The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  ‘And what about your studies?’

  ‘I can finish my degree in Moscow and act there! Everything is so backward here, anyway. People here don’t even know the meaning of the word professional.’

  ‘He’s hit you once, and he’ll do it again!’

  ‘You’re not God, Niza. When are you going to understand that?’

  ‘What’s this got to do with God?’

  ‘You try to control everything, but that’s not how things work. It’s my life and I’ll live it how I want, with whomever I want.’

  *

  The first free presidential elections in Russian history took place in June 1991. Daria moved to Moscow with her lovely Lasha, and Kostya was surprisingly acquiescent; he still believed that over there all was not yet lost, whereas our country had been sliding towards the abyss for a long time.

  Lasha’s parents had advanced him some start-up capital so he could buy into his friend’s business — something to do with banking and loans or credit or something like that, as Daria vaguely described it shortly before they left. What she didn’t tell us at that dinner was that she had also contributed some jewellery from her dowry.

  *

  Georgia declared its independence and reinstated the old constitution of 1918. The Georgian flag flew over the House of Government — newly renamed the Parliament Building — and we got a new national anthem of our own. So now we were free, though no one really seemed to know what ‘freedom’ meant. The peace lasted just six months, then demonstrations, riots, political tensions, and heated debates in parliament finally culminated in a coup against Gamsakhurdia, led by the National Guard and the Mkhedrioni Army. Attacks on party offices, shootings in the street, break-ins, beatings, injuries, arrests, yelling in parliament, yes, yelling everywhere, wild insults, aggression, and finally bankruptcy were everyday occurrences.

  During that time, everything of value disappeared from the Green House: the beautiful furniture, the porcelain vases and mother-of-pearl caskets, all the silver cutlery, Nana’s jewellery and even her tea set collection. All the German, Czech, and Chinese tea sets assembled with such love and effort found their way out of the cabinet in the living room and onto the black market on the ‘Dry Bridge’.

  All non-Georgian ethnicities are multiplying here at a catastrophic speed.

  ZVIAD GAMSAKHURDIA

  ‘This is all taking on a shape strongly reminiscent of a dictatorship … I am resigning. Let it be my contribution — my protest, if you will — against the coming dictatorship.’ So said the Soviet foreign minister, our countryman Shevardnadze, as he left his position. Gorbachev, he claimed, was supporting the protests by Ossetian and Abkhazian separatists, who were complaining about Gamsakhurdia’s strict nationalist policies, portraying themselves as victims of these policies, and heightening the anti-Georgian feeling already prevalent in the Russian media.

  As Gorbachev was booed at the May parade outside the Kremlin, Kostya, wearing his obligatory towelling dressing-gown and baggy pyjamas, stared glassy-eyed at the television screen, shaking his head like a nodding dog.

  ‘It’s official: his reforms have made him the biggest laughing stock in Soviet history. My hearty congratulations!’

  As he stirred his tea, I realised that recently his hands had started to shake.

  ‘And he claims to be a humanist? Him? That’s a joke! The man who allowed these bloodbaths to take place in Tbilisi and Baku? But why am I complaining about him when we have our own little fascist right here: Gamsakhurdia,’ he grumbled to himself.

  I had taken up residence in the Green House again for a few weeks; more and more of my lectures were being cancelled, and I had decided to devote more time to my writing. To talk to Stasia, check on a few facts from her stories. I had borrowed a stack of books about the revolutionary period from the university library and set out to work my way through them. It was painfully obvious now that things were missing; that there was so much we lacked. It wasn’t just the furniture and the vases, it was something else, something bigger, that we had all mislaid, and which, at the time, I was unable to put into words.

  When I discovered that Kostya had even sold his greatest treasure, the GAZ-13, the extent of our privations finally became clear to me. We couldn’t keep acting as though nothing had changed. I was saddened by the fact that Kostya and Nana accepted the small amount of money Daria sent them from Moscow every few weeks. At the same time, I knew it would only make everything worse if we admitted that, like ninety per cent of the Georgian population, we were facing total bankruptcy. We had to preserve the illusion that everything was as it used to be and keep going about our day-to-day business, so that the ground didn’t completely open up beneath our feet. Because we already knew how unstable this ground was. Pensions arrived late or not at all, and they didn’t stretch nearly far enough. Elene’s earnings were irregular. The fruit and vegetables from our garden were a blessing for us; food shortages and the other constrictions of daily life were not felt as harshly in the countryside as they were in the city.

  When Elene was paid, in order to avoid any long discussions with me, or hurting my pride, she would tuck a few notes into my coat pocket. They would last me a while, for trolleybus or metro tickets.

  Lana’s building institute fell victim to the cuts and was closed down. Miro was forced to look for a job, which was anything but easy in those days. As he was good with cars, he started helping out in a garage run by a friend’s father, who tuned up car engines to make them perform better. Most of the garage’s customers were Mkhedrionists, the only people at that time who could still afford such luxuries. People in uniform and men with guns met in the backroom of this garage, where they waited for their cars to be brought up to the desired horsepower and passed the time playing cards.

  I often visited Miro there, so I had plenty of opportunities to watch them. The games fascinated me, and gradually I started to understand the tactics they used, and when it was sensible to fold. Above all, I was fascinated by the sums of money that changed hands. One day, one of the men in uniform asked me if I played poker; they were a player short. I knew the rules from Aleko and his friends, but had little experience myself. When I saw the heap of notes on the little wooden crate that served as their card table, I told them I was a good poker player. I won the very first hand (which to this day I believe was pure luck, and nothing to do with my own abilities) and left the garage with a few notes in my pocket.

  Back home, I made Aleko sit down with me and spend a whole night teaching me the tricks and subtleties of poker playing. This was draw poker, and Aleko and his friends usually played five-card stud, so he had to get himself up to speed as well, and called a friend who explained the details to him over the phone. He sat there on the phone like a schoolboy, with a pen, writing in an old exercise book.

  ‘Why are you so desperate to know all this?’ he asked, a little suspicious of my sudden enthusiasm for the game. ‘I hope you’re not planning to do anything illegal?’

  ‘I’m playing with some guys from university for a few kopeks.’

  ‘I know how obsessed you get with games, and I’d advise you to be careful. I’m all too aware of how addictive these things can be, so just make sure you don’t get in over your head. And not a word to your mother!’

  ‘Not a word, I promise!’

  And I gave him a big kiss on his stubbly cheek.

  Over the weeks that followed, I was able to demonstrate what I’d learned. I went to the garage, withdrew to the back room with the Mkhedrionists, and played for all I was worth. My poverty and my absolute will to win spurred me on to incredible audacity; I bluffed and took huge risks. I’d lied to them, claiming my father had been a professional player (and had therefore spent a fair amount of time behind bars, which was actually the truth). And once they had convinced themselves of my loyalty, they started inviting me back to their headquarters, where they drank thei
r home-brew and played with greater obsession and fewer inhibitions.

  Poker took me to a huge variety of places: former factory buildings, empty schools, and abandoned printing works, filled with bored, mainly drunk Mkhedrionists, oblivious to their surroundings as they played. (They all considered themselves nationalists, so they drank chacha and not vodka during these binges, to rule out any sympathy for Russia from the start.) I remained calm and collected, played my cards close to my chest (literally), and soon acquired something of a reputation. And, as I was aware of the fragility of a player’s luck, I tried to bid high as long as Fate was on my side. Driven by my ambition, I played every hand, and frequently left the table with my pockets full. On my way back, I would think about who I could slip the money to at home, the food shopping I could do, and to whom I could bring a little joy with it.

  Miro very quickly got wind of my activities, which were officially strictly illegal, and made a scene, saying it was dangerous to have anything to do with these cutthroats. But I stood my ground and told him there was nothing dangerous about it; I was just on an incredible winning streak that I wanted to exploit to the full. For a few days after the argument we weren’t on speaking terms, but I was sure he, too, would soon see the advantages of my new ‘work’.

  They tolerated me because I proved myself equal to them as a player, and above all because I was a woman and they thought I posed no threat. But after I had scored a few wins, a man I had never seen before turned up at the old print works one afternoon, took three bottles of chacha out of a plastic bag, and set them down on the card table. He greeted everyone individually with a military handshake and was enthusiastically welcomed. Last of all, he came up to me, gave me his hand, and said, with a roguish expression on his face, ‘So you’re the legendary Einstein everyone’s been telling me about. Well then, let’s see just how smart you are.’

  I wanted to crawl off into a corner. One thing was clear: the other players had set me up. This guy may have been small — only a little taller than me, and gangly in a way that made his uniform hang off him, but he had a large tattoo on his neck (a tiger, winding itself round his throat), a shaved head that gave him a brutish aspect, and under his camouflage shirt his arms were muscular. The most striking thing about him, however, was a scar that split his right eyebrow in two. I disliked him on sight. Unlike most of the other players, who had probably joined the Mkhedrioni out of an excess of pent-up energy and a lack of other prospects, there was something fanatical about him, as if he had given over his whole life to the pursuit of a rock-solid conviction.

  He was nervous; he cracked his knuckles, scratched his hairless head, or chewed on a match. His Makarov (I could now tell one make of gun from another) was always at his side, and the pistol on his belt made me feel uneasy.

  So this was the man I was to play: Cello. He was really good. He was a brilliant manipulator, and that only increased my sense of unease. He looked like he wasn’t a good loser — a fact that might cause me problems — but it was too late to pull out. He won the first round, but in the second I had a wonderful hand and won by a mile; in the third, a split pot eventually went my way. He congratulated me with an extravagant high-five and called out to the group, ‘Well then, lads, you weren’t exaggerating. It’s nice to play someone who’s my equal!’

  We received an enthusiastic round of applause.

  *

  For a while, I regained a degree of inner stability. My writing gave me a clear structure to my day, and the guilt I felt about living at my family’s expense was eased by my poker winnings (although since that afternoon I had been a little more circumspect with my visits). I even felt something like self-satisfaction. As inflation was now in full swing, the Georgian coupon, the transition currency, was worth nothing. The Mkhedrionists had switched to dollars — God knows where they got them. Little by little, I amassed the incredible sum of two hundred and fifty dollars. I meant to spend it on a used car to make Kostya, who was stuck in his Green House, mobile again. Miro helped me with the purchase, and I become the proud owner of a black Zhiguli. I drove up to the Green House, grinning from ear to ear, and enticed Kostya out of his lethargy and into the driveway by sounding the horn loudly.

  ‘What on earth are you doing?’ he snapped at me.

  ‘Voilà: it’s a present for you!’ I announced, pointing to the car.

  ‘You don’t have a driving licence — you can’t drive a car! How did you get here?’ He still didn’t seem to understand.

  ‘I can drive perfectly well; Aleko taught me. But that’s not the point. This is a present for you. It’s not a beautiful Chaika, but it’ll get you into town.’

  ‘You always were good at surprises, I’ll give you that. And what would you do if the militsiya stopped you?’

  ‘The militsiya is called the police now, and I’d slip them a hundred-thousand coupon, and it would be fine.’

  ‘How many roubles is that?’

  ‘At the current rate of inflation, about three.’

  ‘That’s how much they’re fining people now for traffic offences?’

  ‘It’s not a traffic offence, Kostya.’

  ‘What is it then, driving around without a licence and putting other people in danger? In Moscow they would never —’

  ‘Ask Daria, when you speak to her: apparently in Moscow the police turn a blind eye to much worse things if you show them a few notes. But don’t you even want to take a look at my present?’

  ‘Where did you get the money?’

  ‘I saved it up. I got a bursary,’ I lied.

  He was still keeping his distance and eyeing me and the car with a mixture of uncertainty and interest, which he was trying hide under a cloak of severity.

  ‘Well then, let’s see if you really can handle a car.’

  ‘And how shall I prove that to you?’

  ‘Drive me into town.’

  ‘You really want me to drive you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I waited ten minutes while he got changed, then we took the Zhiguli into the city. On the drive, we heard on the radio that South Ossetia, too, had declared its autonomy. Kostya stared out of the window all the way, as if seeing the roads for the first time.

  ‘So, where are we going?’ I asked.

  ‘To Vera cemetery.’

  I didn’t ask questions. When we got there, I knew he wanted to visit Christine’s grave. At the graveside, Kostya rolled up his sleeves and started pulling up the weeds that were already growing over the stone. He cleared them like a man possessed. I tried to help him, but I couldn’t keep up. Then, as if waking from a dream, he sat down on the ground, exhausted. On the way he had bought a bunch of white roses, which now lay on the grave. The place was windswept and inhospitable. I sat down beside him.

  ‘Almost a whole century lies buried here. Isn’t that remarkable?’ he said, and the way he said it gave me a start.

  ‘I can’t visit my sister’s grave. You live your whole life for the state, serving it to the best of your ability, and then that! Yes; that’s how it is when …’

  He didn’t finish his sentence, and I didn’t dare prompt him. I wanted to take his hand in mine, but I didn’t dare do that, either.

  Later, he thanked me for thinking of the car, but said that he didn’t need it, not any more. There was no longer any reason for him to go anywhere. I was welcome to play his chauffeur, should he decide he did want to go into the city after all: I had certainly proved I was safe on the roads. But I should take a driving test all the same, he said, before getting out of the car again outside the Green House.

  *

  It was around this time that I met Severin. I was wandering along the ‘Dry Bridge’, on the lookout for old books that might help me as I wrote down Stasia’s stories (books that weren’t just propaganda, like most of what was in the library). Severin was kneeling on the ground in front of an old blanket
piled high with second-hand books, lost in thought as he leafed through one of them. His haircut and the style of his clothes told me he wasn’t from Georgia.

  He was young — we must have been about the same age — tall and well-built. He looked strikingly healthy, and exuded something you rarely find in Georgian men: calm. I decided to talk to him. My curiosity about foreigners was hard to rein in. In German-accented Russian he told me he came from West Germany; he had been living in Berlin for a few years now, and was travelling around current and former Soviet countries for his father’s antique furniture shop, on the hunt for rare pieces to take back to Germany. You could do good business in the East, he said: people would sometimes sell fabulous things for a few groschen, and even though he found the task abhorrent, he had no other choice.

  Smiling, he went on to explain that his real passion was history, with a focus on Eastern Europe. He loved the Russian language dearly, had been learning it since he was a boy, had trained as a restorer to please his father, and was now here pursuing his passion. How exciting it was to be here at such a time, under these circumstances! At the epicentre of the action, he said. Two years ago he wouldn’t even have dared to dream of it. Everything had changed overnight: no more Wall, no more East Germany, and soon the whole Soviet Union would be gone, too. He had been to many cities in Russia, and had always wanted to visit golden Colchis.

  ‘And now here I am!’

  ‘Yes, well — as you can see, there isn’t much of golden Colchis left here. Not even anything from the Bronze Age.’

  He smiled his mischievous smile again.

  ‘And have you struck it lucky? Have you managed to discover a rare item yet?’

  ‘Listen, don’t get me wrong. I’m doing it for my father’s business. Personally, I don’t like to see people, especially old people, having to sell their most valuable possessions for so little money.’

  ‘So you feel guilty?’