The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  The night was clear, and the stars were especially bright. He started to cry. I let him, without pretending I was able to offer him any comfort.

  ‘I have to go away,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean, away? Away where?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. But far enough away from here. I can’t live here any more. Every day I struggle to keep from collapsing on the spot. Will you come with me?’

  ‘But where to? How will that work?’ he asked, wiping away the tears on the sleeve of his jacket.

  ‘It will work somehow. Just come with me. I’ll sort it out. To Europe, somewhere, just a long way away.’

  ‘You can’t do that, Niza. These things don’t just happen. You have to —’

  ‘I’m going, Miro. One way or another.’

  ‘But what about us?’

  ‘I’m not sure if there still is an us, Miro, and if there is, I don’t want this us any more. I want a new us.’

  ‘I can’t cope with that, I … What would we do?’

  ‘I didn’t think I could cope with this, either.’

  ‘You can’t go, Niza. No, you can’t do that to me.’

  ‘Miro. Please.’

  He pressed me up against the fir tree and showered me with kisses; he held me tight, dried his salty face on mine, kissed my hands, and whispered words of love in my ear. He assured me that everything would be fine, that he would be with me, that it was over now, we could make a new start. He kept telling me we belonged together, there was nothing that could change that, he begged me to stay, and scattered his kisses all over my face and body, like little trophies he seemed to be awarding me for having survived. But I couldn’t accept them now. There was no going back, and every fibre of my body seemed to know that. I knew that a part of me would always remain behind in this place, but this part was no longer capable of living.

  *

  A week after Kostya’s funeral I called Severin in Berlin and asked him if he wanted to marry me.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he asked in disbelief.

  ‘You heard me right. Would you marry me?’

  ‘And what would be the point of that?’

  ‘Then I can finally leave this accursed country.’

  ‘You know I won’t be able to fulfil my marital duties.’

  ‘Good! I have no intention of asking you to.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll marry you.’

  ‘Perfect. Then send me an invitation so that I can apply for a visa. And please, hurry!’

  *

  Before my departure, I wrote an open letter to the university, in which I explained my reasons for not wanting to take any exams there, or hand in my dissertation. I recounted the dialogue between my professor and me, and on the pages that followed I described the narrow, corrupt, nationalistic, and — in part — pro-Soviet attitude at the university. To this day I don’t know whether this letter was ever published or even read by anyone.

  After that, I went to the Green House, gathered up all my exercise books, notes, and above all the stories I had typed out on the typewriter — mountains of pages had accumulated there over the last few years — and carried everything down to a large tin bucket in the garden. Then I started a fire and watched as all my hopes, plans, and ideas went up in flames. But I regretted nothing. I felt nothing.

  I bought the plane ticket to Berlin with the money I got for Thekla’s gold watch — the watch Stasia had once given me as a protective amulet, to shield me from the laughter of my fellow pupils, from the hostility and lovelessness of the normal people of this world, from loneliness, Kostya’s indifference, Daria’s ignorance, evil looks, and God knows what else. When she gave it to me, I’d had no idea that much worse was still to come: things from which neither the watch nor Stasia herself would be able to protect me.

  The night before my departure, Stasia came into my room and wordlessly pressed an old, leather-bound notebook into my hands. It contained my great-great-grandfather’s recipes, written with a scratchy fountain pen. And, on the very last page, the precise formula for the hot chocolate.

  When I asked her what I was supposed to do with it, she just shrugged her shoulders, gave me a tentative kiss on the temple, and walked out. And, on 24 January 1995, I left Georgia, that once sunny land, now storm-tossed, cold, and sunk in darkness. I took a plane to Istanbul, and from there I crossed the now invisible border into the West for the first time.

  *

  Two years after Kostya, Nana died of a stroke. I didn’t go back. Elene and Aleko sold their little apartment to make ends meet. They moved into the Green House. Elene devoted herself exclusively to her granddaughter, whom she raised with a firm hand. Aleko carried on drinking beer and vodka, playing backgammon, and philosophising about life with those of his friends who were still alive. And he argued with his wife, because she prayed too much for his liking and he was finding it harder and harder to compete with her love for God.

  Stasia died at the age of ninety-nine. She just went to sleep and didn’t wake up again. In her final years she was almost blind and talked to almost no one but herself. She lived to be one year younger than the century.

  I didn’t go back. Nor do I know who came to fetch her. But I imagined them all coming for her that morning, just as she had wished: Thekla in her dressing-gown; her White-Red Lieutenant; beautiful Christine and her husband; sharp-tongued Sopio; Kitty; Mariam; the angel-carving Andro, and his curly-headed son Miqa. (Or maybe even two sons?) Kostya and Nana; perhaps even Ida, hovering somewhere in the background. And, first and foremost, my sister Daria, with the different-coloured eyes.

  A year after my departure, Anastasia began to call herself ‘Bri’, and refused to respond when someone addressed her by her given name. It took another three years for Anastasia to vanish completely, leaving only Brilka.

  I didn’t go back.

  Book VII

  Niza

  What you hide away is lost;

  What you give away is yours.

  SHOTA RUSTAVELI

  Severin occupied a pre-war apartment in Wedding, Berlin, with a tiled stove and high, stuccoed ceilings. He still worked at his father’s shop, whose customers were now almost all of the seriously wealthy kind and no longer so eager for the rare finds from the East that Severin had once obtained. The trend was moving towards Asia, as he explained to me not long after my arrival.

  He wore white trainers, summer and winter. Every other day he would cook spaghetti in a mushy tomato sauce, and he had recently fallen in love with a boy called Gerrit, though Gerrit didn’t want a serious relationship. He had an impressive video collection, which proved very helpful for my integration. He lived for the weekends, when he could go out, drink, and dance without feeling guilty. (The idea that you could only let go on a Friday or a Saturday had a logic that was completely impenetrable to me.)

  His friends looked on me as one of the curiosities he brought back from his numerous trips. Every one of them was a left-wing liberal, and they were all active in some organisation or other, everything from animal protection to asylum-seekers’ rights. Severin said I should tell them if their curiosity and their questions were getting on my nerves, but I didn’t dare: I always felt compelled to dispense information about my country and my life with all the drama and emotion I could muster. Afterwards, I usually felt terrible and locked myself in the bathroom. Severin was understanding about my moods, for a completely illogical reason that just sent me into a greater fury. He called my condition the ‘Eastern Blues’, and claimed to be very familiar with it.

  He refused to countenance living in separate apartments; he kept saying the two of us were going to be great flatmates. He didn’t even want to let me get a job for the first few months, thinking it might overtax me, which wouldn’t be good for my state of mind. I did as I was told: he signed me up for a language course, and I parked myself in a classroom with people of
every possible nationality, from countries I had only encountered in my old children’s book of World Folk Tales. I put on a friendly smile and said, in German, ‘Hello, my name is Niza and I come from Georgia. Georgia is a small country in the Caucasus, and …’ One of my fellow pupils then asked if Georgia wasn’t part of Russia, which forced me into a digression on the brief history of the Soviet Union, still making an effort to maintain the friendly smile, and this tired me out so much that I spent the rest of the lesson in a semi-conscious daze, wondering what I was doing here and what on earth was to become of my life.

  Severin showed me the city. He enjoyed playing host. He was finally able to put his historical knowledge to good use, and gave me detailed lectures about some building or other, some street or other, some former or current resident.

  In March, just before my tourist visa ran out, we trooped down to the registry office and applied for a marriage licence. After jumping through numerous bureaucratic hoops and obtaining all kinds of documents, we were able to marry.

  I bought a dress in a second-hand shop — until then I hadn’t owned any dresses — and he borrowed a suit. And when the registrar called upon us to do so, we kissed very passionately by our standards, then spent the whole evening laughing about it. He didn’t invite his parents to our wedding.

  ‘They’d only put the kibosh on the whole thing. I wouldn’t even put it past my father to tell the registrar it was a sham marriage. I don’t want to put you in danger,’ he explained to me.

  Later, we went to a fast food stand, stood under a red and white umbrella with dancing pandas on it, and ate currywurst until we felt sick.

  *

  For the first few months, I suffered from broken sleep and panic attacks; nightmarish images would wake me with a start. I spent whole nights sitting on the window seat, staring out into the darkness, smoking and wondering what to do with all the time that lay ahead of me. I had no motivation. No will. No joy. But there was something liberating about this state. For the first time in what felt like an eternity I sensed an almost masochistic pleasure in this inner emptiness. I suppressed all thoughts of home, limited myself to brief phone calls in which I summarised and prettified things, and told them about non-existent plans.

  I wrote more honest letters to Miro, but never sent them. And every time he called — which was regularly, to begin with, then less and less frequently — I felt a fat lump in my throat, which left a rusty taste behind on my tongue.

  Slowly, I felt my way back into the language and began timidly exploring Severin’s bookshelves, taking out one book after another and negotiating them with the help of a dictionary. Starved and hollow as I was, every line, even the most hackneyed sentence, had the capacity to send me into a genuine paroxysm of joy.

  I took great delight in our summertime visits to the little arthouse cinema, the walks along the Spree, the delicious ice cream in the Italian gelateria, and the Turkish kebabs. When I had no idea what to do with my day, I accompanied Severin’s friends to their university lectures and sat there doing my best to be invisible.

  The idea of studying, of working towards something, scared me at first. But I was much more afraid of doing nothing. I took casual jobs, working as a kitchen porter in a Russian restaurant, walking dogs, doing the night shift in a twenty-four-hour off-licence, even working in an upmarket shoe shop, although I knew absolutely nothing about shoes. I never lasted more than four weeks in any of them. My boredom was becoming increasingly unbearable, and the panic attacks had finally subsided, so I pulled myself together and enrolled on a degree course in modern history and politics at the Humboldt University. Severin strengthened my resolve, saying I could chuck it in at any time if it got too much for me.

  I slipped into my new and truly monotonous student life very quickly. And I kept working: I had discovered a garage in the Neukölln district calling itself ‘The Shed’, which was run by a lesbian couple who only employed women. They were looking for someone to work the till. After a trial day, they hired me, and I sensed I would stay there longer than the usual four weeks.

  Caro and Maggie, the couple who owned the garage, seemed to like me, too. After a while they even started letting me into the workshop, where I was allowed to lend a hand.

  For the first time since I had come to Berlin, I felt something like joy in this place. I loved being able to distract myself from my thoughts with physical activity — even if Severin shook his head when I came home with dirty hair, covered in streaks of oil.

  Now, I remember very little about my first two years in Berlin. All I have are a few images, and a recollection of the strange, semi-conscious state in which I was trapped. When I think back to this time, it’s this ‘not’ state I always think of. All I remember is not wanting, not being able, not feeling. As if I were attached to an invisible device, my only life source, which made me get up every morning, do the things I had to do, put my time to some sort of meaningful use.

  But I also remember the feeling of being constantly short of time. My fear of free time that I might have to spend alone with myself — time when I would have to think, feel something, remember something — made me create an almost impossible schedule, stuffing the day so full that in the evening I had no choice but to collapse into bed half-dead and fall asleep in seconds.

  I ran. I cycled. I walked. I fled. I had no time to miss anyone or anything; I had no time to grieve, no time to laugh, no time for regret, remorse, reflection. No time to be lovesick, no time to live. I functioned, and I did that splendidly.

  And when, in those few moments when I could no longer hide from myself, the images and memories flooded over me, I would press my face into a cushion, a book, even a shoe or a plate so hard that my eyes could see nothing but a pattern of colours, and then I would hurry back to my tasks.

  I needed two mute, introverted years to replace my own words with foreign ones. I needed new faces in order to forget the old. I needed new shoes and jackets, new poets and philosophers; I needed time to catch up on time, to become young again, to cement the walls around me.

  To my great relief, Severin, who initially made a huge effort to integrate me into his circle of friends, began to leave me in peace. He asked less and less often how I was doing, and managed to stay out of my way for days at a time. He organised our life together with little notes on the fridge, which were never about anything more than the need to buy milk or toilet paper. When it was his birthday or New Year, when I was forced to join in and dance, to share in the general happiness, I fulfilled this duty without objection, along with the countless other duties in my life that had to be fulfilled.

  During one of the few arguments we had —I didn’t usually have the energy for an argument — he called me a robot and accused me of having forfeited all my likeable qualities. But when I then suggested that I find my own place to live, he refused, saying he didn’t want to give up on our ‘marriage’ just like that. And in fact I sometimes wished I could have gone to his room, sat on his bed, and howled out everything that had been building up inside me: how catastrophically I had failed myself and the world, how suddenly I had given up my family, my homeland, the world I had thought was mine. I wanted to hold someone responsible for my paralysis, implicate him in my state of not-being. But I knew it was pointless, that my situation would only become even more unbearable after such a desperate confession. I didn’t want sympathy. I didn’t want to hear: ‘But you couldn’t have changed anything’ — and I didn’t want to be convinced of the opposite. Without my self-hatred, what would I have had left? What could I then have used to keep hold of the past? With what emotions could I then have faced the world, and, above all, what motivation would I have had to go on living?

  One day, Severin brought home a cat and informed me that she was our new housemate. I had a fit of rage. I myself didn’t understand what made me overreact like that, screaming that I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t want to feel responsible.
For anyone. Not even for an animal. He looked at me sadly, not knowing what to do. It wasn’t just his annoyance that I had lost my spontaneity, my easy-going manner, my sense of humour — everything that had bound the two of us together in those dark, cold days in Tbilisi. There was a deeper sadness in his eyes, too, and that might have been something new: a degree of understanding. Understanding for the effort it took me not to think about the stories, my stories and those of others that I had borrowed and assimilated over the years, in the hope that I would be able to go on writing them one day.

  The cat was returned.

  *

  After one of my rare phone calls with Miro, which was peppered with sarcastic comments from him and ended in an argument, I left the house in a rage, went to a club, and spent so long smiling at some lanky guy that he couldn’t help but notice and take a seat at the bar with me. After just three sentences I had my tongue in his mouth. He took me back to his apartment in Kreuzberg, which he shared with his girlfriend, who was away, and I lay down in their bed. For the first time my body tried to love someone who wasn’t Miro. For the first time I feigned desire for a complete stranger.

  When he had fallen asleep, I crept out of the apartment, hailed a taxi, and went out drinking. Severin found me the next morning, asleep on the living-room floor. He sat down beside me, lifted my head into his lap, ran his fingers through my hair, and talked to me as if he were saying a prayer: ‘Niza, you have to talk. You have to talk to someone. Otherwise you’ll eat yourself up inside. I can see it, you know. And if you don’t want to talk to me, then go to a therapist, get some help.’

  But I didn’t want to know; I just kept pinching my arms and thighs, my cheeks and belly until he was forced to take hold of my hands and rock me to sleep like a baby.