Salzmann Glorious People

'Hypnotic, sweeping and more relevant than ever' (Maria Kuznetsova)
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78227-949-5
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 336 Seiten

'A fascinating account of the collapse of the Soviet Union' MARIE CLAIRE 'Masterful and haunting' ELENA GOROKHOVA For Lena, childhood summers meant training to be a good socialist at Pioneer camp, singing songs in praise of Lenin. But when perestroika shatters her world, all must be unlearned. Lena's corner of the USSR is suddenly Ukraine: there is a McDonalds in Moscow's Red Square and certified foreign whisky, but no food in the shops. For her friend Tatyana, survival in her changing homeland requires new skills: bullet dodging, business sense and a knack for bribery and corruption. When both women head West in search of new beginnings, their homesickness for a vanished land is inherited by their rebellious daughters, caught between forging their own identities and untangling the rich histories of the mothers who raised them.

SASHA SALZMANN was born in Volgograd in 1985 and grew up in Moscow. In 1995, they emigrated to Germany with their family. Salzmann is an award-winning playwright, essayist, curator, and co-founder of the culture magazine Freitext and their work has been translated and performed in over 20 countries. Glorious People was longlisted for the German Book Prize 2021. In 2022, Salzmann received the prestigious Hermann-Hesse-Literaturpreis and the Preis der Literaturhäuser.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Salzmann, Sasha

Weitere Mitwirkende

Taylor, Imogen

Leseproben

The Eighties

Heroes Avenue

From up close, this wall had once looked as green as the grass in the yard; now it was faded. The black lines of stalks unfurling into flowers were visible only up by the ceiling; down by the carpet the wallpaper was almost ashen yellow. Lena tried to get as close to the wall as possible without giving herself away. The flat was flimsily built; everyone here knew everything about each other, but these people who had arrived an hour ago and accepted the tea she’d made them—these people were pros; they’d been holding what her mother called ‘discreet talks’ all their lives. They could probably sit in a room with the secret service and discuss their important business in such impenetrable code that the agents wouldn’t notice. Since Lena knew, however, what the negotiations were about—namely her and her future at the Medical University of Donetsk—and since she knew roughly how such ‘discreet talks’ went—you agreed on a sum, you received exam questions and, most importantly, you were guaranteed a place at university—it was curiosity more than anything that made her sit by the wall with a book and pretend to read.

The visitors were less prepossessing than Lena had imagined. She had pictured lecturers as imposing figures in dapper three-piece suits of sturdy tweed, peering knowingly through thick glasses perched on beak-like noses. The pair in the kitchen were more like mice, with narrow, naked faces; the shoulder pads of their jackets stuck out past their shoulders when they took off their leather coats. They probably weren’t lecturers at all, but mere cogs in the administrative machinery.

From the moment they had appeared at the door, Rita sounded her old self again, firm and strident, as if they had no alternative but to nod and do as she told them. Even when she greeted them she made it clear she drove a hard bargain and was prepared to do everything in her power for her daughter. But when Lena heard the words ten thousand roubles, she jumped up from her chair. She couldn’t even imagine that much money. What had she finished school with a distinction for? What was the point of that gold medal for outstanding achievement? Why had the headmistress said at the prizegiving ceremony that the future was hers—she just had to reach out and grab it?

She couldn’t burst into the room while they were negotiating a price for her life, so she skulked around the hall until the mousy-faced men had left. As soon as they were out of the flat, she ran to her mother and clasped her hands.

‘Mum, I can get into university by myself. I’m good—I even went to Moscow for the Physics Olympiad. Why would they turn me down?’

Her mother stared at the table in front of her and then out of the window. She looked neither at Lena nor at Lena’s hands squeezing hers.

‘They won’t guarantee me anything—competition is too fierce,’ she said at length, more to herself than to Lena. ‘Even if we pay up, we only get the exam questions, and that doesn’t mean a thing.’

‘Then I’ll just go to Dnipropetrovsk instead of Donetsk—that’s OK. It’s a bit further away, but it’s a good university and I’ll graduate as quickly as I can.’

A strange quiet filled the room. There was no clock, but something was ticking—or the ceiling lamp was buzzing, although it was switched off. An electric charge or tension—something in the air was rushing like blood in the ears. Lena bit her lower lip. She regretted what she’d just said, but more than that she regretted the urgency with which she’d spoken; it was a tacit confession of her fear that her mother’s time was running out.

‘Did I ever tell you I wanted to study medicine too?’ Rita said, coming to her rescue.

Lena shook her head, determined to keep her mouth shut for the rest of the day.

‘I went to Moscow to sit the entrance exam, and of course I failed, fair and square. My mother had no money for bribes, and I was like you—thought I couldn’t go wrong. I knew everything inside out, I’d passed my exams with distinction. Just like you. Went up to Moscow from Sochi, a young girl with dreams of being a great scientist and making medical breakthroughs. I think I was serious about it. The professors must have wet themselves laughing when I turned up for the exam with no cash. But I didn’t regret it. I didn’t get in, of course. I went back and studied in Sochi, and look at me now—head of the chemical plant in Horlivka. Not bad, eh? I’m happy enough. What I mean is, you can always try something else. There are so many interesting professions.’

Lena didn’t shout that trying something else was the last thing she intended to do. She bit back the remark that she’d had it up to here with Rita’s sunken cheeks. The rings under her eyes. The sound of her retching, the groans at night. She said nothing. What could she say?

‘This is what we’ll do,’ her mother went on. ‘The ten thousand roubles are yours whatever happens, but we’ll leave them under your pillow for the time being, and once you’ve graduated and know where you’ll be working, we’ll try to buy our way into the waiting list for the local housing co-op.’

The tears came so suddenly that Lena didn’t have time to blink them back; she lowered her head, shook it a few times and told herself to stop. Her face was burning. She would have given anything to have the old Rita back, ordering her in iron tones to become a doctor at once, find a cure for her, make a career as a great socialist scientist, bring pride to the family. She wanted her the way she used to be, strict and unrelenting. There was something scary about this woman with the dull hair and the puckered lips, telling her to live her life and promising to take care of her future. Her mildness terrified Lena.

It was the same when Lena brought Vassili home. This was soon before she went to Dnipropetrovsk to sit the entrance exam for the Medical University, and it was the first time that Vassili had come to the flat not as a schoolfriend who needed help with his homework, but as a young man hoping to marry the only daughter of the house. He showed up, as the occasion warranted, in a suit and freshly pressed shirt, his face solemn, his handshake proffered with an earnestness no one had ever seen in him before. But Rita only gave a mild, absent smile and gestured to him to take a seat at the ready-laid table, without even asking what he intended to make of himself.

Father took charge of that side of things, quizzing the guest on his family (Russian? Ukrainian? Something else?), as if the young man with red hair in a side parting and a face as broad as a tomcat’s were a stranger whose acquaintance they had yet to make. Vassili dutifully reeled off his pedigree like a socialist poem, but Lena had the impression that no one was really listening, so she interrupted him and announced that he was planning to join the navy. That, she thought, deserved a mention.

Vassili and she had seen each other in school every day for years, but one afternoon in their final year, when she was queuing for an ice cream behind the Technical Museum, he had approached her like a passing stranger. He crept up cautiously, as if afraid of being tactless, and asked if he might buy her a cone. She looked at him, taken aback, and wondered if, instead of the slow-witted Vassili she had known since Year One, this was perhaps a doppelgänger, a relative—someone who looked just the same, with jug ears and dandruff in his parting, but was in fact someone quite different, not the boy she’d spent the last ten years cramming with facts and formulae in preparation for one exam after another. Why was he sidling up to her like this, as if they’d never met? And where had he got the money for two ice-cream cones? She agreed to let him treat her, and he grew even odder and asked if she, too, sometimes went to the Technical Museum to see the insides of the ships which he thought at least as beautiful as the insides of a human being. Then he told her that he was planning to join the navy because he hoped to travel abroad and that he imagined the shimmering surface of the ocean like the belly of a huge lizard covered in goosebumps.

Lena bit into the sweet, milky ice cream and looked at her friend. Something about him was different; something had happened to him. They’d always grown at the same rate and still bickered like children, but they no longer chased each other around the playground, and at some point—Lena seemed to have missed the moment—Vassili must have shed his skin. He’d slithered out of his old self to stand before her as a man—a man she barely knew, she thought to herself, observing him now. He had a small row of spots on his chin and was staring at her wide-eyed. Travel abroad? Lizards? What was he talking about?

It was all very strange to her and, for that reason, interesting. All spring she let him treat her to ice creams, and soon after their school-leaving exams Vassili said it was time to talk to her...