Stasia’s tone left no room for doubt. She seemed absolutely certain.
‘But of course there are dead with no graves!’
There was something leaden, something lifeless, in Kitty’s voice that made Stasia sit up and take notice. Timidly, she rose to her feet and went to her daughter. The abyss in Kitty frightened her; she didn’t trust herself to peer into it, she was afraid of losing her balance. She tried to take Kitty in her arms, but Kitty recoiled.
*
Konstantin Jashi survived. In the last days of fighting, he sustained a serious leg injury and had to have an operation. The clinics in Leningrad were full to overflowing, so he was flown out on an NKVD plane to a military hospital in Moscow. Far away from the shooting and grenades, well fed, and under a warm blanket, the stay in hospital must have seemed to him like a sort of paradise. He was given two weeks’ home leave, which he took, with some hesitation: it was akin to a medal of honour, as it was not generally permitted to Red Army soldiers. Someone must have put in a good word for him. Who could it be, Kostya wondered; but his deliberations did not supply an answer.
It was years since he had last been in his homeland. During the first two years of the war he had corresponded regularly and at length with his father and Giorgi Alania, his former roommate, but he only ever sent short telegrams to Tbilisi. He didn’t know how to put the things he had experienced into words that would be comprehensible to his aunt, his sister, his mother.
He had preferred to remain in a state in which he asked no questions and hoped for no answers, no meaning. He wanted to forget that anything else existed beyond the daily certainty of death. Things like grief, happiness, disappointment, hope, and, above all, intimacy. Happiness had been a sip of schnapps and a piece of black bread smeared with fat; happiness was the sacks of flour and tins of food they smuggled into Leningrad for months on end; happiness was ships unscathed; happiness was mere survival. And everything that had existed beyond this no longer mattered. It didn’t exist any more, and Kostya felt the hope of its return as a hindrance — dangerous, even, in certain circumstances.
Memories make the heart soft and transparent. You can’t shoot well with a transparent heart, Brilka: you miss your target, and soon become a target yourself.
*
It seemed an age before Stasia, who opened the door to her son when he arrived, finally took him in her arms. Her whole body was trembling, and she pressed his head to her neck so hard he almost suffocated. Stasia yelled for Christine, and her voice filled the house. Kostya staggered, but quickly regained his balance by leaning on the walking stick he was to rely on for three weeks after his operation. Christine appeared at the end of the long corridor. It was where she used to stand when he was little, waiting for him to dash up to her after school and fling his arms around her neck. He stared at the unveiled right half of her face. How beautiful she was, he thought; and at the same time her halved beauty made him infinitely sad: his heart contracted, and he felt his palms grow damp. Looking at her, he couldn’t help thinking of Ida.
Christine stopped in front of him and gazed at him, as if they had been writing love letters to one another all their lives and were meeting now for the first time.
‘Kostya, Konstantin, my beautiful Konstantin, you’re back, you’re here, with me!’ Stasia stepped back, allowed her younger sister to celebrate her symbiotic intimacy with her nephew, allowed her son to accept this intimacy, to garland himself with it, for everything about his body and his face suggested terrible hardship.
Later, when Kitty came home from the hospital and heard her brother’s voice in the kitchen, she stopped for a while in the corridor, pressing herself against the wall, taking deep breaths, trying to get her body under control; and before she burst into the kitchen she spent a few seconds practising her old, unbridled laugh, trying to remember what her voice had sounded like when she had been happy.
*
Unlike Stasia, Kostya had a lot to say. He described in unremitting detail his time in Sevastopol, the raid on Constanta, and, above all, what had happened at Lake Ladoga. He wolfed down everything that was put in front of him; his hunger seemed insatiable, and he drank the bitter chacha that loosened his tongue still more.
But Kitty noticed that the way he talked about all these things — the battles, the attacks, the bombs, the hunger, the harsh fight for survival — sounded artificial, almost dispassionate.
Christine and Stasia told him many things, too, but their stories were less tidy: they interrupted one another, argued about details that each remembered differently. When the conversation turned to Andro, Christine lowered her voice and told him what she knew, or rather, what she didn’t know: that it was assumed he had joined a partisan movement and was fighting on the side of the Wehrmacht. Kitty felt betrayed by Christine’s words, even though Christine was just reporting facts; she was also annoyed that Kostya had managed to draw Christine entirely into his orbit in the space of just a few hours. Andro’s story provoked a tirade of abuse from Kostya. He grew heated talking about this betrayal of the Motherland, and launched into a monologue about the importance of the correct ideology, about loyalty and fidelity, about the duties of every Soviet citizen, and repeated that he had always suspected Andro would go astray, that he would bring shame on the family.
Kitty didn’t dare intervene; she didn’t want to get into a fight with Kostya on his very first evening with them, disappointing her mother and aunt. She also knew that her arguments in support of Andro were too weak. Nonetheless, it was hard for her to see him portrayed so simply as a traitor to the Motherland. It wasn’t the truth. For the others, the easiest thing to do was to sacrifice him to his own mistakes.
‘Father’s dead, isn’t he?’
Kostya’s question came very suddenly, as unannounced as a summer storm. He had just been speaking of his experiences in Moscow. Christine bowed her head. Stasia cleared her throat briefly and scratched her forearm.
‘You should know … he’s missing, he’s just disappeared.’ Stasia tried to answer as casually as if she were talking about the weather.
‘Will you stop this!’ shouted Kitty.
‘He’s disappeared, we have no proof that he’s dead!’ Stasia sounded indignant, as if offended that her truth was being called into question.
‘He was last seen in the final days of Stalingrad, outside the German headquarters, just before it was blown up.’ Kitty was breathing fast.
‘And they haven’t found his body!’ Stasia remained stubborn, repeating it like a magic spell that would protect her from reality.
‘Tell her, Kostya — we have to have him declared dead, we can’t go on living like this,’ Kitty implored her brother.
‘I’ll go the commissariat myself tomorrow. They’ll give me more precise information,’ he answered calmly.
*
With the arrival of the summer heat the whole family set off for the town where Stasia and Christine were born. They stayed in the chocolate-maker’s old house, where Lida now lived alone in the half that was still hers. They visited their parents’ graves. They gazed at the gravestones, sat on the grass. They all repeated ‘Amen’ after Lida said a prayer for the dead. The very next day, Kostya commissioned a new gravestone engraved with the name ‘Simon Jashi’ and had it erected beside the graves of his grandparents and his mother’s twin sister. Stasia refused to accompany them to the graveyard to mourn her husband. She announced that she would only acknowledge her husband’s death when his bones lay beneath the gravestone.
In the little town that was once destined to become the Nice of the Caucasus, it seemed unimaginable that somewhere out there a cataclysmic war was raging. Everything appeared so peaceful, almost provocatively quiet.
Kitty and Kostya were bewildered when their mother borrowed a Kabardin and disappeared into the steppe. Christine, too, was bewildered, wandering the little streets and alleyways of the town
where once she had walked so proud and aloof. She stood for a long time in front of the barred doors and boarded-up windows where the chocolate factory used to be; where — it seemed like centuries ago — she had first met her husband. On her walks through the town, Kitty avoided the park with the green-painted benches. She avoided all the streets where she had walked with Andro, and the places where she had hidden from him in the hope that he would find her.
The evening before their departure, Kostya and Kitty walked again side by side through the crooked streets of the old town, stopped in front of the closed shops, argued over what used to be in this or that building. They bought candyfloss from an old woman on a street corner, and both nibbled on the sticky cloud. Kitty took Kostya’s arm; he kept stopping because of the pain in his leg.
‘Aren’t you afraid?’ she asked her brother suddenly.
‘What would I be afraid of?’
‘When you’re out there: that this could be the end? I mean really every second.’
‘Yes, sometimes.’
‘How can you stand it?’
‘I don’t think about it. I just try and do my duty.’
‘Which is to kill or be killed?’
‘Which is to make sure that as few of us as possible are killed. And as far as the enemy’s concerned: if you don’t kill them, they kill you. There’s no mercy. You don’t think about it.’
‘Aren’t they human beings?’
‘They’re sick fascists.’
‘And what are we? Sick communists?’
‘Only you could say a thing like that! Is that your boyfriend’s sick ideology?’
‘We grew up together, Kostya, all three of us. He was like a brother to you.’
‘No. A traitor cannot be my brother. He shouldn’t have done it.’
‘He just wanted to be free.’
‘Free? With the fascists? Are you serious? And you shouldn’t have got involved with him.’
‘We were engaged.’
‘You were engaged?’
‘Yes. And now I don’t even know if he’s alive.’
‘Grow up, Kitty. It’s high time. Engaged!’ Kostya shook his head vigorously.
‘The fact that I refuse to see this world with your eyes doesn’t mean that I don’t see it at all.’
‘Don’t cry over him, he’s not worth it. He’s deceived our family — the family that saved him.’
‘Saved? His mother was shot. What was her crime? Are you surprised he refused to accept this system as just? Wouldn’t you feel the same way if Deda or Christine or I —’
‘They’ll have had their reasons.’
‘How can you say such a thing? You know it’s not true. You know it’s not right.’
Kitty had stopped walking and was looking at her brother in total incomprehension.
‘The war won’t last forever. The Germans are finished. The whole world is against them. Afterwards, everything will get on the right track.’
‘People are waiting, you’re waiting, and nobody knows what’s coming.’
‘Even the USA is supporting us now. They’re supplying us with new tanks,’ Kostya continued, as if he hadn’t heard his sister’s objection. ‘We’re all fighting together now against the Germans.’
‘And you?’ They had stopped at a junction. The silence on the streets was almost ghostly. ‘What do you plan to do, afterwards?’
‘If I survive this, you mean? I’ll do what my duty requires of me.’
‘And what is your duty?’
‘To carry on working for the good of my country. It’s that simple, Kitty.’
‘But …’
‘But what? What do you think Papa gave his life for? Why do you think countless heroes have lost their lives?’
‘Papa lived for the military. You’re not him. He was never there; we missed him all the time. You, me, Deda. Do you want to live like that, too?’
‘What’s that supposed to mean? We missed him? How can you dare to question the path he took?’
‘What I’m questioning is the paths you and I are taking.’
‘You’d do better to see to it that you forget all this rotten ideology your boyfriend has filled your head with, as fast as possible. You should find yourself a real man!’
‘He has a name — his name is Andro! You won’t infect yourself by saying his name!’
Kitty flung the stick of candyfloss aside in fury and strode on ahead.
How did you serve the front?
POSTER SLOGAN
Some time after his deployment to Crimea, Andro Eristavi fetched up in a Georgian Legion combat battalion in Poland. As a radio operator in Lvov he was responsible for safeguarding rail services. Later, he was transferred to the division with the patriotic name ‘Queen Tamar’ and sent to France. During this time he learned German and French. In the Pyrenees, he was charged with decoding enemy communications. In the last year of the war, he was posted to Haarlem in the Netherlands, where he again worked as a radio operator in charge of railway security.
Unfortunately, I have little information about Andro’s state of mind at the time. I don’t know whether he realised while he was still in Crimea what it was he had got caught up in, or whether he regretted his decision; bit by bit his hopeless situation must gradually have become clear to him. He must have understood that Vienna was slipping further and further away as, at the same time, the possibility of returning to his homeland also faded. From 1944 onwards many Georgian Legion battalions began to desert, and the Wehrmacht disbanded the unit. The dream of a free Georgia had died long ago, and from this point on it was down to each individual to try to secure his own survival.
Andro didn’t desert: he stayed with the Queen Tamar. Quite simply, he could see no way out for himself — he knew of no alternative. Looking back, I think in the end it was this paralysis that saved his life. The staunch pacifist Andro Eristavi found himself on Europe’s last battlefield: he became one of the insurgents on the island of Texel.
*
Following the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in early 1940, this Dutch island in the North Sea became a German military base. The Queen Tamar Battalion was responsible for, among other things, protecting the Haarlem–Amsterdam railway. In early 1945, Andro received orders to go to Texel. There was a camp on the island where many Georgians who had been taken prisoner on the Eastern Front were being held; the Wehrmacht was now using them as auxiliaries. In the night of 5 April, an uprising was organised in the camp after news spread of a Wehrmacht order to send them back to the front. The Georgians managed to gain control of the whole island, with the exception of the naval batteries. Even after the German capitulation in Denmark and the Netherlands, the bitter fight for the island continued.
I don’t know when exactly Andro reached the decision to join the uprising, but I presume he saw this rebellion as his only chance of making amends for his disastrous past and ensuring his own survival.
Andro hid in the fields for days. He saw the farms go up in flames. Heard screams, a lot of gunfire. Heard the battleships’ horns. Heard sentences in Georgian and German; his brain could no longer keep the two languages apart. It no longer made any difference who was killed and who survived. More shots. Which side were they coming from? Where should he run? And what should he shoot at? His rifle felt so heavy; it would take such effort to pull the trigger. He saw something lying in the field, not far away. Andro crawled in its direction, then ducked down: more gunfire, very close this time. He crawled on, belly to the ground. He could smell the spring.
It was a man. A soldier in a Wehrmacht uniform. He had lost his helmet somewhere. Was he still breathing? No. His face was already discoloured. How old might he be? The German rifle lay beside him like a faithful friend. His leg was twisted; he was lying in an unnatural position. Andro lay down beside the dead soldier and stared up at the sky. So
ft white clouds were dancing around each other, dispersed by a gentle wind.
Shots.
One, two, three.
Andro whispered to himself: Maman. But his mother didn’t answer. Nor did the sky, and nor did the dead soldier.
Four, five, six.
He heard shots, again and again.
Seven, eight, nine.
He watched a cloud fly away. He smiled. He counted and waited for a reply. Or for death. Perhaps he should envy the German soldier: he couldn’t hear the shooting now, it was all behind him. He had nothing more to do with any of it.
Ten. And another shot. Then a deep, spreading silence that was far from reassuring.
Two weeks after the end of the Second World War, Canadian troops put a stop to the bloodshed on the island, which came to be referred to as Europe’s last battlefield.
Andro Eristavi survived, along with two hundred and thirty other Georgians.
Andro remained on the island until the summer, living with five other Georgian survivors on one of the burnt-out farmsteads.
He never made it to Vienna.
If one man dies, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.
THE GENERALISSIMUS
Kostya spent the last months of the war in the Baltic Sea, where he and his fleet division safeguarded transatlantic convoys bringing in weapons. He lost more than half the men with whom he had joined the Navy, and it was only by a miracle that he himself survived a bomb blast in the Curonian Lagoon in the autumn of 1944.
Stasia went back and forth between Christine and her daughter in the orphaned house on Vera Hill, and Lida in the divided house of her childhood, where they planted vegetables and kept chickens: food rations in the city were getting ever smaller and there was less and less to be had, even on the black market. In May 1944, Kitty Jashi registered with the Rustaveli Theatre Institute in Tbilisi, which had just started teaching again, to take the entrance examination for the acting course. In September of that year, she started training to be an actress. Neither Stasia nor Christine was keen on Kitty’s new choice of career, but they did not oppose her decision.
The Eighth Life Page 31