Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
They have a world to win.

KARL MARX

Elene and her father sat in front of their Rekord television set in the eastern half of the world, while Kitty and Amy sat in front of their Ferguson television set in the western half, all staring, spellbound, at a friendly man in the impressive outfit of a cosmonaut boarding a spaceship in Tyuratam, waving and calling out, ‘Let’s go! Goodbye to you, dear friends, and see you soon.’ The spaceship was called Vostok 1, the calm, friendly man Yuri Gagarin. When the engines were fired up shortly after nine o’clock that April morning and the retention arms released, the Americans sighed and the Russians cheered. But all over the world people held their breath at the start of the first orbit of the Earth in history, and heard Gagarin cry, ‘I see Earth! It is so beautiful.’

*

Her time in Moscow had shaken Elene’s deepest principles and convictions. She became acquainted with doubt, and through doubt she realised something fundamental, something that cut her to the quick and profoundly changed her. She realised that the world was not a protective place, that people didn’t always keep their promises, that love was replaceable, that intimacy was a silken thread that could break at any time, that feelings changed from day to day and affection could breed contempt. She understood that she had been wronged. This thought was liberating for her: ever since she had formulated it and written it on the back of her maths book, she felt surer of herself. Because it meant that it was not she who had failed, but the others: she had not deserved to grow up far from home and be replaced by a curly-haired boy; she had not brought this strict life in Moscow, these cold foreign climes, this loneliness upon herself. It also meant that this wrong that had been done to her could one day be redressed. This thought was sweet as honey; it gave her strength and coaxed a smile to her lips. The child who in Moscow was so reserved, so painstakingly polite, almost deferential, soon became a cheeky, lively, noisy, domineering girl again. Encouraged by thoughts of some time in the future, she returned to her roots.

Whereas in the past she hadn’t wanted to be a Young Pioneer, had never wanted to go to summer or winter camp, now she was first in line at Pioneer parades and managed to become leader of the girls’ group at camp. She was the first to put up her hand in class, and if one of the boys looked askance at her, played a joke on her, teased her, or gave her a condescending smile, he would receive a reply that made him lose any desire to do it again. Elene also became more assertive in dealing with her father — although there were certain boundaries that she would never cross. Kostya was surprised and pleased by his daughter’s sudden transformation. It would serve her better in life to be like this, he thought. He failed, however, to see Elene’s anger, bubbling deep below the surface.

But Nana — who only saw Elene in Moscow in the autumn, when she took time off from university, or in the summer holidays, which Elene spent with her — couldn’t shake a feeling of unease. There was something exaggerated about Elene’s constant cheerfulness and feverish energy. She sensed the strange artificiality in her child’s behaviour, the slightly forced aspect of her carefree manner. Nana, who struggled with her guilt over allowing Elene to go to Moscow, knew that the battle for their daughter had never been about her wellbeing: it had always been more about her and Kostya, even though Kostya never tired of repeating how good Russian discipline was for Elene.

But behind her child’s smile Nana sensed the black tangle of thoughts woven together from unspoken reproaches and injuries. She just couldn’t put this insight into words. How could she explain to her husband that their marriage was now no more than a perpetual conflict of interest over their daughter? He would never believe it if she told him that the child lacked for anything, that she wasn’t happy, that she was nurturing something dark inside.

And during one of those visits, as she watched her daughter sitting alone in the garden one evening, lost in thought, staring icily into space and apparently not even noticing the rain pelting down on her, Nana realised she had to do something or she would lose Elene completely.

She ran through all the options, held conversations with her husband in her head, tried to pit her arguments against his. She needed a strategy in order to formulate her plan in Kostya’s language; she had to be unyielding, she had to be stubborn, at least as steely as Kostya himself. Just as spring turned to summer, she flew to visit her husband in Moscow.

As was to be expected, Nana’s concerns met with little understanding from her husband. Kostya ridiculed her worries as the misguided fears of an egotistical mother who was prioritising her own wishes over her daughter’s future. But Nana kept insisting that this was about their daughter, who was just as much hers as she was his; that this child had lived apart from her — against her will — for long enough. Elene needed her mother: Kostya may have refused to discuss it back then, but now it was her turn. Tbilisi wasn’t just some village, after all; there were good schools there, too. Besides, she should be speaking her mother tongue again, and she should be among women. A single Lyuda was no substitute for all her female role-models.

Although it was hard for her, Nana refused to give in. Worn down by the long discussions with her husband and his egregious insults, she was repeatedly assailed by doubt as to whether bringing Elene back to Georgia was the right thing to do; but then she would remember the black look in her daughter’s eyes and cast her doubts aside.

One night, she was sitting at the kitchen table, still awake, frustration having driven her to eat the blinis Lyuda had made for Elene’s breakfast, when Elene appeared in the doorway in her flannel pyjamas and laughed at her mother in surprise. She fetched a plate and took a blini for herself as well.

‘Everything all right, Deda?’ she asked solicitously. Her Georgian had long since acquired a Russian tinge that made Nana livid.

‘I just can’t get to sleep, my sunshine.’

‘Have you and Papa been fighting again?’

‘We’re not fighting, Eleniko, we’re just having some discussions.’

‘What about?’

‘This and that. Mostly about the fact that I miss you so terribly.’

‘And what does Papa say?’

‘That he would miss you terribly, too, if you were to come home with me.’

Elene appeared to consider this. Her feet were dangling from the high chair; she skilfully rolled the blini and dunked it in the little varenye bowl with its dark red liquid. At that moment she looked so peaceful and happy that Nana’s heart clenched: her thick, uncombed hair, her long eyelashes, the pyjama trousers that were slightly too big. Nana would have liked to bundle her into her coat that instant, run outside with her, and drive her straight to the airport.

‘You want me to come with you to Tbilisi, right? For ever, right?’

‘I just want you to be happy, my pet.’

‘I am happy.’

‘Really? Do you like it here?’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean: don’t you miss us? Me, Stasia, Christine, Goya?’

‘Sometimes. Yes.’

‘I don’t want you to feel you’re lacking anything.’

‘Why don’t you all come here? There’s plenty of space here. There’s plenty of space for all of you, it’s just …’

‘It’s just what? What do you mean, Eleniko?’

‘Well, the boy — Miqa, I mean — he couldn’t live here. And he can’t speak Russian very well, can he? So he can’t go to school here either, and anyway Papa said that his papa is a nasty man, and they don’t take children like that here.’

‘Papa told you that?’

‘Yes.’

‘But that’s not true. Miqa’s papa is just poor, my pet. Miqa doesn’t have as many opportunities as we do, that’s why we’re looking after him. He’s going to school in Tbilisi so he can get a better education than he would in his village. You hardly even know him, Elene.’

‘You all do, though.’

Nana froze. That aggrieved tone. She wished she could have recorded that sentence and played it back to Kostya. The deep-seated anger in Elene’s voice!

‘I’d rather stay here, in any case, with Papa. Why don’t you and Stasia and Christine and Goya come? Why don’t you come here?’

Elene ate the rest of her blini and put the plate in the sink like a good girl. She gave her mother a tentative kiss on the cheek, wished her good night, and went off to bed. Nana stayed sitting at the table for a while, thinking. How alarmingly deliberate and confident Elene’s every word, every gesture seemed to be. She felt impotent, helpless. Had she ever considered that Elene might reject her suggestion that she go back? If she insisted, would it just increase Elene’s rancour? Would she then switch to Kostya’s side, against her, out of protest? She mustn’t let it come to that: open division in two opposing camps would just make the whole thing even more unbearable for Elene.

To avoid Elene’s curious questions, and looks from Lyuda, the couple had decided to share a marriage bed again in Moscow. Seldom had Nana found anything more difficult than lying down that night in the bed where Kostya was peacefully sleeping. A week later, she returned home, humiliated and exhausted. Elene remained in Moscow.

*

When I asked him about it, in the last years of his life, after the story had long since caught up with him, my grandfather admitted to having been in Severodvinsk in late 1958 when the keel of the K-19 was first laid. But a certain Captain Zateyev had been responsible for the K-19, he said; he himself had never had anything to do with this model.

The K-19 submarine, which acquired the less-than-flattering nickname ‘Hiroshima’ following a nuclear accident, and whose faulty construction cost many sailors their lives, was strategically important in the Cold War, since it carried nuclear weapons and was capable of transporting them over long distances, as far as the coast of America. K-19 was the first nuclear-powered submarine, meaning that it had to undergo special security tests. However, because of growing pressure from the Kremlin in the arms race with the American Navy, these were not always carried out.

In 1960, the naval authorities said the K-19 had already passed all the security tests, and the submarine was launched in July 1961. My grandfather, Kostya Jashi, was charged with recording the first training manoeuvres, so he went aboard. The manoeuvres were to take place in the Greenland Sea. Just off Jan Mayen Island, the commander reported an incident in the submarine’s reactor. The cooling system had failed, and the reactor had to be switched off. They were facing a nuclear meltdown. Within the Soviet Union these manoeuvres were kept absolutely secret, and the crews of such submarines were under strict instructions not to transmit the international SOS signal, even in life-threatening situations. In any case, the ship’s wireless antenna was broken; it was impossible to transmit a long-range radio signal, so they couldn’t even call on the Soviet Navy for help.

The only way of saving the submarine was to send some of the crew into the reactor well to jury-rig an emergency cooling system. Until this provisional arrangement was in place, and because the temperature inside the reactor had now risen to a perilous 800 degrees, technicians used ordinary hoses to spray water onto the reactor. This hapless attempt caused a violent reaction when the cold water from the hoses came into contact with the reactor: the water evaporated instantly, releasing a massive dose of radiation.

Kostya never talked about the disaster. Never reminisced. Never said a word about this voyage from hell. But his memories of that day had buried themselves in his eyes, which, as a child, I learned to read. I wondered how close Kostya had been to the reactor well. Wondered what it must have smelled of there — burnt flesh, or something neutral preceding something appalling, or perhaps just ordinary chemicals? I imagined the ruined faces of the men in the reactor well, their cold sweat, their shaking hands, the careful steps, the muffled voices, the nearness of death, the radio silence, the icy quiet of the Arctic Sea, and the dignity of the icebergs, among which the submarine resurfaced, rescued from the loving embrace of the deep. I believe that on that day — for it was daytime — the stars were shining despite the sun, making the icebergs glow like Christmas trees. That the islands off Spitzbergen on the Norwegian side of the sea looked as peaceful and perfect as a film set.

I thought I saw these images in Kostya’s eyes; I searched for them there, followed them, late, very late in his life, too late perhaps, but then I understood. There may have been nothing more to forgive; it was far too late for that, for him and for me, but this helped me understand a lot of things — this experience, this anteroom of the Inferno where he sat for so long, awaiting death. Differently, and with a different finality from that at Lake Ladoga; at the mercy of a different fate, of which he was differently, much more explicitly aware.

But perhaps Ida was in his thoughts, too; not as clear and personified as the dead who appeared to his mother, but clear enough. In his head. Holding on to her image, clinging to it, to a dead woman who promised him life, until he heard the men roar, their joyful shouts that the reactor had finally cooled and the worst was over — they had survived. Yes, that’s what they were thinking at that moment: the immediate joy of having cheated death by a whisker, little suspecting that death, once it was aware of them, once it had got so close to them, would not release them from its clutches so easily, that the worst, for them, was still to come. I also believe that disaster wasn’t averted back then, that it was only delayed. Perhaps just because Ida wanted to give her beloved another chance to lose his heart.

I don’t know. Perhaps that was how it happened, perhaps it wasn’t; all I can say with certainty, Brilka, is that the horror that branded itself in Kostya’s eyes that day remained there for the rest of his life. You just had to look deep enough. Very deep.

A distress signal was eventually picked up by a nearby submarine, and the crew were evacuated, after twenty-four hours.

When they arrived in Moscow, all the crew had to sign a statement that said they were not permitted to speak of their own experiences in any form whatsoever from that day forward. The eight men who had cooled the reactor all died within six weeks of being rescued.

My grandfather, Kostya Jashi, was lucky. Along with other survivors, he was subsequently flown to Vienna and treated in a specialist private clinic. He lost all the hair on his head and body. Before the signs of his sickness became apparent to little Elene, too, he telephoned his wife and informed her that he had been posted on a six-month training manoeuvre in the Baltic Sea and she had to come to Moscow to take care of her daughter. Elene liked her blinis best with raspberry varenye, he added.