‘And now?’ Miro had arrived in a shabby denim jacket and white trousers, and sat down beside me on the steps. Loud music was coming from the hall, and everyone was dancing. I snuggled up to him. ‘Don’t you want to go in?’
‘No.’
‘Is there really no one in there you want to see, Einstein?’
‘No. Now let’s get out of here.’
‘But you look interesting, in your dress.’
‘Stop lying, I look stupid. But at least I’ve got it over with.’
‘So where do you want to go?’
‘Let’s just go for a walk.’
And I slipped my arm through his and we went down the steps three at a time, putting our old life behind us as quickly as possible and careening into the new one.
On the river bank we saw the street lamps reflected in the river. We walked past brightly coloured houses, across the hill, past the sulphur baths, and carried on up the cobbled streets through the Armenian and the Jewish quarters which, people said, were growing emptier and emptier now that so many people were emigrating. We strolled into Lenin Square and both of us felt the strange silence there, the windswept disquiet, the unfamiliar darkness surrounding us. Although it was the weekend and not yet all that late, the streets were almost deserted. Most of the restaurants along the river promenade were closed. Most of the windows were shut. I pressed myself closer to him. Hardly anyone coming towards us. Hardly any cars passing by. Darkness, the dim light of the streetlamps, and a menacing silence.
Of course, we were too young for reality that night. Of course, dreams tasted better than the past and the future. Of course, hope was more attractive than the present. Of course, we were infatuated with each other and with revelling in our idea of love. Of course, we were the first and last lovers on the planet. Of course, the threat that hung in the air was a mere trifle compared to the turmoil we felt inside. Of course, that night we were wiser and more cunning than life itself.
*
The Abkhazians started demanding constitutional changes for the Abkhazian SSR, too. Among other things, they wanted to restore the 1921 constitution, which designated Abkhazia a republic of the Union rather than a constituent part of the Georgian republic. The Abkhazian elite were angered by the undertone of nationalism prevalent in the Georgian media at the time.
As I travelled around the city, I kept hearing people call out, ‘Down with the Russian Empire!’
I spent the days that followed my leavers’ ball in a delirium. I stopped going to the go-kart track and asked Miro to run my ‘book’ for me. I went to the Green House and shut myself up in the room that used to be mine and Daria’s.
There was a Queen poster on the wall, which Daria had torn out of a foreign pop magazine. Our beds were perfectly made; Nana still kept the house in good order. I could hear the television in the living room; Kostya was sitting there, unshaven, in a stained dressing gown, and didn’t even bother to greet me as I walked past him. Stasia was having problems with her blood pressure and spent a lot of time in bed.
It was rainy, cold, and damp. I wanted to cry. The room looked so deserted without Daria, without our shared past. I stretched out on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Nana had folded the clothes that Daria hadn’t taken with her neatly and piled them on a chair. Everything was so clean and so tidy, and that made it so dead, and so much sadder. The life had gone out of the room, out of the whole house.
My brain felt sore. I was making no progress. I didn’t know what to do with myself and my life. I could feel fissures and fractures around me; I sensed that the ground I trod on was made of glass; I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know where to start. I was looking for a place where I belonged, and this house was no longer that place. I felt like a third wheel at Elene and Aleko’s. Miro and I had nowhere to escape the watchful eye of Lana or Christine, and Mziuri Park, with the boys I called my friends, was starting to bore me. I felt as if I were made up of a random collection of clichés. My head was one big ragbag of uselessness and distraction.
‘They’ll shed blood yet, you’ll see. Those pigs! Those Nazis! They’ll trample the people underfoot! And this dunderheaded opportunist in charge of the CP is going to let them massacre us!’
Kostya was ranting in the living room again. I crept over to him cautiously and shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, hoping he would speak to me — but, as if I were one of Stasia’s translucent ghosts, he didn’t. On the screen I could see angry people talking to the camera, bellowing, spitting.
‘What’s happened?’ I finally ventured to ask.
‘Our Central Committee must have sent some kind of telegram to Moscow asking for help, because they can’t handle the demonstrations here. They’re panicking because of the nationalists and they’re already showing that they’re helpless and overwhelmed by the situation. And now, of course, Moscow will come marching in; finally they have a perfectly good, official reason to come and give us a good smack in the chops. And the Georgian Central Committee will come out of it looking good, because they won’t be the ones who got their hands dirty and brought the wrath of the Russians down on their own people.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Think about it! What’s that prodigious brain of yours for, eh? You can still use it, can’t you?’
‘Will it —’
‘Yes, if the government doesn’t take the right steps, there will be bloodshed. They say, “Yes, but look at the Poles or the Czechs, look at the Baltic” — but they’re too stupid to understand that we’re not the Poles or the Baltic. They’re practically in the West — they’re just a stone’s throw from West Germany or Finland — but we’re here at the feet of the giant, miles away from anyone, and for all those years we enjoyed being the giant’s favourite child. Now those idiots are saying they want to stand on their own two feet. But they’ve never stood on their own two feet. Not for two hundred years. And this gang of dissidents, people who’ve been shut out and spat on, who are trying to take advantage of all this — well, you’ve got all sorts in that mob: fanatical nationalists, the red intelligentsia, the esoteric fanatics, fatalistic mystics, criminals and cutthroats. A right old mixture. They’re all looking for their pot of gold. But it was a good thing, it was a good thing that the giant was holding them in his fist.’
‘But every person —’
‘Every person, every person! Most people are bloodsuckers; they’re like ticks. They want to do nothing and fill their bellies just the same. They don’t want to work, but they want to be rich. Most of them want a roof over their heads, sausage in the fridge, a woman’s warm arse in their bed to cuddle up to, and children who are no better than them.’
‘And what do you want? What did you want for Elene? What do you want for Daria?’
Then he did look at me again, with that look that was reserved just for me. As if he despised and pitied me at the same time.
‘You can’t let it go, can you? Have you made it your life’s work to make my life difficult?’
‘I just want to understand you.’
‘Ah, you want to understand me? If you’d understood me, you wouldn’t have driven your sister to this disgrace, single-handedly sent her off into this depraved world. You would have made an effort at school and done well in your exams.’ (How did he know about my poor grades?) ‘If you’d understood me, you wouldn’t have started hanging around with that Eristavi bastard, and —’ (How did he know about Miro and me?) ‘And … Oh, never mind.’
‘All people are bastards to you. Everyone is weak and stupid. Everyone who doesn’t live like you.’
‘Be quiet. Watch television if you want to, and be grateful I still tolerate your presence here at all.’
‘All those people out there want a different life; they want to be treated like human beings. All those students demonstrating and starving out there aren’t going to be content with sausage in
the fridge, a warm arse in bed, and holding their tongues about everything else. They want to decide for themselves what they have in the fridge, whose arse they have next to them, and what they think and say.’
‘Well then, go out there, sit down and starve with them. You’ll be a student yourself soon: be like them, and when someone points a Kalashnikov at you, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘A lot of Union republics have just been through all this, and so far —’
‘None of those poxy Union republics is Georgia!’ He sounded almost desperate.
I didn’t know how to respond, and marched out of the room indignantly.
And Russia did come, first in the guise of General Kochetov, who was the representative of the Soviet defence minister at the time, and had previously served in the Caucasus. He hadn’t even left the airport before he was asking the Georgian Communist Party representatives what the government was planning to do to normalise the situation. But this so-called government was already so divided, its members so at odds with each other, so disunited on what they wanted, that they just stood around looking bewildered and babbling vaguely. On April 5th, Daria returned from the shoot. Beaming, beautiful, her eyes sparkling. She brought presents and souvenirs for everyone. She was wearing a brown leather jacket, which made her look like a real film star and most certainly did not come from a Moscow department store. Elene, Aleko, and I went to pick her up. Several people stopped her on her way out and asked for her autograph. She handled the scene with impressive ease.
The lovely Lasha’s wife was also waiting at the airport. She ran to him and covered him in kisses. I saw how Daria turned away from their meeting with raised eyebrows and put on her enchanting smile for us.
We wanted to go straight from the airport to the Green House together, to give Kostya, Nana, and Stasia a nice surprise. We bought fresh fruit and vegetables at the market, and meat to make shashlik, and drove out to the house.
Kostya’s bottom lip began to tremble when he caught sight of Daria, and even though he tried to maintain the iron countenance of a man who would not be moved, he still folded her in his arms and hugged her with all his might. I could see that something in her had changed, something was happening to her. She chattered incessantly about the exciting shoot, the fantastic screenplay, her helpful colleagues, and despite her best efforts she couldn’t stop herself mentioning Lasha, too. His name cropped up in every second sentence.
‘Daria, please tell me it’s not true. Please tell me you haven’t got yourself involved with that conceited prig!’ I whispered to her as we went into the kitchen to slice tomatoes for the salad.
‘Yes!’ she breathed, almost with relief. ‘We’re together. He loves me, and he’s going to leave his wife.’
*
On 7 April, I went back to the city to meet Miro. We wanted to watch The Evil Dead; The Shark had got hold of a VHS copy and commended it to us as a real hair-raiser. When I met Miro at the bus stop, I could see the dejection on his face from a long way off. The Russians were on their way into the city, he told me in a whisper. Order was to be restored and the right to demonstrate and assemble might be revoked completely for weeks to come.
The Shark was ill, and cancelled our video evening. We wandered aimlessly around the streets. Miro suggested going to the park and taking a couple of karts round the track. I didn’t want to drive, so we found a quiet spot and lay down in the cool grass. He spread his denim jacket out under my bottom. I’d brought Moby-Dick with me and I read to him for a while, but he seemed distracted and wasn’t really listening. I, too, found it hard to concentrate. A lot of things were going through my head.
I ran my fingers through his hair. He stroked my belly. I knew he wanted to find something in my body that would indicate the future, but I denied him his wish. I knew he was mistaken; for today, at least, he was mistaken. Perhaps it would be different tomorrow. I wanted to spend always and forever in this twilight, in this silence, lying on the damp grass with him. But at the same time I couldn’t suppress the turmoil inside me any longer. I ran my hand over the old edition of Melville and closed my eyes.
‘I’m going to write, too. I’m going to write books,’ I told him, expecting him to question me or at least express his surprise. But he didn’t; he just nodded, as if he’d been expecting me to say those words all this time, and gave me a kiss.
‘Yes, you should. You should do that — write books, I mean,’ he said later, after he had walked me back to Elene’s flat. ‘I’ll pick you up tomorrow evening,’ he promised as he left.
When I phoned Christine’s apartment on 8 April, nobody answered. Usually, Christine was always there. Miro didn’t turn up. Aleko wasn’t home. Mother said she was going to her tutorial and wouldn’t be back until late. She told me to stay at home: unrest was expected.
But I went out all the same, and headed towards Rustaveli Boulevard. I saw countless people on the streets, and militsiya cars going by. At that point I didn’t know that several divisions from Moscow and the Northern Caucasus had already arrived in Tbilisi. I didn’t know there were tanks rolling into the city, or that the 345th Regiment was on its way to Georgia, the soldiers who would later be deployed as ‘peacekeeping’ troops in the Caucasian civil wars.
I didn’t know that the nationalists, who by this point had been informed that the military was on its way, still weren’t telling people to go home. On the contrary: the crowd was growing from one minute to the next; people were swarming like ants in the streets, the whole city seemed to be on its feet.
I managed to get to Vake on an over-crowded trolleybus, but I didn’t find anyone at home. I spent several minutes knocking and ringing the bell. Then I walked back — there were no more trolleybuses. I called the Green House from a phone box. Stasia picked up.
‘Sunshine, where are you? Are you all right? Kostya says things are probably going to escalate if they don’t manage to send people home. Daria has gone into the city — we begged her to stay, but she was adamant that she was going to the demonstration with her friends. I hope you’re at your mother’s?’
‘Friends’ in this case was synonymous with the lovely Lasha. I hadn’t had him down as a patriot.
‘If Daria isn’t home soon, Kostya’s going to go into the city and look for her,’ she told me. I heard her dry lips touch the end of a cigarette.
‘It’s all right, I’ll find her, and we’ll come home together tonight. We’ll take a taxi. Tell Kostya to have some cash ready, I don’t have much on me. And tell Mama that Daria and I are coming out to yours tonight, so that she doesn’t worry.’
‘Niza, wait, listen, where are you …’
I hung up.
If Daria was already there, I could assume that Miro had gone to the demonstration as well. I started to walk quickly. I was walking alongside people waving the Georgian flag and shouting slogans. I didn’t pay much attention to their words. It was dark, and the streetlights were on. Sweating, I left Rustaveli station behind me, ran past the Filmmakers’ Union and on towards the Opera and the National Film School. I reached Qashveti Church, went through the underpass, caught sight of my school, and plunged into the crowd.
The secretary of the Georgian Central Committee appeared before the throng, supporting the Patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church. The Patriarch was supposed to tell people to return home, because the secretary knew that nobody would take any notice of what he said now. The nationalists called on the people to keep the peace, whatever that meant. I searched and searched. I called Daria’s name, I called Miro’s. I bumped into a few pupils from my school — the fact that so many young people were here came as a huge surprise to me.
‘They came to me and told me to expect danger. We have only a matter of minutes to avert this danger … Let us go into the Qashveti Church and pray,’ said the Patriarch.
Why wasn’t he telling people to go home, if the situation was really t
hat serious? How was a church supposed to offer protection to so many people?
The Russian commander and his men were already on their way to the House of Government. And I went on looking for the people I loved. I was forced into the crush, people squeezed past me, and it took me forever to forge a path through the mass of demonstrators. Suddenly, I heard a murmur run through the crowd. I hopped up and down — I was too small, I couldn’t see what was happening, all the heads, backs, and necks blocked my view — but then I heard a strange, dull, heavy sound followed by the noise of several engines. My ears were well-schooled when it came to engines, and I didn’t need to crane my neck to know that a whole army of military vehicles was rolling towards us along the two parallel streets that passed the House of Government, followed by swamp-green tanks. I had never seen a tank before, and the sight — the crowd had begun to part — made me stop in my tracks, fascinated.
The panic that now broke out seemed to me like an uncontrollable virus, airborne and infecting everyone, but giving each of them different symptoms. It crippled me. I felt myself go cold, beads of cold sweat forming on my forehead. What was I doing here? What was I demonstrating for or against? What sort of country did I want to live in? I had never given these questions much thought before. Some of the demonstrators were running up the steps to the House of Government, others were falling back towards my old school, but the convoys were already there, no one could escape them.
I climbed onto a podium that had been constructed for the speeches, and from there up to the great pillars of the colonnade; then, suddenly, I saw her. I saw her standing in the front courtyard of the school, as if she had suddenly been abandoned by everyone on this planet, looking about her, helpless and confused.
‘Christine!’ I yelled at the top of my voice. But how was she supposed to hear me? Thousands of people were screaming and shouting to each other. Some were using megaphones. Luckily, I was able to keep sight of her. She stood there as if entranced, looking out for someone or something. At first I thought she had come because of Miro, and that gave me hope — it meant he was nearby, and I would find him — but when I looked closer it occurred to me that there was something very determined about the way she was standing there, straight and tall, as if she had her own aim, some purpose that had brought her here and which she was steadfastly pursuing.
The Eighth Life Page 94