The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  It seemed to be an unwritten law that Daria made everything she touched shine brightly, so it was no wonder that, later on, when the tables turned and the hedgehog inside her disappeared for ever, she also demonstrated the power to bring everything crashing down.

  But I don’t even exist yet; I haven’t yet been born into our story. So I mustn’t rely on my own memories; I must content myself with those of others that tally with my impression of how things were.

  Before I let Daria’s progenitor, whom our mother had helped to flee abroad, walk out of our story forever, I should perhaps mention that he really did get to America. Elene never talked about him. But one day, when the country we all came from had long since vanished from the maps of the world, she told me as she sat cracking walnuts that she’d always believed Vaso would make it. And indeed his criminal brother, who had gone on to become a ‘businessman’, had contacted her and told her that Vaso had died in Davenport, Iowa. At the time of his death, he was a gas-station attendant on his third marriage. An untreated obstruction of the bowel killed him; he hadn’t been able to afford health insurance, and so hadn’t gone to the doctor, despite the pain.

  Even though his life had been anything but a classic example of the American dream, Elene — rather bitter and disappointed that her plan had come to so little and Vaso hadn’t even made it to New York or LA but had fetched up as a lowly provincial gas-station attendant — said at the time that she didn’t think it impossible that perhaps he had been able to wrest a bit more happiness from his life in the West. As far as I’m aware, his three American marriages were childless. He died without ever having seen or spoken to his only daughter.

  *

  Daria was destined to grow up fatherless. It was this that prompted my grandfather to bid farewell to the Moscow military arena and request a transfer to his homeland, even though for Kostya Jashi this relocation was tantamount to a demotion, as the Black Sea fleet had no military significance and was responsible solely for trade. A life without the sea, though, would only have been half a life for him. So he tested the waters at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and asked a few of his confidants in Georgia to enquire about a suitable position for him, because he knew that in Georgia — if he wanted it — all doors were open to him. After all, he had managed to survive in Russia, so he was more than good enough for Georgia. He could boast some triumphant successes on the secret council of the submarine fleet. Under the leadership of Admiral Gorshkov, his committee had managed, in a very short space of time, to build the best submarines in the world. With these, the Soviet fleet was not just numerically superior to the Americans’, it had also broken all their records: for speed, for depth, for size. Kostya could look back on his career with pride. Certainly, many sacrifices had had to be made to achieve this rapid growth; certainly, they had had to suffer losses; but what Great Work was ever achieved without sacrifice?

  Yes, he had found it hard to write the report on K-129, which sank in the middle of the Pacific. It had been no fun with K-8, either, in the Bay of Biscay, and as for K-19 — well, Kostya didn’t even want to think about that.

  The sea: yes, he had married the sea, and now he was thinking of exchanging his companion of many years for a small, soft girl with two different-coloured eyes.

  He didn’t want to go to Batumi or Poti to keep an eye on civilian merchant convoys, but the Black Sea offered him no alternative. Was it time to go ashore now? For good? To take care of his family; to care for Daria in a way that would make up for his failings with Elene? Would they manage to be a normal family at last?

  Kostya felt the burden of age on his shoulders, its leaden weight like a heavy suit of armour. He was constantly checking himself in the mirror, counting the new wrinkles, cursing every annoying new nasal hair or little roll of fat around his waist. Although he still did callisthenics every morning like clockwork, placed great importance on looking elegant, and made considerable efforts to keep up with the fashion, he knew that soon he would no longer find it so easy to persuade these young, blonde, lavender-and-honey-scented women to be his companions. He knew the time would come when he would have to make do with the second- and third-eldest, fourth- and fifth-prettiest. And he feared it.

  *

  Then he was approached by an old friend from Tbilisi, who suggested that he might like to apply to sit as one of the thirty-two members of the National Council. They would welcome such an eminent, deserving man with open arms. And although it was hard for him to exchange the sea for the tedium of a desk job, he could see that this post was the best alternative for him in this situation. A council member was not inferior to a naval captain in terms either of remuneration or status. There, too, he would report to the MVD — familiar territory for Kostya. As a National Council member, he could ask for control of the harbour authority. They wouldn’t be able to deny his request.

  He contacted the relevant people and made his wishes known, which, as anticipated, were very warmly received. Yes, Kostya decided, he should indeed head home, even though Tbilisi had stopped being his home long ago. Yes, he must take command of the doomed ship that was his family and steer it into a safe harbour.

  *

  At the time of Kostya’s return, people were already talking about a ‘thaw’. Brezhnev’s rise to power had marked the beginning of the era of the eminences grises. Fortunately, no one yet knew that he would remain in office for another eleven years, during more than half of which he would be seriously ill, and would lead the country into a state of stagnation. Brezhnev’s greatest ‘achievement’ — along with the crushing of the Prague Spring — was the reintroduction of compulsory silence. Public criticism of the Generalissimus was strictly prohibited, and in that great empire, extending across eleven time zones, calm was maintained so scrupulously that the country imperceptibly fell into a coma.

  Brezhnev’s chest was decorated with an absurd number of medals; he was made a marshal, and declared, with satisfaction: ‘The country is stable, peaceful, and in good condition. I am glad that everything here is proceeding normally.’

  Yes, everything was normal. Because under his government there were no alcoholics, no sadists, no informers, and no creatures corroded by mistrust. After all, there was condensed milk, there was milk powder; there was even caviar, if you moved in the right circles, and complimentary dachas for the higher-ups; kommunalkas too, of course, infested with cockroaches; there was the right idea, for everyone to promote; there were fertile women; there were cheap cigarettes and comfortable Volgas, there was a lot of vodka and, in extremis, samogon, which never failed to do the trick — a few sips resulted in total blackout; and there were prisons for bad people, meaning those who didn’t know how to appreciate this wonderful system. There were proper, state-approved methods for dealing with such vermin; and there were other means of repression.

  The state informed its people which sanatorium they should recover in, gave them a profession, a place to live, and a purpose in life. Yes: everything was normal.

  *

  Kostya packed the expensive porcelain into cardboard boxes, gave away most of his furniture, sent the valuable tapestries and carpets to Tbilisi, and had everything transported to his hometown, along with his beloved cream-coloured GAZ-13 Chaika, the model known as ‘The Seagull’.

  He was received in Tbilisi in a manner befitting his status; endless tables were laid for him in a demonstration of sunny Georgia’s excessive, manic hospitality. There was even an article about him in The Communist. A great hero had returned to his homeland. He was given an office in the Ministry of Internal Affairs on Chitadze Street, and a new driver.

  And when he was offered the supervision of harbour dues along the Black Sea coast of the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, he accepted without discussion. In future he would commute between Tbilisi, Poti, Sokhumi, and Batumi, and the travelling suited him very well; it gave him the opportunity to live out his ‘private life’ undisturbe
d. For, despite his fear of ageing, at this point in time my grandfather had no intention whatsoever of completely renouncing his old way of life.

  Corruption had long been rife in all areas of administration and government, but Kostya trusted that he would be able to cope with it. His years of working in the Soviet Union’s toughest institutions had given him the necessary confidence for that. He had swum long enough in the immeasurable vastness of Russian seas; these Georgian ponds didn’t scare him. What he did not consider, however, was that he had been living far away from Caucasian reality for too long, and was unable to muster sufficient understanding for his compatriots’ fluid mentality. He was familiar with the strict rules of the game among the Russian elite; he was familiar with the authorities’ covert corruption, which had been experiencing a veritable heyday since Brezhnev’s inauguration, but he didn’t see that Georgian corruption, Georgian greed, far exceeded that to which he was able to turn a blind eye. He failed to appreciate what a comfortable life the Georgian elite — including the intelligentsia — had established for themselves in their little piece of paradise during the decades of Bolshevik rule. How they had perfected the art of delusion. How good things were for them in their Russian trauma. How easy it actually was to live with the northern oppression that, off the record, they always professed to hate. In Russia, people believed in the power of the authorities, so they had never learned anything other than to live in constant fear of them. In Georgia, though, this fear was merely feigned: people here assumed on principle that those in power were dishonest and corrupt, and so would think in advance of ways to cheat, trick, or bribe them. They didn’t believe in a system, or in any ideology; apart from, perhaps, the ideology of their own hedonism.

  Once the initial fuss had died down, people had realised that the position their northern neighbour had assigned to them really wasn’t all that bad. That it might well prove a mistake not to take advantage of this position. They could actually live in these conditions: one could be cultured, creative, musical, fond of drink, a little anarchic, yes, that, too, but only a little; beautiful and talkative, lazy and hot-tempered. What was wrong with that? These, after all, are the characteristics we Georgians are proud to cite as part of our national identity. Or were these actually Russian dreams that people had internalised to such a degree they had come to believe they were their own? So what? What was so bad about that? Yes, it could have been far worse. The whole vast empire was gazing enviously at this small, sunny piece of paradise! How many Soviet republics, how many autonomous regions, how many sister states would have liked to swap places with us, let alone all those oppressed, resettled minorities? Because as long as the shadow of our great countryman, the Generalissimus, kept watch over the people of Georgia, nothing could happen to us. Because nobody got past him. Not Russia, not the world.

  It really was an impressively smart move by Mother Russia, Brilka: she decided always to encourage her small, rebellious, rather too unruly son Georgia in all his weaknesses, and to proclaim these weaknesses strengths, until the son began to delight in his role and believe he had tricked his mother, disempowered her, thereby failing to see the extent to which, in his eagerness to be loved and praised by his parent, he was prostituting himself for her love.

  How my soul yearned to catch butterflies!

  May it now find peace somewhere …

  KONSTANTIN SLUCHEVSKY

  There were ladybirds, the ones that had such pretty spots on their backs, and there were the smells of all the different family members to be noted and distinguished; there was the sun and the moon, and there was sleep, and the dreams Daria didn’t usually remember after waking; there were stray dogs and cats, and there were comically patterned lizards; there were thousands of types of plant; there was the unfathomableness of all the different shades of light and earth, the nature of water, her mother’s choice of blouse; there was Goya, claiming his new home.

  Yes, there was plenty to sniff and touch, plenty to smell and taste; and she had things to learn — crawling, for instance, or the word ‘Deda’. Then there was the hilarity of being tickled by her grandfather’s moustache when, with uncommon devotion, she threw her arms about him. The rural idyll around her, the horsewhispering from the stud farm, and the remoteness from the rest of the world protected her from all sorrow.

  The only thing that could darken Daria’s perfect horizon was her mother’s sadness and lack of interest in her. For Elene had not been healed by her child, as she had hoped. It was too exhausting: the crying at night, the keeping to set feeding times, the post-natal hormonal swings. Her melancholy was too great, the pressure of being obliged to completely immerse herself in the joys of motherhood too stressful. And so, after enduring the first three months, Elene increasingly sidestepped her responsibilities and left her child more and more often with her own mother and grandmother, who seemed to have no problems whatsoever with the baby; on the contrary, they mastered every task very easily and with little effort, and even found it all delightful and exciting.

  Initially, Elene was just as enthusiastic about the Green House as the rest of the family. But it wasn’t long before she realised that she was lonely out there, cut off from everything. That neither her daughter nor her parents were capable of filling her inner emptiness. She had too much time to think. Too much time to mull things over. She imagined what it would have been like if Vasili had stayed with her, if she hadn’t helped him to abandon her. Or if she had a place at university now and were living in Tbilisi, in a boarding house with others her own age; if she had made new friends, allies, kindred spirits. As it was, she felt permanently guilty, dirty, disorientated, and so full of anger: it was so stressful having to be Elene, Elene Jashi, having to carry this inheritance around with her, always having to be something special!

  She prowled about, slept badly, was bad-tempered, bored. She found it hard to concentrate on anything for longer than an hour; nothing, it seemed, could rouse her interest, her curiosity. Sometimes she felt old, lethargic, and so alone that she asked herself whether she would ever be able to live like other people her age again. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She crept out of her room at night, wandered about the garden, secretly smoking one of Stasia’s cigarettes, biting her fingernails, staring at the night with restless eyes and searching for a way to be someone — anyone — other than herself. At what point had she failed to find herself? Where had she taken the wrong turning? When had she lost her way, and what way was it?

  Her solitary walks took her further and further away from the Green House, away from Stasia and the child, away from her father and mother, who were both picked up early in the morning and brought back in the evening by Kostya’s driver.

  When she thought about her classmates in Moscow and Tbilisi, her old friends, she was filled with rage towards Daria. She was certain her friends didn’t have swollen, aching breasts, or stretchmarks, didn’t have to get up three times a night, and could go out, drink, party, study, travel, fall in and out of love, and live as their age and desires dictated.

  Her walks grew longer. She got to know the surrounding villages and settlements. Visited the stud farm. She studied the lithe thoroughbred animals as they grazed. She watched the Arabs, Javakhians, and Kabardins. Imagined what it would be like to mount one and ride off into the unknown.

  On one of these walks she met Miqail. I think it was his name that decided it. If he’d been called David, Seraphim, or Giorgi, perhaps she wouldn’t have gone about things with such zeal and such readiness for self-sacrifice. He was a middle-aged man with a full beard and peculiar clothes. A simple cross hung around his neck. He was working at the stables for the summer.

  Once she had overcome her initial mistrust, she grew more talkative; this dour man seemed friendly, open, and interested in her troubles. Also, his speech betrayed his city origins: he was from Tbilisi.

  Elene’s walks became her main occupation. At around three o’clock, Mi
qail would take a break, and she would already be waiting outside the stable. She would bring a little picnic basket with her — Stasia’s delicacies wrapped in aluminium foil, plus a little fruit and some vegetables — and if the opportunity presented itself she would pilfer a bottle of wine from Kostya’s cellar. She liked Miqail’s calmness, his self-control, and above all she liked the feeling that as a woman she didn’t seem to interest him in the slightest. At first, she was almost offended, ascribing his lack of interest to her diminished attractiveness since the birth of Daria, but soon she found it liberating. This, she had to admit, was better and simpler.

  He didn’t ask stupid questions; he didn’t seem the least bit surprised that she never once mentioned the father of her child; he wasn’t interested in why such a young woman was living in such isolation and not pursuing an occupation, in line with socialist values, according to which no one in the Soviet Union was without work. He once asked her whether she believed in God. For some reason, Elene wasn’t surprised by the question; it was as if she had been waiting for it. She didn’t know, she answered; she would like to. Two years earlier she had even entered a convent, but it hadn’t really done anything for her.

  After this, Miqail began to supply Elene with Christian texts. He told her, later on, that his parents had fallen victim to state repression, so he had grown up with relatives and in children’s homes. That his sister had killed herself after discovering that her own husband was spying on her. That, at the age of nineteen, he had ended up in Navtlukhi prison, and subsequently spent seven years in prison in Rostov. He had gone astray, as he put it. In prison he had found God, and now he propagated his own religion, a motley combination of Greek Orthodox ideology and Tolstoy’s A Confession and My Religion.