The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  It was so easy, as soon as she was near him, to forget that anything else existed. It was so easy, as soon as she touched him, to shake off all thoughts of the outside world. In moments like these, he was sure he had absolutely no need of it. The whole Soviet fleet, the parades, his roaring fellow students, his impressive achievements, his plans for the future, were so effortlessly swept aside by her mere presence, so effortlessly replaced. As if the world without Ida were just an illusion.

  He pushed up her calf-length skirt. Pressed even harder against her warm, sinewy body. They were almost the same height; he looked her right in the eyes, which alarmed him a little because they seemed so feverish, even darker than usual. He tried to open the buttons on her grey blouse with his teeth, and, when he didn’t succeed, he bit two of them off. The familiar smile spread across her face. As if she understood both his weaknesses and her strength; as if they were mutually dependent. She whispered something, her lips formed words, but he couldn’t hear them any more; he was intoxicated by her smell, by her dangerous proximity, by the possibility that someone might catch them. Perhaps he even longed for it; perhaps he wanted someone to come across the two of them here, frozen in a tableau that left no room for interpretation, frozen in their clandestine love. So that he would finally be able to take a deep breath and shout at the top of his voice: Yes, this is her, the woman I carry with me in every thought, every fibre of my body, who is so beautiful it pains me, because she is unsaveable, because I know I can’t save her, not from herself and not from the world, either. The woman who taught me to forget, and to feel, with hands and eyes and the hollows of the knees and the ankles and the tip of the nose and the earlobes. This is how I want it — this is exactly how I want it!

  Perhaps that’s exactly what Kostya wanted. Perhaps.

  She kissed his neck and held his head firmly; the pressure grew firmer and firmer, his ears were closed, he could hear nothing, she was sealing him off from something, from what was to come, perhaps, as if she were his oracle, his portent, his Cassandra, condemned to know the future without a single person to believe her.

  Kostya crooked her leg and she adjusted to him, made herself small and round, made it easy for him to love her, even here, even now, pressed up against this cold wall. She could not do otherwise; perhaps there was nothing she could do but follow her destiny, and her destiny was simply to be a fateful, unique, unrepeatable experience for him. But perhaps, too, she knew very well that this man, this moment, this sad, almost furious proximity was the last happiness to which she was entitled, and she seized it with animal strength.

  I don’t know, Brilka, and I’ll never know for sure. But what does that matter?

  *

  Gasping, he buried his face in her neck. He felt her hand gripping his head, felt something brutal, terrible in her grasp; it frightened him, but his lust enabled him to contain his fear, to not think about it. Suddenly his heart leapt: there was a knock at the door. Kostya froze, forgetting even to breathe. Ida did not let go.

  ‘Yes?’ he called, carefully clearing his throat in an effort to conceal the excitement in his voice.

  ‘Hey, Krasavchik, hurry up, we have to go — the boys are already waiting downstairs!’

  ‘I’m coming!’ Kostya answered, with considerable effort.

  ‘No, stay here, please stay with me!’ Ida begged him.

  ‘I can’t — I have to go. It’s our graduation parade and we’ve been practising for it for weeks. I … I’ll come to you tonight. I’ll come as soon as the parade is over, and we’ll talk about everything.’

  ‘Don’t leave me behind like this, please don’t — no, don’t stop!’ Ida clung to his shoulders, pressed her head against his chin, caressed him with her skin. But he pulled away from her, intoxicated, swaying, his desire still unsatisfied. He staggered to the bed and started hastily putting on his shirt.

  Slowly Ida pushed down her petticoat, then her skirt, and turned her back to him. She laid her face against the wall, pressing her forehead into it as if trying to break through it, as if she knew of a way out, a secret way through the wall into another world.

  ‘I really do have to go. My father will be there, too, and … I’ll come tonight, Ida. I’ll come, and I’ll stay as long as you want, all right? And we’ll talk about everything you want to talk about. You can tell me everything that’s troubling you.’

  For a while she didn’t move, and he didn’t know what was going on; whether she was crying, or cursing him, if she were wishing herself invisible, if she regretted coming. Then she turned and looked at him. She was smiling. Her hair was dishevelled; her bun had come loose and a few long, dark strands hung in her face, and once again Kostya was on the point of tearing off his uniform and rushing to her, taking her in his arms, and locking the door — but her smile reassured him: things weren’t so bad, and, after all, he would come to her soon.

  ‘It’s all right, Konstantin, my beautiful, beautiful boy. Look after yourself.’

  ‘Hey, I’m not a boy any more, remember that!’ He gave her a hasty kiss on the lips and dashed from the room.

  *

  During the military parade, Kostya was overcome by excruciating fear. He saw his father standing on the pavement, waving to him, but all of a sudden this sight no longer meant anything to him. He walked in step with the other sailors, shouting the slogans they had learned by heart, and tried to adopt a reverent expression as the cannons were fired into the Gulf of Finland. But in his breast all he felt was a fear that seemed to clench all his internal organs.

  As soon as the parade was over, he ran. He ran until he could run no more, he stopped and sat down in the middle of the street, caught his breath, ran on, flew up the steps, stopped outside her apartment, gasped for air, and hammered on the door — but no one opened.

  He went back downstairs, out onto the street, and looked up at the third floor, but no lights were on.

  He went up again, knocked and knocked, screamed, shouted for her.

  For three days and nights he returned again and again, until finally a neighbour told him that the lady had gone away, he had seen her leave the house with two suitcases but didn’t know where she had gone; she hadn’t been a very talkative neighbour.

  Later, Brilka, I learned that Ida hadn’t gone anywhere; that she had slipped her neighbour a few roubles, asked him to tell a white lie, and that all those days and nights she was standing behind her locked door, holding her mouth shut to prevent her voice and her longing from betraying her, while my grandfather hammered on the door and called her name, no longer able to make sense of the world around him.

  *

  The National Socialists owed their swift and stupendous success at the start of the Second World War in part to the friendly neutrality of the USSR. The Generalissimus supported Hitler not only with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; he also facilitated German import and export shipments across Soviet territory. So the occupation of Bessarabia and Bukovina in northeastern Romania by the Reds in 1940 came as a surprise to the National Socialists. To stop the Generalissimus getting the idea that he could advance any further, Hitler stationed Wehrmacht troops in Romania as well. In July, at a meeting of the High Command at the Berghof — Hitler’s little piece of paradise — a certain unease was apparent as soon as the discussion turned to the Soviet Union. According to General Halder’s notes, Hitler spoke in favour of launching ‘Operation Draft East’ earlier than planned. In November, Molotov travelled to Berlin again, but this time the negotiations were unsuccessful: no further agreement was possible on territorial division. Hitler began to find the Generalissimus’ demands too outrageous: he had laid claim to Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and numerous other territories from the southern Caucasus to the Persian Gulf. On 18 December 1940, Hitler authorised the plan for ‘Operation Barbarossa’, and set 15 May 1941 as the date for its commencement. By the spring of 1941, there were only five neutral countries left in
Europe: Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey.

  The war in the Balkans forced Hitler to postpone Barbarossa by a few weeks. The Soviet foreign intelligence service informed the Generalissimus of Hitler’s plans, but our Great Leader deemed them an intrigue, an invention of the British secret service. He laughed at the warnings, saying that the people making such claims had ‘brains as small as my thumb’.

  The Generalissimus could not conceive of the possibility of a war with Hitler’s Germany. The Soviet Union had adhered strictly to the trade agreement: in the first two years of the war, it had supplied Germany with tons of wheat, oil, and steel. At this point in time, there were almost five million people in the Red Army. Its equipment was inferior to the Germans’, not to mention its organisation: the Generalissimus had had almost all the renowned army generals and officers arrested or shot some years earlier. But Hitler and his entourage, emboldened by the recent successes of the Blitzkrieg, were planning the swift subjugation of the Soviet Union. What Hitler didn’t know was that the terror and misery the Wehrmacht planned to bring with its invasion were already part of everyday life in the USSR. That the Soviet horror of recent years had prepared the people all too well for the horror Hitler planned to inflict on their country.

  The right to sorrow is a privilege.

  DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

  Kostya Jashi was now a junior lieutenant in the Soviet Navy. After staring in despair at the locked door of Ida’s apartment for the last time, he had requested an urgent transfer out of the city. His application was approved, and in April he was transferred to Crimea, to a training ship in Sevastopol.

  On 22 June 1941, three Wehrmacht army groups crossed the Soviet border: Army Group North, heading for the Baltic states and Leningrad; Army Group Centre, heading for Smolensk and Moscow; and Army Group South, heading for Kiev. One of the biggest invasions in military history had begun. From the Baltic Sea to the Carpathians, the Generalissimus’ huge empire was being attacked from all points of the compass by more than three million German soldiers. Hitler ‘thawed’ after the order was given, ‘all tiredness gone’, noted Goebbels, in a diary entry following the invasion of the Soviet Union. The attack rendered all prior military agreements, laws, and rules invalid.

  The earth began to turn faster.

  Despite the warnings, the Generalissimus continued to cling to his belief that the mobilisation of German troops at the borders was an exaggeration by the secret services. He retreated to his dacha in Kuntsevo, and addressed the people only eleven days later in a calamitous radio broadcast in which he declared the ‘Great Patriotic War’.

  Kostya could not have foreseen when he was transferred that the German invasion would come as a complete surprise to the western parts of the Russian fleet stationed in Sevastopol, and that he would be catapulted into the epicentre of the war much faster than he would have liked. The sailors’ training manoeuvres were replaced alarmingly quickly by actual warfare, and Kostya Jashi was caught up in the three-day raid on Constanta.

  In early July, Army Group North began to advance on the Baltic States, and the Soviet Baltic Fleet was forced to fall back to Kronstadt. Army Group Centre took Smolensk on 16 July. Minsk fell into German hands in the first few weeks of the invasion. Novgorod succumbed on 16 August, and on 8 September the Germans reached Lake Ladoga, encircling Leningrad.

  One week after war broke out, the Red Lieutenant Simon Jashi was sent to the front in Minsk.

  The Wehrmacht’s success was colossal. The Red Army’s general staff — hesitant, caught between fear of the Kremlin, still crippled by indecision, and the necessity of taking swift action — remained passive. The paralysis in the Kremlin affected the whole country. It resulted in the loss of countless lives during the first months of the war. In July 1941, Goebbels wrote triumphantly in his diary: ‘There can no longer be any doubt that sooner or later the Kremlin will fall.’

  Having obtained excellent marks in his shipbuilding diploma, Giorgi Alania was posted to the Amur shipyard on the Sea of Japan. Alania hesitated; he didn’t want to go to the other side of the world, to be separated from his best friend. He hoped he wouldn’t have to stay there more than one or two years. In hindsight, the Sea of Japan proved to be his salvation, as the posting to Amur meant he escaped the war; because he worked in heavy industry, he was spared the front.

  When the Germans invaded the Baltic States and Ukraine, no one thought the Bolsheviks would come back. The Germans were celebrated as liberators. When Wehrmacht soldiers entered Ukrainian villages with tanks and trucks, farmers stood in the streets holding out bread and salt as a sign of hospitality.

  The Soviet NKVD, by contrast, had done a thorough job in a very short time. Prisoners had been executed in the jails; inmates in psychiatric hospitals had been killed. Later, villages and towns would be burned — nothing was to fall into German hands.

  Reports in the Soviet press about Nazi crimes, about Jews being rounded up and taken off to some place from which no one had ever returned, were dismissed as lies and Soviet propaganda. Consequently, many Jews decided not to flee. For years, they had been fed lies and invented realities, but this one, out of the mouth of the oppressor, was more blatant than any lie so far: that in the Caucasus and Ukraine ethnic minorities were being recruited by the Wehrmacht to serve as ‘volunteers’.

  In the panic that prevailed in the first months of the war, many Party functionaries, directors, and commissars fled their posts. People believed they had been abandoned, and took liberties they would never otherwise have dared to claim: they refused to work, looted, even threatened their superiors. The Bolsheviks’ unassailable status was called into question.

  In August of that year, the Generalissimus issued order number 270, according to which any soldier who allowed himself to be taken as a prisoner of war was to be considered a traitor. Red Army soldiers had only two options: to let themselves be shot by the Germans, or be shot later by their own people.

  *

  The day Kostya Jashi took up his rifle to shoot at people for the first time, his little sister graduated from her all-girls’ school and ran into the arms of Andro, who still spent his time compulsively carving wooden angels and had shaved off all his curls.

  That same night, my great-great-grandfather died peacefully in his bed after going through the secret recipes in his black notebook, thinking himself back in the chocolate factory, which had ceased to exist three years earlier, and was now a government canteen serving mashed potatoes and cheap meatballs. He died believing himself back in the sweetness of his past life, surrounded by the most tempting aromas in the world, full of plans for the future of his hometown, the putative Nice of the Caucasus, in the company of his four daughters, each one lovely and full of the brightest hopes, undimmed by the cheerlessness of socialism. He had taken his leave of the present gradually, over time, until it grew thin and transparent and finally tore. Old, feeble, frail, with weak kidneys, no social standing, and no longer surrounded by the dark fragrance of grandeur, heavy sorrow had formed a crust around the chocolate-maker — impenetrable, impossible to soften. His decline was hard for his family to bear. And although Lida and Kitty did their best to keep from the old man the terrible news of what was happening in the world, they could not rid him of his sorrow. Again and again he asked after Christine, who hadn’t dared to return to the house of her birth since her disfigurement. He never spoke of what had happened, nor of Ramas: as if Christine had never married, as if no one had done to Christine the things that had been done to her. To him, she remained the young girl for whom the gates of life were open, with everything before her; and Lida and the others had to play along, had to declare the past the present and learn to hide their own sorrow, their own worries, from him.

  Beeswax candles, which Lida kept hidden in her room, were lit. Lida sat at her dying father’s bedside and prayed for hours on end. At daybreak, Andro was dispatched to the post office to
send a telegram to Tbilisi.

  Later, as they sat by the window looking down on the sleeping street, Andro asked Kitty if she wanted to be his wife and go with him to Vienna.

  To our very own, private Vienna, he added.

  *

  Dressed all in black, supported by Stasia, her face hidden by a veil she had cleverly woven into her hair, Christine took a seat at the window of the compartment and leaned her head against the glass. The station was crowded; people were running around like industrious ants. The little boy selling newspapers was shouting at the top of his voice: ‘War! We’re at war! Fascists attack Soviet Union! Generalissimus declares Great Patriotic War!’

  Christine tried not to listen to his words. But Stasia, who was putting her suitcase on the rack, turned sharply and stuck her head out through the narrow gap in the window, waved the boy over, tossed a few kopeks into his hand, and took the paper. Absorbed by the news, she gasped as if she were having an asthma attack and sank weakly into her seat.

  ‘Kostya!’ was all she said, as if she had seen him standing in front of her. She gripped her veiled sister’s wrist. ‘Simon has taken my only son and he won’t stop him going to war. He’ll even be proud of him. Oh my God, Kostya, my only Kostya!’

  ‘We don’t know anything yet. We’ll contact Simon and Kostya first thing tomorrow morning. Try to calm yourself.’

  Christine looked out of the window and watched the green, hilly countryside roll by. At daybreak, the sisters reached the town where they were born, which had become anything but the Nice of the Caucasus. By now, news of the war had reached here, too; people were wandering the streets, older men were standing on street corners with their pipes, recalling the horrors of the last war, and the women, who had set out little tables in front of their houses, were gathered around big wireless sets with pots of coffee, drinking and shaking their heads. Only the children still carried on as normal, playing ball and hide-and-seek, running races, and making a deafening racket.