The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  Once the official part of the reception was over, the delegation drove in several cars to an elegant banqueting hall somewhere in Krtsanisi, where they had laid on a lavish Georgian buffet and lots of Saperavi. The officious speeches continued in a slightly more relaxed tone. She was finding it hard to even swallow. Only Alania’s knee, which kept brushing against hers beneath the floor-length tablecloth, gave her a sense of security. Yes, if she were to fall unconscious on the spot, he would revive her. Before her turn came to propose a toast thanking the minister for his speech, Kostya appeared in the doorway.

  He was still tall, a formidable presence, moustachioed, uniform dripping with medals as he entered the room. She didn’t dare stand up, rush over to him (did she want to? Was she allowed to?). She didn’t know what was expected of her in this situation. But then people around her suddenly started clapping, and in the midst of this bombastic, artificial scenario her brother embraced his traitor of a sister whom he had lost to the evil imperialist world such a very, very long time ago, and for whom this almost biblical return of the prodigal daughter had been staged. All we need now is a marching band, she thought, and hugged Kostya tightly.

  *

  Kitty sat between Alania and her brother, eating delicious fresh river trout in pomegranate sauce and trying not to faint as people told her, with obvious pride, about the sold-out Philharmonia where both her concerts would take place, about the press interviews lined up for her, and the state banquet she was to attend along with a few other Soviet musicians. Three hours later, when she was finally allowed to leave the room at her brother’s side and get into his Seagull — throwing Alania a look that was both grateful and a cry for help — she sank into the passenger seat and closed her eyes.

  ‘You were very lucky. He managed it brilliantly. A very clever man,’ said Kostya, when they had driven for a while in silence. She was incapable of saying anything in reply.

  After they had crossed the city and were on the narrow, winding roads heading north, he told her there was some bad news as well.

  ‘Is it Stasia?’ she murmured. Her mouth was dry and cracked. Every word was painful.

  ‘Oh, no; believe me, she’ll outlive us all. It’s about Eristavi.’

  ‘Andro?’

  ‘He’s in hospital. His liver’s about to give out; no wonder, given his passion for all things alcoholic. I mean, after the death of …’

  ‘Of?’

  ‘His son.’

  ‘I didn’t know he —’

  ‘Drank? Drank is an understatement.’

  *

  Stasia wept, and had to sit down. Nana was so excited she dropped one of the cups from her most expensive Czech tea set. Daria laughed and performed a little dance for Kitty. I … I don’t know what I did, probably nothing remarkable; a bit of prattling, a bit of tottering about. But what was most peculiar was Elene’s reaction to Kitty’s arrival. When she spotted her father’s car on the drive she ran up the hill as fast as she could and hid.

  Elene only returned to the house later that evening, when the tears had stopped rolling down Stasia’s cheeks. Shamefaced, she slunk onto the terrace where the long table had been laid. The similarity was immediately apparent to all the family. It really was astonishing: the same thick hair, the same eyes, the same high cheekbones, even the same full lips; only Elene’s body seemed slightly heavier and softer than Kitty’s.

  Kitty got to her feet and slowly approached her niece.

  ‘It’s all right, Elene.’ She spoke in English. The girl was clearly intimidated, and she hoped the foreign language would make their meeting easier, as Kostya had told her Elene had learned English from her records. ‘Where were you all this time? We’ve all been waiting for you.’

  Elene finally raised her head; she seemed relieved. The girl with the two fatherless children looked so lost, so far removed from any notion Kitty had had of Kostya’s daughter.

  ‘I was afraid,’ Elene said, also in English. The foreign language enabled her to be honest. No one else around the table would understand them.

  ‘What of?’ asked Kitty, shielding Elene’s face with her body from her family’s inquisitive looks.

  ‘I don’t know. That you might not be how I imagined.’

  ‘How did you imagine me, then?’

  ‘Different from all the others.’

  ‘And are you disappointed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you two whispering about there, like a pair of schoolgirls? Elene, let Kitty come back to us — and will you come and sit down please, you’re being rude!’ called Kostya, irritated and disconcerted in equal measure.

  ‘Andro has a photo of you in his house,’ Elene continued, as if she hadn’t heard her father. ‘A photo from one of your concerts. But he’s in hospital now. After Miqa’s funeral, all he did was just keep drinking.’

  Elene’s eyes were wide open and locked on to Kitty as she spoke. As if the two of them were completely alone; as if the whole family weren’t sitting a few metres away, keen to have a joyful celebration. Kitty’s eyes widened. Miqa. Miqa. So that was the name of Andro’s son. Now both his sons were dead, the born and the unborn.

  ‘Elene’s English is excellent!’ Kitty called to the others, without turning round, without taking her horrified gaze off Elene.

  ‘I wanted to tell you that before they serve up all the lies, and I know my father probably won’t let me be alone with you. I wanted you to know. I wanted you to know that it’s our fault, all of ours, that Miqa isn’t with us any more. Mine above all. I don’t know you, but I know a lot about you. They never told me anything, but I found out about you, as much as I could. You have to visit Andro. They’ll follow you everywhere you go, but if you want we can try and shake them off. I drive to the hospital every day.’

  ‘Thank you!’

  Kitty cleared her throat. Then she put on the lightest and most carefree smile she possessed and turned to face the others.

  *

  Christine hadn’t been able to bring herself to come to the Green House and welcome Kitty. She had visited the cemetery every day since Miqa’s funeral. And she had looked after Andro, but had made no more attempts to stop him drinking. All too often he would drink himself unconscious, so that Christine had to call an ambulance, or he would end up in the drying-out cell for shouting abuse and breaching the peace.

  Finally, two weeks before Kitty’s return, Andro was admitted to the city hospital with advanced cirrhosis of the liver. As she sat beside his bed, Christine realised that in his death throes, bloated and no longer lucid, Andro actually seemed peaceful. Much more peaceful than before, when he had struggled with life instead of death. Lana and little Miro went back and forth between Christine’s apartment and Lana’s mother’s place. The boy was sickly, morose, and highly strung, and Lana was finding it very hard to cope. In the past few weeks, Elene had been almost fanatically helpful. She had driven into town every day, gone shopping for Lana and Christine, taken Lana’s little boy to the day nursery, picked him up again, and above all she had sat at Andro’s bedside, held his hand, read to him, and told him all the latest gossip, even though he didn’t really give the impression that he was listening or was able to understand what she said.

  In those weeks, Elene made worrying about Lana her top priority. Lana was still stubbornly, desperately clinging to her pain, for fear of glimpsing the unforgivable fact that might lie beyond it: that she could have saved Miqa’s life if she had given the film back in time. And that meant Elene could be certain she wouldn’t have to encounter Lana’s self-loathing, which would certainly be equal to her own. Because this, she was sure, would have pulled the already shaky ground from beneath her feet.

  She let Lana play the role of grieving widow. Let her pain take centre stage. This, too, was a way of not having to deal with herself, with all that lay behind and before her. She joined forces with Lan
a in maintaining the bogus myth she clung to so persistently, the myth of the unwavering idealist who went forth to fight against the rotten, corrupt system, to drag its filth into the light, and had laid down his life for this great objective. In her own memory, Lana wanted to remain the brave fighter at his side, the custodian of his secret, the mother of his son, the woman to whom he had entrusted his heart and the most precious thing he ever owned: his film, his confession of faith. They both knew, of course, that they were lying to themselves, each in her own way. But this lie could be lived with, whereas the truth was uncertain, gave no clear answers, and left nothing but hatred and self-loathing. No — the truth paralysed; the lie liberated.

  Kitty’s return must have seemed to Elene like a sign from heaven. Bringing two lovers together: her last chance to make paltry atonement. She couldn’t bring the dead back to life, but perhaps she could accomplish one small good deed; one small, sad, good deed. Andro’s sickbed, and Kitty, a photograph personified.

  Yes, perhaps this western resistance fighter, this anarchist, this goddess of music would find peace in Elene’s stead, here at the deathbed of her childhood sweetheart. And she, Elene, would be able to watch her and learn how to accept things that came to nothing, that simply vanished into thin air. Things, feelings, hopes … people.

  ‘He doesn’t love you.’ That was what she had said to Lana, in Andro’s house — but it was herself she had meant. And she had not prioritised Miqa’s life over her inability to live with that fact. Now Miqa was dead. And Elene was still here. Just as godless as before. Just as alone. Just as confused.

  Peace, land, and bread!

  POSTER SLOGAN

  Kitty had spotted Christine from the other end of the corridor. She had looked so old, and at the same time so childlike. The once-striking beauty had become an impoverished, eccentric, introverted figure. She held her aunt in her arms for a long time. Inhaled her scent, and remembered how, when she had returned from that village, from Hell, without her big belly and with burning stitches in her abdomen, she had run her fingers over Christine’s wounds to draw her own map of survival.

  The window of the hospital room looked out onto narrow-limbed, black-green cypresses, with tops that seemed to stab the clouds. Elene led Kitty into the room and explained to her that he came round intermittently, that when he did he even took a little food, but that he had not spoken since his arrival and Kitty shouldn’t hope for too much. Then she offered her a chair, as if she, Elene, were the hostess at some happy event.

  Another patient lay in the other corner of the room; he was conscious, and reading Pravda.

  Cautiously, Kitty approached Andro’s bed. He was lying slightly on his side, head turned towards the sunny window, one arm resting on top of the blanket. It took some time for her to see the old features in his face, which the intervening years had disfigured beyond all recognition. It wasn’t easy to find the blond, curly-haired Andro, carver of angels, in this man with the matted beard.

  How had he lived since she’d been gone? Who was the woman who had borne him a son? And what had his son been like? Did he resemble the son who had been denied the right to be born?

  Elene told her that the doctors said he only had a few more weeks. Kitty stretched out her hand. She was shivering, although it was warm outside. Elene had gone over to the window and was looking down into the hospital garden with the tall cypresses and the white benches.

  Neither of them saw the woman in a man’s suit, with eyes like Andro’s, who stood down there under the tallest cypress, looking up at them. Smiling patiently.

  Dark veins were visible through his skin; skin rough and lined from the hard work to which he was so unsuited. From the busts of Lenin and the Generalissimus.

  Kitty struggled for words.

  ‘Andro, can you hear me?’ she whispered, bringing her lips close to his ear. ‘It’s me, Kitty. I’m back. Here — my hand, can you feel it? I’ve come. To you, Andro.’

  Only now did Kitty sit on the chair Elene had pulled up for her. Then she beckoned to Elene, who hurried over and sat on the edge of it, where Kitty had made space.

  ‘Tell me about him. And about his son,’ she said quietly, not taking her eyes off Andro’s stony face.

  As if she had waited centuries for this request, Elene began to talk. Cheerful and over-eager, the words and sentences gushed out of her such that even the Pravda-reading patient put down his paper for a moment and squinted over at them. She talked wildly, indiscriminately. About her childhood. About her time in Moscow. About Vasily and the Black Sea coast. Then the business with Miqa’s film that no one had ever seen. Then about the night she and Lana had driven to the village in the mountains to fetch Andro. But mostly she talked about Miqa. She tried to tell the truth. She tried not to gloss over her own failure. But she couldn’t do it: no matter what she said, no matter how long she went on talking, her words didn’t create a unified picture, didn’t make anything clear. There was no logic to her story, nothing made sense; the thread that could have led to Miqa’s death was missing.

  Elene kept glancing hopefully at Kitty, but gleaned no comfort from her features, no understanding, not even a reproach; it was as if Kitty’s face were a mirror in which she saw only herself.

  Suddenly, Kitty stood up and left the hospital room. Elene stared after her in dismay, incapable of connecting Kitty’s exit to her report. Kitty walked past Christine into the orange-tiled hospital toilet, which stank of urine. The door swung shut behind her; immediately she leaned against it and stood there, motionless, for several minutes, trying to control her breathing. Then she walked over to the basin, which was yellowed with age, and turned on the tap. A brownish liquid flowed from it; recalling her mother’s saying, ‘Let the water run long enough and eventually it’ll run clear,’ she waited. Sure enough, the brown disappeared and the clear water came. She held her hands under it. She looked at herself in the scratched mirror. And screamed.

  She sank to the wet floor, fell on her knees, still clinging to the basin with one hand. Her body was failing her. Her breath was failing her. People, too: all of them had failed her.

  He would die. She would have to mourn him. He, too, would go.

  There was so much she still wanted to say to him. She would have had to tell him the story of half her life. No — all of it. But differently: retold. The story he didn’t know. Didn’t understand. She wanted to puke up her silence, her impotence, into this miserable basin. To vomit with all she had and disgorge her fear, the fear of what was still to come. Yes: she was no longer interested in what might lie ahead. How could you live if you were constantly looking back?

  *

  She saw him again at the state banquet. Four days had passed since her arrival. Four days in the Green House, where a non-existent happiness was invoked and celebrated. There he stood, in the entrance to this stylish restaurant above the city, near the television tower. Between the white-clothed tables, under painfully garish lights, surrounded by frantic waiters and the suit-wearers who all dissolved into a grey mass in Kitty’s eyes.

  Kostya was originally supposed to accompany her to this reception, where she was to shake countless hands, give prepared answers to questions, and eat with people who inspected her with suspicion and, at the same time, were filled with envy; where she was to meet the musicians, painters, and writers who had been recognised and approved by the state and speak with them about the advantages of socialism. Where her every gesture and every word would be carefully weighed and she would be examined and judged on the degree of her capitalist depravity. Kostya, however, had caught the flu and stayed at home.

  Instead, Kitty had brought her niece, who was wearing a bright yellow dress and was very excited. It seemed there was something she had to live with that she couldn’t live with, and she was seeking in Kitty another life that Kitty — she was sure of it — would not be able to give her. Elene would end up being disappointe
d. This young woman looked so like her, yet was so unlike her in her passivity, her torpor, her inability to lead an autonomous life, while always longing for precisely that.

  He greeted her, played the role of official chaperone so masterfully. He hadn’t needed to rehearse this. Nor had she. He shook her hand. Not too firm, not too feeble.

  Seated between Elene and a pianist, she kept glancing at him as she let the obligatory stilted speeches about friendship between peoples, art, homeland, socialism, the Georgian Communist Party and its impeccable leadership wash over her. And every time she looked at Alania she saw Andro’s closed eyelids. The cracked lips, the feeble, cold hand, the ragged fingernails, the matted beard. And when she thought of him, she thought of the classroom and Mariam; she saw the blonde woman hidden behind the dark corner of a house, pulling her brother towards her. And then she saw the blood on the knife in the room on the Holy Mountain, and asked herself whether she had ever really left that room. And when she asked herself this, the next question was inevitable: after all that, how could she have bound anyone to her again, and how could she ever have believed a red-haired woman who, unlike her, was smart enough to know that concentration camp barracks and rooms with corpses are not places you ever leave?

  *

  Her rehearsals at the Philharmonia began the following day. They tried out the acoustics and the engineers did a sound check, under the eyes of Alania and two other men from the Georgian KGB. She hadn’t performed for a very long time, particularly not in front of such a large audience. After her American tour, and then the split with Fred, she hadn’t played any more big concerts.

  She was to be accompanied on four songs from the album Replacement by a string quartet, and by a pianist for three more. They rehearsed together, and once they started playing she was actually able to forget Andro’s face. Soon they were creating harmonies that drove the battle between socialism and capitalism out of her mind.