All Russians Love Birch Trees (5 page)

Elias took my hand in his, kissed my palm, and covered my arm with small kisses. Then he reached out for my face, stroked my cheek, and pulled me in close.

6

The sky was gloomy and commuters waited on the platform. Completely identical groups of students entered and exited. The S-Bahn stopped every two minutes. I couldn’t concentrate on my flash cards and instead observed the students. The boys were dressed in public housing fashion. The girls utilized their cellphone screens as mirrors and tried to fix their hairstyles. The gangsta peer group boasted with Turkish-Arabic pseudo-syntax. The underage ones bid their fellow students goodbye with “OK then … 
bunun üzerine
, bye.” Fields, new buildings, and train stations now only appeared from time to time and they yelled at each other. “OK, like, bye!” Houses and people started to look like
loaves of bread that had not fully risen. I was glad that my youth was over.

Officially, we were part of a contingent of Jewish refugees that were allotted to strengthen the Jewish communities in Germany. But our emigration had nothing to do with Judaism and everything to do with Nagorno-Karabakh.

In the beginning of 1987, a campaign was launched in Armenia to integrate Nagorno-Karabakh into the Armenian Soviet Republic. At that time, both Azeris and Armenians lived in the territory. Mass demonstrations by Armenians were held in Yerevan, the first of their kind in the Soviet Union. On February 20, 1988, the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast declared their secession from the Azerbaijan Soviet Republic. Clashes followed, and the first wave of Azeris had to flee. Then the situation escalated. But nobody expected the Sumgait Massacre. It all started with a small demonstration. Supposedly it was Azeri refugees from Kafan who had gathered in the city center. The police didn’t do anything. Over the next two days, multiple Azeri gangs raided the city and turned it into a death zone for Armenians: they broke windows, set cars on fire, and looked for Armenians. Apartments were trashed and plundered, the residents debased, abused, and raped.
Several people were mutilated with axes—to the point that their bodies couldn’t be identified later. The murderers often couldn’t tell Azeris from Armenians as there were no distinguishing ethnic features and most Armenians spoke excellent Azerbaijani. I was on my way to the conservatory with my mother when the first rumors reached Baku. We were standing in the line for bread and the woman in front of us told another woman in Russian that her friends’ car had been stopped, the passengers had been ordered to get out and recite the Azerbaijani word for hazelnut—
fundukh
. “Say
fundukh
!” the attacker yelled. “If you can say
fundukh
you are a Muslim. Then you have nothing to worry about.” My mother explained to me that Azeris and Armenians pronounced the word differently. That was the only explanation she could give. About thirty people died during the pogrom. Almost all 14,000 inhabitants of Armenian descent fled from Sumgait.

Over the next months and years there was to be more violence, displacements, rapes, and pogroms on both sides. The national movements gained backing, the status of Nagorno-Karabakh remained unresolved. Then the Armenian parliament decided that Nagorno-Karabakh belonged to Armenia. Two days later the Azeris declared that it was, in fact, their land. Armenians left Azerbaijan and Azeris left Armenia, and few did so by choice. We collected clothes and food for the
ever-increasing number of refugees. The first time I saw a boy my age begging in the city center with stumps instead of legs, I was infuriated because I understood that this wasn’t the result of an accident, nor had he been born that way. My father was sent to Karabakh as an observer and often for days on end we didn’t know whether he was still alive.

The fight for power and oil was raging. In Baku the National Front was founded. Meetings were held in factories and offices. Arms, purchased from Russian soldiers (illegally, of course), were stashed away. Back then, a Kalashnikov was a hundred dollars, a tank three thousand. Our neighbor became a fervent nationalist, too. When she attended assemblies my mother watched her son Farid.

The hatred was nothing personal. It was structural. The people didn’t have faces anymore. No eyes, no names, and no professions—they became Azeris, Armenians, Georgians, and Russians. People who’d been acquainted all their lives forgot everything about each other. Only their alleged nationality remained.

On January 13, 1990, members of the National Front, refugees from the annexed territories, and supposed KGB agents went from one Armenian apartment to the next. There was a system to it. They had lists with Armenian addresses. Their visits meant looting, rape, mutilation, and murder. They killed people
with knives and sticks. It wasn’t uncommon for people to fall out of windows. I was not allowed to leave the house or ask questions.

My grandfather, who was living with us at the time, was a dark-eyed, dark-haired man with pronounced cheekbones. In the tram, on his way to the university, where he taught inorganic chemistry, he was taken for an Armenian and beaten up. Three days later he died of a heart attack. I found him that morning in his favorite chair. My father locked the door to his room. It had been his father.

My mother, drenched in tears, called her mother. They argued for a while until my mother hung up and told me to get dressed. She packed a bag and handed it to my father. It was quiet in the streets. Next to some houses lay smashed furniture. And glass. My father dragged me by the arm, told me to hurry up. My grandmother lived only three streets away. When I arrived at her apartment my childhood was over.

On January 15, 1991, Russian troops gathered around Baku. The population grew nervous. Roadblocks and barriers were erected on roads leading to Baku and in front of Russian barracks. The Russian invasion had to be stopped. A few days later the radio and TV stations were blown up by a KGB unit. Static on all channels. Nobody knew anything anymore and we were prepared for everything. I heard the first tanks
roll down the streets. Our neighbor stood in my parents’ kitchen and yelled: “All Russians are murderers.” Calm and composed, my father answered, “Please leave my house.”

Russian snipers shot at unarmed people. Tanks rolled over barricades, over people, over an ambulance. Hundreds died that night. A sixteen-year-old Jewish girl was shot in her living room because her shadow was visible on the window. She bled to death lying on a rug in colors and ornamentation typical of the Caucasus region.

The next morning tens of thousands demonstrated in front of the president’s palace. On January 23 there was a rally for the fallen martyrs and my parents tried to bury my grandfather at it. His corpse had been decaying in our apartment for days. The decision turned out to be a bad one. My parents’ car was stopped, they were accused of being Russian agents and murderers and almost dragged out of the car. The target of the hatred now was Russians. My parents were accompanied by a friend who spoke accent-free Azerbaijani and was a member of the National Front. This friend saved my parents’ lives that day.

A general strike marked the following forty days of mourning. The declaration of independence followed in October. Instruments for identification and classification were created; a new flag flew: blue, red, and
green with a white crescent and a white eight-pointed star. Blue represented the sky, red freedom and the blood that was shed to gain the freedom, green the fertility of the land—all of which we learned at school. I didn’t start school until December. We kept our coats on in the classroom and wrote with gloves because the windows were broken. An unannounced curfew descended over Baku like fog and would remain there until our emigration.

Nagorno-Karabakh was at war. Our neighbor implored God five times a day: “Don’t let my son go.” It didn’t help. Farid was drafted two days after his eighteenth birthday. My mother gave him my father’s warm jacket. Farid didn’t return and his mother stopped praying.

Refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh camped out in parks, wrapped in blankets. Some of them were mutilated. Many occupied Armenian apartments, by force if necessary. A million Azeris had fled from Nagorno-Karabakh. The schools with classes in Azerbaijani filled with new students from Karabakh, while the Russian-speaking ones emptied out. Meanwhile, I played with my dolls and practiced forgetting.

In the following years there was hardly any gas, hardly any electricity, hardly any water, at most for an hour a day. Every hospital treatment came at a price. Money couldn’t be printed fast enough and
any semblance of comprehensible rules had gone out the window. The system had collapsed. People who recently had been well off now hurried along the streets, cowering, their expressions desperate. Many took to begging. A well-dressed woman rang our doorbell. Her twins were dying. Her hands shook as she took my mother’s money. The intelligentsia and the mafia left. Hardly anybody stayed in Baku: no doctors, no professors, no engineers; neither Armenians, nor Georgians, Jews, Russians, Tartars. The only thing left was graves. Relatives from abroad sent money for their upkeep.

We couldn’t stay in Azerbaijan.

My father refused to go to Israel. Every morning my mother spoke about the anti-Semitism in Russia, but in private couldn’t imagine my father living in a Jewish state either. Besides, the words
Occupied Territories, army
, and
Jewish state
didn’t quite fit her utopia.

In 1990 my aunt immigrated to Israel. My parents didn’t go along. Both had good jobs and decided to wait. At first there was the hope of getting into the United States or Canada, but those borders were the first to close. The remaining options were Germany and Israel, but only as a Jew, and thus the register in the synagogue filled up, as did the immigration applications at the German and Israeli embassies. The same
people who were bribed to erase the word
Jew
from passports and birth certificates in the past were now bribed to do the opposite.

In the meantime, the Gulf War broke out. Iraq launched Scud missiles against Israel and my mother sat in front of the TV, desperate, telephone in hand. Of course that was useless as international calls had to be ordered weeks in advance.

My relatives spent their first Israeli winter in bunkers wearing gas masks. My mother decided that she wouldn’t under any circumstances follow them. Initially the idea to go to Germany of all places seemed just as absurd to my parents. In 1994 my mother still claimed that she would never set foot in this country—the ashes were still warm. My grandmother was a survivor. Nine months later, my parents filed an application for emigration at the German embassy. In 1995 the application was approved and we began selling our things: first household electronics and kitchen equipment, then the furniture. My mother didn’t have long to think about whom to leave her grand piano. Every sale was celebrated with a meal. Food was available again, if at exorbitant prices. Only the books didn’t find a new owner. The two thousand volumes made for a big heap of trash. In 1996 we were in Germany. In 1997, for the first time, I considered suicide.

Friedberg was the final stop. I got off. The weather was bad, the houses low and quiet. In front of the train station it smelled like urine and a twelve-year-old yelled “cunt” in my direction. As I turned around to face him, he laughed out loud and said something in Turkish to his friends, who wolfed down stir-fried noodles in front of a Chinese take-out shop. Now the whole group erupted in roaring laughter and I wished for them to choke on their food.

The bell gave three loud shrieks before my father opened the door. The corners of his mouth briefly twitched in surprise before resuming their usual disheartened expression. My father was a man who had understood that things would never be good. I tolerated his lips brushing my right cheek and carefully patted his back. He told me that my mother wasn’t home and wanted to know if I had eaten. Not awaiting my reply he went back up into the bedroom, to his computer and his Russian movies. I took one of my mother’s lactose-free yogurts from the fridge and sat down in front of the TV, but didn’t turn it on.

The dark brown leather sofa was covered with a beige throw. The remote control was wrapped in plastic foil.
The wall shelves featured, next to the Russian edition of the complete works of Feuchtwanger, framed photos of better days: my mother and I at the beach in front of a sandcastle; my grandparents’ wedding picture; my father as a young man, at the gate of the Yuri Gagarin Training Center. All Russians wanted to be cosmonauts, but my father actually was one. Just one who never got to go into space. Father was a member of the Communist Party, just like Yuri Gagarin. He graduated from flight school with honors, studied—like Gagarin—at the military academy for air force engineers in Moscow, completed the cosmonaut training—like Gagarin—but that’s where their parallel story ends. Nobody knew why. Father returned to Baku, and nobody resented him for this setback, nobody saw his return as defeat. He got a post at the ministry and became a respected and very busy man. I think that and the collapse of the Soviet Union were the big surprises in his life.