Beside Myself by Sasha Marianna Salzmann & Imogen Taylor

Author:Sasha Marianna Salzmann & Imogen Taylor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2020-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

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It was cold in the cellar, colder than outside, and the cold was heavy with the smell of damp earth. If they heated at all, they heated with the sunflower-seed shells that were dumped behind the market square—a sea of dry shells, prickly as brushwood, there for the taking. And plenty took; Daniil darted between the lumbering men with a big sack whose coarse weave couldn’t protect his back from the pointy shells when he lugged the fuel home. He left a load at Auntie Astra’s and took the rest into the cellar, emptying it in front of the stove, then sitting down at the end of Dora’s mattress and warming himself at her little feet.

The war invalid from the next building, who had only one leg—and only half of that—managed to get hold of sugar, which he burned on sticks to make lollipops that were shaped something like cockerels. He liked Daniil and let him help sell the lollies. The child’s bright eyes and rosy cheeks were good for sales; people preferred to buy sweets from a cheerful boy with black curly hair than from a foul-smelling cripple. Daniil earned four kopeks a piece—a lot of money for him. He put the coins in his socks and ran home as fast as he could, terrified of being robbed by the other boys, who envied him his status as lolly-seller.

Daniil’s mother made money by selling homemade plum jam. Her jam was famous; people came from the other end of town to try it and Daniil acquired the nickname Don Jam in school because he seemed to eat nothing but jam sandwiches. When Daniil’s mother wasn’t boiling up fruit and sugar, she was busy tending rosebushes. She had a reputation for ringing strangers’ doorbells and asking if she could take care of their gardens for them—especially the roses, which she was particularly fond of. When the householders asked how much she wanted for the work, she said: “Nothing.” Most people paid her anyway; they weren’t to know that if she came to them for work it was because she only really felt at peace with herself when she was gardening.

She was a strange person, who did a lot of looking, but not much talking. If times had been better, she might have gone out into the mountains and lived off herbs and roots, and her hair would have grown long and green, and her skin transparent and luminous. But times weren’t better and Clava couldn’t find any real use for herself, so she took care of others. She took care of her children and her sister-in-law’s children and her neighbors’ children and the children from the next street—and years later, when she was old and sick and dying, she said not a word about her pain, though she must have been in agony; it was the year when there was nothing but Pyramidon, after a gang of local doctors had made off with the entire stock of more effective painkillers and drugs and gone east with them.

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