And lies were an important part of his life. Throughout his years in London, Giorgi Alania had located and personally repatriated so many people whom he lured with false promises, who followed him voluntarily or were forced to do so, that he now enjoyed a considerable reputation and a certain untouchability at headquarters in Moscow.
Yes, he had kept his promise, as he always kept his promises to Kitty. But in this instance he had done so with particular devotion, with particular conviction. Had risked everything for it. How often he had feared that it would all be exposed, that he wouldn’t be able to protect her; how much willpower this promise had demanded of him. And yet how happy he had been to keep it. For her. The only saint in his life.
In the beginning, he had done it for Kostya, for his effortless love, but then he had had to admit to himself that Kostya no longer played such a crucial role in his desire to go on being there for this disembodied woman, for this voice. He had been a shadow for many years, but now they were sitting opposite each other, telling each other about their lives, expressing their most intimate thoughts and wishes, admitting things to one another as if they were two old friends who had celebrated birthdays and weddings together, had mourned people together, had spent their lives together.
He thought back to the day when he had realised she no longer needed his protection, that she was free: the day he heard her first song on the radio. He had done it; he had made her untouchable.
And now, for her, he had thrown all the rules out of the window, disregarded safety precautions, risked everything to protect what had seemed to him, for so many years, so immeasurably important. He had also allowed himself to be found by her, and it would be child’s play for her to bring his house of cards tumbling down; he would have to fear for his life. But this, too, meant nothing to him in the light of her physical presence. Being caught, having his double life exposed, seemed laughably insignificant to him if he could have this face to go with this voice.
Night was now dangerously close to day. And the day that was dawning would be different from all the days of his life until now. Who would he be when he left this flat again?
Kitty took a deep breath and stretched on the sofa like a contented cat.
*
Elsewhere, in another world, a heavy, bloated body turned on its side. A bearded man, poisoned by alcohol and transgression, crippled by an unspeakable loss, battered by his own impotence, incapable of speech, let out an animal sound.
In the same world — in the same city, even — a thin, red-haired woman sat up on a mattress, beside a young woman whose name she did not recall, and bit her lip. The poison that consigned everything to oblivion had worn off; her head hurt, her body, too, but her mind was alert, and it raged and lamented, telling her that she had failed, she had lost someone and could not cope with this loss.
*
‘You have to help me. If I don’t go to Tbilisi, I’ll lose my mind. This feeling is paralysing me, it’s driving me mad. I can’t think about anything else any more. I have to go back. I don’t know what it is; for years I’ve been able to keep all these feelings and memories at bay, but I can’t, not any more. I’m going to go. I have a British passport, but … Help me.’
Kitty spoke quietly, in a monotone, like a prayer to be recited over and over again.
‘What do you hope will come of it?’
‘I don’t know, I just know I have to do it. It’s the last thing I’ll ask of you. I promise, Giorgi. Oh God, it’s so strange to be saying your name.’
‘I don’t know if I want you never to ask me for anything again. But what you’re asking lies outside my authority.’
The night melted down to a lump that stuck in the throat. They were like two acrobats who had fallen from their tightrope, circus people whose tents the wind had carried off in all directions.
His stomach clenched as if he were on a rollercoaster: with excitement and fear, at the thought of all that might happen. His legs were tingling. He knew the answer to the question she didn’t dare ask him; he had carried it on the tip of his tongue all these years without realising. The answer to the question of why he had ensured, all this time, that she stayed alive, that she was still here. But he couldn’t yet tell her that she was the longest — disembodied, but nonetheless the longest — and most constant relationship of his life.
A little chill ran down his spine. If she no longer needed him, if she were no longer dependent on his friendship, what else was there to give his life meaning? To stop the ice from filling his soul completely? No: he wanted her to ask him for help, wanted her to ask many more things of him.
‘I was nineteen. Or maybe only eighteen. In any case, I was still in my first year at the Frunze Academy. I was taking the train to the Black Sea coast. Kostya had given me a parcel to take with me; I was to deliver it to his mother, or his aunt, and I was willing to make the detour because he told me that his sister …’
Kitty, suddenly attentive, raised her head and stared at him incredulously, as if waking from long hibernation.
‘… that she was at his grandfather’s and maybe I could give her the parcel and she could send it on to Tbilisi. For some reason, he wanted this parcel to get there in a hurry. I remember it clearly: he put it together with such excitement. Anyway, I was happy to make the detour because I was so curious about Kostya’s family, about his sister …’
Kitty stared at him, dumbfounded. She knitted her brow, searching her memory for the missing pieces of the puzzle.
‘It was right at the start of the war, the day I met you at the station.’
‘Oh God — that was you,’ whispered Kitty.
‘I still remember it as if it were yesterday. That station entrance hall. I don’t know why, but I was excited. I was going to meet Kostya’s sister, I’d see a different side of him, find out more about him; I don’t know what I was hoping for. I really don’t. And then I saw you. You were wearing this awful school uniform, but without the pinafore. And your wild hair. It was falling over your face. When you arrived, you seemed to be in a rush, and so distracted, and I desperately wanted to talk to you. I was so curious. I wanted to know so much, to know how a man becomes like Kostya, and why, what sort of family he must come from … And I got you. You were impatient; you said you had homework to do. I could scarcely hide my disappointment; I thought, I don’t believe it, I’ve made such a detour, and for what, just these few minutes in this stupid hall to meet a schoolgirl who won’t even look at me properly, and then … I was annoyed. I didn’t know what to say, and you took the parcel and left. I was so crushed; I thought, that’s how it is, that’s how it always is, people, especially women, they look through me, why would it be any different this time. But then you came back into the hall and gave me this huge smile. I was so happy and surprised and overwhelmed. Yes, it’s true, I’m not exaggerating. Don’t look at me like that. You were so full of life. I remembered how often Kostya had been exasperated with you, and said how rebellious you were. And all of a sudden I decided that was a marvellous thing.
‘Later, you walked me to the train and waved me off. Yes: you waved me off. It was dark by then, and I pulled down the window and peered out, almost the whole of my upper body hanging out, and you stayed there, the whole time you stayed and waited, and for one brief moment I saw myself as a boy saying goodbye to his girlfriend. A boy in love, waving goodbye to a girl in love. That was enough. For a long time. A very long time.’
Kitty was silent. She stared thoughtfully into her empty glass, then down at the floor again, not daring to look him in the face. Then she turned to him, put her arms around his shoulders, and pressed her forehead to his.
Yes, from now on things would have to change, Alania knew that, after everything he had said. Decisively. Whether for better or worse he didn’t know, but he would let them change, he would let them, because before him sat the only woman who loved him.
Today I have so much to do:
I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn soul to stone,
I must learn to live again
ANNA AKHMATOVA
It was a sullen, unsettled morning as the plane prepared for landing. It looked as if all the gloating ghosts had gathered on the clouds and were gleefully sticking out their tongues at the arriving passengers.
He had promised to pick her up. He would support her if she fell; he would stretch out a net of feathers for her to land softly, or simply spread his wings and fly away with her if she thought she were in a trap; if she suffocated, he would give her the kiss of life.
He had promised her all this in the long summer months in London, and in her house near Seven Sisters, which Kitty had finally visited, with him, in the sultry July heat.
Those had been days full of words regained. She felt safe; not safe in a physical sense, but in a much deeper one, as if before their meeting reality had been just one great threadbare backdrop, as if she had always been suspicious of this backdrop and had now finally learned to look behind it. A reality behind reality. Words behind which stood whole armies of other words. Sentences that drew countless others after them, and didn’t trickle away into emptiness and insignificance.
Since that never-ending night, which went on long after the sun had risen, their first night without telephone or time limits, he had never spoken of his work again. The things he had to hide were ugly — the things he could not speak of, the things that frightened him — and she, too, was unwilling to jeopardise this fragile construct they both suddenly found themselves prepared to build. She just wanted him to stay. In her life. By her side. She sometimes wondered whether she would be prepared to receive all his secrets as the price for his years of loyalty. But she dreaded it; she didn’t want to know what price he had paid in order to be able to support her. What worried her most of all, though, was — paradoxically — his decision to stay by her side. Why was he ignoring all his precautions, the agreements that governed his reality, and taking an inconceivable risk? Why wasn’t he afraid that his double life might end in a prison cell? That his well-made play would be exposed as a farce?
She didn’t ask him about it. Just welcomed him. Whenever he came to her; whenever he decided that it was time to come to her, and stay. Only formal, obligatory security measures were still maintained: the night became their day. They never left the flat together. They never met in public. They took different trains from the city to their cottage. Sometimes, as she watched him making her an omelette or flicking through her record collection, she would go rigid with fear. The thought that he might disappear again paralysed her. And thinking about the impossibility of a normal life together paralysed her, too. And sometimes, when he turned away from her, insisted on going for a walk alone, or skilfully, slickly, evaded a question, she thought it would be unbearable for her, impossible for her to live with, if ever she were compelled to despise him. For things he had done, for things he embodied, for things he concealed from her.
But then she consoled herself with the terrible thoughts that had haunted her all her life, the thoughts she had always tried so resolutely to suppress: the murder, Mariam, and the shadowy house on the Mtatsminda mountain. At moments like this, she meekly accepted that she was a murderess, and persuaded herself that she, a murderess, a traitor, had not the slightest reason to despise another, irrespective of what that person might have done.
They never touched. He seemed unused to physical contact: she was too overwhelming for him.
That was all right with her. She, too, needed to relearn how to be close to someone, if indeed she were ever to permit such a thing again. Their days on the English coast were filled with long, damp walks and the sound of the sea. Days full of sentences sucked like sweets. There, for the first time in ages, she was seized by the need to pick up her guitar and create something new. And when he set off for London, leaving her behind on her own, she unplugged the phone and sat down in the window seat, creating new melodies, teasing them out from deep within. She always kept some elderflower cordial ready for him in the fridge. She learned to hold back her memories of the red-haired woman and not let them ruin the atmosphere. Because things were good as they were.
And then one afternoon he travelled down from London, burst into the kitchen like an excited little boy who’d surpassed himself in his audacity, and planted himself in front of her, grinning.
‘I think I’ve found a solution. At least, I hope I have.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asked, confused.
‘I think I’ve found a way of getting you to Tbilisi.’ He smiled his despondent smile, which for some reason always made her feel sad. ‘I spoke to your manager. I explained to her that the authorities in Tbilisi would be interested in having you play a concert there, but that the request had to come from her. She seemed very surprised at first, but she responded well and said she was sure you’d be delighted to be able to travel back to your homeland. So I explained to her in detail whom she had to call and what she had to say, so there wouldn’t be any suspicions, and afterwards she called our embassy and requested a concert in Tbilisi. As a sort of sign of peace on both sides. That was five days ago, and afterwards I had a meeting with the Culture Department that went on till midnight. I spoke to the ambassador, and he called Moscow. You should know you’re famous in the Soviet Union; young people in particular listen to your songs. Since Replacement and the Prague photo you’ve been very popular there. So, anyway, they thought about it, and realised it wouldn’t be such a stupid idea to take this opportunity and use it for their own purposes this time. Take a nice photo of you in your hometown, a gesture of reconciliation, so to speak, a sign that you have nothing against the Soviet Union, that what happened in Prague was a kind of silly misunderstanding. They need these gestures of reconciliation; for young people in particular, they need proof that we’re not monsters.’
As he spoke, she stared at him in disbelief, incapable of processing there and then the information he was giving her, incapable of believing that her wish to go back could soon become reality.
‘And what about you?’ she asked later, over dinner.
‘What about me?’
‘Are you coming with me?’
‘My plan is this: they won’t give Amy an entry permit; she’s far too British and capitalist, and she can’t keep her mouth shut. If all goes smoothly, they’ll assign me to take over Amy’s job while you’re in Georgia. And if that’s approved, then for the two weeks they’ll give you I’ll be your official minder.’
‘Ha! If they only knew you’ve been that for twenty years.’
*
Now the past was getting alarmingly close to the present, approaching at the speed of the Aeroflot plane.
Her legs were swollen. She had balled her hands into fists. Patches of sweat had formed under the arms of her white shirt. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to get her breathing under control. Strangely enough, now, of all times, she found herself thinking of Fred. Now, when she was furthest away from her, and getting further with every kilometre. But she couldn’t help imagining how Fred might find, experience, see the country that, after an absence of almost two decades, was unfamiliar to her as well. Where was Fred right now? What was she doing? Was someone protecting her, or had she already bartered all her guardian angels for the needle? She pressed her forehead against the seat in front. She had changed planes in Moscow and had had to endure endless checks, but the biggest test still lay ahead of her.
He was there, though. He had flown to his homeland ten days before her to organise everything on the ground. He would pick her up, and she would be able to breathe again. He would prevent her being buried entirely beneath the cascade of memories. She was sure he would.
*
The crowd began to cheer as soon as the plane doors opened and the stairway was brought over. They were all
waving bunches of flowers, calmly and in time, as if carefully choreographed and synchronised; no one stepped out of line, no one screamed excessively, no one was insufficiently enthusiastic.
Even the journalists who did get a little out of line, running up to her and holding out their best wind-protected microphones, were polite and smiled at her encouragingly.
She allowed herself to be photographed, and responded politely to the vacuous questions their editorial departments had approved, as the crowd lapsed into reverential silence. She accepted the flowers, thanked people, and afterwards allowed herself to be led to the second floor of the airport building where a large group of editors, KGB agents, security men, and so-called programme directors, all in suits, were gathered around a long conference table. They gave ceremonial speeches, spoke of the significance of her concert, stressed her homeland’s interest in her, the dangers of western propaganda and manipulation, and explained to her the programme she was to follow over the course of her two-week visit.
They were on the third speech before he entered the room. She recognised his footsteps even before he came in. He walked straight up to her and gave her a formal handshake. His gaze was calm, as if to convey to her that everything was going to be fine.
The Eighth Life Page 75