The workers of the Soviet Union will live

ever better, ever more joyfully!

POSTER SLOGAN

Over the next few months, the private secretary’s mandatory official trips doubled in number, and Christine’s outings trebled. Ramas was busy with issues of espionage, exit visas, the press, the administration of the gulags; the Little Big Man was busy trying to satisfy his insatiable hunger for feminine beauty.

I don’t know what made Stasia do it, but one afternoon she followed the black Bugatti that came to collect her sister after these phone calls. I don’t know whether Stasia followed on horseback, or took the tram, or an automobile; what I do know is that she arrived at the grandest villa in the city, reminiscent of a villa somewhere in South America, with a beautiful garden full of exotic plants and palm trees that screened the house from curious eyes. Everyone in the city knew whose house this was, and that it wasn’t just the master who came and went there, but some of the city’s most beautiful women, too. Stasia watched the black car pass through the gilded gates with her sister inside.

Back at Christine’s house, she sat down at the long table in the kitchen and didn’t move until her sister returned late that evening. Stasia had given the staff the evening off and sent the children up to their room early. Something in her voice had made the two of them realise that resistance would not be tolerated, and they obeyed.

Christine came into the kitchen, took off her shoes, picked up the liqueur bottle, and sat down with her sister. Stasia, rendered almost sexless by the years of hunger in Petrograd and the bitter aftertaste of her Red Lieutenant’s love, and Christine, blooming in her femininity and elegance. Stasia, wearing a plain, calf-length cotton dress with tiny buttons, and Christine, in a claret-coloured jacket with a hand-embroidered collar and a floor-length black silk skirt. Stasia drew on her cigarette and stared, glassy-eyed, at the floor. Christine was babbling about the weather and holiday plans and the stresses of city life when Stasia interrupted her.

‘I followed you.’

For a long time, Christine didn’t reply. She just went on drinking her liqueur. Then she whispered, ‘Why?’

They sat facing each other like two moles, frightened and blinded by the light, staring as if recognising each other for the first time.

‘I didn’t want to believe it. I couldn’t believe you were really doing this.’

‘What? What am I doing?’ Christine yelled. Stasia realised it was the first time she had ever heard her sister shout.

‘You …’ said Stasia, but her voice failed her.

‘I have to do it.’

‘Why do you have to do it?’

‘Well, someone has to lay themselves on the butcher’s slab so the others can go on celebrating, don’t they?’

Stasia suddenly heard so much contempt, so much spite, so much self-hatred in Christine’s voice that it frightened her, and she instinctively shifted away from her a little on her chair.

‘You disgust me.’

‘But the good life, the wonderful food and the nice clothes, the day trips, the private lessons, the good schools for your children — they don’t disgust you?’

‘I never asked for those things. Why, why, Christine? Ramas has money enough.’

‘You understand so little, so little, sometimes I could scream in disbelief! You still don’t understand just who he is and what he’s capable of, do you? Can you still not see where it is we live?’

Christine abruptly fell silent, took a generous swig from the bottle, and left the room.

The future had become the present.

Everything would arouse mistrust; words and hearts would become battlegrounds. They would slip into tunnels that offered no way out. Stasia would have to fight, but what was worth fighting for when everything had begun to taste of hopelessness? Where could you look and not see the teeth of the Little Big Men laughing in your face? How tightly would you have to shut your eyes from now on, to avoid seeing the ruins being unearthed? How much effort would it take to laugh, when you could feel all those bodies beneath your feet?

Stasia closed her eyes and saw Thekla before her, rosy, laughing, she was reaching out to her, calling her — Stasia quickly opened her eyes again to escape her ghosts, but it seemed reality was filled with ghosts as well.

*

In the first week of January 1932, the Little Big Man assumed the leadership of the Communist Party in the whole of the Transcaucasian Republic, and transferred his private secretary to the Party headquarters in Baku, meaning that Ramas Iosebidze only got to see his wife on the last weekend of every month. A new wave of peasant deportations and mass executions was in progress — it wasn’t yet apparent in the cities, but it was getting closer, creeping slowly into the metropolises. There were stories of marauding gangs of children all over Russia, of miserably long queues outside grocers’ shops, of female workers selling their bodies to feed their families. Stories of editors who had strayed from the ‘happy and joyous life’ and been arrested. Stories of millions of peasants who had been executed or deported from Ukraine to Kazakhstan over the previous two years. And people saw the state-sponsored posters that read: ‘To eat your own children is an act of barbarism!’

The people of the sunny Southern Caucasus had not yet felt much of this; they might know someone who knew someone to whom something had happened, but they still hadn’t felt it, they still didn’t want to see it.

All the same, Stasia was worried, not just for Christine, but also for Sopio, who often stayed out all night and hardly spoke to her friend any more.

When Stasia confronted her about it, Sopio avoided the question and invented excuses. The first night Sopio disappeared, Stasia knew that this was the end of her self-imposed asceticism and seclusion in her dingy apartment; or rather, she knew that Sopio, following her natural inclination, had begun to rebel. Stasia was tormented by doubts and indecision, afraid of the dreams that had died and afraid of a life without dreams. She was tormented by Sopio’s silence, and by her fractured love for her husband; she was tormented by the hardness that had taken root in her younger sister these last few months. And yet she capitulated, even now, paralysed by her inability to intervene.

Not even that bloody March night, the night she only told me about much later, could bring her to her senses. The night she returned from Sopio’s apartment to Christine’s villa, holding Andro by the hand (his mother had asked her, once again, to take the boy with her), and heard cries coming from Christine’s bedroom.

She told Andro to go up to the nursery, and hurried into the room where her sister and her absent brother-in-law slept. There she found her sister, enveloped in the scent of lavender from the dried flowers that stood on the chest of drawers to guarantee the couple a good, peaceful night’s sleep. She was lying on the starched white sheets of the four-poster bed, with the white mosquito net stretched above it, and beneath her was a lake of blood.

Christine was groaning and crying out through gritted teeth, clinging to the bedstead. Stasia ran to her and said she would fetch the doctor, but at that Christine screeched so loudly, like a wounded animal, that Stasia froze and, eventually, obeyed.

‘No doctor, no doctor … No one must know … I’ve sent them all home. No one can —’

‘You could bleed to death! What have you done?’

‘In the black notebook on the table, on the last page, at the bottom, there’s an address. Go there and bring the woman back here with you. She knows how to stop the bleeding.’

With cold sweat on her brow, Stasia fetched compresses, made towels into makeshift bandages, then hurried to a suburb of the city where she found a wrinkled old woman in a tin shack and took her back to her sister’s house. A backstreet abortionist, who had given Christine a mixture of herbs to get rid of the unwanted child.

Stasia sat by Christine’s bed for two days, and, at the end of the second day, she went to the kitchen, sent the cook away, and prepared the hot chocolate for her ailing sister. And when Christine drank it — after shooing away the children, who had come running at the aroma — she smiled again, and a little tear rolled from her left eye.

‘I’ll never have children with Ramas. We’ve been to see several doctors,’ she said quietly, sipping the chocolate.

Stasia sat in silence on the edge of the bed and tried not to look at her sister, who seemed so fragile, so weak and sickly, with her colourless lips and the deep circles around her eyes.

‘I thought it was me … Isn’t that a bad joke?’

‘I thought you didn’t want any. Not yet. You told me you were still enjoying life, and —’

‘I lied to you. I hoped it would happen eventually. When you thought I was at the seaside, we were in Warsaw seeing a specialist. Why now, why like this, why?’

Stasia tried to hold back the tears, tried not to make the whole unhappy situation unhappier still.

‘Finish with him, please. Even if you’re frightened, finish it. Please,’ she whispered at last, handing her sister a glass of water.

‘You know I can’t do that.’

‘But you’re even less able to do this, Christine, don’t you understand?’

‘I can’t, Stasia!’

‘Let’s go away. Disappear somewhere.’

‘Don’t be silly! Anyway, he would find me, no matter where I was.’

‘He’s not God, Christine!’

‘There is no God any more, no God can rescue anyone from this misery. That’s just the way it is now. He’s … he’s addicted.’

‘Addicted?’

‘To me.’

‘What are you talking about? He’s a —’

‘He’ll need it again and again, he’ll do anything for it; he’s in thrall to me. He’ll need it again and again.’

‘It? You mean you and —’

‘Let me sleep now, Stasia. I’m so tired. And tell them downstairs that I’ll need my green dress tomorrow. They should iron it and starch the collar, and — oh yes, polish my hair clip as well, the one with the butterfly on. It’s silver, tell them to use salt.’

‘Christine!’

‘Tell them. I don’t want to get up tomorrow and find that the dress is still in the laundry.’

‘Tell Ramas.’

Christine laughed, a scornful laugh, and turned away.