The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  And, even if I’ve never told you, I would so like to help you, Brilka, so very much; to write your story differently, to write it anew. So as not just to say this, but to prove it as well, I’m writing all of this down. That’s the only reason.

  I owe these lines to a century that cheated and deceived everyone, all those who hoped. I owe these lines to an enduring betrayal that settled over my family like a curse. I owe these lines to my sister, whom I could never forgive for flying away that night without wings; to my grandfather, whose heart my sister tore out; to my great-grandmother, who danced a pas de deux with me at the age of eighty-three; to my mother, who went off in search of God … I owe these lines to Miro, who infected me with love as if it were poison; I owe these lines to my father, whom I never really got to know; I owe these lines to a chocolate-maker and a White-Red Lieutenant; to a prison cell; to an operating table in the middle of a classroom; to a book I would never have written, if … I owe these lines to an infinite number of fallen tears; I owe these lines to myself, a woman who left home to find herself and gradually lost herself instead; but, above all, I owe these lines to you, Brilka.

  I owe them to you because you deserve the eighth life. Because they say the number eight represents infinity, constant recurrence. I am giving my eight to you.

  A century connects us. A red century. Forever and eight. Your turn, Brilka. I’ve adopted your heart. I’ve cast mine away.

  You are the miracle child. You are. Break through heaven and chaos, break through us all, break through these lines, break through the ghost world and the real world, break through the inversion of love, of faith, shorten the centimetres that always separated us from happiness, break through the destiny that never was.

  Break through me and you.

  Live through all wars. Cross all borders. To you I dedicate all gods and all rosaries, all burnings, all decapitated hopes, all stories. Break through them. Because you have the means to do it, Brilka. The eight — remember it. All of us will always be interwoven in this number and will always be able to listen to each other, down through the centuries.

  You will be able to do it.

  Be everything we were and were not. Be a lieutenant, a tightrope walker, a sailor, an actress, a film-maker, a pianist, a lover, a mother, a nurse, a writer; be red and white, or blue; be chaos and heaven; and be them and me, and don’t be any of it. Above all, dance countless pas de deux.

  Break through this story and leave it behind you.

  *

  I was born on 8 November 1974, in an otherwise insignificant village clinic near Tbilisi, Georgia.

  Georgia is a small country. It’s beautiful, too — I can’t argue with that; even you will agree with me, Brilka — with mountains and a rocky coastline along the Black Sea. The coastline has shrunk somewhat over the course of the past century, thanks to a multitude of civil wars, stupid political decisions, and hate-filled conflicts, but a part of it is still there.

  You know the legend only too well, Brilka, but I’d like to mention it here anyway, to make clear to you what it is I’m trying to say — the legend that tells how our country came into being. Like this:

  One beautiful, sunny day, God took the globe he had created, divided it up into countries (this must have been long before they built the tower at Babel), and held a fair, where all the people tried to outdo one another, shouting at the tops of their voices, vying for God’s favour in the hope of snaffling the best patch of earth (I suspect the Italians were the most effective in the art of making an impression, whereas the Chukchi hadn’t quite got the hang of it). It was a long day, and at the end of it the world had been divided up into many countries and God was tired. However, God — wise as ever — had, of course, kept back a sort of holiday residence for himself: the most beautiful place on earth, rich in rivers, waterfalls, succulent fruits, and — he must have known — the best wine in the world. When all the people had set off, excited, for their new homelands, God was just about to take a rest beneath a shady tree when he spotted a man (doubtless with a moustache and a comfortable paunch, at least that’s how I’ve always imagined him), snoring. He hadn’t been present at the distribution, and God was surprised. He woke him up and asked what he was doing here and why he wasn’t interested in having a homeland of his own. The man smiled amiably (perhaps he had already permitted himself a glass or two of red wine) and said (here there are different versions of the legend, but let’s agree on this one) that he was quite content as he was, the sun was shining, it was a gorgeous day, and he would settle for whatever God had left over for him. And God, gracious as ever, impressed by the man’s nonchalance and utter lack of ambition, gave him his very own holiday paradise, which is to say: Georgia, the country you, Brilka, and I, and most of the people I will tell of in our story, are from.

  What I’m trying to say is this: bear in mind that, in our country, this nonchalance (that is, laziness) and lack of ambition (lack of arguments) are considered truly noble characteristics. Bear in mind also that a profound identification with God (the Orthodox God, of course, and no other) does not prevent the people of our country from believing in everything that has even the slightest hint of the mysterious, legendary, or fairytale about it — and this is by no means restricted to the Bible. Giants in the mountains, house spirits, the evil eye that can plunge a man into misfortune, black cats and the curse that goes with them, the power of coffee grounds, the truth that only the cards reveal (you said that nowadays people even sprinkle new cars with holy water in the hope it will keep them accident-free).

  The country, once golden Colchis, that had to surrender the secret of love to the Greeks in the shape of the Golden Fleece because the king’s wayward daughter, Medea, so lovestruck she had lost her mind, commanded it.

  The country that encourages in its inhabitants endearing traits like the sacred virtue of hospitality, and less endearing traits, like laziness, opportunism, and conformism (this is certainly not the perception of the majority — you and I agree on this, too).

  The country in whose language there is no gender (which certainly does not equate to equal rights).

  The country that, in the last century, after a hundred and thirty-five years of tsarist Russian patronage, managed to establish a democracy for precisely four years before it was toppled again by the mostly Russian but also Georgian Bolsheviks, and proclaimed the Socialist Republic of Georgia and thus a constituent republic of the Soviet Union.

  The country that then remained in this union for the next seventy years. There followed numerous upheavals, bloodily suppressed demonstrations, several civil wars, and, finally, the long-awaited democracy — though that designation has remained a question of perspective and interpretation.

  I think that our country can really be very funny (by which I mean not only tragic). That in our country forgetfulness, too, is very possible, in combination with repression. Repression of our own wounds, our own mistakes, but also of unjustly inflicted pain, oppression, losses. In spite of these, we raise our glasses and laugh. I think that’s impressive, I really do, in view of the not very pleasant things the past century brought with it, the consequences of which people still suffer today (though I can already hear you contradict me!).

  It’s a country from which, in addition to the great executioners of the twentieth century, many wonderful people also come, people I personally have loved and still love very much. A country that is still mourning its Golden Age, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, and hopes one day to recover its former glory (yes, in our country progress is always simultaneously retrogression).

  Traditions seem a pale reflection of what they once were. The pursuit of freedom is like a senseless quest for uncertain shores because, these past twenty years especially, we haven’t even been able to agree on what exactly it is we mean by freedom. And so, today, the country where I came into the world thirty-two years ago is like a king who still sits in a glitter
ing crown and magnificent robe, issuing commands, presiding over his realm, not realising that his entire court has long since fled and he is alone.

  Don’t cause any trouble — that’s the first commandment in this country. You said this to me once, on our journey, and I made a note of it (I made a note of everything you said to me on our journey, Brilka).

  To which I’ll add:

  Live as your parents lived; be seldom — better, never — alone. Being alone is dangerous and unprofitable. This country idolises community and mistrusts loners. Appear in cliques, with friends, in family or interest groups — you’re worth very little on your own.

  Procreate. We’re a small country and we have to survive. (This commandment ranks alongside the first commandment.)

  Always be proud of your country, never forget your language, find foreign countries, whichever they may be, beautiful, exciting, and interesting, but never, never, never better than your home.

  Always find quirks and characteristics among the people of other nations that in Georgia would be, to say the least, disgraceful, and get worked up about them: general stinginess (that is, the reluctance to spend all your money for the benefit of the community); lack of hospitality (that is, the reluctance to reorganise your entire life whenever anyone comes to visit); insufficient willingness to drink and eat (that is, the inability to drink to the point of unconsciousness); lack of musical talent — characteristics like these.

  Let your behaviour tend towards openness, tolerance, understanding, and interest in other cultures, provided they respect and always affirm the specialness and uniqueness of your homeland.

  Be religious, go to church, don’t question anything related to the Orthodox Church, don’t think for yourself, cross yourself every time you see a church (very en vogue, you said!) — so about ten thousand times a day if you’re in the capital. Don’t criticise anything sacred, which is pretty much everything that has anything to do with our country.

  Be bright and cheerful, because that’s this country’s mentality, and we don’t like gloomy people in our sunny Georgia. You’ll be all too familiar with that, too.

  Never be unfaithful to your man, and if your man is unfaithful to you, forgive him, for he is a man. Live first and foremost for others. Because, in any case, others always know better than you what’s good for you.

  Finally, I want to add that, despite my years of struggling both for and with this country, I have not managed to replace it, to drive it out of me like an evil spirit that beset me. No ritual purification, no repression mechanism has yet been of any assistance. Because everywhere I went, travelling further and further from my country, I was searching for the squandered, scattered, wasted, unused love I’d left behind.

  Yes — it’s a country that doesn’t want to show any ambition, that would ideally like to have everything handed to it on a plate because its people are so lovely, so nice, so happy and cheerful, and capable (on a good day) of putting a smile on the face of the world.

  *

  In this country, then, I came into the world, on 8 November 1974. A world that was too busy with other things to pay much attention to my arrival. The Watergate scandal, the anti-Vietnam-War campaigns, the military coup in Greece, the oil crisis, and Elvis were keeping the western world on its toes, while the eastern world was mired in dull stagnation under Brezhnev and the Soviet nomenklatura. A stagnation that consisted of people preserving power by all possible means, thereby rejecting any kind of reform, while increasingly closing their eyes to the black market and the burgeoning corruption.

  Either way, people in both parts of the world were listening to Pink Floyd’s ‘The Great Gig in the Sky’ for the first time. In the West, openly; secretly in the East.

  And Vysotsky was to sing about those times:

  The eternal circus

  where promises burst

  like soap bubbles:

  rejoice, if you can.

  Great changes?

  Nothing but words.

  I don’t like any of this,

  it makes me sick.

  Apart from my birth, and my sister’s fall, nothing special happened that day. Except, perhaps, for the fact that, on this day, my mother finally lost her patience in the eternal battle with her father and her eternal hope for the understanding of her female relatives, and started screaming.

  ‘Are you a whore?’ my grandfather is said to have yelled at her; and my mother, weeping, is said to have screamed back, ‘I might as well be, the way you treat me!’

  Two hours later, she went into labour.

  Parties to the conflict: my domineering grandfather, my infantile grandmother, and my mother, increasingly losing control of her own life.

  The other unusual event that day, right before the contractions began, was my three-and-a-half-year-old sister’s concussion.

  A few days earlier, she had visited the nearby stud farm with our grandfather and fallen in love with the Arab horses and Dagestani ponies there; so on the day I was born, my grandfather had sat her on a pony and was just holding her lightly by the waist when the pony suddenly broke free and threw the little girl off. It happened so fast that my grandfather failed to catch her.

  She fell, and crashed like a heavy pumpkin to the ground, which was lined with straw, but hard enough for my soft and rosy sister.

  As my grandfather was throwing himself on his granddaughter in desperation, blaming the horse breeders and threatening to close ‘the whole organisation’ down, my mother — upset by the fight and by the hurtful words that would echo for a long time in the ‘Green House’, my childhood home — was starting to groan. My grandmother, who during this kind of noisy argument — and there were many — between her husband and her daughter would make a show of acting as a kind of umpire, but only inflamed both parties’ anger by refusing to take sides, immediately ran into the kitchen where my mother was sitting and reached, without a word, for the massive telephone that hung on the kitchen wall.

  The labour lasted precisely eight hours.

  At the same moment that my mother, accompanied by her corpulent mother, was heading for the hospital in the village, my sister Daria, usually called Daro, Dari, or Dariko, was also being rushed to hospital.

  My grandfather leapt into his daughter’s white Lada — because his beloved Chaika (the ‘Seagull’, officially a GAZ-13 reserved for the Soviet elite) was too slow for the country roads — and raced to the best Tbilisi hospital, where it was certified that Daria had a slight concussion. And, a few kilometres away and a few hours later, that I had come into the world.

  My noisy crying compelled my exhausted mother to raise her head, look at me, and realise that I didn’t resemble anyone, before falling back again on what appeared to be a rather makeshift birthing stool.

  My grandmother was the first person to hold me while fully conscious. I was, she declared, ‘a baby with a preternaturally developed need for harmony’: after all, I had come into the world in the middle of an argument.

  As far as the need for harmony was concerned, she couldn’t have been more wrong.

  My grandfather, who had transported my sister home again from the hospital — she had been prescribed bed rest — received by telephone the news that I, ‘scrawny and dark-haired’, had now arrived and was blessed with ‘robust health’. He sat down on the terrace, wrapped himself in his old sailor’s jacket, which my sister and I were to squabble over so often, and shook his head.

  While his mother baked a welcoming cake, fetched her favourite sour cherry liqueur from the cellar, and planned a birthday party, my grandfather sat there, not moving, stunned by his daughter’s fresh disgrace, unable to do anything but shake his head repeatedly. My birth forced him once again to bestow his own family name — Jashi — upon a granddaughter, because I was conceived out of wedlock. And this time not just with a deserter and traitor, like my sister’s progenitor, but
with a man who was, quite simply, a criminal, in prison at the time of my birth.

  ‘This child is a product of Elene’s shamelessness and depravity, sealing my conclusive defeat in the battle for her honour, so I have absolutely no reason to be happy, or to celebrate anything at all. Even if it’s not her fault, the girl is the embodiment of all the ills her mother has brought down upon us.’ This was his first sentence, uttered with governmental finality after repeated demands from his mother — my great-grandmother — to please show some reaction to the arrival of his second grandchild.

  Well, in this he wasn’t too far wrong, and, given the circumstances into which I was born, I can’t hold his words against him.

  During the five days I spent in hospital with my mother, where my grandmother visited her daughter every day bringing chicken soup and pickled vegetables, my grandfather stayed at home and kept watch at Daria’s bedside. She couldn’t understand why she wasn’t allowed to get up, so he kept her entertained with all sorts of stories, games, cartoons (he put a television set in her room specially); and Daria knew nothing of my existence, while my mother knew nothing of her first-born’s concussion.

  *

  Daria was the idolised, adored child in our powerful grandfather’s kingdom, destined to be worshipped and looked upon with wonder. Until she … But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before then, many years were to pass in which she performed brilliantly in the role of universally admired jewel.

  Yet despite these circumstances — the extreme contrast in the division of roles that our grandfather, the head of the family, assigned to us from the very beginning — I had secured one advantage forever the day I was brought home from the village hospital: I had the crazy, unconditional love of my great-grandmother Stasia all to myself. She belonged to me and me alone. Great-Grandmother gave me the love she’d denied everyone else for decades; had given only frugally, in small doses, covertly, almost hesitantly, and, above all, not to her own son. But she gave it to me now: belligerently, loudly, almost obsessively, childishly, extravagantly. As if for all these years she had just been waiting for my arrival; as if she had been saving herself for me.