Going Dutch with German Writers (5): Narnia-like Adventures

Who?

Olga Grjasnowa brought out her outstanding debut novel last spring, Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt. It’s a cleverly composed story about a young woman originally from Azerbaijan and now living in Germany and then in Israel, coping with the death of her boyfriend and also a tough case of post-traumatic stress syndrome caused by her experiences of civil war. The novel was longlisted for the German Book Prize. Olga originally comes from Baku and has lived in Berlin, Warsaw, Moscow, Leipzig, Göttingen and Israel. She’s not quite thirty.

She brought along her friend Primoz, a psychiatrist.

Where?

Barbie Deinhoff’s Bar, Kreuzberg, another bar I don’t know the name of, Kreuzberg

What?

On Tuesday nights you get two drinks for the price of one at Barbie Deinhoff’s. Olga and Primoz were drinking white wine (they only had one kind on the menu) and I had Jever pilsener.

What did we talk about?

I get there a tiny bit late but so does Primoz, so poor Olga looks a bit wan when we arrive. Olga gets the first round while I’m rather distracted by Primoz, who is really very attractive. He tells me he advises Olga on psychiatry subjects for her writing – and on gay stuff. I assume I must have been ogling him and he thought he’d put me out of my misery early on. Olga tells us she’d been to watch ballet dancers practicing at the Staatsballett in Charlottenburg, as research for her next novel. They were all absolutely gorgeous, apparently, all under 35 and less than 45 kilos. I talk about my hippy dance teacher when I was a kid; Olga says she’d had five weeks of ballet classes but thankfully there’d been a coup d’état so she got to stop going. Actually, she’s officially studying Dance Studies at university but she only ever went to a few weeks’ worth of seminars. We wonder what kind of people do Dance Studies – which is about dance but isn’t supposed to involve actual dancing. Apparently it’s a mix of failed dancers and other people who couldn’t think of anything else to do.

The new novel is probably going to be about a married couple. The woman is a ballet dancer and a lesbian and her husband is a gay psychiatrist. Hence the advising. I think they both came from somewhere or other but I can’t remember where. And then the woman falls in love and the other woman moves in with them and things get hairy. Maybe they were from Russia – Olga says everyone involved in ballet is from Russia. My childhood literary diet of girls’ comics confirms this. There was always a very strict elderly Russian dance mistress. Olga says all teachers in the Soviet Union were incredibly strict so she didn’t notice anything special about her ballet teacher during those five weeks.

The music gets a bit loud; we move to the back room. Primoz gets rather mischievous and keeps raising topics Olga doesn’t want me to write about. I pretend not to notice. She tells me she wants to have his babies and she’s already told her mother. Her mother’s coming to visit soon. How shall we entertain her when we go out together? asks Primoz. “Alcohol. Lots of alcohol.” Primoz goes to the toilet and Olga tells me she’ll just start by having one baby with him and if it turns out ugly and dumb she’ll stop. I think it’s unlikely that Primoz’s babies would turn out ugly and dumb. Olga shows us photos on her phone of a Passover party she went to, where most of the guests were in drag as biblical characters. It looks like much fun was had. For some reason, I start telling stories about my wasted youth. I suspect I’m trying to compete with their hip youngster lifestyles. They both look at me like I’m a fascinating old lady. The nineties! You took what kind of drugs? Hmmm. Fascinating. I stop telling stories about my wasted youth because it’s making me feel old and uninteresting.

We switch to something more innocuous: our parents. It’s fine for me to write about her parents, Olga says, because they’ll never read it, especially if it’s in English. There are things we don’t want to know about our parents: Olga’s mother once started telling her what sex was like with her dad, and one of my dad’s ladyfriends once told my sister all the different drugs they’d taken. We all squirm at both of these thoughts. Before her first trip to Israel, Olga’s dad – who’s been married to a Jewish woman for thirty-odd years – took her aside and said, “Keep an eye out for those Jews.” Her mother is a piano teacher and once heard one of her pupils playing wrong notes from outside the building. She promptly took the lift up to the seventh floor, rang on the doorbell and berated the poor child, leaving little Olga on the pavement. My dad’s into music too; he sends me dub reggae CDs every now and then.

Primoz has to go – he’s getting up early. His leaving sort of upsets the balance for a while. Olga and I sit in our corner a little tongue-tied, watching the large group of people next to us celebrating someone’s birthday. They look very heterosexual for Barbie Deinhoff’s: very little facial hair, very tame outfits. We puzzle over it for a while. Look, those two girls are getting closer, Olga says excitedly. The two girls go to the toilet together, which makes matters much more interesting. Unfortunately the toilet is exactly where I want to go too and they’re taking an awfully long time in there. Olga’s pleased; I cross my legs. Olga makes about a hundred comments about why they’re taking so long. I suggest perhaps there’s a parallel world behind the toilet door and they’re having Narnia-like adventures. Olga says no, she’s been in there lots of times and it was just a very small toilet. She grins. Another woman from the birthday party goes in too. I groan in discomfort. We watch a woman and a man getting rather cosy together, interpreting their conversation at a distance until they start watching us back. I venture a trip to the toilet and find the three girls talking about babies. How disappointing.

Organic beer? Whatever.

© Promo

Olga has had enough to drink but I haven’t. We decide to go somewhere else where she can get a cup of tea. So we walk up the road and forget we were going to go somewhere else until the only viable option is a place that sells organic beer. Whatever. Unfortunately they also have live free jazz. But not free in the sense that it doesn’t cost anything. A man comes round with a hat and I make a grudging donation. Once the music stops I realize we haven’t talked about anything particularly meaty, apart from a few rather X-rated things I don’t think I ought to write about. Actually the bar is OK when it’s quiet. We talk about some more publishable things to make up for it. Olga says interviewers are always trying to talk about her sexuality, and we’re not sure they’d do that with a man. I can see the appeal though, to be honest, because the sexual identities in her novel are very fluid, not something any of the characters want to define, in the same way as they don’t want to pin down their nationalities. None of it matters to them, really. Or maybe it’s important to them not to pigeonhole themselves. I like that about the book.

We end up talking about fears, in a way. Olga’s studied so many things in so many places and the only qualification she has, she tells me, is a degree in creative writing. Which is scary, yes. She’s also scared of her accountant because she knows so much about her. Her accountant even bought her book so she knows she writes about heavy stuff like genocide and spends all her money on clothes and nail varnish. She has nice nails, one of my notes says. Olga has a very quiet voice sometimes. I have to keep asking her to repeat herself. We talk about the strength of our hate for certain politicians. I did a little irrational dance when I heard about Thatcher’s death, I say. Was there an equivalent for her? Probably Gorbachev, she says. Foreigners love him but the Russians hate him – 500% inflation and no food in the shops; people didn’t get paid for seven months. Her mother’s monthly earnings were enough to buy six eggs only there weren’t any eggs to be had. Tins of caviar but no bread. And the Azerbaijani politicians who came after him were worse. The first one had to quit because of his liver cirrhosis. He’d get up at two in the afternoon and have the first prostitute of the day called in. She doesn’t really know anyone in Azerbaijan now though; those ties have been cut.

We finish off with a brief gossip section. We talk about our mutual friend, the writer Nino Haratischwili, whom we both adore. She asks have I met Elisabeth Ruge, the publisher at Hanser Berlin. I say no but I think she’s probably awesome. She is and she’ll introduce me, says Olga. I may have swooned. We bitch about a couple of other writers who shall not be named. One is just not that great, we agree, but insists on writing more books. Another one is very clever but Olga seems to think he’s a bit unreconstructed. I’m not sure he isn’t hiding some huge knowledge of gender theory beneath the surface of his work. We shall see, we shall see. Oh shit! Just as we’re about to leave, me all calm and collected and having enjoyed the evening, I realize we haven’t got any photos. Olga whips out her phone and takes some. She takes loads, just pressing the button and leaving it pressed – it makes a fake camera-shutter sound – as though we were models. I’m not feeling much like a model though. It’s funny (I don’t tell her this) – for many years I didn’t like strikingly attractive women; they made me feel insecure. Now it’s not usually a problem and I do genuinely like Olga, she’s clever and a lot of fun. I think it must be the eleven-year age difference that makes me feel uncomfortable having my photo taken with her.

Olga(The least awful photo of us. I’m not sure what I was doing with my hand.)

We put on our coats, leave and hug goodbye on the street. I miss the last train.

Hangover?

Not that bad but I feel incredibly tired and that makes me feel incredibly old. Or maybe it’s the other way around.