‘You don’t know Billie Holiday? — Okay, fine; if you don’t want to come in, I’ll come out. But I wouldn’t have expected you not to know Billie Holiday. You of all people should know her.’
Hesitantly, Kitty sat on the floor, utterly mesmerised by the voice and its infinite sadness.
‘You need to breathe, my beauty! More air, more freedom. You must be yourself again,’ said Fred suddenly, and her tone was serious, thoughtful, the mischievousness gone from her voice.
‘What do you want from me?’ asked Kitty guardedly. She raised the wine glass to her lips.
‘You,’ said Fred, laughing again. ‘Just you.’
‘You’re a woman.’
‘Correct: I think you’re familiar with my sex?’
‘And Amy?’
‘Amy doesn’t need me.’
‘She does need you, very much!’
‘We’re a good team. Believe me.’
Before Kitty could reply, Fred was already leaning over her, closing in on her mouth. Her kiss was no longer cautious. It was what it was: a kiss that would lead to many more.
‘How do you think this is going to work?’ asked Kitty, turning her head away. ‘You know nothing about me.’
‘I know everything I need to know. I see you.’
‘I can’t betray another person, not again. I can’t do it.’
‘Just close your eyes. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’ll take care of you.’
*
Three months after the birth of my mother, a woman in a village in the Caucasus had a baby boy who was given the name Miqail. His family name was Eristavi.
That night, Stasia dreamed of her dead friend Sopio. She appeared to her — bright, affectionate, with a conciliatory smile on her lips — sitting in an armchair in an unfamiliar room, gazing out of the window at a sunny garden. Overwhelmed by the sight of her beautiful friend, who seemed not to have aged a single day despite the passage of almost twenty years, Stasia stopped in the doorway and stared at Sopio stretching in the sunlight.
‘Come on in, Taso, it’s warmer over here,’ called Sopio. She beckoned to her. ‘Don’t be afraid.’
Stasia went to her dead friend and perched cautiously on the arm of the chair. The sunlight poured through the window, dazzling her and warming her cheeks.
‘I’ve missed you,’ Stasia whispered through the warm sunbeams. She stroked Sopio’s shoulder tentatively.
‘Yes, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’
‘A very long time. Are you angry with me?’
‘You couldn’t have changed anything. It’s so warm, so warm here, isn’t it?’
‘Sopio. How I miss you. My Sopio!’
Suddenly, Sopio clasped Stasia’s hand. Her hand felt velvety and delicate, young and full of strength. Stasia was speechless. There was so much she wanted to say, so much to explain, confess, but she couldn’t seem to do it; it was as if, all of a sudden, she had no words.
‘Tell my boy stories of a good world. Do that. Do that!’
No sooner had Sopio said this, and stroked Stasia’s head once again, than Stasia woke with a start.
*
The father of the boy who came into the world that stormy September evening was a taciturn kolkhoz worker who carved wooden figures in his room in secret by the light of a kerosene lamp (electricity was a scarce commodity in the mountains), and hid them under his bed, in case the figures were seen as immoral or destructive.
He had married a devout peasant girl who worked on the same shift as him at the grain factory; who sometimes brought him pickled tomatoes and plums, was one of the few who asked him how he was, and didn’t watch him with stern, suspicious eyes, unlike most of the villagers, who saw the stranger with the full beard and bald head as a thorn in their side. Because he didn’t know how to distil schnapps, because he wasn’t one for making noisy drinking toasts, because he didn’t ogle the girls, because he took no part in celebrations, be they heathen, Christian, or public holidays, because he refused to sacrifice sheep for the sake of a good harvest, and because from time to time he travelled to the provincial capital, went to the library there, and returned with books under his arm.
He felt profound humility before the rites of these people, who lived so free of doubt, so far removed from any kind of modernity, as if operating by a different calendar; but at the same time he loathed their tradition-steeped intransigence, their superstition, their unwillingness to place anything above the laws of their ancestors.
Every day he would try afresh not to look back. And every day the image of almond-eyed Kitty, the woman with whom he had wanted to share his vision of the world, faded a little more. Gradually, he learned that life consisted of breathing, eating, digesting, hard physical work, drinking schnapps, and sleeping, and that he had no right to expect anything else of it.
A human warmth he thought he had lost returned to him with the birth of his son: it commandeered the whole of his chest and made his heart swell. He was truly moved, for the first time in years, by the tiny bundle he held in his arms. Perhaps, he thought, through the child he would learn to love again, too.
One afternoon, when it had already started to turn cold, he went out into the street with the peacefully sleeping baby wrapped up snugly in a hand-knitted shawl. He walked past the farm and the stony path that led down to the valley; he passed the neighbouring houses, the factory, the shops, the school, met the shepherds driving their sheep back from the meadow, greeted the black-clad war widows sitting together as they did every evening around the village fountain, and the village elders in the square in front of the church, came to the village library, which housed nothing that had been written in the past forty years, and passed children playing, racing down the slope, noisy and sweaty, with a sheepdog at their heels; on he walked, into the evening, and came to the quarry in the southern part of the forest surrounding the valley. There he sat down on a large stone, not far from a waterfall that cascaded with immense force into the depths — heedless, imperious — and looked around. Miqa (as the boy would come to be known) went on sleeping peacefully in his arms; not even the ferocious sound of the water seemed to bother him. And Andro closed his eyes, hugged his son close, took a deep breath, and smiled. He had come here in order to be able to smile again. And when he smiled, he saw her face before him: the face of the young Kitty with whom he had shared first kisses on a green bench in a sleepy little town, and to whom he had dedicated all his ideas. And he remembered the war. He remembered the gulag. He remembered the dehumanisation he had experienced, which was apparently so easy to accept, as if the true nature of mankind were to be inhuman.
*
Telling this story, Brilka, I sometimes feel as if I can’t breathe. Then I have to stop, go over to the window, and take a deep breath. It’s not because I just can’t find the right words, not because of the punishing gods, judges, and omnipresent choirs. Nor is it because of all the stories clamouring to be told. It’s because of the blanks.
The stories overlap, intertwine, merge into one — I’m trying to untangle this skein of wool because you have to tell things one after another, because you can’t put the simultaneity of the world into words.
When I was about the same age as you, Brilka, I often used to wonder what would happen if the world’s collective memory had retained different things and lost others. If we had forgotten all the wars and all those countless kings, rulers, leaders, and mercenaries, and the only people to be read about in books were those who had built a house with their own hands, planted a garden, discovered a giraffe, described a cloud, praised the nape of a woman’s neck. I wondered how we know that the people whose names have endured were better, cleverer, or more interesting just because they’ve stood the test of time. What of those who are forgotten?
We decide what we want to remember and what we don’t. Time has nothing to do with it. Time doe
sn’t care. But the injustice of our story, Brilka, is that neither you nor I have been granted the possibility of recalling everything, including all those who have been forgotten — the injustice is that I too must choose, for you; I must decide what’s worth telling and what isn’t, which seems to me at times an impossible task. I am fighting against my own personal, entirely subjective memory. Since I started to write our story down for you — this Where, How, and Why — I’ve been alone. But I’ll tell you more about that later, when it’s time to tell the story of my life, when at last I have been born and come alive within this realm of words.
For this, I have set aside all my own needs, if indeed I had any. I’ve even forbidden myself my daily dose of melancholy and devoted myself entirely to my task. After the last few years, in which I got so lost, went so far astray, this almost monastic asceticism and iron discipline did and does me good. It’s my journey. It’s a sort of cleansing process, in the course of which I myself am changing — and I don’t even know what my final shape will be.
Tonight — it’s Friday, and the warm evening has driven even more people out of doors — I could already tell that I needed to pause again for a moment. The noise, the clinking of glasses and bottles, the music — all this was mingling beneath my windows, creating that enticing, inescapable symphony of summer and making it impossible for me to concentrate on the task in hand. The present is too alive, too intrusive, and I can’t listen to the past.
So I got up, went over to the window, opened it, let the hot, summery, dusty air into my room, and looked down on the heads of passers-by. And then something strange happened. In the distance, over by the crossroads, where the homeless man greets me every day and tries to sell me his newspaper — I saw Stasia standing there. No, I haven’t gone mad; I don’t believe in madness, in any case — but all the same …
That was when I knew that the ghosts have come to me now; and I also knew that it really is the right thing to do, to record their stories for you. Ours. Yours. Mine, and those of all the others who have written their lives into ours. I suddenly knew why I was doing this, and that it was right to do it. I knew that I was carrying out a duty, the duty of an axe that shatters time: for you. Suddenly, all my doubts were gone.
I understood that one day all of them will come, all the ghosts with a story they have yet to finish telling, and they will pore over my words. And I laughed aloud. Yes, I laughed. I thought of you. I missed you terribly, with an unbearable longing, but I also felt a sense of relief — yes, I did.
I have finally arrived in that timeless time beyond the bounds of law, and even if I am losing my connection to the reality of the present a little more each day, even if I am less and less sure of what moves the people out there and what awaits me after all this, I do know what question I will put to you at the end of this journey, this story. Even if you’re still far away, not here, even if you’re still unaware of any of this, even if you feel justified anger towards me — I will come back. To you. And I will ask you my question, and you will give me your answer.
How can we act as if we didn’t know what went on?
KHRUSHCHEV
They say she laughed all the time, as a baby and then as a child. My mother: Elene Jashi, Stasia’s granddaughter, Christine’s great-niece, Kitty’s niece, and the daughter of Kostya and Nana. Mother to Daria and me. The woman who resembled no one, not even herself. The woman who for no apparent reason would decide to atone for her greatest mistake through her children.
They say she was very quick, as a child, quick to think, to want, to demand. She came into the world in the year of bewilderment, in the year of newly revived hopes, in this vast empire that now no longer exists. Her father took a leave of absence from his top-secret mission and spent a few weeks, enraptured and euphoric, at the side of his exhausted wife and laughing daughter. The casual calmness with which Christine and Stasia greeted Elene’s birth seemed to Nana much healthier and more desirable than the excessive solicitude of her own family: she would retreat to her darkened room when the visits from her aunts and mother, with their top child-rearing tips, became too much for her. She felt she was in good hands here, and against all the advice of her relatives and girlfriends, Nana decided not to go and join Kostya for the time being.
*
When Christine heard of the Little Big Man’s death, she fetched her old gramophone from the attic and played Norma so loudly it could be heard all over the house. She stood at the window looking out at the garden and listening to the music. Her expression remained a mystery: it betrayed nothing, neither pain nor alarm that the curse of the chocolate had proved true. Her sister had been right all along!
From that day on, she started buying opera recordings, obsessively, as if she had decided to amass a rare and valuable record collection. No sum was too high for her. Less than a year later, by which time my mother was refusing to start walking, Christine owned an impressive collection ranging from Purcell to Puccini. In the evenings, the whole house succumbed to the soprano and bass voices from the gramophone: the warmer it was outside, the faster the voices would swallow up the area around the house and its unruly garden, reaching the narrow cobbled streets of this part of town and touching the tops of the towers of the old, empty church.
Christine listened, spellbound, and refused to turn the music down, until in the end all those living in the house found themselves forced to tolerate her operas as the constant background music to their daily lives.
*
The unruliness began with the advent of freedom in the family house in Tbilisi. With Elene’s birth. With her first sounds.
The plants sensed it, and sprouted like mad in the garden. Bit by bit, they also invaded the house. Even items of furniture started to emit curious noises, and all kinds of birds held their parliaments in the attic. Butterflies and crickets sought out the house, stray cats strolled around it, squirrels and martens were found.
The house sighed. It was bursting at the seams, taking off the tight corset that had held it in for years. It began to live. Noisily, expansively, palpably, and visibly.
The older inhabitants of the house didn’t seem bothered by this degeneration; quite the opposite, in fact. The spiders and butterflies were welcomed; the plaster that occasionally came off the ceiling remained where it fell; the plants were no longer pruned; even the frogs that had set up home in the fountain were left in peace. The dust that gathered everywhere was not wiped away. Stasia even bought herself a hand-reared grey parrot, and christened him Goya. No one cleared up the crockery and lampshades, either, as they fell victim to Goya’s aerobatics.
The only person annoyed by the rapidly progressing dilapidation was Nana, who tackled it with every means at her disposal. She ran around after the noisy bird, cleaned and scrubbed every day, and secretly hid any records she found lying about in order to avoid constant exposure to Christine’s music. All her energy went into making the house look well-cared-for; she chased after vermin, shooed away cats, and put poison in the fountain for the frogs. She cried down the phone to Kostya, complaining about his mother’s eccentricity and Christine’s provocative passivity. He ought to speak to them; they wouldn’t be a good example to the child. Elene would grow up amid chaos, and nothing good could come of it. Given the disorder in the house and the two sisters’ neglect, Nana decided not to go back to university; she would put her doctorate on hold for the time being and devote herself entirely to being a mother.
My grandfather accepted these developments from afar, since they could not be influenced, but it was a burden Nana struggled with her entire life. Although Kostya was always quick to send money whenever Nana complained, so that rooms could be freshly wallpapered, pipes repaired, and a swing seat acquired for the garden, and although she even employed a gardener to come once a week to curtail the wild proliferation of the plants, the house contrived nonetheless to gradually transform itself into a fairy-tale dwelling, as if it
had only just realised its true destiny and now intended to enjoy it to the full.
It meant that my mother was able to spend her childhood in an enchanted realm. As soon as her mother handed her over to her grandmother and great-aunt — which she did most reluctantly, as their educational methods were far from reliable — Elene’s world was transformed into a place without constraints, where she was allowed to play with the parrot, wallow in dirt, smash the crockery, climb and romp about, eat sweet things, pull Christine’s hair, and make faces with Stasia. In this enchanted world, with these two old women, it seemed to her that anything was possible, anything was conceivable, anything was doable. Here, nothing stood in her way; and there was no one who could have been made happier by this state of affairs than a growing girl to whom all doors were open.
*
At the Party Congress in the year 1956, in a secret speech that nonetheless became famous, the First Secretary of the Central Committee, Nikita Khrushchev, sharply criticised the Generalissimus and publicly used the word ‘crimes’ in reference to his predecessor’s brutal purges. He spoke of ‘mass extermination’ and ‘execution without trial’; he also spoke of his own responsibility, and asked, ‘How can we act as if we didn’t know what went on?’ We are told there was an eerie silence; almost all those present, including the First Secretary, had participated in these arrests and executions with impressive dedication. Yet it was so unheard-of for someone even to name what had really gone on that doing so called into question all the rules, structures, and internal agreements that had applied until that moment. Until then, the silence and taboos surrounding certain political practices in the USSR had signified stability for the country. Now, after these words, no one knew what was to come.
When the speech found its way into the public domain, students began to demonstrate on the streets of Tbilisi. People were shocked; they felt aggrieved. Their national identity was being called into question; their great countryman, who over the course of decades had pacified the boundless Russian Empire, was being declared a criminal. Even people whose parents and grandparents had fallen victim to this countryman of theirs could not endure the truth, though they must have been aware of it for years. It was absolutely outrageous, the things that Ukrainian lout was coming out with. People stormed onto the streets and boulevards, surrounded the university, blocked crossroads, rebelled against the truth. Because the victims had long since become perpetrators; the perpetrators, victims.
The Eighth Life Page 47