The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  Andro had to watch his mother being dragged from the apartment, shrieking, struggling, cursing, spitting at the men, though all the while she kept shouting to him, telling him never to be afraid, not of these beasts, not of anything or anyone! But Andro was afraid. He ran up the steep streets of Vera and hammered on the iron gate of the villa until a sleepy Stasia flung open the door and the light went on in Christine’s bedroom. He hadn’t been able to stop sobbing all the way there, and it was a very long time before he could string a sentence together.

  Stasia took him into her arms. She comforted him, told him Sopio would be back soon, lied to him, said his mother was getting better and sent her love.

  Kitty seemed to be a support to him, a source of energy. She was a survival artist. She went on smiling and digging the boys in the ribs; she pinched Andro’s arm in passing and threw sunflower seeds at her brother. Despite the dark mood in the house, she went on listening to music on the bakelite wireless, meeting up with school friends, and playing football in the playground, even though she had been told several times that it was indecorous. She went on pulling faces, and greeting each new day by cheerfully exercising to the early morning callisthenics broadcast. Though she did all of this more quietly, more cautiously than before.

  The more her behaviour seemed to annoy her brother, the more Andro sought her out. Kitty intuitively did all she could to make Andro laugh again and overcome his fear. She drew pictures of her teachers as animals, or sitting on chamber pots; she spat sunflower seeds from the attic window onto the heads of passers-by; she stole sweets; she cut off her hair. She did everything she could to evade the speechlessness of the adults. Even though she had to spend hours standing in the corner, was told off repeatedly, and given punishments and detentions; even though Stasia read her the riot act and Christine called her a boy. Even though they threatened to pack her off to her father in Russia, where she would have to live in a military barracks, eat nothing but porridge and groats every day, and would at last be shown a firm hand.

  Andro took comfort in books. They seemed to form a bridge between him and his mother. She had always read aloud to him, had told him that literature was the ‘anchor in the black lake of life’. He wanted to feel close to her, wanted her to know he wouldn’t disappoint her, and he began to read obsessively. He read everything he could get his hands on. Ramas must have possessed a first-rate library, which may even have included books you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in a model socialist household.

  Andro and Kitty had been a good team from the very beginning; they’d always been able to occupy themselves and play together better than she and her brother could. But now this alliance seemed to be becoming a front. A front against Kostya.

  *

  The devout communist Ramas Iosebidze fell into a deep abyss — so immense, so dark, that the only way out he could see led to the final darkness.

  He had given up everything, including his family, for an ideology — and had done nothing but serve this ideology for years. This portly, generous hedonist, whose greatest loves were communism, the Party, and his wonderful wife, lost all of them at once. The three seemed inseparably bound together; they had fused into a whole.

  It started with a growing disillusionment with his work — the means to an end that was becoming ever harsher, harder, bloodier; supposedly in order to strengthen the Party, to serve the cause. But the cause was no longer the one he had once believed in, the one for which he had sacrificed so much. And the people with whom he could have banded together in another struggle against the apparatus of death were all either dead or in exile. The Party’s allegations became increasingly absurd, and the general mistrust of everyone and everything grew to ludicrous proportions. Treason was being committed on an hourly basis. People pointed the finger at their friends, their neighbours.

  Ramas had believed in Marxism. He had become a communist at a time when you paid for this conviction with your life. He had rebelled against his father, believing that what was due to him was also due to others. And he had believed in the Little Big Man.

  On the night of the fateful New Year’s Eve party, he had already seen it in his eyes: the lust, the unbridled lust for Christine’s narrow hips, her porcelain wrists and ankles, her swan neck, her drowsy eyes, her stern lips, her small, girlish breasts, the magnificence of her hair, her dignity.

  It wasn’t the same lust, the same longing that other men were unable to suppress at the sight of Christine. Deep down, Ramas even took pride in the way other men looked at her — yes, pride, like a collector who is the envy of all because he owns a particular work of art. No, the Little Big Man’s lust was different. It was the lust of a murderer.

  Ramas couldn’t have put this into words at the time. He hadn’t dared to think such a thing, had not admitted it to himself. He had played it down; after all, he’d been loyal and faithful to this man, had stayed by his side on every path he had taken.

  But this person sent other people to torture chambers and death cells without batting an eyelid. Ramas knew that; he had already begun to suspect it by the night of the party, and was now seeing it for himself. He also knew what that meant for him and Christine.

  He had taken her for himself — but even now Ramas couldn’t believe that his Helen, the most beautiful woman in the universe, had allowed herself to be taken.

  He had suspected it for a long time, ever since his official trips had become more frequent — there wasn’t all that much for him to do in Baku, Yerevan, or even in Tashkent, he was surplus to requirements. His doubts were confirmed when Christine began to offer herself up to him whenever he was at home. She had never shown any desire for physical intimacy. She had regarded her marital duties as a kind of burden, though he had always hoped she would gradually discover her own desire and give herself to him, let him in. It hadn’t really troubled him; this inertia, this absence was part of her beauty, and, as a great connoisseur of this beauty, he knew it soon dissipated if too many demands were placed on it. He was a realist, and when he had married this fabulous woman twenty years his junior he had known that she would never desire him as he did her, that she wouldn’t love him straight away, that he would have to win her love in some other way than with his body.

  In the first years of their marriage, Christine quickly realised that she had found the right husband. Ramas was the man who would give her the life she’d always wanted to live, the life she felt she was made for. She had stopped giving him the brush-off when he thrust his hand under her long nightdress, stopped ignoring him when he whispered sweet nothings in her ear, stopped regarding him with irritation when, excited and flushed, he covered her in kisses, worshipping her. These days she even, occasionally, slid one of her feet from her side of the bed to his. She no longer found it embarrassing to see him naked, and some mornings she even flashed him a conspiratorial smile. And he had thought himself the luckiest man in the world.

  Until that New Year’s Eve, after which his official trips began to pile up; until the evening when he found a theatre ticket in the wastebasket, with a note on the back written in an all too familiar scrawl: I’m crazy about you.

  Then Ramas Iosebidze’s world collapsed, and his dream crumbled into ashes. The swansong began with pathos and grandeur, accompanied by a Greek chorus. Ramas lived large, in every sense. And so his unhappiness was created from the rib of life: bloody, painful, and ugly. The rib violently torn from Ramas Iosebidze’s life, dreams, and hopes. Just as he knew he should never have left her alone with him, should never have underestimated him and overestimated her, should never have relied on her to be strong enough, he also knew he would never be able to forgive her. He had raised her up to such heights of admiration and adoration that the fall from that Olympus would be correspondingly extreme.

  He couldn’t change the fact that he still loved and desired her, and that made him detest her all the more. He convinced himself that he had hoped for salvat
ion and searched for a solution. He wished she had at least given herself to a young king, someone equal to her presence, her radiance — but the reality was much crueller.

  Life had given a free hand to death. To the many skilful executioners.

  *

  Stasia had long since stopped begging her sister not to get into the black Bugatti. She had come to terms with lying to her brother-in-law, participating in the whole masquerade, even warning the children not to say anything about Aunt Christine’s outings. She had reconciled herself with arranging for the plump cook and the pale maid to be absent whenever Christine went out. She had tacitly signed this pact because she was afraid — yes, indeed she was. She was afraid for Andro, frightened that someone might take him from her. She was afraid for her husband, even if he seemed to be doing well and regularly sent money for his children. And most of all she was afraid for her little sister.

  Christine always came back. She never stayed away longer than three hours. Stasia had never spoken to her about how she felt, or what it was like for her to get into that car wearing those elegant outfits. About how it could be that Christine actually seemed to be flourishing, becoming more beautiful, more spirited, more aloof. About how it could be that Stasia never saw her little sister shed a tear, never heard her complain. Because the thing she was most afraid of was a question, which she would have to ask loudly and bluntly: ‘Did you enjoy it?’

  ‘You have to stop it happening,’ Stasia said once again, in a soft voice. She was sipping a glass of her cherry liqueur and looking out at the garden, which had been left to its own devices and was running riot.

  ‘I’m doing my best, I hope you know that. I have been for months now. But I’m not all-powerful. I’m just one of many.’

  ‘You’re the favourite.’

  ‘The favourite. Oh, nicely put, thank you.’

  How do you feel in the arms of this man? Who is he and who are you? Who am I, if I can’t save what I love? What kind of person am I, what kind of woman, what kind of mother? Why does this life feel as if we’ve all taken a vow of silence? What happened to our childhood? Why does the lilac only blossom for such a short while? Have you seen the cherry tree? I think we need to do something: it isn’t really thriving any more. Where is Ramas, what does he think? What will happen if no one protests against all these prohibitions, these rules? What are these propaganda posters doing all over the streets? Why do I still feel, at the age of thirty-six, as if I still have to learn everything, as if nothing comes naturally to me? Why don’t birds drop out of the sky when they die? Can you not die with outstretched wings? Do you believe in miracles? Where is Sopio? How is she surviving? What’s she being forced to do? I left her all alone. I didn’t understand her. I’ve never felt such a sense of belonging as I did with her. Nothing must happen to her — nothing more than has happened already. I’m longing for our hot chocolate, are you? Maybe I should visit Father. Lida wants to enter a convent, forever, did you hear? Father wrote. I hardly miss my husband at all, isn’t that strange? I’m worried about Kitty. She’s too quick-tempered for the times we live in. I’ve been feeling so unbearably tired lately. I wonder why; I do so little. I’m no good for anything. You truly are beautiful. I think it every time I see you. Even your eyebrows, your tongue, the hair on your arms, even your feet and the veins that shimmer through your skin are shapely and beautiful. My son idolises you. I believe things are easier when one is as beautiful as you are. You never have to do much to arouse others’ curiosity. And your husband really loves you, I think it every time I see you together. I respect him, he’s a clever man. We should change the tablecloth, it’s stained.

  All this Stasia would have liked to say to her sister; all this went through her mind. Instead, she just said, ‘I’m going out for some fresh air.’

  Islands of powerlessness formed. Clouds gathered, the sky lacked lustre and took on the colour of a chameleon. The willow on the riverbank bent lower and caressed the earth to comfort it: worse was to come, and Nature had to arm itself.

  Little wrinkles formed in the city’s potholes, in the rainwater, green and dull. Screams formed in people’s throats, and had to be swallowed down like bitter medicine.

  Grey shadows formed on the walls, the ghosts whispered hoarsely; no one heard anything. For years to come, the words would go on dissolving in people’s mouths. For years to come, the streets would reek of ridiculous despair, undignified and treacherous.

  Armies of restless insects formed in the gutters and the dusty corners of houses. They hissed and tore their wings to shreds in an effort to be heard, but no one noticed.

  Blotches formed on people’s faces from all the suppressed desires, from all the dreams that had been driven away.

  *

  At the dawn of the ‘great purge’ of 1935, the year that saw the grand opening of the legendary Moscow Metro, Sopio Eristavi was deported to a labour camp. They said she had been banished to Central Asia. Months would pass before, thanks to Christine’s help, Stasia discovered that she had been taken to an NKVD colony with the simple abbreviation SasLag, in the Uzbek SSR. The camp focused on agricultural labour, and Sopio Eristavi had been assigned to cotton processing.

  It was only after several miserable trips to the militsiya, with much begging, queuing, and humiliation, that Stasia was able to send her friend a long letter and a parcel containing provisions, photos of the children, a skirt she herself had made — would Sopio even be able to wear it there? — postcards from Kitty and Kostya, and a heart-rending letter from Andro.

  We cannot expect mercy from nature;

  it is our task to take what we need.

  POSTER SLOGAN

  It was the start of an exciting year! A year that saw the founding of the German Luftwaffe, the first performance of Porgy and Bess and ‘Summertime’, and a ban on jazz in the German Reich. It was the year in which jukebox culture started, in which Billie Holliday sang ‘What A Little Moonlight Can Do’ in a jam session, and a year in which the Soviet leader started work on a new constitution that would come into force the following year, costing millions of people their lives.

  A year in which a certain Mr Mairanovsky (who was also born in our sunny homeland) was taken under the Little Big Man’s wing, and went on to head what became known as Secret Laboratory 12. This laboratory, under the auspices of the NKVD, and therefore the Little Big Man, manufactured poisons and tested them on prisoners. The work done in the laboratory was intended to ‘assist’ Soviet spies in capitalist countries. Mairanovsky’s main contribution was the invention of the poisoned chair.

  An exciting year, yes. A year in which Elvis Aaron Presley was born, in Tupelo, Mississippi (in the company of a dead twin, just like our Stasia).

  The year in which the Soviet judiciary upheld a law that any action intended to weaken the leadership was punishable as counter-revolutionary.

  The exact meaning of ‘weaken’ remained vague, nebulous, and therefore applicable to any action that displeased the Party. The law also stipulated that, in cases in which the charge was terrorism, the accused lost all right to a defence and the only punishment was the death penalty. The law meant that anyone who had ever laughed at an anti-socialist joke or read an anti-socialist book, visited Europe or given his wife a western perfume could be picked up by NKVD officers without any warning or explanation — preferably at dawn.

  Of the twenty-one men on the Central Committee in 1917, only one was left alive by 1938: the man of steel himself.

  *

  Then Christine said they urgently needed to change Andro’s surname, and that Stasia and Simon should officially adopt him.

  A single letter reached them in September 1936, a month that blanketed the city in a murderous heat. Sopio’s handwriting was the same — generous and broad — but everything else had changed. Her train of thought was interrupted, every line spoke of fear, you could smell it; you could smell the censor
ship through which the letter had passed.

  Dear Taso, my dearest darling Andro, my wonderful Kitty, my clever Kostya, the package and the letters gave me such joy. I am well. We work a lot. I miss you to distraction, but my confidence has not left me, I hold on tightly to it. A lot has changed and I am sure a lot more will change, but one thing I know with absolute certainty: I love you all with all my heart. Be together, be a little brigade, because then we will pull through, whatever happens. Forever yours, Sopio.

  I don’t know if Stasia wept, felt ashamed, or chewed her fingernails to the quick with rage. But I am sure that this letter, and what happened afterwards, were a powerful injection to Stasia’s heart that anaesthetised it for a very long time.

  The news of Sopio’s death reached Tbilisi two months after the fact. The exact circumstances of her death, and the place of her burial, were unknown. The letter was clinical, clear, and businesslike. As if Sopio’s death were simply unavoidable — as if she had been suffering from a terminal illness and her sad end had been predicted long ago.

  The only visible sign of Stasia’s grief was when she wandered out into the garden one morning — the children were at school, and Christine was at her dressing table, putting on her make-up — and trampled all the flowers. She stamped on the snapdragons, the begonias, tore up the radiant yellow sunflowers and the pale yellow marigolds. She ripped them out by the roots and crushed them. It was a massacre of beauty.

  They kept the news from Andro. At school, he was learning to sing hymns in praise of his homeland, not knowing that his mother had been executed in the name of this very homeland, with a three-rouble bullet to the head in a dirty backyard. They wanted to spare him, but the main reason was really that they didn’t know how to explain the grim, senseless event to him, and were afraid of what they might read in the child’s eyes.