Olga Grjasnowa - All Russians Love Birch Trees

“I have the visa,” Sami said.

“Oh,” was all I could think of as a reply.

Sami regarded me curiously. “After a year. Can you imagine that? I waited for an entire year.”

“You lost an entire year.”

He looked at me. “It was good that I was here. Because of you.” He took a little pause. “All I’m saying is that I’m no terrorist. There was no reason to sleep on my parents’ couch for an entire year. I’m writing my thesis on German idealism. I taught at the university. I had friends and something like a girlfriend.”

“Oh.”

“She dumped me when it became clear that I wouldn’t be back for a while.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“Have you heard anything from Neda?” I tried to say this as casually as possible, but my voice trembled.

“No. What makes you think that I would?” Sami asked, genuinely surprised.

“So, you’re leaving?”

“Yes.”

“When?” I swallowed, trying to keep a businesslike tone, but the word shook.

“Next month. What are you going to do?”

“I got a fixed-term contract with the Tel Aviv office of a German foundation. I shouldn’t worry about Hebrew, they said.”

“But you know Hebrew.”

“No.”

“Why not? You’re Jewish. And your family lives in Israel.”

“Distant relatives. With the exception of one of my cousins. I never learned Hebrew.”

“First time that you admit to not being able to do something.” He smiled at me and then said: “Let’s go, I’m tired.”

I started packing everything into boxes. On some I wrote my name, on most the names of Elisha’s parents. More than half a year had passed since his death and his parents had regularly sent me postcards reminding me to send Elisha’s things. The postcards displayed Thuringian landscape shots. They came every week and in white envelopes, so that their content wouldn’t force itself upon the mailman. After a while the motifs started to repeat themselves. The cards were always written with a black ballpoint pen and in Horst’s narrow handwriting. Polite nothings became increasingly rare and often some words were illegible, because Horst was probably drunk and wrote them in phases of emotional turmoil, complaining about the injustice done to him. I didn’t understand why, among all the options, he chose Thuringian landscapes. Thuringia had nothing to do with our subjective sense of justice.

It was not for me to judge, but Horst was anything but a good father. He drank away the proceeds from his wife’s restaurant and now and then coached the local soccer team. Elisha, never one to excel at sports, got a beating after every game. The way he saw it, the coach’s son shouldn’t grow up to be a weakling, or a homosexual. It had taken Elisha a while to comprehend that love isn’t expressed with fists.

Explaining to Horst or Elke that I needed Elisha’s things had been impossible. I needed his things close by, because I would roam our apartment for hours and days on end, telling myself that Elisha would come through the door any minute.

Now I stood in this very apartment, from which I had never ever wanted to move, and packed. It had taken Elias and me a long time to find an apartment. Mostly it was us and thirty other couples looking at a place that was inevitably way too expensive. And then Elisha criticized the layout, the colors, the floor, and the light. If his expression grew sour before we even got up the staircase, I assumed it was my fault.

I started with the kitchen, a big sunny room, semiprofessionally equipped. We had all kinds and sizes of plates, bowls, serving dishes, glasses, forks, knives, spoons, pans, casserole dishes, baking pans, a pasta maker and a rice cooker, but not two matching plates. Our dishes and cutlery had migrated to our kitchen piece by piece. Mostly from restaurants in which Elisha had worked as a sous-chef, or from other places. And because it was difficult for two wineglasses to disappear into a handbag at once, we equipped our table with a wide variety of plates and glasses. We stole everywhere — in cafes, inns, restaurants, snack bars, in Frankfurt and on trips. Everything in our kitchen had a history: the big serving dish with the naked lady was from a diner in New York, the crystal glasses from hotels in which we’d worked, the little baking dishes from Paris.

Of course we hadn’t thought of it as stealing, but rather a strike against the system. If we were exploited in badly paid jobs and our superiors treated us like serfs, then at least a few steak knives should be a part of the deal. The system owed us that much, we thought. Which system didn’t matter.

Elisha was very picky about the table being set right. He always hummed when setting the table and started with the large knives, one thumb’s width from the edge of the table and at a right angle to the chair. Then the large forks, the fish cutlery — if necessary, the small knives, the small forks, and the dessert fork and spoon. At this point Elisha would stop humming and his forehead would wrinkle, as if he mistrusted his composition. If there was nothing to find fault with anymore, Elisha would repolish the glasses, set the glass for red wine down in line with the knife for the main course, next to it the glass for white wine and then the water glass, most often arranged in a cluster. This mise en place seemed almost archaic in combination with our stolen tableware.

I saw Elisha standing by the stove, saw him sitting at the table, saw him pouring coffee into his cereal. My body missed him, reflexively my hand reached out for his and if I forgot, I sometimes leaned onto nothing. I saw silhouettes that resembled his. Sometimes I waited in bed for him to come home. He was still out with friends and had just forgotten to let me know. Sometimes I stood at the Hauptwache S-Bahn stop and waited. The entire station was filled with waiting people and I checked my watch impatiently, thinking that he’d be late again and that I would have to wait just a little bit longer. I looked for his face in every S-Bahn car. And in the line at the supermarket. I still bought double the amount of groceries that I needed.

Now I was wrapping everything in newspaper and storing it in boxes. In two days Horst would lock the boxes up in the basement of his house in Apolda. I opened the windows as wide as I could. The little herb garden that had grown in a window box had wilted.

I got lost in pots, pans, and flowers, thinking of our old apartment in Baku. How mother sold everything, how our belongings dwindled over time and found new owners. When our sofa was picked up and lost a leg on the staircase, my mother made a chicken that she pushed into the oven with a fatty layer of mayonnaise covering the skin. It must have been during the time when groceries were available again. I got to pick what I wanted to take to Germany. When we stood in front of the shelter for asylum seekers we had three suitcases and soon learned that we couldn’t use any of what we’d brought.

I resumed my packing. Cameras, lenses, tripods, photometers, chemicals. Dozens of frames that Elisha had bought at flea markets and restored himself. Art monographs, sketches, notepads, drawings. I took pictures of Elisha’s things, put up Elisha’s video camera and filmed myself while packing.

The bedroom. I took his pullovers from the dresser where they lay neatly stacked. I had not touched them since he’d put them there. Had only moved his worn T-shirts, which I draped over his side of the bed at night. Now I put everything into a box. I folded every piece of clothing multiple times until it fit perfectly. In the pockets of his jeans were crumpled train tickets. I didn’t remember where he had gone, or why. In another pair of pants I found a gum wrapper, for long-lasting fresh breath. His mouth had sometimes tasted like this gum. In between Elisha’s winter clothes I found a big box that I’d never seen before. Taped shut and covered with a fine layer of dust. I didn’t know whether I had the right to open it.