Young people still do not feel deeply enough the poetry of work.

MAXIM GORKY

That summer, Stasia travelled back to her hometown with her husband and the children. She spent her time there with Lida, who had grown even more pious, her stepmother, who since her only daughter got married seemed to do nothing but eat, and her father, who appeared increasingly preoccupied and melancholy, ever thinner and more frail.

For the first time, Stasia wondered whether there might not be a rightness to all of this — life, as it usually turned out — and whether dreams might not just be obstacles that kept you from what was real.

While the lieutenant met with old friends every day to play backgammon, Stasia took her eight-year-old daughter to the stables, hired a Kabardin, and taught her to ride. Astride, naturally. She showed Kitty her childhood haunts. And Kitty, who was now much quicker, noisier, and more energetic than either of the boys, laughed and squealed with delight. This city child, used to being driven everywhere in her aunt’s car, blossomed, and made Stasia think of something peach-coloured, beautiful, joyful. And this something moved her very deeply. Stasia showed her daughter the oak tree — let’s agree it was an old oak tree — the cave monastery, the barren landscape. They looked up at the painfully bright stars, the yellow moon, and they smelled the old earth, which knew so much and gave away so little.

Meanwhile, Kostya was trying to keep his jealousy of Andro in check, and to reconnect with his father, whose constant absence had made him a stranger to his son. Caught between the adults’ quarrels and frontlines, between his insatiable longing for his father and peculiar distance from his mother, Kostya lost himself in approaching adolescence. He lost himself in his rage against the restless, unpredictable women around him. He was desperate for consistency and order, and he missed Christine, the queen of his little world. She had changed. She didn’t spend as much time with him as she used to. She seemed to have stopped putting him on a special pedestal — it seemed he wasn’t her prince any more. She kept disappearing, and when she came back she would sit alone in the kitchen, never switching on the light, drinking that sweet, sticky stuff straight from the bottle, and staring into space. She retreated into her silence, for which he had no explanation.

He wanted recognition from his father, but he wanted love from Christine.

He wanted her to tell him how handsome and different he was, how clever, and how few worries he caused the adults. What good manners he had and how like her he was. It was what she had always told him, ever since he was born. It was Christine, not his mother, who seemed to need him most, who spoke to him as an equal. Who made him believe that one day he would make something of himself, that he would be a king.

Above all, he missed the sense of being her favourite. Because Christine had always made that quite clear, too — that she thought him better than all other children. More than anything, Kostya wanted not to be like everyone else. Least of all his younger sister. He was almost offended at having been brought down to the same pitiful level as his sister and Andro, having to compete to get himself noticed and distinguish himself from them.

That boy — that curly haired Andro. Who was weak and fragile, and seemed to have no ambition of any kind beyond reading books or being read to, who always sang when he thought no one was around, who could recite poetry in three or four languages, who loved carving those pointless wooden figures. And who earned so much admiration for it. And for supposedly being so nice, so considerate, so self-sufficient, so forgiving, as if that were the most important thing in life: to be nice, considerate, self-sufficient, and forgiving.

And his sister, who had nothing in common with him besides a surname and the shape of her fingernails. Who wound him up, worked him into a white-hot rage, with her insolent manner and lack of sensitivity. Who was clumsy, with a head full of nonsense; who was lazy at school, and whose greatest talent was clowning and silliness, with which, however, she always seemed able to amuse adults and win them over. Who was constantly giggling and smacking her lips and pulling faces. Who always had a ladder in her stockings, and who clung to Andro like a limpet.

And secretly he always blamed his mother for the fact that he was separated from his father, the man with the medals — which he too so desperately longed for, and which his later career would bring him in abundance. Konstantin Jashi would spend a few more years stuck in his own and his family’s inner landscape, until he had clearly separated the fronts, fixed his truths, and chosen his means.

*

There must be a new man in Sopio’s life, thought Stasia, on her return to the city in the autumn. This, at least, was how she explained Sopio’s moods, her long absences and secretiveness.

A man had, in fact, entered Sopio’s life. He was an architect. He had studied in Florence, created a few wonderful designs, and had begun to realise them, too, until he was declared too decadent and western, and the authorities removed his professional accreditation and stuck him in a communal apartment where he shared a bathroom and kitchen with some potato-sellers.

But this man had not awoken in Sopio the kind of love Stasia suspected. Rather, he had laid a thin, delicate band around Sopio’s shoulders, the ends of which were tied firmly to his ideas. The architect was forced to work in a canning factory and had no choice but to sketch his designs — for houses, at first, and then for the world in general — at night, by candlelight, in a crumpled exercise book that he hid under the mattress in his communal apartment.

He had shown this book to Sopio; she had come to the factory one day to inform the female factory workers of their rights. Most of the women had stared at her without interest, nodded, and gone back to work, but the architect had stayed. He had been listening in the back row, and Sopio was pleased to see a man in the audience. Thus it was they fell into conversation.

*

This man looks like a drinker! was the first thing Stasia thought when she saw the architect. Bloated, sallow, hunched. Stasia felt a kind of anger towards him from the moment she laid eyes on him, when he arrived at the apartment and began sipping the black tea Sopio had made for him.

If at least he were an interesting man, if at least he were really special — if … she thought.

When he finally left, she interrogated Sopio. Was she intending to expose herself to neighbourhood gossip, or to make the whole thing more official? And Sopio said how tremendously sad it was that Taso was yet again shutting her eyes to everything that was unfamiliar to her, and that, for the umpteenth time, that wasn’t what this was about.

‘For a start, there’s nothing going on between us that would need to be made official. Secondly, he’s being watched, and I can’t put Andro in danger; thirdly, you’re really not making this easy for me; and fourthly, I can’t let him down,’ she said tersely, and hurried to the door, where Andro was knocking, having just got back from school. He went to a Georgian school that was rather less elite than the selective Russian schools Kitty and Kostya attended, and his journey home was shorter than theirs.

*

Not long after Stasia’s first encounter with the architect, Christine summoned her sister to her husband’s study (he was absent, as usual), and set a glass of her favourite cherry liqueur in front of her.

Christine’s appearance revealed none of her troubles: she was beautifully attired, and held herself erect. Her hair was wound into an elegant, intricate knot, jewellery sparkled at her ears and wrists, and her lips were painted cherry red. Christine remained an impossible puzzle to Stasia.

They sat down. Both women had a glass of liqueur and exchanged a few banalities. Kitty had received a bad mark in maths the previous day, and the teacher had told her off; Kostya was doing wonderfully well, top of his class in calligraphy; the cook had over-salted the omelette — well, she was getting on a bit now; people said the price of wheat was going to go up; and so on.

Stasia watched her sister’s dancing fingers, with their wickedly expensive rings, and tried and failed to work out what it felt like to be Christine.

‘I wanted to talk to you about your friend,’ Christine said, and her tone suddenly changed, becoming more abrupt and distant, as if she had just cast aside the role of sister and was now playing the politician’s wife to perfection.

‘What about her?’

‘She’s started moving in dissident circles, and her new boyfriend … Well, he’s being watched. She sympathises with the wrong people. It could get her into real trouble. That man has mistaken ideas, if you understand me. She needs to break with him as soon as possible.’

‘That man is harmless. Any problems he has are psychological, or with alcohol, if you ask me. He’s not capable of having any ideas at all,’ replied Stasia snippily.

‘I just wanted to tell you. I’ve already put in a good word for Sopio. But that’s not going to help her in the long run if she doesn’t watch out for herself. She needs to watch out, and so do you.’

‘Why me?’

‘You’re her friend.’

‘But I’m your sister.’

‘Of course you are. All the same, I wouldn’t like you to get into trouble. I’m not all-powerful, Stasia.’

‘But you’re his …’

‘What? Courtesan? Lover? Whore? What do you want to call me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Go on, say it!’

‘What do you want from me?’

‘Me? Me? I’d just like you to be able to go on living a life without cares. Please take what I’ve said seriously, that’s all.’

Stasia left the room with her mind in turmoil and walked out into the garden, to the fountain, which had been dry for months and was full of leaves, to smoke one of her long cigarettes. Something about Christine’s words had affected her deeply.

She just didn’t know exactly what.

Maybe it was the whole situation, which to her felt bizarre and disgusting — her sister’s situation, which she, Stasia, was doing nothing to change, from which she was even profiting.

Or maybe it was the comfortable state of dependency in which she had now been living for several years. Or the strange mood that had suddenly started to spread through her country like a virus, a mood that made her afraid, a mood she didn’t want to think too much about. She felt miserable and powerless. She didn’t admit to herself that she was haunted by the sense of having failed, on all possible fronts.

She marched into Kostya’s room and made him get up. He had just gone to bed and was reading Treasure Island, a book he dearly loved. Puzzled and yawning, he followed her into the dining room and poured himself a cup of milk.

Stasia stared at her son, surprised at how much of a stranger he seemed. So serious, so un-childlike, so fierce, and yet somehow so lost in his grown-up manner. She was surprised at how little he played with other children, at his preference for being with the adults, at his constant quarrels with Andro and Kitty; the quarrels with his sister were sometimes so heated that they came to blows.

‘Are you all right?’ Stasia began.

Konstantin, now even more puzzled, nodded and took a large gulp of milk, while Stasia lit another cigarette.

‘Is there something the matter, Deda?’ he asked.

‘I was wondering how you were. We don’t talk very much, you know.’

‘What should we talk about?’

‘Oh, everything. Anything you like. About you, me, Kitty, your father, Christine.’

‘Is something the matter with Aunt Christine?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Well, she’s been a bit irritable lately.’

‘Yes, she has. Things aren’t easy for her at the moment. She’s probably missing Uncle Ramas.’

Even as she said it, she could have kicked herself for the lie.

‘Or maybe she doesn’t miss him at all any more, like you don’t miss Papa,’ retorted Kostya, staring into his cup, which he had quickly drained.

‘What makes you think I don’t?’

‘Well, you just don’t look like you do, Deda.’

‘And do you miss him?’

‘Yes, sometimes.’

‘Do you write to him?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘And what do you say in your letters?’

‘That I miss him and that I’d like to visit him.’

‘And what does he say to that?’

‘He says he wants to have me there, once I’m in senior school.’

‘And is that what you want?’

‘I just want to see what it’s like where he is. And I want to try shooting, and see what that’s like, too. Papa can teach me.’

‘What for?’

‘What do you mean, what for? Why does anyone shoot? So you can fight, and defend yourself, of course.’

Stasia sensed an ever-increasing distance between them; she sensed the almost total lack of compassion and empathy with which her son regarded the world around him. The bid to redeem her evening by attempting a rapprochement between them had failed entirely and left her feeling even more confused and powerless.

When she finally fell asleep, as dawn was breaking, she dreamed of Kostya shooting at everything around him; she woke that morning dripping with sweat.

*

I believe Stasia tried several times to speak to Sopio — whenever I asked her, she said she’d given her warning signals — but to this day I can’t explain why she didn’t do a better job of warning her friend or repeating Christine’s words to her. I suspect that, once again, her immense capacity for repressing things was to blame.

The end began with suicide of the Leader’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. She was twenty-two years younger him, the mother of two of his children, and her husband had placed her under the same surveillance to which he would later subject the whole country. They say she once told her husband that he tormented his wife as he tormented the entire population. And yet she had made such an effort to be a good wife, a good mother, a good Party member. Almost all the socialist history books, right up to the late 1980s, gave her cause of death as appendicitis. On that cold November day she had appeared at a military parade to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of the Revolution, waved, smiled, beamed, attended a reception afterwards for the Party elite, fallen out with her drunken husband, returned home, and shot herself with a pistol.

Not quite two months later, at the dawn of the year 1933, the architect was arrested. He was by now wholly confused and frightened, having endured two years of harassment, intimidation, and questioning. He was found guilty of treason and counter-revolutionary activities and sentenced to death.

Sopio, who until then had been cautious, quiet, and mild in her protests, could no longer contain her hatred.

They say she ran through the streets, yelling at people; they say she wrote a cycle of poems with the unambiguous title The Festival of Blood. Just four weeks after the architect was shot dead, two gentlemen in uniform came for Sopio in the middle of the night and took her to a psychiatric hospital. Apparently she was endangering her fellow citizens, and very probably suffering from hysteria and madness — at least, that was the reason they gave.

Andro had to watch his mother being dragged from the apartment, shrieking, struggling, cursing, spitting at the men, though all the while she kept shouting to him, telling him never to be afraid, not of these beasts, not of anything or anyone! But Andro was afraid. He ran up the steep streets of Vera and hammered on the iron gate of the villa until a sleepy Stasia flung open the door and the light went on in Christine’s bedroom. He hadn’t been able to stop sobbing all the way there, and it was a very long time before he could string a sentence together.

Stasia took him into her arms. She comforted him, told him Sopio would be back soon, lied to him, said his mother was getting better and sent her love.

Kitty seemed to be a support to him, a source of energy. She was a survival artist. She went on smiling and digging the boys in the ribs; she pinched Andro’s arm in passing and threw sunflower seeds at her brother. Despite the dark mood in the house, she went on listening to music on the bakelite wireless, meeting up with school friends, and playing football in the playground, even though she had been told several times that it was indecorous. She went on pulling faces, and greeting each new day by cheerfully exercising to the early morning callisthenics broadcast. Though she did all of this more quietly, more cautiously than before.

The more her behaviour seemed to annoy her brother, the more Andro sought her out. Kitty intuitively did all she could to make Andro laugh again and overcome his fear. She drew pictures of her teachers as animals, or sitting on chamber pots; she spat sunflower seeds from the attic window onto the heads of passers-by; she stole sweets; she cut off her hair. She did everything she could to evade the speechlessness of the adults. Even though she had to spend hours standing in the corner, was told off repeatedly, and given punishments and detentions; even though Stasia read her the riot act and Christine called her a boy. Even though they threatened to pack her off to her father in Russia, where she would have to live in a military barracks, eat nothing but porridge and groats every day, and would at last be shown a firm hand.

Andro took comfort in books. They seemed to form a bridge between him and his mother. She had always read aloud to him, had told him that literature was the ‘anchor in the black lake of life’. He wanted to feel close to her, wanted her to know he wouldn’t disappoint her, and he began to read obsessively. He read everything he could get his hands on. Ramas must have possessed a first-rate library, which may even have included books you wouldn’t necessarily expect to find in a model socialist household.

Andro and Kitty had been a good team from the very beginning; they’d always been able to occupy themselves and play together better than she and her brother could. But now this alliance seemed to be becoming a front. A front against Kostya.

*

The devout communist Ramas Iosebidze fell into a deep abyss — so immense, so dark, that the only way out he could see led to the final darkness.

He had given up everything, including his family, for an ideology — and had done nothing but serve this ideology for years. This portly, generous hedonist, whose greatest loves were communism, the Party, and his wonderful wife, lost all of them at once. The three seemed inseparably bound together; they had fused into a whole.

It started with a growing disillusionment with his work — the means to an end that was becoming ever harsher, harder, bloodier; supposedly in order to strengthen the Party, to serve the cause. But the cause was no longer the one he had once believed in, the one for which he had sacrificed so much. And the people with whom he could have banded together in another struggle against the apparatus of death were all either dead or in exile. The Party’s allegations became increasingly absurd, and the general mistrust of everyone and everything grew to ludicrous proportions. Treason was being committed on an hourly basis. People pointed the finger at their friends, their neighbours.

Ramas had believed in Marxism. He had become a communist at a time when you paid for this conviction with your life. He had rebelled against his father, believing that what was due to him was also due to others. And he had believed in the Little Big Man.

On the night of the fateful New Year’s Eve party, he had already seen it in his eyes: the lust, the unbridled lust for Christine’s narrow hips, her porcelain wrists and ankles, her swan neck, her drowsy eyes, her stern lips, her small, girlish breasts, the magnificence of her hair, her dignity.

It wasn’t the same lust, the same longing that other men were unable to suppress at the sight of Christine. Deep down, Ramas even took pride in the way other men looked at her — yes, pride, like a collector who is the envy of all because he owns a particular work of art. No, the Little Big Man’s lust was different. It was the lust of a murderer.

Ramas couldn’t have put this into words at the time. He hadn’t dared to think such a thing, had not admitted it to himself. He had played it down; after all, he’d been loyal and faithful to this man, had stayed by his side on every path he had taken.

But this person sent other people to torture chambers and death cells without batting an eyelid. Ramas knew that; he had already begun to suspect it by the night of the party, and was now seeing it for himself. He also knew what that meant for him and Christine.

He had taken her for himself — but even now Ramas couldn’t believe that his Helen, the most beautiful woman in the universe, had allowed herself to be taken.

He had suspected it for a long time, ever since his official trips had become more frequent — there wasn’t all that much for him to do in Baku, Yerevan, or even in Tashkent, he was surplus to requirements. His doubts were confirmed when Christine began to offer herself up to him whenever he was at home. She had never shown any desire for physical intimacy. She had regarded her marital duties as a kind of burden, though he had always hoped she would gradually discover her own desire and give herself to him, let him in. It hadn’t really troubled him; this inertia, this absence was part of her beauty, and, as a great connoisseur of this beauty, he knew it soon dissipated if too many demands were placed on it. He was a realist, and when he had married this fabulous woman twenty years his junior he had known that she would never desire him as he did her, that she wouldn’t love him straight away, that he would have to win her love in some other way than with his body.

In the first years of their marriage, Christine quickly realised that she had found the right husband. Ramas was the man who would give her the life she’d always wanted to live, the life she felt she was made for. She had stopped giving him the brush-off when he thrust his hand under her long nightdress, stopped ignoring him when he whispered sweet nothings in her ear, stopped regarding him with irritation when, excited and flushed, he covered her in kisses, worshipping her. These days she even, occasionally, slid one of her feet from her side of the bed to his. She no longer found it embarrassing to see him naked, and some mornings she even flashed him a conspiratorial smile. And he had thought himself the luckiest man in the world.

Until that New Year’s Eve, after which his official trips began to pile up; until the evening when he found a theatre ticket in the wastebasket, with a note on the back written in an all too familiar scrawl: I’m crazy about you.

Then Ramas Iosebidze’s world collapsed, and his dream crumbled into ashes. The swansong began with pathos and grandeur, accompanied by a Greek chorus. Ramas lived large, in every sense. And so his unhappiness was created from the rib of life: bloody, painful, and ugly. The rib violently torn from Ramas Iosebidze’s life, dreams, and hopes. Just as he knew he should never have left her alone with him, should never have underestimated him and overestimated her, should never have relied on her to be strong enough, he also knew he would never be able to forgive her. He had raised her up to such heights of admiration and adoration that the fall from that Olympus would be correspondingly extreme.

He couldn’t change the fact that he still loved and desired her, and that made him detest her all the more. He convinced himself that he had hoped for salvation and searched for a solution. He wished she had at least given herself to a young king, someone equal to her presence, her radiance — but the reality was much crueller.

Life had given a free hand to death. To the many skilful executioners.

*

Stasia had long since stopped begging her sister not to get into the black Bugatti. She had come to terms with lying to her brother-in-law, participating in the whole masquerade, even warning the children not to say anything about Aunt Christine’s outings. She had reconciled herself with arranging for the plump cook and the pale maid to be absent whenever Christine went out. She had tacitly signed this pact because she was afraid — yes, indeed she was. She was afraid for Andro, frightened that someone might take him from her. She was afraid for her husband, even if he seemed to be doing well and regularly sent money for his children. And most of all she was afraid for her little sister.

Christine always came back. She never stayed away longer than three hours. Stasia had never spoken to her about how she felt, or what it was like for her to get into that car wearing those elegant outfits. About how it could be that Christine actually seemed to be flourishing, becoming more beautiful, more spirited, more aloof. About how it could be that Stasia never saw her little sister shed a tear, never heard her complain. Because the thing she was most afraid of was a question, which she would have to ask loudly and bluntly: ‘Did you enjoy it?’

‘You have to stop it happening,’ Stasia said once again, in a soft voice. She was sipping a glass of her cherry liqueur and looking out at the garden, which had been left to its own devices and was running riot.

‘I’m doing my best, I hope you know that. I have been for months now. But I’m not all-powerful. I’m just one of many.’

‘You’re the favourite.’

‘The favourite. Oh, nicely put, thank you.’

How do you feel in the arms of this man? Who is he and who are you? Who am I, if I can’t save what I love? What kind of person am I, what kind of woman, what kind of mother? Why does this life feel as if we’ve all taken a vow of silence? What happened to our childhood? Why does the lilac only blossom for such a short while? Have you seen the cherry tree? I think we need to do something: it isn’t really thriving any more. Where is Ramas, what does he think? What will happen if no one protests against all these prohibitions, these rules? What are these propaganda posters doing all over the streets? Why do I still feel, at the age of thirty-six, as if I still have to learn everything, as if nothing comes naturally to me? Why don’t birds drop out of the sky when they die? Can you not die with outstretched wings? Do you believe in miracles? Where is Sopio? How is she surviving? What’s she being forced to do? I left her all alone. I didn’t understand her. I’ve never felt such a sense of belonging as I did with her. Nothing must happen to her — nothing more than has happened already. I’m longing for our hot chocolate, are you? Maybe I should visit Father. Lida wants to enter a convent, forever, did you hear? Father wrote. I hardly miss my husband at all, isn’t that strange? I’m worried about Kitty. She’s too quick-tempered for the times we live in. I’ve been feeling so unbearably tired lately. I wonder why; I do so little. I’m no good for anything. You truly are beautiful. I think it every time I see you. Even your eyebrows, your tongue, the hair on your arms, even your feet and the veins that shimmer through your skin are shapely and beautiful. My son idolises you. I believe things are easier when one is as beautiful as you are. You never have to do much to arouse others’ curiosity. And your husband really loves you, I think it every time I see you together. I respect him, he’s a clever man. We should change the tablecloth, it’s stained.

All this Stasia would have liked to say to her sister; all this went through her mind. Instead, she just said, ‘I’m going out for some fresh air.’

Islands of powerlessness formed. Clouds gathered, the sky lacked lustre and took on the colour of a chameleon. The willow on the riverbank bent lower and caressed the earth to comfort it: worse was to come, and Nature had to arm itself.

Little wrinkles formed in the city’s potholes, in the rainwater, green and dull. Screams formed in people’s throats, and had to be swallowed down like bitter medicine.

Grey shadows formed on the walls, the ghosts whispered hoarsely; no one heard anything. For years to come, the words would go on dissolving in people’s mouths. For years to come, the streets would reek of ridiculous despair, undignified and treacherous.

Armies of restless insects formed in the gutters and the dusty corners of houses. They hissed and tore their wings to shreds in an effort to be heard, but no one noticed.

Blotches formed on people’s faces from all the suppressed desires, from all the dreams that had been driven away.

*

At the dawn of the ‘great purge’ of 1935, the year that saw the grand opening of the legendary Moscow Metro, Sopio Eristavi was deported to a labour camp. They said she had been banished to Central Asia. Months would pass before, thanks to Christine’s help, Stasia discovered that she had been taken to an NKVD colony with the simple abbreviation SasLag, in the Uzbek SSR. The camp focused on agricultural labour, and Sopio Eristavi had been assigned to cotton processing.

It was only after several miserable trips to the militsiya, with much begging, queuing, and humiliation, that Stasia was able to send her friend a long letter and a parcel containing provisions, photos of the children, a skirt she herself had made — would Sopio even be able to wear it there? — postcards from Kitty and Kostya, and a heart-rending letter from Andro.