*
The two men retired to Kostya’s study. After a few delicacies and a litre of good Kindzmarauli, Vasili suddenly found that the future Kostya was sketching out for him didn’t seem so bad after all. It would be a good and, above all, a solid alternative to his own risky, and as yet still unfinanced, American dream. He was even able to feign a degree of cheerfulness to Kostya regarding his role as a father.
He was told he would be able to study — ‘Engineering would be good for your lively intellect and skilled hands, my boy; besides, the country will always need good engineers!’ He and Elene would move into their own apartment in Moscow, would receive the greatest possible degree of support, and he would have a good time with the most generous and permissive girl he knew (naturally he didn’t breathe a word of this last to his future father-in-law). Yes, that all sounded sensible; a bit less exciting, perhaps, than the voyage to America aboard the cargo ship, but much more tangible, much more real. Vasili dreamed himself into a sweet and carefree future, into a prosperity represented by this serious, decisive man who spoke to him so persuasively. And who left Vasili in no doubt that he would brook no contradiction.
*
The engagement was hastily celebrated. Nana and Vasili’s mother were both flown to Moscow, and a small but suitable party was held. The guests smiled, toasted one another, and congratulated the young couple. Vasili was given a generous allowance so he could entertain his pregnant wife in the manner to which she was accustomed. He soon acquired a taste for his new life. Elene accepted all this with what was now her characteristic impenetrable indifference and turned all her attention to her belly, which was growing fuller and more prominent by the day. She was going to have a baby, she was going to be a mother, the best mother in the world, and she was going to do everything for her baby; she pictured how she would devote herself wholly to her new offspring to compensate for the other, dead, unwanted, unborn child.
One evening, the couple were leaving the Pushkin Museum hand in hand, talking excitedly about art, when Vasili stopped in the middle of the street, sat down on the pavement, and began to weep. Elene, overwhelmed by this unaccustomed sight and by her fiancé’s sudden sorrow, sat down beside him and tentatively put her head on his shoulder. She didn’t enquire about the reason for his sudden change of mood but waited until he had calmed down. Almost out of breath, gasping for air, he forced himself to describe to her his hatred of the country in which they lived; he told her about his childhood, the endless humiliations; he even gave her an unvarnished account of his romantic affairs. He talked about his mother, his brother; he bared his soul to her, as if all his life he had been waiting for this one confession. He spared her nothing, didn’t gloss over his feelings, revealed to her even the smallest of his longings for revenge, the most secret of his desires.
They found a bench in a secluded street and sat down. He had talked himself into a frenzy; saliva had gathered in the corners of his mouth and he looked exhausted and empty. She put her arm around his shoulders and thought about what he had said.
‘Aren’t you surprised?’ he asked, when he couldn’t bear her silence any longer. ‘Or disappointed?’
‘I’m not disappointed, Vaso. I understand you, even. I understand you very well, at least I hope so. Sometimes I feel guilty; I didn’t want it to be like this, and believe me, I didn’t want you to suddenly be here, with me; that wasn’t my plan. You shouldn’t give up something that’s so important to you for me, or for the baby.’
‘But I want to be with you. This isn’t because of you, Elene.’
‘But more than being with me, you want to be somewhere else, don’t you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Aha. Well, there’s one thing I definitely don’t want: for you to become one of those pompous bastards who are always cheating on their wives and think they’ve got everything under control. You only have to look at my father. All that posturing — it disgusts me. I have worries of my own, you know. Don’t think I don’t. I just don’t like talking about them.’
‘I’ll pull myself together. I promise I’ll be stronger — for us, for you. I’ll do better. It’s just … well, it’s hard. And it all happened so suddenly, so unexpectedly.’
‘I do understand. You know, I used to want to leave as well. I have an aunt in the West. She’s a famous singer there.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, but I’m not allowed to talk about her.’
‘We could go together …’
‘Don’t be childish. I don’t want to. Your dreams aren’t mine, Vaso. What would I do in the West? Where would I go? I belong here, with my family; it doesn’t matter how much I hate them, I still belong here. Perhaps I should have met you two years ago, in the summer. I was … different then. Do you have anyone who could help you?’
‘If I had enough money, yes. I know a couple of sailors who occasionally smuggle people onto the ships and —’
‘Good. Very good. Listen. Papa wants us to get married before the baby comes. That means spring at the latest; recently, he’s been talking about March. He’ll give us money. For the wedding, our new life, and, you know, all that nonsense. He wants us to stay in Moscow; he doesn’t want us to go to my mother’s in Tbilisi. He thinks it’s her fault. I used to think it was, too. That’s not true. But it doesn’t matter now. So we’ll get the money and we’ll act as if we’re planning our wedding. Look for a place to hold the reception, make sure everything’s stylish and expensive. That’s how he wants it, so he can invite all his colleagues. On balance, he actually thinks it’s good that you’re a Russian. And we have to make an appointment with the registry office; and we should really do all this, too, because he checks up on everything; but we’ll only ever pay people a deposit and say that the rest will follow on the day of the wedding. You’ll get the rest. Go to Sochi; settle everything you need to settle there. And just before the wedding, you’ll disappear. By the time they find out, you have to be gone. You have to be gone, Vaso, or you’ll be finished. They won’t spare you. My father least of all. It can’t go wrong, otherwise you’ll never see a window again without bars. Do you understand me?’
Vaso stared at his fiancée, wide-eyed, with a mixture of tremendous respect, fascination, and awe.
‘When you’re in Sochi, if you realise it’s not going to work, come back and we’ll have to get married. We can split up in a few years’ time if you like; that’s fine by me. If you doubt even for one second that you can make it — turn back.’
‘You’re talking like a pro.’
‘A pro?’
‘Yes; as if you had experience with this sort of thing.’
‘I used to imagine it sometimes. That’s all. The rest I know from my father. They all think I don’t pick up on anything, but I pick up on everything, even things they don’t pick up on themselves. I also know that my father covered for his sister when she left. But that doesn’t matter now, either.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Don’t worry: the baby will have everything it needs. You know that. My father will do everything he can for us. And I’ll do everything I can for the baby. I think it’s going to be a girl.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘No idea. I’ll find a beautiful name for her. Haven’t decided yet, though.’
‘When I was little, there was a woman who lived in our neighbourhood. Some people said she was a witch. I think they were just jealous of her. Because she was different, and so special. She healed people with herbs, but no one trusted her an inch. She was a gypsy. Some people said she was a whore, but no one ever saw her with any men. Others said her family had been killed — deported, and so on — but no one really knew anything about her. She just turned up, overnight, in the place where we lived.
‘When I was a child I often went to play in her garden. She lived in a converted garage, in the middle of a
field. That was so romantic; it seemed so romantic to me. She was so … different from everyone else I knew. I didn’t know anything about her, either. But she knew how to sing, cook, and love. She really knew. She was always there for me. For me, and lots of other children who wandered around the neighbourhood not knowing what to do with themselves. She played with us; she was like a child herself, and she was always telling us stories.
‘As I … well, as I got older, I started to lust after her. One day I plucked up all my courage and went to see her. I mean, people had always claimed she did it with anyone for money. So I raided Mother’s purse and went to see her. And when I explained to her what I wanted, she started to cry. It was so shocking to me that I just ran away. She just stood in front of me with the tears running down her cheeks. I couldn’t even have imagined her ever crying at all. I saw how much I’d disappointed her. And I was so ashamed.
‘Soon after that she was gone. From one day to the next — just as she had appeared. I never saw her again. She never came back. I don’t even know if she’s still alive. I think she was the only woman I’ve ever really loved. And the only one who didn’t want to sleep with me. Ironic, isn’t it?’
‘What was her name?’
‘Daria.’
And so it was that my sister got her name from a gypsy witch whom some took for a whore, but who, as far as my sister’s unknown father was concerned, was the only saint he had ever met, back then, in his still-young life.
We hear the command! In this brave time the people shall burn the past!
With the proud flag we greet our eternal people, Georgia!
PABLO IASHVILI
Daria, the sun child, came into this world in the stifling, sultry night of 4 June 1970, in a pastel-coloured room in a hospital reserved exclusively for Lubyanka personnel. People had started to call the Lubyanka building in Moscow ‘Grown-Ups’ World’, after the big department store ‘Children’s World’ was erected opposite it in 1957.
Kostya himself had driven his daughter to the hospital when she went into labour. He had rejected outright his wife’s suggestion that she come to Moscow to support her daughter. He had paced up and down in the waiting room all night, and was the first person, after the midwife and Elene, to look into Daria’s angelic face. He was also the one who registered his own surname on Daria’s birth certificate. Naturally there was no question of giving his granddaughter the name of a deserter.
She was born during President Nixon’s first term in office, one year after Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon, two years after Gagarin was killed in a mysterious plane crash, one year before Bernd Sievert was shot forty-three times and seriously wounded by East German border guards while attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall. The same year the Beatles announced they were splitting up, unleashing a flood of tears all around the world. Shortly before the Easy Rider wave washed over the eastern half of the globe and had every twenty-year-old praying that some blessed person would smuggle Harleys across every border. Shortly before Idi Amin seized power in Uganda; during the protest by the dissident Sakharov against sending members of the opposition to Soviet mental hospitals; and some months after the Nobel Prize was awarded to a certain Mr Beckett, who was still unknown in the East and, of course, nonetheless — or perhaps for that very reason — banned. Two years after the revolution that started in Paris — people still didn’t know whether the history books would record it as failed or successful, or whether it could even be described as a revolution. Shortly after the publication of an article in LIFE magazine about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which the American Task Force Barker unit raped, murdered, and wiped out an entire village. And exactly one month after the Green House was completed.
*
The Green House was, and still is, one of the most beautiful houses I’ve ever seen. Bordered by a thick forest of pine trees to the north, to the west encircled by a breathtaking gorge (the first thing Stasia did was erect a three-metre high fence in front of it), to the east, a narrow dirt path leading to the nearby village, and overlooking the barns of the stud farm to the south.
Construction was completed in what was, for Georgian workmen, a utopian timescale. Stasia had shown real talent as a building contractor: she had driven the workers the way an experienced shepherd drives his flock, had cooked them princely meals every evening, kept their schnapps bottles full, and had nonetheless managed to ensure that work began at seven each morning. This despite the fact that Soviet workmen were a breed apart, one that needed a vast amount of alcohol, food, and rest before they could so much as put one brick on top of another.
At the age of seventy she had not only achieved the impossible, but had also demonstrated good architectural taste. She had had the old wooden balconies restored, the curlicued ornaments and old banisters refurbished. Had the wooden floorboards typical of the region varnished dark red; had stone floors laid in the spacious kitchen and in all the bathrooms, as well as in the cellar; and even managed to resurrect the ruined fireplace in the guest bedroom.
There were eight rooms over two floors, and a huge terrace at the front of the house that was to become the main living space for the whole family, except in the winter months. And then there was the phenomenal piece of land the house was built upon, which, according to Stasia’s plans, she and Christine were going to transform into an enchanting garden.
On the wide meadow that sloped up to the forest, she had a barn built, which — God knows why — she had the men paint lettuce-green. She claimed this barn for herself, and no one thought to ask what she intended to do in there, given that there was now plenty of room for everyone to have their own space in the magnificent house. They probably thought she wanted to use it for her gardening tools.
The Green House was an ideal place; it promised the world as it was meant to be. And the whole family was excited about moving in, looking forward to this new beginning and the arrival of a new family member. All except Christine.
She felt the loss of Miqa keenly: she was like a different person. She was seldom at home; no one knew where she went after work; they hardly ever heard her opera arias any more; her former passion — spending hours in the garden sowing seeds, weeding, trimming bushes, watering flowers — was extinguished. Added to the difficulty she had in coming to terms with her advancing age, and her perpetual resistance to retirement, was the disappointment of losing Miqa, whom she had raised with besotted love. The result was that Christine constantly gave the other women the feeling that they had done something wrong, that it was all their fault, because whenever she spoke to them now it was in a tone of condescension.
Any conversation about Miqa was stifled by Christine with icy vehemence. But what else could they have done, given the problems Miqa had caused? Stasia, newly returned from Prague, had been in no state to think about anything but her daughter. And ultimately they had had to make sure Miqa was safe from Kostya’s anger; even Andro had been forced to acknowledge that. Stasia would not accept any reproach on this score. Sopio had whispered to her in a dream, all those years ago, that she should tell the boy stories of a good world, and this she had conscientiously done. Now the boy was almost a man, and he would have to learn to fend for himself. Stasia was too old to put rose-tinted spectacles on anyone’s nose. She was too old to tell fairy tales. Besides, the boy — presumably it was in his nature — had made a terrible mistake, the consequences of which he, as well as her own biological grandchild, must bear. That was that — over and done with! She had done her duty; it was her right to take her well-earned, and above all peaceful, retirement and make the most of the opportunity the Green House offered them all.
But the more often Christine drove out to the house with her sister, to support her during its construction, the more her resistance to the plan intensified. It wasn’t a new beginning for her, not here, not under these circumstances. She had allowed her beloved boy to be sent back like a parcel delivered t
o the wrong address. Neither her opportunistic sister nor her weak-willed daughter-in-law had tried to establish the truth; they had just stoked the girl’s destructive fury and humiliated the boy in his defencelessness. And, although Christine respected her sister’s great achievement and could see how meticulously she had worked, with such attention to detail, she nonetheless became increasingly convinced that this paradise on earth could never be her home. Miqa was not allowed to be here, the truth had no place here, and she would never find peace, not without the boy.
And when the next scandal surrounding Elene came along, and then the news reached Tbilisi that the Russian bastard Vasili had jilted his pregnant fiancée and sneakily, dishonourably, run off with the wedding money, Christine could not restrain herself. She remarked triumphantly that it was only logical that he had bolted before it was too late: sensible men didn’t marry women who coerced them into things. Her schadenfreude was hard to comprehend; Nana responded with scorching fury, Stasia with bewilderment.
One month before the planned move to the Green House, Christine announced to her sister as they were washing up in the kitchen that she would not be going with them.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ cried Stasia in astonishment, putting a plate back in the sink.
‘What I just said: I’m staying here. This is my home.’
‘Don’t you see you’re being childish? Of course this is your home. You don’t have to move in straight away with all your worldly goods. As far as I’m concerned you can just come up for the weekends, while you’re still working at the hospital —’
‘I’m staying here. I’ve got nothing more to say on the subject. Besides, Miqa will apply to study in Tbilisi, and when he does I want him to live with me in my house.’
The Eighth Life Page 60