Only the powerful and the beautiful were here. The most powerful and the most beautiful. Men who for years had done nothing but play at being gods, and women who spent their lives in a state of constant, self-absorbed exhilaration. The best singers from the National Opera House performed arias, because the host loved grandeur and opulence, he loved the monumental — yes, he loved beauty.
Christine didn’t let him out of her sight all evening. The Little Big Man, at the heart of his marble palace, drinking champagne, talking animatedly to his guests, listening, entranced, to the singers and to the chamber orchestra which, terrified of making a mistake, gave a truly first-rate performance. She watched him dispense compliments, carelessly brushing countless bare shoulders and arms as he passed, hips and breasts draped in light, floating material; making witty jokes, sparkling amid this spectacle of horror.
Decades later, Brilka, when digging up part of the garden, the human rights organisation then resident in the building — let’s call that an irony of fate! — would come across human remains, and this discovery would lead to a lengthy debate in Georgian society over what should be done with the house. Some people demanded that the municipal government demolish it, raze it, erase from the collective memory all the horrors — whatever they may have been — that had taken place within these walls. Others wanted to preserve this architectural marvel; some just shrugged their shoulders, unable to come up with a solution. Nobody inquired about the dead; nobody tried to trace them.
Sing not, my love, sad Georgia’s songs,
For they recall to me once more
A place for which the heart still longs,
Another life, a distant shore.
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Christine joined the ranks of the elegant ladies, who were all listening to the sounds of the orchestra and looking very moved by them, and who pinched each other’s elbows as soon as Christine arrived.
The Little Big Man raised his hairless head, pressed his round glasses more firmly onto his mole-like eyes, and stood motionless, as a pale woman and a short, fat man in a green suit launched into ‘O soave fanciulla’ from La Bohème. His eyes kept meeting Christine’s across the room, across the many shoulders, necks, heads, arms, mouths, and glances. As the soprano responded to the tenor’s declaration of love with ‘Ah, tu sol comandi, amor!’, he walked up to her and stood by her side, and that was when she knew she would win. Tonight, she would win. She towered over him by almost a head — she and her body that she flaunted so openly, a body that was not disfigured, that the acid had spared. As if by accident, he touched her shoulder with his.
The singers’ voices united in harmony, soft as butter, and he whispered in her ear in his sticky, soft, West Georgian dialect, ‘Stay here, stay until they’ve all gone. You are so stunningly beautiful.’ And she nodded, turning her head slightly away from him.
The exhilarating atmosphere was tremendously seductive; everyone loved to lose themselves in it. And at this exclusive ball, Christine sat in majesty on the high throne of fearlessness. She had already lost everything; there was nothing left for her to lose. She didn’t need to contort herself, didn’t need to hide anything, as the other guests did; didn’t need to be loved and accepted by them. She triumphed over those who envied her, over their fearful dependency, over their burning desire to be counted among the vassals of their host.
Again and again, she slipped her hand into her handbag and felt for the slabs of dark chocolate, the little bottles of spices.
She had never believed her sister; she didn’t believe in curses, or gods, not any more: the red star had supplanted all gods long ago. But for this one night, she wanted to believe in them again. She was hoping for their support. For this one night, she would borrow her sister’s belief. She would believe that the black temptation her father had created possessed the power ascribed to it by Stasia. That these ingredients in her handbag could be the source of the sweetest revenge. She would believe in it, just for tonight.
Long after midnight, the room began to empty. He commanded the exhausted musicians to play a waltz just for the two of them, and with impeccable manners he asked Christine to dance. He danced with her slowly, out of time, wearied by all the golden champagne, but with great devotion. It occurred to her that she had never danced with him before. Yet how often she had danced with Ramas. Perhaps this time she would manage to close her eyes and imagine her husband leading her across this room, so proud to be holding his Christine in his arms. So happy.
She put her arm around his narrow shoulders. She accepted that for one night she was mistress of this cruel world. One of those countless women who liked to let themselves be dazzled and exhilarated by the sheen of ignorance, of repression, of obliviousness, rejecting all responsibility for tomorrow because their purpose in this world was pleasure and delight, to arouse male passions, to love and be loved.
*
I always imagine them, after this, going up the wide marble staircase to his private chambers, entering the enormous bedroom that Christine had had to enter so often before, in her previous life. I imagine that she was the one who stopped in front of him and began to take off her clothes; imagine her undoing the button at the back of her neck with a single flick of her hand, the soft fabric falling to the ground; imagine her making herself indispensable to him.
Satisfaction was what she felt at that moment: the satisfaction of suspending time for a few hours, the time between the present and the past. Of disrupting it, letting it slip completely out of joint. Not so that she could be young again, and beautiful, with a whole face instead of half of one, but because for a fraction of a second it felt as if Ramas were still alive. If she was sleeping with him, if she had to sleep with him, if she was here, in this room, on this bed, she could imagine that afterwards she would drive home and wait there for her husband. Her husband, who knew everything, who had understood everything long ago, even the future.
I always imagine, Brilka, that she was prepared to take this man in her arms over and over again in order to give herself the gift of this one lie. Anything was better than Ramas’ death. Perhaps tonight she would manage not to think of her husband’s body beneath the sheet, the husband for whom she had not been able to weep because she had had no face with which to do so.
He leaned over and kissed her neck. Her unblemished neck.
She sensed in herself a strange, alarming lack of inhibition, as if she had taken off a corset for the first time in many, many years. A corset of nightmares. She lay down on the bed. Her body naked, her face half veiled. He bent over her; she removed his pince-nez, stared into his eyes, and pressed her lips to his. Hard, harder, she would give him everything, everything, so that in her thoughts she could, just once, bring Ramas back to life; so that in her imagination she could, just once, have a whole face again, not a monstrous cratered landscape. Beside the bed was a framed photograph of his wife: soft, silent Nina. Christine banished the question of how much self-hatred one person could take, and clasped her arms around him.
Yes, I imagine how effortlessly she faked passion for him in order to reclaim her past. How she remembered Ramas; how she believed — yes, Brilka, it is that macabre — that she could be close to her husband again by being with his murderer. How she took control, took the lead in this game he had mastered so well. I imagine him gazing on her sundered beauty, growing intoxicated on it again and again. Imagine the barbed wire around her heart slowly loosening until she believed she had cut through reality and entered the realm of ghosts.
And then I see her rise up above him, like an ancient goddess appearing in order to dispense mercy or to condemn. In my mind’s eye, I see her look at him, euphoric at the thought of what is to come, making him uncertain as to what that look might mean. See her sit up and slowly, with deliberate, controlled, very precise movements, remove her mask. Unveil her face. Her moonstruck beauty and her unbearable ugliness. Possibly feeling pleasur
e at being able to reveal to the man who had caused it the damage from which he had fled so many years ago.
He had wanted to look at her back then, that New Year’s Eve; he couldn’t abide her mask. Now he had no choice: the damage had become part of her face, he couldn’t now remove the rough, maltreated visage, and for the first time in her life she felt a cruel gratitude that the nightmare was recorded in her face.
She let him look.
‘I have a request,’ she said.
‘Anything you want,’ he said, and looked away.
‘I’ve brought something for you. I just have to prepare it. I’d like to thank you. For Andro. I’ll go down to the kitchen, then I’ll bring you my surprise. And I want you to taste it. I’ll taste it, too,’ she added, so as not to arouse his suspicion.
He nodded, relieved that she was going to leave the room, that he would no longer be forced to endure the sight of her corroded features.
She went downstairs, naked as she was, as God and the Little Big Man had made her, and prepared the hot chocolate.
She served the black, sinful concoction with the magical fragrance on a silver tray. She sat beside him on the bed, her right side turned towards him so as not to spoil his appetite, and thrust her finger into the thick, sticky mass. Then she licked off the chocolate. Fascinated, he brought his open mouth towards her and waited for her to feed him from her finger. Patiently, with great satisfaction, she initiated him in her father’s secret. He devoured the chocolate; he wolfed it down.
*
At the Central Committee meeting on 26 June 1953, the day my mother came into the world, the Little Big Man was arrested. This was the culmination of a conspiracy by the other nine members of the Politburo, headed by Nikita Khrushchev.
The Little Big Man had come back from summer manoeuvres in Smolensk, where they had sent him to gain time while they meticulously planned his disempowerment. The meeting began in the conference room, in the Little Big Man’s presence. One hour later, five armed men from a special division entered the room. Meanwhile, seventeen members of the MVD, the Little Big Man’s vassals, were sitting in an antechamber with not the slightest inkling of what was happening behind closed doors.
‘He is to be arrested in the name of the law,’ declared Malenkov, and weapons were drawn. The same Malenkov who, like the Little Big Man, had been one of the Generalissimus’ closest confidants; who had an estimated 150,000 people killed over the thirty years of his activities in Armenia and Belarus; the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, nicknamed ‘Malania’ on account of his wide hips and squeaky voice; a man of whom the Little Big Man was supposed to have said, ‘If the Leader gives an order for one person to be killed, Malenkov kills a thousand.’
This Malania, this caricature of a ringleader, now stood alongside Khrushchev, in front of him — the most feared man in the whole Soviet Union, the man the Leader himself had called ‘our Himmler’ — ordering guns to be levelled at him! In the Little Big Man’s inside pocket was a crumpled piece of paper with the word ‘Alarm’ written on it, over and over again. It seems that he’d suspected something was up before the meeting, but had had no opportunity to pass the paper to his guards.
On the night of 26 June, the Little Big Man was secretly smuggled out of the Kremlin in the back of an SIS-110 and taken to an interrogation facility. The interrogation continued for six months; he confessed to little, but wrote numerous letters of pardon or accusation to various Central Committee members, such that in the end he was even banned from writing and corresponding from prison.
For the first time, his melancholy wife, Nina, grew active. She appealed to one of her husband’s colleagues and wrote a letter to Malania. She was sure, she wrote, that this must be a misunderstanding; she believed in her husband, believed that he was a true communist who had always acted in the interests of the Motherland, Lenin’s legacy, and the great Generalissimus; finally she requested that, if he had indeed committed some crime of which he had been unaware, she, too, should be held fully responsible. The Central Committee members were impressed by such loyalty; particularly those among them who had denied their own wives, brothers, parents, and friends at their Leader’s behest and had them arrested. In December 1953, a secret trial was held: the death sentence was pronounced, and apparently carried out the same day. He was shot. The body was burned. Nina’s wish was disregarded; she was left alive. She was to be granted many more years in which to preserve her husband’s memory and maintain her blind fidelity.
The trial records are preserved in forty volumes. The indictment includes accusations ranging from unlawful persecution, arrests, and torture, to rapes, misuse of office, poisoning, and shootings. Yet the Little Big Man pleaded ‘Not guilty’ right up to the day of his execution.
*
Once the great power struggle had been won, and Malania too was swept aside, the Generalissimus’ great empire passed into the hands of a peasant boy from Kalinovka named Khrushchev, who had been to school for all of two years before his father declared that all the boy needed to be able to do was count to thirty, as he’d never earn more than thirty roubles anyway. So far, Khruschev’s socialist career had been an enviable one. As early as 1937, he had written to the Generalissimus to say that he had personally identified 8,500 enemies of the system who, in his eyes, deserved to die; which was why ‘our hand must not tremble, we must march across the corpses of the enemy for the good of the people’. For this, he was rewarded. Very generously. And now here he was, where his father would never have dreamed it possible for him to be. The peasant boy from Kalinovka who was to admit, shortly before the end of his life, ‘My arms are up to the elbows in blood.’
he left many heirs
behind on this globe.
I fancy
there’s a telephone in that coffin:
the Generalissimus
sends his instructions.
From that coffin where else does the cable go!
No, he has not given up.
He thinks he can
cheat death.
YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO
Kitty sat in Amy’s kitchen hunched over the Evening Standard, which had a photograph of the Little Big Man splashed across the front page. Her body was racked by violent sobs. It was the third year in which she had heard nothing from her family, and her fearful longing had by now already assumed monstrous proportions. However, this was also the day when she admitted to herself that she loved a woman. Following her morning argument with Amy, Fred Lieblich had once again moved out of the house and retired to her studio on the pretext that she was in a productive phase.
Kitty had been avoiding Fred ever since their fateful encounter. Overcome with remorse and horror that she had let herself be seduced by a woman, she started spending more time at the jazz club. She would stay later than usual, sitting at people’s tables after her performance and drinking a lot of whisky. She allowed customers to engage her in conversation, and played the part of the Soviet sensation to the hilt. She played up to people’s fears and projections, and accentuated them with more horrific details. Little by little, she even began to enjoy it. Her imagination spat out ever wilder and more colourful tales of her communist past; scenarios became increasingly exciting and dangerous.
But although she let a few men buy her drinks, give her presents, and persuade her to accompany them to the cinema, and although she even permitted a few kisses on Amy’s doorstep, none of it helped. She had now mastered the English language, but that didn’t make any difference, either: the fact was that she had nothing to say to the people she met, nor did she wish to say anything to them. The only person she longed to hear speak was her anonymous friend. The only woman she wanted to speak to was Fred.
And whenever she couldn’t help overhearing the two women giggling and teasing each other in the dining room, she was overcome by piercing jealousy; she wanted to run down and seize Fred, dra
g her up to her room, and tell her everything that was going through her mind. But she was too ashamed of her yearning, and instead would bury her face in the pillow, deep enough for their voices and laughter not to reach her.
One day, she plucked up all her courage, took the Underground to Soho, and looked for the address she had surreptitiously copied from Amy’s address book. She secretly hoped that she wouldn’t be in, that she wouldn’t open the door to her, that she would have a visitor. But she was in, opened the door on the very first ring, and immediately invited Kitty in. She was alone. Kitty went on standing outside, as if she feared she would never find her way out again.
Fred stood in the doorway, observing her unexpected guest, tilting her head slightly. Then a smile spread across her lips.
‘Please stop doing that.’
‘What?’
‘You always look at me like that, so … Especially when Amy’s there.’
‘And when she isn’t there?’
Fred seemed to find her embarrassment amusing. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall.
‘So you absolutely don’t want to come in? Or take off your coat? Or have tea with me? Or see my paintings?’
Kitty shook her head. Over and over again, as if reaffirming to herself what it was she wanted. Fred held out her hand. Not a single ring; short, clipped fingernails, very clean for a painter. She didn’t move. Waited. She was, in fact, certain that Kitty would follow her. When she continued to hesitate, Fred dropped her hand and ran off as if someone were chasing her, disappearing into the big studio space Kitty didn’t dare peep into. Music started up. Then the hostess reappeared with two wine glasses in her hand. They were sure to have come from Amy’s drinks cabinet.
‘This is beautiful. What is it?’ asked Kitty. She couldn’t help smiling at the sight of Fred making herself comfortable on the hall floor. She patted the ground beside her, inviting Kitty to sit down.
The Eighth Life Page 46