Civil war has its laws, as is well known, and
they have never been the laws of humanity.

LEON TROTSKY

At the start of September 1920, Stasia began her travel preparations. She wrote to her husband at the Moscow headquarters of the Red Army, informing him in a cool tone of her plan to return home. She no longer ended her letters with the phrase ‘with love’. The last piece of jewellery was sold, as was Thekla’s lambskin coat. With money for bribes, and after weeks of waiting, she finally managed to buy tickets for a train to Odessa, leaving at the end of October. From there, they would take a boat to Georgia. After she had got hold of a heavy suitcase — Thekla’s expensive, hand-made suitcases had been sold off long before — Stasia returned to the powdery-yellow house on the Fontanka, soaked and frozen from the rain, but pleased with her success.

‘It’s worked: we have the tickets, we can go next Monday!’ she called out, and then suddenly fell silent, confronted with an unaccustomed icy stillness. Cautiously, she went into the kitchen. A seductive scent emanated from it. There was nothing there, but she was familiar, very familiar, with the smell.

Quietly, she went upstairs. The scent led her to Thekla’s bedroom door. She knocked: there was no reply, so she turned the handle and peered into the room. Thekla, her back to the door, seemed to be asleep. A tin cup stood on the floor beside the bed, with the sticky remains of chocolate inside. How many weeks had it been? It seemed an eternity since the last time Stasia had made hot chocolate for Thekla. She recognised the cup she had brought her the chocolate in last time. Thekla must have saved the remains and reheated them. Stasia lifted the cup and smelled it; the scent was delicious, magical, intoxicating, but there was something else mixed with the sweetness, something metallic.

Stasia slowly put the cup back on the floor, her knees trembling. Thekla lay motionless on the bed. Something had been mixed into the chocolate; something final. A cold shudder ran down her back, and she saw her father’s reverent face in the chocolate factory, the night before her wedding. She heard him speaking of calamity, something she had dismissed as a figment of her anxious, troubled father’s imagination. This word — calamity — the meaning of which she had not been able to imagine now resounded inside her head. Was he talking about this horror, this pain, this fear that she now felt, looking at Thekla’s back? Had she brought on this calamity, believing she was bringing Thekla a little joy, and had Thekla known the price this black happiness would exact from her? Or was it she who had used the chocolate for something as calamitous as her own end?

An eternity passed before Stasia dared to go round to the other side of the bed and look at Thekla’s face. She had expected something terrible, but Thekla lay there as if sleeping peacefully. Beside her was a sheet of white paper:

Darling, I will be with you always. Your coming into my life at such an unspeakable time was a gift from God. This life, the life that awaits us, is not made for me — I no longer have a place there. I knew the tsar was dead. I knew from the start, but I thank you for keeping it secret from me for so long. I am so very tired. Don’t be angry with me. I have left you a little money, in the sugar tin in the kitchen. That should suffice for the burial, and hopefully also for your journey back. Look after yourself, and remember: if there should be anything beyond this eternal sleep, I will be there watching over you. Forgive me, and accept this last gift from me.

Underneath the note was a watch. An incredibly beautiful, gold wristwatch. It was only after several minutes that Stasia realised the letter was written in their shared mother tongue, in the ornate script that looked to outsiders like a kind of secret code, the script that Stasia had almost forgotten, the script that had made her tear her hair out at her girls’ school when she hadn’t been able to write beautifully, in a manner befitting a lady. She and Thekla had almost always conversed in Russian, and this last letter was a painful reminder that she would never again be able to speak to Thekla in the language that went with the script.

Stasia herself didn’t know how many hours she spent nestled against Thekla’s dead body. At some point, she said, she shouted for help, and people came charging into the house. Strangers.

Three days later, Thekla was buried, without a funeral service, without a priest. The churches had shut their doors for fear of pogroms. Stasia remained standing by the grave for a long time, crying uncontrollably. She had not been able to cry before. Even lying beside Thekla’s dead body. But now, standing at her graveside, with Thekla’s farewell letter and the gold watch in her pocket, the tears came.

*

By the time Stasia came downstairs with her suitcase the next day, people had already forced their way into the house and were running around in a frenzy, stuffing whatever was left to steal into their pockets and arguing about the rooms.

At the station, she was told that she required an exit visa for Odessa. Stasia, at her wits’ end, trembling, showed them all the papers she had, including a copy of Simon’s RKKA certificate, which he had sent her a few months earlier for safety’s sake. She begged with tears in her eyes, but it was no good. Eventually, the lady in the ticket office took pity on her. She couldn’t go to Odessa, but, as the wife of a Red lieutenant, she could follow him to where he was posted; this she was permitted to do. Where was he stationed, she asked.

‘In Moscow,’ an exhausted Stasia replied, sitting down, dejected, on her suitcase.

‘There’s a train leaving for Moscow at six o’clock in the morning; I’ll exchange your ticket, and your husband can get you an exit visa in Moscow. Give me your ticket.’

Stasia absentmindedly handed her both tickets.

‘There are two here. Who’s supposed to be travelling with you?’ the uniformed lady asked.

‘She’s not coming now.’

On the train she sat in silence, listening to the monotonous sound of the wheels. She told me she kept thinking about Thekla’s rigid body, and the simple shirt that was the last thing she wore, a simple white cotton nightshirt, a plain nightshirt, as if she had put it on to set out on a journey into a dream of before.

*

There were propaganda posters all over Moscow depicting a soldier in a white uniform, pointing his finger at you. Underneath, they said: ‘Why aren’t you in the army?’ On the others, the Reds’ posters, there was a soldier in a red uniform, pointing at the viewer. Underneath, they said: ‘Have you joined the volunteers yet?’

Stasia was in luck. At the address she had been given, everyone knew Simon Jashi. It was a barracks, somewhere on the edge of town. Stasia, exhausted, frozen (her boots were stuffed with newspaper, as they were full of holes), sat in the corridor of this barracks, having finally arrived there in a hired droshky. Two young soldiers brought her a mug of tea and a little schnapps — that would do her good, they said. She drank the schnapps, holding her nose, and it did bring her some relief. Simon, they said, was at a union meeting in some factory or other, and would be back that evening. In the meantime, they showed her to his room, which he shared with two other soldiers, and covered her with all the bedcovers they could find.

She slept, long and deep.

A man woke her. He was sitting at her feet, his arms wrapped around her hips and his head on her stomach. He was sobbing. As exhausted and empty as she was, Stasia was unable to express any kind of emotion. She ran her hand absentmindedly through his hair. It was a strange state of affairs. All that time she had been waiting for this, playing out the details of the scene hundreds of times over, conducting daily conversations with Simon Jashi in her mind. She had such a long, cruel, cold, hungry journey behind her, and now she was able to feel so little. As if all her feelings and her words had been used up. As if the Petrograd years, Peter Vasilyev, and Thekla, above all, had taken from her everything that Stasia had been hoping to save for her husband. They held each other, without talking much. He warmed her feet and brought her hot borscht and a whole loaf of bread, a thing that Stasia had not held in her hands for two years. She ate greedily, and later fell into a deep sleep.

When she woke in the morning, they were alone in the room. He was lying beside her, fully clothed and sleeping. She sat up and looked at him for a long time. There was so much she wanted to tell him, so much she wanted to ask, to explain, but she didn’t know where or how to start. He was sleeping peacefully, his grey wool coat with the red star sewn onto it hung neatly on a hook on the wall. His boots, which were old and worn, but clean, stood on the floor.

He was now well over thirty, but his face still seemed very boyish to Stasia. His thick brown hair, good-natured brown eyes, thick lashes, bushy eyebrows, his long, straight nose, well-shaped lips, and, in particular, the little moustache he had grown. She looked at him and sensed that it would be very difficult ever to forget these years, this separation, ever to overcome it — that it would be very difficult for her to become the old Stasia again, with a head full of fanciful nonsense and feverish dreams. She felt empty and dreamless, exhausted. His sleeping face did tease a smile from her, but at the same time she felt an immense sadness.

Outside, she could hear footsteps, the shouts of soldiers; it sounded as if they were mustering.

‘Simon, wake up, I think you have to go,’ she said to her husband. He sat up, looked at her in disbelief, and shook his head.

‘They’ll manage without me,’ he said, and kissed Stasia on the lips. These words made Stasia furious. Suddenly, her sadness gave way to anger. Then why, why had he never come, not once? If they could spare him here, if he wasn’t out there saving lives, then what and who excused him for leaving her alone for so long — and worse, for leaving her there in suspense?

Stasia felt tears welling up in her eyes, full of disappointment — but again she said nothing, she made no accusations, she didn’t scream at him; she swallowed her rage and let him undress her. To begin with, Stasia found it difficult to let herself go: she was listening to the footsteps in the corridor, the shouts and the conversations in the yard. It seemed she couldn’t remember what it was like to soften, to feel this special joy, to no longer be tense and filled with fear. It took a great deal of effort for her to make love to her husband. Only it was not as it had been on their wedding night, in the guesthouse, where she had felt this euphoria, this joyous excitement. She simply lay there, patient and quiet, her eyes closed. But even like this she could find no relief; she kept seeing Thekla’s stiff back in a simple cotton nightshirt, the sheet of paper with her name at the top, and the watch, which she had sewn into her underskirt.

‘I want to go home. I need an exit visa. I can take a boat from Odessa,’ said Stasia finally, when they were lying naked, side by side, breathing in time with each other. For a brief moment, Stasia hoped he would say that he didn’t want this: that he wanted her to stay, that he would do everything humanly possible to keep her by his side, but then he replied:

‘Yes, it’s time you went home.’

‘How long will you have to stay here?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘How long is everything going to be like this? What was the point of our getting married?’

‘Stasia, there’s a war on, and things are no better for us here, believe me. I’m kept regularly informed, and …’

He spoke for quite a while about the necessity of the Bolshevik victory, various fronts that still had to be defended or wrested from the Whites, a few adventures that he and his team would have to face in Moscow, and difficulties in the Party leadership. Stasia barely listened. She found it hard to follow him; she had no idea why he was telling her all this, and she doubted his socialist convictions. Everything he said sounded like a poem learned by heart. Something in his voice sounded very tired, empty, resigned — a state that felt familiar to Stasia. But he didn’t admit it; he wanted her to go on thinking of him as the confident lieutenant, sure of himself and his work. And yet, thought Stasia, it would be so much easier if he, or she, were to tell the truth. Then, perhaps, it might be possible for them to come together. If they would only try.

*

Stasia finally saw her hometown again at the end of 1920, after an absence of almost three years. She was met by her eldest sister, Lida, who had spent most of that time in the Church of St George; her grey-haired, sad-looking father; her smartly dressed stepmother, who had put on weight; and an almost surreally beautiful Christine, who had just celebrated her thirteenth birthday. Meri, the second eldest, had finally found a suitable husband, a notary from Kutaisi, and had followed him there. When she arrived in her homeland, Stasia did not yet know that, in addition to all these people, there was somebody else at the family gathering — in her belly.

At this point, she was already pregnant with her first child, my grandfather.

The patisserie was still going, though they were constantly afraid for all the family property, which was threatened with expropriation. Democracy was on a shaky footing in Georgia. There were daily workers’ and peasants’ uprisings and factory strikes, and the socialists were boycotting the government. Nobody knew what the next day would bring, and the nation was disconcerted by the unclear political axis of the various parties and groups. Nobody knew who to vote for, or why; the laws, the demands, the promises changed every day.

Stasia’s return to the bosom of her family was given the celebration it deserved. There was weeping, arms were constantly being thrown around her neck, and even Lara, who was usually so reserved, shed a few tears. Stasia told her family in detail and at length of her hardships and battles in Petrograd — everything she had not told her husband. It was only the end of the story that she kept to herself, until the evening when she confessed it to her father in his study, after allowing herself a sip of his cognac. Her father’s gaze was fixed on the floor as Stasia gave him her account in a wavering voice, though she said nothing of the chocolate and the poison. She didn’t want to disappoint her father, or give him the impression that she had acted recklessly, abusing her knowledge, and, most importantly, failing to keep the promise she had made him. But, above all, she didn’t tell him because she had still found no answer to the question of whether, in this case, the chocolate and the poison were one and the same, and she was afraid of this answer.

She was back home. She had survived. Even if, once again, Paris seemed so far away, and Thekla had left her in the lurch — or was it the other way round? — even if at the end of it all she still wasn’t with her husband: she was still alive, and that was good.

*

A week later, Stasia was to finally discover the reason for her sentimentality and hypersensitivity: the pregnancy.

The discovery made her feel a strange mixture of irritation and excitement. In view of the circumstances, she wasn’t entirely sure whether to be glad about the news. The ministrations of her father and Lida, however, alleviated the pain, the longing, and the dark memories to some degree. Lida had grown to be a sort of dove of peace for the family. She strode about the house with her crooked gait, performed all kinds of services, helped out in The Chocolaterie, did Christine’s homework with her, and was responsible for the whole family’s wellbeing. In her mind, she had already become a bride of Christ, although her entry into a convent was perpetually delayed by her father’s objections.

In the evenings, Stasia sat in her father’s study, sometimes with a newspaper or a book, while he engrossed himself in his papers. His presence gave her a sense of safety.

‘I always used to think you were too dreamy to love seriously, but now I suspect I was wrong. Still, no woman should travel so far for a man, and no man should leave his wife alone for so long,’ he told his daughter one evening. He asked if she would like a hot chocolate — he would make one for her, just this once — and Stasia had to run out and vomit.

The Red front relocated to Azerbaijan. When the Bolsheviks were able to safely suppose that England would abandon the competition for access to the Orient, and therefore to oil, fighting officially commenced. The war finally ended in victory for the Reds, and the Sovietisation of the country, as Stasia’s belly inexorably grew. The neighbouring country of Armenia, weakened by the war against the Turks, was also unable to put up any further resistance. The Crimea was now under occupation, and Kiev had been firmly in Soviet hands since the summer. The question was how long Georgia, which the Bolsheviks had so far recognised as sovereign territory, would be able to remain an independent country.

But in February 1921, the dam broke. The Georgian Bolshevik Filipp Makharadze and his followers proclaimed the Soviet Republic of Georgia, and called on the Russian Central Committee to provide military support against the ‘Third Group’ and the Mensheviks.

The 11th Army took just nine days to capture the capital, meaning that by 25 February the resistance had already been broken and the country belonged to the Reds. The ‘Third Group’ government had fled to Kutaisi, and left the country altogether a short while later.

During Stasia’s pregnancy, the Reds had brought all supplies of wheat and weapons under their control, as well as the entire rail network. At the same time, the people in thirty-seven Russian governorates were starving, and the western press was already carrying reports of cannibalism and of many thousands of children with rickets. When somebody was facing the firing squad, their life could be bought for around four litres of sunflower oil and three litres of vodka.

Yes: all of this happened while my grandfather was growing in his mother’s belly, and when he came into the world that hot August, his country already bore the name of the Georgian SSR. Two weeks later, in the Church of St George, one of the few intact churches left in the city, he was baptised Konstantin, but from then on everyone called him Kostya.

*

A little less than a year after Kostya’s birth, just before his father met him for the first time, the chocolate-maker’s property fell into the hands of the state, as they had feared, and the spacious house in the city centre was divided in two. The upper floor and the large attic room now accommodated two workers from the wood factory and their families.

The Chocolaterie continued to exist as a nationally renowned institution; now, though, it belonged to the state, and my great-great-grandfather was a state employee.

From this point on, as a silent protest, my great-great-grandfather stopped adding his secret ingredients to the chocolate mix, which quickly led to a loss of custom. He was forced to change the shop’s decadent, capitalist décor in favour of the Party-approved style, which would not necessarily have delighted most of his customers, either: they went to the shop to enjoy the Parisian or Viennese atmosphere, not the dismal reality of an occupied Soviet town. The servants were dismissed, of course — there was no place for a nanny in this new proletarian life — and so Stasia and Lida spent their time child-minding. Only occasionally did Stasia manage to escape her day-to-day life and ride out into the steppe, on a Kabardin she borrowed from the stud farm.

The range of food on offer decreased with every day that passed; people’s clothes lost their colour, and the town’s only dance school — and Stasia’s only hope — was closed down. Instead, they opened a branch of the Komsomol, the ‘All-Union Leninist Young Communist League’, a Party youth organisation, which continually struck up patriotic songs and glorified the October Revolution, and whose goal it was to raise young people as ‘loyal communists’.