I prayed that my son would be a good student

and would grow up to be an independent man!

EKATERINE DZHUGASHVILI, THE GENERALISSIMUS’ MOTHER

Andro had graduated from the local school with average grades. With the future of the country so uncertain, he was advised to learn a proper trade, and was apprenticed to an Armenian carpenter. His carvings were already laying siege to every room in the house. The young journeyman carpenter pursued his apprenticeship with the same disciplined indifference as his schoolwork, and, slowly, began to understand that his mother wasn’t coming back.

Andro hadn’t wanted to see the truth; he had been too afraid. He dreamed of his mother incessantly. He searched for her in his sleep; in his dreams, she seemed relaxed and free, but when he enquired as to her whereabouts, she only gave him a loving smile. When he woke, he was always overwhelmed with hysterical excitement and would spend long minutes in the bathroom trying to calm down. Yes: he was afraid of the moment when any further hope would prove futile. Sometimes, without warning, a fit of fury would seize him and he would start smashing his wooden figures, because something about their naivety, their sweetness, made him incandescent with rage. He would take his tools and batter their heads and limbs to pieces, gouge out their eyes. The only things that remained unchanged were Kitty and his absolute trust in her. He knew that however angry, however sad, however desperate he might feel, she would make him laugh, play her games with him, clasp him in her strong arms so tightly he couldn’t breathe. Kitty gave him the confidence that better times were coming soon, that they would leave this place and start a new, different life. She was so full of life, so full of energy, and he relied on her sharing this energy with him. Above all, she was so fearless. Things she was forbidden to do, she did anyway. Things she was scolded for, she practised with even greater conviction, and this obstinacy fascinated him. Kitty gave him the impetus he needed to outwit his dismal reality.

They were ridiculous games, utterly pointless and childish, but he went along with them all: if she decided to hide from him all day long until he found her, or they had to rescue three homeless kittens from a ditch, or the game was a race, or to see who could gobble their bread and jam the fastest — Andro went along with it because they were the only moments of fun and freedom in their daily life, between Christine’s recuperation and the chocolate-maker’s slow decline. Between the hot Tbilisi summers and the cold winters in the little town.

Sadness lay over them both, and the moody petulance of puberty was already apparent. Their love became more than platonic. Despite this, they remained bound to each other: to each other, and their childhood.

And while the German army was marching into the Netherlands and on to Belgium and Luxembourg, and my grandfather was graduating from the Naval Academy with a gold medal, and Giorgi Alania was preparing for his shipbuilding exams, Andro was staring at his future with empty eyes. It held so little that he could look forward to.

*

On that mild June day when Italy joined the war on the German side, four days before the 18th Army of the Wehrmacht took Paris, Christine started to speak again, and Ida came to look for my grandfather in his room at the boarding house for the first time — the first and last time she saw him outside her little plant-filled apartment.

She pretended to be a relative of Comrade Jashi, ascended to the second floor of the boarding house, and knocked on Kostya and Giorgi’s door. My grandfather was just getting ready for the graduation parade in honour of the Soviet Navy, and when he flung open the door and found himself face to face with his lover, he froze.

‘What are you doing here?’ stammered Kostya, quickly pulling her into his room.

‘I had to see you. I had to see you just once by daylight. Your skin, your eyes, your lips, without that wretched bedside light, the gloom. Because I want to remember you the way you are now: bright.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m leaving. And I want to leave before you. I don’t want to be left. Let me have that pleasure. Let me leave you, Konstantin.’

‘I don’t understand you.’

‘We have to stop this. You’ll soon be going to join the fleet, and I won’t be able to manage without you. I’m already far too dependent on the hours you find for me, and they’re getting fewer and farther between, shorter and shorter. I won’t manage, Konstantin.’

‘Yes, they’ve given me a special award, I’ll probably even —’ Kostya broke off, only now understanding what Ida had said.

‘You’re too good for war.’

‘But we’re not at war — and if it comes to that, I’m more than ready, believe me. I’ll be able to sink ships like little stones! Pow, pow, pow!’

‘You’re happy because your ignorance protects you from yourself and from what lies ahead of you, and from missing me, but it will come, this realisation; it usually comes at a very inopportune time, my dear Konstantin, and I don’t want it to tear you apart, I don’t want it to change you; you have to promise me that, all right? All right? Will you do that?’

‘Ida, what are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere; I’m here, and even if I do go to sea, I’ll come back again. Listen, my parents —’

‘I can’t — forgive me, and grant me this prerogative. Please.’

‘The prerogative to do what? You’re not going anywhere. You’ve fallen prey to gloomy thoughts again. You should distract yourself more, get out of the apartment more often.’

‘And now I want you to sleep with me.’

‘What?’

‘Let’s go to bed.’

‘But it’s not night-time, and besides —’

Ida started to laugh. She seldom laughed, but when she did her whole body shook. She wiped tears from her eyes, bent double, slapped her knees and thighs with her hands. Kostya watched her; he couldn’t help admitting to himself how much he admired her, how desirable she was. He felt both fear and excitement rise up in his body. He went to her, put his hand over her mouth; she bit it gently, which aroused him even more; he pressed harder, still hesitant because of her presence in this, his world, where she did not belong. He put his arms around her, lifted her slightly off the ground; she defended herself, still laughing; he pushed her against the wall, grew bolder, more impatient, she should stop laughing, he didn’t like the thought that she might even be laughing at him. He narrowed his eyes and looked at her; her eyes were so dark that he assumed she must see everything around her through a kind of black filter. He thrust his forefinger between her teeth. She bit down again. Suddenly she fell abruptly silent, as if a terrible thought had cut off her laughter for ever; she grabbed his thick hair, pulled his head towards her, and, for a moment, breathed calmly and evenly, as if inhaling his scent. He kissed her.

It was so easy, as soon as she was near him, to forget that anything else existed. It was so easy, as soon as she touched him, to shake off all thoughts of the outside world. In moments like these, he was sure he had absolutely no need of it. The whole Soviet fleet, the parades, his roaring fellow students, his impressive achievements, his plans for the future, were so effortlessly swept aside by her mere presence, so effortlessly replaced. As if the world without Ida were just an illusion.

He pushed up her calf-length skirt. Pressed even harder against her warm, sinewy body. They were almost the same height; he looked her right in the eyes, which alarmed him a little because they seemed so feverish, even darker than usual. He tried to open the buttons on her grey blouse with his teeth, and, when he didn’t succeed, he bit two of them off. The familiar smile spread across her face. As if she understood both his weaknesses and her strength; as if they were mutually dependent. She whispered something, her lips formed words, but he couldn’t hear them any more; he was intoxicated by her smell, by her dangerous proximity, by the possibility that someone might catch them. Perhaps he even longed for it; perhaps he wanted someone to come across the two of them here, frozen in a tableau that left no room for interpretation, frozen in their clandestine love. So that he would finally be able to take a deep breath and shout at the top of his voice: Yes, this is her, the woman I carry with me in every thought, every fibre of my body, who is so beautiful it pains me, because she is unsaveable, because I know I can’t save her, not from herself and not from the world, either. The woman who taught me to forget, and to feel, with hands and eyes and the hollows of the knees and the ankles and the tip of the nose and the earlobes. This is how I want it — this is exactly how I want it!

Perhaps that’s exactly what Kostya wanted. Perhaps.

She kissed his neck and held his head firmly; the pressure grew firmer and firmer, his ears were closed, he could hear nothing, she was sealing him off from something, from what was to come, perhaps, as if she were his oracle, his portent, his Cassandra, condemned to know the future without a single person to believe her.

Kostya crooked her leg and she adjusted to him, made herself small and round, made it easy for him to love her, even here, even now, pressed up against this cold wall. She could not do otherwise; perhaps there was nothing she could do but follow her destiny, and her destiny was simply to be a fateful, unique, unrepeatable experience for him. But perhaps, too, she knew very well that this man, this moment, this sad, almost furious proximity was the last happiness to which she was entitled, and she seized it with animal strength.

I don’t know, Brilka, and I’ll never know for sure. But what does that matter?

*

Gasping, he buried his face in her neck. He felt her hand gripping his head, felt something brutal, terrible in her grasp; it frightened him, but his lust enabled him to contain his fear, to not think about it. Suddenly his heart leapt: there was a knock at the door. Kostya froze, forgetting even to breathe. Ida did not let go.

‘Yes?’ he called, carefully clearing his throat in an effort to conceal the excitement in his voice.

‘Hey, Krasavchik, hurry up, we have to go — the boys are already waiting downstairs!’

‘I’m coming!’ Kostya answered, with considerable effort.

‘No, stay here, please stay with me!’ Ida begged him.

‘I can’t — I have to go. It’s our graduation parade and we’ve been practising for it for weeks. I … I’ll come to you tonight. I’ll come as soon as the parade is over, and we’ll talk about everything.’

‘Don’t leave me behind like this, please don’t — no, don’t stop!’ Ida clung to his shoulders, pressed her head against his chin, caressed him with her skin. But he pulled away from her, intoxicated, swaying, his desire still unsatisfied. He staggered to the bed and started hastily putting on his shirt.

Slowly Ida pushed down her petticoat, then her skirt, and turned her back to him. She laid her face against the wall, pressing her forehead into it as if trying to break through it, as if she knew of a way out, a secret way through the wall into another world.

‘I really do have to go. My father will be there, too, and … I’ll come tonight, Ida. I’ll come, and I’ll stay as long as you want, all right? And we’ll talk about everything you want to talk about. You can tell me everything that’s troubling you.’

For a while she didn’t move, and he didn’t know what was going on; whether she was crying, or cursing him, if she were wishing herself invisible, if she regretted coming. Then she turned and looked at him. She was smiling. Her hair was dishevelled; her bun had come loose and a few long, dark strands hung in her face, and once again Kostya was on the point of tearing off his uniform and rushing to her, taking her in his arms, and locking the door — but her smile reassured him: things weren’t so bad, and, after all, he would come to her soon.

‘It’s all right, Konstantin, my beautiful, beautiful boy. Look after yourself.’

‘Hey, I’m not a boy any more, remember that!’ He gave her a hasty kiss on the lips and dashed from the room.

*

During the military parade, Kostya was overcome by excruciating fear. He saw his father standing on the pavement, waving to him, but all of a sudden this sight no longer meant anything to him. He walked in step with the other sailors, shouting the slogans they had learned by heart, and tried to adopt a reverent expression as the cannons were fired into the Gulf of Finland. But in his breast all he felt was a fear that seemed to clench all his internal organs.

As soon as the parade was over, he ran. He ran until he could run no more, he stopped and sat down in the middle of the street, caught his breath, ran on, flew up the steps, stopped outside her apartment, gasped for air, and hammered on the door — but no one opened.

He went back downstairs, out onto the street, and looked up at the third floor, but no lights were on.

He went up again, knocked and knocked, screamed, shouted for her.

For three days and nights he returned again and again, until finally a neighbour told him that the lady had gone away, he had seen her leave the house with two suitcases but didn’t know where she had gone; she hadn’t been a very talkative neighbour.

Later, Brilka, I learned that Ida hadn’t gone anywhere; that she had slipped her neighbour a few roubles, asked him to tell a white lie, and that all those days and nights she was standing behind her locked door, holding her mouth shut to prevent her voice and her longing from betraying her, while my grandfather hammered on the door and called her name, no longer able to make sense of the world around him.

*

The National Socialists owed their swift and stupendous success at the start of the Second World War in part to the friendly neutrality of the USSR. The Generalissimus supported Hitler not only with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact; he also facilitated German import and export shipments across Soviet territory. So the occupation of Bessarabia and Bukovina in northeastern Romania by the Reds in 1940 came as a surprise to the National Socialists. To stop the Generalissimus getting the idea that he could advance any further, Hitler stationed Wehrmacht troops in Romania as well. In July, at a meeting of the High Command at the Berghof — Hitler’s little piece of paradise — a certain unease was apparent as soon as the discussion turned to the Soviet Union. According to General Halder’s notes, Hitler spoke in favour of launching ‘Operation Draft East’ earlier than planned. In November, Molotov travelled to Berlin again, but this time the negotiations were unsuccessful: no further agreement was possible on territorial division. Hitler began to find the Generalissimus’ demands too outrageous: he had laid claim to Finland, Bulgaria, Turkey, and numerous other territories from the southern Caucasus to the Persian Gulf. On 18 December 1940, Hitler authorised the plan for ‘Operation Barbarossa’, and set 15 May 1941 as the date for its commencement. By the spring of 1941, there were only five neutral countries left in Europe: Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain, and Turkey.

The war in the Balkans forced Hitler to postpone Barbarossa by a few weeks. The Soviet foreign intelligence service informed the Generalissimus of Hitler’s plans, but our Great Leader deemed them an intrigue, an invention of the British secret service. He laughed at the warnings, saying that the people making such claims had ‘brains as small as my thumb’.

The Generalissimus could not conceive of the possibility of a war with Hitler’s Germany. The Soviet Union had adhered strictly to the trade agreement: in the first two years of the war, it had supplied Germany with tons of wheat, oil, and steel. At this point in time, there were almost five million people in the Red Army. Its equipment was inferior to the Germans’, not to mention its organisation: the Generalissimus had had almost all the renowned army generals and officers arrested or shot some years earlier. But Hitler and his entourage, emboldened by the recent successes of the Blitzkrieg, were planning the swift subjugation of the Soviet Union. What Hitler didn’t know was that the terror and misery the Wehrmacht planned to bring with its invasion were already part of everyday life in the USSR. That the Soviet horror of recent years had prepared the people all too well for the horror Hitler planned to inflict on their country.