After rehearsals, Kitty would stroll around the streets of Tbilisi, accompanied by the three silent men. There was little she could do about the fact that she saw the city through the eyes of two people: the eyes of the red-haired junkie, Fred, and the eyes of the dying Andro.
The day of the concert was the only day Kitty didn’t go to the hospital. Despite Alania’s protests and the warnings of the security men, who refused to be shaken off, she had visited Andro in hospital every day, had stroked his hands and watched them artificially keep him alive; and once, unable to stop herself, she had lain on his chest and kissed his face over and over again. Elene had been outside, the Pravda patient asleep.
Now she was sitting alone in her dressing room at the Philharmonia, thinking of a particular hotel room in Baltimore. It had had heavy gold curtains, presumably from the Gilded Age. Fred had taken one of the curtains and wrapped the material round her body, draping it like a Victorian dress; she had put on Kitty’s lipstick and posed as if singing an opera aria. Kitty had picked up Fred’s newly purchased camera and taken a photo. A photo she’d never had developed, as the camera had disappeared along with the film and its owner.
Kitty hid her face in her hands for a moment, took a deep breath, rose to her feet, and stepped out on stage with her guitar. She would sing of her life of two halves. Here, on this stage, she could finally be who she was, and afterwards it would surely be harder for her to go back to the bad play in which she couldn’t be who she wanted to be, couldn’t say what she thought, couldn’t mourn those she wanted to mourn. She was afraid the sentences she had learned by heart would run out, that she would lose control of her face, that her voice would crack. But she was buoyed up by the applause that broke out the moment she was caught in the spotlight, and the fear instantly vanished when she played the first chord on her guitar.
Who included me among the ranks of the human race?
JOSEPH BRODSKY
‘I’ve got precisely twenty minutes. Then I have to go to some excruciating event, national children’s dances or something. I wanted to have you to myself for a moment — you didn’t come to the concert yesterday, and I thought …’
Kitty was exhausted. She was sitting at the round table in Christine’s living room, and her eyes had dark rings under them for lack of sleep.
Christine put her arms around her from behind and stood like that for a while. They listened to the old cuckoo clock ticking on the wall. Kitty closed her eyes. Leaned back against Christine’s chest. Her body felt so weightless, like a bird you could hold in the palm of your hand.
‘I don’t know what’s happened between you, but it seems unthinkable to me that you and Deda hardly see each other any more,’ Kitty said wearily.
Christine moved away to fetch a carafe of cherry liqueur and two glasses. Then she sat down opposite her niece. Her gaze was full of warmth and comfort, as if she were laying a warm blanket round Kitty’s shoulders.
‘There are three men on the stairs outside my door. I assume they’re here because of you.’
Christine poured the red liquid into the glasses.
‘Yes, they follow me everywhere I go. Every second, every minute, they’re there. Only when I’m with Kostya — then they leave us alone. Kostya’s trustworthy enough for them. But I wanted to see you — all of you. Not this masquerade, Christine. I don’t get to see you, Deda and Kostya are trying to turn my life into one long party, Andro isn’t even conscious any more, and the rest, the rest is … unbearable.’
Christine leaned across the table and pressed a kiss to Kitty’s forehead. What Kitty really wanted to do was lie down on this table, right here and now, and ask her aunt to watch over her, to stroke her head as she had back then, during the worst time of her life; until her strength returned and she was healthy, raring to go and bursting with new songs. But at any minute they would knock on the door and remind her that this masquerade, in which, like it or not, she was playing the lead role, had to go on. She would go out to them, give them a friendly smile. They would warn her once again not to visit the dying deserter and traitor in hospital.
She got up and went to the bathroom. Since returning to her homeland she always seemed to be taking refuge in toilets and bathrooms, both public and private. They seemed to be the only places where she could assume she wouldn’t be followed. It felt as if someone were squeezing her temples with forceps.
There was a knock on the apartment door. Kitty heard Christine open up. It was Alania. She recognised his footsteps. She heard him say something, and Christine invited him in. No — she couldn’t go out yet. She let the water run.
*
‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but they’re waiting: I have to take Comrade Jashi away from you.’ Alania was embarrassed. He felt inhibited and ugly before the once-beautiful Christine; he wanted to get out of this apartment again as quickly as possible. He thought of how Kostya had idolised this woman. This was the woman for whom he had delivered the parcel, an impotent attempt to comfort her after her tragedy. And it was the parcel he had to thank for his encounter with Kitty Jashi: it was because of Christine that he’d made that detour all those years ago. The detour that had lasted a lifetime.
She had opened the door to him, but now she stepped back in shock. Her lips parted as if she were going to cry out; then she closed them again and slowly backed away. She groped along the wall with one hand, feeling for something, found the switch and snapped on the overhead light. She stared at him as if she had seen something that scared her to death.
‘Is everything all right?’
Alania raised his head and looked straight at her. Although it made him rather uneasy, he wanted to look at her properly, to impress her image on his mind. To seek the beauty behind the passage of time.
Christine had dyed her hair black and wore it swept into a stern, symmetrical bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a knee-length black dress and nylon stockings. One half of her face was veiled by a piece of dark-blue lace pinned to her hair. How many rumours had circulated about her, about the husband who had killed himself, about her lover? What strength must she have summoned, back then, to sacrifice her face for her honour, to preserve her dignity, to refrain from pumping her mind full of contempt.
Now she stepped a little closer to him. She slowly raised her right hand, as if she were about to touch him. Then lowered it again, and froze in that unnatural stance. He took a step towards her, afraid that she might fall, but she immediately folded both arms across her chest as if to protect herself from him.
‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my apartment?’ she asked quietly, almost hissing.
‘Giorgi Alania — you must know my name, I’m an old friend of your nephew’s. I trained with Kostya at the Frunze Higher Naval School in Leningrad, do you remember?’
He tried to speak in as calm and friendly a voice as possible.
‘Giorgi Alania. Alania.’ Christine repeated his name quizzically, as if it were very unusual, as if she were practising the correct pronunciation. Suddenly she shook her head, as if to dispel some fanciful thought; she seemed annoyed by her own irrational behaviour. ‘I’m sorry; how silly of me. For a moment you reminded me of someone I used to know … How stupid of me, that’s just not possible, forgive me.’
Christine invited Alania into the living room.
‘Kitty’s in the bathroom. She’ll be back in a minute.’
They sat down at the table, and Christine, clearly still agitated, reached for the glass of liqueur. She knocked it back and started scrutinising him again, studying his face. She kept shaking her head in disbelief, as if she were having an internal dialogue with herself. Then she laughed and slapped her forehead.
‘Is there something the matter with my face?’
‘No, no. It’s just …’ she said, as if waking from a dream. ‘It’s just. I don’t know how to say it.’
‘T
ell me what it is that’s troubling you. I’d be more than happy to help.’
‘You really do seem very familiar to me.’
Something about the way she said this made Alania prick up his ears.
‘I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ve met before. I would never have forgotten your face, never.’
‘You are from Georgia, aren’t you? Who are your parents?’ she asked disarmingly, still absorbed in her examination of his features.
What was taking Kitty so long? Alania suddenly felt an urgent need to escape, not to be forced to continue this peculiar conversation.
‘Yes, but you definitely won’t know the village where my mother spent her whole life, I’m quite sure of that.’ Alania continued to maintain an amiable and courteous tone.
‘And your father?’
She wouldn’t let it go. A question that was like a judgement. Alania cleared his throat. Lowered his head. Should he lie? Make up a father? A hardworking kolkhoz farmer, a patient teacher, a busy geologist, perhaps?
‘There is no father.’
He gave the honest answer. Suddenly Christine stood up, walked over and stopped right in front of him; he smelled her slightly sweet, alcoholic breath as she bent down and touched his face. Goosebumps crept up his arm.
‘Everyone has a father,’ she said, almost inaudibly.
‘I never had the chance to meet him. My mother died without explaining to me the precise circumstances of my … um, well, conception. I don’t even know his name, and so I have no father.’
‘It’s quite remarkable … You’re the spitting image of him. The same skin. Your voice is a little deeper, but it has the same timbre.’
‘Who are you talking about?’
Alania was finding the situation increasingly uncomfortable. He tried to tell himself that she had, of course, mistaken him for someone else; but something about her manner refuted this. He wasn’t prepared for it. Hoped that Kitty would come and save him.
‘He was addicted to beautiful women. Preferably blonde, pale, tall, blue- or green-eyed. Was your mother blonde?’
She had listed these characteristics as if talking about a product that only rarely came onto the shelves at the grocer’s. The alarm in her face had been replaced by a triumphant certainty.
‘Yes, she was — and tall, too, but …’
‘Or perhaps I’m entirely mistaken.’
She was about to go back to her chair, but he reflexively grabbed her hand and asked her to stop.
‘Who are you talking about? Please, tell me.’
His voice wavered. He looked at her, appealing to her for help.
And then she spoke the name of the Little Big Man out loud. And as terrible and unlikely as this name seemed to him in the context of his own existence, at the same time it was like a key to the eternal puzzle of his origins. If he traced back the thread running through his life with this in mind, everything fitted together, completely logically. As if there could never have been any question of his having any other father. As if it were obvious that the Little Big Man had fathered him.
He had let go of her wrist. She, however, continued to look down at him. His hands were trembling. He didn’t have ultimate confirmation of this atrocity, but already the realisation was dripping into his consciousness like poison, paralysing his body.
Of course it had happened in Baku. The Little Big Man had studied there, he had lived there, had begun his stellar career there. And Gulo, little naive Gulo — what could she have said against him? The scales fell from his eyes. Of course his mother had had to remain silent. How could she have protected her offspring from his own progenitor?
Suddenly, he was paralysed by an appalling realisation. At some point he must have found out about his, Giorgi’s, existence. Of course — he owed it all to the recommendation of his anonymous father: his admission to the naval academy that was open only to the best families in the country, the transfer to the Sea of Japan, his recruitment, and the move to Moscow! Beads of sweat broke out on Giorgi Alania’s brow. He felt as if he were about to fall off his chair. The Amur shipyard, and the visit from the senior official just before the end of the war! Of course. His whole life had gone according to his invincible father’s plan!
Yes, this woman was right. Everyone had a father.
He lost his composure: tears rolled down his cheeks. Christine didn’t move. Nor was she looking at him any more. She had found what she had been searching for. Now she would be patient. She would wait. She had all the time in the world. She was the messenger. The black angel.
*
Even the security men had been invited to Kostya’s table. They were all there: the madmen and the hypocrites, the parasites and the opportunists, the sympathisers, the servants and the commanders, the wives and the lovers, all sat there eating a celebratory dinner in Kitty’s honour. Only Alania had not come. He had excused himself right at the beginning of the feast and disappeared. Kitty had waited for him in vain; she had hoped he would return and brush his knee against hers under the table, the assurance that everything was fine. But nothing was fine. She knew that, and so did he.
She found him on the hill, standing there in the dark. The terrifying abyss of the gorge fell away into infinite blackness. Crickets could be heard exchanging their secrets. The distant conviviality of the company around the table and the loud, long-winded toasts drifted up to where they stood, on the edge of the property, as snatches of echoes.
‘What’s going on? Why did you leave?’ She saw that his eyes were red, swollen. He was shivering as if he were delirious. Without knowing why, she knelt before him.
‘Giorgi? What’s happened to you?’
‘It can’t be true, not now, not like this …’ he kept repeating.
For the first time, she saw terrible fear in his face. Now it was her turn to catch him, to offer him refuge, to spread her wings over him. He clasped her so tightly she could barely keep her balance. She took his hand and guided it to her neck. She nestled her head in his hand, she let his hand stroke her neck. She kissed him.
He ran his forefinger over his lips in disbelief, as if checking to see whether she had left her taste on them.
Sometimes it was lips that were the wings, sometimes just words, and sometimes treasured photos.
*
Andro died three days after Kitty’s departure. He didn’t regain consciousness, but my mother says the last time Kitty was there with him he clutched her hand. I don’t know whether this was just the reflex of a dying man, or whether it could perhaps be construed as a gesture of reconciliation — which was my mother’s interpretation.
Book VI
Daria
We’re not the ones who invented this world,
I’m not the one who invented this world.
A world where you can do anything,
But you’ll never change a single thing.
ALLA PUGACHEVA
For Daria and me, the Soviet Union meant: constant funeral marches and processions as aged gentlemen of the Communist Party were carried to their graves; carnations everywhere, macabre spectacles broadcast on all the television channels. For us, the Soviet Union meant: endless summer camps, Pioneer neckerchiefs. Tea plantations, apiaries, and kolkhozes. White knee-socks from China, tapestries of hunting scenes on the walls, Mishka Na Severe chocolates, and Lagidze’s tarragon lemonade. Our grandfather’s GAZ-13, the brightly coloured blocks of Plasticine with the frog on them, yellow Krya-Krya children’s shampoo, Grandfather’s Start shaving cream, the talcum powder in the bathroom cabinet with the cat’s head on the pot, which we weren’t allowed to use. Hygiene body lotion, and Stasia’s Red Moscow perfume, which smelled of old people and was enough to give you a headache. The odourless brown bath-soap that was actually called ‘Bath Soap’.
It was the brown school uniforms from Moscow — a symbol of prospe
rity — and the identical, but more coarsely cut, uniforms made in Tbilisi and worn by everyone whose parents were not company directors, professors, or commissars. It was the fat, white-aproned women sitting in canteens, grocery stores, cafés, hotel corridors, and beside the malt-beer tanks. The Cao Sao Vang Golden Star Aromatic Balm, also known as ‘Vietnam ointment’: tiger balm, which smelled appalling, and which you had rub on your chest if you had a cold coming on.
It was the triangular blue and white kefir cartons and milk in glass bottles, both of which could be bought in the city’s Gastronoms, where the product range was otherwise pretty limited. The Soviet Union meant delicious condensed milk, which we would drink secretly straight from the can, and disgusting fish paste. The calendar that hung in every good socialist kitchen, with a daily recipe for socialist housewives, and all the important socialist holidays and biographies, and useful, but less socialist, tips for everyday life: ‘Aloe vera can reduce inflammation, if you …’
It was the red identity cards with the logo of Lenin’s head for workers, pensioners, and Komsomol members; the games that were called things like ‘The Thinker’ or ‘The Young Watchmaker’, and especially the most coveted game ‘The Young Chemist’, over which Daria and I argued constantly. It was the man and the woman clutching, respectively, a hammer and a sickle, the identification for almost all socialist films (like MGM’s roaring lion).
It was Cheburashka and Winnie the Pooh, which we pronounced ‘Veeny da Puh’, characters from socialist cartoons; it was the dreadful snowsuits our mother wrapped us up in every winter, which you had to take off completely if you wanted a wee, and the scratchy woollen socks. It was Misha the Bear with the medal belt, the mascot of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. (This bear lived on in almost every socialist household for many years after the Olympics in the form of every conceivable toy as well as on flags, plates, and cups.)
It was the yellow Zhigulis, the black Volgas, and the white Ladas. The red plastic stars you could stick to your chest, with a photo of Lenin as a baby or a child (age not really discernible). It was Melody records and Maxim cassettes, which didn’t come cheap. Gulliver chocolate bars, and coffee-flavoured chewing gum, with a bitter taste no child in the world has ever found appealing. It was soft toys made of heavy, scratchy woollen material, predominantly dogs or bears (bears, always bears!), which only a very generous-minded person would describe as ‘soft toys’. It was Friendship processed cheese and the Vanka-Vstanka roly-poly toy that looked like a hollow plastic Russian doll gone wrong. It was delicious Leningrad ice cream, solid oblongs wrapped in gold paper. It was the Russian Father Christmas with his red nose (minus the beer belly of the Coca-Cola Santa). It was heavy tin teapots and highly sought-after 8mm cameras. Brightly coloured underpants with pictures of happy sportsmen or the days of the week written on them. It was cheap pamphlets with titles like The Truth About American Diplomats. The grey and mostly out-of-order public phone-boxes. The grannies’ net shopping-bags. (These are common to grannies all over the world, though; God knows where they get them from!)
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