They decided to keep the news from Stasia. Even Daria and I had to promise not to tell her anything.
Two weeks after the phone call, when Stasia and I were digging manure into the garden, she suddenly stopped and asked me to bring her the little stool she used when she needed to take a breather. She sat down on it, and suddenly froze. Then she lowered her head, and I could see tears rolling down her cheeks. I crept over and hugged her from behind, incapable of looking her in the eye. If she asked me whether her daughter was dead, I wouldn’t be able to lie to her.
Eventually, she got up and carried on with her work. We didn’t say a word. A few birds twittered. A car drove by in the distance.
‘Is it the ghosts again?’ I said, breaking the silence.
She looked at me and gave me a wise smile. ‘Yes, my sunshine, it’s the ghosts again.’
‘Are they over there by the cherry tree? Can you see them?’
It was an eerie thought that two dead women, invisible to me, were playing cards not fifty metres away.
‘Yes, I can see them.’
‘Are the two of them playing cards again?’
‘Three of them. There are three of them playing,’ she said; and I didn’t dare ask who the third was.
*
Kitty Jashi was laid to rest in London. The police were forced to erect barriers to cope with the onslaught of mourners and rubberneckers. Amy and Fred walked behind the coffin. Fred had hardly said a word since the night she called the coastguard.
Two months after the funeral, Alania called Fred Lieblich. They met in a pub on Leicester Square. He felt terrible. He had a nasty cold, he was chilled to the bone, and his face was covered in red pustules. There was something uncanny, hard, in her eyes. They were eyes from which all trace of empathy had gone.
Fred took a drag on her cigarette. She looked at him as if he were an object, something lifeless. She probably wouldn’t feel anything even if he were to drop dead right in front of her, he thought to himself. But he told her the most incredible story she had ever heard in her life. In his soft, upper-class English he told her the story of Kitty Jashi and Giorgi Alania. Of the day he saw her for the first time on a station platform in a small Georgian town, up to her escape from Tbilisi. Of Mariam and Kostya, of her child, and of Andro. She hadn’t known all the facts; Kitty had only mentioned some of the people, some of the names to her. But this sickly-looking man revealed to her the whole panorama of Kitty’s life, which was so inextricably interwoven with her own.
The way he told his story was clear and straightforward, and yet she felt she needed another four ears, a second or third brain to comprehend it all, to take it all in and make sense of it. His story had a mantra-like quality, and even though most of what he said sounded so dire, so final, it gave her comfort. Something like grace, a kind of meaning within the absolute senselessness of her death.
He told her about Kitty’s escape from Prague, and her years in London, and how he had feared for her safety every day. He told her how Kitty had increasingly become part of his life, perhaps the most important part. He spoke of their phone calls, and she remembered how Kitty would retreat behind closed doors in her flat to speak on the phone. And now his words carried her along, spread out a carpet before her, a carpet in which there seemed to be a logic to everything, a cruel logic.
And when he told her about their last meeting in the house by the sea, about that night and their desperate lovemaking on the cold hall floor, yes, the details too, it seemed almost harmonious to her, that night, the end of his and her story, and despite a passing flash of childish jealousy, she understood the point of departure for Kitty’s final journey, and didn’t know what to say. Her words seemed helpless against his. And although he wanted her to, she couldn’t tell him about her final hours with Kitty. She simply wasn’t capable. He would be the first person she told, she said, one day; she would seek him out.
For a while, he looked crestfallen. Then he nodded politely, understandingly, and blew his nose in a handkerchief that she thought looked like a relic from another age.
She asked him how he had come to be to London, and what he was planning to do.
‘I fled. I don’t know yet. I won’t be going back, in any case. I can’t go back now.’
‘But you can’t just stay here, I assume; it’s not that simple?’ she asked, lighting another cigarette.
‘No,’ he said, and made an effort to smile, to alleviate the danger emanating from this ‘no’.
‘What do you want to do now?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
‘Why did she never tell me anything about you?’
He shrugged. ‘I assume she wanted to put some distance between you and her past.’
‘She was my heart. My black heart.’ She wondered why she had said that, but it felt honest. ‘Amy will take care of her estate. Amazingly, there was a will: Kitty wanted to start a foundation for young musicians. And I get the Seven Sisters house. I’ll probably sell it. I can’t bear this city, this country. I just need to get away. Marry me,’ she said suddenly.
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Well, exactly what I said. Marry me, then you can stay. I’m going to move away in any case. You can have the house, or move elsewhere; either way, you’ll get leave to remain in this country. Then you’ll be a free man.’
He lowered his head. She didn’t know whether the offer had overwhelmed or frightened him.
‘But don’t expect me to become your best friend and go and visit her grave with you. I’d just be glad if I could help you in some way.’
He stared at his hands, apparently still not knowing how to react.
‘You can think it all over. You’ve got my number. But don’t take longer than a week. First, because I’m an old bat, and secondly, I don’t want to put off my move for too long.’
She got up. Before she left the pub, he asked her where she was planning to go.
‘Vienna,’ she said.
At that, he told her that he would gratefully accept her offer.
*
Kostya holed himself up in the Green House. He sat in his study for hours, drank wine, stared goggle-eyed at the television, and started emitting tirades of abuse at the Vremya evening news once more. His compulsory retirement had cut him off from the outside world at a stroke. As if someone had clipped his wings, he had lost the will to live overnight.
At first, visitors still came to see him on a regular basis: colleagues and subordinates who worked for the MVD or the port customs authority. But these visits grew less and less frequent, and the tables laid for them by Nana and Stasia ever smaller.
Daria, on the other hand, was fêted. Her platform was no longer just the school and the playground; now the whole city admired her, and soon, perhaps, the whole country. Impossible, people said, not to like ‘that damned pretty girl’ from the film. People recognised her in the street, asked for autographs; directors phoned. Even the teachers — this time without Kostya’s intervention — turned a blind eye when marking her work, so she didn’t do at all badly in her school-leaving exams, although with all her public engagements she barely had any time for revision.
Daria was still part of family life in the Green House, but nothing there was the same as before, and both she and Kostya knew it, felt it, and were equally pained by it. Kostya hadn’t been able to hold on to her. She had slipped away from him, achieved a success that he had not set in motion. This knowledge made the ground beneath his feet quake. This knowledge made his mind, which was already ailing, wander restlessly through the gloomiest and blackest of realms.
The more her relationship with Kostya hardened, though, the closer she and I became. We talked every day. I was inducted into her secrets, hugged, and pampered; she took me out with her; people admired me for being her sister; I was permitted to share in her fame.
For me, life in the Green House was becoming increasingly unbearable. I couldn’t endure Kostya’s disdain. Every day I expected him to lose control, to shout at me. I slept badly, crept around my own home on tiptoe. And I could no longer count on Stasia. She was too old, too fragile, and ever since her two dead visitors had become three, I knew that the unreality which had always existed for her had taken over. After Kitty’s death — which no one ever told her about — there was no more Tchaikovsky and Mozart to be heard from the barn. And there were no more pupils, either. Within a short time, her body seemed to have lost all its strength. She complained constantly about her infirmity and often spent the whole day in bed. The garden, too, began to run wild. No matter how hard I tried to maintain order in her plant kingdom, this patch of earth now looked like a wilderness that suddenly refused to be tamed.
A few days after her eighteenth birthday, Daria got an offer from a Ukrainian director to play a role in a film that would be shot in Kiev. At first, she hesitated, unsure whether she would make it through six weeks alone in a foreign country, but when she heard that the lovely Lasha was going to be behind the camera, she immediately said yes.
I remained unconvinced by him. His self-satisfied smirk made it clear to others that he was aware of his superiority, his good looks. But no matter how often I tried to persuade Daria, my arguments failed to convince her, and I was powerless against the fact that she worshipped him. Her admiration may still have been a childish, naive crush, but soon, I suspected, she would want more.
And when Daria told me that she and Lasha were soulmates, and he would give anything just to be able to look at her for a single hour each day, I knew that the battle was lost. I wasn’t skilled in matters of the heart. I never was, Brilka, and I’m still not, to this day.
I didn’t want to make the same mistake twice and let Elene or someone else in on Daria’s secret, but I had to stop her, protect her. I had a bad feeling about this; a very bad feeling.
One afternoon at the go-kart track, I took Miro aside and told him I needed his advice. I told him it was about a ‘friend’ and outlined Daria’s situation to him. Miro gave me the impression that he was considerably more experienced in this sort of thing than I was.
By this time, the go-kart track in Mziuri Park had its own regular crowd of spectators. And they weren’t just teenagers and schoolboys wanting to be part of the action. Grown men, petrol-heads and would-be racing drivers, swarmed around the track, staging races or betting on the victor.
They’d given me the nickname ‘Einstein’, and the name had spread so quickly that sometimes I myself forgot that I answered to another name elsewhere. Naturally I would have preferred another nickname: ‘Bardot’, for example, which was what they called a busty blonde who was always among the spectators; or ‘Claudia’, The Shark’s brunette girlfriend who supposedly looked like Claudia Cardinale; or ‘Alla’, the girl they’d named after Russia’s national singer Alla Pugacheva because of her funny poodle perm. ‘Einstein’ meant you were clever first and foremost, and although I was flattered by it, it meant first and foremost that no one would ever press his lips to mine as we danced to ‘Take My Breath Away’, wrapped in each other’s arms.
‘I think the guy’s a bastard, and he either has to leave his wife or your friend should stop seeing him. It’s that simple,’ Miro pronounced, confident as always, after listening to my concerns. He scratched the back of his ear and turned his attention to the track, checking that everything was taking its usual course. What he had told me was in fact a simple, indisputable truth; but I doubted that these words, which I wanted to repeat to my sister with the same emphasis, would have the same enlightening effect on her as they did on me, or that they would get everything back on the rails.
‘And what about you?’ he suddenly asked me.
‘What about me?’
‘Do you have someone, too?’
‘Are you taking the piss?’
That was the only answer I could think of. He didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw a little smile flash at the corners of his mouth. And then he slid closer to me and hugged me tightly, something he often did. This time, though, the gesture felt unfamiliar, unexpected, and I tensed. I had always found physical intimacy difficult. And Miro was very physical. He was always there with a peck on the cheek or a smacking kiss, a hug or a shove, as if he needed this constant physical contact in order to be sure of himself.
‘And you?’ I whispered softly, without turning towards him, in the hope that he might not hear my question.
‘Yes. There is someone.’
Of course. How stupid of me! In a split second I was plunged into misery. ‘Who?’
‘You.’
He fell silent and stared at the ground again. I couldn’t believe it. I asked again, and he repeated that meagre ‘you’. I looked at him and saw the boy who only revealed himself when we were left alone together: the boy whose eyes misted up when I read to him from the romantic novels he loved so much, though he would never admit it in front of his friends, the boy who didn’t seem to care that I was a head shorter than him, too scrawny, too flat-chested, that I had bony knees and a long nose, that I had bluish circles under my eyes, that my hair could never be teased into a pretty bun or a symmetrical plait, that my eyes were so black you couldn’t see the pupils in them. A boy who preferred me to all these Bardots and Claudias at the go-kart track.
‘You and I are a good fit, though, don’t you think?’ He spoke the words very fast, as if he had a hot potato in his mouth or wanted to get the whole thing over with quickly. ‘I’ll love you forever.’
It sounded like a line from one of the many books and films I had read or watched. But you didn’t usually find a line like that in good books and films. In good books and films people didn’t say what they meant; they suffered, failed, and regretted. It was only in bad books and films that people said things like that, and there was no way I wanted us to be two characters from a bad book or film.
I stood there, rooted to the spot, incapable of saying anything in reply. He took my face in his trembling hands, looked at me, and gave me a kiss on the lips. I didn’t know how to kiss, I didn’t know how to be beautiful, I didn’t know how to desire. I knew how other people did it — but I didn’t yet have my own language for talking about my feelings. That didn’t seem to bother him; he pressed his lips to mine a few more times before we were interrupted by The Shark calling for us, and Miro walked off, hesitantly, though also looking proud and content.
During my last year at school, I moved in permanently with Elene, in the city. I was surprised at how hard it was to turn my back on the Green House so definitively, only seeing Stasia at the weekends, missing Nana’s pancakes and the Illusioni and Animal World programmes on television, as well as the garden, the freedom, the woods, and the whispering of the horses — the most constant music of my childhood — but I knew that otherwise the sepulchral mood would tip me into a deep black hole.
*
The same year I finished school, protests flared up once more in Czechoslovakia on the twenty-first anniversary of the Soviet invasion. A degree of unrest was felt in Georgia, too; new national demands were made and numerous discussion circles founded.
Georgian students were suddenly daring to write letters of protest to magazines. People started new clubs and accepted former dissidents as members. It was the year they started talking about an ‘awakening’; the year Latsabidze’s film The Way achieved cult status — after it had been screened at Cannes and awarded a special prize, and the filmmakers themselves had not been granted exit visas to attend. It was the year Madonna sang ‘Like a Prayer’. The year Fred Lieblich finally moved to Vienna. The year terms like ‘national interests’ and ‘territorial integrity’ first started circulating. The year when clubs suddenly turned into political parties. It was the year Hungary opened its border with Austria and an uncontrollable flood of refugees from East
Germany washed into the West. The year of mass demonstrations on both sides of the Berlin Wall. The year six communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe crumbled into dust, and Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed by his people.
The year people in my homeland began to discuss the ‘Soviet occupation’. The year the Berlin Wall fell.
The year of the first free elections in Georgia since 1921.
It was the year of the 9th of April in Tbilisi.
The meeting that never took place
Still sobs round the corner
ANNA AKHMATOVA
There was a hunger strike outside the Central Committee’s main building; the people’s most important demand seemed to be a change to the constitution that would allow the SSR states to ask to leave the USSR. Tents were erected in the middle of Rustaveli Boulevard, an unheard-of, unprecedented occurrence.
The escalation in the clashes between the Communist and National Parties, and the constant unrest in the city, meant that school-leaving exams were brought forward to March.
School was finally over. At the leavers’ ball, I sat on the steps of the great hall, smoked a cigarette, and waited for Miro, who was supposed to be coming to pick me up. For the first time in my life I was wearing a smart dress (I think it might have been the first time I’d worn a dress at all); it was one of Daria’s that my mother had taken in for me, and I felt like a scarecrow.
I was planning to apply to the university’s history faculty. Actually, though, I had no idea what to do with my life. I was interested in so many things that it was agony having to decide on a particular direction, and I would have liked just to carry on with things the way they were: with Miro and the other boys from Mziuri Park, holding our races, hanging around and living aimlessly, living in the moment.
Miro didn’t know what he wanted, either. His mother was urging him to study architecture, as he was good at drawing, but he greeted her suggestions with cold indifference. Lana had tried everything she could to keep him away from the go-kart track, but in the end she had failed.
The Eighth Life Page 93