When the unknown woman asked him if he wanted to have a glass of wine with her, Kostya realised what it was about her that he found most attractive. It was her voice. She had a deep, rich voice that was also somehow very brittle, as if liable to crack on the very next word. She fetched a bottle of wine, handed him a corkscrew, and asked him to open it. Then she brought two glasses, snatched the bottle from his hand, held it up to the light for a moment, and poured. She sniffed at the red liquid before taking the first sip.
‘This is a Bordeaux. It’s very old. And very good. Very good. Wines are a special business — as I expect you know, Georgian. I’ve kept this bottle long enough. I was always saving it for that special occasion. But we’ll drink it now.’
Kostya, even more confused, and preoccupied with trying not to let his confusion show, obeyed without protest. Beside the bed he could see an old piano draped in white cloth. After they had raised their glasses to each other, and the unknown woman had emptied hers in one go, she stood up, went over to the gramophone on the floor beside the piano, and put on a record. A chanson by Vertinsky began to play. She approached Kostya, stopped in front of him, and extended her hand.
‘Would you dance with me, Konstantin?’ she asked him, with an ambiguous smile. Kostya leaped up, excited and clumsy, and seized her hand in one of his, encircling her waist with the other.
She felt good: somehow, in a strange way, very familiar. In the middle of the dance she stopped, removed his hand from her waist, disengaged herself, and threw herself onto the little metal bed, which was covered with an old plaid blanket. A few moments later she had buried her face in both hands and was sobbing desperately.
Kostya stood in the middle of the room, rooted to the spot, not daring to look at the weeping woman. At last, he went over to her and, moved by her despair, knelt before her and placed his hand cautiously on her leg. The woman immediately flung her arms around his neck and dragged him onto the bed. He fell, and she pressed herself against him, started unbuttoning his jacket. Not thinking about what was happening to him, Kostya allowed himself to be led by instinct: with a sweep of his hand he opened her dressing gown and started kissing her, and she gripped his hair with her beringed fingers, guiding his head to where she wanted it. He didn’t mind her leading him. Before he knew it, she had undressed him, and with hurried movements and trembling hands he helped her, undid her suspender belt, slipped off her petticoat. The open dressing gown exposed her small breasts, her smooth, soft skin, and the dark triangle between her legs.
Although she was brusque and possessive, very domineering, and expressed her lust with abandon, Kostya found her behaviour touching. There was something lost about her urge to possess him; her passion was fragile, as if at any second it might be extinguished as unexpectedly as it had been kindled.
For a moment, Kostya felt as if he were losing consciousness, while the unknown woman kept her eyes firmly closed, kissing every inch of his face and smiling through her tears.
Hold sacred all the riches of our homeland.
POSTER SLOGAN
For days after this encounter, my grandfather was stupefied. He walked around as if in a dream, astonished at the peculiar turn of events that had catapulted him not into the arms of a prostitute, but straight into his first love affair. He was torn between his days at the Naval School with its strict discipline and the nights of abandonment in the dimly lit apartment on Vasilievsky Island.
To his father, he pretended to be a model son; in the drinking sessions with his comrades, he played the ringleader with tremendous panache. But in his thoughts, Kostya was constantly in the dizzying proximity of the unknown woman, whose depths he began devotedly to explore.
‘Ida.’ This was the name his lips would form during class, or on board ship in the Gulf of Finland; he would repeat this name in his thoughts like an incantation as he lay in bed, sleepless, at night. He would cling to these three letters when the longing for her skin, for her deep, smoky voice, for her ambiguous smile, became too much and he didn’t know how to quench his painful desire for her.
Some nights he could stand it no longer. He would jump out of bed, grab his coat, and run down the street like a man possessed to hammer breathlessly at her door, hoping she would open it and take him in like a hungry, homeless animal, feed him and care for him, give him warmth and protection.
And she did. Always. She never left him standing outside.
With a mischievous smile, she would open the door a crack, look at him, sometimes with curlers in her hair or an open book in her hand, then shake her head and say, ‘Konstantin, what is it now? I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow evening.’ She would say it in a tone of mild reproach, and at the same time he could sense how pleased she was that he didn’t stick to their arrangements, that he was paying her a surprise visit. He could speak to Ida with his body; he didn’t need words. From the taste of her skin, he could guess the measure of her sorrow; from the way she touched him, he could guess her fears; from her kisses, he could tell whether that night she would behave with particular abandon.
During the daily shooting practice, he had to screw his eyes tight shut so as not to blink, then open them again, close them, open them, until the images from the previous night had gone from his head and he could concentrate on the target again.
All his life, Kostya would remain in thrall to this incurable beauty — incurable because, to him, she radiated a sense of something endangered, something utterly unprotected, a beauty with the capacity to destroy you.
For the rest of his life, he would never stop seeking this beauty, and his ability to love would depend on the extent to which he found it again in his subsequent love interests. As if he could only experience desire when he felt this desire would destroy him. As if he needed to dive for hidden pearls, concealed in the deepest depths of the sea, and in doing so run the risk of drowning.
*
In her previous life, Ida was meant to become a pianist. She had studied with one of Rubinstein’s star pupils. She came from a well-to-do St Petersburg family of Jewish intellectuals; her father was a doctor, and her mother had also aspired to a career as a concert pianist until severe depression rendered this impossible. Ida had spent half of her life in Paris, where her family had settled after the Revolution and the subsequent wave of anti-Semitism in Russia. In her early years, she was said to have had a nervous disposition, anaemia, a marked tendency towards excessive passion, and inspired fingers, destined for a world-class career. But she cut the umbilical cord of predestination with her own hands when she announced to her family that she had fallen hopelessly in love with an exiled violinist, who had a wife and two children in a little attic apartment in Paris, earned his money in dubious locales, and could scarcely keep his head above water. Despite pleas and threats from members of her family, Ida appointed herself the saviour of the violinist’s battered soul; she, of course, considered him brilliant, and even converted to Christianity in the hope the violinist would want to marry her once he was legally divorced from his wife.
That, however, didn’t happen.
Instead, he lived with her in a seedy room in a hotel that charged by the hour; he allowed her to cook for and spoil him, was also very happy to take the extra money Ida earned giving piano lessons, and never even dreamed of asking his wife for a divorce. One day, he announced to Ida that he was in trouble: he had run up a mountain of debts, and his only hope of escaping the debt-collectors was to flee to Russia. All attempts by Ida’s family to stop their daughter failed; Ida returned with her martyr to St Petersburg, which was not even called St Petersburg any longer, and where nothing was as it had been before.
They moved into a communal apartment on the outskirts of the city. Ida taught piano and worked at surviving the post-war years. She provided her violinist with food, began to hate him, berated him, lamented her suffering, missed Paris and her family’s affluence, reproached herself, and was as
hamed of her miserable existence. The violinist would disappear for days at a time while Ida, caught up in her masochistic feelings of love and loathing, was being driven up the wall by worry, disgust, and socialism, which was profoundly abhorrent to her. She started punishing the most precious thing she owned for her unhappiness: she draped a cloth over her piano, the only valuable thing she had sent for from Paris. The violinist doubled his alcohol consumption and ran up more debts, with, among others, a Siberian butcher who controlled the black market. There was a fight. The violinist was given a kicking; he cracked his head against a wall, and crawled through the streets on all fours until he reached the hallway of the communal apartment, where he collapsed. He died of internal bleeding before a doctor could get there. Ida managed to procure this single room on Vasilievsky Island, formerly inhabited by a lady from Dnipropetrovsk who, as previously mentioned, earned her living with her sturdy body until one day someone reported her to the authorities and she was sent packing.
The only thing Ida took with her from her old life was the piano. She found herself a job as a ticket attendant at the theatre, applied twice more to leave the country and was rejected both times, upon which she cut all contact with the people from her old life, but did not try to make any new acquaintances, lived with her records and books, and drank her strong black tea.
She lived like that until one day Konstantin Jashi appeared at her door.
When Kostya’s youth and willing body fell into her hands, Ida pounced on him as if famished: she lost herself, let herself go, forgot, and began to hope.
Even if Ida was now a woman who no longer had any romantic illusions, there was nothing she could do about the fact that, with Kostya at her side, she had started to hope again — unintentionally, against her will, entirely without wanting to. Because until then hopelessness had been the only constant in her life, and the gradual erosion of this constant frightened her; she believed that, for her, the renewed hope of a different life could be life threatening.
With each day that passed, Ida let another little piece of hopelessness drop away. With every word Kostya addressed to her, with every touch, she scratched the thick layer of desolation from her skin and allowed herself to be infected by his youth, his greed for her, his joy in her body, and in an unspoken future.
And Kostya, fearful and insecure, because he craved her nearness, her nocturnal enchantment, her secrets, stumbled after his desires at night only to punish himself for it the next day. He didn’t tell his fellow students about his new love; he was embarrassed about it because he assumed Ida would not be seen as a suitable match for him. He reproached himself for the fact that he could never take her out for a meal, never go for a walk with her; that she existed for him only at night, and by day he tried to banish her from his thoughts, from his daily life, acting as if she didn’t exist.
But Ida was good at hiding her feelings: it was something she had learned well in her years of struggling with life, or with what life had denied her. She had learned that words are not always promises, that music cannot save you, that your own abilities do not always lead to their predestined objective, that love is sometimes just camouflage for something much worse; she had learned to tame her dreams, had learned to paint over her disappointments with a dash of lipstick; and so Kostya knew nothing of how painful she found the waiting for those nights, the effort it cost her to keep pace with his pent-up longing; all the words she left unsaid, all the reproaches she spared him, the understanding his divided life required of her, how impossible it sometimes seemed to her to be part of his parallel world. And how moved she was by his desire to experience love through her; and how much, at the same time, it frightened her.
But Ida had always been a good teacher, and all the things that, years earlier, she had tried to show her students, on the black and white keys, she now taught Kostya, devoting her entire body and soul to the task. She taught him to prepare a nourishing winter soup from leftovers, taught him to iron his uniform immaculately, taught him to keep secrets, and to speak without words.
Holding each other close, they danced to every Vertinsky song in Ida’s record collection: for every song, a different dance. Their dances were slow and fast, restrained and unbridled, risqué and accompanied by full-throated laughter, sad and oblivious to the world around them; they danced together and alone; they danced and danced.
She told him the stories behind each of her many rings, kissing the tips of his fingers as she did so; she laughed at him when he bored her with lectures about ships; she tickled him as he slept and woke him to show him the full moon, which was particularly yellow and sickly that night. She showed him photographs of her old life while he massaged her feet; she told him that her house plants were her true friends, and introduced them all to Kostya by name. She giggled like a schoolgirl when he took off her clothes, and ordered him to undress with the stern face of a headmistress.
They lent each other happiness. They lent each other the present, and gave each other memories for the future.
*
She stretched luxuriously, like a Persian cat, on the squeaky metal bed. Kostya was ironing his shirt; he had to be at the academy in less than an hour. Suddenly, as if stricken, Ida jumped up, rushed over to Kostya, flung her arms around him, and clung on.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, laughing, already calculating in his head whether he had enough time to comfort her with another, brief bout of lovemaking. But Ida pulled away and gazed at him, wide-eyed.
‘There’s going to be a war,’ she said quietly, backing off.
‘You’re not really afraid of the stupid fascists, are you, Ida? Come here, come here, you silly thing.’
‘You should turn on the radio.’
‘Just because the Germans are marching into Poland, you’re afraid they’ll come all the way here?’ He laughed and hurried over to give her a kiss on the tip of her nose. ‘They gave us a long talk at the Academy. When I come back tonight I’ll tell you a bit about how cleverly the Generalissimus is dealing with the Germans. Apparently he held a secret meeting at the Politburo on the nineteenth of August. At the Academy they’re saying he told them the Soviet Union would definitely reject the Franco-British alliance against Germany, and would extend its hand to the Germans. Because, they said, it’s impossible to promote communism in Europe in peacetime, but if the Anglo-French declare war on the Germans both sides will quickly overextend themselves, and the Soviet Union can advance the cause of socialism in Europe undisturbed. I think that’s an incredibly far-sighted attitude, don’t you? … Ida, are you even listening to me?’
‘Even if they do start fraternising with the Germans, it doesn’t mean the Germans will be happy to give up territories to the USSR, Kostya. And that’s the whole point. Without this alliance with the Nazis, the Generalissimus doesn’t stand a chance of getting his hands on those areas. Think about it: the Germans are constantly talking about the need for lebensraum.’
Ida fell silent and began to stare at a spot on the wall as if she could already see the future there in front of her.
‘All right, listen. I’ll tell you a secret. You’ve heard about this trade agreement, haven’t you — this Molotov-Ribbentrop thing? The one that was all over the newspapers? Do you know what they told us at the Academy? Behind the trade agreement there’s a secret protocol that’s far more important than the actual agreement itself.’ Kostya lowered his voice. ‘Apparently, it talks about neutrality for the USSR in the event of a European war. There — is my Ida reassured now? The Generalissimus knows how to deal with the fascists. You mustn’t doubt that!’
Suddenly, Ida began to laugh at the top of her voice. She doubled over and slapped her hands on her knees. Kostya stared at her in bewilderment.
She took a copy of Pravda out of her bag and held it under Kostya’s nose.
‘Isn’t it hilarious, my angel, the world we live in? The biggest newspaper in the country calls t
his agreement, and I quote, “an instrument of peace”. Yet what it really is is two madmen squaring up to each other and misusing the world to benefit themselves and their ideologies; two madmen who will stop at nothing. Isn’t that hysterical, Kostya? Two madmen are never going to allow one to become greater than the other.’
‘What madmen? Ida, calm down! Ida, look at me. I’m here, I’m with you, nothing’s going to happen to you. I won’t let anything happen to you.’
‘The only question is, for how long,’ murmured Ida, going back to the bed.
‘How long what? What do you mean?’
‘Go on, get dressed. I don’t want you to be late.’
*
The news of Christine’s disfigurement, which Stasia had kept from Kostya for almost two years, reached him along with the news that war had indeed broken out in Europe. On the same day that the whole of Leningrad started talking about the German invasion of Poland, Kostya finally learned the real reason Stasia had asked him not to come to Tbilisi these past two summers, but to spend his holidays in Russia. In her letter, Stasia recounted Christine’s tragedy in detail — without naming names, of course, as post office workers might read the letter.
She described the terrible deed, Christine’s time in intensive care, her deep depression, her silence. She told him about Ramas’ funeral, which had taken place anonymously in order to avoid a scandal, and about the sale of his paintings. She ended with news of the death of her stepmother, Lara; Christine’s tragedy had caused her to have a stroke.
The Eighth Life Page 21