All Russians Love Birch Trees
Copyright © Carl Hanser Verlag München 2012
Originally published in German as
Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt
by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, in 2012.
Translation copyright © Eva Bacon, 2014
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut that is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Chekhov epigraph from
The Complete Plays
, translated by Laurence Senelick (New York: Norton, 2006).
Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 2 Park Avenue, 24th Floor,
New York, NY 10016.
Or visit our Web site:
www.otherpress.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Grjasnowa, Olga, 1984- author.
[Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. English]
All Russians love birch trees / by Olga Grjasnowa; [translation by Eva Bacon].
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-59051-584-6 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-59051-585-3 (ebook)
1. Jews—Azerbaijan—Fiction. 2. Jews, Russian—Germany—
Fiction. 3. Jews, Russians—Israel—Fiction. 4. Jewish women—
Fiction. I. Bacon, Eva, translator. II. Title.
PT2707.R587R8713 2014
833’.92—dc23
2013008395
Publisher’s Note:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.1
Vershinin: Why should you care? Here there’s such a wholesome, bracing Russian climate. A forest, a river … and birch trees here too. Dear, humble birches, I love them more than any other tree. It’s a good place to live. Only it’s odd, the train station is over thirteen miles away … And nobody knows why that is.
Anton Chekhov
Three Sisters
Contents
part one
1
I didn’t want this day to begin. I would rather have stayed in bed and kept sleeping, but the laughter of the fruit vendor and the rattle of the streetcar invaded our bedroom through the wide-open window. Our apartment wasn’t far from the central station, which basically meant that in our neighborhood there were streets better left avoided, with discount stores and huge erotic cinemas. Here—between an old Chinese Laundromat and a left-leaning youth center, whose visitors often mistook our front door for a urinal—was our home. Our apartment was ramshackle and rundown, but cheap. Every morning at about five o’clock, fathers, brothers, and cousins unloaded their vans beneath our windows.
They slammed their doors and assembled their stands, drank tea, roasted corn on the cob, and waited. They waited for the street to fill so that they could advertise their fruit in automated singsong voices. I tried to follow their conversations, but mostly just understood a bit here and there, or fell asleep again.
Elias was lying next to me: stirring, lips slightly parted, eyelids fluttering, irregular rise and fall of his chest. “Fucking pig faggot, I’ll kill you!” yelled a drunk under our window. The fruit vendors laughed at him and spit sunflower shells onto the street.
Elias woke up and turned toward me. Without opening his eyes, he rested his head on my stomach. His hands followed mine. We stayed there, wedged together, until someone else’s alarm clock went off behind the wall and my hand grew numb beneath his weight. When it went completely numb I climbed out of bed to take a shower.
The kitchen was crammed with yesterday’s dishes. Pots and pans with crusty rims, plates and half-full wineglasses were stacked on top of each other on the counter. The air smelled like exhaust and stuck to my skin like syrup. It was going to be the hottest day of the year.
Elias was sitting at the kitchen table. In his right hand was a spoon full of granola. Crumbs were scattered in front of him. Half a roll sat on a plate, covered
in a dark red layer of jam. I took a seat facing him, reached for the newspaper, and then, instead of the paper, studied his face. He had high cheekbones, gray-blue eyes, and dark lashes just a little on the short side. Elias was little-boy-pretty. His good looks annoyed him—people would never remember him as a person, but as someone resembling an actor, whose name they never quite remembered. It wasn’t his beauty, but rather his intuitive politeness that gave him the effect he had—on impatient cash register ladies, who suddenly forgot to check their watches, on giggling schoolgirls, medical assistants, librarians, and me. First and foremost on me. The gifts of a con man, my mother said. But she loved him, because of those gifts especially, and because Elias, for whatever reason, knew how to behave around an Eastern family.
He poured coffee into his granola. White dissolving into brown and raisins bobbing on the surface. On the kitchen table, under the newspaper, lay an open cookbook. On the page a fish’s head stared out at me questioningly. I flipped it shut.
“I hate to remind you, you’re a vegetarian!” I said jokingly.
“At least I check what it is that I’m putting into the oven,” he replied, irritated.
He was alluding to the night before. I had attempted to make a quiche because I wanted to try out the word
quiche
for my vocabulary. As if I were a French actress playing a French housewife awaiting her French lover, who was returning from the war an invalid, and she is baking a quiche for him, not knowing which limb he’s lost.
Quiche
rolled nicely off my tongue.
La quiche
. I’d purchased frozen shortcrust pastry, which turned out to be sweet shortcrust pastry. The quiche was inedible.
In France the dough was neither sweet nor salty. Elias ate my quiche anyway. I hadn’t insisted on this polite gesture, but he was still suffering from the aftereffects of his good education. He had immediately washed down every bite with water.
“Have you seen my shin pads?” Elias asked as I was rifling through the fridge, searching for the quiche.
“Have you seen dinner?” I asked.
“I put it in the freezer.”
“What?”
“I didn’t think you still wanted it.”
“You always have to play the compassionate German, huh?” I asked. Elias grinned, pushing the milk and the granola toward me and getting me a bowl from the shelf. I took a seat and sorted my school stuff into one neat pile—notepads, vocabulary lists, flash cards, and dictionaries that I memorized from
A
to
Z
. When Elias returned to the table, he softly kissed the top of my head and asked again: “Have you seen my shin pads?”
“I already told you.”
“But you always lose things.”
“No idea where they are,” I said.
He carefully put the dishes into the sink, making sure that the plates didn’t touch each other.
“And since when do you play soccer?” I asked. “And with whom?”
“I’ve played before.”
“I’m sure you’ll break something.”
“Do I need an
immigrant background
to play soccer?” he asked, looking me straight in the eye.
“Not that again.” I tried to sound as ironic as possible, but without much success. Whenever I came across this expression I could feel bile rising in my throat. The only thing worse was the adjective
postmigrant
. I hated the discussions related to these words, not only the public ones, but also the ones between the two of us. Nothing new was ever said in these conversations, but the tone was patronizing and strident. One of us provoked disagreement and then we both got caught up in allegations and rebukes. Elias accused me of caginess and I blamed him for being pushy, at which point he tended to move from general to specific claims.
