The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  Mariam’s family, who had come to Tbilisi for the engagement, glowed with pride all day long. It was already a miracle that their daughter had been granted a place to study medicine, and now she was getting engaged to a naval officer. Nothing now seemed to stand in the way of her extraordinary happiness.

  Stasia and Christine had also seemed bemused when Kostya broke the news to them. Stasia, with her characteristic passivity, kept out of her son’s private life; she gave him a little kiss on the cheek, which Kostya interpreted as her approval of his intentions. And Christine was sufficiently tactful not to express her doubts openly. The wedding was to take place the following summer.

  After the engagement party, Kostya left Tbilisi. He was going to spend two months in Moscow, where, he said, he wanted to sort out his future. Telegrams had started arriving for him; he’d sat hunched over them in the garden, deep in thought. If anyone asked about them he would get irritated and evade the question, saying that these were his private affairs.

  *

  Christine, meanwhile, received the letter she had secretly, fearfully, been waiting for, and opened it with trembling hands. There was no official stamp on the envelope. Would he want to see her? What price would he demand of her in return? Or did he still not have the courage to behold the work of art that Ramas, because of him, had drawn on the living canvas of her face? She extracted the single sheet of paper, smelled it. Did the paper smell of him? Would she recognise the smell? If so, how would it make her feel?

  But she felt nothing. There was just an infinite emptiness inside her. Not even anger, her one constant emotion in recent years. He wrote that, after much consideration, he had decided to help her, even though the boy’s file contained nothing concrete that suggested a satisfactory solution; still, he would see what could be done. And he was pleased to have received a message from her, even though it had only reached him months later. As she was aware, he was very busy, but he would always make time for her. The letter, which was unsigned, ended by conceding that he had not forgotten her.

  Of course he wasn’t prepared to see her. Of course that would have been asking too much of him — too much for his eyes, which he hid so well behind the round lenses of his glasses. All day long, Christine sat in her room, the letter on her knees, trying to imagine what it would be like if she were to meet him again somewhere, some day. Would she feel the same sense of shame, and, at the same time, this bitterness? Would she be able to face his passion with the same indifference as she had years ago, in another life?

  Christine sat down on the window seat and drank her cherry liqueur. Darkness had fallen; the streetlamps were being lit outside. She thought of his wife, the angelic Nina, whom she had seen only once, at the opera. Christine was still happily married to Ramas back then; back then, there was still no fear, no trembling at the unexpected calls, the Bugatti on the street corner, come to pick her up. Nina had been wearing an apricot-coloured dress and the melancholy expression of a lamb about to be slaughtered for gods it had no knowledge of and didn’t believe in. Nina had given her a slight, almost imperceptible nod, and Christine, smiling, had passed her by and walked on, past all the busybodies bad-mouthing the Little Big Man’s beautiful wife. How safe she had felt, arm-in-arm with Ramas — Ramas, who had escorted her safely to her box. Back then, she had felt pity for beautiful Nina, always surrounded by security men, and had questioned Ramas about her. Back then, she didn’t yet know that she would soon be the one deserving of pity. Had this shy and retiring woman, the most mysterious of all the Kremlin wives, already been suspicious that evening? Had she sensed that one day, on that very spot, during another performance, in the box where they were sitting, her husband would take Christine, with such brazen, brutal nonchalance; would make her his own, like a wild animal he had to tame? With the same neutral nonchalance as the many women who came before and after her?

  In the first years after Ramas’ death, she had often found herself thinking of the silent Nina. She couldn’t have said why, but Nina’s face often materialised before her during her stay in hospital. Again and again, she had asked herself why, of all the many beauties, the gentle, dreamy beauty of his wife was the one he seemed to need and desire the least. Unlike all the other Kremlin wives, Nina led a shadowy existence. She was never seen with her husband at an official reception, or accompanying him at a military parade. Very occasionally she would go with him to theatre or opera premieres, but for a long time she had not even done that.

  After her husband had consolidated his power and was finally summoned to Moscow, she followed him, spending most of her time living in her dacha while he resided alone in the magnificent villa on Triumfalnaya. People said she worked in a little chemistry laboratory; she had studied agricultural sciences. However, very few fellow workers had actually seen her. They said she was driven to work every day in a car with tinted windows, and after work it picked her up again. Patient Nina. Why was it that she couldn’t help thinking of her, even now, Christine wondered — and was unable to answer. Nina had borne her Little Big Man a son, had tolerated an army of other women in his rooms, never asked anything of him, never got involved, never put him in an unpleasant situation. How does it feel to be someone like that, Christine wondered. How does it feel to decide, yourself, not to want to know anything that could pull the ground from under your feet? Or did she really believe in the rightness of what her husband was doing? Did she believe in his magnificent work, his extraordinary sacrifices for the Soviet people?

  At the end of a long life, Brilka, when she gave her first and only interview at the age of eighty-six and was asked about her husband’s predatory infidelity, Nina was indignant. She replied, ‘He worked day and night; when would he have had the time to satisfy a whole legion of women?’

  Submissive to you? You’re out of your mind!

  I submit only to the will of the Lord.

  I want neither thrills nor pain,

  My husband — is a hangman, and his home — prison.

  ANNA AKHMATOVA

  Andro Eristavi returned to Tbilisi in the autumn of 1946. He was released without further explanation and put on a goods train to Moscow. There he was met by a couple of men from the NKVD — now the MVD — and taken to a police station, where it was made clear to him in no uncertain terms that he could hope for neither proper employment nor any kind of social integration. He was a parasite, and in future would be treated as such. He was to keep his mouth shut, live inconspicuously, think inconspicuously, never draw attention to himself, and content himself with employment in a kolchoz somewhere in the mountains. There was no chance of him obtaining the necessary registration certificate to live in Tbilisi. He should consider himself lucky to be alive; if he hadn’t had influential friends, he would have been hanged in a few months’ time — even a bullet was too good for scum like him.

  Right up to the last minute, Christine didn’t say a word about Andro’s release and return. She was also the one who picked him up from the bus station and took him to a little apartment in the new town. The house it was in was still under construction, meaning that it was completely empty; it belonged to one of Christine’s doctor friends, who had said she could use it for a few weeks.

  Andro looked worse than she had expected. Like a haggard old man, with cheekbones that stood out so sharply you could cut yourself on them.

  She disinfected his clothes, brought him new ones, washed him, shaved his lice-infested head and his beard, cooked him light, non-fatty meals. He didn’t speak much, but thanked her for every little thing, which drove Christine crazy. She asked him what he would like. He requested a few books, which she brought from home, and a little schnapps, which she also obtained for him. He spent his time reading or listening to the little radio she had bought him, waiting for her to come back and bring him something to eat.

  It was only when she judged that Andro was stable enough to cope with the impending meeting that she picked K
itty up from university and took her to the new town. Buildings were being constructed on every street corner now, mostly by prisoners-of-war.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ asked Kitty suspiciously when they were in the tram.

  ‘I have a little surprise for you. But I must ask you to control yourself as best you can,’ came the unexpected reply.

  After they had battled through the jungle of apartment blocks, all of which looked the same, Christine knocked at a rough wooden door on a half-finished staircase. There were no tears, no screaming: in fact, there was nothing, at all. There were two people — a young woman with dark, bobbed hair, in a green raincoat and knee-length boots, and a haggard, prematurely aged young man, stooped and short-sighted, staring into space, whose hands shook as if he had Parkinson’s disease. They stood there in front of one another. They didn’t touch. Eventually Christine’s voice wrenched them out of their daze and called them to the table she had just laid.

  ‘I’ve made chicken stew. I took a lot of trouble over it. So come, eat something. And there’s cherry liqueur.’

  Christine tried all evening to cheer them up a little. She chatted about the weather, about her work at the hospital and her unruly patients, but neither of them laughed, not even once, or said a word. Late that evening she picked up her handbag and left them alone together.

  *

  Kitty stayed in this apartment for the next fourteen days. What exactly she did during those days, I don’t know. Perhaps she nursed him, as Christine had before her, cooked for and washed him. Perhaps they just drank cherry liqueur in silence, or read each other the poems of Lord Byron, of which Andro is said to have been particularly fond. Perhaps Kitty tried to cheer him up, telling him all sorts of anecdotes, or perhaps she just lay beside him and held his trembling hand in hers. She brought him his old things, which she had kept safe: a whole tool-bag full, so that he could start woodcarving again.

  After these two weeks, Kitty went back home and took out her old guitar, which she had scarcely used before then and could only play badly. At first there was no music, no harmony, in the chords. She kept on trying until a simple but clear melody emerged from beneath her fingers. The next day she got herself a couple of music books and started to practise every day.

  *

  During that first meeting with Andro, it was immediately, searingly clear to Kitty that the days when wishes were flexible, pliable, were gone for good — buried on all the countless battlefields in the west and the east, the south and the north. She looked at Andro and saw a shadow who was unable to speak of the horror. In the first few days she had so hoped, had so wished, that he would ask her; that he would feel his way towards the unspeakable, towards her burning wound; but he didn’t, and she didn’t succeed in putting everything she had saved up, accumulated, into words. Like the rest of the family, the two of them were swallowed up by silence: silence consumed them, like a great whale in whose belly all of them, one after the other, had landed.

  She soon felt more miserable around him than without him. She could bear his forlornness, but not his absence, the fact that he no longer had anything to communicate to the world. Even his eyes seemed to have lost their radiance; their blue seemed dull and watery now, and his dreamy gaze was gone for good. The war had beaten, shot, obliterated the dreams from his body, from his head.

  She sensed the way he avoided the sight of her firm, well-rounded body, how he looked away whenever she drew near, how he resisted being touched by her, as if she contained explosives and he feared that her very first caress would blow him to pieces.

  Only once, in the depths of her despair, did she touch his forehead with her hand and press her lips firmly to his, leaving him no chance to evade her — but he did not return her kiss. He remained cold; his body betrayed no sign of desire. Ashamed, he rose and went into the kitchen, and Kitty tried to force herself to smile through her tears so he wouldn’t feel she thought him weak and incapable. Incapable of loving.

  Lying awake at night on the mattress, with him on the sofa just a few feet away, she sometimes felt an insatiable desire to leap up, throw water in his face, scream at him to wake up and help her; to tell him of the price she had paid for his dreams. But she knew that if she did she would pull the ground from under his feet once and for all.

  *

  When Kitty returned home, Stasia happily took over Andro’s care, and from then on Kitty stopped visiting him. Neither Stasia nor Christine questioned her about it. It was only weeks later, as she was returning home from a play, that she decided to pay him a spontaneous visit. She was wearing an elegant dark-blue dress with a plunging neckline.

  She regretted her decision the minute she entered the apartment. Andro greeted her more sullenly than usual, and when she took off her coat he abruptly turned his back, muttering to himself. She followed him into the cramped kitchenette, where he put some water on to boil.

  ‘I’ve brought you some of those sour barberry sweets you like so much,’ she said, trying too hard to sound friendly.

  ‘Will you stop it!’ he shouted suddenly, banging his fist on the edge of the table. ‘You can see that …’

  ‘What have I done? Why are you yelling at me?’

  ‘You come here, you pretend everything’s all fine and dandy, and every time you come your clothes get more outlandish, and the sweets get sweeter, and you expect me to —’

  ‘What, what do I expect? I don’t expect anything, I just want you to be all right.’

  ‘I can’t do it. Stop deceiving yourself. You’re so beautiful; I look at you, and it makes me want to weep. But I can’t bear this any more. Your being here makes it so blindingly obvious to me that I’ve fallen apart; I can’t stand it. I don’t have any strength left, I don’t even know how I’m supposed to get through the next day, let alone —’

  ‘But I don’t expect anything of you.’

  ‘Yes, you do. You expect me to give you hope. Sometimes I even ask myself whether it was the right thing to get me released.’

  ‘You are so ungrateful. That is so bloody unfair — I could kill you right now.’

  ‘So do it! Maybe then we’ll both be free.’

  Kitty froze. She staggered backwards. The bag of sweets slipped from her hand, and the contents rolled across the floor. They both looked down at the little sweets in their colourful wrappers, and the sight made them even more dejected. Everything about this felt wrong.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Don’t you love me any more?’

  ‘How am I supposed to still love you, how am I supposed to feel anything at all, when I’m not even a man any more?’

  ‘It was terrible for everyone. You should be happy that you’re alive.’

  ‘To be happy you must first be able to feel something.’

  ‘We all want you to —’

  ‘I don’t care what you all want. I’ve lost everything I had, can’t you understand that!’

  ‘So have I, you ungrateful man! Guess what — I’ve lost everything, too!’

  And just as Kitty was ready to shout out the unspeakable, Andro brushed past her and left the kitchen, saying, ‘I’m not a man any more. I’m not man enough to love you any more, Kitty. I don’t feel anything any more.’

  Kitty stood there, still staring at the brightly wrapped sweets, and suddenly felt the urge to laugh. She didn’t know why, but she had to keep her mouth pressed firmly shut so as not to burst out laughing. Well, don’t we just make a perfect couple, she thought. It seems he can no longer father children — and I can no longer have any. What a perfect, perfect couple, in a perfect, perfect world!

  But she had misunderstood him.

  And that night, as she sat alone on her bed and lit herself a cigarette cadged from her mother, words started running through her head, followed — accompanied — by a melody: What a perfect, p
erfect couple, in a perfect, perfect world, look at us, wouldn’t you say we’re perfect?

  By daybreak Kitty had composed her first song.

  She was humming it during one of her theatre company’s rehearsals when the director asked her to sing him her ‘little ditty’, as he called it. He found it enchanting, and immediately worked it into the play, in a kitsch love scene where Kitty, with her guitar around her neck and a sorrowful expression on her face, sang it with feeling while gazing adoringly at her leading man.

  And it’s true, Brilka: soon every happy, lovestruck couple in the city was singing her song; then all the unhappy ones, and the forsaken lovers. And when Kostya returned to wed Mariam after months away from home, he heard his sister’s voice on the radio.

  *

  Kostya had stayed in Moscow longer than planned. He appeared to be waiting for something big, something important, but he kept his worries and his hopes to himself. Not even Christine had any idea about the scheme her nephew was hatching.

  *

  Kitty’s song, so captivating in its artlessness, so memorable in its clarity, gained her national popularity overnight. People stopped to talk to her on the street; one of the theatres offered to schedule an evening of her songs. Kitty was overwhelmed by her unexpected success. She used the holidays to practise the guitar and write more songs, because it was embarrassing to admit in public that ‘A Perfect, Perfect World’ was her only song, born of her inability to say what she wanted to say. Now, though, she found the words she had spent so long searching for. They only came to her through the music. As if her language needed crutches to lean on. And again I find myself thinking of you, Brilka; you played me those songs on our car journey, and sang along. How your eyes sparkled when you sang for me! It was a real struggle for me not to show how moved I was, how deeply moved, not to let you see the emotion those lines of yours, sung with such enthusiasm, evoked in me. But there were so many other little marvels you revealed to me on our journey, Brilka, so many that if I were to start talking about them I would never stop, and our story would probably never end. But I have to share you with all the other people, because our story is also theirs, and theirs is also ours. And we haven’t got as far as us yet …