‘That’s not true.’ I didn’t want to talk about that morning.
‘No, it is true. Give me your hand; hold out your wrist, my eyesight’s bad — yes, like that.’
She opened her fist and fastened something onto me. It felt cool and heavy.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s a watch. An important person gave it to me. This watch is older than you, older than your mother, your grandfather, older than me, even. We’ll hide this watch in your bedside cabinet — it’ll be our little secret, all right? It’ll wait there for you, until your wrist is big and strong enough for it. It will always protect you. It always protected me.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Yes, it is. It has magic powers, this watch. Oh, what’s that sigh for; do you think I’m telling you fairy stories?’
‘You tell me fairy stories all the time. How can your friend come here when she’s dead? And why does she come?’ I couldn’t get the idea into my head. After all, I was a socialist child, and socialist children learn mistrust from an early age.
‘I don’t know, my sunshine, I don’t know. Maybe there was something she left unfinished, a story she didn’t finish telling.’
I nodded thoughtfully and tried to imagine the ghost of Stasia’s dead friend. I had so many questions.
The world is worn out like a coin,
Now life is empty and quite dark,
Don’t be surprised if at this point
I’m grateful for a little luck.
GALAKTION TABIDZE
The whole country had celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the Revolution, though the once gigantic Soviet empire now only existed on paper. Ministries, like those for Mechanical Engineering and Power Generation, were feeding off an economy that was no longer there. Meanwhile, alcoholism, theft, and absenteeism had become the norm. For the elite, though, those years were a golden age: everyone could help themselves without fear and could take away whatever there was to take. The General Secretary and head of state, a great lover of cars, owned an impressive fleet that included a Rolls-Royce and a ZiL armoured limousine. A passionate hunter, he promoted the master of his hunt, who flushed out wild boar for him, to the rank of general.
Diplomats, generals, ministers, directors — all these ‘heroes of work’ were having a seemingly endless party. And nobody in the country appeared to have any objection. There was only one mass demonstration under Brezhnev, during the Moscow Winter Olympics, when Vysotsky died and the actors of the Taganka Theatre took to the streets, until they were joined by tens of thousands of other people. Of course, the demonstration was crushed. Unrest at home was the last thing the head of the Party needed — he had been suffering from cerebral sclerosis for a decade. Just one year earlier, he had begun the invasion of Afghanistan ‘in fulfilment of international socialist duties’. When the head of the Party was permanently released from his demanding work in November 1982, he was succeeded by the sixty-eight-year-old head of the KGB, a Mr Andropov, who had the irreproachable worldview of a secret service agent. The Party was now led by another seriously ill man who spent half his time in hospital before his kidneys gave out and his career came to an end after less than two years. He had no trouble ignoring the fact that Afghanistan was costing his empire millions it didn’t have, and that the bodies of more and more fallen Soviet soldiers were having to be transported home. Andropov was succeeded by the seventy-two-year-old Chernenko, an unprepossessing Party bureaucrat who was already suffering from a serious lung condition when he took office. Chernenko managed to outdo his predecessor, spending even less time as General Secretary of the Central Committee before he died.
I might not have made any friends at school, but thanks to Stasia’s watch, which was lying close at hand in my bedside cabinet (and did, unexpectedly, give me a certain security), or my own doggedness, I kept the violence and the mockery at bay. I began to develop the strategies that would help me survive the rest of my school years relatively unscathed. I had to be as normal and unproblematic as possible and, above all, not let the others see that the lessons didn’t interest me in the slightest.
The one concession Kostya made was to allow me to skip the fifth year. In my new class I learned to act like the others, securing for myself a relatively peaceful coexistence with my classmates. I laughed at their jokes, and asked for help even when I didn’t need it.
I knew it would pass. I knew I would soon be back at home with Stasia, where I could listen to her stories, walk in the woods, run around, work in the garden, and most importantly, in the late afternoon, go up to the roof terrace and be alone with my books. It would pass and I would be allowed to be myself again. Yes, it would pass, if I just trained myself to be patient.
Sometimes I brought Aleko’s books or records back to the Green House, and there were always jealous outbursts from Daria. She wanted to know how I had spent the weekend, what exactly I’d been doing, and what new discoveries I’d made. She didn’t want to feel excluded, and one day — she had just turned eleven — she announced that she wanted to spend the weekends with Elene and her husband as well. It was also Aleko who gave me one of the most beautiful gifts of my childhood: David, who was to become my Peter Vasilyev. David was an old school friend of Aleko’s. He was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation and had been a promising physicist, but his fondness for banned political and philosophical writings had got him thrown out of the research institute, and he ended up teaching physics and mathematics at a school on the edge of the city. After his divorce, David had taken up residency in a little studio in the New Town, and the subject of his research had changed from atoms to life in general. Aleko had been reproaching my mother for not challenging me enough ever since I started school, and so one day he brought me to David and asked him to ‘take a look’ at me.
*
David was forty-two years old then, and looked at least ten years older. The social and scientific ostracism, the separation from his wife, who thought he was a loser, and the absence of his two sons, whom he missed terribly and did not see nearly enough, had all left their mark. He was not a tall man, and, like Stasia, he walked with a stoop. He had slender limbs, delicate features, beautiful, sunken, deep-green eyes, and an old-fashioned moustache. He made tea in a samovar and wore checked woollen slippers and beige or grey shirts. He always had cold hands, and he spoke slowly, as if his voice needed an eternity to come through to us.
He asked Aleko to leave the two of us alone, and set a small bowl of sweets down in front of me. Then he sat down opposite me in an armchair, fixed me with his green eyes, and said: ‘I hear you’re bored at school.’
I nodded shyly.
‘So what does interest you?
‘Can people really see the dead?’
The question had been on my mind ever since my night-time conversation with Stasia. I’d never brought it up again with her, but every time I saw her sitting on her little stool in the garden and looking over at the cherry tree, I would try to make out the ghosts of her friends. I never could.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
I was very pleased with this answer. He seemed to be one of the few people who didn’t react to my questions by pretending to be cleverer than they were.
He continued: ‘I think if someone believes they can see a dead person, then perhaps they can.’
‘But when you’re dead, you’re dead, and you’re not there any more,’ I insisted, pressing the point.
‘I’m afraid we pretend to know a lot of things when we don’t,’ he said, confirming my suspicion. ‘Do you know how big our universe is?’
I shook my head. Then he got out pens and paper, and started drawing the whole universe for me on a squared page from a school exercise book.
*
I could ask David what love tasted like. I could ask him why babies had a soft spot on the top of their heads that you were
n’t allowed to press, why tears were salty, and why whales had fountains on their heads; I could ask him what beauty was and why grandfathers loved some children and not others. I could ask him what suicide meant, I could ask him why butterflies lived such a short time and crows lived so long, I could ask him why we didn’t fall over as the earth turned, and whether Led Zeppelin were worse than Pink Floyd. I could ask him if a child who didn’t have a father really needed one. When I asked him if he believed in God, he said he was looking for Him and that, if he found Him, he would let me know and ask Him to grant me an audience. I was content with this answer.
I loved the fact that he didn’t ruffle my hair or laugh at me indulgently, didn’t shake his head or looked shocked. Even when I wanted to know if it was true that a man and a woman took off their clothes and lay on top of one another to make babies, he got out a medical book and explained the process of human biology that leads to conception, which seemed far more plausible to me than my mother’s or Stasia’s silly explanations involving storks or bees.
He painted the world for me. And the world aroused a pathological interest in me. It wasn’t the limited world of school, or Kostya’s clearly structured world, or my mother and Aleko’s world, plagued by day-to-day worries, or Daria’s rose-tinted world, or the raw and ethereal world of Stasia. It was a world I felt at home in. It was a large, unfathomable world, in which not every question had an answer. And, above all, a world in which nothing was normal.
Twice a week, I was allowed to visit him after school. They were the happiest two days of the week. I would leave David’s studio floating on air. I danced my way onto the trolley-bus. I looked about me and laughed. Ran up the stairs to Mother’s flat.
Thanks to David, I learned to live with the cracks that surrounded me. I learned to look at myself in the mirror: my dark face, my skinny, shapeless body, my short stature, my dark eyes, so dark you couldn’t make out the iris in them, my curly, untameable hair that refused to be coaxed into any style, the hooked nose, and the duck’s beak that was my mouth, and I learned not to compare any of this with Daria. I had David, so what did it matter that Daria had Kostya? She was welcome to him, I thought.
*
Although my father was alive and Daria’s was dead, mine was in no particular hurry to get to know me. I saw him once, briefly, when I was nine or ten, before he went back to prison for another four years (a break-in at a university dean’s house). And so I wondered which of us had been luckier, Daria or me. We met — Elene, Beqa, and I — in the café with the sweet fizzy drinks, where I had tarragon lemonade. He was a broken, chain-smoking, heavy-set man, who looked around nervously and had even less idea of what to say to me than other people did.
It seemed incomprehensible that my mother could ever have loved this man. Eventually, though, he asked her whether I shouldn’t take his surname. ‘Can’t have people calling her a bastard,’ he added, eyeing me with visible dissatisfaction. It seemed I was neither pretty nor charming enough for him to love me straight away, but he would deign to give me his name, the only thing he had to give me.
Elene replied tersely that I already had a name and didn’t need a new one. What I could use was a father who took some interest in me, but it looked like we’d have to keep searching for one of those, didn’t it? Elene put her arm round my shoulders, and soon after that we left the café. Of course, at that time I couldn’t have known what it was like to spend five years in a Soviet prison. But whether that would have excused his behaviour, his lack of interest, his inability to start a conversation with me, I don’t know. As Elene and I stepped out onto Rustaveli Boulevard, I saw tears running down her face. She clasped my hand tightly and dragged me along behind her. I wasn’t particularly sad. I’d never had a father, and wasn’t expecting one — but Elene was.
I wanted to comfort her. But she walked so quickly I had trouble keeping up with her.
We walked and walked. And then we stopped at the entrance to a dark, old staircase in the middle of Vake. I had never been there before.
‘Where are we?’ I asked my mother as we started up the dilapidated stairs.
‘We’re going to see your great-great-aunt,’ she replied, pulling me after her.
When I look back on this first meeting with my father, I always think of the tarragon lemonade, and then of Miro. Not the man who fathered me. I don’t think of Rustaveli Boulevard and the café where the three of us sat, but of Christine’s small, cosy apartment. Because on the day when I should have got to know my father and found myself sitting opposite a stranger instead, I met Miro. The plan hadn’t worked: my father had not come back into our lives. The first father, the father of the child who was never born, was dead — a miserable death in a prison hospital. Elene had helped the second flee to another continent. The third had now turned from a would-be revolutionary into a criminal; and the fourth, a man who loved her as she loved him, but who couldn’t make anything of himself and drowned his untold stories in alcohol, was someone with whom she was unable to have children.
Christine’s hands were covered in flour. She opened the door without asking who was there. Maybe she was expecting someone else. She was wearing a veil that covered half her face. If it hadn’t been for the flour on her hands, you might have thought she was a character from a film; there was an air of unreality about her.
‘Now I know!’ I burst out, before the two adults could speak to each other. ‘You’re Christine, Stasia’s sister. I’ve seen photos of you!’
‘And you must be Niza.’
The one visible side of her mouth curled into the suggestion of a gentle smile. Christine made a welcoming gesture and we went inside.
We sat at a round table decorated with a crocheted cloth similar to the one Stasia had put on our living room table at home, and ate Christine’s bean soup. I was hypnotised by the old cuckoo clock on the wall: I couldn’t wait for the hour to strike and the bird to hop out.
My eyes were also drawn to this mysterious lady who was apparently my beloved Stasia’s sister. I found it difficult to connect the two. Stasia’s rubber boots, her brash manner, the vulgar language she sometimes used — it seemed impossible to reconcile all that with this striking, elegant person. Everything about her was so considered; there was an affected quality to her language, and this strange curtain over her face put me in mind of a fancy-dress ball. Elene’s tension, the hesitant way she moved, didn’t escape me either. I must have sensed then that a kind of wall had been erected between these women, and my mother was trying to shake it.
‘What’s going on?’ Christine asked her great-niece, after finally taking a seat between us at the little table.
‘It’s all so bloody difficult!’ my mother burst out, as if she’d just been waiting for this question.
‘Come on, then, tell me about it,’ Christine prompted her. My mother had come here to be comforted, I thought then, but this woman had difficulty comforting her. Something was holding her back; at one point she raised her hand as if to touch Elene’s shoulder, but then had second thoughts about it. They both acted as if I was invisible. That annoyed me, because I didn’t really know how I was supposed to behave. But I decided to stay quiet and eat my soup. There was something going on between these two people that had nothing to do with me.
‘It’s all so unbearable.’
At once, Elene started to sob. I hated it when she got like this. When she gave free rein to her tears. I knew then that things were bad, that she couldn’t pull herself together any more, one of the main tasks of her day-to-day life.
‘I think about him every day. Every day I see his face in my mind. I don’t know how I’m supposed to forget him. And everything’s been going wrong since … since he …’
Christine’s face darkened. Her expression reminded me of Stasia’s when she stopped in the garden and looked over at the cherry tree. Did this woman see the dead, too? Was that the only connection between
the two sisters? The ability to see ghosts?
My mother sobbed and complained, bemoaning her life and the way she had failed herself, her father, her husband. She complained of the drab hopelessness of her existence and her fatherless children. The impossibility of offering her girls a good life. And one name came up again and again: Miqa. I’d never heard it before. Eventually she started talking about how ‘gifted’ I was. (She always used this word, though she spoke it as if it were some kind of illness, a terrible fate I was suffering.) How I hated it!
She probably would have kept on like this for hours, and Christine would have let her, but then the doorbell rang and Christine, her eyes still on Elene, got up, slowly, reluctantly, and went to open the door.
*
There was no telling from Lana’s face whether she was pleased to see my mother or whether she was uncomfortable with the impromptu visit. Miro. however, expressed his delight quite openly. He looked me up and down, ran around the table three times, pulled my hair, laughed loudly, and was told several times to behave himself, but still he didn’t stop dancing for joy. Later, he was told to sit next to me and eagerly tucked into the bean soup. He kept pulling faces, and even his mother’s raised voice didn’t have the desired effect; on the contrary, it made him giggle wildly. But he had achieved something incredible: Elene was smiling again.
Miro was lively and funny. He seemed to have assumed the role of the clown at an early age, and played it with tremendous gusto. He wasn’t much taller than me at the time (this certainly changed later on), and he had wild curls that danced around his forehead and black eyes with calf-like eyelashes. But that afternoon, I remember very clearly, it was his speed that impressed me most: how quickly he thought, spoke, moved. As if he were constantly afraid of missing something and was always trying to do at least three things at once. When he was eating, he couldn’t sit still; when he was speaking, he couldn’t stand still; when he moved, he couldn’t hold his tongue. I immediately liked the gap in his teeth, too. Whenever he grinned — which he did often, from ear to ear — he revealed the space between his front teeth, which gave him a very comical aspect, as if this gap were also there purely to make you laugh.
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