The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  Her hand touched the eye socket. She touched the place where once there had been an eyebrow. The spot where Christine’s husband, perhaps, had kissed her every morning when they awoke; or where perhaps, as a child, she had contrived to cut herself and received a kiss from her mother, right there. Or perhaps from her father. A spot that had had stories to tell and that now no longer existed, that could no longer write stories on this face. A spot obliterated by the dark wing of a poisonous bird that had flapped over Christine’s head and brushed her as it passed.

  ‘Where is Andro?’ asked Christine, once Kitty had fallen silent and taken her hand away from her aunt’s face.

  ‘Please, don’t ever ask me that again. Never, never, never again, you hear?’ Kitty suddenly let out a scream, turned to face the other side of the bed and drew up her knees. ‘I don’t know where he is, and I don’t want to know any more.’

  The USSR guards the peace of all peoples!

  POSTER SLOGAN

  General Paulus was appointed commander of the entire German 6th Army, which had more than a quarter of a million soldiers and several tank battalions at its disposal. On 23 August 1942, the first German tanks reached the Volga north of Stalingrad. That same day, the Luftwaffe attacked the city. The Generalissimus had absolutely no intention of allowing an evacuation; the city that bore his name was too important to him for that.

  In early August, Lieutenant Simon Jashi was appointed commander of a company in the 38th Rifle Division under the leadership of Lieutenant-General Zhukov, who led the overall defence in the battle for Stalingrad. Of the almost 600,000 inhabitants who were still in the city in the summer of 1942, 40,000 were killed in the first days of the offensive. For the Kremlin, not even the massive death toll, the starvation, and the bombardments constituted an argument for evacuation. On the contrary: on 25 August, the Generalissimus announced that he was going to ‘turn the city into an invincible fortress’.

  The ghosts started giggling hysterically from the late-summer treetops and the great branches of the oaks.

  On 12 September, parts of the 6th Army penetrated the city — the flag at the main station changed three times in as many hours. The city was transformed into a lunar landscape, its architecture designed by the Luftwaffe. Fuel from wrecked cars and broken pipes ran straight into the Volga, lending an additional morbid drama to the inferno. Ten days later, the Germans had taken the station, which by then had changed sides fifteen times. A grotesque battle began for every house, every street. Every centimetre counted. After forty days, the city had been transformed into a deadly labyrinth with no way out. People called it the ‘War of the Rats’, because the majority of the population was forced to live in the sewers. As many as two thousand Luftwaffe Stuka bombers were sent out over the city. In November, practically the whole of the city was in German hands. When the final German offensive began on the eighty-first day of the battle, there were only a few Russian bases in the city still holding out against attack. And it was here that, once again, the relentless cold came to the Red Army’s aid. The Luftwaffe was unable to carry out aerial attacks because of bad weather, and supply routes on the ground were blocked, giving Marshal Zhukov time to launch a military counterattack codenamed Operation Uranus. Zhukov mustered almost one million soldiers on the southern and northern fronts, and began to draw the noose tight around the city. The northern and southern forces joined up on 23 November: they began to encircle Stalingrad, and with it the entire 6th Army.

  Even when the German general staff sent desperate warnings to Berlin requesting permission to retreat, or risk the deaths of many thousands of German soldiers, Hitler bellowed into the receiver: ‘I’m not leaving the Volga!’ Göring assured them that the Luftwaffe would guarantee food supplies from the air. Field Marshal von Manstein was to make an immediate plan for the German counteroffensive.

  The Germans spent Christmas 1942 in foxholes, freezing and starving, hallucinating Christmas trees and fragrant Christmas biscuits. Softly whistling ‘Silent Night’, the ghosts of war climbed over the barricades and crawled into the soldiers’ dreams. There they metamorphosed into the faces of their mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, their wives and sweethearts, warmed their hands and whispered lovers’ vows in their ears. The ghosts knew nothing of time, and created bright illusions in the soldiers’ heads. The dreams tasted delicious, and waking was unbearably hard.

  In desperation, wounded, starving soldiers clung to planes taking off for home just to escape this hell, only to fall a few moments later, frozen, to their deaths. In Stalingrad, Death was dancing his wildest dance. The Soviet command had death songs specially composed and played all over the city via loudspeaker: ‘Every Seven Seconds A German Soldier Dies’, ‘Stalingrad: A Mass Grave’.

  The Red Lieutenant, his hair now totally grey, sat in a headquarters near the Red Barricades ordnance factory and wrote to his wife with a shaking hand, unsure whether he would ever be able to send the letter: My Anastasia, how I wish now that I could turn back the clock …

  On 10 January, the 6th Army launched its final, decisive counteroffensive against the Reds, which led to the division of the army and its encirclement in two pockets. The Germans’ supply lines were cut off completely.

  After this day, the White-Red Lieutenant disappears without a trace. It is said that he was seen again on 31 January in the Univermag department store, the headquarters of the 6th Army, which was stormed by his division and blown up in the general orgy of destruction. It’s very likely that Simon Jashi was in the building. But perhaps it wasn’t like that at all; perhaps he died some other death, in some other place.

  I’ve always had a picture in my head of the ruined department store: the skeleton of the building before my eyes, its shell, its bones. And the haggard shadows inside that have forgotten what it feels like to be human. I picture Simon Jashi yelling something, I picture soldiers stumbling past him like an emaciated herd, aimless, uncomprehending, following a brute survival instinct. Dust falling from the ceiling, and the biting wind creeping through the smashed windows, the broken-down doors, the façades, now shot to pieces, and spreading out, encompassing everything, blowing everything away, all of time, except for this one moment in which Simon Jashi stops. Perhaps he hears someone, a young soldier, shouting: ‘Get out, get out, quick, get out of here!’ But he is unable to move. He stands staring out through the shattered glass, out through a hole in the wall at this great graveyard of humanity, the apocalyptic landscape, this terrifying beauty of the end of days. He sees the gardens of rubble and stones, the skeleton architecture, sees the patterns of blood, sees the sculptures of mangled reinforced concrete, and is amazed that everyone but himself is oblivious to this doomed symphony of death and destruction. Simon Jashi stands silently and doesn’t understand why he cannot move. It lasts only seconds, or perhaps minutes, but to Simon it feels different: as if time has been slowed down, as if everything were happening in slow motion. Always, in my imagination, Simon has forgotten the war and the thoughts of his terminal future, the hopeless days, the sense of failure, the disappointed eyes of the wife he was unable to make happy, the tsar, Lenin, the Motherland, and the Generalissimus; yes, even the steppe, which could have been the start of a better future. And suddenly the noise is very loud, a deafening thunderclap, and blood starts to flow from his ear. He knows that more detonations will follow, that time has run out, but he’s not thinking about that any more, he can’t move any more and he doesn’t want to.

  Beat the fascists to death!

  POSTER SLOGAN

  As if by an irony of fate, Simon Jashi’s son had celebrated his greatest victory a few days before that final decisive battle for Stalingrad in which his father most probably lost his life. On 18 January, the Reds captured the shore all the way around Lake Ladoga. An eleven-metre-wide corridor was created, and with it a link to the mainland. Konstantin had distinguished himself through outstanding service in the battle to libera
te Leningrad. When radio communications broke down completely one night during Operation Iskra and the commander-in-chief was unable to issue any further orders, Konstantin Jashi had assumed command of one of the ships in the Gulf of Finland.

  Kostya celebrated the victory with his comrades. The schnapps he hadn’t tasted for months warmed his stomach, went to his head, and made him so euphoric that he climbed the mast of the ship, yelling that the fascists were finished.

  *

  Less than forty kilometres away, a gaunt, dark-haired woman crept out onto the street. Her hands were purple and her eyes sunk deep in their sockets; her hair was thin, her boots full of holes, her back bent. She dragged herself out of the dark entrance of one of the houses and onto a cobbled street, staggered in the direction of Nevsky Prospekt, stopped, took several deep breaths. She was heading for the post office on Karavannaya Street, where a registration office had recently been set up to compile an evacuation list.

  The past month had robbed her of her remaining strength. She barely managed to leave the apartment, negotiate the stairs, or survive the interminable queues for food rations. However, the news that the siege had been broken had conjured a smile to her lips, and she had decided to go to the registration office again. Surely just one look at her would be enough to put her at the top of the list.

  She had been coughing blood for some time now, but she didn’t want to think about that. She had to make it there; she had to get to the post office.

  Perhaps she really had lost her mind, like the street-sweeper last month, who had stood naked in the street shouting obscenities. She didn’t know what day it was, or what else was going on in the world. In some of her daydreams she hallucinated that the rest of the world had long since ceased to exist, that Leningrad was the last island of survivors. Today, though, Ida was struggling to banish all her destructive thoughts and concentrate on getting to Karavannaya Street.

  The sky was not as dusty, powdery, and overcast as it usually was at this time of year. A few rays of sun were even shimmering through, and beneath the hard ice the Neva had begun to flow again. A couple of ragged children ran past. A woman walking in front of her was pushing a pram, as if it were a perfectly ordinary day in a perfectly ordinary town, but when she drew closer, Ida saw that the pram was full of stones. She heard a car in the distance: a good sign — there must be petrol again.

  The little junk shop on her street had reopened its doors; another good sign, she thought. Even if there was nothing to buy there.

  You really could have supposed that this was a perfectly ordinary day in a perfectly ordinary town. Perhaps she ought to persuade herself that this was actually the case. Perhaps that was her best chance of holding on to what remained of her wits; but the ghostly silence that hung over the city made her doubt this possibility. She stopped, breathed deeply, swallowed; her mouth was dry, her eyes burned, she was barely accustomed to daylight any more. In her apartment she kept the curtains closed, initially on account of the air raids, then out of habit; now she could no longer imagine it any other way.

  The last three times she hadn’t even gone down to the bunker when the air raid siren went off; she’d been unable to summon either the necessary strength or the necessary hope. Back in the first year of the blockade there had been old people who had stayed in their apartments despite the alarm. Ida used to get upset about these people; back then, she had still possessed the optimism and the memories necessary to want to survive. Now she herself was one of these people. Now she too was one of these mummies whom both life and the war passed by.

  On Nevsky Prospekt she stopped. She had caught sight of her reflection in the window of an old shop, long since closed. She had known this street so well, before, in her old life; now she couldn’t even begin to remember what shop had been here. Perhaps the upmarket fabric shop, or the bookshop … What was the point, anyway, in reconstructing something that would never be that way again?

  The question was banished by a vague memory: the memory of his face. Or what her memory had turned it into. Did he still look so touchingly young, in his dark-blue uniform with the white-gold braid on collar and sleeve? Did he still have that thick, wavy hair? Could he still laugh with such abandon? Utterly childlike, utterly free, utterly unforced, forgetting his habitual seriousness? Was he still so eager to please, to be acknowledged and accepted by those in power? What was he afraid of? Had she become the same indelible memory for him that he was for her?

  On her darkest days, Ida pictured Kostya’s death. Believed he was already dead. Wallowed in this fateful, ghastly certainty. She pictured terrible scenarios: Kostya, hit by a grenade, falling into the sea; Kostya drowning, or shot, wounded, bleeding to death on some distant shore.

  On better days she put him at the side of a young girl with big doe eyes and pigtails that hung halfway down her thighs. Pictured him teaching the girl, with the same devotion, all that she had once taught him.

  She turned into a side road. The street sign had disappeared long ago. She knew the street, but couldn’t remember its name. Suddenly she had to stop again, because she had heard something; a noise, a sound, something very familiar. It was music — a piano, definitely. A well-known melody that, like the street, Ida was unable to place. But she followed it: without thinking what she was doing, she hurried after the notes. The melody grew clearer and louder with every step.

  Where did she know this melody from? What was it? Ah, yes: in another life — or was it a dream — she had played the piano. She could feel the keys under her bare, transparent fingers, which had long since lost their rings: the ivory, the cool, beautiful material of her childhood grand piano.

  Once there had been all this, and much more. Now there was shattered debris, shards of glass, hunger, and the siren that announced the air raids.

  It was Grieg. Yes, Ida remembered now. Grieg. The Romantic. The romance of ruin, she thought. She kept following the music and came to an inner courtyard where an old house with broken windows had managed to withstand the bombs. A first-floor window was open; the piano music was coming from this apartment.

  Ida entered the dark stairwell and climbed the few steps to a wooden door that stood ajar. All this time her brain was trying without success to reconstruct the title of the piece. She knocked, but heard no footsteps; the piece continued uninterrupted. She peeped through the gap and stepped over the threshold.

  She found herself in a spacious hall, empty and damp, with grey, wet patches on the walls. She followed the Grieg and came to a room with a fox-coloured parquet floor and a bare mattress in one corner. At the window stood the piano: undamaged, beautiful, well tuned. A young girl was sitting at it, lost in the melody, playing the ‘Ballade for Piano in G Minor’ — yes, that was the name of the piece, she remembered now.

  The girl didn’t turn, didn’t look round. From behind, Ida guessed that she couldn’t be older than fifteen.

  ‘Excuse me — I heard you playing and I followed the music. You play beautifully.’

  Cautiously, Ida approached the pianist. The girl continued to play. She nodded her head almost imperceptibly.

  ‘An audience of one, at least. Come in, do come in. I’m afraid I don’t have a chair; you’ll have to stand. We burned all the furniture when it was so cold.’ The girl didn’t turn round; her fingers continued to dance across the keys without a single mistake. Ida sensed goose pimples creeping up her arms; it was disconcerting, as if her skin had forgotten how to feel. Carefully, Ida positioned herself at the piano, glanced at the girl’s face for the first time — and shrank back, holding her breath so as not to betray her shock. The girl’s eyes were missing. There were two dark hollows where her eyes should have been. But she was smiling.

  She was wearing a grey worker’s dress full of holes, and warm felt boots on her feet. Her thick, light-brown plait hung down her back.

  ‘I’m practising for my third young musicians’ competition. I was
supposed to travel to London, before …’ said the girl, her body swaying slightly to the music.

  ‘You’re going to be a pianist?’ asked Ida, still not quite over the shock.

  ‘I was supposed to become one, yes.’

  The girl stopped abruptly. Her fingers rested on the keys, suddenly quite stiff and without purpose.

  ‘You still will, I’m sure. If you’re practising in these conditions.’

  ‘I wasn’t able to practise for a long time. My mother wouldn’t let me, after …’

  ‘After …?’

  ‘It was because I was practising that I didn’t make it to the bunker in time. I was hit by a piece of shrapnel — here, you see …’ The girl turned her blind face towards Ida, as if she wouldn’t notice otherwise that her eyes were missing. ‘Now Mama is dead, and I can play again.’ The girl spoke with as little emphasis as if she were talking about the death of a pet.

  ‘And your father?’

  ‘He was killed. At Minsk. My brother’s at the front, too, but he’s alive. I know he is. Sergei’s still alive and he’ll come back, I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Definitely. Definitely.’ Ida noticed that her voice sounded tender, almost loving. ‘I like music. I used to think that I’d become a pianist, too.’

  ‘What stopped you? The war?’

  ‘Not quite. But something similar,’ said Ida, and laughed. Suddenly the girl got up from the stool and stood in front of her. She was tall and bony, but not undernourished. That was a good sign — a very good sign, in fact. The girl raised her hand.

  ‘May I?’