‘In the black notebook on the table, on the last page, at the bottom, there’s an address. Go there and bring the woman back here with you. She knows how to stop the bleeding.’
With cold sweat on her brow, Stasia fetched compresses, made towels into makeshift bandages, then hurried to a suburb of the city where she found a wrinkled old woman in a tin shack and took her back to her sister’s house. A backstreet abortionist, who had given Christine a mixture of herbs to get rid of the unwanted child.
Stasia sat by Christine’s bed for two days, and, at the end of the second day, she went to the kitchen, sent the cook away, and prepared the hot chocolate for her ailing sister. And when Christine drank it — after shooing away the children, who had come running at the aroma — she smiled again, and a little tear rolled from her left eye.
‘I’ll never have children with Ramas. We’ve been to see several doctors,’ she said quietly, sipping the chocolate.
Stasia sat in silence on the edge of the bed and tried not to look at her sister, who seemed so fragile, so weak and sickly, with her colourless lips and the deep circles around her eyes.
‘I thought it was me … Isn’t that a bad joke?’
‘I thought you didn’t want any. Not yet. You told me you were still enjoying life, and —’
‘I lied to you. I hoped it would happen eventually. When you thought I was at the seaside, we were in Warsaw seeing a specialist. Why now, why like this, why?’
Stasia tried to hold back the tears, tried not to make the whole unhappy situation unhappier still.
‘Finish with him, please. Even if you’re frightened, finish it. Please,’ she whispered at last, handing her sister a glass of water.
‘You know I can’t do that.’
‘But you’re even less able to do this, Christine, don’t you understand?’
‘I can’t, Stasia!’
‘Let’s go away. Disappear somewhere.’
‘Don’t be silly! Anyway, he would find me, no matter where I was.’
‘He’s not God, Christine!’
‘There is no God any more, no God can rescue anyone from this misery. That’s just the way it is now. He’s … he’s addicted.’
‘Addicted?’
‘To me.’
‘What are you talking about? He’s a —’
‘He’ll need it again and again, he’ll do anything for it; he’s in thrall to me. He’ll need it again and again.’
‘It? You mean you and —’
‘Let me sleep now, Stasia. I’m so tired. And tell them downstairs that I’ll need my green dress tomorrow. They should iron it and starch the collar, and — oh yes, polish my hair clip as well, the one with the butterfly on. It’s silver, tell them to use salt.’
‘Christine!’
‘Tell them. I don’t want to get up tomorrow and find that the dress is still in the laundry.’
‘Tell Ramas.’
Christine laughed, a scornful laugh, and turned away.
Young people still do not feel deeply enough the poetry of work.
MAXIM GORKY
That summer, Stasia travelled back to her hometown with her husband and the children. She spent her time there with Lida, who had grown even more pious, her stepmother, who since her only daughter got married seemed to do nothing but eat, and her father, who appeared increasingly preoccupied and melancholy, ever thinner and more frail.
For the first time, Stasia wondered whether there might not be a rightness to all of this — life, as it usually turned out — and whether dreams might not just be obstacles that kept you from what was real.
While the lieutenant met with old friends every day to play backgammon, Stasia took her eight-year-old daughter to the stables, hired a Kabardin, and taught her to ride. Astride, naturally. She showed Kitty her childhood haunts. And Kitty, who was now much quicker, noisier, and more energetic than either of the boys, laughed and squealed with delight. This city child, used to being driven everywhere in her aunt’s car, blossomed, and made Stasia think of something peach-coloured, beautiful, joyful. And this something moved her very deeply. Stasia showed her daughter the oak tree — let’s agree it was an old oak tree — the cave monastery, the barren landscape. They looked up at the painfully bright stars, the yellow moon, and they smelled the old earth, which knew so much and gave away so little.
Meanwhile, Kostya was trying to keep his jealousy of Andro in check, and to reconnect with his father, whose constant absence had made him a stranger to his son. Caught between the adults’ quarrels and frontlines, between his insatiable longing for his father and peculiar distance from his mother, Kostya lost himself in approaching adolescence. He lost himself in his rage against the restless, unpredictable women around him. He was desperate for consistency and order, and he missed Christine, the queen of his little world. She had changed. She didn’t spend as much time with him as she used to. She seemed to have stopped putting him on a special pedestal — it seemed he wasn’t her prince any more. She kept disappearing, and when she came back she would sit alone in the kitchen, never switching on the light, drinking that sweet, sticky stuff straight from the bottle, and staring into space. She retreated into her silence, for which he had no explanation.
He wanted recognition from his father, but he wanted love from Christine.
He wanted her to tell him how handsome and different he was, how clever, and how few worries he caused the adults. What good manners he had and how like her he was. It was what she had always told him, ever since he was born. It was Christine, not his mother, who seemed to need him most, who spoke to him as an equal. Who made him believe that one day he would make something of himself, that he would be a king.
Above all, he missed the sense of being her favourite. Because Christine had always made that quite clear, too — that she thought him better than all other children. More than anything, Kostya wanted not to be like everyone else. Least of all his younger sister. He was almost offended at having been brought down to the same pitiful level as his sister and Andro, having to compete to get himself noticed and distinguish himself from them.
That boy — that curly haired Andro. Who was weak and fragile, and seemed to have no ambition of any kind beyond reading books or being read to, who always sang when he thought no one was around, who could recite poetry in three or four languages, who loved carving those pointless wooden figures. And who earned so much admiration for it. And for supposedly being so nice, so considerate, so self-sufficient, so forgiving, as if that were the most important thing in life: to be nice, considerate, self-sufficient, and forgiving.
And his sister, who had nothing in common with him besides a surname and the shape of her fingernails. Who wound him up, worked him into a white-hot rage, with her insolent manner and lack of sensitivity. Who was clumsy, with a head full of nonsense; who was lazy at school, and whose greatest talent was clowning and silliness, with which, however, she always seemed able to amuse adults and win them over. Who was constantly giggling and smacking her lips and pulling faces. Who always had a ladder in her stockings, and who clung to Andro like a limpet.
And secretly he always blamed his mother for the fact that he was separated from his father, the man with the medals — which he too so desperately longed for, and which his later career would bring him in abundance. Konstantin Jashi would spend a few more years stuck in his own and his family’s inner landscape, until he had clearly separated the fronts, fixed his truths, and chosen his means.
*
There must be a new man in Sopio’s life, thought Stasia, on her return to the city in the autumn. This, at least, was how she explained Sopio’s moods, her long absences and secretiveness.
A man had, in fact, entered Sopio’s life. He was an architect. He had studied in Florence, created a few wonderful designs, and had begun to realise them, too, until he was declared too decadent and weste
rn, and the authorities removed his professional accreditation and stuck him in a communal apartment where he shared a bathroom and kitchen with some potato-sellers.
But this man had not awoken in Sopio the kind of love Stasia suspected. Rather, he had laid a thin, delicate band around Sopio’s shoulders, the ends of which were tied firmly to his ideas. The architect was forced to work in a canning factory and had no choice but to sketch his designs — for houses, at first, and then for the world in general — at night, by candlelight, in a crumpled exercise book that he hid under the mattress in his communal apartment.
He had shown this book to Sopio; she had come to the factory one day to inform the female factory workers of their rights. Most of the women had stared at her without interest, nodded, and gone back to work, but the architect had stayed. He had been listening in the back row, and Sopio was pleased to see a man in the audience. Thus it was they fell into conversation.
*
This man looks like a drinker! was the first thing Stasia thought when she saw the architect. Bloated, sallow, hunched. Stasia felt a kind of anger towards him from the moment she laid eyes on him, when he arrived at the apartment and began sipping the black tea Sopio had made for him.
If at least he were an interesting man, if at least he were really special — if … she thought.
When he finally left, she interrogated Sopio. Was she intending to expose herself to neighbourhood gossip, or to make the whole thing more official? And Sopio said how tremendously sad it was that Taso was yet again shutting her eyes to everything that was unfamiliar to her, and that, for the umpteenth time, that wasn’t what this was about.
‘For a start, there’s nothing going on between us that would need to be made official. Secondly, he’s being watched, and I can’t put Andro in danger; thirdly, you’re really not making this easy for me; and fourthly, I can’t let him down,’ she said tersely, and hurried to the door, where Andro was knocking, having just got back from school. He went to a Georgian school that was rather less elite than the selective Russian schools Kitty and Kostya attended, and his journey home was shorter than theirs.
*
Not long after Stasia’s first encounter with the architect, Christine summoned her sister to her husband’s study (he was absent, as usual), and set a glass of her favourite cherry liqueur in front of her.
Christine’s appearance revealed none of her troubles: she was beautifully attired, and held herself erect. Her hair was wound into an elegant, intricate knot, jewellery sparkled at her ears and wrists, and her lips were painted cherry red. Christine remained an impossible puzzle to Stasia.
They sat down. Both women had a glass of liqueur and exchanged a few banalities. Kitty had received a bad mark in maths the previous day, and the teacher had told her off; Kostya was doing wonderfully well, top of his class in calligraphy; the cook had over-salted the omelette — well, she was getting on a bit now; people said the price of wheat was going to go up; and so on.
Stasia watched her sister’s dancing fingers, with their wickedly expensive rings, and tried and failed to work out what it felt like to be Christine.
‘I wanted to talk to you about your friend,’ Christine said, and her tone suddenly changed, becoming more abrupt and distant, as if she had just cast aside the role of sister and was now playing the politician’s wife to perfection.
‘What about her?’
‘She’s started moving in dissident circles, and her new boyfriend … Well, he’s being watched. She sympathises with the wrong people. It could get her into real trouble. That man has mistaken ideas, if you understand me. She needs to break with him as soon as possible.’
‘That man is harmless. Any problems he has are psychological, or with alcohol, if you ask me. He’s not capable of having any ideas at all,’ replied Stasia snippily.
‘I just wanted to tell you. I’ve already put in a good word for Sopio. But that’s not going to help her in the long run if she doesn’t watch out for herself. She needs to watch out, and so do you.’
‘Why me?’
‘You’re her friend.’
‘But I’m your sister.’
‘Of course you are. All the same, I wouldn’t like you to get into trouble. I’m not all-powerful, Stasia.’
‘But you’re his …’
‘What? Courtesan? Lover? Whore? What do you want to call me?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Go on, say it!’
‘What do you want from me?’
‘Me? Me? I’d just like you to be able to go on living a life without cares. Please take what I’ve said seriously, that’s all.’
Stasia left the room with her mind in turmoil and walked out into the garden, to the fountain, which had been dry for months and was full of leaves, to smoke one of her long cigarettes. Something about Christine’s words had affected her deeply.
She just didn’t know exactly what.
Maybe it was the whole situation, which to her felt bizarre and disgusting — her sister’s situation, which she, Stasia, was doing nothing to change, from which she was even profiting.
Or maybe it was the comfortable state of dependency in which she had now been living for several years. Or the strange mood that had suddenly started to spread through her country like a virus, a mood that made her afraid, a mood she didn’t want to think too much about. She felt miserable and powerless. She didn’t admit to herself that she was haunted by the sense of having failed, on all possible fronts.
She marched into Kostya’s room and made him get up. He had just gone to bed and was reading Treasure Island, a book he dearly loved. Puzzled and yawning, he followed her into the dining room and poured himself a cup of milk.
Stasia stared at her son, surprised at how much of a stranger he seemed. So serious, so un-childlike, so fierce, and yet somehow so lost in his grown-up manner. She was surprised at how little he played with other children, at his preference for being with the adults, at his constant quarrels with Andro and Kitty; the quarrels with his sister were sometimes so heated that they came to blows.
‘Are you all right?’ Stasia began.
Konstantin, now even more puzzled, nodded and took a large gulp of milk, while Stasia lit another cigarette.
‘Is there something the matter, Deda?’ he asked.
‘I was wondering how you were. We don’t talk very much, you know.’
‘What should we talk about?’
‘Oh, everything. Anything you like. About you, me, Kitty, your father, Christine.’
‘Is something the matter with Aunt Christine?’
‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Well, she’s been a bit irritable lately.’
‘Yes, she has. Things aren’t easy for her at the moment. She’s probably missing Uncle Ramas.’
Even as she said it, she could have kicked herself for the lie.
‘Or maybe she doesn’t miss him at all any more, like you don’t miss Papa,’ retorted Kostya, staring into his cup, which he had quickly drained.
‘What makes you think I don’t?’
‘Well, you just don’t look like you do, Deda.’
‘And do you miss him?’
‘Yes, sometimes.’
‘Do you write to him?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘And what do you say in your letters?’
‘That I miss him and that I’d like to visit him.’
‘And what does he say to that?’
‘He says he wants to have me there, once I’m in senior school.’
‘And is that what you want?’
‘I just want to see what it’s like where he is. And I want to try shooting, and see what that’s like, too. Papa can teach me.’
‘What for?’
‘What do you mean, what for? Why does anyone shoot? So you can fight, and defend yourself,
of course.’
Stasia sensed an ever-increasing distance between them; she sensed the almost total lack of compassion and empathy with which her son regarded the world around him. The bid to redeem her evening by attempting a rapprochement between them had failed entirely and left her feeling even more confused and powerless.
When she finally fell asleep, as dawn was breaking, she dreamed of Kostya shooting at everything around him; she woke that morning dripping with sweat.
*
I believe Stasia tried several times to speak to Sopio — whenever I asked her, she said she’d given her warning signals — but to this day I can’t explain why she didn’t do a better job of warning her friend or repeating Christine’s words to her. I suspect that, once again, her immense capacity for repressing things was to blame.
The end began with suicide of the Leader’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She was twenty-two years younger him, the mother of two of his children, and her husband had placed her under the same surveillance to which he would later subject the whole country. They say she once told her husband that he tormented his wife as he tormented the entire population. And yet she had made such an effort to be a good wife, a good mother, a good Party member. Almost all the socialist history books, right up to the late 1980s, gave her cause of death as appendicitis. On that cold November day she had appeared at a military parade to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution, waved, smiled, beamed, attended a reception afterwards for the Party elite, fallen out with her drunken husband, returned home, and shot herself with a pistol.
Not quite two months later, at the dawn of the year 1933, the architect was arrested. He was by now wholly confused and frightened, having endured two years of harassment, intimidation, and questioning. He was found guilty of treason and counter-revolutionary activities and sentenced to death.
Sopio, who until then had been cautious, quiet, and mild in her protests, could no longer contain her hatred.
They say she ran through the streets, yelling at people; they say she wrote a cycle of poems with the unambiguous title The Festival of Blood. Just four weeks after the architect was shot dead, two gentlemen in uniform came for Sopio in the middle of the night and took her to a psychiatric hospital. Apparently she was endangering her fellow citizens, and very probably suffering from hysteria and madness — at least, that was the reason they gave.
The Eighth Life Page 16