The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  After this rejection he never made any further attempt to win a woman’s heart. But he was unlucky with prostitutes, too. He invited a notorious middle-aged woman with bleached blonde hair, bad teeth, darned stockings, and a strong Siberian accent to his house, and opened one of the better sparkling wines he saved for New Year. The woman got drunk, took off her clothes with absolutely no warning, then, with an expression of vacant indifference, grabbed him between the legs so hard that it hurt and he felt compelled to ask her to leave.

  Since then he had felt only shame and mortification when the shipyard workers boasted of their amorous adventures. Over time, he realised that it was impossible for him to desire someone without at least the illusion of being desired and needed himself. That his longing was not for a woman’s body, but for that body to need his. As the fatherless child of a single mother, he had been bullied in his village to the point of humiliation. At family gatherings his grandparents had treated him with contempt — no matter how good he was, in spite of all his achievements there was a perennial air of worthlessness, inadequacy, like bad breath, that he simply couldn’t shake off. And he knew that this malady had its root in his dishonourable conception.

  He became obsessed with this idea.

  Perhaps he really was inferior — perhaps he owed his existence merely to an unfortunate accident — perhaps his mother really had acted disreputably? Why else was she so stubbornly silent about his progenitor? Why had she refused to pass on this knowledge to him, when it was surely the most natural thing in the world?

  He wrote her a letter, formulating his question directly. He had a right to this knowledge, he said; she could not withhold it from him. He was old enough now to learn the truth of his conception. He didn’t want to live with the stigma of father unknown any longer. He didn’t want it branded on his face for all to see.

  Months later, the answer reached him. Next time they saw each other, his mother promised, she would tell him everything, face to face; but not in writing, please, she mustn’t do that. She promised him.

  *

  As is usual in stories like these, Brilka, in our story, too — or, in this case, to be precise, in Alania’s — it all turned out quite differently. Shortly before the capture of Berlin, Alania received a visit from an elegantly dressed, pipe-smoking gentleman with a gold hammer-and-sickle insignia on the lapel of his black jacket. He had driven up to the shipyard building in a conspicuously large automobile — a rarity in the town — and asked for Giorgi Alania. They sat down in armchairs in the shipyard boss’ office, facing each other. The distinguished gentleman introduced himself as an employee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, or NKVD. He talked for a while in a non-committal way about the importance of domestic political cooperation in these difficult times, the intensification of fighting on the counter-revolutionary fronts, the danger now posed by the capitalist region, and how important it was — more important than ever — to continue the socialist struggle. How watchful one now had to be in all respects — and here he gave Alania a searching look.

  He asked questions: the gentleman wanted to know everything, from extremely personal matters to Alania’s attitude towards his duty to the Motherland.

  ‘Both the Frunze Higher Naval School and the Comrade Shipyard Director have given you outstanding recommendations. You were also, if I’ve ascertained this correctly, active in the Sokhumi Komsomol in your youth. Exemplary, really exemplary, Comrade Alania.’

  Puffing on his pipe, the man nodded his bull-like head in approval.

  ‘Excuse me, I don’t quite understand … What can I do for you, if I might ask?’ Alania was disconcerted.

  ‘Well, the Party, of course, Comrade, the Party. Now, more than ever, the country needs good men, loyal to their homeland. Now that the war is won, the work begins in earnest. To think that the war is the end of everything would be a disastrous mistake. You’re not in the union, which might be looked upon with disapproval in some quarters, but perhaps a good word can be put in for you nonetheless.’

  Giorgi was baffled. How was it, then, that they had come looking for him, of all people? He was confused. He had been drifting; for the last four years, he had abandoned himself to his fate. He hadn’t allowed himself to make any sort of plan. As the world went to rack and ruin, the only thing he wanted to understand was who he actually was. He had no time for the world any more; he was enough of a puzzle to himself. But why on earth had they specifically come looking for him?

  He had no influential friends. The fulfilment of his duty to the Motherland consisted, to date, in his work for the shipyard. He might be a good learner, and quicker than many of his comrades, but he was certainly the last person anyone would think of when it came to bold adventures and daring secret operations. This man was not about to disclose anything, though, if indeed he knew. Far more likely that he was just carrying out an order, assessing and evaluating Alania on someone else’s behalf.

  In the half-hour he spent with the mysterious gentleman in the shipyard director’s room, Alania mulled over a few things. Did this visit represent an opportunity to get out of this swamp? Regardless of what awaited him, regardless of where this visit might lead, it would certainly mean getting away from here, and back to the Giorgi he had wanted to be when he’d stood and saluted next to Kostya in their graduation parade.

  ‘I’m at your service!’ said Alania, uncertainly, but with visible relief; and he asked the NKVD man to explain his business in more detail.

  *

  In May 1945, Alania was summoned to Moscow and, at a secret session of the interior ministry, assigned to the newly established ‘Repatriation’ group. At that time there were almost five million Soviet citizens in Europe — primarily in western Europe. The group’s job was to bring them home and protect them against enemy propaganda. The majority were prisoners-of-war and forced labourers; the Generalissimus himself had commanded that they be returned as a matter of urgency. After the war ended, the British and the Americans opened the camps and handed over around sixty thousand Soviet citizens. But there were still plenty more on western soil who had to be tracked down, lured with false promises, and brought back to the Soviet Union — by force, if necessary.

  In many secret meetings at the NKVD, and in the Lubyanka, the talk was of the threat posed to exiled Soviet citizens in Europe. They were all being recruited by the capitalists, or by the Mensheviks, whose ‘democratisation campaigns’ were being financed by the Americans. The influential National Alliance of Russian Solidarists, or NTS for short — which was indeed financed by the Americans and collaborated with the exiled Mensheviks of the post-revolutionary era — was demonised incessantly.

  In the post-war years, fighting these ‘vermin’ and repatriating ‘endangered’ Soviet citizens who fell victim to western propaganda became a top priority.

  Now, Giorgi Alania was also to perform these tasks. In addition to his personal attributes and qualities, which had been so highly praised by someone or other, he needed special training, too: this would last three years, and would take place in Moscow.

  He was shipped off to the capital of socialism, allocated an apartment on Tverskoy Boulevard that was reserved for the nomenklatura, and began his secret, specialist training. In addition to methods (with which I am unfortunately, or fortunately, not acquainted) for luring people back to the Soviet promised land, or abducting them and taking them there by force, this training also included learning the English language.

  Everything changed for Alania in Moscow. He still wasn’t all that popular with his co-workers, but he was serving a higher purpose; he was one of the chosen ones. People respected and valued him and, above all, his impressive aptitude for learning. He was living in a metropolis, even if it hadn’t yet recovered from the apocalyptic war; and it was possible to find certain women here who were prepared, for a fee, or in return for other services, to simulate the passion he longed for and
the desire he craved.

  Alania no longer had time to spend on gloomy thoughts. He needed to become the best of the best. And his growing power — which until then he would never have dared to imagine, not even in his wildest dreams, and which had been granted so suddenly, so unexpectedly — meant he was able to do some good as well. He managed to track down his best friend, who had thankfully survived, and bring him to Moscow; he would heal his friend’s wounds and help him become the man he surely would have become, had this terrible war not intervened.

  *

  In 1946, before Alania was able to undertake the journey home — he had repeatedly postponed it, as his comprehensive training left him no time — his mother died of a stroke. The news sent Alania into a state of shock that lasted for quite some time. He had missed his chance to hold his mother to her promise. The burning curiosity about his origins took possession of him once again, with unimagined intensity. He requested a leave of absence, and travelled back to the remote Abkhazian-Megrelian countryside.

  After the funeral, he started to make determined enquiries. He questioned neighbours, his few detested relatives, his mother’s colleagues; he was open, almost provocative, as his mother had nothing left to lose and he — well, he was not intending ever to come back.

  Whether out of fear or ignorance, nobody had anything to tell him. Some swore by all that was holy that his mother had maintained a deathly silence all her life about the conception of her illegitimate child. Alania, however, was patient, he was meticulous, and his understanding of people was almost as good as his memory. His KGB identity card gained him access to the university archive in Kutaisi, where, among the countless files, he found the one bearing the name of the woman who had once had an entirely different future ahead of her, because she was the first and, for a long time, the only woman to be admitted to the faculty — a minor sensation. Until the only affair she had ever had in her life put an end to this prospective career before it could even begin.

  According to his calculations, he must have been conceived while she was in Kutaisi, and so he persisted. He went through everything in his head once more. Then he examined it again. And suddenly it no longer seemed quite so logical to him that he had been conceived in this town. It was so unlike Gulo — his beloved Gulo, his ‘little heart’, whose heart they had torn out, whom they had forced to live like a leper — to let someone get her pregnant just days after taking up the university place she’d coveted for so long. It made so little sense that, on the one hand, she had decided that higher mathematics was her future, yet, on the other, she had chosen to bring him into the world. All her life she’d had nothing but contempt for the opposite sex, and if he stopped to think about it, he, her beloved son, had been the sole exception.

  A terrible suspicion began to take shape in his mind, then suddenly came sharply into focus: absolutely logical, almost unavoidable, something that had been staring him in the face all along and which, for precisely this reason, he had failed to see. It wasn’t Gulo’s fault, as the whole village had claimed; it wasn’t her recklessness, her supposedly sluttish capitalist ideology, that had destroyed her life and made a bastard of him; it wasn’t her carelessness, it wasn’t even pleasure, a lapse — no, it must quite simply have been something that was done to her.

  It must have been rape! At first, the thought brought Alania a kind of relief, but then he felt a knot of anger forming. And this loathsome deed, of which he was the consequence, must have occurred shortly before her move to this town. She had wanted to study in Kutaisi, to start a new life; she would never have moved there, would never have fought so fiercely for her place at the university, if she’d known that she was expecting. Gulo had been, first and foremost, a pragmatic woman; she would have known that she wouldn’t stand even the ghost of a chance with an illegitimate child. She must have already been pregnant when she came to the town and only found out once she was here. But if something so terrible had been done to her, why had she stayed so resolutely silent? Why hadn’t she saved her honour? Then, too, he wouldn’t have been regarded as just his stupid, reckless slut of a mother’s mistake.

  He went back to his home village and visited his mother’s old school. He impressed the principal with his identity card, and finally received some useful information. The principal referred him to Gulo’s old teacher, who was still alive and living in a neighbouring village. Alania paid a kolkhoz worker a few roubles to drive him to the village in his droshky. There he found the old teacher, who was now almost blind, though her mind still seemed to be sharp. It didn’t take him long to explain whose son he was. She remembered Gulo quickly, and vividly. What a girl, what talent. She should have moved to the city, she hadn’t been able to find happiness in the countryside, such a shame, such a shame. What he needed, though, were facts.

  ‘Facts? What facts, my boy?’

  The old woman pronounced the word as if something poisonous had just been put in her mouth. All of a sudden she seemed more alert, and started to shift in her seat.

  ‘Who she was friends with before she went to university, for example. Who were her good —’

  ‘Listen, I taught my pupils, I didn’t make friends with them. I don’t know about any of that, my son.’

  But the manner, and the haste, with which the old lady blurted this out implied the opposite. Alania’s work with the NKVD had taught him a great deal, had honed his mind into a kind of antenna that picked up everything, even things that went unsaid. He showed the woman his identification; she looked at it, straining her eyes, seemingly unable to decipher the writing.

  ‘What’s this, my boy?’

  ‘You know exactly what this is.’

  ‘And what do you want from me?’

  She had dropped the ‘my boy’ this time. Her reedy voice was coloured with fear.

  ‘You know something that I have to know. You remember something that means a great deal to me, and you don’t want to tell me what it is, and although I would find it most distasteful, you’re leaving me no choice but to —’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes … All right. I don’t want any problems. My son is an upstanding socialist, he works for the tea plantation …’

  ‘I didn’t threaten you. I just need some facts.’

  ‘Fine. Your mother wasn’t your typical sort of girl, even back then. Didn’t gossip, didn’t hang around with the shy village girls; she knew what she wanted, and she was very determined. I realised that early on, believe me. But funnily enough, she got on well with the Lezhava girl, although she was a blonde dolly-bird type, the opposite of Gulo. Pretty dresses and plunging necklines and driving the village boys crazy when she went out for her evening stroll. But she was the daughter of Comrade Lezhava, the militsiya commissar. The two of them got on well; the girl was good at reciting poems, and they became friends on the trip to Baku.’

  ‘Baku? My mother was in Baku?’

  ‘It was a trip for young Komosomol members. I remember it well; a nice trip, only the best students were allowed to go, and we took the Lezhava girl along because, well, because … Four days we were there, maybe five. And …’ The woman paused; she seemed to be trying to find the right words, to put her memories in order, to turn back the clock.

  ‘When — when exactly was that? When was this trip?’

  ‘After graduation, in the summer. Special trips like those were only for the gold-medal graduates, so it must have been after they finished school.’

  ‘What happened in Baku?’

  ‘I don’t know — my God, I’m an old woman, I wasn’t with the girls every second …’

  Suddenly the woman’s face seemed to convulse, as if she were warding off an unpleasant memory. Giorgi sensed that he was getting close to the truth.

  ‘We met lots of people; they even put on a fancy reception for us.’ Her face lit up briefly with something like pride.

  ‘Who was at this reception?’

&n
bsp; ‘Senior commissars, Party men, very important ones; we were promoting friendship between peoples.’

  ‘Were they Azerbaijanis?’

  ‘Yes, and there were Georgians, too.’

  ‘And there was drinking?’

  ‘I didn’t let them drink.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then? How should I know … But nothing happened there; what are you getting at? I loved my girls and I protected them; and besides, they were honourable men, true communists, Party men, I told you!’

  She was breathing heavily, and complained that she had high blood pressure. She called her son, told him to bring her her medicine. Alania got up. Of course she knew more, of course he could force her to tell him what she knew, but he suddenly felt despondent, he wanted to get out into the fresh air, out of this damp room that stank of medication.

  ‘I won’t trouble you any longer, but do you know what happened to the Lezhava girl? What was her first name, do you remember?’

  ‘What was her name … hmm … no, I can’t think of it. Ask in the village. Her family’s been gone for years but people remember her — the men in particular remember her, I can tell you. As far as I know, she went to live in Batumi.’

  *

  Giorgi Alania stood there for a while on the dusty country road. As so often when he was nervous, his palms were damp, and his head hurt. The KGB card in his breast pocket felt like a bulletproof vest; it felt good. It made him feel that he would never have to ask anyone for anything ever again.

  Alania went to Batumi, visited the local commissariat, showed them his card without comment, and waited until they provided him with information about the girl, Comrade Lezhava. In the past few days he had found on several occasions that the effect his KGB card had on others saved him a great deal of time and effort.