If We Exist

29.

Ru Konstantin is dead. He died the same second his body speared the Mediterranean's shimmering surface. Quick. And a thousand slow deaths on the obtuse tongues of foreigners who grappled with the rolled R and the soft U of his one-syllable name. The fact that he's dead doesn't gnaw on me as much as when he died. Some days I know with the same acuteness a toddler knows his mother. Bent over in the supermarket queue, gasping for breath, I know he died that night in Tallinn when a drunken thought had translated into action and he'd gotten MALADAPTIVE tattooed on his left ribcage, and not when the immigration officer, chewing gum like his jaws couldn't be bothered by the motion, had called him Konstantin. I know because the latest recollection always dwarfs the pain of the one before it, making it feel more real.

The quick deaths vie for attention in the most desperate ways, attacking when you least expect them; at a pub with friends, while pored over work, at night just as sleep wraps you in its sweet embrace. Last week one found me in my bathroom mirror: was it as quick as that time? The thought entered my mind just as the lightbulb switched on, illuminating eyes too sleep-deprived to fend off the question. On tiles as cold as these but grimier, on your knees with your trousers like a blanket over your calves; the metal clasp on your belt scraping against the floor, and your breaths as laboured as his moans. The pungent memory of stale urine and sex knocked me over and I clung to the toilet bowl, but it might as well have been the same cold tiles, the same smooth ceramic surface because I lay there long after the panic had subsided, dry heaving, same as back then.

I take .5 milligrams of alprazolam in the AM and that's how I deal with the resurgent memories of quick deaths. It's the slow ones that are undoing me. I'm not so much dodging venomous snake bites as I'm slowly eroding. It's like I've taken every fatal knife stab and now carrying the bleeding corpse of my old self. Ru Konstantin is dead and I can't find a way to discard his decomposing body. He overshadows me. The good boy. The good, honourable brevidijemal. I can't stand him, so I aid in his self-destruction, and then, as soon as I feel his corpse slipping from my grip, I cling to him. The mornings I wake up muddled from whatever I upended into my body the night before—unrecognisable to where I start fearing I've lost him for good—that's when the self-preservation kicks in and I try to drape his flesh back over my bones.

I don't know whether I'm fooling anyone anymore. I wear coloured contact lenses to enhance my mother's contribution to my genetic makeup, and I go by my great-great-grandfather's name in a country where no one would think to make the association. I do it to forget—because it's easier. Because if it means one less person is asking about the war then I've officially killed him and that makes me the winner.

But no one talks about the war. Not this far from home, and yet I'm still carrying him around, still pondering over slow and quick deaths to determine exactly how long I've been walking, hunched over—a witness to my own self-destruction.

If no one is talking about the war, does it even exist? Do I exist? Has there ever been a Ru or is this washed out, hazel-eyed Konstantin—just Konstantin—all there ever was and will be? In the evenings I exercise until I'm too exhausted to even think by the time my head hits the pillow, and in the mornings I crunch my anxiety medication to never—not even for a second—spare these questions a deeper thought. Yet, in moments of sedated conformity, I plague myself with them, too. Agonising over them as I nitpick the comforts in my life which have afforded me anonymity, and when I'm thoroughly disgusted with what I've become, I seek venues where I can once more squeeze into that retired costume to see if I can still perform as Ru Konstantin.

Every evening in the company of Madame Ivana Stronszak Grimovic and her husband, Boris, is a silent performance of Spot the Difference. Tonight, at The British Arash Society's annual meeting, in an upscale hotel on the northern Thames Embankment, I wear my mother's eyes but school my expression into that of a military sergeant and become every inch my father's son.