Days in the Caucasus

by Banine

  I liked everything.

  Gulnar came in and handed me a letter. ‘It’s from Zeynab Khanim,’ she said.

  I knew the letter was from Andrey, so I went into the next room and opened it with trembling fingers. Andrey had set our rendezvous for ten o’clock the next day at his apartment. I went back to Jamil.

  ‘When I think how happy your father will be when he can join his family at last!’ said the grating voice. ‘The poor man has suffered so much, he deserves this happiness. Do you know of the old belief that the amount of happiness in the world is limited? The amount remains the same but changes destination. So when you are unhappy, you can console yourself with the thought that your unhappiness is allowing someone else to be happy. And the reverse, when you are happy, you are taking the same degree of happiness away from someone else, maybe your sister. It’s a curious idea, isn’t it?’

  I imagined my father deprived of his passport, deprived of the hope that reconciled him to life, cruelly banished from his state of euphoria when I left with Andrey. I was gripped by anxiety again. I couldn’t leave.

  ‘I’m sorry, Jamil,’ I said. ‘Could you leave me alone? I don’t feel very well all of a sudden.’

  I couldn’t bear the sight of him any longer, couldn’t bear the sound of that hideous voice which enveloped me like an immovable shroud. It was only eight in the evening but I went to bed, wanting to die and be done with these insoluble problems once and for all.

  Then I called Gulnar and told her everything I had been hiding from her. She was outraged. ‘How could you hide it all from me, your confidante, your lifelong friend? You’ve always told me everything.’

  But I was crying, so she stopped criticizing me.

  ‘You will go and see Andrey tomorrow at ten,’ I said, ‘and explain everything—about the passport, Jamil, how I can’t hurt my father and all the family. You will explain it to him, won’t you?’

  She promised and, coward that I was, I took four sleeping pills so that I could get to sleep to escape my sorrow. The next day I awoke at around ten with a terrible headache and a deathly taste in my mouth. All was still in the silent apartment. Gulnar was at Andrey’s and Selim must have been out shopping. I was too tired to get up. It was raining outside and cold in the room. I was overcome by a sense of great unhappiness. ‘When you’re unhappy, that allows someone else to be happy.’ I remembered Jamil’s words, but they were no use to me: I couldn’t be kind with this sense of bitterness inside. I only cared about my own fate; the rest of humanity could perish—what difference would it make to me? Something irreparable had happened, something that would change the direction of my life—for better or worse, I didn’t know. What I did know was that I had lost Andrey. The black knight, the wonderful man whom I could have admired, perhaps loved, my whole life, was at this moment leaving Baku for good. I could have gone with him, but I was in that bed, so crushed by despair that I didn’t have the strength to cry.

  I heard the door to the apartment open and close and a few moments later Selim walked into my room.

  ‘Where’s Gulnar?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve only just woken up—I’m not well.’

  Selim had been downcast since Gulnar’s revelations, his shoulders permanently hunched, but he fussed around me, too much for my liking as I wanted to be alone.

  ‘Let me go back to sleep, but if Gulnar comes, tell her to wake me up.’

  I turned to face the wall and Selim left the room.

  Gulnar didn’t come back at eleven, when she would normally have been home, nor at midday, nor in the evening, nor the next day. Quite simply, she did not come back at all. Selim discovered that a small suitcase was missing, as well as two dresses, some underclothes and toiletries, and I realized the truth, though I couldn’t tell the poor man.

  ‘How could she do it? How? How could she leave without saying a word? Not even to you. Do you swear?’

  I could swear with a clear conscience.

  Selim seemed to have gone mad: he would cry, then fall into a pit of despondency from which there was no rescuing him.

  ‘How could she have done such a thing? Leave without a word, without a thought for the pain it would cause me? For the agonies of uncertainty I would suffer?’ he kept repeating.

  His grief was so constant, so violent, that I forgot my own a little, though it was deepened still further by jealousy. I had no doubt that Andrey had left with Gulnar instead of me. I imagined what must have happened: she was tired of Selim’s doleful complaints (he couldn’t get used to his wife’s infidelity but he couldn’t leave her either) and ‘wanted fresh air’ (she couldn’t breathe living with Selim, she had kept telling me recently). She also wanted to become Andrey’s mistress, as she liked him a lot, so she had decided to take a small case and go and meet him in my place. The Gulnar I knew would have told herself that she wasn’t taking any risks and that she might in fact come out on top. Cold and calculating, she must have propositioned Andrey, who in his disappointment and resentment thought ‘Why not?’ and agreed. She hadn’t worried about Selim’s grief or mine, or about the scandal that her flight would cause in the family. Gulnar followed her desires without scruple and with no concern for anyone else. A happy disposition that allowed her to live as she saw fit, her conscience clear, her soul at ease.

  I sat in a small, gloomy room with just one narrow window, waiting to get married.

  In the next room a mullah was drawing up our marriage contract in the presence of Jamil and his witnesses. When the signatures were placed at the bottom of the paper, I would become the wife of a man I hated. I held a book, which I tried vainly to read. Those who claim that reading is a consolation for everything cannot feel very deeply—a powerful emotion leaves no spare mental capacity; it takes over, hypnotizes you, stops you thinking of anything else. I had already found out for myself that life was more eventful than fiction; books seemed flat to me, still do, in comparison to reality. So I read the words of the open book without understanding their meaning: I was constantly tormented, haunted, by the idea that I would ‘belong’ to Jamil. I knew what this verb meant: Jamil would have the right to get into my bed, he would have monstrous rights over my body. Not that my body felt anything yet—it was my imagination that was torturing me. I closed my eyes and saw the mouth that would have the right to put itself on mine; I saw the hands covered in red hairs touching my body; I heard the grating voice say tender things to me that I didn’t want to hear from it. But more than anything I was horrified at the thought of living with Jamil, whose presence I could hardly bear for an hour; I would have to put up with him for a whole day, ten days, a year, years, a lifetime! I was tortured by regret. But I didn’t cry: my pain was so closely mixed with hatred for my father and Jamil that it stopped me falling apart.

  The door opened and I hid my book, because according to the rules of the game I should not be reading but be absorbed in the idea of marriage. I got up. With tears in their eyes (this was part of the ceremony) my aunts appeared en masse and announced the good news: I was married! ‘What joy!’ I cried ironically. Aunt Rena hugged me tightly—I didn’t complain. It was useless.

  I was fifteen years and three months old, while Jamil was thirty-five.

  * Now known as Tbilisi.

  10

  That evening we took the train to Tiflis, where we intended to wait for my father to leave for Batumi. We would join him there to see him off as he sailed for France. He was waiting for his passport, the famous passport that Jamil’s friend the commissar had promised to obtain. A promise bordering on miraculous in those still revolutionary times, so much so that this passport was referred to as a thing of fable or legend. Bets were made—would he get it? Wouldn’t he get it? The commissar had given assurances though; in accepting Jamil as his son-in-law, my father was barely settling the rather significant debt he owed him.

  The station bore the signs of troubled times: the war abroad, the civil war, and general wear and tear had all made themselve
s felt on the railway. An unusually long train was coupled to a wretched little locomotive, which seemed exhausted before it had even started. The dilapidated carriages lined up along the astonishingly filthy platform, jam-packed with a throng of defectors lured by the Caucasus and its relative prosperity.

  My father was there, calm and taciturn, as were Fräulein Anna and Aunt Rena, who were crying instead of me; Leyla was giving practical advice to the frightful Jamil, who was hovering over me. He looked awfully like a worm that had momentarily taken on human guise. I could hear his grating voice, which I hated more than ever, to the left of me, to the right of me, in front of me and behind me; it flooded me, overwhelmed me, hemmed me in on all sides.

  We had the good fortune to get into a compartment for eight, where some fifteen people were already doing battle.

  The journey lasted two days instead of the standard twelve hours. A carriage took us to the home of friends of Jamil, who were expecting us; they were Georgians, hospitable as all Caucasians are, but real chatterboxes. They dazed us with their questions, which we had to answer, though I was very tired. At last they took me to my room, to our room, rather—it was time I understood that my room was now Jamil’s room too. I was alone with him, my husband. There was a bed, a large double bed. I sat in a chair and began to cry; I could no longer bear the enormous weight of my regrets, the constant image of what was and what might have been. I would soon have to lie down in the bed with this Jamil, who turned my stomach; I would have to bear his flesh against mine; I would have to let him caress me, do a deed that I hadn’t thought about when Andrey took me in his arms, a deed that now seemed hideous to me. Jamil was wriggling around me.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked in his grating voice.

  For the first time he had used the informal ‘you’, and this familiarity, unjustified by any affection, felt like a humiliation. I didn’t answer. Even if I’d wanted to, how could I have done so? What words could have come out between the strangled sobs?

  ‘Be good now and get undressed,’ he continued.

  I shook my head violently. ‘Certainly not that,’ I said to myself. I was vehement in my thoughts, rebuffing Jamil, covering him in violent blows; I killed him so I no longer had to see him or hear him or know that a Jamil existed somewhere with rights over me.

  ‘What to do? What to do?’ he asked out loud, at a loss.

  He left the room and came back with a glass of water, but I pushed him away so strongly—him and his glass and his water—that the liquid spilt. Then Jamil sat on the bed. I was still crying, but the tears were not so profuse.

  Suddenly I heard snoring; looking through my fingers, which I had pressed to my tear-streaked face, I saw Jamil half-lying on the bed, fast asleep. He seemed worn out. This gave me a sense of freedom. I got up, turned off the light, quickly got undressed in the darkness and furtively groped my way into the bed. I fell asleep straightaway. I woke up with a start when I felt a hand touch my breast. I hit out in the dark, catching Jamil in the face. He gave a cry and I jumped out of bed.

  ‘If you touch me again, I’ll get dressed and spend the night in the armchair.’

  ‘I’m your husband,’ Jamil cried angrily.

  ‘I don’t care. I hate you.’

  ‘Why, for God’s sake? What have I done?’

  I didn’t answer. Minutes passed during which Jamil must have been waging an internal battle.

  ‘Very well,’ he said eventually. ‘Come back to bed and I won’t touch you.’

  I lay down at the very edge of the bed. I reassured myself by imagining the space between us as an impassable ditch. Jamil did not move any more.

  The few days we were to spend in Tiflis became three months. All the commissar friend’s magic was powerless to speed up the issue of the passport. I sometimes wondered if my sacrifice had been in vain. But I enjoyed living in Tiflis, which I much preferred to Baku. This beautiful city was lively and gay, and only rarely did you feel you were living in extraordinary times. Those who still had money could enjoy good restaurants, theatres, the ballet, shopping. Jamil sold a diamond ring, which made us rich for a while. We went out a lot with Jamil’s many friends, went to the theatre and on trips, in short led what is generally considered a dissolute life. It was what I needed: I hadn’t changed at all in myself; I still loved Andrey and thought about him all the time, while I hated Jamil.

  For two months I turned my back on him when we went to bed, picked up a book and with manifest hostility pretended to read. Jamil would cry, complain about my cruelty, try gently to caress my back but not dare go very far, oppressed by the wall of silence and hostility that I put up against all his attempts. When he became too forward, which usually happened after an alcoholic dinner, I pushed him away brutally, and succeeded in disheartening him with my harsh words. But I felt no pity for him and enjoyed hurting him. I considered him hateful: physically repulsive and morally weak.

  I was exasperated by his desperate desire to be witty at all costs, a desire that was practically manic and never left him. He was spiteful and boastful, mean too, except if he was gambling, when he cheerfully lost money. There was no limit to his boasting. He boasted about everything: his intelligence, his education, his family, his clothes. Since his marriage he especially boasted about having married one of the richest heiresses in the Caucasus. That memories were all the heiress had left of her fortune did not deter him: the memories were dazzling enough, especially since he considered Bolshevism an accident of fate and our impoverishment a temporary phenomenon. So I had to hear him take shameless delight in my past riches, which, though they had ceased to exist, gave him a reassuring sense of grandeur and increased his self-esteem (not that there was any need for it at all; his self-satisfaction verged on madness). Everyone who came near was doomed to hear all about the size and precise value of my momentarily disappeared assets. Jamil was downcast when he couldn’t extract cries of admiration or envy from his audience, and quivered with pleasure when his public took the bait. At those times he would be expansive and treat me with even greater consideration than usual—for Jamil always treated me with a great deal of respect, the sole pleasant consequence of his admiration for my fortune. Here perhaps was the reason he bore my revulsion for him as patiently as he did. It wasn’t my own personality that inspired this respect, but the fact that I was ‘the daughter of such a man’. I could have been deformed, an imbecile or a shrew and Jamil’s attitude would have been the same. As the ‘daughter of such a man’, I was immutable, above the fray, in some way fixed in eternity; everything might change, worlds might collapse, but I would remain ‘the daughter of such a man’. An attitude that was to my advantage, but reinforced my scorn for Jamil.

  Everything served to stoke this hatred, as happens when one is ill-disposed towards someone. Gestures that would have appeared harmless from other people irritated me from Jamil. The way he ate, dressed, spoke, all disgusted me. But I also took a sadistic pleasure in hating my husband; sometimes I would even take a seat so I could see him better and enjoy, yes enjoy, my hatred. I stirred it up the better to savour it. Fortunately he wasn’t aware of my feelings (I say fortunately out of a residue of pity) and put my ‘reserve’ down to the extreme modesty of a young girl—or at least pretended to.

  The longer we stayed in Tiflis, the more I loved the city. Eventually we rented a small, furnished apartment in a central street, but we still ate in restaurants; my education had not included the culinary arts and I didn’t know how to boil an egg. I made sure to maintain this convenient ignorance: I was disgusted at the thought of looking after Jamil, which was enough in itself to keep me from making any effort. Add to that an ineradicable tendency to idleness and daydreaming, typical of many orientals. The hours I spent in this state were among the best of my life; that was when I lived entirely with Andrey. Somewhere a long way from me, he lived his life of action, ‘burning bright’ as he followed his desires, alone or with Gulnar; this latter detail remained uncertain as we had never hea
rd news of my cousin. My grief at the thought of them was perhaps fading slightly, though it remained strong enough to cloud all possible joy.

  We were surrounded by an ever-growing crowd of friends, most of whom were poker players. Jamil seemed to attract them—he was considered one of the best poker players, I was going to say in the world, but I will say more modestly in the Caucasus. What happens when poker players get together but poker? And there was plenty of it. Our house became a club where poker was played from afternoon till dawn with breaks to troop off to a restaurant for sustenance. Fed, watered and rested, the poker players would resume their places at the green baize tables with renewed vigour. Jamil and his friends played with intense commitment; no social cataclysm, war or similar disaster could have stopped them. They played for high stakes; everyone still had lots of gold and jewels to sell, since in the Caucasus we were only at the start of the revolution. I often joined them. I had learnt to play poker at the age when other children learn to read; in my family young and old were passionate, fervent players. Lessons from Jamil, an incomparable teacher, added to this firm foundation and I soon became a player destined for a brilliant future. Carried along by the others, I sometimes stayed up all night smoking and playing, hooked in turn by this passion. Whether or not such a pastime was suitable for the mind and body of a young person of fifteen is a dilemma I am not competent to resolve.

  The wife of one of the poker players befriended me and decided I should spend less time playing cards and more time going out with her. ‘With a regimen like that,’ she told me, ‘you’ll be old by the time you’re thirty. Why, you’re worn out at the card table.’ So I would leave Jamil with his fellow players and go out with my new friend.

  She was a strangely gentle, phlegmatic and perverted woman. She spent her time looking for lovers, whom she had no trouble finding, thanks to her deceptively soft, cat-like physique. Men were easily seduced by her large eyes, very short nose and mouth, which was almost always half-open to reveal dazzling white teeth. Short and plump, she moved gracefully and talked sweetly. This was the woman that befriended me.