The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  One night, sleepless as usual and sitting on the roof terrace again, I watched as she crept out onto the drive. I could see a silhouette there. A man I didn’t know. He handed her something wrapped in paper, which rustled pleasantly in her hand. It didn’t take long to work out what the present was.

  *

  That August was sweltering. I was forever putting cold compresses on my face: there were now no working ventilators in the house and the attic was like a furnace. I drifted listlessly around the house. I couldn’t sleep. In the kitchen I found unwashed bowls and pans. Stasia had been baking. Her age made her increasingly careless: she had left the remains of the hot chocolate in a little bowl on the gas cooker. I couldn’t resist. I snatched the bowl and went up to the roof terrace.

  When I got there, I saw a candle burning. I found Daria sitting in my usual spot, dangling her legs and eating a slice of watermelon. I was about to turn round but she asked me to stay. I went over to her and sat a little way off, on the edge.

  I put the bowl down beside me. The aroma was irresistible: it even woke her from her torpor. Unable to resist the temptation any longer, I stuck a finger into the bowl.

  ‘Is that Stasia’s chocolate that we must never taste?’ she asked, smiling at me.

  I wondered when I had last seen her smile. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I try it?’

  I shrugged and set the bowl down between us. She leaned over and put her forefinger into the black mass.

  ‘Stasia thinks it’s cursed,’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘It’s heavenly!’ she groaned.

  Greedily, we licked the bowl clean.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘That it’s cursed? To be honest, I think we’re already so cursed that we can withstand this as well. And unlike all the other curses, at least this one tastes divine!’

  She laughed.

  ‘I want Anastasia to be different. I want her to have as little of me in her as possible.’

  ‘All of this will pass. The curses, and all the rest of it.’

  ‘You know, that’s always driven me crazy. I’ve always hated that about you — I hated it so much, Niza …’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The way you … You always try to make everything right. The fact that you’re even sitting here talking to me. Why don’t you still hate me ?’

  ‘Who says I don’t?’

  ‘Oh, come on. I’ve never understood how you do it. They’d kick you, and you’d get right back up again like a roly-poly doll; you got up and carried on. But surely even you must weaken eventually. No one can bear it. Always finding a way to carry on, keep going; never stopping, always being prepared. For the worst.’

  ‘You’ve got the wrong impression of me.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I hope you know exactly why I did it. It was nothing to do with him.’

  I felt sweat break out on my forehead. I didn’t want to talk about it. I wasn’t ready for it. But I nodded.

  We sat like that until dawn, in our favourite place, the only place we still had in common, and spoke briefly about what had happened that night, but nothing more. We were both aware of our inadequacies, our failures, our cruelties. We were each so frighteningly knowledgeable about the other.

  The sky was an indescribable colour, one that existed only in that place. If I could have invented this colour anew and given it a name, I would have made that sky the colour of a broken world. Broken and beautiful.

  ‘No. It won’t happen to you. Never,’ she said suddenly.

  ‘What? What won’t ever happen to me?’

  ‘You’ll never weaken.’

  *

  Nine sunrises later, my sister was dead. On the night of her death, her secret visitor had brought her another bottle, and she had got drunk on the roof terrace. A little breeze had risen and blown away the exhausting heat. I was in bed: that particular night, I wasn’t there for her.

  She finished the bottle of vodka and fell from the top floor, her temple smashing into the hard, dry August ground. She fell from our terrace, which had never been finished, never been fitted with a railing. From the attic that had provided our mother, Daria, and me with so many hiding places, where we pursued our dreams, licked our wounds, where we shook off our anger. Where we had always enjoyed the unique sky, which seemed so close to this enchanted place that you only had to reach out your hand to touch it.

  Stasia found her in the early hours of the morning, lying with her face on the earth. Her arms were spread wide, as if she were trying to learn to fly as she fell. As if she were balancing on an invisible tightrope.

  Stasia knocked on my window from the outside, waking me with a start. I had slept more soundly than I had in months. Yawning, I stretched towards the sun, walked out into the garden, unsuspecting — but even before I saw her body lying there, Stasia’s face had already told me everything. She knelt down beside the motionless body, Daria’s head in her lap, hugging her shoulders and rocking back and forth. Her lips formed soundless words; her face had disappeared behind a veil of deepest grief. She kept putting her lips to Daria’s forehead, kissing her hands, stroking her hair.

  I remember that, before I had even realised what had happened, the first thought that came to my mind was that I had to somehow keep Kostya away from this sunlit spot. That I had to destroy this image. Prevent Kostya and Elene from ever setting eyes on it. Pull Stasia away from Daria’s body. Cover Daria up, take her inside, order her to get up. Yes: she must just be unconscious — it was the alcohol that had rendered her motionless, and Stasia simply hadn’t realised that she was just sleeping off her binge.

  I knelt down by my sister and started pummelling her. Get up, I told her. Come on, you stupid cow, get up, you’re scaring us, I whimpered, but Stasia pressed my head against her breast.

  ‘No, Niza, no, she’s not going to get up, she can’t get up, let her go, Niza, let her go, my sunshine.’

  Her words came like a litany: monotonous, calm. But I didn’t let go of Daria; finally, I turned her face towards me and saw the blood on her temple, saw the finality written into her features, her bluish lips, her eyelids, the sun beating down on them so mercilessly. Even then I refused to acknowledge her death. I shook her. I tried to get her on her feet. Until Stasia gave me a slap and forced me to look at her.

  ‘She’s dead, my sunshine, she’s dead. There’s nothing more we can do.’

  ‘How do you know? Are you a doctor? We have to get her to the hospital, we have to —’

  ‘I know the dead, Niza. I know them,’ she said; and I froze. Then I leaned to one side and vomited. Stasia instructed me to stay there and not do anything, and went into the house to phone Aleko. I don’t know how much time passed before he arrived. Luckily no one else was awake yet; luckily it was still too early to mourn a death. Stasia and I spent minutes or hours sitting hunched over Daria’s body, shielding it with our own from the burning sun.

  And I remember showing enough presence of mind to go to Aleko as he got out of the car and put my hand over his mouth so that he didn’t cry out.

  ‘You have to help me get her to her room. While Mama and Kostya are still asleep, right now. You have to help me!’

  I’ll never forget his look. Never. He looked at me and I knew that at that moment he was asking himself how, in the face of what had happened, I managed to say these words and not break down, how I managed to think about Elene and Kostya. He was wondering what kind of person I was.

  In this life there’s nothing new in dying,

  But nor, of course, is living any newer.

  SERGEI YESENIN

  Death laid itself over our eyelids, over our skin, like a layer of dust. We were all its prisoners. I smelled and felt it everywhere. I wondered whether the line between life and death even still existed in our house, or if we
, the house’s inhabitants, were all dead already and simply didn’t know it.

  I felt Daria’s death spread like an incurable disease that had infected us all. It was just that each of us displayed different symptoms. Each of us was sick in our own way.

  While the sight of Daria’s shattered temple shredded the last remnants of Stasia’s energy, while Nana threatened to collapse under her own weight and the weight of Daria’s death, while Aleko crept around the house on tiptoe, and little Anastasia, who had been an unusually good-tempered baby, now screamed almost constantly, my mother froze.

  She was like an oracle from a classical play, giving dire predictions. Her movements were imperceptible and noiseless, and when she touched us it was mechanical. Her face was suddenly old and hard, her eyes frightening. She wouldn’t put the little girl down. She screamed at us the minute we approached her and offered to take over the night shift. She talked to herself. She prayed for hours. She kept the candles burning and stayed in her black mourning clothes. She warned us of God’s anger and told us to say an Our Father three times a day for Daria’s soul.

  But as the days streamed past and we did our utmost to seal shut the doors to Death again, pressing the weight of our weakened bodies against them, my grandfather Konstantin Jashi was summoning Death with all the strength he had left. He spent whole days at Daria’s gravestone, which had been erected next to Christine’s. He looked through us, at Daria. In these moments, when he was oblivious to everything around him, he started to smile, and I knew he could see Daria, that he was recalling Daria’s first steps, remembering how he had straightened her plait, feeling her warm hands on the back of his neck. Hearing her laugh.

  It was almost impossible to tear him away from these memories; he swore at us and refused to return to the present, which tasted to him of deadly poison, while the past still retained the taste and the smell of Daria’s rosy cheeks.

  His grey beard hung raggedly from his chin; his cheekbones protruded like the ribs of a gulag prisoner. His hands wouldn’t stop trembling, and he couldn’t finish a drink without spilling it over his knee. He couldn’t sleep; if he ate, he had to vomit afterwards. Drank himself so senseless that sometimes he just fell over and lay there on the floor, or even wet himself. All of the will to love and to live that he had left after Ida was taken by Daria when she went. I suspected he would seize the first opportunity to follow her. And he didn’t have long to wait.

  *

  In October 1994, two months after Daria’s death, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. The inferno during the submarine test run and the sickness he thought he had beaten in an Austrian clinic had returned to his body. He refused chemotherapy; he refused medication.

  At lunch one day he calmly explained to us where this illness had come from, and how he had been treated before. He reminded Elene of the time he’d had to leave her alone. Tears ran down Nana’s cheeks, and Stasia got up from her seat, trembling, and dropped her plate on the way to the sink. Kostya spoke of the catastrophe, of the dead sailors, of the official secrets document.

  Just five weeks later, he was bed-ridden. All attempts by his mother, wife, daughter, and granddaughter to persuade him to go to hospital failed.

  At the end of November, I went into his bedroom and lay down beside him. I took his hand in mine and remembered those twenty-four hours I had spent with him in this bed, collecting his tears, holding out the wine to him, sharing our secrets. It was another life. A life in which Daria had been alive.

  We said nothing, and I listened to the ticking of the old wall clock. I laid my head on his sunken chest; I closed my eyes to avoid seeing his sickly pallor and the blemishes on his skin.

  ‘Do you know what I’ve been thinking about all this time?’ I heard him say, his weary voice sounding as if it came from a long way off.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘All those years, all those decades, there were millions, billions, of busts and statues and pictures here. Where’ve they all gone?’

  ‘What statues and pictures?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, of Lenin, Marx, and Engels, the Generalissimus — all those men!’ He seemed to be giving it serious thought.

  ‘They’ve gone.’

  ‘But they can’t all just disappear, just like that!’

  ‘Apparently they can. Everything disappears sooner or later.’

  ‘Nothing disappears. Nothing, Niza!’ He laid his hand on mine.

  ‘You mean, everything is hidden somewhere, waiting to be found again?’ I tried to bring myself to smile.

  ‘Everything is waiting to come back.’ Lost in his own thoughts, he squeezed my hand more tightly.

  I listened to his breathing. I listened to his heartbeat. I thought about how much I loved him and about all the things I would have done and given to have him return my love, ever since I was born. And suddenly I started to think it wasn’t so bad that he never had.

  I forgave him in light of the love he had given to someone else: my sister. I forgave him, because at that moment I understood that this was the connection I had been looking for all this time, perhaps our most profound connection: our love for the same woman, who was now no longer with us. I forgave him for his coldness and his domineering nature, I forgave him his tyranny, I forgave him for overlooking me so often. I forgave him for letting me spend so many nights weeping alone in my bed; I forgave him for deceiving so many people and making them unhappy, for betraying so many.

  The object of our love had gone. And nothing else mattered any more. We had lost the person whose love we had fought over. There was nothing more worth arguing about.

  I curled myself around him, laid my head in the crook of his neck, and stayed there until he fell asleep. Then I wove my thoughts and the words that I had never said to him and never would, all my feelings about him, into his dreams.

  Kostya died in December. Absurdly, or logically, the official cause of death was cardiac arrest. His heart had pre-empted his illness.

  The night after his funeral I saw Stasia go into the barn for the first time in years, and I followed her. She put on Tosca. She stood at the window with her eyes closed, listening to Puccini. I approached cautiously, my face swollen.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her.

  ‘It’s what Christine wanted. I put it on for Christine,’ she replied.

  ‘Why Christine?’

  ‘Well, she came to fetch him. She was here today. She came for Kostya,’ she said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world: one dead person had come to fetch another.

  ‘So Christine fetched Grandfather?’

  ‘Yes; Christine and another woman, a stranger.’

  ‘A stranger? What kind of stranger?’

  ‘I’ve never seen her before in my life.’

  ‘What did she look like, Stasia?’

  ‘Tall, thin — too thin for my liking — with a lot of rings on her fingers. Beautiful rings.’

  I didn’t know now which of us was mad.

  ‘And where did you see them?’

  ‘Where I always see them. In the garden. They stood there for quite a while, a little way off, where the fig tree used to be before we cut it down, do you remember?’

  ‘So you saw Christine and this woman fetch Kostya?’

  ‘No, I didn’t see Kostya. They were here for him, I know that. But it takes time.’

  ‘And Daria? Did somebody fetch her?’

  Even as I asked the question I was ashamed, but at the same time I envied her this madness, this gift or paranoia. I would have liked to share her certainty that somebody had come to get Daria; that she hadn’t just disappeared.

  ‘Kitty …’ she said, and her mouth twisted out of shape. Tosca launched into ‘Vissi d’arte’.

  ‘What about Kitty?’ I felt something clench in my stomach.

  ‘She was there under
the cherry tree so often in the days before what happened with Daria. She and Thekla were always sitting there …’

  ‘But Kitty …’

  ‘Oh, I know. Of course I do. You all think I’m too old to notice when my own daughter dies, do you?’ Her voice was suddenly filled with contempt.

  ‘And you say Kitty’s there sometimes, too?’

  ‘Yes. My little girl, my beautiful Kitty.’

  ‘And you believe that Kitty … um, came to fetch Daria?’

  ‘I have outlived both of my children and my great-granddaughter. Now I hope it won’t be long before they all come together, to fetch me.’

  I lowered my head. ‘If Kitty came for her, then maybe she’s looking after Daria now.’

  I clung to these words, not at all convinced of what I was saying — but it was such a comforting thought, such a lovely idea.

  ‘Sometimes one is much stronger when one is weaker, Niza.’

  She surfaced suddenly from Tosca’s lament and looked at me for a moment, only to sink back immediately into her thoughts. And when, reaching the climax of her despair, Tosca asked her God why he punished her so, I began to dance.

  Stasia watched me. She seemed unsettled at first, then something like a smile began to spread across her face. I performed all those movements she had taught me as a child and which my body could still remember. I spun around, leaped through the air, pulled in my legs, stretched them out; I flew through the empty room. I danced my best dance. A dance of death for Stasia and her ghosts.

  When I left the barn, drenched in sweat, I saw Miro coming towards me. Without a word, I went to him, hooked my arm through his, and started up the path towards the woods. It was dark and cold, but I was hot. He seemed grateful that I was touching him again. He didn’t ask what was wrong with me, and I was glad of it. We trudged through the dry leaves and came to a halt under a large fir tree.