The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  ‘Why not?’ asked Gulo.

  ‘You don’t seriously think they’ll hold them accountable? Them?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ll stick us in a mental hospital and pump us full of drugs until we believe we invented the whole thing.’

  Sober now, no longer whimpering and slurring her words, Nelly seemed almost too grown-up. Her tone was practically vicious.

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘What do I suggest? We say nothing, go on living our lives, and remain spinsters forever.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘What, you think men are going to be queuing up for us, now that we’re …’

  ‘But —’

  ‘Forget it, Gulo. And not a word to anyone — not a word, you swear!’

  ‘Nelly …’

  ‘Swear!’

  ‘I swear.’

  Two days later they returned home.

  Gulo went to Kutaisi and embarked on her studies. She was staying with an old lady who gave piano lessons and served as a kind of chaperone. One month later, she discovered the reason for her unusual irritability and sentimentality: pregnancy. She knew that this was the end.

  As she didn’t have enough money to go to an abortionist, she tried all kinds of herbal concoctions that were said to cause women to miscarry, and when none of them had any effect she climbed up a ladder and jumped off, hoping that this would rid her of her unwanted burden. When nothing happened, she began to have terrible pangs of conscience.

  Every night she cried into her pillow, her hands clamped over her mouth so her landlady wouldn’t discover her problem and turn her straight out on the street.

  Her work started to suffer. From the very first day, the male students had seen her presence as a kind of insult; now, in light of her shortcomings, they took every opportunity to make this clear.

  Gulo cursed the man who was the author of her misfortune; she cursed her gender, her powerlessness; she cursed the heartless people around her from whom she could expect no sympathy.

  After three months, she went to her professor and explained the situation. He tugged his goatee, cleared his throat, shook his head, and told her he could see no way of keeping her coveted place at the university open.

  ‘You see, Comrade Alania, why we are so reluctant to allow women to study here? When it comes down to it, they always have something better to do than apply themselves to mathematics. I thought you were an exception,’ he concluded, affecting an expression of commiseration, ‘but now all this exception does is to prove the rule.’

  When she was six months pregnant, Gulo packed her bags and left Kutaisi. She swore to herself that as soon as the child was old enough she would try a second time, that she would apply to every university in the country.

  She went back to her hated village.

  Endless interrogation followed. Who was the father of the child, Gulo’s father demanded in fury. Was he a fellow countryman, or just some nobody? Was he even a Christian? He must be tracked down and called to account; and so on.

  Gulo endured it all with stoicism. After interminable weeks of contempt, tirades of abuse, ostracism, violence, her family abandoned their attempts to discover the identity of the child’s father. Gulo was packed off to her elder sister, who was married to a forestry worker and living an isolated life at the edge of the woods. Gulo was to keep house there while her sister worked on the tea plantation. Away from the village, the villagers were less likely to spread malicious gossip about her.

  When her time came, no midwife was called because the family were ashamed of her, and she had to give birth with no outside help, alone in her attic room, reluctantly assisted by her childless sister. This was how Giorgi came into the world.

  When Giorgi reached his second birthday, Gulo applied again to every university in the country, but received only letters of rejection. After this, she accepted a post as a maths teacher in the village school. Because there was no one to look after her child, she always took him with her to class. Giorgi could already read, write, and do arithmetic before he formally started school.

  She would never have thought it possible, but her love for her son was unburdened by his history, as if he had come into being through immaculate conception and not through rape. She passed on to him all her knowledge and skills; she told him about the things she wished for, and the things she had wanted to discover and explore; she garlanded him with her dreams like a necklace handed down from generation to generation.

  When Giorgi was in his seventh year at school, the principal commended him to the science college in Sokhumi. It was during his time there that he fell in love with the sea — the only love he did not share with his mother. He graduated from school at the age of just fifteen, and his teachers and the chairman of the Komsomol, the Communist Union of Youth, made an application for him to attend the Frunze Higher Naval School in Leningrad.

  Giorgi first asked who his father was at the age of five. At the age of seven he even threw a temper tantrum about it in front of his mother. At the age of twelve he cried and begged her to tell him. But Gulo always gave him the same answer: ‘I’ll tell you when you’re old enough.’

  And so he had no choice but to wait until he reached this eagerly anticipated age. But life had other plans for him, and the wait was to be a very long one.

  Many years later, Nelly, the girl Gulo had been unable to walk away from that terrible night, came back to visit her home village, and called on Gulo. After that summer, Nelly had moved to Batumi, the white seaport, and Gulo had heard nothing from her since. She had often thought of her companion in misfortune and hoped that that night had not had the same consequences for Nelly as for her.

  Now, all of a sudden, this heavily made-up woman was standing there before her. Gulo focused on her features and tried in vain to find some trace there of the girl from years ago. This was a voluptuous lady in rather vulgar clothes, who had an artificial laugh, smacked her lips, feigned an insincere cheerfulness, and spoke in a voice that was excessively loud and over-articulated.

  She had brought Gulo a gold box of chocolates, and sat down in her sparsely furnished living room. She had a ‘marvellous’ life, Nelly proclaimed at the top of her voice. Batumi was a great city, and she lived in a house right on the promenade.

  They sat drinking lemonade in Gulo’s cramped, shabby apartment, and Gulo kept trying not to look at her guest. She found it hard to look Nelly — the person she had become — in the eyes. She had so hoped that Nelly at least had made a life for herself; that she had had better luck than Gulo herself had done.

  ‘Tell me, have you got a drop of wine, or something stronger? I can’t endure this place without alcohol. Really I can’t,’ said Nelly suddenly, and gave that false laugh again.

  ‘No, I’m afraid not. I don’t drink. I lost the desire to drink a long time ago,’ answered Gulo; and for a fraction of a second the women were silent. Then Nelly spoke again, too loudly.

  ‘I’m very sorry about what happened to you. It’s a boy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You know — the child.’

  ‘Yes, he’s a wonderful boy. Do you have children?’

  At that moment Gulo realised that this strange woman was the only person other than herself who knew the identity of Giorgi’s father. It dawned on her that this accursed secret bound them together forever, like invisible handcuffs, and the realisation made her deeply uneasy.

  ‘No, no. That’s not for me. Hahaha. I enjoy life far too much, you see. And men — men are very egotistical creatures, too. They demand your full attention.’

  There was something in the way she said ‘men’ that made Gulo feel nauseous.

  ‘Maybe you’ll come and visit me and the two of us can have fun! I have lots of influential friends, believe me!’ said Nelly, rising, as their awkward conversation
drew to a close.

  A car was waiting outside. Gulo watched as Nelly ran out into the street and a Red Army soldier opened the door for her. For a moment Gulo thought she was having a moment of déjà vu, and screwed her eyes shut. The man slapped Nelly’s bottom lightly, and she feigned an outrage as artificial as her laugh, before getting into the front seat. How young and beautiful and light-hearted she had been back then, thought Gulo; and she closed her eyes again to escape the image that had haunted her for years.

  The image of Nelly being put into the carriage by a Red Army soldier. Of how she had lain her heavy head on Gulo’s shoulder, so trusting, so relieved, with absolutely no premonition of what was to follow.

  Gulo kept her eyes tight shut to drive away the thought that usually followed this image: the thought of what it felt like to close, with your own hand, a door that would never open again.

  Dictators have always had time for illusions.

  ANTON CHEKHOV

  The first year Kostya spent in the white city can be said to have been a happy one. He applied himself assiduously, both at the Naval School and during manoeuvres in the Gulf of Finland; he spent many nights with Alania, immersed in discussions about life and the world; he walked over the Anichkov Bridge with his comrades, drunk and singing lewd songs, and wolf-whistled at Pioneer girls. He did everything in his power to try to impress his father, and ignored the rest of the world with the indifference and self-confidence of youth. At a time of shootings, at a time of arrests and forced resettlement, at a time of suicides, Kostya blossomed, and believed he had found his place in the world. He rejoiced in himself and in life, at the height of his youth.

  He wasn’t yet interested in knowing how very alike the score of life and the score of death can be.

  *

  Sometimes, Brilka, stories repeat themselves, and overlap. Even life lacks imagination occasionally, and you can’t blame it for that, don’t you agree? And so I need to tell you about two more knots that were being tied simultaneously in our carpet.

  On the same January night that Kostya attended the Academy’s annual Naval Ball, his fifteen-year-old sister, who had cut her hair into a pert bob, was waiting for someone in the park, in the little town once destined to become the Nice of the Caucasus. Kitty and Andro always spent the winter holidays with Kitty’s grandfather, the chocolate-maker. Christine still didn’t believe she was strong enough to go out in public; she relied on Stasia’s full and unqualified attention. And so, late that evening, Kitty was sitting in the park, chewing her fingernails, freezing, waiting.

  It was a game. She was putting Andro’s love to the test. She hid, and he had to find her. Sometimes she would send him on a wild goose chase all over town, leaving him little clues on scraps of paper that she slipped into the pockets of his trousers.

  She hid everywhere — in the old school building, behind the bakery, sometimes in the empty chocolate factory, sometimes in the garden of the cloistered Church of St George, even under her own bed. But she knew that he would find her because he had never let her down; he had always been able to follow her trail. And so it would be again today, although she was already a little annoyed; she should have sat somewhere warm, not out in this damned cold, because Andro was taking his time.

  Since his mother’s disappearance, it was more difficult to persuade Andro to join in with all the games they used to play together, but he always did with this one. He refused to play tag with her, didn’t want to touch the cards any more, didn’t want to sing, either; but when she challenged him to seek her, he would seek, and find.

  For some time now, the only woodcarvings he had made were of angels, which worried Kitty. This passion had developed into a downright obsession. Whereas before he would carve figures of animals and little houses, now it was only angels: old and young, with outspread or folded wings. The chocolate-maker’s house was populated by an army of angels, and in Christine’s house too they stood in rows, on the mantelpiece, on window ledges, on chests of drawers.

  She saw him coming. He was running. He was out of breath. It was going to snow, her grandfather had said; the whole town was blanketed in thick fog. And this fog made people silent and careful, more fearful than they already were. He sat down beside her, smiled at her in affirmation, and she gave him two smacking kisses, one on each cheek, as a reward for finding her. Neither of them was in any hurry to return to the gloomy atmosphere in the chocolate-maker’s house: since his retirement, all he did was indulge in reminiscences, look at old photographs, or jot down secret recipes in an old notebook.

  Lida’s demonstrative piety didn’t make their home more inviting, either, and nor did Lara’s strangeness. She couldn’t understand why her only daughter hadn’t been to visit her for two years. She spent most of her time making jam, and hid banknotes between books which she then couldn’t find again.

  ‘I want to leave. But I don’t want to go without you,’ said Andro suddenly. He started to scrape at the frosty earth with the toe of his boot. ‘Would you come with me?’

  ‘Where do you want to go, you lunatic? You don’t have any money; and anyway, you have to wait for your mother.’

  ‘My mother may not be coming back any time soon.’

  ‘How can you know that?’

  ‘I just know.’

  ‘And where do you want to go?’

  ‘I want to go to Europe. Remember when I showed you the map of the world the other day? I’ve marked it up. All the places I want to go. I want to go to Rome and Paris, Madrid, and Vienna — especially Vienna, they say it’s very beautiful there. You’d like it there, Kitty.’

  ‘But we can’t, not on our own …’

  ‘Would you come with me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you scared of going away?’

  ‘What do you want to do in Vienna? There are only poor people and rich people there, and the rich people don’t give the poor people anything, and the poor people starve and freeze to death on the streets. And anyone there who isn’t blond gets kicked up the arse,’ she said, and giggled.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Fine. All right, then, of course I’ll come with you. You know I will!’

  And Andro bent over his Kitty, the girl with the most beautiful almond eyes in all the world, and kissed her on the lips. The fog-filled town, the green-painted park benches; tall, gangly, quiet Andro, and restless, frenetic Kitty, both numb with cold and excitement in equal measure.

  And as Kostya’s sister pressed her fingers to her mouth, holding on to the first real kiss of her life and the taste of Andro’s lips, her brother, three years older, was losing his virginity. I don’t know whether these two events really did take place at precisely the same moment, but I like the idea that it might have been that way.

  *

  After the Naval Ball, Kostya’s friends dragged him up an old staircase on Vasilievsky Island and left him in a dark, narrow corridor in front of a wooden door. They hammered on the door for all they were worth before sprinting off, laughing, down the stairs. At first, Kostya, who had already drunk a good deal of vodka, didn’t really understand what was going on. He could only move slowly, and because he knew he wouldn’t succeed in running away so easily he decided to stay there, come what may, even though his heart was beating so loudly he felt the whole house must be able to hear it.

  The door was flung open and a tall, dark-haired woman in a long dressing gown, with rings on every finger, stared out at Kostya in his blue uniform, standing there like a kicked dog, red-faced, not knowing where to put himself.

  ‘What’s all this about?’ asked the stranger indignantly, stepping towards him.

  ‘Oh, excuse me — I don’t know, either — they …’ stammered Kostya, in accent-free Russian.

  ‘If you’re looking for that … hmm … lady, she doesn’t live here any more. I live in this apartment now.’ />
  The woman was about forty. She had olive skin and her eyes were jet-black, like her hair, which was loosely held up with a clip.

  They’d played a trick on him. Kostya needed to think fast — how could he extricate himself from this awkward situation and pay them back? You were only a real sailor when you were as good at sea as in a woman’s arms, that was what they’d said, and Kostya had allowed himself to be swept along, had walked here with them through the snow-covered streets, because this was the home of that lady who, for a few roubles and without any fuss, would initiate him in the art of love.

  He was already on the point of turning round and walking briskly away, but she stopped him and asked, ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Konstantin. Kostya.’

  ‘Hello, Konstantin. And how old are you?’

  ‘I’m seventeen.’

  ‘Aha. And where are you from, Konstantin?’

  ‘From … from … Georgia.’

  ‘From Georgia. Oh, that is nice. I spent a summer there once as a child, beside the sea. I ate a lot of pomegranates. I love pomegranates. Do you like them, too?’

  ‘They’re all right.’

  ‘Would you like a tea, Konstantin? You look frozen to death.’

  There was something about this unknown woman that Kostya found attractive. He couldn’t have said himself what it was: her slightly sarcastic tone, her mischievous smile, or the sparkling rings on her hands.

  The apartment must once have consisted of several rooms, now partitioned off by thin walls. The space he entered was only one room, with the kitchen in an alcove. The bathroom was in the corridor and was probably used by the neighbours as well. An entire corner had been taken over by indoor plants; on the dining table were piles of books, all of them open. The room was illuminated by a single lamp. It smelled good here. Kostya immediately felt at home.

  He did indeed get a strong cup of tea, and his coat was hung over a coal-fired stove. He took a closer look at her in the light: she was almost as tall as he was, with a narrow frame, bony joints, and hips that were a little too wide. Her wrists were as slender and delicate as those of a young girl. Her face appeared to be hiding something, which Kostya found slightly arousing. A long, pointed nose, thin lips, slightly hollow cheeks. But it was her dark eyes, above all, that gleamed seductively in the dim light, as if coated with a film of oil. Hers was a sickly beauty, already starting to fade.