All Russians Love Birch Trees (15 page)

“You don’t get appointed to the UN, Dad.”

“Of course you get appointed to the UN.”

“Nope.”

“Yes. We always got appointed.”

“Here you apply directly.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you apply?”

Awkward silence and rhythmic stirring in teacups followed.

“Back in my day, there was still wiggle room,” said my father, who couldn’t get over the fact he no longer had connections.

“Daddy, so far I’ve managed fine on my own.”

My father shot my mother a concerned look.

“I don’t need help,” I tried again.

“Do you need money?” my mother asked.

I shook my head.

“What kind of an organization is it?” my father finally asked.

“A political organization,” I responded.

“A leftist one?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then at least we didn’t fail completely as parents.”

“You really needed to attach that nice afterthought, didn’t you?” said my mother. “After chasing your own child out of our house.”

“I chased no one out of the house. Besides, we can hardly claim that it’s our house if the lion’s share of your salary pays the rent.”

My mother bit her lip nervously. She feared that the argument would escalate, but my father’s face relaxed again. Silently we sat next to each other and watched Cem. He yelled into the phone: “Dude, I don’t have a problem with my national identity … Don’t give me this crap again. National identity. I’m pressing charges. I’ll go to court. I don’t care about this nation bullshit … I need a lawyer, not a lecture in cultural theory. Shit, man.”

“What’s he saying?” my mother asked and took a sip of her tea.

“He’s having a fight with a friend, Mom.”

“What’s wrong with his friend?”

“Cem, don’t step on my roses!” my father yelled in Turkish.

On the plane I sat next to a woman and her baby, who was sleeping peacefully in a cradle in front of our knees. In the row behind us were four more children, who also belonged to her. The woman spent the four-hour flight standing, watching over her children. She addressed them in plural: “
Les enfants, asseyez-vous! Soyez calme!
” The flight attendants had trouble allocating the kosher meals. Every single one was noted on a list, but the list was off. The kids ate kosher, but not the in-flight meals. Instead, they had the cookies their mother had brought.

I had tried calling Sami before takeoff. I hadn’t said goodbye and he didn’t answer. As soon as the seat belt signs turned off, the Israelis got up, walked around—looking for familiar faces.

part three

1

I waited at Ben Gurion Airport underneath a bunch of colorful balloons that congregated at the ceiling. I read the display panel, ate a sandwich, watched people look around, clueless. Soldiers, Russian grandmothers, Orthodox Jews, and extended Arab families. A mezuzah was affixed to the gate that led into the arrival hall. Many of the arriving passengers kissed it by running the fingertips of their right hand over it and then touching their mouth. Most faces displayed joy and great expectation. Again and again, people ran toward each other, hugged, let go, and examined each other’s faces as if trying to make up for lost time. Next to me an ultra-Orthodox man in a black suit and a wide-brimmed hat
dropped to his knees and kissed the ground. A young woman, holding a little boy in her arms, was picked up by an older man. The boy kicked and screamed as the man tried to touch him. An older woman lectured her grandson. In the arrival hall all the different languages mixed into a wave of sound: Russian, Hebrew, English, Italian, and Arabic. A deep woman’s voice repeatedly warned over the loudspeaker not to leave any luggage unattended, adding: “It’s prohibited to carry weapons in all the terminal halls.” Fifteen minutes ago my computer had been seized and shot with a firearm, and now I would have to wait for a letter of acknowledgment that would allow me to apply for financial compensation from the state of Israel.

It all started at the passport check. I’d been asked about my name.

“Maria Kogan.”

“Maria, of all names.”

I shrugged and said, “My mother liked the name.

Masha.”

“Masha?”

“My nickname.”

He made a note in one of his forms and studied my work visa.

Why was I here?

“To grieve.”

Another note on his form.

“How long are you planning to stay?”

“As long as possible.”

“Are you sure that this is your computer?” He scowled at the stickers with Arabic characters on my keyboard.

“Yes.”

“You are interested in our neighbors, huh? Can I take your computer for a little test?” he said, grinning, and left with my computer.

The situation was serious. Now my suitcase had to be searched as well. This task was assigned to two young soldiers, neither of whom could be older than twenty. They were wearing translucent rubber gloves and told jokes to loosen up the situation. The girl dug through my stuff, respectfully trying not to look too closely. This earned her repeated reprimands from the other soldier, who was bald. He stood next to her, bow-legged, examining the contents of the suitcase and giving orders. Every piece of clothing, every scarf, every pair of panties was unfolded. All jars were opened. Even my electric toothbrush was tested for explosives. The fact that I’d hardly brought any clothes, but instead many dictionaries, aroused suspicion.

During this examination they questioned me. Whom do you know in Israel? With whom are you
going to live? For whom are you going to work? What are you going to do? The bald soldier looked me directly in the eye. Why had I come to Israel, and why had I not come sooner, and why not forever? The female soldier leafed through my Arabic dictionaries with her long red fingernails; her tone, too, becoming increasingly aggressive. Why had I traveled to Arabic countries and what did I know about the Middle East conflict?

“Do you speak Arabic?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I studied it.”

“Do you speak Hebrew?”

“No.”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“Yes. No. I mean no.”

“Is he Arab, Egyptian, or Palestinian?”

“No.”

“What is he then?”

“Dead.”

They looked at each other, irritated.

“When did he pass away?” the young woman asked shyly.

“Recently.”

“I’m sorry.” The female soldier showed the tiniest of sympathetic smiles.

“How did he die?” the male soldier asked.

“Pulmonary embolism.”

“Was he Arab, Egyptian, or Palestinian?”

I was still trying to figure out if he’d really just asked this question when we heard the following announcement: “Do not be alarmed by gunshots. Security needs to blow up suspicious passenger luggage.”

Multiple gunshots followed. The walkie-talkie of the bald guy beeped and he talked into it in a quick, agitated voice. The soldiers closed my suitcase. They apologized for the examination and explained that it had been necessary because of the security situation. They wished me a pleasant stay in the Holy Land. The soldier wanted to talk me into visiting Eilat. He was from there and knew every stone, he said. His colleague interrupted to tell me about little waterfalls all around Jerusalem. She was in the process of writing out the bus connection from the central bus terminal when a concerned officer hurried toward us.

He introduced himself, shook my hand, and apologized politely for having blown up my computer. Then he led me into another room, where its remains had been laid out. My computer hadn’t really been blown up, though: the white case bore three bullet holes. The officer chewed his gum.

“Why did you shoot my computer?” I asked in disbelief.

“We thought it was a bomb. It’s standard procedure with a suspected terrorist attack.” He spoke slowly, as if to a child, having to explain the obvious.

“How am I supposed to work now?”

“The Israeli state will provide you with another computer.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

My cousin arrived about forty minutes later, flung her arms around my neck, and was gorgeous. Right away she informed me that she’d received my call while in bed with her new director, but she didn’t want to miss out on greeting me at the airport. Hannah was my mother’s niece. But we were a widely cast family with unclear degrees of relation and Mother was bad at remembering both names and faces. Therefore everyone who didn’t earn their own money was a niece or nephew. The seniors were uncles and aunts, and the rest were simply cousins. To better tell them apart, my mother secretly assigned them numbers. Hannah was Niece No. 5 and her mother, Cousin No. 13, but she wasn’t a hundred percent sure about that.

I mostly knew my relatives from photos that were sent regularly. The photos of family gatherings were especially sad—my aunts still had crumbling smiles on
their faces, but their husbands didn’t bother anymore. They just stared dejectedly at the camera. The table in front of them was set with the dinnerware they’d brought from the USSR. Hannah, on the other hand, was always the noticeably good-looking girl in front of spectacular motifs: the Dead Sea, Jerusalem, the Sea of Galilee, the desert.

I’d never properly gotten to know Hannah. The last time we saw each other was seven years ago, when her parents had visited us in Germany. It had been a short, relaxed visit. Hannah was sixteen, I was twelve, and she never took off her headphones. Her parents rented a car and drove from one Rhine castle and forgotten synagogue to the next. My mother had her mind set on proving that it was possible to live in Germany as a Jew.

Following Elisha’s death, Hannah had started calling me regularly. At night, between ten and eleven, after my mother had left. We both knew to avoid getting too close, or asking any touchy questions or expecting honest answers. We didn’t talk about Elisha’s death or Hannah’s daughter. Hannah talked about Israel, the landscape, and the beach, about hiking trails in the North that she wanted to try out with me and about clubs in Tel Aviv that she promised to show me. She talked with me about normal things that I didn’t think of anymore. Soon I became familiar with her everyday
life, the names and stories of her friends, even the units in which they had served.

“Why don’t you make aliyah?” she asked.

“No way,” I said. “I’d be stupid to give up German citizenship.”

“OK, then at least come for a while. You’ll like it.”

Now, a few months later, in the parking lot of Ben Gurion Airport I was hit by a wall of hot and humid air. I felt like I’d arrived in the tropics. Suddenly I was excited to be here. I was looking forward to the work and happy that my life might not be entirely over after all.

Hannah never took her foot off the gas pedal. Behind us blinked the red and yellow lights of the airport.

“This isn’t the way I’d imagined you,” Hannah said and lit a cigarette. “You don’t look like me at all. I thought you would look like me. No, I didn’t think you would, I just hoped you would. I hoped you and I would look a bit alike.”

“We’re just cousins.”

“But you don’t look like it at all.”

“Like what?”

“Jewish.”

“You think?”

Hannah nodded and focused on the street again.

“Not at all?” I asked.

“No.”

I secretly studied myself in the rearview mirror.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK.”

“Are you offended?”

“No.” I laughed, loud and hysterical.

2

Again and again we stopped to take pictures. Hannah was constantly asking someone to take a photo of the two of us, but despite that, we only needed an hour to cross the old town of Jerusalem. After strolling through the Armenian, Christian, Jewish, and Arab neighborhoods, we got in line to go through a security check. The Wailing Wall itself was divided into two sections: one for women and one for men. Of course, the part for women was much smaller. The heat was stifling, the Shabbat almost over, and the Wailing Wall nearly empty.

A tired-looking woman with sunken, wrinkled cheeks wordlessly handed Hannah and me polyester
scarfs to cover our knees and shoulders. Hannah took a prayer book from the shelf at the entrance to the Wailing Wall and single-mindedly approached it. I hesitated and sat in one of the randomly dispersed white plastic chairs. To my left, Orthodox girls were praying, dapper in their best Shabbat dresses. To my right, a young woman in a long gray dress and a wig rocked back and forth in prayer. Her little son was jumping around cheerfully between the chairs, pawing his mother’s butt and babbling. His yarmulke kept falling from his head, but he always put it back on immediately, without having to be told to do so. At the very back a nun stood perfectly still, as if carved from stone. She surveyed the scene from a distance, emotionless. Her features were rather masculine and her face sunburned. Only her eyes sparkled, gleaming with an inward focus.

So here, at the holiest site in Judaism, wrapped in a pink-and-blue polyester scarf, I could have consulted God, could have complained or wailed. For a long time, I contemplated what to write on my piece of paper, but I couldn’t think of anything. I wanted Elisha back, that was all. So I wrote
Elisha
on the slip, folded it, approached the wall, reached out with my right hand, and recited the kaddish. Every crack was filled with paper, prayers, and wishes in different languages. Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, many of them laminated. When I stuffed my piece of paper into the wall, others
fell out and landed in front of my feet. I knelt down and started collecting them. I couldn’t resist a quick glance at their contents. Every slip had an addressee. Dear God, Yahweh, El, Adonai. I asked myself whether the missing address would downgrade my slip. But the idea of addressing God hadn’t even crossed my mind, and if it had, I wouldn’t have known how.