances, and bulky items. I turned on the radio and translated the morning news into French while I rinsed out the stovetop espresso maker and soaked a crescent roll in a bowl of milk. The phone’s ringing startled me and I choked on the roll, which I hadn’t bothered to bake prior to consumption. The display showed Elisha’s number.
“Already awake?” I asked, surprised.
“What do you think? They wake us up at six a.m. for the ward round and stare at us like rabbits pulled out of a hat. And if somebody sleeps through the magic trick, they’ll come back.”
“How are you?”
The line crackled.
“Are you in pain?” I asked again.
“No,” he replied.
Both of us knew this was a lie.
“Do you think you could come earlier today?” he hesitantly asked.
“Yes.” I tried to sound tender, and just then recalled that I had a seminar today. But it was too late. I had already agreed to come.
“Thank you.”
“No problem. Should I bring you anything?”
“Warm clothes—I have to keep the windows open here.” He murmured something into the telephone that I didn’t understand and then continued in a normal volume: “A scarf and a pullover if possible, the black one and the light gray cashmere one.”
“Do you want anything to eat?”
“God no. I’m constantly being force-fed here. I’m starting to beef up. But you could bring me the books and the lens from the dresser, first drawer on the left. This time the right one, please.”
“You hardly need all your f*cking equipment there, do you?”
I hung up and tried to fish the soggy piece of bread from the cereal bowl. It turned out to be easier to just drink everything. I was furious. With Elias, with myself, with the entire world.
I wandered through the art academy library that was so very different from the one in my department. Again and again I pulled a book from the shelves and leafed through reproductions of old Flemish masters and descriptions of happenings. Holding in my hands the catalog for the Sonic Youth exhibition, I asked myself whether my life had taken the right course. Languages come easily to me. I quickly grasp the patterns and have a good memory, but in the last few years I had hardly done anything other than learn technical terms and grammar constructions. I was disciplined and hungry for success. In school I had studied English, French, and a bit of Italian, then I had spent a year as an au pair in France to perfect my French. Afterward, I’d enrolled to study interpreting. In my free time I studied Italian, Spanish, and a bit of Polish, but I never managed to work up enthusiasm for the Slavic languages. Nonetheless, I spent a semester at the Lomonosov University in Moscow, then did internships with international organizations in Brussels, Vienna, and Warsaw. A scholarship had freed me from having to work on the side. But by then I had compiled a respectable CV and was familiar with the use of Ritalin and other substances that facilitate an easier learning process. I finished college in record time and started taking Arabic lessons. Sami had been a good teacher, but he returned to the United States. A year later I met Elias.
We’d been together for a mere two months when we decided to travel together. We were on the road for almost four months, crossed France, into Italy, from there on to the Balearic Islands and Spain, then to Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey. During the trip Elias took pictures for his thesis show. Upon our return he disappeared into his darkroom and I started a double master’s degree: interpretation and Arabic.
The librarian wore large horn-rimmed glasses and stared at my T-shirt. I pushed the books toward him. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it. They’re beautiful. Your breasts, I mean.”
I looked him straight in the eyes—they were cold and gray. Obviously he was at ease, didn’t feel embarrassed or caught in the act, and smilingly handed me the books. Probably he had deconstructed his own sexism and now felt that he could get away with anything. I was tempted to drop the heavy stack of art monographs onto his fingers, but he withdrew his hands just in time. Then I thought about spitting at him, but that seemed a little overly theatrical.
I was so angry that I walked the entire way to the university. I hoped that would calm me down. On foot it took an hour. I had to cross the crowded downtown and financial districts. En route I was asked to donate money three times, smiled at six times, two people asked for a cigarette, three people asked me for a euro, and an aging hippie asked me to give him a tantra massage. I was too late for my seminar and my French translation was subadequate. In general, I wasn’t in the mood for Simultaneous Interpretation French–German III and Introduction à la problématique des techniques industrielles. Or any translation for that matter.
My professor asked me to come to his office hours. Over the course of my studies I had never gotten worse than a 3.7 and that was by accident in the first semester. This afternoon he would be sitting across from me, stirring his spoon around his blue mug and asking me to work harder. Then he would inquire about vineyards in Azerbaijan and would pity me for becoming multilingual so late in life. I would never be a native speaker, nothing to be done about that. And I would remain silent and stir my unsweetened tea and not mention the superb cognac from Ganja. A cognac that is available neither in an elegant bottle nor at a fancy specialty shop on Fressgass Street, but only in Ganja and only in small canisters that are mailed exclusively to real connoisseurs or close relatives. I furthermore would abstain from mentioning that I didn’t learn Azerbaijani from my parents, but from our neighbors, and that I’d spoken it fluently and without an accent until we emigrated to Germany, where I no longer had a reason to speak it in my daily life anymore. And I would leave him in the dark about the fact that in Azerbaijan, starting at age five, I had a private tutor in English and French and that my mother had to sell her mother’s diamond ring to pay for it. I wouldn’t tell him that people who live without running water aren’t necessarily uneducated. But my professor was my professor. He sponsored foster children in Africa and India. His multiculturalism took place in congress halls, convention centers, and expensive hotels. To him integration meant demanding fewer hijabs and more skin, hunting for exclusive wines and exotic travel destinations.
When I arrived at the hospital I was even angrier. Rainer said that Elias was in the middle of an examination. Heinz added, winking: “It might take a while. But don’t worry, stay with us. We’ll take care of you.” Both laughed.
I slammed my books on the table and went straight back out. There was a little park between the different wards, but it wasn’t quiet there either. The benches were constantly occupied by old people, the narrow paths congested with wheelchairs. I sat down on the only free bench and lit a cigarette. Not five minutes later a delicate old lady with a colorful hijab and golden front teeth sat down next to me. From her hospital pajamas she produced a bag of sunflower seeds, cracked them in her mouth, and spit the empty shells onto the ground directly in front of my feet.
“It’s not allowed inside anymore. The neighbors complain to the doctor.”
I replied in Russian, and her face lit up. She waved the bag of sunflower seeds in my face.
“Do you have a fiancé?”
“No.”
“A boyfriend?”
I nodded. She spit out a bunch of empty shells, satisfied.
“When I was your age I was already married.”
I shrugged.
“How often?”
“Excuse me?”
“How often?” She repeated. “How often does he hit you? Does he hit hard, with full force?”
“He doesn’t.”
“Everybody hits. My husband hit me. My mother-in-law. She, she hit the hardest. She was quite a hitter, that one. But my daughter-in-law was bad, too. I was in a hospital for two years.”
“Two years?”
“Yes. Two years.”
“Was it a locked ward?”
“Of course not, I’m perfectly clear in the head. What are you talking about? I was pregnant. With my seventh.”
I said nothing.
“As if six weren’t enough. I told him not to touch me anymore, but he kept on doing it anyway.”
I nodded.
“I didn’t want anymore. I went up on top of the closet and jumped. The abdominal organs fell out and here I was. And now I’m here again.”