I’d just wanted to feel something again.
*
My history professor kept me behind after a seminar, wanting to talk about an essay I had just submitted. She fixed her eyes on me from behind her large glasses.
‘I would venture to say that you have a great gift, Miss Jashi.’
I held my breath. This word belonged in my old life, it mustn’t turn up again here, not here, not now and never again, anywhere.
‘Not that I know of.’ I tried to sidestep.
‘You are, perhaps, aware that there is support available for nurturing special gifts?’
‘Listen, I’m not gifted!’
‘Well, let’s see. You write better German now than your native-speaker classmates. You absorb information at an incredible speed, but on the other hand you are surprisingly bad at making use of it in a purposeful way. You have problems with attribution. Then again, you have a store of knowledge that is, how shall I put it, remarkable. You are highly focused when something interests you, but incredibly lax when you already know something. The fact that you rarely associate with people your own age also suggests that you’re not being stretched enough. You are uncommunicative, awkward, and stubborn. And you aren’t always scrupulous with the truth …’
‘So? Are those all signs of being gifted, then? Don’t you think that’s a little — well, clichéd?’
‘It would be a cliché to assume that what you have is a deficiency, not a gift. The cliché is your fear of confessing to your own talents and making proper use of them. I don’t know who taught you not to use these talents. It was most certainly a mistake.’
‘I like it here. I don’t want anything to change. Please.’
‘I’m your professor, not your mother. As your professor, I would advise you to apply for a research grant. I further recommend that you apply for a post as an assistant at one of our research centres. If you make a little effort, you can finish your degree ahead of time. You could do so much more, Miss Jashi. And if I were your mother, I would advise you to start facing up to your talents at once, and dealing with your absurd reluctance to use them.’
It was the first time since coming to Berlin that I had cried in front of anyone.
*
Caro was a trained car mechanic with strikingly long legs, tattoos on her arms, and one of a lizard around her ear. She idolised her girlfriend, a DJ who played many of the city’s clubs and belonged to a feminist performance-art group. She loved fast cars, but above all she loved to play cards.
The first time she asked me whether I played, I said no. When she pressed me again, saying that she didn’t believe me, given how curious I had always been whenever she talked about her poker games, I replied that I had given up. And when she finally persuaded me and took me to a game with her, I had to go to the bathroom after the first hand and throw up. Caro declared that I had professional qualities, and took me to a game in the backstreets of Pankow, where we played a very serious-looking group for money in a strange building that was more like a warehouse than anything else. I won some cash that evening, and deliberately left it on the seat in the U-Bahn. I handed my next win over to Caro. It was only on the third occasion that, as I raked in the cash, I managed not to immediately think of that hundred-dollar note that had made me stay at the print works and eventually, with trousers round my ankles and aching limbs, ram the neck of a broken bottle into a man’s skin.
By that winter, I had so much money that at Christmas I was able to send home a considerable sum, get myself an old Volvo 760, and buy Severin some special edition trainers he had been drooling over for months.
‘Where did you get the cash?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘I play cards,’ I confessed in a neutral tone.
‘You do what? You play cards? Where?’
‘Private games.’
‘You know you could get yourself in trouble doing that?’
‘Oh, don’t start, okay? I love capitalism — just let me love it! I lived under socialism for long enough! Come on, Severin!’
That made us both laugh.
*
In the Christmas holidays I got into my dark blue Volvo, took what remained of my winnings, and set off. I didn’t know where I was going; I just drove through snowy landscapes and along icy roads. On the move, on my way somewhere, the feeble sun at my back, I felt something homely, something familiar, something that allowed me to breathe easy. I stopped at service stations, slept in cheap motels, ate bad food, and felt good. I crossed the whole of Germany. I drove to Paris. The borders had disappeared, and I wondered where they had gone. In Paris, I took a seat in a café and ate a slice of almond gateau. I watched the passers-by; I watched snowflakes falling onto the Seine. I drifted. I tried to take in the scent of the city. I was happy that no one knew me there, that I knew no one. I thought about my childhood and tried to reconstruct the pictures that had been in my mind as I’d read Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Colette and Miller, Voltaire and Diderot, Genet, Duras.
I thought about the French films I had so enjoyed watching with Aleko, Daria, and later Miro. The discussions afterwards.
I sat on a bench, looking out at the passing tourist boats, and wondered whether the city would have disappointed Stasia, whether it would have held its own against her idea of it, whether it would have welcomed her and, most importantly, let her dance. I saw Stasia behind my closed eyelids, and watched her dance for me.
I drove on from Paris to Lyon, then to Geneva and Turin. I crossed Switzerland, I crossed Italy and sang along to an old song on the radio and thought about my sister’s different-coloured eyes. I exchanged my language for the songs on the car radio. I exchanged my native language for all the languages I borrowed for a few days, like the pretty hair slides I had once borrowed from Daria.
I crossed Europe, which had once been so far away and which now melted together beneath my tyres. I visited Rome and held back my tears at the thought that my sister would never be able to set her different-coloured eyes on all this beauty.
Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In April 1998, Miro called. He would be travelling to Amsterdam in the next few days and wanted to see me again. He seemed to have been drinking, and was very tearful on the phone. He murmured something about a ferocious longing for me. I agreed.
After hanging up, I spent a while looking silently at my reflection in the window. I saw a very small woman whose age and sex seemed somehow of secondary importance. I saw the short, untidy hair, which could never be tamed, saw the flat chest, the sloping shoulders, the sharp cheekbones, and the long, hooked nose. Saw the tired circles under my eyes, the duck lips, the dark eyes that looked so cagey, so inexpressive, and wondered what he might say about it all, whether he would recognise me, what we would have to say to each other after all this time. I wondered whether we would be able to smell, taste, feel on each other everything that had happened in between, the other people there had been in the last few years. And whether that would mean anything.
I got off the train in Amsterdam and went straight to the hotel where he was staying. I had forbidden him from meeting me on the platform. In my unsettled state I couldn’t handle any sentimental scenes.
I knocked, and he immediately flung open the door. We looked at each other. I put my little overnight bag down on the floor. He was more grown-up, more imposing, more self-assured. The playfulness had gone from his face. He was wearing suit trousers, which for some reason made me feel completely overwhelmed.
He took my hand and pulled me into the room. He threw me onto the bed, and before I knew what was happening we were both undressed and wresting the memories from each other, the memories of what we once had been and what we had believed we would remain forever.
We didn’t say a word. We struggled in silence, each of us trying to expand our ribcag
es to let the other one in, trying to scratch off the layers of time that stuck to our skins like a crust. It seemed so easy to be an us again. Our intimacy was so effortlessly restored. I could love him so effortlessly, like no one else in the world.
It was dark in the room; we hadn’t turned a light on. We listened to each other breathing.
‘Let’s try again,’ I said to him. ‘Let’s do it. We’ll make it work, if you want it to. I have so little to keep me here, yet there’s so little calling me back. But if I had you again, if I could bring you back into my life, then …’
He hesitated, laid his head on my chest, stretched, sighed, said I was right, that he didn’t want to forget me, that he was sure we would make it work. That he had to think about coming to Europe. That we had a future, a future together. That we should go to Berlin, the very next day.
And I believed him, unquestioningly.
Holding hands, we marched to the station the next morning. Holding hands, we bought our tickets. Holding hands, we got on the train. Our carriage was very full, so I asked him to wait while I found an emptier one. He stayed in his seat. When I came back, he wasn’t in his seat any more. The train was still stationary. I thought he had gone to the toilet, but then I saw that his little suitcase was gone as well. I didn’t want to think the worst. Maybe he was scared of thieves, or wanted to have a quick shave in the train toilet, I told myself. He hadn’t had time for a shave that morning, and had complained about it. I forced myself to sit down. The train was about to leave. I stared at my watch; I stared at the empty seat in front of me. I didn’t dare ask the other passengers about him: I already knew the answer and didn’t want to believe it.
As the train began to move, I leaped up from my seat and ran to the door. I wanted to get off, but it was too late, and I had no choice but to take my leave of him from the window as the train pulled away and I saw him, the collar of his coat turned up, his gaze fixed on the ground, hurrying along the platform as if he were escaping from something. Wordlessly, with a deep horror and a sense of devastating finality lying heavy on my limbs, I watched as he vanished into the crowd.
*
Ignoring what my professor had said, I took the usual amount of time to complete my degree. I didn’t intend to hurry; I had nothing to hurry towards. Even when, over the months that followed, she kept talking to me about the research post, I declined the offer and avoided the subject. I did, however, play regular games of poker, and sent the money to Georgia. When my mother asked where I was getting so much money from as a student, I told her something about a generous grant. I don’t know whether she believed me. Or whether it even mattered to her. Mostly, when we spoke on the phone, she talked about God, Jesus, and the Church, and when she wasn’t talking about this trio, it was about Anastasia, whom everyone now called Brilka, and who was apparently not as keen on becoming a pious, God-fearing child as Elene wished.
I kept working at the garage, and when everything got too much for me, when I was sick of the city and day-to-day life, I got in my car and drove all over Europe. Sometimes with Severin; sometimes without him. Vienna was the only place I gave a wide berth. I associated the city with other people’s dreams.
My professor, who had a real bee in her bonnet about me, insisted that after my finals I should write a thesis. She introduced me to a colleague of hers, an expert on Eastern Europe, who had just got funding for a project researching the Cold War and was looking for a capable assistant, as she informed me with a satisfied grin. The Eastern Europe expert turned out to be a thoroughly charming, eloquent, and quick-witted man, who assailed me with countless questions and had already read my final dissertation. In the past few years I had done my best to steer clear of Eastern Europe. My reaction to being forced to consider it again was one of extreme aversion. However, as I had no real alternative, and no idea what to make of my life, I said I was prepared to do it. And so I became a research assistant, writing my thesis as part of a project which was to culminate in the publication of a wide-ranging book.
I kept running. I didn’t stop. I didn’t pause for breath.
*
Four years after my arrival in Berlin, Elene called me and told me Stasia had died. I pulled out my old suitcase, which was gathering dust under my bed, and found the recipe book Stasia had bequeathed me. I read through the recipes, but most importantly I tried to memorise the mixture of ingredients for the hot chocolate. In the morning I bought everything I needed and made my great-great-grandfather’s hot chocolate.
Mechanically spooning up the dark liquid, I wept for my great storyteller, the spirit-seeing great-grandmother who was woven into my dreams. And along with her, I wept for the fact that I had not yet learned how so many of the stories ended, had not yet understood the connections between so many events, and that she would never again be able to help me understand.
*
I remember this dream as well as if it had all really happened. I remember his face so well, imperceptibly different from the photo I had found as a child among the old pictures in the living room cabinet. I dreamed of this man, Kostya’s friend, who had helped Kitty Jashi across the border. In the dream I didn’t remember his name, but I knew that at the Green House I had seen an old photo of him in which he was wearing a naval uniform and standing beside my grandfather, smiling into the lens. In my dream, he visited me in Berlin and brought me a bunch of violets, beautiful dark-blue violets, like the ones from the garden of my childhood. And he smiled at me. In my dream, he was young, just as he was in the photo from St Petersburg. I invited him into my apartment, we drank tea, and he showed me a suitcase — but I woke up before I could find out what was in it.
Three days later, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and phoned home. I had trouble getting my mother to remember who I was talking about: after all, I didn’t know his name. I just knew that he had travelled with Kitty when she returned to Tbilisi, and that he was the one who had brought my grandfather the news of his sister’s death.
‘You mean Giorgi Alania. What made you think of him?’
‘I don’t know. He just came to mind for some reason. Do you know where he is — whether he’s still alive? And if so, where I might find him?’
‘What do you want with him?’
‘It’s to do with my thesis. I’m researching Soviet prisoners, and I thought —’
For the first time since I left home, I wasn’t telling my mother a pack of lies.
‘I’ve no idea what became of him. But yes, he was Kostya’s best friend.’
‘Can you think who I could ask about him?’
‘Some of Kostya’s old colleagues are still around; they must remember him.’
In fact, just a few days later my mother got me the phone number of one of Kostya’s old colleagues. And when I heard his name, and then his voice, I knew who it was. It was Rusa’s father, who had been such a good host to us in Batumi, never guessing that his friend was having an affair with his daughter.
‘Oh, so you research depressing things like that these days, do you? I’m sure your grandfather would be proud of you,’ he said, after hearing me out. ‘Guess who’s on the phone!’ he suddenly called out to someone. ‘Kostya Jashi’s granddaughter, who’s living in Germany. The wunderkind, do you remember?’
Then I heard footsteps in the background, and suddenly there was a female voice on the line.
‘Niza?’
I recognised her at once. The velvet-soft voice hadn’t changed.
‘Rusa?’
I tried to picture her face. The delicate face from before I found her in the bathroom. The face from before I met her in the snow. The face of a carefree woman in love, who simply wanted too much, and who was so good at backgammon. She was very affectionate, wanted to know all about me, and told me she was working as a lawyer now; she was married and had two sons. I was a little taken aback by so much openness and warmth. She seemed to have nothin
g in common with the woman in the red snow suit from Bakuriani. Before she handed the receiver back to her father, she murmured softly into the mouthpiece, ‘I’m so sorry about Kostya. I was too afraid to come to his funeral; I just couldn’t. I wanted to keep him alive in my memory.’
‘I understand.’
‘Niza?’
‘Yes?’
‘Thank you.’
I didn’t say anything else.
Of course you could save a person. I just hadn’t managed to save my sister. With the people I loved, I hadn’t managed it. Or with myself. At least there’s her, I thought. At least I managed to save her.
Rusa’s father told me that Alania had been living in London for more than ten years. He had asked to be transferred there at the start of perestroika, and since then Rusa’s father had heard nothing more from him, which meant he had no contact details, either. I thanked him and hung up, thinking I would just drop this naive idea and go back to my books. But the next day Rusa called me: she had so wanted to do me a good turn that she’d pestered her father until he called someone in Moscow, who knew someone, who … and so on and so on, until she had finally tracked down an English postal address. I noted down the address and thanked her. A place near the very lyrically named Seven Sisters.
I flew to London and took the train down to Sussex. I had a taxi take me to the address I’d been given. It was a pretty, rather out-of-the-way cottage with a lovely rose garden, ringed with elder trees. Nobody answered the door. Until that point I hadn’t doubted that my plan would work. Unsure what to do next, I sat down on a small wooden bench, lit a cigarette, and let the distant sound of the sea envelop me. I considered taking a room for the night somewhere nearby and getting the train back to London the following morning. I was annoyed at my own naivety: how could I have hoped that this stranger would be here to welcome me, sitting in his rocking chair wrapped in a woollen blanket, smoking a pipe, ready to tell me stories about his past? What had I come here for in the first place? Did my visit really have anything to do with my research, or was I actually looking for answers for myself, which I pretended not to need? After I had smoked my third cigarette and cursed myself for now having to trudge back through this no man’s land in the windswept darkness, I heard footsteps.
The Eighth Life Page 107