The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

  To cheer her up I stopped off in Florence, booking a nice hotel en route. Italy seemed to do her good. Maybe because she had no goal in this country that she could fail to reach; because she expected nothing here but sunshine and beauty. We looked round the city, and I showed her a few hidden places I’d discovered on my first trip to Italy. But the fire seemed to have gone out of her, and although she did reply whenever I asked her a question, and her appetite seemed to have returned, she didn’t want to take the initiative any more. Neither an Italian ice cream nor the night-time view from the Piazzale Michelangelo of the city bathed in coloured lights awakened her passion.

  Only once, as we were listening to a busker playing the violin in the Piazza della Repubblica, did she thaw for a moment and begin to move slowly to his melody. I stopped and watched her: as she had done with Aman, she lost herself in her own secret world, which fascinated and drew in the other watchers along with me: a happy twelve-year-old girl, reaching for life with both hands. In Berlin, the sight had filled me with pride and admiration, but now I had a bitter taste in my mouth, the taste of regret, for not having helped her, led her to her goal; for having lied to and disappointed her.

  On the way back to the hotel I couldn’t stand it any more: I seized her by the elbows and shouted at her that it wasn’t my fault, she should stop punishing me. I repeated my lie that Fred Lieblich had been dead for several months; I held on to it, wanted to believe it myself. But not even my fit of rage seemed to make any difference to her. She listened, batted her thick eyelashes a few times, then walked on towards the hotel in silence.

  When I woke the next morning she had already gone down to the breakfast room, leaving her bulging notebook on the bed. I hesitated, but, spurred on by her refusal to talk to me, curiosity finally made me reach for the book. I opened it in the middle, leafed further on, and found the pages she had written in Berlin. Most of the entries were about me. I appeared in almost every note she had made since her arrival. The things I saw there about myself did not make for pleasant reading. Sometimes she was really sharp-tongued — sarcastic, even — and I found it hard to believe that the entries had been written by a twelve-year-old. But through these notes, which described her emotional state in very precise terms, though they hardly ever extended to more than half a page, there shone a frighteningly deep sadness.

  I went on reading; I couldn’t stop. As though it were a secret book I had spent years searching for and had finally discovered. A book of revelations. I flicked obsessively back to the start. There, the tone seemed different, more objective and less emotional. Descriptions of everyday events, notes for her choreography, though the precision of her descriptions was no less impressive here.

  And then I came to a page from last winter. It contained only incoherent isolated sentences, which had probably been written over the course of a month. I hate it all. I hate her. Two days later: I won’t pray until Elene can prove to me that Mama is with God. Then: Aleko made me go back to school today. I couldn’t think of any more excuses for staying at home. I can’t tell him, I can’t tell him what they did to me in the toilets last week, or he’ll tell Elene, and then she’ll cry or pray even more. The page ended with: I got her letter today. (Her was underlined three times and followed by several exclamation marks.) A letter from F. L. I know it: from now on everything will be fine. Everything will be different. A few pages later, I found the following note: If I run up and down the stairs three times this evening, there definitely won’t be a thunderstorm. And: If Elene makes rissoles for me tonight, they won’t throw stuff at me at school again tomorrow.

  She must have made the following entry just before her journey to Vienna: And then, when I have the rights, I’ll call her and ask her to come and pick me up, if Elene hasn’t told her already. That depends on what time they realise I’m not at the hotel. I found a cheap ticket on the internet today. Then we’ll go to her house, and then, once we’ve spent a little time together, that’s when I’ll ask her. I don’t know how yet, exactly, but I’ll ask her. Maybe like this: Do you want to write the story for my dance? But maybe I’ll think of something better before then.

  I’m so happy. Soon, soon, yes, soon.

  The last note I was able to read before my eyes began to swim with tears was this: If I make it to V., if Elene calls her and she comes to pick me up, if she takes me with her — then I won’t die.

  How could I have been so blind? How could I so consistently overlook what was right in front of me? How could I have ignored Brilka’s existence so completely all these years? How could I, paralysed and caught up in my own helplessness, have spent years acting as if she didn’t exist? The girl who had set out, undaunted, to look for a new, better story for herself and her ghosts?

  That time in the car on the country road, when we managed to stop just in time and not run over that beautiful animal, I should have explained to her that my tears, my breakdown, weren’t the fruit of fear, of having come within a whisker of killing an animal, but of the sudden realisation that I still had the ability to love.

  To love her.

  Why had I not told her that it was easier to live with the empty space behind my ribs than with the permanent, annihilating fear that this feeling sparked in me? Why had I not had the courage to explain that the love that threatened me, through her, put my life in danger? That I knew only too well the hatred it could leave behind once it was gone; and how easily, how suddenly it could become a destructive force when the person it belonged to was no longer there, or no longer able to return the feeling. How it then started to destroy; this emptiness.

  And at the same time, I wondered how I could resist her. How could I withstand the flood she brought with her? How could I stop the army that would invade my life with her? Stop my sister’s face with the different-coloured eyes coming through the door along with her; Stasia and her card-playing ghosts; Kostya and his poisoned grief; his sister, Kitty, unknown to me, with her eerie songs; her old friend from the English coast; Christine, bare-faced in the final hours I saw her alive. David and his chain. My mother, dead-eyed after weeping for her favourite child. Cello and his naked loins, pressed against my backside in the abandoned print works. I would be overrun by an army against which I would be powerless.

  How could I make her understand what life tasted like once I had seen Daria lying motionless after her fall from the attic? How my fear tasted, the fear of going back and finding nothing left of what I once regarded as part of myself? Finding nothing to welcome me, embrace me, be my home? Having nothing left to remind me of myself before the world, my world, our world, the world we used to live in, broke apart and left behind nothing but dust, graves and dead dreams? Was life really like a carpet whose pattern you had to learn to read? And if so, why had I not yet learned?

  *

  We drove along the Adriatic coast. We cut the time into slices. We didn’t believe in it any more, we had our own time. We were following our memories, it was just that we weren’t yet ready to share them with each other. We stopped and went swimming off small, remote beaches. She was nervous of the water, but gradually she learned to trust me. We swam out. We watched the sun caress us beneath the surface.

  On a beach near Bari she put her headphones on me and convinced me to dance. She encouraged me, corrected my posture: she, the master of her art, and I, the obedient pupil. I started drinking Fanta, and let her give me directions. We took the ferry from Brindisi and watched the high waves rebelling against the rain.

  When we arrived in Greece, we got back in the car and drove across the country, sleeping in little hotels and B&Bs. There, her lightness and joy finally returned. We reached Thessaloniki and stayed in the city for three days. We ate ice cream, white or yellow. Although here she dared to try a scoop of raspberry — until now, red had been taboo. I felt proud as I watched her overcome her fear.

  In Turkey, she started asking questions again. This time I gave her more honest an
swers; her questions didn’t frighten me any more.

  As we reached the Black Sea coast she suddenly burst into tears, and I had to pull up at a petrol station. She ran away, shut herself in the toilet, and made me wait for over an hour.

  I left her to her sorrow. Her sorrow over the borders that could be felt once again, over the dark hue of the Black Sea. I left her to her sorrow over the fact that we would soon reach our destination, which, as I now knew, had not been her destination when she left her hotel in Amsterdam.

  The landscape changed outside our windows. The water changed. The bays, the roads, the people were different. The houses and the smells. We changed, without being able to put it into words. From Hopa we crossed the Georgian border and wound our way along the mountain passes, lost ourselves in the gorges, reappeared, drove down roads lined with bamboo and pine trees, and finally reached Batumi. When we arrived, we took a room and strolled down to the beach in the sickly yellow moonlight. To my surprise, not a soul was there. We sat down and started throwing pebbles into the water. We were too scared to admit that the end of our journey made us afraid.

  ‘So, what’s it like?’ she asked me after a while.

  ‘What’s what like?’

  ‘Being back. Do you feel anything?’

  ‘Give me a while longer, I still don’t have the sense of this place.’

  ‘How far do we have to drive tomorrow?’

  ‘If we set off in good time we’ll be there late afternoon, early evening.’

  ‘And how long will you stay?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. I need to …’

  I fell silent. I knew she knew just as well as I did that there was nothing else I needed to do. That all the needing had drained away from me since I got in the car with her. That my life was in the here and now, with her at my side, in my car, on these roads. But, as ever, I fell silent this time, too. I couldn’t do it. My fear of what she had awakened in me was still too great.

  In the early evening of the next day we reached Tbilisi.

  In vain I sought my loved one’s grave;

  Despair plunged me in deepest woe.

  Scarce holding back the sobs I cried:

  O where art thou, my Suliko?

  AKAKI TSERETELI

  I stayed at the Green House for two weeks. I let my mother take care of me and played backgammon with Aleko. I walked up and down the hill. I searched for the ghosts under the cherry tree. But I never went up to the attic, the stairs to which were now blocked by a door that was permanently locked. I drove into the city, sat in newly opened cafes and restaurants, wandered aimlessly around the streets. All the city had to say to me were things I no longer wanted to hear, and all I wanted to confess to it, I kept to myself. I asked after the people I used to know. I looked around hesitantly. I didn’t allow myself to get involved in any more political debates with Aleko, who thought that the country was on the road to improvement, that the new president had western values, and that his young cabinet had what it took to prise Georgia away from Russia once and for all and take it into Europe.

  I passed the places I used to pass every day, looked for streets and buildings that had been familiar and were familiar no more.

  Only in the hours I spent with Brilka, the evenings when she danced for me, when we ate together, when she showed me something that was important to her, when she woke me in the morning and chattered away to me — only then did I feel at home.

  *

  One evening, I dialled the number I still had in my head, and recognised Lana’s voice at once. It took her a while to understand who was calling. Then she started telling me how much she had missed me and how good it was to hear my voice again. Apparently I no longer represented a danger to her son. The kilometres and the years that lay between us were probably security enough for her. When I finally asked after Miro, she began talking about how busy he was, but then she gave me his mobile number all the same and invited me to dinner, which I politely declined. Of course it was easy to love me from a distance. I called him and we arranged to meet in a café in the Old Town the following day.

  He was aloof from the beginning; he fiddled self-importantly with his car keys and smelled of an unfamiliar aftershave. From the very first second, he talked of nothing but his work. He was the head of a small building firm which was doing fantastically well as the real estate market was booming. He told me about his travels and his life, which was wholly dedicated to work and seemed to include everything except life itself. He asked me no questions, as if afraid I might say something that would throw him off balance. Something that might challenge this image of the happy, imperturbable man. But eventually, when I could bear the whole act no longer, I touched his hand tentatively and asked him how he was.

  ‘But I’ve just been telling you how I am,’ he replied with a nervous laugh.

  ‘What, you mean all that nonsense? I asked how you are, Miro. You can try as hard as you like to be a stranger, but it’s never going to feel that way to me.’

  ‘I’m not trying —’

  ‘I thought I had a thousand questions for you, but now it feels like I don’t have any at all.’

  ‘Well, that’s fine with me.’

  ‘I just wanted to see you, to know how you are. I’m not here to reproach you.’

  ‘And what should you be reproaching me for?’

  ‘Maybe for kissing my mentally unstable sister? Maybe for leaving me alone on the train we were supposed to be getting together? Maybe for hurting me very badly?’

  ‘And here we go again with the reproaches … Let’s change the subject.’

  ‘Where did you go, Miro, after you got off the train?’

  For a moment he looked straight at me with his big eyes; for a moment I thought I saw a flash of something familiar after all, but then his face resumed its neutral, impassive look and I lowered my gaze.

  ‘What about the film?’ I asked, before getting up from the table.

  ‘What film?’

  ‘What film?’ I repeated in disbelief.

  ‘Oh right, the film. Good grief, Niza, what decade are you living in?’

  ‘I’d like an answer, please!’

  ‘It turned out the material had been damaged in storage. Apparently it was too damp where it was. Most of it was irreparably destroyed.’

  *

  Two days before my departure, I took Brilka to visit the graves of Christine, Stasia, Kostya, and Daria. We sat in the shadow of an oak tree, looking at the gravestones. I had a cold beer and Brilka sucked at a bottle of Fanta. The place was hot, empty, and quiet.

  ‘I don’t want to stay here,’ she said suddenly, pulling at a blade of grass.

  ‘But you have to go back to school, and carry on with your dancing, too, and —’

  ‘Take me back with you.’

  Although by now I knew the right answer, the one that should have followed her request, I said nothing.

  ‘I’ll find a way to get hold of Kitty’s rights.’

  She was wrestling with herself, with her pride, with her fear of another disappointment, and yet she kept going, because, unlike me, she was brave.

  ‘Will you write me a story?’

  ‘What kind of story?’

  I played the innocent. I couldn’t admit to having read her notebook. I couldn’t expose myself to an even greater risk of her hating me.

  ‘About Kitty and all that. Then I’ll use it for my choreography.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Sometimes I hate you!’ she cried, springing to her feet. ‘Then go away. Get out of here! I wish you’d all leave me in peace!’

  From one second to the next she had started shrieking hysterically.

  ‘Brilka, you need people to look after you; you need structure and a secure life, and those are things I can’t give you. I’ve got enough problems of my own.
Come on, you’ve seen how I live. Brilka, please, look at me!’

  ‘Just say it, say it! Admit it! Stop lying to me, like you lie to everyone — Aman and your mother and Aleko, and the whole world and yourself as well — and probably my mother, too!’ she snarled angrily in my face.

  ‘Say what? Admit what, Brilka?’

  ‘That you don’t want me. You’re no better than them. You’re worse than all the others, even. Much worse. At least tell me that you don’t want me, you never wanted me!’

  ‘But Brilka, that’s not true … Stop, wait!’

  She started running through the graves. I ran after her.

  ‘You’re lying again! Just leave me alone. Piss off. Go away. Everything I wanted has already gone wrong!’

  ‘Brilka, stop!’

  She wanted to hide her tears from me. I couldn’t bear her weeping. Or my lies. I wanted so much to be able to give her something other than my devastating answers. But I was so terribly afraid of being brought to life by her — without realising that she had done it long ago.

  *

  On the day I went to the airport — I left the car for Aleko; it wouldn’t have survived the long journey back — Brilka was nowhere to be found. I didn’t say goodbye to her.

  What we love we shall grow to resemble.

  BARNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

  Back in Berlin, I spent ten whole days trying to go back to my old life. Then, when I realised with a painful clarity how pointless the attempt was, I stopped trying.

  I gave notice to my employer. I gave notice on my apartment. I said goodbye to the garage. I rented a cellar storage room and put all my possessions in it. I asked Severin to put me up for a few weeks. I wrote Aman an email, begging his forgiveness and promising to explain everything to him, as soon as I was able. Everything that prevented me from making and keeping a promise. I went to the bars, warehouses, and private apartments where people played poker, and gathered money. By early October, I had scraped together enough to fly to England, and make a start.