‘So what are you trying to tell me?’
‘That I can’t cover for you forever. That I’ll be putting myself in danger if I go on doing it, and others with me. I have a position of some responsibility now.’
‘Yes, we’ve all gathered that. Congratulations!’
‘Spare me your sarcasm. I’m trying to help you.’
‘You’ve already helped me, thanks.’
‘You used to be less ungrateful.’
‘Ah well, times change. So do people, by the way. I’ve written to Mariam, many times, but I haven’t received a single reply. Apparently she’s banned from corresponding.’
‘I didn’t summon you here to talk to you about Mariam. We’re talking about you and your future, Kitty.’
‘Do I still have one? I didn’t realise.’
‘This is serious, damn it.’
For the first time, he looked up from his trousers and turned his head towards Kitty.
‘I look at you and I don’t know who’s standing in front of me any more. I don’t know you. I don’t know who you are,’ said Kitty, lost in thought, as if she hadn’t heard him.
‘Don’t change the subject. It’s important that we work together to find a solution.’
‘Together? When did we ever do anything together?’
‘You’re being impossible, as always.’
‘Really? And what should I do, in your opinion? Run away? Hide? In the forest?’
‘Well, this is what happens when you get mixed up with deserters and traitors.’
‘I despise you.’
‘Fine. I’ll just have to live with that. Listen: I will help you one more time, one last time, and then I want you to stay out of my life.’
‘I’ll be very happy to do that, Kostya, even without your help.’
Carefully, he set the iron aside, smoothed the trouser-legs with his hand, and stepped towards his sister. Then, lowering his voice, he said: ‘As far as I recall, you had an offer to perform a song recital. You’re sure to get another of these, and you will accept. Later there’ll be an invitation to go on a tour, of the Soviet Union, perhaps; perhaps even to one of our sister states. Let’s say Eastern Europe. Let’s say Prague. You will stay there. You’ll be provided with papers. You’ll be looked after. There you’ll receive further instructions, and as soon as it’s possible you will leave Prague for the West. I don’t have the precise destination yet. You will not contact us. If necessary, I will find you. But a friend of mine will look after you.’
Kitty slid off the window seat and walked up to her brother. She smelled the sharp scent of his eau de Cologne, she breathed it in, she put out a hand to touch his face.
‘What are you talking about?’ she whispered.
‘There’s no other way. Believe me.’
‘And what if I say no?’
‘You don’t want to put your friend Andro in danger, do you?’
‘What’s he got to do with it? Why Andro?’
‘He may have been reprieved, but he’s still a traitor.’
‘Kostya …!’
‘You have no choice. You wanted your punishment. Now you’ve got it.’
For a moment they were silent. Tentatively, she laid her hand on his cheek. She wanted to touch him; she wanted to know what he felt like. It clearly made him uncomfortable, but he kept still and didn’t resist her caress.
‘Kostya, where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do there?’ she asked, in a voice of abject despair.
‘Didn’t the two of you rave about the West all the time, about Vienna and Paris?’
‘But there is no two of us any more.’
‘But there is you.’
‘I don’t believe you, I don’t believe you really mean it.’ Shocked, she withdrew her hand, as if she had just felt his innermost self in his face.
‘You drove my fiancée to commit murder. You. Not me, Kitty.’
‘The fiancée you betrayed with a child killer.’
‘Having an affair is a lesser crime than murder, though, don’t you think?’
Kitty stared and stared at him in the hope of seeing something familiar: she stared at him until she couldn’t see anything any more.
*
The death sentence was abolished in the Soviet Union in 1947. It was reintroduced in 1950, as if those in power had been frightened by their rash decision and had quickly reversed it. Mariam was one of the first to fall victim to the law when it was reintroduced. As was customary with traitors, deserters, and dangerous criminals, her family was sent the bill for the bullet they used to shoot her in the back of the head.
The illusion was broken and the people disintegrated into atoms.
ANDREI SAKHAROV
Andro Eristavi was working in the metal factory in Rustavi, a nearby industrial town. Because he couldn’t get a registration certificate, he had to move on every month, staying in various different barracks and rooms before finally ending up at Christine’s house again, even though he had firmly resolved not to go back there. He had no choice.
He left the house early in the morning, came home late at night, and no one noticed when he stayed in his attic room all day on Sundays. His presence was without sound and without smell. He ate little, but thanked them politely, like a well-behaved child, after every meal they put in front of him. The only things he consumed in abundance were Christine’s liqueurs and the homemade schnapps he bought from the factory workers. He never participated in family conversation, and when he sat with Christine or Stasia in the garden he would carve little figures out of wood. They weren’t angels any more, though, but strange creatures with outsized heads and bellies that no one really wanted to put on their shelf or mantlepiece.
At first, Kitty had fiercely opposed his presence in the house. Eventually she had had to relent, with a sour face, when she realised he had no option but to move into Christine’s attic room. His silent, passive manner aggravated her, goaded her into making barbed and cynical remarks. When she secretly observed this man who was now no more than a shadow, something inside her contracted, causing her almost physical pain.
One morning, she came across him sitting on his own in the garden. Christine and Stasia had gone out, and he shouldn’t really have been home from the factory yet. But there he sat, wrapping a bandage round his wrist, a bottle of schnapps placed squarely on the table in front of him. Blood-soaked cotton wool lay on his knees. Apparently he had cut himself carving.
‘Hello, Andro,’ she said, sitting down opposite him. ‘Shall I help you?’
‘I don’t know … Yes, maybe.’
She fetched fresh cotton wool and some lint from the house, moistened the cotton wool with schnapps, and dabbed carefully at his wound. His expression didn’t change; if it hurt, he wasn’t letting it show.
‘What happened?’
‘Cut myself.’
‘But how?’
‘My hands tremble sometimes.’
‘Nearly done. I’ll tie the bandage a bit tighter. Why are you home already?’
‘They informed me today that I can’t work there any longer. A letter came from the commissariat. I’m being sent to the mountains. To some kolchoz or other.
‘I don’t believe it! Those bastards.’
‘I don’t care. Things can’t get any worse. At least up there I’ll have my own four walls. And the mountains …’
‘You were never a big nature lover.’
‘Will you have a drink with me?’
‘Yes, why not. I’ll fetch a glass.’
‘No, stay there. I’ll fetch you one.’
He quickly returned and poured her some of the clear liquid. Kitty shuddered at the thought of the bitter taste, but she didn’t want to disappoint him by rejecting one of his rare invitations. She noticed his smell, the smell of tiredness and drunke
nness mixed with the sharp tang of blood: this smell no longer had anything in common with the scent she had breathed in from his skin that night in the Botanical Garden and had held in her memory throughout all the years of the war.
‘You’re unhappy,’ he stated matter-of-factly, raising his glass.
‘You’ve never asked me about it.’
‘What good would it do? I can’t change anything anyway. It’s like I’m an invalid. I can’t do anything, I’m not allowed to do anything. The way they look at me in the factory sometimes … In their eyes, I’m scum.’
‘Yet again, you’re feeling sorry for yourself.’
‘So what? Don’t I have a right to? Cheers!’
‘Oh, Andro …’
‘Stop giving me those meaningful sighs. Is it something to do with Mariam?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell you. He’d … Forget it.’
She downed the bitter drink in one gulp. Her whole throat burned, but she didn’t let it show.
‘I wish you’d stayed with me,’ she said, holding her glass out for him to refill.
Two doves settled on the fig tree. She wanted to touch Andro, to anaesthetise her pain by being near him, but she couldn’t. She didn’t move. There they sat again, side by side, mute, trapped by their own impotence, just as they had back then, after his return, in the half-finished apartment in the New Town.
‘Do you know why we’re a threat, in their eyes?’ Andro began. ‘Why they banish us, forbid us to have contact with other people, why they want to get rid of us? Because we understand — because we’ve seen it all with our own eyes! We’re the ones who’ve survived; we’ve come back, and they know we can’t go on living inside the lie, and they don’t know what to do with us. We’re too much for them. They want us to forget everything, they want us not to remember all the things we’ve seen, but they know it won’t be possible. Things they’ve kept from us all these years, and will go on keeping from us. Things that are beautiful. Those of us who’ve crossed the border understand what a shithole we all come from, how we’ve been lied to and abused. Now lots of these men are back again, in this emptiness, this darkness, and they have to start singing the praises of our state again. How do you bear that? How do you live with it? And the worst thing about it is not that this bloody war has turned us into cripples, taken away our friends, destroyed our lives, but that the war has actually legitimised the whole thing. Now they say: “Look, our great Leader led us to victory, we did it, we defeated the fascists, we survived. It was right, all of it, the path that brought us here.” They say it was necessary, the sacrifices we had to make — yes: that it was necessary. And it’s so horrifically stupid, so unfair.’
For the first time, Andro talked about the war and the images that refused to let him go. He talked about his time in Crimea, about his hopes, about the Georgian Legion, about the letters he wrote to her and then destroyed. He talked about Texel.
Kitty listened, spellbound. It was too late to cry, and there was nothing left to laugh about. She listened attentively, grateful that he was letting her share his memories; and she struggled with herself, suppressing her desire to unlock her own chamber of memories and release her nightmares.
‘What exactly did you do?’ he asked her suddenly, out of nowhere. He looked her in the eye. Normally, he couldn’t bear to hold her gaze, couldn’t bear her eyes demanding something of him, but this time he looked straight at her.
‘I tried to put something right.’
‘Is it something you’ll be able to live with, Kitty?’
‘I think her death doesn’t even begin to match the death she made me die. Perhaps I’ll be able to tell you one day. Perhaps. But not now. Not yet.’
That night, Kitty crept into Andro’s room and lay down beside him. He woke with a start and hastily tried to get up, but she clung to his body with all her might, pressed herself against him, held him tight, waited until his muscles relaxed, until the fear left his skin, until he no longer had the strength to push her away. Then she laid her head on his chest and ran her hand over his body, feeling the unfamiliar bumps, the scars, the strangeness of him.
He felt so hard, so impenetrable, but she didn’t want to give up so easily this time. She wanted to rediscover the familiar within this strangeness. She wanted to find the traces of Andro, her lover, the father of her son. Because he must still be there; that afternoon in the garden, listening to him speak so openly, she had believed it, had seen in those dull, clouded eyes the clear blue of long ago. She gently stroked his skin, kissed him hesitantly on the lips. She ran a tentative hand over his bald skull; this was the hardest thing for her to do, because she so longed for his curls, for the old days.
His body remained tense, but he didn’t push her away, didn’t look at her scornfully, didn’t laugh at her hope, allowed her to search for the old days. She stroked his body until it softened, and he placed his hand uncertainly on her scars. The second person after Mariam to touch her there.
With her body, she gave him the gift of forgetfulness and herself the gift of remembrance. But they would never make it anywhere, never feel they had arrived. They would sense each other, but would never get past the barriers; they would find no relief. They knew this. And they didn’t hope for it from each other. It was enough to be able to succumb to an illusion for just one night.
‘I may be going away soon,’ Kitty murmured into the dark.
‘Where? What do you mean, going away?’
‘I may have to.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘That’s how Kostya wants it.’
‘Tell me. Tell me everything.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because your hands tremble and your heart is full of holes.’
Two weeks later, Andro Eristavi left Tbilisi. He was sent to a mountain village in Racha, where he was assigned to the local kolchoz.
*
Kitty Jashi finished her studies, and, as her brother had predicted, she toured various Caucasian cities, performing her songs in youth clubs and arts centres. The idea that she might have to leave her homeland one day still seemed unreal to her. She comforted herself with the belief that Kostya had been making empty threats, hoped she had avoided the banishment he had warned her of, hoped that other ways had been found to ensure that her file remained under lock and key. Soon she would get a permanent contract from a provincial theatre, and would play all the Desdemonas, Julias, Mashas, who would distract her from herself until she disappeared completely behind the characters.
But it was not to be. In the spring of 1950, she received a telegram from Kostya informing her of Mariam’s death. Kitty became so hysterical at the news that Stasia had to slap her several times to put a stop to her ear-splitting screams. Kitty kept repeating the same question: But how can it be? How can it be? How can it be? How can it be …
After that, Kitty knew she would not be able to stay.
*
The same day — at least, in my imagination it was the same day he sent his telegram to Kitty — her brother opened a letter from Giorgi Alania. He knew that his best friend was due to leave the country in the coming weeks, and would finally be taking up the post in London for which he had been groomed for years. Kostya was hoping for a sentimental but cheerful letter of goodbye. But the letter he held in his hands was a different one. In the cold light of the room, between the portraits of Marx and Engels, the busts of Lenin and the Generalissimus, he decided that he would never allow himself to read lines like these again. Never again would he put himself in a situation where he might have to bear such pain.
Ida was dead. This, no more and no less, was what this brief letter said. He had lost the woman for whom, if there had still been any hope for her at all, he would have endured the hunger, the cold, the shooting, the bombs, all of it, all over again. If he hadn’t had to read that this woman
, whose loss now killed him more definitively than death could ever have done, had not boarded any of the trucks that he, with such effort, such labour, such anxiety, had sent into the city. No: she was dead, and he had lost her. Because of a parade. He had gone to the parade, had not taken her premonition seriously. He had not finished loving her. His naive desire to be a hero. A hero for whom a forty-year-old Jew with rings on her fingers and melancholy eyes would not have been a suitable partner.
He should not have gone to see Mariam in that cell, and he should never have lied to her, should never have told her that Alla had been only a little, insignificant affair, that Alla had meant nothing to him. But he had said it, so that she would cover for his sister, a woman who viewed the world with radical indifference. He had sent her to her death, promising her that by forfeiting her own life she could attain divine power and save another person’s life. But this power did not exist. He did not have this power. Just as Mariam didn’t. He hadn’t known who Alla was and what she had done. He hadn’t known about the path Mariam and Kitty had walked together. But he could have done. He could have known so much more.
With Ida, Mariam also died. And with Mariam, his sister also died. At least, she was dead to him. And Alla, with her blood-red lips, died, too, as did the possibility of making amends. Hunched over the lines his friend had written, Kostya Jashi understood what it was to lose. He had lost. He was fatally wounded, but his death throes would last a lifetime. For this war was not a war against enemies; it was a war he had waged against the people he loved.
*
Kostya ran out of the building. The sky was overcast and sulphurous. The sea reflected the ships anchored in the distance. It was cold; the air was piercing, icy. He ran down to the quay, down the long jetty. He had come out without his coat, but he didn’t feel the cold any more. He was still holding the letter in his hand; it burned his skin. Somewhere a freighter sounded its horn.
He ran alongside the sea. The sea, which carried the winter within it, and somewhere, in the distance, a door, a door to the sky. Perhaps he could swim out to this door; perhaps he would manage to reach it. Perhaps there was a way to get back to that shadowy room on Vasilievsky Island and find Ida there.
The Eighth Life Page 39