Kostya came to Ida’s apartment in the middle of the night, lay down on the bed, and wept for more than three hours without stopping.
Ida asked no questions: she let him grieve, because she knew about grief; for many years it had been her most dependable companion. Ida knew that the world — both her own and, above all, the fragile world of all-encompassing intimacy she shared with Kostya — was doomed, but she faced this doom with her eyes wide open, awaited it, stoic, erect, standing to attention, like a steadfast tin soldier.
War came to Kostya long before the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The horrendous news of his aunt’s misfortune unleashed a struggle within him and presented him with the almost impossible task of reconciling his feelings, his duty, and his future.
He tried to imagine Christine’s corroded face, and saw before him Ida’s olive skin, the blackness of her eyes. He felt anger towards his mother, who had kept him in the dark, had kept him far away from Christine and her sorrow, and he tried to fill in for himself the gaps that Stasia’s truth had ripped open. Because in her letter Stasia had not told him who, other than Ramas and Christine, was involved in this jealous drama. In his mind, Kostya laboriously went through all the renowned communists in his homeland who had been guests at Christine’s house. He tried to imagine what man had possessed such power that Ramas hadn’t dared to rebel against him; someone from whom Ramas had believed he could only protect his wife by inflicting this cruel disfigurement upon her.
Kostya’s deliberations left him in no doubt, but even in his thoughts he didn’t dare say the name of the Little Big Man, who the previous year had become the head of the entire Soviet NKVD.
There were many things Stasia had not told him.
She had not told her son that, after the tragic event, his adored aunt was paid a generous pension as the widow of a hero of the Soviet Union, which Ramas was posthumously declared to have been. She had also not written about the scented roses Christine’s lover had sent her every week in hospital, and then later at home, all of which she had thrown away. She had not written that the Little Big Man never again visited the first lady of his harem after her face was burned away, for fear he would be too revolted by her devastated beauty.
*
When Kitty called her brother from the post office in the little town, she noticed that he seemed irritable and distracted, inattentive and demanding.
‘Giorgi, my good friend and roommate, has been granted leave and he’s heading for Georgia. I’ve given him a small parcel for Christine. There are all sorts of things in it that she really likes. I want the parcel to get there quickly, and he’s offered to make a little detour and change trains near you. He’s not going as far as Tbilisi, but you can meet him tomorrow and send the parcel on to Tbilisi. It won’t take as long then.’
Kitty was annoyed that he had paid so little attention to what she had been saying, and hadn’t asked after either herself or Andro. He didn’t even seem surprised that she and Andro had been living in the countryside for months, banished to her grandfather’s house. That they had had to change schools, and now lived far away from Stasia and Christine.
‘Incidentally, I’m sorry Lara died so suddenly. Is Grandfather bearing up?’ was the only thing he wanted to know.
‘He’s trying,’ she answered, reluctantly. She promised to take receipt of the parcel and send it on, although she secretly wished it were a parcel for her, and that she didn’t have to live with the feeling that her big brother had forgotten her.
*
That evening, she walked to the station on her own. An unprepossessing lad in glasses and a sailor’s uniform stood waiting in the little station hall, which was almost completely empty. He introduced himself as Giorgi Alania; he was passing through on his way to Abkhazia to visit his mother; she wasn’t well, which was why he’d asked to go on leave. He had travelled via Vladikavkaz, had got off here to hand over the parcel, and would take the night train for the Black Sea coast later on.
‘Isn’t it very inconvenient for you to make such a detour on account of this silly parcel?’ asked Kitty, still annoyed with her cold, domineering brother.
‘Oh, I don’t mind. Your brother’s really very important to me. Believe me, I would do a great deal for him.’
Kitty marvelled as to how her narcissistic brother had managed this.
The lad asked her whether she would like to have a coffee or tea with him; he still had a while to wait for his train, and he’d be very glad of the company. But Kitty politely declined; she had homework to do.
He seemed disappointed by her refusal, but he remained courteous and immediately handed over the parcel. She wished him all the best for his onward journey, and turned to go. Outside on the street, though, with his disappointed face still before her eyes, she stopped, turned round, and went back into the station.
He was standing in the middle of the empty hall with his little suitcase, waiting for something: it had to be more than just a train. When he saw her coming, he smiled gratefully at her, and she suggested they go for a little walk, perhaps sit in a park; the station café had already closed, and in any case the station concourse wasn’t very inviting. He agreed thankfully, and beamed at her as if she had just accepted his proposal of marriage.
They went out onto the street, and Kitty led him to the little park nearby where she so often met Andro. Giorgi didn’t seem to be all that used to feminine company, and kept thanking Kitty for her time.
They exchanged some small talk. When he started speaking about Kostya she hedged and changed the subject. They chatted about politics, in which Kitty had no interest, about mothers, and about school, where he had apparently done well; they even laughed about this and that, and later Kitty accompanied the lad to his platform and waited until he had boarded his train. She gave him a hug, feeling as she did so that he was trembling slightly. It couldn’t possibly have been from the cold. She waved to him from the platform, and he stuck his head out of the window and waved to her for a long time as darkness settled over them, until it swallowed him completely.
*
In the first week of September, the Wehrmacht advanced eastwards as far as Warsaw. On 17 September, the Red Army entered Poland with 620,000 men. On 22 September, the Germans and the Russians organised a joint military parade in Brest-Litovsk, and on 28 September, Ribbentrop and Molotov signed a further treaty on ‘friendship, cooperation and demarcation’. In November, the USSR then expanded to include regions in western Ukraine and Belarus — Polish territory since 1920.
The Kremlin knew it couldn’t turn its new subjects into model Soviet citizens overnight with laws and dictates alone. Nonetheless, in the new territories they had to fast-forward through the years of ‘re-education’. Here, too, ethnic conflicts were to be intensified — the strategy of playing different ethnicities off against each other had, after all, proved effective in so many other regions. The invasion of Poland was presented as the liberation of the Belarusian and Ukrainian populations. The Soviet press praised the ‘reunification’ of these peoples with the Soviet Union, great friend to and helper of all oppressed nations. The tactics soon had the desired effect. In Novgorod and Łuck, Ukrainian farmers attacked Polish officers; in Pruzhany, Belarusian farmers stoned another officer; the NKVD looked on approvingly. However, when the resistance went too far, they resorted to more direct methods: both commanders and partisans who defied orders were summarily shot without trial.
By the end of September, more than 250,000 Polish soldiers had been imprisoned. Transit camps were set up for them because some of the prisoners were to be packed off to the Germans. Almost 43,000, all of them Jews, were handed over to the Germans in November.
Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia were coerced into providing the USSR with military assistance. With around 60,000 Red Army soldiers stationed in the Baltics, the countries had no choice but to prepare for annexation, which took place in the s
ummer of 1940. That same year, the USSR expanded to include the Socialist Republic of Moldova. Northeastern Romania was occupied, Ukraine extended. The Latvian and Estonian presidents were arrested; one died in prison, the other in a psychiatric institution. Only the Lithuanian president managed to escape. Border fortifications were hastily erected between German and Soviet territories, and all private radios were confiscated: only Party-approved information was to reach the population in the border areas.
*
In March 1940, the Generalissimus received a letter from the Little Big Man in which the latter proposed that the 25,000 Polish officers, officials, landowners, police, spies, constables, and prison guards currently under arrest should be shot then and there. This request was justified as follows: they were ‘all sworn enemies of Soviet authority full of hatred for the Soviet system’. The people in question were 14,700 state officials from the camps and 11,000 spies and counter-revolutionaries from the prisons.
The Generalissimus gave his approval the very same day, and forced another five Politburo members to put their signatures to the document. A troika, made up of close allies of the Little Big Man, was tasked with implementing it, and set to work at the beginning of April. First, rumours were disseminated in the camps and prisons that the prisoners would soon be released; their food rations were increased, they were vaccinated against typhus, and then they were fetched. They were taken by train to Kalinin, to Kharkov, and to the forest of Katyn near Smolensk. A number of NKVD men arrived from the capital especially for the operation with pistols in their suitcases. In the basement of the prison in Kalinin, two men held each prisoner still while a third shot him in the head. A maximum of two minutes was allocated for each execution. In Kharkov prison, they burned all the inmates alive. Afterwards, the bodies were taken away in trucks and buried in mass graves in the surrounding forests.
Regional prison directors and public prosecutors were present during the operation, as was Vasili Blokhin, the Lubyanka commandant who had already proved his loyalty on numerous occasions and was one of the people the Generalissimus trusted with special tasks. A man who liked to wear an apron, gloves, and rubber boots at executions, and who is said personally to have sent more than 15,000 people to their deaths in the course of his ‘career’. It was also Blokhin who got his employees and subordinates to sign a document stating that ‘educational measures’ should be used against those condemned to death to prevent the name of the Generalissimus from passing their lips. ‘Educational measures’ signified blows to the head.
At the Little Big Man’s suggestion, once the operation had successfully been completed, Blokhin’s men were given an extra month’s pay. Just six years later, Roman Rudenko, the deputy public prosecutor from Ukraine who had been summoned to Kharkov to observe the execution of the operation and ensure everything went according to plan, was one of the Soviet Union’s chief prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. Throughout those trials he accused the fascists of being responsible for this indiscriminate orgy of killing.
Blokhin himself was showered with medals and later made a general. He served the machinery of killing with loyalty and devotion for almost thirty-six years before being forced into retirement in 1953. He was buried in Moscow’s Donskoi Cemetery, where many of his victims had been burned and bucketfuls of their ashes poured into anonymous graves.
I prayed that my son would be a good student
and would grow up to be an independent man!
EKATERINE DZHUGASHVILI, THE GENERALISSIMUS’ MOTHER
Andro had graduated from the local school with average grades. With the future of the country so uncertain, he was advised to learn a proper trade, and was apprenticed to an Armenian carpenter. His carvings were already laying siege to every room in the house. The young journeyman carpenter pursued his apprenticeship with the same disciplined indifference as his schoolwork, and, slowly, began to understand that his mother wasn’t coming back.
Andro hadn’t wanted to see the truth; he had been too afraid. He dreamed of his mother incessantly. He searched for her in his sleep; in his dreams, she seemed relaxed and free, but when he enquired as to her whereabouts, she only gave him a loving smile. When he woke, he was always overwhelmed with hysterical excitement and would spend long minutes in the bathroom trying to calm down. Yes: he was afraid of the moment when any further hope would prove futile. Sometimes, without warning, a fit of fury would seize him and he would start smashing his wooden figures, because something about their naivety, their sweetness, made him incandescent with rage. He would take his tools and batter their heads and limbs to pieces, gouge out their eyes. The only things that remained unchanged were Kitty and his absolute trust in her. He knew that however angry, however sad, however desperate he might feel, she would make him laugh, play her games with him, clasp him in her strong arms so tightly he couldn’t breathe. Kitty gave him the confidence that better times were coming soon, that they would leave this place and start a new, different life. She was so full of life, so full of energy, and he relied on her sharing this energy with him. Above all, she was so fearless. Things she was forbidden to do, she did anyway. Things she was scolded for, she practised with even greater conviction, and this obstinacy fascinated him. Kitty gave him the impetus he needed to outwit his dismal reality.
They were ridiculous games, utterly pointless and childish, but he went along with them all: if she decided to hide from him all day long until he found her, or they had to rescue three homeless kittens from a ditch, or the game was a race, or to see who could gobble their bread and jam the fastest — Andro went along with it because they were the only moments of fun and freedom in their daily life, between Christine’s recuperation and the chocolate-maker’s slow decline. Between the hot Tbilisi summers and the cold winters in the little town.
Sadness lay over them both, and the moody petulance of puberty was already apparent. Their love became more than platonic. Despite this, they remained bound to each other: to each other, and their childhood.
And while the German army was marching into the Netherlands and on to Belgium and Luxembourg, and my grandfather was graduating from the Naval Academy with a gold medal, and Giorgi Alania was preparing for his shipbuilding exams, Andro was staring at his future with empty eyes. It held so little that he could look forward to.
*
On that mild June day when Italy joined the war on the German side, four days before the 18th Army of the Wehrmacht took Paris, Christine started to speak again, and Ida came to look for my grandfather in his room at the boarding house for the first time — the first and last time she saw him outside her little plant-filled apartment.
She pretended to be a relative of Comrade Jashi, ascended to the second floor of the boarding house, and knocked on Kostya and Giorgi’s door. My grandfather was just getting ready for the graduation parade in honour of the Soviet Navy, and when he flung open the door and found himself face to face with his lover, he froze.
‘What are you doing here?’ stammered Kostya, quickly pulling her into his room.
‘I had to see you. I had to see you just once by daylight. Your skin, your eyes, your lips, without that wretched bedside light, the gloom. Because I want to remember you the way you are now: bright.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I’m leaving. And I want to leave before you. I don’t want to be left. Let me have that pleasure. Let me leave you, Konstantin.’
‘I don’t understand you.’
‘We have to stop this. You’ll soon be going to join the fleet, and I won’t be able to manage without you. I’m already far too dependent on the hours you find for me, and they’re getting fewer and farther between, shorter and shorter. I won’t manage, Konstantin.’
‘Yes, they’ve given me a special award, I’ll probably even —’ Kostya broke off, only now understanding what Ida had said.
‘You’re too good for war.’
; ‘But we’re not at war — and if it comes to that, I’m more than ready, believe me. I’ll be able to sink ships like little stones! Pow, pow, pow!’
‘You’re happy because your ignorance protects you from yourself and from what lies ahead of you, and from missing me, but it will come, this realisation; it usually comes at a very inopportune time, my dear Konstantin, and I don’t want it to tear you apart, I don’t want it to change you; you have to promise me that, all right? All right? Will you do that?’
‘Ida, what are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere; I’m here, and even if I do go to sea, I’ll come back again. Listen, my parents —’
‘I can’t — forgive me, and grant me this prerogative. Please.’
‘The prerogative to do what? You’re not going anywhere. You’ve fallen prey to gloomy thoughts again. You should distract yourself more, get out of the apartment more often.’
‘And now I want you to sleep with me.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s go to bed.’
‘But it’s not night-time, and besides —’
Ida started to laugh. She seldom laughed, but when she did her whole body shook. She wiped tears from her eyes, bent double, slapped her knees and thighs with her hands. Kostya watched her; he couldn’t help admitting to himself how much he admired her, how desirable she was. He felt both fear and excitement rise up in his body. He went to her, put his hand over her mouth; she bit it gently, which aroused him even more; he pressed harder, still hesitant because of her presence in this, his world, where she did not belong. He put his arms around her, lifted her slightly off the ground; she defended herself, still laughing; he pushed her against the wall, grew bolder, more impatient, she should stop laughing, he didn’t like the thought that she might even be laughing at him. He narrowed his eyes and looked at her; her eyes were so dark that he assumed she must see everything around her through a kind of black filter. He thrust his forefinger between her teeth. She bit down again. Suddenly she fell abruptly silent, as if a terrible thought had cut off her laughter for ever; she grabbed his thick hair, pulled his head towards her, and, for a moment, breathed calmly and evenly, as if inhaling his scent. He kissed her.
The Eighth Life Page 22