We thank our leader for our happy childhood!

POSTER SLOGAN

Kostya came to Leningrad (previously Petrograd, the former St. Petersburg) to train as a sailor at the Frunze Higher Naval School.

It was in an old building on beautiful Vasilievsky Island, right on the Neva. The training centre had recently been awarded the Order of the Red Banner on account of its discipline and exemplary character. Kostya had come to what was possibly the most European city in the East, built, in the competition for western appreciation, by forced labourers and prisoners, who all too frequently paid for this beauty with their lives (the gilding of the twenty-six-metre-high dome of St. Isaac’s Cathedral alone resulted in eighty dead). The white city. With its proud Neva, the islands and bridges, and the beautiful black cats and undaunted ravens that — majestic, complacent — permitted anyone to feed them. The dark, interconnected interior courtyards; the secret passages. A city with the raffinesse of a French bride and the grandezza of an Italian widow.

But Leningrad was, above all, the epicentre of communist ideology. This was where the Aurora had fired the first shot and the imperial palace had been stormed; this was where Lenin had arrived, as if by a miracle, at the Finland Station, to save the country. This was where the Party bigwigs had started out. This was where a new calendar had begun!

Already, as his train pulled in to Moscow Station, Kostya’s breast was filled with pride and awe. For him, it was an honour to be here, at the heart of Communism, following in his father’s footsteps.

He thought it very laudable that his father lived in such a modest abode, a tiny apartment on Petrogradsky Island, in a classical, nineteenth-century house that had been converted into kommunalkas and allocated to soldiers and their families. None of the splendour and luxury he was familiar with from his aunt’s house; no superfluous items, no wasted labour.

He could have burst with pride when his father took him out and showed him the city, even allowing him a glass of vodka with some of his colleagues. Kostya was sure he would soon give his father plenty of reasons to be proud of him. He would demonstrate to him how upright he was, how hardworking, how disciplined, and how faithfully he served his country.

And then his happiness on seeing all the ships. At last, he had escaped the fetid, oriental seclusion of the Caucasus and was here at the heart of world affairs. Even his tiny room at the boarding house filled him with childish delight. The plain wooden bed, the old woollen blanket, the little table, the musty wardrobe — this was all he would need in the coming years. And he would make friends, kindred spirits who shared his passion for the Navy.

*

His first minor disappointment came on the very first day of training, when he discovered that his roommate was by no means a genteel Leningrad native, but a small, slight, rather unprepossessing Georgian with thin hair and overly narrow shoulders. He spoke with a southern Georgian accent, which softened all his words and which Kostya thought sounded smarmy. Giorgi Alania, as the boy was called, seemed insecure and overawed, and didn’t correspond in the slightest to Kostya’s image of the ideal roommate.

Kostya complained to his father, asking him whether it was customary in Russia to allocate roommates according to nationality. His father laughed and said no, it was just a coincidence: he should be pleased that he still had an opportunity to speak his mother tongue. However, what with the strict drill at the traditional academy, the onset of the northern winter, and Kostya’s pathological desire to be the best and to prove it to the world, he quickly forgot this initial disappointment.

He rose at six in the morning, did callisthenic exercises in his room, had breakfast in the canteen, attended his courses, then went to the academy library and read up on engineering so that he could show off his knowledge in class and gain favour with the teachers. He was eagerly looking forward to the first training exercises in the Gulf of Finland because he was a practical sort of man and knew he would come out of them looking good.

Soon, most people were calling him ‘Krasavchik’ — ‘Mr Handsome’ — and even the older students started seeking his company. He was said to be a ‘real man’, as good at drinking as he was at studying.

Yet the harder Kostya tried to win his father’s affection, the busier and more dismissive the latter seemed. Simon Jashi’s slack posture, constant tiredness, pallid skin, and his restless, wandering eyes spurred Kostya on to ever greater boldness, daring, and accomplishments. For so many years, he had preserved the statue of his heroic father in his imagination; he wasn’t prepared to drag it down from its pedestal so soon. The more assignments he was given, the more energetic he became. The more strenuous the training manoeuvres and sporting activities, the more enthusiastic he was. He never complained about the teachers’ severity, never longed for the weekend or the holidays. And at the same time, he never missed any of the gatherings in the various rooms of the boarding house or the kommunalkas. He drank, he sang, he was always the first to raise his glass. This soon earned him a reputation for indestructibility, and the respect of his fellow students.

Giorgi Alania was the exact opposite. A loner, he was always buried in his books. His comrades didn’t invite him to the gatherings; they never saw him drink or swear, never heard him make lewd jokes. He clearly struggled to meet the Academy’s high standards in the physical disciplines, but in the theoretical subjects — mathematics above all — his performance was remarkable. Soon, people were casting envious glances in his direction and calling him a swot behind his back.

Alania’s fellow students only approached him when they needed his assistance with their exams. He was happy to help, and did so without protest, but it never occurred to anyone to invite him to the weekly drinking sessions in return. Kostya, too, steadfastly ignored him at first. Their conversation never went further than an exchange of banalities. Sometimes they lent each other books or read Pravda together, but that was all. The only classes they both attended were the mandatory ones; Alania had decided early on to study shipbuilding, and that suited Kostya just fine.

On this particular evening, though, when Kostya put down the book he was reading, he observed Alania more closely; he was finding it hard to concentrate, and was looking for some distraction. Alania was in the middle of peeling a cucumber, so meticulously that Kostya was impressed. As if the cucumber were a bomb that required defusing.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Kostya, curious. He generally addressed Alania in Russian.

‘My mother sent me a parcel with all kinds of treats in it. I bought cucumbers too, to complete the meal. And you’re most welcome to share it with me, if you like,’ he answered in his soft Georgian.

Indeed, Kostya’s mouth began to water when he saw Alania laying the little table. A constant diet of black bread, groats, and fat-free borscht was too meagre for his stomach, and although he might not have wanted to admit it, he missed the sumptuous meals he had enjoyed at home.

Alania prepared the food with great care and attention: he sliced the bread, put the spicy adjika in little bowls — God knows where he’d found them — cut the smoked cheese into thin slices, patiently stirred the cucumber salad in the bowl, arranged pickled garlic on a plate, and uncorked a bottle of Saperavi.

At the sight of this lavish meal, Kostya’s reserve evaporated. Quickly recalling Georgian dining tradition, he proposed a hearty toast to the dinner. The wine loosened their tongues, and Alania told him about his childhood in a small village, Machara, on the Black Sea. He was an only child, which was most unusual in that region. He spoke very highly and with the greatest respect of his mother, a teacher in the local village school. He did not, however, mention a father.

Kostya wondered how, as an ordinary village boy, Alania had managed to get into the Frunze Academy in Leningrad. He soon decided that Alania must be one of the token students from the kolkhoz that almost all the educational institutions were required to take. Alania’s knowledge of natural sciences and mathematics was very impressive, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that a headmaster or a kolkhoz representative had recommended him. By the early hours of the morning, they were already singing the Georgian song ‘Suliko’ together and slapping each other on the back.

Kostya became Giorgi Alania’s only friend, and, although he couldn’t have known it at the time, Alania was to become Kostya’s best friend, and the most loyal.

Because, Brilka, the friendship sealed that evening traces what is perhaps the most interesting and improbable pattern in our carpet. By the end you’ll agree with me that, without Alania, parts of our story would never have come together; that, without him, I might not be able to tell this story this way.

*

In 1922, before Alania came into this world, the first official constitution of Soviet Georgia was accepted. That year saw the start of the agricultural reforms, collectivisation, and kolkhozation. But it seemed that none of this could prevent a schoolgirl of barely seventeen from graduating from her village school with a gold medal and looking forward to her future. In her case, this future showed tantalising promise: as the best student in her class, she had a good chance of gaining a university place — and that was a very big deal for a girl from one of the remotest villages on the Black Sea coast.

Her family were less than delighted by this prospect. A girl was supposed to get married — she was quite good-looking, there would have been a number of interested parties — and for that, in this rural region, a woman didn’t need to be able to do more than read and write and add a few roubles together. And be good to her husband and not work-shy, because there was work aplenty in the tea plantations round about.

But Gulo, their ‘little sweetheart’, wanted nothing to do with all that. She explained to her parents, who had had only three and five years of schooling respectively, that the tea plantations were not for her; she was interested in higher mathematics, and there were far more exciting challenges in the world than mucking out cowsheds or picking tea. Besides, she had two older sisters, both of whom had been married for some time and shared the responsibility for the farm and the next generation; and there was her brother, who would inherit everything anyway and was already following in her father’s footsteps. So they needn’t have any concerns about releasing her from the clutches of the family.

Her mother complained about her ungrateful child; her father painted grisly pictures for her of what he believed went on in the cities: murder, rape, exploitation. But Gulo, or Guliko, as she was usually called, just kept shaking her head and repeating over and over again that she would take her father’s hunting rifle and put a bullet through her brain that instant rather than marry some village idiot and die a lingering death out here in the back of beyond.

It was only when Gulo’s teachers, convinced of her academic promise, went so far as to pay her father a visit to urge him to allow Gulo to go to university that her parents finally admitted defeat.

The very next month, Gulo became the first woman in the history of the university to be offered a place at the Faculty of Mathematics in Kutaisi. If she successfully completed the four years in Kutaisi, she could then, with top marks and a diploma, apply to the Institute of Astrophysics in Moscow. Astrophysics was her ultimate goal: she dreamed of a career in research. She had no doubts — nothing else stood in the way of her dreams, and she would give everything she had to achieve her aim; of this she was firmly convinced.

The only thing that, to everyone’s astonishment, Gulo considered a disadvantage was her outward appearance. Her unusually pretty face, her flawless skin, her large eyes the colour of an autumn lake, her marvellous head of hair, and her strong, tall, curvaceous figure didn’t really seem appropriate for a girl with a passionate interest in physics and mathematics.

And indeed, had her striking appearance not got in the way, her life after that summer would have been a very different one. Perhaps it really would have gone according to her plan.

A month after the final school examinations, Gulo’s class teacher invited her on a trip. As the top graduate in her year, she had the honour of spending a week in the oil town of Baku, along with other girls from the region who had similarly distinguished themselves. The trip was financed by the Transcaucasian Federation and was intended to promote understanding between the peoples of the Caucasus.

For Gulo, who had only ever left her village once, on a school trip to Sokhumi, it was a very welcome opportunity. Baku was an expanding metropolis; the financial aristocracy, the Rothschilds and the Nobels, had changed the face of the city, and Gulo was happy to have the chance to absorb some of its big-city atmosphere before beginning her studies. She wanted to be able to hold her own with her future fellow students; she didn’t want to look like a country girl.

The first few days were marvellous. Gulo was impressed by Baku — the colourful oriental markets and the friendliness of the people — and it didn’t even seem to bother her when men ogled her on the street. She enjoyed the strong tea, the honey-drenched baklava, and the bustle of city life with its trams and horse-drawn carriages.

She felt like an adult: it was her first taste of the sort of freedom that awaited her in Kutaisi, and it filled her with euphoric happiness.

The girls stayed in a communist youth hostel, where they all shared one big dormitory. It was hot and dusty, and the nights were long. Full of new impressions, they chatted in whispers throughout the night, talking about their new lives that would begin at the end of the summer.

On the fourth day of their visit, they attended a public event organised by the local Communist Party. Their teacher, a staunch communist, believed it would do the girls no harm to think about ways to improve living conditions for the working classes — the subject of the event — and urged her protégées to go with her to the National Library. The room was packed; the audience listened with great reverence to three men who spoke one after the other, tediously and at length, in heavily Caucasian-accented Russian, about the measures that must now be taken to improve working conditions in the kolkhoz.

The teacher went on clapping enthusiastically long after the obligatory applause had subsided, then dashed over to one of the men as he was heading for the exit, practically dragging Gulo along behind her. The man with the glasses was Georgian, the teacher explained, and he must be important if he was permitted to give a speech here. They had to seize the opportunity and make his acquaintance.

The teacher introduced herself and her group of girls, and enthused about what the man had said and the suggestions he had made. He listened to her patiently, nodding thoughtfully a few times, and as he was about to shake her hand and excuse himself his eyes fell on Gulo, who was standing mutely at her side. Suddenly, he switched from Russian to Georgian and asked which village they had come from. The teacher, delighted by his unexpected interest, started gushing like a waterfall. They were from a small village, not worth mentioning, she said, Machara; their trip was to promote understanding between peoples, and she and the girls were extremely pleased to have had the honour of hearing his lecture.

He himself came from Merkheuli, a nearby village — what a funny coincidence! — the man cried, and added that this absolutely must be celebrated. The ladies had undertaken such a long journey and should therefore be entertained appropriately, to seal this friendship between peoples. There were a few restaurants here, he said, that served excellent lamb cooked in all manner of ways, and delicious desserts — the girls liked sweet things, didn’t they? All girls like sweet things!

Barely able to contain her enthusiasm, the teacher summoned the girls, and after the little man had consulted his colleagues, they made their way to the exit, accompanied by two Red Army soldiers. The group was split up into three carriages and driven to a restaurant on the promenade, overlooking the sea.

The girls were overwhelmed to find themselves the object of so much male attention. They didn’t know how they were supposed to behave, and kept glancing across at their teacher, whose rapture now knew no bounds; she seemed just as overwhelmed as her wards.

Sweet wine was brought to the table, and although for a while the teacher protested and forbade the girls to taste it, their glasses were eventually all filled to the brim. A brass band was soon summoned and the mood grew increasingly jolly and relaxed. Bit by bit, the girls lost their inhibitions, and soon some of them were dancing with the inebriated Red Army soldiers.

Gulo remained sceptical. The leader of the group was paying her far too much attention. He had sat down beside her and kept pouring her more wine; he entertained her with anecdotes and paid her compliments. The teacher didn’t see the man put his arm around Gulo and brush his knee against hers.

It got late, and although the teacher kept saying that they had to leave, the bespectacled man ignored her protests and ordered more bottles of wine. One of the girls threw up in the toilet. Another fell asleep with her head on the table.

Eventually the carriages were brought round and they split into three groups again. The gentlemen insisted on driving the ladies back to the youth hostel. Gulo had no choice. Relieved, she climbed into one of the carriages in the hope that the evening was now over, but the man got in and sat down beside her. One of the girls didn’t have a seat, and Gulo called out to her: on no account did she want to be alone with this man. Nelly, as the other girl was called, was of a cheerful disposition; she had been dancing a lot and laughing very loudly. Gulo knew her from the village; she was the daughter of the village commissar, and always wore strikingly beautiful clothes that emphasised her generous bosom.

Nelly wasn’t nearly as stupid as Gulo had originally thought, but that evening she had clearly drunk much more wine than was good for her, and had to be lifted into the carriage by one of the Red Army soldiers as she could hardly stand. The soldier went to sit up front with the coachman and they set off.

Initially, they drove along behind the other carriages, and after a few minutes Gulo’s unease lessened. Soon they would be at the youth hostel; soon it would be over. But when their carriage suddenly turned right while the other two carried straight on, Gulo felt herself starting to panic.

The bespectacled man assured her that there was no need to worry, they were just making a small detour, he had something to attend to en route. Nelly laughed stupidly again and laid her heavy head on Gulo’s shoulder.

Eventually the carriage stopped in a dark alleyway and the girls were asked to get out. Gulo could hear her heart hammering. Nelly began to whimper; Gulo took her by the hand, trying not to betray her fear. They were invited into an interior courtyard. The man was talking at her non-stop: everything was absolutely fine, no need to be afraid, they were just taking a little break, and Nelly could go to the bathroom and freshen up.

Gulo helped Nelly up the spiral staircase to a wooden gallery. From there, they passed into a small apartment with low ceilings and lots of tapestries. As if by magic, the Red Army soldier produced a basket of fruit, and the bespectacled man offered Gulo lemonade, which she politely declined. The apartment was dark; the men had lit two candles, but the silence all around only served to heighten Gulo’s fear. The gentlemen laughed and tried to revive the jolly atmosphere from the restaurant, telling jokes and paying the two girls more compliments.

Gulo excused herself, took Nelly’s arm, and dragged her into the little bathroom, which had a bidet and a washbowl. Nelly didn’t really understand where she was, and was slurring incoherently. Gulo took some water from the bowl and threw it in Nelly’s face. Nelly screamed and pushed her away with both hands, but Gulo grabbed her wrists, brought her face up close to Nelly’s, and compelled her to look her in the eyes.

‘Listen to me. We’ve got to get out of here. You have to wash your face and try to sober up. Do you hear me? We’ve got to get out of here. The door’s right here, at the end of the corridor, and it’s not locked. There’s only a chain. You just have to pull yourself together and be absolutely quiet. Do you understand?’

‘I feel sick!’

Gulo threw more water in her face. Nelly stopped resisting.

‘Do you understand?’ Gulo repeated. This time Nelly nodded hard and wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her dress.

A few steps and they would be outside. Gulo held her breath. She pushed the chain aside and opened the door, slowly, carefully, as soundlessly as possible. She turned to Nelly and placed her forefinger on her lips, then let her go on ahead.

And that was when it happened. Nelly stumbled and fell, crashing flat onto the floor. For a split second Gulo considered stepping over Nelly and running down the spiral staircase; not looking back, running out, away from these men, away from their mocking laughter. But she couldn’t do it. She saw the girl lying on the floor, pathetic, feeble, drunk, stupefied. And although she didn’t know exactly what staying would mean, she did know that if she ran away she still would not escape. And she stopped, and closed the door, even as she heard the men coming down the corridor.

He bore down hard on her on the old sofa, which kept sagging more and more beneath the weight of their bodies. She focused on the whimpering coming from Nelly in the corridor. She heard the panting above her, and the same words, over and over again: ‘You’re so beautiful — so beautiful!’

With one hand gripping the arm of the sofa, she struggled not to turn her head so she wouldn’t have to look at him. She closed her eyes and tried to erase the image from her mind: the image of Nelly in the corridor, lying on the floor like a lifeless doll, legs spread, and the Red Army soldier kneeling in front of her, pulling her thighs towards him with increasing force, lifting her pelvis, driving himself into her.

She tried to think about Kutaisi, about the day she would pack her bags; she tried to think about her home, the farm, her sisters, the school; she even tried to think about the cattle, the cows and the pigs, the oilrigs off Baku, the green countryside she had seen from the train; she tried not to think about the pain in her abdomen, not to breathe in the smell of the bespectacled man above her, not to scream out her despair and disgust; she wanted not to hear Nelly’s terrible whimpering and her heartbreaking cries for help.

When the two of them were dropped off outside the youth hostel at dawn, nothing was the same as before. Yet their bodies betrayed nothing of what had happened to them. No traces of blood, no ripped clothes, no bruises.

When they got into bed, everyone was still asleep.

Why hadn’t they looked for them? Why hadn’t they fetched help? Why?

At breakfast, the teacher gave a speech about the importance of yesterday’s meeting. No one asked what time the two girls had been brought back to the hostel. The teacher avoided Gulo’s and Nelly’s eyes, patted them absent-mindedly on the cheek, and didn’t even question them when they both said they were sick and asked to stay at the hostel and be excused from the day’s events.

‘Had a few too many last night, did you?’ one of the girls joked half-heartedly as the rest of the group headed off and Nelly and Gulo remained behind in the canteen.

Afterwards, they returned to the dormitory and lay down on their beds.

‘We should go to the militsiya,’ said Gulo, after staring interminably at the ceiling and listening to the regular breathing of her companion in misfortune.

Nelly just laughed. Her laugh had a scornful edge and made Gulo feel even more wretched and helpless than she did already.

‘Why not?’ asked Gulo.

‘You don’t seriously think they’ll hold them accountable? Them?’

‘Why not?’

‘They’ll stick us in a mental hospital and pump us full of drugs until we believe we invented the whole thing.’

Sober now, no longer whimpering and slurring her words, Nelly seemed almost too grown-up. Her tone was practically vicious.

‘So what do you suggest?’

‘What do I suggest? We say nothing, go on living our lives, and remain spinsters forever.’

‘But why?’

‘What, you think men are going to be queuing up for us, now that we’re …’

‘But —’

‘Forget it, Gulo. And not a word to anyone — not a word, you swear!’

‘Nelly …’

‘Swear!’

‘I swear.’

Two days later they returned home.

Gulo went to Kutaisi and embarked on her studies. She was staying with an old lady who gave piano lessons and served as a kind of chaperone. One month later, she discovered the reason for her unusual irritability and sentimentality: pregnancy. She knew that this was the end.

As she didn’t have enough money to go to an abortionist, she tried all kinds of herbal concoctions that were said to cause women to miscarry, and when none of them had any effect she climbed up a ladder and jumped off, hoping that this would rid her of her unwanted burden. When nothing happened, she began to have terrible pangs of conscience.

Every night she cried into her pillow, her hands clamped over her mouth so her landlady wouldn’t discover her problem and turn her straight out on the street.

Her work started to suffer. From the very first day, the male students had seen her presence as a kind of insult; now, in light of her shortcomings, they took every opportunity to make this clear.

Gulo cursed the man who was the author of her misfortune; she cursed her gender, her powerlessness; she cursed the heartless people around her from whom she could expect no sympathy.

After three months, she went to her professor and explained the situation. He tugged his goatee, cleared his throat, shook his head, and told her he could see no way of keeping her coveted place at the university open.

‘You see, Comrade Alania, why we are so reluctant to allow women to study here? When it comes down to it, they always have something better to do than apply themselves to mathematics. I thought you were an exception,’ he concluded, affecting an expression of commiseration, ‘but now all this exception does is to prove the rule.’

When she was six months pregnant, Gulo packed her bags and left Kutaisi. She swore to herself that as soon as the child was old enough she would try a second time, that she would apply to every university in the country.

She went back to her hated village.

Endless interrogation followed. Who was the father of the child, Gulo’s father demanded in fury. Was he a fellow countryman, or just some nobody? Was he even a Christian? He must be tracked down and called to account; and so on.

Gulo endured it all with stoicism. After interminable weeks of contempt, tirades of abuse, ostracism, violence, her family abandoned their attempts to discover the identity of the child’s father. Gulo was packed off to her elder sister, who was married to a forestry worker and living an isolated life at the edge of the woods. Gulo was to keep house there while her sister worked on the tea plantation. Away from the village, the villagers were less likely to spread malicious gossip about her.

When her time came, no midwife was called because the family were ashamed of her, and she had to give birth with no outside help, alone in her attic room, reluctantly assisted by her childless sister. This was how Giorgi came into the world.

When Giorgi reached his second birthday, Gulo applied again to every university in the country, but received only letters of rejection. After this, she accepted a post as a maths teacher in the village school. Because there was no one to look after her child, she always took him with her to class. Giorgi could already read, write, and do arithmetic before he formally started school.

She would never have thought it possible, but her love for her son was unburdened by his history, as if he had come into being through immaculate conception and not through rape. She passed on to him all her knowledge and skills; she told him about the things she wished for, and the things she had wanted to discover and explore; she garlanded him with her dreams like a necklace handed down from generation to generation.

When Giorgi was in his seventh year at school, the principal commended him to the science college in Sokhumi. It was during his time there that he fell in love with the sea — the only love he did not share with his mother. He graduated from school at the age of just fifteen, and his teachers and the chairman of the Komsomol, the Communist Union of Youth, made an application for him to attend the Frunze Higher Naval School in Leningrad.

Giorgi first asked who his father was at the age of five. At the age of seven he even threw a temper tantrum about it in front of his mother. At the age of twelve he cried and begged her to tell him. But Gulo always gave him the same answer: ‘I’ll tell you when you’re old enough.’

And so he had no choice but to wait until he reached this eagerly anticipated age. But life had other plans for him, and the wait was to be a very long one.

Many years later, Nelly, the girl Gulo had been unable to walk away from that terrible night, came back to visit her home village, and called on Gulo. After that summer, Nelly had moved to Batumi, the white seaport, and Gulo had heard nothing from her since. She had often thought of her companion in misfortune and hoped that that night had not had the same consequences for Nelly as for her.

Now, all of a sudden, this heavily made-up woman was standing there before her. Gulo focused on her features and tried in vain to find some trace there of the girl from years ago. This was a voluptuous lady in rather vulgar clothes, who had an artificial laugh, smacked her lips, feigned an insincere cheerfulness, and spoke in a voice that was excessively loud and over-articulated.

She had brought Gulo a gold box of chocolates, and sat down in her sparsely furnished living room. She had a ‘marvellous’ life, Nelly proclaimed at the top of her voice. Batumi was a great city, and she lived in a house right on the promenade.

They sat drinking lemonade in Gulo’s cramped, shabby apartment, and Gulo kept trying not to look at her guest. She found it hard to look Nelly — the person she had become — in the eyes. She had so hoped that Nelly at least had made a life for herself; that she had had better luck than Gulo herself had done.

‘Tell me, have you got a drop of wine, or something stronger? I can’t endure this place without alcohol. Really I can’t,’ said Nelly suddenly, and gave that false laugh again.

‘No, I’m afraid not. I don’t drink. I lost the desire to drink a long time ago,’ answered Gulo; and for a fraction of a second the women were silent. Then Nelly spoke again, too loudly.

‘I’m very sorry about what happened to you. It’s a boy, isn’t it?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘You know — the child.’

‘Yes, he’s a wonderful boy. Do you have children?’

At that moment Gulo realised that this strange woman was the only person other than herself who knew the identity of Giorgi’s father. It dawned on her that this accursed secret bound them together forever, like invisible handcuffs, and the realisation made her deeply uneasy.

‘No, no. That’s not for me. Hahaha. I enjoy life far too much, you see. And men — men are very egotistical creatures, too. They demand your full attention.’

There was something in the way she said ‘men’ that made Gulo feel nauseous.

‘Maybe you’ll come and visit me and the two of us can have fun! I have lots of influential friends, believe me!’ said Nelly, rising, as their awkward conversation drew to a close.

A car was waiting outside. Gulo watched as Nelly ran out into the street and a Red Army soldier opened the door for her. For a moment Gulo thought she was having a moment of déjà vu, and screwed her eyes shut. The man slapped Nelly’s bottom lightly, and she feigned an outrage as artificial as her laugh, before getting into the front seat. How young and beautiful and light-hearted she had been back then, thought Gulo; and she closed her eyes again to escape the image that had haunted her for years.

The image of Nelly being put into the carriage by a Red Army soldier. Of how she had lain her heavy head on Gulo’s shoulder, so trusting, so relieved, with absolutely no premonition of what was to follow.

Gulo kept her eyes tight shut to drive away the thought that usually followed this image: the thought of what it felt like to close, with your own hand, a door that would never open again.