The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  How I hated the days when she refused to tell me stories. How hard was the punishment when she was dissatisfied with my dancing. How deep my disappointment on the days when she decided I hadn’t earned a tale. I would have danced until my feet bled or forced myself to do the splits hundreds of times over if only she would bring those enchanted times back to life for me. I loved her stories, but all the arabesques and retirés were foreign to me. My imagination grew fevered when her voice embarked on a story, not when I heard Tchaikovsky. I wanted to listen; I wanted to complete this other world in my head. I had fallen in love with this world, and the only reason I kept dancing was to have her tell me its stories.

  If I was in luck and she kept telling stories until the others got back from the city, I could think of nothing else all evening, and even when I went to bed, I would refuse the bedtime fairy tale that Nana would read to Daria and me. I was so full of Stasia’s memories that there was no more room inside me. Stasia’s stories took possession of me; they filled me up. Without really understanding it myself, I dreamed of writing them down, transforming them into my own words. I wanted to turn them into my own story.

  *

  The whole of my childhood in the Green House — the time before I started asking questions, before anger and sadness could gather within me, before I broke open the beautiful puzzle that had been presented to me as our family history, before I began to peek behind the curtains that were drawn in my face — I spent with these stories, which were Stasia’s memories. And so for me, my life begins right there, in the year 1900, in that bitterly cold winter when Stasia came into the world. I was born then, too, just as you were, Brilka. My childhood didn’t start in 1974 — no, it began much earlier, it reaches much deeper. My childhood, when I thought myself free and happy, because I was so sure of Stasia’s love, is these stories. Where they begin, I begin. All these places, towns, houses, people — they are all a part of my childhood. The Revolution as much as the War, the dead as much as the living. All these people, lives, places burned themselves so firmly into my brain, they were so present there, that I began to live with them. I still needed Stasia if I wanted to wander around in these times, to pass through them, dive into them. But soon, I hoped, I would be capable of telling the stories myself, telling them anew, completing them.

  To Nana, Daria and I were children, to be chastised and educated. Children, who must be clearly shown what was good and what was bad. To Elene, we remained babies; babies who were aware of nothing beyond their own needs and pleasures, both of whom loved sweets and being taken to the zoo, who went to the circus or the puppet theatre on Sundays, and cried if they fell over or burned their fingers.

  To Kostya, Daria was an angel and I was the bastard. Everything Daria did was enchanting, enthralling; it took his breath away. When she fell over, when her nose ran or she wet herself, it was heartrending or, at the very least, disarming.

  I remained the foreign body in this little paradise Kostya had constructed for his princess. He avoided me. He didn’t feel comfortable when — and this happened seldom enough — I was alone in the house with him, with no Nana, no Stasia, no Elene around to defend him from me.

  Of course, I, too, would receive a present when Daria did, I got a kiss when he pressed one on Daria’s cheek, and for lack of alternatives I, too, was taken for a walk or to the amusement park when he went out with Daria. It’s just that certain things weren’t expressed, not in words. Daria was the protective shield he held up against me. I had to learn to want what Daria wanted, to say what Daria said, to permit what Daria permitted, to refuse what Daria refused.

  The evenings, when the adults and Daria brought the Green House back to life, were the most hated times of my childhood. In the evening, everything was entirely centred on Kostya and Daria. She was the sun in our galaxy. And we dying stars flared up every evening for the last time before collapsing and being extinguished in the universe, only to create ourselves anew the next morning as soon as they left the house.

  At the weekends, just as I finally thought I had our mother all to myself, since Daria spent most of her time with Kostya, Daria would invariably get chicken pox or the flu, or fall over and hurt her knee, or simply whine and refuse to leave Elene’s side for a second, and I would run to Stasia, filled with anger and disappointment, curl up on her lap, and cry my eyes out, until Mother finally extricated herself from Daria’s arms, hurried over to me, and told me all sorts of nonsense, and in less than two minutes I would be forced to laugh.

  But for some strange reason, I acknowledged Daria’s rights and privileges. As if they were a law of nature, something self-evident. All the same, sometimes a blind rage rolled over me, something uncontrollable and irrational took possession of me, and I would run at Daria, ram my knee into her or throw her to the floor, give her a painful pinch in the belly or poke her backside with a pencil, which gave me a strange pleasure. Later, when I was at school, there was only one thing that could surpass this pleasure: testing my grandfather’s patience. There was nothing in the world I loved more than making him lose his self-control, seeing his iron countenance transformed into a grimace of rage, causing his voice to waver. I knew if it got really bad, I could always run to Stasia, and she would shake her head and give me a sympathetic look and say, ‘So, what have you done this time?’

  *

  Elene loved us in her chaotic, off-kilter way. She found it hard to watch her two children growing up without a father, to stay on top of her degree, and to swallow down the larger part of her self-hatred without anyone seeing, much as she wanted to be a woman who just sailed through all of this. Her inner turmoil was reflected in our behaviour. Sometimes we cried at night, our faces buried in our pillows, longing for our mother; sometimes we didn’t want to see her at all. We would avoid her, and were shy and distant when she came to the Green House on Friday evenings.

  Kostya constantly undermined her authority, made sarcastic comments about her parenting methods and largely ignored her wishes, to such a degree that we, too — unconsciously, of course — began siding with him, and refused to listen to her whenever our grandfather was around.

  The times that made me saddest of all were when Elene wandered restlessly about the house and up to the attic like a hunted animal. I spied on her, tracking her, discovering her hiding places and watching in secret as, armed with a lamp, a blanket, a glass of wine or liqueur, and a book, she withdrew into a world to which we were denied access.

  The only satisfaction I could glean from those days was the realisation that Elene showed Daria the same thoughtless indifference as she did me. It was a parity that united us in the battle for her attention. The equality of our efforts. For neither chickenpox nor tantrums could help Daria win Elene for herself; on such days, our mother remained as distant and unreachable for Daria as she was for me.

  Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

  CHAIRMAN MAO

  Two funerals — the son and the father — in such close succession, Christine’s total disappearance from his life, and his sister’s surprise visit and the excitement surrounding it had taken more out of Kostya than he would have thought possible.

  Unlike his mother and his aunt, who were both enjoying surprisingly good health at their advanced age — apart from a few rheumatic pains and low blood pressure (Stasia), and arthritis, varicose veins, and joint pain (Christine) — Kostya, who was now in his mid-fifties, was really feeling his age. Maybe it was just that he gave a lot more thought to his health than his mother or aunt did. He found it hard to admit that some of his female companions were now simply out of his league. But the thing that threw him most at that time was the news of Alania’s transfer home.

  His old friend had called and told him that, after more than twenty years in the field, he had been ordered back to headquarters and was returning to Moscow. Despite the untroubled tone Alania was so careful to maintain on the phone, my grandfather wa
s not deaf to the tension and fear in his friend’s voice. Something had gone wrong. Was it to do with Kitty? Had something come to light that should have remained buried? Of course, he couldn’t permit himself such questions over the phone, but he sensed that he could not leave his friend alone now, could not abandon him to his fate. He promised to come to Moscow as soon as Alania’s transfer had taken place.

  *

  Giorgi Alania had not been healed by the truth about his parentage. The thing he’d hoped for all his life had not happened. The paralysis remained. He couldn’t talk to anyone about it, least of all Kitty. Letting Kitty in on the secret was out of the question.

  After his return to London, he withdrew. He didn’t get in touch with her, stopped visiting, wove a steel cocoon around himself. Kitty’s attempts to help her friend and share in his troubles came to nothing. She felt cheated, useless, rejected. He blamed his withdrawal on the dangerous level of carelessness he had displayed over the past few months, and warned her about his colleagues, who could put an abrupt end to the friendship they had become increasingly open about. His behaviour had been stupid and naive, he said, when in fact everything was at stake.

  ‘But now that we’ve been to Tbilisi together, now we know each other officially, so to speak, surely we don’t have to hide from your people — surely there’s nothing stopping us from seeing each other?’ Kitty couldn’t understand him.

  ‘It’s not appropriate for me to associate with a western singer. As much as we may have grown to like each other over those two weeks, the fundamental situation hasn’t changed. Don’t forget why I was sent to this country.’

  He dashed her hopes. For the first time since he’d come into her life, she felt he had let her down. She was groping in the dark, unable to understand what had prompted his cold, distant demeanour, the unexpected way he had turned from her. She felt indignant that now, of all times, when she was so full of overwhelming and confusing feelings for him, he was leaving her on her own.

  She didn’t understand that he was ashamed, that he judged himself unworthy of her, that he was afraid of himself, of his heritage, of his own blood. That he had gone along with everything, had sent all those people home, using cunning, threats — and quite often violence. And what if none of it was true? What if all the hundreds of photos he had examined through a magnifying glass in the British Library, the old newspaper cuttings with portraits of a bald-headed little man with a pince-nez, a man who had so effortlessly taught the world to fear, were nothing to do with him at all? What if Ramas Iosebidze’s unhappy widow had simply made a dreadful error?

  Kitty was a silk thread that could be snapped with a flick of the wrist. Kitty had been the only thing worth dreaming about, as long as his dreams remained dreams. Kitty was the only bright, fragile, breakable thing for which it was worth heaping up these broken shards. What choice would he have, if she should want to link her future with his? He had no future. Not in the place where she was; and if there were to be a future for him — as unlikely as that seemed — he wasn’t going to risk being spurned, rejected, or even despised by her.

  He should never have stepped out of his own shadow. Never have become part of her life. Never have made plans with her. Never have travelled back into the past with her.

  *

  First, he missed one of their meetings. Just didn’t turn up. Then he stopped calling. Kitty realised that something had been lost, something definitive had happened, and there was nothing she could do about it. She waited and waited. In vain. Then she called Amy.

  ‘Finally! I thought you’d never get back in touch! I thought you’d got married back home and would be herding sheep in the Caucasus by now!’ cried Amy indignantly, blowing a cloud of cigarette smoke into the receiver.

  ‘I have twelve new songs. We can go into the studio next week, if you like. I’m ready. But I want to get out of London. As far away as I can.’

  ‘Hallelujah! I’ll sort everything out, and give you a call on Monday.’ Amy went straight back to her no-nonsense managerial tone, and hung up.

  The day Alania wrote his application for a transfer back to Moscow, Kitty went into the studio and recorded the first track for a new album with the simple title Home.

  I remember it so well, Brilka: as you and I were driving across Greece, we talked about the first song on that album, the title track, and I remember you saying that the song wasn’t about a place or a country, it was about a condition. You said you thought it was a song about childhood, and you asked me where people keep their childhood, and I remember telling you that we keep it hidden, between our ribs, in little liver spots and moles, in the roots of our hair, above our heart, in our ears or our laugh.

  Home was released in 1976, five years after Replacement, the same year the whole of Vietnam became a socialist republic and Saigon ceased to exist and Ho Chi Minh City was born; when Mao Zedong died and China was visited by a devastating earthquake, as if the earth were joyfully shaking off the great dictator; the year Honecker was elected Chairman of the State Council of East Germany, and abortion was legalised in West Germany; the year Ulrike Meinhof was found hanged in her cell, and Fritz Lang died in LA and Agatha Christie in Winterbrook; the year of the great anti-apartheid uprising in Soweto; the year Hotel California was a hit and punk exploded into life— and the year Fred Lieblich embarked on her third and final stint in rehab.

  *

  ‘Girls, come with me,’ whispered Elene.

  I rubbed my eyes. I could only see her silhouette in the moonlight. Daria was already sitting on her bed, wearing her white pyjamas with the rocking horse print.

  ‘Come on, Niza, wake up. We’re going to do something exciting!’

  Elene had been drinking, both Daria and I could smell it, and we braced ourselves for one of Mother’s silly, playful, unpredictable moods.

  It was the middle of the night, a Saturday. The previous day she hadn’t come to the Green House as usual, and her absence had sent Kostya into an exhausting fit of rage. He spent hours ranting about his failure of a daughter and his wretched mother. He demanded that his wife convince Elene to move back into the Green House with her children. She should just go into the city every morning with the rest of them, with him, Nana, and Daria. Otherwise he would stop supporting her financially. Kostya demanded that Nana tell Elene all of this right now, this very minute. So Nana had no choice but to call the friend Elene still officially lived with and ask to speak to her daughter. The friend told her that Elene hadn’t lived there for weeks; she had a new boyfriend and was presumably staying with him. Elene could not be found. Now, after her parents had spent two whole days searching for her, she had crept back into the house like a thief and was trying to kidnap us while we were half-asleep. Stuffing our clothes willy-nilly into a canvas bag, she warned us to be quiet. I had already jumped out of bed and was holding up my arms so she could pull a jumper over my head. Daria whined that she didn’t want to get up, and wasn’t at all excited about the promised adventure.

  ‘Don’t be a spoilsport!’ Elene told her eldest daughter, forcing her into her clothes.

  Soon we were tiptoeing out of the sleeping house to her car. There was a man at the wheel. We were bundled into the back, and the man stepped on the gas.

  ‘This is my boyfriend, Aleko. So now you’re finally getting to meet each other.’ Elene turned to us from the front seat. ‘Do you know what he does? He writes really brilliant things. Stories and poems and fairy tales — he can tell you stories that’ll make your head spin. And he loves candyfloss, just like the two of you. He thinks we should go to Mushtaidi Park tomorrow and eat as much candyfloss as we like — what do you reckon?’

  ‘I don’t like candyfloss, Niza likes candyfloss. Grandfather says candyfloss gives you toothache. I prefer ice cream,’ said Daria, interrupting our mother; but Elene seemed to have made up her mind that we were all going to be perfectly happy together, and refused to let
it spoil her mood. The man was smiling at us, too, in the rear-view mirror. He seemed very tall: his head almost touched the car roof. He could have been Elene’s father, not a ‘boyfriend’, or so I thought at the time; he looked much older than her, with his full beard and the big bags under his eyes.

  When we arrived, my mother carried Daria up the stairs of their filthy apartment block while the tall, bearded man carried me. A grey dawn was already in the sky, and I was freezing. Elene unlocked a door and we entered a narrow hallway. The hall led straight into an uncarpeted room, the walls of which were covered with posters; there were two beanbags, a small hostess trolley that served as a table, and two oversized box speakers with dusty records piled up on them. A glass-panelled door with newspaper stuck over the space where the glass should have been led off into another, evidently smaller, room: the bedroom, presumably. The bed was a mattress on the floor, and clothes were draped everywhere, over the chairs and chests of drawers — there was no wardrobe. A large teddy bear with a missing ear sat on the mattress. Elene pointed at it and said it was a little welcome gift from her boyfriend.

  She undressed us and laid us down on the mattress. I’d never shared a bed with Daria before. Luckily, she was too tired to protest.

  Next morning, though, it started: ‘This isn’t a proper bed! I’m hungry. Where’s Mama?’ She immediately started complaining. I crept out of the room to find Elene. They had set up a much too narrow fold-out bed between the beanbags, and were lying asleep in each other’s arms. They looked peaceful. A half-empty vodka bottle and a full ashtray stood beside the bed. I approached the sleeping couple and gently touched my mother’s bare shoulder. It was March; spring was dragging its heels that year, and the air in the flat was icy. Elene woke instantly and sat up in bed, startled.

  ‘Niza, my sunshine, how long have you been awake?’