All Russians Love Birch Trees (12 page)

The neighbors got louder and louder.

“Afterward—” She didn’t say after what, but I knew what she meant. “It was just you and me. You didn’t say a word, didn’t even look at me. I wasn’t allowed to touch you either—a little like now. You were like a stranger, and you lost all warmth. You never got it back. From
that day onward you became withdrawn and I never regained access to you. It’s absurd. I didn’t want to let you go. I knew it was wrong, but what should I have done? We had a dead body in our house.”

“It’s not your fault.”

Mother raised her eyebrows.

“It’s me. Everyone around me dies.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“It’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“I had an abortion.”

“When?”

“When I was together with Sami. Shortly before I left him. I didn’t get my period and my first thought was that I’ll have to make an appointment and somehow find the time for an abortion between my exams. Then I did a test and it was positive.”

“I had no idea.”

“It didn’t even occur to me to keep the child. I was embarrassed about that. In the clinic the hallways were decorated with pictures of kids. Pink babies everywhere. Can you imagine that?”

“Did anyone go with you?”

“Cem. Everyone thought he was the father and was afraid of the responsibility. He didn’t deny it.”

“Where was Sami?”

“In the States. I never told him.”

6

“You look horrible,” Cem said.

In those last weeks I hardly left my apartment. I watched TV and occasionally flipped through books, magazines, or the phone book. My cellphone remained off and I didn’t check the mail anymore. I had not gone to work and had forgotten to request an extension of my scholarship. My mother paid for our—now my—rent. I knew things would have to change soon.

“I slipped,” I answered guiltily.

“Can’t you pay more attention?”

“My mother said the same thing.”

“Gee, Masha. You look like an abused wife. Seriously, pay attention. Otherwise I won’t go outside with you anymore.”

“Are you afraid?”

“Do you want me to get deported?” Cem went into the kitchen and poked his head into the fridge. He dug through the drawers, examining the vegetables, throwing away some and checking the expiration dates on the yogurts.

“You went shopping. Very good.”

“That was my mother.”

“Good woman.”

“And I’m not a good woman?”

“No.”

“No?”

Cem paced the living room, looking around. He tried to estimate how much of Elisha’s stuff was still there.

“No.” He shook his head decidedly. “You know, when a Turkish guy and a girl meet for the first time, and the girl—of course, Turkish as well—offers him cake or something else, the guy takes a taste. And then he decides whether she’s a good woman or not. If not he can at least cast her out before it’s too late.” Cem looked me directly in the eye. “Masha, not even the slightest chuckle?”

“Cem?”

“What is it?”

“Will you tell me how your brother died?”

“No.” He looked determined as he sat down next to me and pulled Zigzags and a small round can from his jacket pocket.

“Afghan Black, with very best wishes from Konstantin.” Cem let me smell the hash.

“Did he get it in the park?” I asked.

“From his cousin.”

“I was in the park the other day with—” I interrupted myself. Cem’s face hardened. I took a deep breath and continued. “I guess it’s been a while. Anyway, there were only thirteen-year-olds trying to sell me rosemary. I thought the kids belonged to the same group of guys I bought from in the past and told them in Turkish that they should do their homework instead of trying to fuck with hardworking people. One of them said that he only spoke German and the other called me white trash.”

Cem laughed at me.

“So Konstantin’s cousin doesn’t sell there anymore?”

“No, he works from home now. He just enrolled in economics.”

I took several deep tokes and passed the joint to Cem.

“Masha, I spent three hours in the booth today, interpreting French parliamentary speeches. If I don’t start studying at night, too, I’ll never pass that exam.”

Cem was my co-interpreter. We took turns, thirty minutes at a time, and together interpreted conferences in soundproof booths. We were well attuned to each other, immediately noticing if the other struggled with a word or an expression, sometimes helping or taking over early. Even our voices complimented each other nicely.

“Do you know the French term for
synced election cycles
?” Cem asked.

I reached out for the joint again and again. My limbs grew heavy. Cem always got silly on drugs: “Continuous campaigning, federal budget, referendum,
diéte fédérale allemande, mandats directs et mandats de listes
.” He giggled.

From then on I went back to spending my mornings in the interpretation booth, where I listened to absurd speeches on renewable energy, income tax, and fish farming over my headphones and repeated the words into the microphone in German, Russian, or French. Even though I was concentrating, half an hour later I had forgotten what the speaker had talked about. I spoke without forming a single thought. My brain was a machine. The afternoons I spent in the
library, sitting at a long table between dozens of other students and studying vocabulary. In the evenings I read scientific papers and articles. In the morning before classes I read newspapers and magazines in English, German, French, and Russian. I tried to fill the void with vocabulary.

7

On New Year’s Day Sami came by, unannounced. His hair was shortly cropped, about as short as his beard. He was wearing a parka, beat-up jeans tucked into heavy boots, and a neatly ironed bright blue shirt.

He followed me into the living room and sat down on the couch. He opened the bottle of wine that he had brought and we watched a movie on TV.

Sami had been born in Beirut during its civil war. Albert, Sami’s father, was Swiss, the son of Italians who later became French. He was the manager of a bank in Beirut. Shortly after Sami’s birth they were relocated
to Paris and French became Sami’s real mother tongue. When he was thirteen, the family moved to Frankfurt. When he spoke Arabic, he always had to rely on French words to fill in the gaps. Beirut he only knew from short trips, images in the papers, and his mother’s long phone calls with Lebanese relatives that always ended in her crying.

Sami had an older brother, Paul, from his father’s first marriage. Albert’s second wife, Sami’s mother, treated Paul and Sami the same. Her favorite child was her youngest, born after their arrival in Frankfurt, whom she had named Leyla. Neither Sami nor Paul were jealous of Leyla. They both loved her sincerely and boundlessly. When Paul graduated from high school, Albert decided that it would be better for Paul to study economics in the United States. So Paul went to California. Sami had spent every summer with his older brother and soon moved in with him in the States in order to get his high school degree there. In his new school none of his classmates could figure out why he had both a hard German accent and an Arabic name. He was supposed to return to Germany, but didn’t because he fell in love.

A few weeks after arriving in the States, Sami met Neda. She was fourteen, had long, black hair, almond-shaped eyes, slender ankles, and, to Sami, she was unreachable. They became friends and sometimes went to
dinner or to the movies, but Sami wasn’t even allowed to hold her hand. Neda fell in love with Paul, who didn’t much care for her, and besides, he would never have betrayed Sami. Sami and Neda remained friends. Sami finished high school and went off to college in a different city in California.

Two years passed and on one warm spring day when the campus was fragrant with lilac they happened to see each other again. Neda wore her hair down and—inevitably—a romance ensued. Except that Neda was from a traditional family. Her parents expected her to marry the older Persian doctor who had been chosen for her. Sami supposedly had a lot of women and supposedly he was looking for Neda in every single one of them.

When I fell in love with Sami, Neda had been married for a month and Sami had just returned to Germany to get his master’s degree. I had worked up the courage to talk to him at a bar. He had sat with a friend two tables down and hadn’t even looked at me. I was insanely bored that night. I was there with a woman who crushed my hand and had got her Ph.D. in gender studies. I had known about Neda from the very beginning and I also knew that Sami would return to California in two years to get his Ph.D. We stayed together for those two years and I loved Sami in a way that I had never loved anybody before, and he loved the memory of Neda.

I had asked him if he compared me to Neda. It was a lazy Sunday morning, the bedroom draped in a wan gray light. We were lying on the bed. He was reading the Sunday paper, I was reading a dictionary. Now and then I read a word out loud and he corrected my Arabic pronunciation. Sami said that he didn’t think much of comparisons, and anyway, Neda and I were too different. I wanted to know what he meant. He explained that I was strong and independent. That I didn’t really need him. That Neda was fragile. He had fallen in love with her the very first day, and when he saw how she suffered it broke his heart. Crocodile tears, I said. She left you. I didn’t have the energy to stop her, Sami said. Did he compare our bodies, did he think of Neda when he was lying in bed next to me? Or when he was making love to me, did he think of her then? Sami got up and left the room. He didn’t even slam a door. He left, quiet and determined. But if somebody tells you that he loves another woman and if she happens to love him as well, there’s no use in going on talking, especially if you love him.

I had searched the Internet for photos of Neda and finally found one on a social network. Neda wasn’t particularly pretty and what she had written on her page wasn’t particularly smart. For a while I had her picture up next to my mirror and compared our faces in the morning, afternoon, and at night. I wanted to understand why he loved her and not me.

Sami had fallen asleep during the movie. When the credits rolled I placed a blanket over him and turned the TV off. He woke up.

“I’m going to go home now.”

“You can stay.”

With great effort he propped himself up: “No, I’m going to drive now.”

“You can’t drive. You’ve had too much to drink. Sleep here.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes. I’ll wake you up tomorrow.”

“Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

Sami turned toward the back of the sofa and went back to sleep.

8

At my oral exam for my diploma, Windmill put on a presidential demeanor. I focused completely on the buzzing of the fly in the room, its shiny green body that looked more like a tank than something air-bound. I had passed with top marks and didn’t know how that had happened. They asked me where I’d like to work and I said the United Nations.

Didn’t I know how hard that was?

Had I not just graduated with top marks?

Windmill laughed.

I had prepared thoroughly, learned the most important UN languages and done the right internships. I was good, I said.

Nothing wrong with my grades, he replied.

“But truly, how good is your Arabic?” Windmill asked.

“Quite good,” I lied.

“And you just learned it on the side?”

“No.”

“What? No?”

“Not on the side. As a double major.”

“Your strongest dialect?”

“Lebanese.”

A week later Windmill called to say that I’d graduated at the top of the class. Then he went on to praise my interpreting notes and invite me to dinner. I agreed, without quite knowing why.

We sat in an Italian restaurant across from the Alte Oper. Windmill looked at me as if he was afraid I was going to start crying. It was easy to read in his face that he hoped it wouldn’t happen in the restaurant.

On the menu there were no prices and few dishes. The plates were served and cleared in next to no time. To be precise they were cleared before we had a chance to finish. Windmill kept saying, “You’ve got to try this!” And kept on ordering more, always in Italian, always winking and joking with the waiter. I tried to discern in which region he had learned Italian, but couldn’t—his
Italian was clear and sterile. Without so much as a trace of an accent. Soulless, as if bred in a lab.

“Where’d you learn Italian?” I asked.

“In Mayence, at the university. And you?”

He focused on me as if we were back in the exam.

“In Rimini.”

“What did you do there?”

“Waitressed for three summers.”

Windmill nodded and signaled to the waiter that he could now serve the espresso. The cups were made of porcelain that was so white it was almost transparent. I leaned across the table and kissed him. He was surprised but returned my kiss.

“I don’t like their espresso here. Don’t you agree? I’ll make you a better one at home.”

He paid the check discreetly with his credit card, which I found a pity as I would have loved to know what I was worth to him.