The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Sorry. That sounds so easy. You’re the first person I’ve heard say that word. Not counting in films.’

  He smiled, this time a little more sadly. He was probably the only person smiling at all in this part of town, I thought to myself. It seemed to me like a very pleasant change.

  ‘And what are you reading?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m interested in political power structures. I’m teaching myself about Soviet history.’

  ‘You won’t find much about power structures in the Russian books. It’ll be all brotherliness and equality there.’

  We had interests in common. I questioned him about his western life; he wanted to hear all about my eastern life. We strolled through the deserted, windy streets and didn’t notice evening falling. I suggested finding one of the few cafés still open in the Old Town, and Severin followed me to Leselidze Street. We drank cheap, lukewarm beer (there was no electricity in the bar) and went on chatting for hours by candlelight. He was staying in a private house with a Georgian family who kept their heads above water by subletting rooms. He had been in the city two weeks and wanted to stay as long as he could. I even told him about my attempts at writing, and complained about the lack of good secondary literature. He offered to provide me with the right books — but most of the books he had with him were in German. When he saw my disappointment, he said we could make a deal: I would teach him Georgian, and in return he would teach me German.

  We quickly became friends. We found it easy to like each other. We had similar taste in writing, though he made me realise that there was a huge gap in my reading when it came to contemporary literature, because it was impossible to get hold of the books. He was far better versed in contemporary art as well. We both liked films, and aimless walks on the riverbank. He was restless, searching, and that soon made him feel very familiar to me. The only thing about him that left me almost embarrassingly confused was the fact that he flirted with socialism and was always quoting Marx. I simply couldn’t comprehend someone who came from the West and could afford to travel to Paris, Rome, New York, or Tokyo journeying through the rubble of the Soviet Union, taking in the exotic adventure of the East, searching out rare antiques for the capitalist market, and at the same time talking about the advantages of a system that had long been heading towards its demise.

  We started meeting regularly. We drilled each other on vocabulary over tea or beer in his accommodation. He told me about West Berlin, Europe, a world I knew only vaguely from books and films. I asked one question after another. There was something slightly lost about his light-heartedness. As if he were constantly wanting to be surprised, swept away from himself, from everything that seemed familiar and certain to him. As if the unknown were the only thing that counted. When I asked him why he didn’t just study history and philosophy, if he was already so obsessed by it, he smiled again in his rakish, ambiguous way and told me that the years of doing battle with his father had worn him out. That several times already he had run away, only to return to the shelter of his family when everything had gone wrong.

  ‘My father is a great businessman, you have to give him that. He moved us all to Berlin a few years ago because he could already smell that history was about to be written, and he wasn’t wrong. He’s made a fortune with old GDR lamps and wallpaper. Westerners are prepared to pay through the nose for simple, factory-made crockery and curtains from the Soviet Union.’

  English tasted like sea air and like an autumn sunset on a northern coast; it smelled slightly of fish shops, a little of rain. I thought French, which I had never learned, must dissolve like apricot jam on the tongue and taste of dry white wine. Russian tasted of an endless plain, of wheat fields, of loneliness and illusions. But Georgian tasted dusty, full — almost over-full — and sometimes also like a game of hide-and-seek in the woods. By contrast, the German that Severin taught me tasted icy and bitter at first; then the flavour changed and transformed into the taste of algae, of dark green moss; then it became pungent again, but more pleasant; and later, much later, German was like ripe chestnuts in my mouth, and heights, yes, dizzying heights.

  He learned the thirty-three letters of the Georgian alphabet. I learned the German words for ‘shitty country’, ‘exploiter’, ‘genocide’, and ‘Cold War’. Sentences like ‘How are you?’ and ‘Do you come from the West or the East?’ Later, I learned the words for things like ‘house’, ‘child’, ‘girl’. And then his silly, perpetual ‘okay’.

  ‘Das Mädchen — why is ‘girl’ neuter, not feminine? I don’t understand it,’ I grumbled.

  ‘Because Germans are so incredibly tactful, you know? They don’t want to disadvantage anyone.’

  ‘Who’s going to feel disadvantaged? I think it’s stupid that I’m a neuter das while you’re quite clearly a masculine der.’

  We laughed until he was red-faced, with tears in his eyes — something that didn’t otherwise feel natural for a person like Severin: he walked around as though he had a sticker on his forehead reading: ‘There’s nothing that can rattle me or throw me off balance’.

  ‘Okay, people who are neither one nor the other, they might feel disadvantaged. Me, for example,’ he explained.

  ‘You’re a der. How does being a der disadvantage you, if you please?’

  ‘Well, I like boys.’

  ‘Oh, right, I see. But that makes you a double-der, doesn’t it?’

  And once again he shook with laughter.

  ‘That’s the kind of logic that might just help me make my sexual orientation comprehensible to my parents.’

  ‘You’d get locked up for that in the Soviet Union,’ I added contemplatively, with David’s story on my mind.

  ‘Thanks for the tip. That’s a huge comfort. In Germany, they castrate you. Nice life, huh?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and they take a hot iron and brand the word “poof” on your chest.’

  ‘Oh my God — maybe you really are better off staying here.’

  He laughed again, slapping the flat of his hand against his thigh.

  ‘No, it’s not that bad! It’s okay in Germany, actually. But listen, if my father had his way, that’s exactly what would happen.’

  ‘Well, either way, I just want you to teach me German for as long as possible, and I want to keep your books a while longer,’ I said, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Okay, sure thing.’

  From then on, I went with him on his long marches, looking at rugs, armchairs, silver cutlery, crockery, and all kinds of lampshades. We were invited into various apartments and houses where there was something Severin wanted to see. I acted as interpreter, but when I saw a war veteran selling his medals I told him the whole thing made me so sad it might be better if he did his father’s job alone.

  On 19 August, while Gorbachev was on holiday in the Crimea, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and other reactionary and conservative forces made a final attempt to halt perestroika. They declared a state of emergency, mobilised against the new Union Treaty, declared that any relaxation of the communist system effectively meant the end of that system, and asked the KGB for support (its head was one of the coup’s central figures). The coup failed, and three Party functionaries committed suicide, but from then on Gorbachev’s days seemed to be numbered as well. It was no use now that he agreed to the abolition or — as it later turned out — restructuring of the KGB, or that as a final demonstration of his own power he had the leaders of the coup arrested. Yeltsin seized his chance, proclaimed a country-wide ban on the Communist Party, and had its property confiscated. On paper, Gorbachev may still have been president of the Russian Republic, but by 24 August the tricolour Russian flag was already hanging over the seat of government in Moscow.

  The Soviet Union, the country in which I was born and grew up, no longer existed.

  *

  When the Gulf Wa
r broke out, I was lying in bed with Miro, thinking about how I was going to survive the winter without losing my mind. Electricity blackouts were occurring with increasing regularity. We had to get by with old kerosene lamps. The central heating had stopped working, too. So we had to make other preparations for winter. We got hold of firewood and stinking petrol stoves, which would provide a little heat. We had more things to worry about than keeping up with history.

  Only the gods are not afraid of gifts.

  Try to meet a god.

  MARINA TSVETAEVA

  They said a civil war had broken out in Tbilisi. The city lay in darkness. Everyone was against everyone: the opposition — though by that time nobody knew who was actually in it — was against Gamsakhurdia; the Communist Party was for itself; the private army was for more power; the partisans for anarchy; criminals for justice; the intelligentsia for Shevardnadze; and the rest of the people somewhere in between. Shots were fired with increasing frequency; a curfew was imposed. Barricades were erected everywhere they could be, and voices amplified by megaphones became part of the everyday background noise.

  Despite all this, Severin didn’t want to leave. I was annoyed by his excitement and interest in these tragic developments. I suggested that the only reason he saw any good in the destructive potential of what was happening here was that the world he came from was still in one piece. Lectures were cancelled. Demonstrations weren’t. We were always hearing about people who had been physically attacked or held up and robbed.

  I wrote, and froze. The poker games were temporarily put on hold. The boys had more important things to do. Everywhere stank of petrol. Everywhere was cold. Everywhere people looked about them fearfully and flinched if something was dropped on the floor.

  We wanted to spend New Year’s Eve 1991 all together at the Green House because shots kept being fired in Tbilisi and bullets had shattered our neighbours’ windows. There was a worried phone call from Daria every week, but she had stopped sending money to Kostya and Nana. I suspected something was wrong, but I put the thought to the back of my mind. I had enough worries of my own.

  With the civil war, something else entered the country: heroin. The staircases of apartment blocks were increasingly littered with needles. There were more and more glassy eyes on the metro, more and more absent expressions.

  We sold and sold. My mother even pawned her wedding ring. When there was nothing left to sell, and the money I had saved from the poker games was gone as well, Stasia announced that there was only one way for us to survive. That night, a delicious aroma spread through the house. We wandered sleepily into the kitchen in nightshirts and pyjamas, and discovered our ninety-one-year-old Stasia at the kitchen table — with a chocolate torte in front of her.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ I cried out. I wanted to stick a finger into the wonderful cake then and there, but Nana stopped me, and Stasia explained that she had made it using her father’s old recipe. She wanted us to take it into town and sell it to one of the small, newly-opened kiosks that offered cakes and pancakes.

  At first everyone thought it was a crazy idea, but then Elene told us excitedly that she knew someone in Tbilisi who sold confectionary in his shop, and she would try taking the cake to this man in the morning.

  I drove her into the city the next day, and together we took the cake to the little basement shop Elene had mentioned. The corpulent and excessively hairy owner took the cake with some reluctance, and of course for much less money than we had originally asked, saying he would see how it sold. He thought individual slices would do better; at the moment the Mkhedrioni were probably the only ones who could afford a whole cake.

  But by the next day the cake had sold, and he ordered three more from Elene. In two weeks, we sold a total of ten cakes. Stasia refused to accept help from other members of the family, and insisted on keeping the family recipe a secret. I was the only one she would countenance as an assistant in this difficult task.

  ‘Only Niza. No one else. She’s the only one in this house who can withstand the curse!’

  My mother and Nana exchanged meaningful looks. Initially, I was far from delighted at having the honour of assisting her. I hated any kind of kitchen job, and baking in particular had never been one of my strengths. But Stasia was adamant and wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. I told myself that at least this was a good opportunity to spend more time with the increasingly frail Stasia and finish collecting my stories.

  The first night, as I watched her make the chocolate, I remembered the delicious aroma in Christine’s apartment that had enticed Miro and me out of our beds and into the kitchen. And as she stirred the dark mass, I heard, for the first time, the story of the chocolate-maker’s hot chocolate, and the curse that, according to Stasia, went with it.

  ‘You should never have been allowed to taste it, and now you have. My sister, may she rest in peace, never believed me. She used it to put the Little Big Man in his grave, and even after that she still doubted. But you — you must promise me faithfully: two dessert spoons of the mixture are all you need for a cake. You must never make it in its pure form for someone you love. Swear it to me.’

  The scent melted me along with the chocolate as I watched her mixing the ingredients with hands that were old but still nimble, cautiously, carefully tasting, and measuring everything several times as if it were a medicine, a poison, and not this heavenly chocolate. And of course I didn’t believe a word she said. Chocolate was there to be eaten, after all, and I just wanted to dive into this dark mass and lick it all up. But she watched over me, sternly ensuring that not one of my fingers found its way into the pan; tasting to check the flavour was all that was allowed. Stasia’s cakes got us through the winter, and spring, too, and when Boris Yeltsin was elected as Russia’s first president in June 1991 our cake business really took off. Our world was sinking, and people wanted to stuff themselves with cake until they felt sick.

  ‘When times are bad, business is good for confectioners — that’s what my father always said.’

  Stasia repeated these words like a mantra as I stood beside her in the kitchen, stirring the black mass by candlelight.

  *

  She was thinner now; her cheeks seemed sunken and her eyes gleamed. Her dress no longer clung sleekly to her hips, but hung loose on her body. Her hair was tied back in a hurried ponytail and her make-up had been carelessly applied. Nonetheless, she was recognised at the airport, and although people didn’t ask for her autograph — which in any case wouldn’t have been practical in the semi-darkness of the complete electricity blackout in the arrivals hall— they stared as she passed and whispered to one another.

  We hugged for a long time.

  ‘So where’s your husband?’ I asked my sister.

  ‘He stayed in Moscow.’

  ‘That’s nice for us: we’ll all have a bit more of you. The Green House is expecting you. We’ve cooked your favourite things.’

  ‘I’m so glad to be home,’ said Daria, before falling asleep in the back seat of the car.

  Kostya had put on some decent clothes for once, in honour of Daria’s visit, and was wearing a white shirt and pressed suit trousers. We had a late supper, and Daria told us about Moscow, about the chaos there, the extreme food shortages. The one good thing was that she had been able to get a part in a play, and had work. When Elene asked her about Lasha’s business, she prevaricated and changed the subject. Three days later, she went to their empty apartment to ‘take care of a few things’ and disappeared for days. The telephone was cut off, so I drove to her building and rang the bell for a long time. Even on the stairs I could hear loud music and a hubbub of voices coming from her apartment. I was surprised that she had visitors and hadn’t thought it necessary to tell me. The whole apartment was full of people I didn’t know. I could only see a few of her old friends. People were standing around drinking vodka by the light of kerosene lamps, which stank to h
igh heaven, playing guitar and singing. The flat was untidy, as if she hadn’t made any attempt to clean it since she’d got back. When someone pressed a vodka glass into my hand, I knocked back the bitter liquid in one go and listened with irritation to these people’s drunken nonsense, all the while keeping my eyes on my sister. I had never seen her like this: she was hysterical, loud, forward, almost vulgar; her skirt was hitched up and her make-up had run. She danced around, told Russian jokes, kept throwing her arms around her friends’ necks, and eventually ended up on the lap of one of these strangers, who in his drunken state instantly started feeling her up — but not even this seemed to bother her.

  When she went to the toilet, I followed her and locked the door behind us.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Spare me your moralising. I’ve been away for a long time — I missed them all so much, and my friends —’

  ‘Your friends? I’m pretty sure you’ve never met most of these people before. Come on, please. There’s something wrong. Please, Daria — I don’t want to stop you doing anything, I just want to know you’re all right, and I haven’t seen you for so long — I really missed you, and I thought —’

  Suddenly, she threw her arms around me and started to cry.

  ‘It’s all going wrong. I don’t know what to do. He … he … Lasha’s in real trouble.’

  In short order she told me that his business hadn’t gone well from the start; he was dependent on help from his parents, but wanted to maintain his standard of living, and was increasingly losing himself in the whirlwind of Moscow life. She told me he had been injecting heroin for quite a while, and sometimes he would disappear without trace for days on end. She kept saying how much she loved him, though, as if she were afraid I would tell her to leave him. But before I could say anything, she wiped her face, put on a smile, and, beaming once more, hurried back into the living room where she was loudly welcomed.

  Daria had always known what place in the world was her due, what she could expect from life; she hadn’t doubted things, she hadn’t questioned herself or the world around her. She had just chosen the wrong person to love, and she herself had granted him permission to knock her world off kilter. She had practically laughed in his face and said, ‘You love me — you may do it; take everything you need, take everything, as long as it makes you happy.’