Olga Grjasnowa - All Russians Love Birch Trees

Even though it had been a long time since we broke up, from time to time I reflexively reached out for him. Sometimes when I felt his body close or when I looked at him for too long, everything was back: love and lust and hunger and greed. Besides, we’d hurt each other so deeply that there was no going back.

In the line in front of the bathroom I spotted Daniel, who looked like a famished, offended rabbit. Daniel called himself anti-German, by which he meant Judeophile, pro-American, and somehow radical left. He was of the type who constantly wanted to save the world through one project or another. First it was nuclear energy, then the rain forest, organic food, and finally the Jews. He especially had a thing for them.

Every time I saw Daniel he laid out his plans — unprompted — for his magnificent future as a gentlemen’s tailor in London. Herzl said that if only we wanted to want, it wasn’t just a dream, and Daniel wanted and wanted and in the meantime sewed tighter and tighter briefs. I already had three Aperol Spritzes down and tried to avoid him. I looked for Cem, but he was talking on his cellphone in a corner. He was probably talking with his boyfriend, a cook who’d been working in France for three weeks. I didn’t understand why Cem was so insistent on attending parties. He hated loud music and people who went to parties. For him, every bash was a battle he fought against himself for every minute he made himself stay.

Daniel had stupidly waved at me. I ignored him, but he started to shout my name across the room, which over time got embarrassing. He made his way toward me hastily, taking large, awkward steps, his hand reaching out for mine, without me extending it. He fidgeted with my sleeve, his breath smelled of beer and bad digestion.

“I’m backing you guys all the way,” he said.

“Backing whom?”

“Well, you guys.”

Daniel licked his chops and I got angry that he had a clear point of view and all I had was doubts.

“Which you guys?” I was practically yelling, and a few people turned their heads.

“Israel, of course.”

“Good save.”

“You’re mean. So, what do you make of the situation? I mean you, as a Jew.”

“Daniel, leave me alone with this crap. What do you want from me? I live in Germany. I have a German passport. I’m not Israel. I don’t even live there. I don’t vote there and I don’t feel any particular connection to the Israeli government.”

Daniel always reminded me of my great-aunt, who sat in her Israeli living room — which was an exact replica of her former Soviet living room — drinking tea with a splash of lemon and intently studying Westi , the newspaper of the Russian-speaking immigrant population in Israel. Westi reported in detail on attacks carried out by Arabs in Israel, desecration of graves carried out by Arabs in France, and everybody’s publicly broadcast opinion on Jews.

Daniel thought of Sami as an anti-Semite, Sami thought of Daniel as a Judeophile, and both were right. I would have preferred if they’d not bother me. But during a group project at school Daniel had said that my Arab lover was oppressing me and sucking me dry. An Egyptian plague — those were his words. Thereupon I had hit Daniel and knocked out a tooth and would’ve been expelled if Daniel hadn’t taken all the blame. Of course the blame was his. And not just in a third-generation-since-the-Holocaust kind of way. Ever since his missing tooth he treated me like his personal pet Jew. My only flaw was that I didn’t come straight from a German concentration camp.

“I know, I know.” Daniel sighed deeply and pulled my sleeve. “The Jews are protected only by governmental force. You know, back in his day, my grandfather was part of a governmental force too, and if your governmental force had existed back then, the whole thing with our governmental force would never have happened. Just because of your collective trauma—” He took a little break. I’d nearly reached the stall, where I could finally lock the door behind me. “I don’t want to start a totalitarian discourse with broad abstract terms, don’t get me wrong. But it does make sense that many Jews see Israel primarily as a safe haven from genocide. And Auschwitz can happen again anytime. But now you are here, the materialized consequence of the anti-Semitic annihilation fury. Its executive, so to speak. After Auschwitz the Jews have to be able to defend themselves against those who wanted to kill them. My uncle Günther always wanted to kill Jews, but he didn’t mean it that way. He didn’t fight, he was a paramedic. Nobody from our family actually fought. We’re from a small island. There you only fight with the levee. But this …”

Daniel took a short deep breath and motioned toward the toilets.

“This is the practical emancipation of the Jews from the permanent threat of destruction. You defend your hard-fought, functioning state with your life. The Israeli army is not an object of discussion, it’s not an object at all, but made out of flesh and blood. It’s you, your arms and legs, your feet and toes and fingers and hair and night-vision goggles and—”

“Daniel, I am not Israel.”

He ran his tongue across his thin lips, looking at me, dumbfounded. “I can’t win with you! But you’re lucky that I’m well-tempered and go along with everything if I’m into someone.” He smiled to himself and sighed. “I’m going to Israel. I booked my ticket today.”

“What do you want there?”

He looked at me, shocked, as if he hadn’t considered this until now.

“Sunshine.”

“What?”

“I spent ten years studying the country. Does that count for nothing?”

The urge to hit him welled up in me again and I had already made a fist when Cem dragged me away. “Come on, let’s go. I’ve had enough. Shit party.”

The Main River lay black and calm in front of us. It was almost windless. On the other riverside somebody was fishing in the dark.

“I swear, it was the first porn film we got. In Holland. We’d been looking forward to that vacation for months and the first thing my brother and I did was go into a coffee shop and then search for a porn film. We wanted hard-core and didn’t understand a word. We took a tape from the very back, top shelf, of course. Real hard. And then, finally, we put the tape into the VCR and the only thing we saw was feet. A woman was walking alongside a creek, but we only saw up to her knees. We fast-forwarded, but nothing aside from the feet and the creek. There we were in Holland, liberal country and all; our father had warned us, as had the mullah. We were really horny. And then that. Feet. My brother lost his shit, set the tape on fire and threw it out of the hostel window. He was already doing pretty poorly. Half a year later he died. Did I ever tell you how my brother died? How it took him half a year to kick the bucket?” Cem threw his empty beer bottle into the river and for a moment covered his face with his fingers.

He had told neither Sami nor me how his brother had died. We only knew that it had been a long time ago and that it had been cancer. Often, when Cem was drunk, he cursingly and threateningly promised to tell us how his brother had died. But he never did and we didn’t ask, because we, too, had our secrets.

Sami rolled a joint. I reached out for Cem. Cem took my hand and pulled me closer. He said, “Masha, I don’t know how to tell you, but all evening I’ve been getting texts from my cousin telling me not to shop at Aldi over the next few days. Supposedly the profits will go straight to buying arms for the Israeli air force.”

“Me too,” said Sami.

“You got them too?” Cem asked.

“Yeah. No idea who they’re from. I don’t even know the numbers.”