he left many heirs

behind on this globe.

I fancy

there’s a telephone in that coffin:

the Generalissimus

sends his instructions.

From that coffin where else does the cable go!

No, he has not given up.

He thinks he can

cheat death.

YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

Kitty sat in Amy’s kitchen hunched over the Evening Standard, which had a photograph of the Little Big Man splashed across the front page. Her body was racked by violent sobs. It was the third year in which she had heard nothing from her family, and her fearful longing had by now already assumed monstrous proportions. However, this was also the day when she admitted to herself that she loved a woman. Following her morning argument with Amy, Fred Lieblich had once again moved out of the house and retired to her studio on the pretext that she was in a productive phase.

Kitty had been avoiding Fred ever since their fateful encounter. Overcome with remorse and horror that she had let herself be seduced by a woman, she started spending more time at the jazz club. She would stay later than usual, sitting at people’s tables after her performance and drinking a lot of whisky. She allowed customers to engage her in conversation, and played the part of the Soviet sensation to the hilt. She played up to people’s fears and projections, and accentuated them with more horrific details. Little by little, she even began to enjoy it. Her imagination spat out ever wilder and more colourful tales of her communist past; scenarios became increasingly exciting and dangerous.

But although she let a few men buy her drinks, give her presents, and persuade her to accompany them to the cinema, and although she even permitted a few kisses on Amy’s doorstep, none of it helped. She had now mastered the English language, but that didn’t make any difference, either: the fact was that she had nothing to say to the people she met, nor did she wish to say anything to them. The only person she longed to hear speak was her anonymous friend. The only woman she wanted to speak to was Fred.

And whenever she couldn’t help overhearing the two women giggling and teasing each other in the dining room, she was overcome by piercing jealousy; she wanted to run down and seize Fred, drag her up to her room, and tell her everything that was going through her mind. But she was too ashamed of her yearning, and instead would bury her face in the pillow, deep enough for their voices and laughter not to reach her.

One day, she plucked up all her courage, took the Underground to Soho, and looked for the address she had surreptitiously copied from Amy’s address book. She secretly hoped that she wouldn’t be in, that she wouldn’t open the door to her, that she would have a visitor. But she was in, opened the door on the very first ring, and immediately invited Kitty in. She was alone. Kitty went on standing outside, as if she feared she would never find her way out again.

Fred stood in the doorway, observing her unexpected guest, tilting her head slightly. Then a smile spread across her lips.

‘Please stop doing that.’

‘What?’

‘You always look at me like that, so … Especially when Amy’s there.’

‘And when she isn’t there?’

Fred seemed to find her embarrassment amusing. She lit a cigarette and leaned against the wall.

‘So you absolutely don’t want to come in? Or take off your coat? Or have tea with me? Or see my paintings?’

Kitty shook her head. Over and over again, as if reaffirming to herself what it was she wanted. Fred held out her hand. Not a single ring; short, clipped fingernails, very clean for a painter. She didn’t move. Waited. She was, in fact, certain that Kitty would follow her. When she continued to hesitate, Fred dropped her hand and ran off as if someone were chasing her, disappearing into the big studio space Kitty didn’t dare peep into. Music started up. Then the hostess reappeared with two wine glasses in her hand. They were sure to have come from Amy’s drinks cabinet.

‘This is beautiful. What is it?’ asked Kitty. She couldn’t help smiling at the sight of Fred making herself comfortable on the hall floor. She patted the ground beside her, inviting Kitty to sit down.

‘You don’t know Billie Holiday? — Okay, fine; if you don’t want to come in, I’ll come out. But I wouldn’t have expected you not to know Billie Holiday. You of all people should know her.’

Hesitantly, Kitty sat on the floor, utterly mesmerised by the voice and its infinite sadness.

‘You need to breathe, my beauty! More air, more freedom. You must be yourself again,’ said Fred suddenly, and her tone was serious, thoughtful, the mischievousness gone from her voice.

‘What do you want from me?’ asked Kitty guardedly. She raised the wine glass to her lips.

‘You,’ said Fred, laughing again. ‘Just you.’

‘You’re a woman.’

‘Correct: I think you’re familiar with my sex?’

‘And Amy?’

‘Amy doesn’t need me.’

‘She does need you, very much!’

‘We’re a good team. Believe me.’

Before Kitty could reply, Fred was already leaning over her, closing in on her mouth. Her kiss was no longer cautious. It was what it was: a kiss that would lead to many more.

‘How do you think this is going to work?’ asked Kitty, turning her head away. ‘You know nothing about me.’

‘I know everything I need to know. I see you.’

‘I can’t betray another person, not again. I can’t do it.’

‘Just close your eyes. Nothing’s going to happen to you. I’ll take care of you.’

*

Three months after the birth of my mother, a woman in a village in the Caucasus had a baby boy who was given the name Miqail. His family name was Eristavi.

That night, Stasia dreamed of her dead friend Sopio. She appeared to her — bright, affectionate, with a conciliatory smile on her lips — sitting in an armchair in an unfamiliar room, gazing out of the window at a sunny garden. Overwhelmed by the sight of her beautiful friend, who seemed not to have aged a single day despite the passage of almost twenty years, Stasia stopped in the doorway and stared at Sopio stretching in the sunlight.

‘Come on in, Taso, it’s warmer over here,’ called Sopio. She beckoned to her. ‘Don’t be afraid.’

Stasia went to her dead friend and perched cautiously on the arm of the chair. The sunlight poured through the window, dazzling her and warming her cheeks.

‘I’ve missed you,’ Stasia whispered through the warm sunbeams. She stroked Sopio’s shoulder tentatively.

‘Yes, it’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’

‘A very long time. Are you angry with me?’

‘You couldn’t have changed anything. It’s so warm, so warm here, isn’t it?’

‘Sopio. How I miss you. My Sopio!’

Suddenly, Sopio clasped Stasia’s hand. Her hand felt velvety and delicate, young and full of strength. Stasia was speechless. There was so much she wanted to say, so much to explain, confess, but she couldn’t seem to do it; it was as if, all of a sudden, she had no words.

‘Tell my boy stories of a good world. Do that. Do that!’

No sooner had Sopio said this, and stroked Stasia’s head once again, than Stasia woke with a start.

*

The father of the boy who came into the world that stormy September evening was a taciturn kolkhoz worker who carved wooden figures in his room in secret by the light of a kerosene lamp (electricity was a scarce commodity in the mountains), and hid them under his bed, in case the figures were seen as immoral or destructive.

He had married a devout peasant girl who worked on the same shift as him at the grain factory; who sometimes brought him pickled tomatoes and plums, was one of the few who asked him how he was, and didn’t watch him with stern, suspicious eyes, unlike most of the villagers, who saw the stranger with the full beard and bald head as a thorn in their side. Because he didn’t know how to distil schnapps, because he wasn’t one for making noisy drinking toasts, because he didn’t ogle the girls, because he took no part in celebrations, be they heathen, Christian, or public holidays, because he refused to sacrifice sheep for the sake of a good harvest, and because from time to time he travelled to the provincial capital, went to the library there, and returned with books under his arm.

He felt profound humility before the rites of these people, who lived so free of doubt, so far removed from any kind of modernity, as if operating by a different calendar; but at the same time he loathed their tradition-steeped intransigence, their superstition, their unwillingness to place anything above the laws of their ancestors.

Every day he would try afresh not to look back. And every day the image of almond-eyed Kitty, the woman with whom he had wanted to share his vision of the world, faded a little more. Gradually, he learned that life consisted of breathing, eating, digesting, hard physical work, drinking schnapps, and sleeping, and that he had no right to expect anything else of it.

A human warmth he thought he had lost returned to him with the birth of his son: it commandeered the whole of his chest and made his heart swell. He was truly moved, for the first time in years, by the tiny bundle he held in his arms. Perhaps, he thought, through the child he would learn to love again, too.

One afternoon, when it had already started to turn cold, he went out into the street with the peacefully sleeping baby wrapped up snugly in a hand-knitted shawl. He walked past the farm and the stony path that led down to the valley; he passed the neighbouring houses, the factory, the shops, the school, met the shepherds driving their sheep back from the meadow, greeted the black-clad war widows sitting together as they did every evening around the village fountain, and the village elders in the square in front of the church, came to the village library, which housed nothing that had been written in the past forty years, and passed children playing, racing down the slope, noisy and sweaty, with a sheepdog at their heels; on he walked, into the evening, and came to the quarry in the southern part of the forest surrounding the valley. There he sat down on a large stone, not far from a waterfall that cascaded with immense force into the depths — heedless, imperious — and looked around. Miqa (as the boy would come to be known) went on sleeping peacefully in his arms; not even the ferocious sound of the water seemed to bother him. And Andro closed his eyes, hugged his son close, took a deep breath, and smiled. He had come here in order to be able to smile again. And when he smiled, he saw her face before him: the face of the young Kitty with whom he had shared first kisses on a green bench in a sleepy little town, and to whom he had dedicated all his ideas. And he remembered the war. He remembered the gulag. He remembered the dehumanisation he had experienced, which was apparently so easy to accept, as if the true nature of mankind were to be inhuman.

*

Telling this story, Brilka, I sometimes feel as if I can’t breathe. Then I have to stop, go over to the window, and take a deep breath. It’s not because I just can’t find the right words, not because of the punishing gods, judges, and omnipresent choirs. Nor is it because of all the stories clamouring to be told. It’s because of the blanks.

The stories overlap, intertwine, merge into one — I’m trying to untangle this skein of wool because you have to tell things one after another, because you can’t put the simultaneity of the world into words.

When I was about the same age as you, Brilka, I often used to wonder what would happen if the world’s collective memory had retained different things and lost others. If we had forgotten all the wars and all those countless kings, rulers, leaders, and mercenaries, and the only people to be read about in books were those who had built a house with their own hands, planted a garden, discovered a giraffe, described a cloud, praised the nape of a woman’s neck. I wondered how we know that the people whose names have endured were better, cleverer, or more interesting just because they’ve stood the test of time. What of those who are forgotten?

We decide what we want to remember and what we don’t. Time has nothing to do with it. Time doesn’t care. But the injustice of our story, Brilka, is that neither you nor I have been granted the possibility of recalling everything, including all those who have been forgotten — the injustice is that I too must choose, for you; I must decide what’s worth telling and what isn’t, which seems to me at times an impossible task. I am fighting against my own personal, entirely subjective memory. Since I started to write our story down for you — this Where, How, and Why — I’ve been alone. But I’ll tell you more about that later, when it’s time to tell the story of my life, when at last I have been born and come alive within this realm of words.

For this, I have set aside all my own needs, if indeed I had any. I’ve even forbidden myself my daily dose of melancholy and devoted myself entirely to my task. After the last few years, in which I got so lost, went so far astray, this almost monastic asceticism and iron discipline did and does me good. It’s my journey. It’s a sort of cleansing process, in the course of which I myself am changing — and I don’t even know what my final shape will be.

Tonight — it’s Friday, and the warm evening has driven even more people out of doors — I could already tell that I needed to pause again for a moment. The noise, the clinking of glasses and bottles, the music — all this was mingling beneath my windows, creating that enticing, inescapable symphony of summer and making it impossible for me to concentrate on the task in hand. The present is too alive, too intrusive, and I can’t listen to the past.

So I got up, went over to the window, opened it, let the hot, summery, dusty air into my room, and looked down on the heads of passers-by. And then something strange happened. In the distance, over by the crossroads, where the homeless man greets me every day and tries to sell me his newspaper — I saw Stasia standing there. No, I haven’t gone mad; I don’t believe in madness, in any case — but all the same …

That was when I knew that the ghosts have come to me now; and I also knew that it really is the right thing to do, to record their stories for you. Ours. Yours. Mine, and those of all the others who have written their lives into ours. I suddenly knew why I was doing this, and that it was right to do it. I knew that I was carrying out a duty, the duty of an axe that shatters time: for you. Suddenly, all my doubts were gone.

I understood that one day all of them will come, all the ghosts with a story they have yet to finish telling, and they will pore over my words. And I laughed aloud. Yes, I laughed. I thought of you. I missed you terribly, with an unbearable longing, but I also felt a sense of relief — yes, I did.

I have finally arrived in that timeless time beyond the bounds of law, and even if I am losing my connection to the reality of the present a little more each day, even if I am less and less sure of what moves the people out there and what awaits me after all this, I do know what question I will put to you at the end of this journey, this story. Even if you’re still far away, not here, even if you’re still unaware of any of this, even if you feel justified anger towards me — I will come back. To you. And I will ask you my question, and you will give me your answer.