My attempt to intervene failed before I could even begin. I didn’t stand a chance. I protested half-heartedly, explained that there were things called child protection laws and it was too late at night to drag a twelve-year-old girl out to some smoky dive. But she was already hanging on his arm and following him around like a faithful dog. I had no choice but to pack my things and trudge after them. It was the club where I had first met Aman, where he and his band played regularly. The other band members were clearly enamoured with this cheeky creature who immediately took over the stage, working out how big it was, and wanting to see the lights. In short, The Barons agreed to the idea and kicked off their gig. The boys opened with ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’. I thought I could see a touch of fear in Brilka’s face, but she very quickly found her own rhythm, adjusted her body to the band’s beat and transformed the melody into pure joy. She was a good improviser. People clapped and shouted bravo. She bowed coquettishly and gave Aman a kiss on the cheek before leaving the stage. We went out to get some fresh air. Side by side, we stood at the door and listened to the boys for another few minutes; they’d got into their stride and were fired up by the crowd.
‘You’re really good,’ I said.
‘I know.’
‘Modesty doesn’t seem to be one of your strengths, though.’
‘Aman’s cool. He’s much cooler than you.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘You shouldn’t send him away.’
‘So you’re an expert on personal relationships as well, are you?’
She looked at me through narrowed eyes and puffed air out of her mouth.
‘Why are you grinning?’ she asked.
‘You remind me of someone.’
‘Who?’
‘Your mother.’
‘Really?’
Her pupils widened. Her powerful reaction surprised me.
‘Yes, you do,’ I told her, feeling more lenient.
‘I made these shorts from Mama’s old jeans. But Elene always says I’m like you.’ She gave me a probing look.
‘Does she?’
‘Yes, that’s what she says.’
*
Aman asked if he could ‘borrow’ Brilka for a few performances. She went down really well — she could come on tour with him as well. ‘As a kind of support act,’ he said with a laugh. Brilka had already fallen asleep, and I didn’t think any of this was a laughing matter. The feeling that my life had been turned upside down overnight was too powerful for that, and I had no idea how to undo it all; I was hardly getting any work done. I started to wash up. I didn’t want him looking at me with his pleading puppy-dog eyes any more. I never wanted to feel so cruel again.
‘Do you really find it so difficult to say what it is you want?’ He didn’t let up.
‘Come on, you can see I’ve got this kid on my hands. I can’t just drop everything and —’
‘On your hands? You should be glad she wants to be here with you.’
‘She doesn’t want to be here with me. She wants to go to Vienna, for God’s sake, and only she knows what it is she wants to do there.’
‘She says it’s to do with some songs. She wants the rights for them. It all sounded very plausible, quite a mature plan.’
I leaned on the sink, unable to decide who I should be more angry with — him, her, or myself.
‘You could talk to her about it. You do speak the same language, after all. She’ll explain it to you,’ he went on. ‘Of course she wanted to come to you, Niza. She was hoping you’d help her.’
‘Okay, have you lost your mind as well now? What am I supposed to help her with?’
‘Well, maybe you should ask her that yourself!’
Just then, I heard the front door click shut, and ran into the next room in a panic. The sofa was empty and her rucksack was gone, as were the trainers in the hall. I shoved my feet into a pair of sandals and ran out into the street in just the baggy t-shirt I slept in. Luckily she hadn’t got very far: I caught up with her near the U-Bahn station and took hold of her.
‘Where are you going?’
And as she turned to face me, I suddenly let her go. Her face was streaming with tears and her chin was quivering. I wondered whether she could have picked up on what Aman and I were talking about, despite her lack of German.
‘Brilka, what’s wrong?’ My voice cracked.
‘I’m going to the station. I’ll get the train home. I don’t want to do this any more,’ she mumbled.
‘You can’t get the train home. That’s ridiculous; you have to fly, Brilka.’
‘I thought …’
She tried to walk on, but I blocked her path. ‘What did you think?’
‘I hoped you … you would keep me here with you.’
‘Keep you, how?’
‘Oh, forget it.’
‘No, wait, please. Don’t go. Wait. I’m just … I’m not used to this. I’m overwhelmed. The job and Aman and —’
‘Maybe you should find another job if you’re so unhappy,’ she said, reverting to her usual condescending tone. She wiped her nose on the hem of her shirt and lowered her head, seemingly unsure whether to stay or go.
‘Why are you so desperate to get to Vienna?’
‘Because I want to secure the rights to Kitty’s songs for my choreography.’
‘Kitty’s? Kitty Jashi’s?’
‘Yes, who else?’
‘Okay. Kitty’s songs, then. Why Kitty?’
‘Because I’m her biggest fan on this earth!’
She shook her head incredulously, as if she couldn’t believe I had never noticed this. And no, I hadn’t noticed.
‘Okay. Okay. I didn’t know. Her songs, then. You want the rights to her songs?’
‘Yes, I want to be the only one to choreograph dances to her music. I’ve already written out all the individual parts.’
I took a step closer to her. She shrank back. Still undecided as to whether or not she could trust me.
‘Written them out?’
‘Yes — in my head it’s all finished, and I wrote it in my book, too, so I wouldn’t forget anything.’
‘But why Vienna?’
‘That’s where Fred Lieblich lives.’
‘Fred Lieblich?’
I remembered Alania — he had mentioned Fred Lieblich.
‘Yes. She knew Kitty really well, and she knows the head of the foundation in London as well, Amy something, who owns the song rights and —’
‘How do you know all this?’
Alania had mentioned Amy and London as well.
‘Er, hello? Are you actually listening to me?’ She rolled her eyes.
‘Okay. Okay.’
‘What does okay mean? Are you going to drive me there?’
‘You remember, in Mödling, you said you knew I’d come to get you? You said you knew Elene would phone me. What did you mean by that?’
‘What do you think I meant? I knew you’d come and get me and that then I’d be here …’
‘Here?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you wanted to come to Berlin?’
‘Everyone says you’re so clever. I thought you’d sort it out — the song rights, I mean. You could help me, if you only wanted to.’
Three days and several visits to the authorities later, her visa had been extended.
*
I tried to smile kindly when Aman and Brilka went out in the evenings ‘to earn some money’; I tried to keep to myself the comments about streets and smoky bars being no place for a child. I wasn’t one of her official guardians, and she made that abundantly clear to me, just as Aman made it clear that I had no right to tell him what to do when I still hadn’t decided whether to be with him or not. But I didn’t want to decide. I wanted to be carried along on the bana
l tide of everyday events, to walk with regular, calm steps alongside everyone else. To keep my regular rhythm, not let myself be thrown off balance.
I let her go. I provided food for her. I went on buying Fanta. I extended my route home, took detours, sat in a café for a while to read a newspaper and stay out of their way for as long as possible. Them and their expectations of me.
Brilka had been with me for two weeks when Aman packed up his belongings. She threw her arms round his neck and didn’t want to let go. When I went to kiss him, he shrank back.
‘I’m away for three months. The schedule for the whole tour is on the kitchen table. If you don’t show up, I’ll take that as your answer.’
He gave Brilka a bear hug, then went out, slamming the door behind him.
Again, I sensed my annoyance with him. What was the point of this unromantic ultimatum, what was this sentimental nonsense? Why did he expect something like this from me — didn’t he know that our bond was fundamentally non-binding, and that that was the only certainty to which we could lay claim?
‘Do you love him the same way you loved Miro Eristavi?’ Brilka asked me abruptly. She slid down the wall in the corridor and dropped to the floor, her eyes still on the door as if she hoped Aman might come back at any second.
Miro? What was all this? How did she know? Without giving her a reply, I stumbled back into the kitchen. She followed me.
‘Miro came to visit us once. He brought me sweets — I was still little. Elene told me you loved him once. But Aman is better.’
She took a bottle of Fanta from the fridge and went back to her sofa.
There has been war here for two thousand years.
A war without reason or sense.
War is a thing of youth.
A medicine for wrinkles.
ZOI
I began to feel overwhelmed to an unimagined degree. Sleep had abandoned me. My head felt as though boiling lava had taken the place of my brain. During lectures I kept losing my thread and starting to stutter. The ground beneath my feet trembled as if I were in the middle of an earthquake. I couldn’t hold myself together any longer. The worst thing was the evenings I spent with her, now on my own. How lost she looked from behind, when I came into the apartment and saw her sitting on the little stool on the balcony, how out of place, her bare legs on the railings, the food sorted by colour on her plate, the bulging notebook on her lap, the muffled music from her headphones, the way she swayed in her seat and the closed-off, engrossed, waiting, demanding, provoking look in her black-on-black eyes. I couldn’t bear the fact that I was gradually learning to decipher her gestures and expressions, that I recognised the longing in her tone of voice. That I could see the tears coming before they appeared in her eyes.
I tried to ward off the sense of familiarity that was growing inside me. I withdrew whenever she started to get too close. Left her to her desperate dreams and demanding thoughts. Her ever more direct, abrupt questions. They were mostly about the time before she was born. She was mostly interested in a past to which she had always been denied access. Above all, I was daunted by the questions about her mother: what Daria was like, her preferences, her dreams, the exact sequence of events in the days before her death. Then there were questions about her father, questions about me. Questions about happiness, both general and specific; why no one in our family had been able to hold on to this happiness for any length of time. Why I hadn’t been home, not even once. My replies were brief, matter-of-fact, and only masqueraded as answers; in reality, they weren’t answers at all. And then there were her remarkable questions about death. A topic she seemed to be truly obsessed with.
At night, when she was calmer, she started asking about the present. Why I had gone away, why I didn’t want to tell her anything about her mother, why I didn’t live with Aman, or worse still: why I had never wanted to meet her.
It was a daily challenge for me to make her see who I was, to make her see the bridges that existed between us and those that did not. To explain why she hadn’t been given signposts and directions for certain things along her path. Why she had no mother and no father; why her only aunt wanted nothing to do with her.
Her whole life seemed to consist of one big why. As if she had come into the world without an umbilical cord and her greatest aim was to find it, a frantic search I was unable to help her with. More to the point, one I was unwilling to help her with.
I would retreat into the bathroom and run the water so as not to hear anything. I would try to read a book. Stay locked in there until she went to bed and left me in peace. I turned up the music in my bedroom, unable to shake the feeling that she would pursue me all the way into sleep. Three times I fled the apartment in the middle of the night. Without leaving her a note, a message. Left her there asleep and got drunk with Severin or Caro. I couldn’t bear being exposed to her fears and longings any more. I was ashamed of my behaviour, and couldn’t stop worrying, even as I was pouring vodka or wine down my throat to anaesthetise myself, to still something that would not, could not, be quieted.
There came a point when even my night-time escapes were no longer an option, since I couldn’t stop thinking about her, couldn’t outwit her any longer, couldn’t escape her questions even by putting some distance between us. One evening, when she had retreated to the living room earlier than usual and gone to bed, I decided to dig out the old hot chocolate recipe and make myself a cup. I hoped its taste would allow me to forget everything, at least for a few hours. I set to work.
I recalled the candlelit kitchen of the Green House, and Stasia with her arthritic fingers, bent over the black, bubbling mass, keeping all the house’s other inhabitants away from her magic drink, fearful that its curse might strike them, hoping that I would be strong enough to withstand all the curses in the world.
Of course she was woken by the scent of the chocolate. Just as, years earlier, Miro and I had been lured into Christine’s living room by the irresistible aroma, she came running into the kitchen and watched me wide-eyed as I greedily devoured the black mass. She immediately wanted to know what I was eating. The taste had actually dulled my senses, and I sat there in an ecstatic apathy, spooning up the last remnants of the chocolate. But for some reason, at that moment I wanted to believe Stasia’s grim prophecies. For the first time, I considered the possibility that my great-grandmother might have been right. As irrational as it seemed, just then I was entirely convinced that I should keep Brilka away from the chocolate; it was as if Stasia were standing behind me and I was heeding her warning. I was convinced it was my duty to make sure the curse didn’t touch her.
I leaped up as if I’d been stung by a wasp, clutching the cup with the remains of the chocolate in it, holding it above my head for fear she might snatch it out of my hand. Brilka’s eyes betrayed her incomprehension.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, confused.
‘It’s Stasia’s chocolate. Or to be more precise, her father’s. But the chocolate is cursed.’
I couldn’t believe I had actually uttered these words. For a moment she eyed me with mistrust, as if trying to work out whether I was pulling her leg. My expression, and the terror she could see in my face, prompted by the memory of that evening in the attic, must have convinced her, because she approached me and said, in her deliberately indifferent tone, ‘I don’t eat anything brown, in any case.’
These words disarmed me. I lowered my hand and let out a laugh of relief. Of course: she didn’t eat brown food. Her conviction made her immune to the cursed state of complete abandon that came with tasting the chocolate. All at once I felt incredibly silly. I put the cup back down on the table.
‘Anyway, even if it’s true, for every curse there’s a spell that makes it harmless,’ she added, completely sure of herself. She picked up the cup, took it to the sink, and tipped the remnants of the chocolate away.
I was overcome with relief. How reasonabl
e, how almost logical her idea sounded. Yes, she was right, she must be right. For every curse — so the legends would have it, in any case — there was a spell that suspended its effects, made its power vanish. Why had Stasia never considered this possibility?
Brilka turned on the tap and watched the clear water dissolve the thick, brown liquid, until it was no more than a thin, pale line circling its way to the plughole. Then she looked at me, her face relaxed, her lips spreading into an understanding smile, as if trying to signal that I needn’t be afraid; she was here with me to face down any curse in the world.
*
She was sitting tight. I could sense it. She was waiting for my resistance to break, for the moment when the last threads of my patience would snap and I would be swept away into a maelstrom of events that had slipped out of my control. She was waiting for me to say something, to make confessions and promises. In her own way, she hoped she was proceeding with more skill and cunning than Aman, who had not managed to force me into making an admission.
Maybe she wanted to prove to me that my old life felt like a blank space; she seemed to be waiting for me to need her, to become reliant on her presence, her devotion, her trust. She was waiting for my rejection to prove weaker than my longing. She probably thought that if she persevered, remained absolute, stayed strong, she could cure me of my paralysis.
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