The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  ‘Do you have to go in?’ I could feel disappointment spreading through me.

  ‘No, but someone’s coming here. They didn’t want to tell me who. They’re just sending him up here, like it’s a bordello!’ he said indignantly, and started searching his wardrobe for a suitable outfit.

  ‘Put some proper clothes on, it’s an official visit. And tell your great-grandmother to take off her smock and those awful rubber boots.’ Reluctantly, I did what was asked of me and put on my school uniform, the most official thing I could find, though I left off the cuffs that Stasia washed every day, and the lace collar, as well as the silly white pinafore apron.

  Less than half an hour later, a black Volga pulled into the drive. Kostya, wearing a well-fitting pin-striped suit that I had never seen before, came down the steps and stood at the entrance to the garden. I was up on the terrace, watching with great curiosity. Two militsiya officers got out first, then a man in a long raincoat, whom I had seen visiting Kostya at the Green House from time to time. He spoke to Kostya alone for a while, and my grandfather just nodded, though I didn’t get the sense that he really understood what was expected of him. Finally, Kostya, who was clearly annoyed at being bothered by business matters when he was off sick, brushed the raincoat man aside, went over to the Volga, and opened the passenger door.

  The first thing I saw was a metal stick, then a woman’s hand gripping Kostya’s wrist, then a pair of high-heeled shoes, testing the ground beneath them. Only then did the woman get out, in an elegant suit of dark-blue bouclé and a white headscarf. She looked like an actress from a film noir movie, hurtling along the Monte Carlo coast in a convertible, pursued by a sinister man. As she turned to Kostya with some hesitation and I spotted the huge black glasses, I realised that the visitor was blind.

  The scarf and glasses masked her face, making it difficult to tell how old she was. She might have been Kostya’s age, or a lot younger. Kostya was just as surprised as I was. It seemed to be the first time he’d met the woman: they shook hands formally, and after Kostya had exchanged a few words with the raincoat man, he led her up to the house. She used her stick expertly and didn’t take the arm that Kostya proffered.

  When they reached the terrace where I was standing, uncertain whether to make myself known, she asked who was present apart from the two of them. Slightly taken aback, Kostya introduced me. She came up to me and held out her hand, inclining her head a little and smiling gently.

  ‘So you’re Niza, are you. Hello, I’m Ida.’

  The woman spoke a strange-sounding Russian. Her name made Kostya twitch nervously, but he said nothing. The sound of his footsteps showed her the way to the front door; then he led her into his study. I was tasked with bringing her a glass of water — she had declined tea or coffee.

  Something about her fascinated me. I wasn’t sure whether it was her disability or something else. She seemed so clear and self-assured, as if she could somehow see through us. Driven by my curiosity, I tiptoed to the study door, which had been left slightly ajar, in the hope of overhearing a few scraps of their conversation.

  ‘Comrade Yvania said you were in Georgia on private business and wanted to see me,’ said Kostya, since the lady seemed in no hurry to reveal the purpose of her visit.

  ‘Yes. I’ve just come from Leningrad. After all these years, I was finally allowed to give a concert in my home country,’ she told him in her peculiar Russian.

  I was trying to figure out where she came from, but I hadn’t met many foreigners in the course of my short life, and soon abandoned the attempt.

  ‘I’m sorry to say that nobody informed me of your visit, otherwise I would have arranged a more fitting reception. Although culture doesn’t really fall within my remit.’

  ‘As I said, I’m here in a private capacity,’ the lady interrupted him. ‘To see you. I requested a degree of anonymity from your colleagues at the ministry, and I apologise if I am keeping you from other things. This is a purely personal matter. I wasn’t aware that you — well, that you held such an important position. I had imagined it would be rather less complicated.’

  What kind of purely personal matter could this be? If I knew Kostya, he would give his colleagues short shrift later for sending a complete stranger to his house.

  ‘No, no, please, I just feel a little — well, how shall I put it — embarrassed to be receiving you with so little preparation.’

  Kostya was still groping in the dark. But she put an end to this exchange of polite, empty words by announcing in a much more abrupt tone:

  ‘Forty years I’ve been waiting for this opportunity. I’ve been looking for you for forty years.’

  There was an oppressive pause. Kostya was completely at a loss, not knowing whether to respond or wait for what was coming next.

  ‘I’ve been living in West Germany since 1955. No, let me correct myself: I managed to track down your address many years ago, when you were in Moscow. But at that time I wasn’t able to make contact with you directly, and I was reluctant to go through the official channels. What I have to tell you, I could only tell you in person. So I had to wait.’

  I could hear Kostya breathing heavily, but he didn’t ask any questions.

  ‘As I mentioned, I come from Leningrad. I know you know the city: you went to the academy there, you lived there.’

  She seemed to be searching for words. Was what she had to say so grave or so momentous that forty years had not been long enough to find the right words for it?

  ‘So I know that you worked for the Road, and were there throughout the blockade. I was there, too. I lived through the blockade. Lost most of my family and … my eyesight. The fact that I am sitting here with you, that I survived, that I was able to pursue my passion for the piano, start a family, have a life, is all thanks to one person, and that person is also the reason I came looking for you. I assume you know now who I’m talking about?’

  Again, the oppressive silence. Kostya murmured something, but I couldn’t catch the words.

  ‘She loved you very much,’ the woman said suddenly.

  For some reason these were the words that surprised me most. As if I had been expecting a terrible event, an awful deed, but not love. I found these words so difficult to associate with Kostya. Inconceivable, I thought, that this woman had searched for and found him after forty years to tell him that he had been loved.

  ‘She didn’t know if you were still alive, but I think the hope that you were kept her going through the years of the blockade. You were her most treasured memory, and that helped her to endure the horror. You were the only person she wanted to remember. It was very important to her that you should know this. That’s why I searched for you, and it’s why I’m here. Because I have her to thank for everything: for all that I am and all that I have.’

  Ida E. sat opposite my grandfather in the Green House, a meeting delayed by decades, and gave him her memories of his Ida.

  Of course, at the time I understood nothing of all this. I didn’t know what a blockade was, or which woman they were talking about, but I guessed from Kostya’s bearing when he emerged from the room afterwards, a changed man, that it was serious. And without realising what was happening to me as I eavesdropped on these strange stories through the crack in the door, I was certainly aware that this moment would have consequences for me, too. Perhaps that was the day I realised that so many other stories were already written into that of my own short, ordinary life, and had their place alongside the thoughts and memories I was gathering for myself, which helped me to grow. Perhaps it was when I realised that the stories I so loved to tease out of Stasia were no fairy tales, whisking me off to a different age; they formed the very ingredients of my life. Crouching outside Kostya’s study door, holding my breath and clenching my fists in concentration, it became clear to me that, more than anything else in life, I wanted to do what this woman, blind and yet so far-sighted, was
doing right then: I wanted to bring together the things that had fallen apart. Assemble other people’s memories, which only reveal their connections when a whole is created from a host of individual parts. All of us, whether we know it or not, perform our own dance within this overall picture, following a mysterious choreography. (Yes, Brilka, you were right: we do all dance!)

  Ida E. spent more than an hour in my grandfather’s study, telling her story. In that hour, Kostya barely said a word; but the woman didn’t seem to expect him to. Before she pushed back her chair and headed for the door, I heard her place something on the table and say: ‘This is my autobiography. It was published in Germany a few years ago, and has been translated into other languages, too. Not Russian, unfortunately. But I had a translation done anyway, for private use — for you, I mean. I thought you deserved to hear about it all in more detail. The book is dedicated to Ida.’

  I heard my grandfather murmur a mournful, crushed ‘Thank you’, before opening the door and bidding her farewell: ‘Thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Thank you.’

  I had never heard the phrase ‘from the bottom of my heart’ from Kostya’s lips.

  He watched the car drive away, and stood there for a long time afterwards, staring into the emptiness the car had left behind. Then suddenly he turned on his heel and called out to me to fetch a bottle of wine from the cellar.

  When I came back, he was lying on his bed with his legs pulled up, sobbing like a little child. Seeing him lying there, looking so desperate, I wanted to turn round and creep straight out again, certain that he wouldn’t tolerate my presence in his moment of weakness. But he motioned me to stay where I was and give him the bottle. His hands were trembling so much he couldn’t get the cork out. I was unable to move; I stared at him in bewilderment, my heart clenching with pity. I could never have dreamed that one day I would feel pity for my powerful, despotic grandfather, the man who made my life so difficult. But the way he looked made me so sad I was on the point of crying myself, and I took the bottle and ran down to the kitchen, where I uncorked it after several attempts. Just then, I spotted a clean milk bottle on the draining board — like so many Soviet housewives, Stasia saved them for some inexplicable reason. It had a wider opening than the wine bottle, and I poured the wine into it. I went back to the bedroom and, as you might with an orphaned deer or calf, I held it to his mouth, which was sticky with tears. He began to suckle gratefully, then to swallow down greedy gulps of the red liquid.

  I put a blanket over him. Then I lay down beside him and waited until his tears had dried up. What wouldn’t I have given at one time to see my grandfather weak and in need of help, vulnerable and fragile — but now it had actually happened, I couldn’t bear it.

  I kicked off my shoes and they clattered onto the wooden floor. I slid over to him tentatively, placing a timid hand on his side, and touched his wrist so lightly he would hardly have felt it.

  At that moment, I was closer to him than to anyone else in the world. Mother’s, Nana’s or Daria’s tears, even my own, had never had such an effect on me. Nor had the sight of Rusa’s opened veins; nothing could have unsettled me like this did. After a little while, I gave free rein to my own tears as well. I was crying for the closeness that could have existed between us.

  He lay rigid on the bed for some time, staring at the blank ceiling, then he sat up, sniffing, and took a swig from the bottle, this time without my help.

  ‘Was she your girlfriend?’ I whispered, exhausted. I was finding it hard even to talk.

  ‘I was there, I was close by, I could have …’ he murmured. I didn’t know what he meant.

  ‘Do you still love her?’

  ‘She’s dead. She’s been dead for a very long time.’

  ‘Stasia says there are ghosts.’

  ‘Stasia talks a lot of nonsense. You shouldn’t believe everything she says.’ He looked at the bottle in his hand in amazement, and asked me how the decent wine had got into a milk bottle.

  ‘The neck of the wine bottle was too narrow. You would have spilled it.’

  ‘Thank you … I didn’t know she had stayed in Leningrad. She should have been evacuated long before. I …’

  He kept the final sentence to himself. He had retreated into his thoughts again.

  ‘You must have been much nicer then,’ I said, after a minute or two of trying to imagine my grandfather as a young man. He looked down at me and couldn’t suppress a smile.

  ‘So you don’t think I’m nice now?’

  ‘Not usually, no.’

  ‘And why are you so eager for me to be nice?’

  ‘Well, you want other people to be nice to you too, don’t you?’

  He seemed nonplussed by my frankness. He looked as though he were searching for a response befitting the situation, but instead he smiled, shook his head, reached out, and pinched my cheek, eliciting a loud cry of protest from me.

  We lay there in the semi-darkness of the room, and he listened to me. He didn’t interrupt, didn’t tell me off, didn’t reproach me, didn’t correct me; he let me say everything I had to say. I talked about a whole jumble of things. There was no chronology; I just said everything that came into my head. I spoke with him as I had seldom spoken with anyone, apart from David, and as I did so, I was not the wilful little girl, not the secretive girl with the gloomy expression and the pathological curiosity, the one everyone was always worrying about. I was just me. And it was such a relief not to have to make an effort; and he simply sat there, sipping at his milk bottle and listening to me, smiling now and then or shaking his head as if in agreement, frowning, smacking his lips — and Brilka, he was the best, most attentive listener in the world.

  He was there, with me, for me. I was grateful to Ida for this afternoon with the person whose love I had wanted above everyone else’s, ever since I was born. And in that moment of weakness I broke the rules that I had trained myself so rigorously to observe with him; I softened, became garrulous; I took off my protective armour and inducted him into my secrets. I told him about Mother’s money worries and Aleko’s problems; I told him about David, about Daria, about the audition.

  I spent the whole afternoon in his room, on his bed, and, naive as I was, I believed that words could be a substitute for love and remembering could make amends for the past.

  I was wrong. Of course I was wrong.

  I believe dangers await only those who do not react to life.

  MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

  The reaction was delayed, but all the more terrible for that. And, for the first time, it fell on Daria. Kostya’s rage was characteristically elemental and uncompromising — something so familiar to me, and so alien to my sister.

  After Ida E.’s visit, Kostya spent a whole week at home. He and I went on watching television in his bedroom, breakfasting on Nana’s pancakes and talking about this and that, but this everyday chit-chat had nothing in common with the naked intensity of that afternoon.

  Exactly one week later, he called for his driver, and, after dropping me off at school, went to the ministry. He told me he would collect me and Daria later. And with that, I knew that my temporary reign in the Green House had come to an end. I looked for Daria at school, but even during the long break there was no sign of her in the playground. Eventually, I found her, puffy-eyed and red-nosed, sitting on a bench behind the school building. She was alone — an unusual sight. I sat down beside her. When I tried to put my arms around her, she pushed me away harshly and I ended up on the ground.

  ‘You’ve ruined everything! I hate you!’ she yelled, before running off.

  I finally managed to call Elene’s apartment from a payphone. Aleko’s subdued voice gave me an intimation of the trouble I’d caused. Kostya had phoned them the previous evening, threatened his daughter and her husband with never being allowed to see Daria again, and told them he would see the whole film studio smashed to smithereens if
they didn’t stop this nonsense right away, terminate the contract immediately, and send Daria straight back to his care. Elene was lying in bed, the picture of misery, Aleko told me, and despite his cautious manner I could hear the reproach in his voice.

  I was a traitor! I had betrayed my mother, Aleko, and above all my sister, for the sake of a little intimacy with Kostya, a little affection. Now everything was ruined, and I was to blame.

  The war between Elene and Kostya, which these past few years had been more of a tacit ceasefire, was raging again with a destructive force it had never previously possessed, and this time everyone would be drawn in; this time, victory and defeat would be absolute.

  Kostya’s mood was at a low point for another reason, too: Gorbachev had assumed the leadership of the Communist Party and announced reforms for the 27th Party Congress, which was to take place the following spring. Kostya kept shaking his head every time he saw the leader’s face in the newspaper and exclaiming that this ‘cowardly opportunist’ would wreck the country. Gorbachev had voiced criticism of the authorities and their corruption, which the masses had greeted more with confusion than delight.

  I tried to make amends — not knowing what for exactly, or, more importantly, where to begin.

  Kostya’s surveillance increased to absurd levels: Daria was not allowed to go for a stroll after school with her friends, or to the ice-cream parlour, or to spend more than two minutes on the phone. She was driven to school and the sports institute, and collected again, with excessive punctuality. He didn’t permit her a single second of freedom. She had to turn down birthday party invitations and come up with ridiculous excuses for not going. But the thing that really broke my heart was the lack of fight in her, the way she accepted all this as if she deserved nothing better, as if the punishment were inevitable, as if she felt terribly guilty for having gone behind Kostya’s back and deceived him.

  The real magnitude of my defeat only became clear to me when, a few weeks later, David called Aleko. After beating about the bush for a long time, he admitted to his old friend that he had a ‘delicate matter’ to discuss with him, and asked Aleko to visit him the following day.