The day they brought me home, scrawny, shrivelled, and not the slightest bit sweet, was the day Anastasia, to give her full name, left her soundproof castle and emerged into the daylight to greet my ugly, humble self. No longer was she half-hearted and unworldly, as had been her way for so many years; something changed abruptly the minute she took me in her arms and closed her eyes.
And when she awoke from this somnambulistic state and finally inspected her great-granddaughter, she said: ‘This is a different child. A special one. She needs a lot of protection and a lot of freedom.’
And everyone slapped their palms to their foreheads and groaned. The mad old lady had come back to life, and they weren’t really sure whether this was a good thing or a disaster.
*
Initially, I, too, was permitted to idolise my older sister.
In my former life, I was often asked whether I suffered because of her beauty, her popularity, the general admiration she received. But it wasn’t like that. Despite all the difficulties that accompanied Daria and me in our childhood and adolescence; although we tormented, almost tortured, one another, and found it very hard to forgive each other’s failings, all this was only because of our incandescent love for one another.
When I was little, I always fell silent as soon as Daria approached, as soon as she contemplated touching my head or tickling my nose. I couldn’t have done anything but idolise Daria, just like everyone else around us. Perhaps at this point I ought to try to explain her cruel, evident allure by saying that Daria had golden hair. And I mean really golden. Or perhaps that Daria had different-coloured eyes, incredibly different and incredibly fascinating, one a crystalline blue, the other hazelnut brown. That she had a captivating smile and an unusually deep, throaty voice for such a golden child, like that of a pudgy, sulky little boy. But that would make it all too easy; it wouldn’t be enough.
Although my grandfather loved Daria so very much and saw my birth as a kind of effrontery because it threatened Daria’s dominion, and although I, too, sensed this, right from the beginning, it made no difference: I sought and needed Daria’s company.
*
I was an ugly child (and as such you quickly learn to fight to acquire beauty).
Stasia, as Anastasia was always called, had been a striking woman; not as unusually and dizzyingly beautiful as her younger sister Christine, but by the time I was born my great-grandmother’s beauty had transformed into something surreal, dreamy. She had started to rediscover ballet, and, in doing so, to become young again.
We made a really great couple.
Stasia … I owe her so much, even if there were certainly moments in my childhood when I would have liked to reverse her awakening. When her love felt like a curse, and I often wished not to receive this love as strange compensation for the many other deprivations of my childhood. But, all in all, she taught me to live, to dance on a tightrope when everything around me was going up in flames, on a tightrope stretched taut, higher than any tower, poised and fearless — because, when you fall, all you do is stretch out your arms and you’re flying. Thanks to her, I learned to curse (a very underappreciated skill: the ability to curse well in times when the world around you is falling apart). Thanks to her, I learned to look for ways of escaping when there is no escape, to climb the walls when bridges are collapsing, and to laugh like a soldier. Always, and especially when there’s nothing to laugh about.
Thanks to her, I was able to slough off many curses like inconvenient clothes, and thanks to her I was able to see through hypocritical haloes. I owe all this, and much more, to Stasia, with whom everything really began …
One thing Stasia gave me, the thing that perhaps made the most lasting impression on me, is the story of the carpet.
One rainy morning — I was in the second or third year at school — when I’d stayed at home at the Green House because I’d caught a cold, I came across Stasia in the attic, the conversion of which had never been finished. There was an open balcony — wide as a terrace, but without a railing — where we children were always forbidden to set foot, but which was nonetheless our favourite place to spend time, as we often did in secret. Now Stasia was standing on this balcony beating out a moth-eaten carpet, beautifully patterned in various shades of pomegranate red. I’d never seen the carpet before.
‘Stay there. Don’t come any closer!’ she commanded when she saw me.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’ve decided to have this carpet restored.’
‘What does restored mean?’ I asked. I stopped in front of her, fascinated.
‘I’m going to make the old carpet new again and hang it on the wall. The carpet belonged to our grandmother, and Christine inherited it. She never liked it, so she gave it to me, but I never appreciated it either, not until I was old. It’s a very ancient, very valuable tapestry.’
‘You can’t do that, can you, make something old new?’
‘Of course you can. The old thing will become new, so it’ll be different, never quite what it used to be, but that’s not the point of the exercise. It’s better and more interesting when something transforms itself. We’ll make it new, hang it up, and see what happens.’
‘But what for?’ I wanted to know.
‘A carpet is a story. And hidden within it are countless other stories. Come here; be careful, take my hand, yes, that’s it. Now look: do you see the pattern?’
I stared at the colourful ornamentation on the red background.
‘Those are all individual threads. And each individual thread is an individual story. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
I nodded, spellbound, although I wasn’t sure I did understand.
‘You’re a thread, I’m a thread; together we make a little ornamentation, and together with lots of other threads we make a pattern. The threads are all different, differently thick or thin, dyed different colours. The patterns are hard to make out if you look at just one individual thread, but if you look at them together you start to see all sorts of amazing things. Look here, for example. Isn’t that gorgeous? This ornamentation — absolutely marvellous! Then there’s the density and number of knots, the different colour structures — all that creates the texture. I think it’s a very good metaphor. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Carpets are woven from stories. So we have to preserve and take care of them. Even if this one has spent years packed away somewhere for moths to feast on, it must now come to life again and tell us its stories. I’m sure we’re woven in there, too, even if we never suspected it.’
And Stasia beat away at the heavy carpet with all her might.
It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.
I don’t know whether I should thank Stasia at this point because, with this knowledge, she more or less condemned me to become addicted to stories and spend years looking obsessively for the stories behind the stories, like the different patterns in a precious carpet.
So I’ll begin here, comforting myself a little, like a fearful child hugging her favourite toy as tightly as she can. Because I am afraid. I don’t know whether I can do myself justice with what I want to try to tell you — whether I can do you justice, Brilka.
And I’m afraid of these stories. These stories that constantly run in parallel, chaotically; that appear in the foreground, conceal themselves, interrupt one another. Because they connect and break through each other, they betray and mislead, they lay tracks, cover them up, and most of all they contain within them hundreds of thousands of other stories.
I don’t know whether I myself have understood everything and recognised the connections, but I have to hope, and — if I must, if the ropes fail and all the bridges collapse — stretch out my arms once again; I have to hope that, if the worst comes to the worst, I will, somehow, fly.
I’ll start with Stasia in order to make my way to you, Brilka.
*
She came into the world — so I was told — in the coldest winter at the dawn of the twentieth century. She had a headful of hair; you could have plaited it, they said. And with her first cry she was, in fact, already dancing. They said she laughed as she cried, as if she were crying more to reassure the adults, her parents, the midwives, the country doctor, not because she had to.
And they said that with her first steps she was already describing a pas de deux. And that she loved chocolate, always. And that before she was able to say ‘Father’ she was babbling Madame Butterfly. And that she discovered the gramophone at an early age and played the latest records before she could write and read properly, singing and dancing along. And that Eleonora Duse was her favourite. And that she was more nimble and eloquent than either of her sisters. And the cleverest and the most cheerful.
But people say all kinds of things when they tell stories like these.
She loved books and the fine arts, they said, but above all it was in dancing that she spent her days. And they said it was in dancing that she turned the head of the White Guard lieutenant, at the mayor’s New Year ball, her first ball; impudent, gamine she seemed then, they said, you might have thought almost provocative. And the plaits: she had braided her long plaits around her head, they shone round her narrow head like a halo, around her porcelain brow. She shone, they said, so brightly that he fell in love with her light. Undying love, of course; forever, of course.
And they say that, of all the women, she was the best at riding astride, and that this impressed the lieutenant. Considerably. And that she was interested in the bluestockings and wanted to train as a dancer, in Paris, at the Ballets Russes. She was seventeen then; he asked for her hand, then the Revolution came and threatened to tear them apart. Shortly before he left for Russia, she grew afraid and forgot the Ballets Russes and the bluestockings, and married him. In the little church, in the presence of two of her sisters and the priest Seraphim. They spent the wedding night in a guesthouse on the edge of the steppe, near the cave monastery: just the two of them, the night, the cave, the stones. That’s how it was, they said.
Of course, she should have fallen pregnant immediately, that’s what usually happens in stories like these, but not in this one.
Before this, they said, she had repeatedly asked her father, the chocolate-maker, to give her permission to go to Paris and study the fine art of dance. He had always replied that it was improper to ride astride, and most certainly improper to perform vulgar bodily contortions in a foreign city.
So she travelled to Petrograd, to her husband, and not to Paris.
And it was only much later, they said, after many peregrinations and much suffering, that she returned to the warmth of her homeland.
To the land where, decades later, I, too, would be born; and you, Brilka. And this is where, for now, legend ends and facts begin. Their child, the eldest child she bore, grew to manhood and fathered a daughter. The daughter grew to womanhood and bore Daria and me. And Daria had you, Brilka. The women, the lieutenants, the daughters and sons are dead, and the legend, you, and I are alive. So we must try to make something of this.
Book I
Stasia
No, not under the vault of alien skies
And not under the shelter of alien wings —
I was with my people then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
ANNA AKHMATOVA
The doorbell was ringing and none of her sisters were answering. Someone kept yanking at the bell-pull and she continued to sit, motionless, looking out at the garden. It had been raining all morning; her mood rendered visible. The rain, the grey sky, the damp earth: they exposed her, giving the whole world an insight into her wounds.
Her father was not yet home, and her stepmother had taken the little one out to buy fabric in Papa’s magnificent new carriage. She called her sisters. No one answered, so she slowly stood up and forced herself to go downstairs and open the door.
A young man in a white uniform was standing outside. She had never seen him before, and she stepped back from the heavy oak door, slightly confused.
‘Good morning. You must be Anastasia? Allow me to introduce myself: Simon Jashi, lieutenant of the White Guard and a friend of your father’s. We have an appointment. May I come in?’
No ordinary soldier, then; a lieutenant, an officer. She merely nodded silently and proffered her hand. He was well built, tall and broad-shouldered, with slender limbs and bony hands: the latter were rather hairy, which seemed incongruous in such a dapper gentleman; it was as if Nature were forcing its way through the uniform.
He removed his perfectly angled headgear, which she found ever so slightly ridiculous, and stepped inside. She wondered where all the others were; it was only now that she noticed that the whole house was silent as the grave.
The smell of coffee and cake wafted from the kitchen, but no one was there. She took the guest through to the reception room, where the door to the garden stood open. Rain was blowing into the room, the white curtains flapping in the damp wind. She quickly ran to the door and closed it. The rain was a threat to her: seeing it, she felt the urge to cry again, which in the presence of this strange man was inconceivable.
It occurred to her that he had recognised her and addressed her by name, although they were four sisters. Yet he had never been to their house before; she could tell that from the way his eyes kept darting curiously about. It was a trap. Yes, that was what it was. Now she understood the sudden emptiness of the house. So it was him. He was the one. He was the wrathful God who was to mete out her punishment. He was the guarantor of her future. He was the slaughterer, the executioner. She turned pale and stumbled out of the room.
‘Is everything all right?’ he called after her.
‘Oh yes, yes. I’ll just fetch us some coffee and cake. You do like coffee?’ she called from the kitchen, leaning against the wall and wiping away her tears with her sleeves.
Nothing would ever again be as it was. Suddenly, she had understood this; she had received confirmation that her childhood was over. That her life would, at a stroke, become another; that everything — all her dreams, desires, visions — would be reduced to this one man in the white Russian uniform, probably a subordinate of the fat, uneducated governor of Kutaisi — how frightful!
She felt like throwing up, but the coffee was steaming in its pot and the chocolate gateau from Papa’s patisserie, symmetrically cut, was waiting to be offered to the guest.
And so the chocolate gateau was her first offering to her executioner. Just as she would have to offer up to him all the promises of a future that Life itself had whispered into her ear night after night: offer them up for him to kill, in that she would start to live his life, where she would not find her place, where she would be an outsider, where she would never be at home. She bit her lip and stifled the pain.
She carried out the silver tray with the steaming coffee and the porcelain cups and saucers. The man was sitting in Papa’s armchair, legs crossed, staring at the green lawn that was being drowned and buried by the heavy rain, along with the little spring flowers that had forced their way up through the earth, greedy for life and warmth.
‘Oh, that’s delicious. Your father is a true genius. And such a good man. So modest: a man of humility. One seldom finds such men nowadays. Someone plants a tree and the whole parish has to hear about it. Nobody does good deeds any more nowadays, at least, not without shouting them from the rooftops. Your father’s not like that. I’m very proud to be able to count myself one of his circle. And your maman. She is enchanting.’
‘She’s my stepmother.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do take a slice. We have plenty more cake. There’s never a shortage of sweets in this house.’
‘Yes, I’m familiar with your father’s creations. Those delicious little almond tarts — and his plum mousse is magnifi
cent! An absolute dream.’
‘And how do you know Papa, may I ask?’
‘I … I did him a favour once, if I might put it that way.’
‘You said just now that, when one has done something good, one should not speak of it. That, if I understood you correctly, is true greatness.’
‘You’re very precise.’
‘I am indeed.’
‘The cake is divine. Why don’t you try some?’
‘I eat enough of it every day. Thank you.’
‘I did him a favour, that’s all. I didn’t say it was a good deed that I did.’
‘It’s in the nature of a favour that it should be good.’
‘That depends entirely on how you look at it, wouldn’t you agree? Everyone sees things from their own perspective, which is not necessarily shared by others.’
‘That’s not what I meant. There are some things about which all people should feel the same. And see in the same way.’
‘And what would those things be?’
‘For example, that the sun is wonderful, and that spring can work miracles; that the sea is deep, and water soft. That music is magical when it is well played. That toothache is a dreadful business, and ballet the most beautiful thing in the world.’
‘I understand. You love to dance, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And you don’t like me because you think I don’t share this view?’
‘How should I know?’
‘It’s what you think. It’s what you suppose.’
‘I don’t suppose anything at all.’
‘That I don’t believe.’
‘All right, I admit it: no, I don’t believe you share many of my opinions, not least because you’re serving in the army and I am not fond of the army. Why are you laughing?’
The Eighth Life Page 3