The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  On the narrow dirt path that led up to the cottage, I made out the silhouette of a man carrying a stick and a torch. I leaped up and approached him cautiously. I called out that I was part of a research project on the history of the Soviet Union and needed information. It was only when I had spoken the words that I realised I’d said them in Georgian.

  He shone his torch in my direction. Stopped, but then carried on moving towards me. When he shone the torch in my face I had to narrow my eyes, but despite the bright light I knew that I had found him. An unexpected wave of euphoria rolled over me.

  He walked with a stoop, and evidently with some difficulty, always leaning on his stick. He simply passed me by without a word, unlocked the door, and disappeared, slamming the door in my face. Shocked, I stayed where I was, then started to knock tentatively, explaining my request again in as friendly a tone as possible. But there was no response to my knocking. I was angry, and about to turn and leave, but then I stopped and shouted through the door: ‘I’m Kostya’s granddaughter. I’m here because of Kostya. Because of him and Kitty. And I’m here because of you. I’m here because of my great-grandmother and my grandmother, and I’m here because of my sister, and I …’

  I could hear my heart hammering. I was afraid. I was afraid of rejection and of what he would have to say to me, in equal measure. It was only when he tentatively opened the door and switched on the light that I realised my whole body was trembling. As I stood before him, he raised his liver-spotted hands to my cheeks, took hold of my face, and stared at me, wide-eyed, for a long time.

  ‘You’re Kostya’s little girl?’ he asked in Georgian.

  ‘I think you’re mistaking me for my sister. I’m the younger one. My sister … she’s dead.’

  He let go of my face and took a little step back.

  ‘The beautiful girl?’

  ‘Yes, the beautiful girl.’

  ‘Good God. How? What happened?’

  He invited me in.

  *

  I stayed in the Seven Sisters house for four whole days. Since I had left Tbilisi, this frail old man was the first person with whom I could speak about my past. He convinced me to stay with him; when I learned that the house had once belonged to my great-aunt, I accepted his offer. And he willingly answered my questions. For every one of my stories, he gave me one of his. Stories about the many photos that adorned most of the walls in the house. The photos of a woman I didn’t know, who had been my great-aunt.

  Every day, a red-haired carer came to help him with everyday tasks, and to lay out his medication for him.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked him.

  ‘A better question would be what isn’t wrong with me,’ he replied.

  We ate potato soup. He showed me the bay where Kitty Jashi had taken her own life. He stayed up on the cliff: his legs hurt. I climbed down the steep path to the beach alone, looking for the last traces of her, but found only the sea.

  He told me things about people I’d assumed I had known, and after hearing these stories, I could no longer assume that I did. He opened himself to me like a book and let me read him. He made me a pudding with shaking hands and veiled eyes.

  ‘You said you came here because of your grandfather and because of Kitty. Because of your great-grandmother and grandmother. And to ask me questions. But you didn’t say: I’m here for my own sake. Why?’

  His question surprised me. I didn’t know what to say, but he gave me a smile that was like an embrace. Perhaps finally the meaning of it all would be revealed here; perhaps I was close to making a connection. But my fear didn’t vanish; it grew with every story. All the ghosts gathered in my head as he went on weaving the carpet before my eyes. I watched him do it, never able to recognise my own thread amid all the confusing patterns.

  I went down to the rough, stony beach. I sat down on the wet sand. I let the wind whip my face. I stretched out towards the sea. I let myself go.

  Of course Stasia had been right: of course they were still there. And they stayed. I screamed. I didn’t want to keep listening out for them across time. I didn’t want to chase after them any more. I didn’t want card-playing ghosts in my garden, and yet here I was, sitting with Alania, filled to bursting with all these words, all these things that had happened, all these stories which, clearer in his words than they had been in Stasia’s, showered down upon me with incredible force, burying me under their weight.

  For me, there had always been something magical about Stasia’s stories; they were fables and fairy-tales from another world. The things Alania told me were facts, real and brutal.

  I had wanted to lead a life. My life. I had wanted a history I could use, a history that could have provided anecdotes in sentimental sepia for evenings with my Berlin friends, for instance, or at least for a few solution-orientated therapy sessions. Yes, that was the life I should have been leading. Wasn’t that why I had crossed the border from East to West, the border from Then to Now?

  I dug myself into the wet sand. I hadn’t come to the sea for it to remind me of all the things that hadn’t happened in my life. No; I wanted to know what was still possible. And here, looking out at its grey expanse, I understood that too many stories were already gathered within me, blocking the view ahead, and the temptation just to keep looking back, like Orpheus, at what lay behind me was too great.

  I climbed the steep path up the cliff. I asked him to go on talking. I asked him to answer only the questions that were important for my research project. Nothing else of a personal nature. Not a single familiar name, nothing about my own flesh and blood — please.

  He looked at me quizzically, poured us some elderflower lemonade. He put a record on the old record player. He closed his eyes.

  ‘This voice — her voice. That remains. Always,’ he said. ‘Yes, ask me. Go ahead and ask me what you want to know. But go to London. Do it soon. Find Amy. She spent years trying to track down someone from your family. Only, back then, when she had the strength for it, the Iron Curtain was still in place and nobody got through. And I stayed out of it; after I moved, I didn’t want to take a single step backwards … Go and visit her.’

  ‘I don’t know how relevant that would be.’

  ‘You know, it’s really fascinating,’ he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘I knew that one day someone would come; that someone would come looking for all that.’

  ‘I really just want to write my thesis. That’s all.’

  ‘You shouldn’t separate your history from history in general; you shouldn’t try to amputate yourself from it. No matter what you do with it all, this isn’t the way to do it.’

  ‘It’s for a piece of academic research, not a romantic novel.’

  ‘Go to London. Or to Vienna. Fred Lieblich, talk to Fred Lieblich, I can give you her address. Who knows how much longer these traces of the past will still be visible.’

  I didn’t reply.

  *

  I didn’t go to London, or to Vienna.

  And I didn’t go back, either.

  I didn’t write.

  Not a single line.

  I forbade myself from thinking about words that might have a meaning, a meaning that went beyond the banalities of everyday life. Words that described more than I was ready to remember. I forbade myself from using more words than were strictly necessary to deal with day-to-day life. I forbade myself from creating my own sentences, finding an independent form for my thoughts. Yes; in fact, I forbade myself from thinking anything at all.

  I didn’t finish my thesis. I refused. I didn’t want to possess any abilities beyond those necessary for everyday tasks. For the monotonous research work, for other people’s lives, for the hours I spent in the workshop, and for playing cards. I went through the motions of doing research and assisted the project leader, who was constantly urging me to get on and do something with my material. In our work tog
ether I proved stubborn and uninsightful, but he didn’t drop me from the project.

  The promised publication came out in 2002 and caused some controversy. Although I was a contributor, I stayed out of it, and brusquely declined when the Eastern Europe expert offered to take me along to his conferences. The project was over, and I hoped that this was one duty I had now escaped — but then I was recommended to the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, which offered me a guest lectureship. I accepted on the spur of the moment, because we had just been caught playing poker in the back room of a restaurant and were only able to avoid prosecution by paying a horrendous amount in compensation to the landlord.

  I wanted to carry on sending money to Georgia, and there was my divorce from Severin to pay for, and Severin and Gerrit were going to live together, which meant I had to find an apartment of my own. I agreed to lecture on the Cold War. I learned others’ sentences off by heart, others’ theses and experiences, and reeled them off day after day in the lecture hall. Every day I expected complaints from the students to reach the dean’s office about my inability to teach them anything, or at least my lack of enthusiasm. But they didn’t complain; they accepted me, just as I accepted everything, as my life turned into a dull progression. A path that led nowhere.

  I found a recently-renovated apartment in an old building in Motzstraße, and, after a boozy farewell party in our old place, I moved out and cleared the way for Severin’s long-desired happiness. Once in a while, I would go out with men who usually had a wife or a girlfriend and didn’t want that to change. I went on driving across Europe in the hope of eventually arriving somewhere. I didn’t read newspapers, didn’t watch television, only used the internet to write emails and stay in touch with the university. I lost interest in the world, both the eastern and the western parts of it.

  I called Mother and Aleko, and heard Brilka growing up in the background. Brilka was too strong-willed, too taciturn to speak to me on the phone. She fobbed me off and quickly passed the receiver back to the adults.

  I received postcards from England written in a barely legible hand. If I responded at all, my replies were very polite and distant; I didn’t react to his pleas and insistence, which I found intrusive.

  I had found peace, the golden centre of my existence, more rust-red than golden, but that didn’t matter to me, and I kept looking straight ahead: as time went on, it no longer took as much effort.

  Twice, Elene and Aleko came to visit me in Berlin, and I played the uncomplicated daughter. They didn’t bring Brilka; they said she was staying with Lasha’s parents. They told me she was growing up to be a keen dancer, and I thought of Stasia. Stasia — wherever she was — was watching contentedly, while at the same time keeping a strict eye on her steps.

  *

  Once, Severin, Gerrit, and I were sitting in a pub, our eyes fixed on the television positioned above the bar, when we saw Shevardnadze being carried away from his lectern by security personnel. A tall man rushed forward carrying a rose, followed by a jeering throng, and we witnessed the overthrow that was to herald a new revolution and a new era in Georgia. I recognised the parliament building, saw my old school and Rustaveli Boulevard. But these places seemed so distant, so far removed, that I had trouble connecting them with me. Meanwhile, Severin was almost frantic in his jubilation over the new, young revolutionary and probable future president. Like the whole of the West, he seemed to be rejoicing along with the Georgian people, who were hoping for a better life, an end to corruption, a more open attitude to the West, a putative democracy.

  Severin looked at me curiously, wanting to see my joy as well, but I had already turned my eyes away and was just muttering to myself that this was the third Georgian Messiah since 1989 and neither of the previous ones had managed to carry out his mission. I, at least, had no interest in another saviour.

  ‘Get us another beer. In four years, at most, we’ll know which of us was right,’ was all I said.

  Gerrit, too, was fired up by the images of the peaceful revolution and the symbolic rose, and called me a fatalist. ‘Here, nobody comes out and complains about anything. Nobody bothers to get off their backside. So everyone’s doing okay here, are they? At least there is still a sense of possibility in Georgia: be glad that people there aren’t indifferent to their country and their future! At least they’ve got that!’

  There was a strange longing in his eyes as he went on staring at the television. And once again I marvelled at the western yearning for chaos.

  In scarf, with hand before my eyes,

  I’ll shout outdoors and ask the kids:

  Oh tell me, dear ones, if you please,

  Just what millennium this is?

  BORIS PASTERNAK

  2006

  At the moment when Aman Baron, whom most people knew as ‘the Baron’, was confessing that he loved me — with heartbreaking intensity and unbearable lightness, but a love that was unhealthy, enfeebled, disillusioned — my twelve-year-old niece Brilka was leaving her hotel in Amsterdam on her way to the train station. She had with her a small bag, hardly any money, and a tuna sandwich. She was heading for Vienna, and bought herself a cheap weekend ticket, valid only on local trains. A handwritten note left at reception said she did not intend to return to her homeland with the dance troupe and that there was no point in looking for her.

  At this precise moment, I was lighting a cigarette and succumbing to a coughing fit, partly because I was overwhelmed by what I was hearing, and partly because the smoke went down the wrong way. Aman (whom I personally never called ‘the Baron’) immediately came over, slapped me on the back so hard I couldn’t breathe, and stared at me in bewilderment. He was only four years younger than me, but I felt decades older; besides, at this point I was well on my way to becoming a tragic figure — without anyone really noticing, because by now I was a master of deception.

  I read the disappointment in his face. My reaction to his confession was not what he’d anticipated. Especially after he’d invited me to accompany him on tour in two weeks’ time.

  Outside, a light rain began to fall. It was June, a warm evening with weightless clouds that decorated the sky like little balls of cotton wool.

  When I had recovered from my coughing fit, and Brilka had boarded the first train of her odyssey, I flung open the balcony door and collapsed on the sofa. I felt as if I were suffocating.

  After sitting on the sofa and putting my face in my hands, after rubbing my eyes and avoiding Aman’s gaze for as long as possible, I knew I would have to weep again, but not now, not at this moment, while Brilka was watching old, new Europe slipping past her outside the train window and smiling for the first time since her arrival on this continent of indifference. I don’t know what she saw that made her smile as she left the city of miniature bridges, but that doesn’t matter any more. The main thing is, she was smiling.

  At that moment, I was thinking that I would have to weep. In order not to, I turned, went into the bedroom, and lay down. I didn’t have to wait long for Aman. Grief like his is very quickly healed if you offer to heal it with your body, especially when the patient is twenty-eight years old.

  I kissed myself out of my enchanted sleep.

  As Aman laid his head on my belly, my twelve-year-old niece was leaving the Netherlands, crossing the German border in her compartment that stank of beer and loneliness, while several hundred kilometres away her unsuspecting aunt feigned love with a twenty-eight-year-old shadow. All the way across Germany she travelled, in the hope it would get her somewhere.

  *

  I met Aman in a little bar near my apartment. He was performing there with his band, a trio who called themselves ‘The Barons’. He played his own interpretation of ‘Cry Me a River’ in a drunken endless loop, and I realised that, after an eternity, I was actually feeling something; that, as he played, something had taken hold of me and wasn’t letting go. So much so that w
hen he finished, I had to go up and talk to him, find out where he was performing next. He was nice, tipsy, and talkative. The bar had been half-empty, and most people disappeared quite quickly after the gig; we seemed to be the only ones left. It turned into a long conversation. Since his fellow band members had also gone, and by the time we finished talking he was so drunk he couldn’t find his way home, I decided to take him with me. And so he ended up on my sofa. The next morning, he was gone, having left without a word, and then, four days later, at two in the morning, he rang my doorbell again. I let him in, asked no questions, and once more gave him a blanket and pillows. So it went on for a few weeks. He came, slept, and disappeared early the next day.

  One February evening — his visits had become a kind of normality for me and I had started leaving the sofa-bed unfolded — he arrived sober for once, sat down, and asked me if he could have a cup of tea. I made him one. Then I went to bed, but it wasn’t long before I was woken by the singing of his saxophone. I wandered into the living room in my old nightshirt. He was sitting there playing, oblivious to everything around him. I watched him and wanted to cry, but crying was something I had unlearned, so I just stood there. Eventually he looked at me, and we looked at each other for a long time and admitted the desolation we carried within us. It was a very honest moment. A moment that overwhelmed us both.

  Then I disappeared back to bed, and he went on playing. After a while, he fell silent, and I waited for him to start again. I heard him taking a shower, I heard him in the kitchen, getting something from the fridge, and then suddenly he was standing before me, naked. I looked at him steadily. He lay down beside me and said I reminded him of someone, it made him so terribly sad, he was so infinitely sad, oh God how sad, so very sad, and without ceasing this talk of sadness, he embraced me, and I, still a little speechless, his melody still in my ears, finally gave in and opened my arms.