The Eighth Life
Page 100
And he had.
She stood before me, with those sunken cheeks and dark shadows under her eyes. Her blue eye was glassy; her brown eye was dull. She had lost her equilibrium.
And as I watched her, as she danced in the arms of some idiot, I had a frightening realisation: Lasha had managed to turn her into his nightmare version of her. He had projected all his fears, complexes, and manias onto her. And she had let it happen. He had managed to transform her love into a dull, dirty, swampy mass, so that he could finally accept it. I watched her dancing and felt nauseous.
Where was my wonderful, unbroken, self-sufficient Daria, the beautiful queen of Kostya’s realm? And where was Kostya’s realm now, anyway? Where were we all living?
*
Three days later, I met Aleko. He was distraught. He told me that David had been stopped in the street by some men who’d tried to mug him. When they discovered there was nothing in his purse, they wanted his gold chain, but he defended himself. (I tried to remember a chain around his neck. Had I ever noticed? No.)
‘Is he dead?’ I asked Aleko, marvelling at my own composure.
‘Yes. Nine stab wounds. Probably some kind of criminal gang or friends of the Mkhedrioni.’
‘For a chain?’
‘For a chain.’
I shut myself in the bathroom and stayed there for hours. I held the world tightly in my fist but still it ran through my fingers as if it were made of sand.
I lay down in the empty bathtub. The water had been cut off again.
Time seemed to shatter against the backs of my knees. I was eight, I was ten, and I was in David’s apartment. I saw the drawings and pictures on his walls, I tasted the scalding tea on my tongue, I heard his voice. Would he play cards with the other ghosts now, too? He didn’t like cards. If he played anything, it would have to be backgammon.
I tried to cry. I had never been good at it. I had no tears. I hated this country, I hated these people, I hated this bathtub, I hated myself and my powerlessness. Why had he done it? Refusing to give up a chain, for God’s sake? Why had he done that to me? I thought about the blood in the bathroom, at the seaside that time; about beautiful Rusa and how she had pretended to be carefree in the snow, so many months later.
I laid my face against the cold edge of the bath.
I went under. Even though there was no water.
Christine’s halved face, the screeching human mass of 9 April, the cold of the last two winters, the darkness on the streets, David’s words, our last meeting, the strong tea, my desperate sister’s glassy eyes, Miro’s laugh, the pervasive hopelessness of these days, the pages I had filled (with what, exactly?), my mother’s despondent expression, the smell of the hot chocolate … At that moment, everything merged together in my mind.
How long would I be able to lie there? And what would it change? This useless grief.
I gave myself a slap. I wanted to feel something. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted to be closer to David. I wanted to hold on to him: in my unspoken words to him, in my vision of the afternoons and evenings I could have spent with him. In the next room, my mother put on Kitty Jashi’s album Home, and perhaps that was the first time I consciously listened to her music. And perhaps it was Kitty’s music that enticed me out of the bath, out of the house again after those endless, empty hours, Brilka.
*
‘Do you know why everyone, even his former allies, wants to get rid of Gamsakhurdia now? Do you know why they’re all railing against him?’ Kostya was getting worked up over supper again, as we sat around the kitchen table by candlelight during a blackout, listening to the battery-operated radio. ‘Because people are starting to realise that in return for the sovereignty they so desperately wanted, they’ll have to change their lifestyle. No more quick flights to Moscow, with its restaurants and its Russian women; no more Caucasian swagger, no more privileges, no more sunny Georgia. And now they realise that’s not what they wanted at all.’
Uprisings were still happening all over the country. If you wanted bread, you had to start queuing in the middle of the night. The National Guard and the Mkhedrioni refused to enter into cooperation with the Ministry for the Interior. They had long since abandoned the rule of law — if anyone was actually still abiding by it — and were making laws of their own. No authority was going to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do any more. At the end of the year, when Gamsakhurdia had all Russian television channels blocked in an effort to keep negative Russian propaganda away from Georgia, general dissatisfaction was aroused once more. Those average citizens who, a few months previously, had fervently shouted ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’ at the demonstrations were now upset at being denied Russian ‘culture’.
‘Yes, I suppose it’s true: we are a nation that looks at itself through others’ eyes. I’m afraid I can’t remember who said that,’ Stasia commented that evening, agreeing with her son for once.
*
We made chocolate cakes to the recipe of a long-dead confectioner who was trained in Budapest and Vienna, using flour and powdered milk with USAID printed on the packets, and cocoa powder adorned with a red star. Meanwhile, the National Guard, working with the Mkhedrioni, occupied all the city’s central buildings and set up posts outside them. Once again, people thronged Rustaveli Boulevard. And once again, shots were fired; once again, people were killed and wounded. What surprised me most of all was the general indifference of the city’s population to these warlike acts. Flame-throwers kept causing fires, the sound of Kalashnikovs was constant, yet most people still went calmly about their daily business.
The metro was running; cinemas were open; passers-by stopped in the street and watched with cold expressions, their faces motionless as the soldiers loaded their guns.
After Severin got caught up in it, too (he was attacked and robbed), he handed all his books over to me and left, promising to come back as soon as he’d taken care of some stuff in Berlin. The day before his departure I invited him up to the Green House, and we ate polenta and cheese in silence. I’d got very used to him; I had learned to love our intimacy, and the German words that I promised to go on memorising in his absence. I could see that the thought of returning to order after all this chaos troubled him, too.
‘You should go to Europe, Niza,’ he told me, this time in German.
‘Europe, yes, Europe. Remember when you said you wanted to be at the epicentre of history?’
‘Yes, well, maybe I’ve changed, or maybe I just got tired. Tired of this fear. I was never afraid before — I wasn’t afraid when I came here. It’s different now.’
Before I drove him back into town, we went up to the attic, took a candle out onto the unfinished roof terrace, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the clear, starry sky. Piles of old books and my notes lay in the corner. This had been my kingdom, my retreat for so many years. Despite the chaos of those days, I vowed to try to leave enough space within me that I wouldn’t forget him. At that time, I didn’t think I would ever see him again.
Within Russia, take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.
BORIS YELTSIN
On 7 January, the battles were declared to be over, and the Mkhedrioni uncorked the champagne outside the Parliament Building. Gamsakhurdia had been forced to flee, and after being denied residency in Armenia, he ended up in Chechnya. The demonstrations continued; Gamsakhurdia’s followers tried again to set up shop all over Tbilisi, but the Mkhedrionists and the National Guard opened fire on them. Southern Georgia, especially Samegrelo, the region with the most presidential supporters, was up in arms.
People demanded Shevardnadze’s return to Georgian politics. It had started to dawn on everyone that dissidents and criminals would not be able to bring this chaos to an end. And there were increasing signs of a power struggle between the Mkhedrioni and the National Guard.
Shortly after Shevardnadze’s return in March 1992, my s
ister also came to Tbilisi for a few weeks. She withdrew to our childhood bedroom, announcing that she and the lovely Lasha had had ‘a falling out’; he had even greater ‘financial problems’, and she wasn’t sure how long she would be staying with us. She firmly blocked all of Kostya’s attempts to get any more out of her; however, she had more colour in her cheeks than the previous year, when she had spent two weeks doing nothing but partying. But her gaze was absent, her demeanour restless and jumpy, and even her normally soothing smile had something artificial and contrived about it. The happiness she had always radiated so majestically, the satisfaction at being at the centre of everything, the confidence that she could reach out and grasp anything she wanted — all the things she used to display so openly — seemed to have been snuffed out, as if her main impetus, the sole engine for all these characteristics, had been switched off.
It made me sad to sense her emptiness, and I decided to spend more time with her, support her, tease out her secrets, and show her at long last that it was time to tell her lovely Lasha to go to hell. But she was slippery as a fish, eluding anything that might come too close for comfort; she was an expert at manipulating every conversation. I found it difficult to figure her out, something I used to be able to do so well. But between then and now lay her love, her marriage, Moscow, and the countless moments and emotions I had not shared with her, the experiences she’d had without me.
Just two weeks later, Lasha suddenly turned up at the front door. He had grown thin, and his face had an unhealthy, yellowish hue. His appearance at once brought Daria back to life. She turned her attention to him, patting his cheeks all the time, preparing his favourite food. She stopped complaining about the blackouts and how cold the house was; she snuggled up to him, showered him with tender gestures, and seemed to completely ignore his snubs and his lack of interest in her. As if she didn’t even notice that he wasn’t returning her kisses and shunned her tenderness. I couldn’t watch. I turned my eyes away from her. Couldn’t get the images out of my head. This man had done something terrible to my sister; he had taken something precious from her, something important had changed in her, and I wouldn’t and couldn’t come to terms with it. Once again, I decided to interfere in someone else’s life. This time, though, I wouldn’t be able to win the fight alone. Perhaps Kostya — as difficult as this was for me — would become my ally. Perhaps he would summon his dwindling energy, pour his pent-up frustration and rage over Lasha’s head and make him stay away from Daria. For that reason, I was more than grateful to Kostya for persuading the two of them to stay in the Green House rather than going to their apartment. It was more difficult to get provisions in the city, he told them, and, above all, it was more dangerous there. I had given over our old bedroom to them, and was sleeping in Stasia’s room. We had all started huddling together: it was cold, and there wasn’t enough petrol and wood to heat all the rooms.
Over the days we spent living together, Daria’s arguments with Lasha began to escalate. He had done all this for a ‘little two-bit whore’, I heard him shouting, from the other side of the door. He was an ‘ungrateful pig, a rotten bastard, a nothing’, Daria retorted. And my suspicion from the last party was increasingly confirmed: she was doing all she could to prove to herself that he was right, that she really did correspond to his image of her, that she deserved to be mistreated. And if Daria finally succumbed to this image her husband had created of her, her life would be ruined — of that I was also certain. ‘All or nothing at all’ had always been her motto. Once her appetite was piqued, she couldn’t stop eating. If she was beautiful, she had to be the most beautiful. If she was an actress, she would play only leading roles. If her interest in someone or something was aroused, she couldn’t stop until she possessed the object of her desire. If she fell in love, she had to get married. Once she was in love, it had to be forever. If they had a fight, she would let herself be beaten and insulted in the most despicable way. I was certain that if ever she were to start hating herself, it would end in complete self-destruction.
One night, I was lying in bed and heard Daria’s footsteps in the corridor. She passed my door and started climbing the stairs to the attic. I quickly threw on a jumper and hurried after her. She had lit a small candle and was sitting beside my pile of dust-covered books with her knees drawn up to her chest. When she heard my footsteps, she looked round in alarm.
‘Oh, it’s you …’ she said, with a note of disappointment in her voice, as if she’d been hoping someone else had followed her.
‘Yes, it’s only me.’
‘Do you want to have a cigarette with me?’
‘Sure.’
‘Funny that in all these years we still haven’t managed to put up a railing,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘I like it the way it is.’
‘It’s pretty high, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is. Do you remember how much we loved coming up here as children?’
‘I was always afraid of heights — I only did it because of you, so you wouldn’t think I was a coward.’
‘A fear of heights doesn’t exactly go with being a trapeze artist, does it?’
‘I’ve always done things that scared me.’
‘Uh-huh … And are you scared of your husband, too, Daria?’
‘I don’t want to talk about him. Just drop it, please.’
‘He’s a filthy swine. All those things he says are just his warped imagination.’
She looked at me in shock.
‘Have you been eavesdropping?’
‘Even without hearing his wonderful words, you can tell how much he loves you just by looking at him.’
‘That’s not true. He does, even if you can’t see it.’
‘When? When he hits you, you mean, or when he can’t get it up to have his way with you?’
‘You’re going too far. It’s got nothing to do with you!’
‘You’re my sister, for God’s sake, and I won’t let this bastard break you.’
‘He’s ill. Try to understand that. You have to be lenient with him. He has so many problems, and there’s so little I can do to help him … You live in your world. You don’t know what it’s like to love a person so desperately.’
Our cigarette ends burned in the dark like two amorous glow-worms.
‘All you’re doing is living up to his twisted ideas, Daria.’
At these words, she looked at me thoughtfully. As if this one sentence had really got through to her.
‘I just can’t do it,’ she said in a weak voice, and buried her head between her knees.
I couldn’t hold back any longer: I wrapped my arms around her with all my strength. She tried to shake me off and get up, but I clung on tightly. I wanted to hold her, I wanted to save her.
I wanted her to be mean to me again, and so beautiful that you would forgive her anything; I wanted her to drive me into a white-hot rage, to be catty and capricious — anything but this, this hunched back, this sluggishness and submissiveness, this guilt, this disappointment. I let out a laugh.
‘You’re crazy,’ she cried. She freed herself from my embrace and fell back, exhausted. I crawled over to her and laid my head on her belly. Hesitantly, she brushed a strand of hair from my forehead.
‘You had my husband beaten up by your criminal friends, Niza. That doesn’t help.’
‘But he —’
‘That doesn’t help!’
‘I won’t do it again. I promise. I’ll do anything you want. But don’t go back. You have to start acting again.’
‘Who’s interested in films or theatre these days?’
‘It won’t be like this forever.’
‘Oh, Niza.’
She hugged me to her and rubbed my back. Then she got up and brushed the dust from her nightshirt.
‘I have to go back down. He can’t sleep without me.’
*
That was how the war started.
Daria went back to Moscow with Lasha. A few months after her departure, she called the Green House and screamed down the phone. It was only after Nana had made several attempts to calm her down that Daria was able to get a clear sentence out: her husband had been shot by debt collectors of some kind, and was now in intensive care. The bullet had grazed his spine.
Only at the end of the phone call did she mention, almost in passing and completely unable to cope, that she was expecting a baby.
Patriotism is slavery.