Communists should set an example in study;

at all times they should be pupils of the masses as well as their teachers.

CHAIRMAN MAO

Wild times were coming, Brilka. The East envied the West its blue jeans, and young girls in the West fainted at Beatles concerts. In the West, people were demonstrating against the Vietnam War, which was taking on ever more absurd and bloody dimensions, and had become, like the Berlin Wall, a symbol of the Cold War power struggle.

In Paris, students occupied the Sorbonne and erected barricades. Parents no longer understood their children. They didn’t understand why these children, who had never lacked for anything, were suddenly taking a stand on behalf of unions and workers. Why they didn’t take their own national identity seriously, why they were dragging its values through the mud; why they were taking to the streets to demonstrate for women’s rights and against the military. Surely they didn’t seriously believe they were bringing peace to the world with a joint and a few flowers plaited in their hair, or by wearing ridiculous batik sarongs!

In our glorious and powerful land we were still a long way from shameless demands like these, but there had, at least, been a change of leadership in the Soviet Communist Party. The Ukrainian peasant had been replaced by a more gallant, pleasure-loving man, who dripped with medals and awards for heroism, and had the bushiest eyebrows in the world.

The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia also had a new leader and, encouraged by this change, the people were calling for liberalisation of the system. Some straightforward reforms had been pushed through, and the populace — asked for the first time to help shape the future of their country — demanded further relaxation of laws, such as the abolition of press censorship and the democratisation of the Communist Party. A Kafka congress was held to rehabilitate the writer; more rehabilitations were set to follow.

The western protest movement seemed to have arrived in the East at last.

The Kremlin quickly felt that things were getting too complicated. Party functionaries grew uneasy. Comrade Brezhnev insisted that the reforms already passed be reversed, but his decree did nothing to check the wave rolling across the country, and there was a fear that the Czechoslovakian situation, as they called it, might find imitators in other sister states.

In August 1968, things came to a head. People stormed onto the streets, called for the restitution of human dignity, demanded the release of all political prisoners and the complete abolition of the totalitarian regime. Dubček, the head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party — removed from power by Moscow shortly afterwards — said later in an interview that he had not believed in August 1968 that his people wanted the complete abolition of the communist system; for him it had just been a question of ‘moderating the system’.

*

Stasia arrived in Prague on 20 August. She was picked up at the airport by Intourist staff and taken to a hotel, along with a few other Soviet fellow travellers. Kitty had arrived the previous day, and after a long and exhausting process at the airport, had been welcomed by two employees of the Komsomol Club and someone from the Ministry of Culture. She, too, was taken to a hotel — a much better one than her mother’s. There, Kitty got a telegram informing her that she would receive a call on the telephone in the hotel lobby in half an hour. She instantly felt as though she had been transported back in time and, as if under a spell, sought out the telephone booth.

‘Your concert on Wednesday has to be cancelled.’

He spoke more quietly and was more subdued than usual. He sounded nervous.

‘What’s going on? I’ve only just arrived.’

‘I know. The circumstances … It’s all got a bit out of hand.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. I just have to make sure that I get you out of there right away.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘There’s just been a crisis meeting in Bratislava to resolve the Czechoslovakian question. The Communist Party chairmen of the sister republics concluded that developments in Prague must be stopped by force.’

‘Stopped by force?’

‘That’s the situation.’

‘Who was I supposed to meet here? Tell me, who was supposed to come?’

‘You needn’t worry about her. She has a Soviet passport; you don’t. And in times of crisis like this, they don’t really like having western observers in the city, if you get my meaning.’

‘She?’

Kitty’s knees had turned to butter. Her mother. Her mother was here.

‘Don’t listen to the Komsomol people, wait for further instructions from me. Do you understand?’

Kitty hung up. She wouldn’t take a single step out of this city until she had seen her mother again.

That same evening, Kostya too received a phone call from his friend, explaining the situation and asking him to contact his mother and prepare her; she had to take a flight to Moscow within the next three days. Kostya, who had spent the previous night in the arms of a twenty-seven-year-old blonde and had drunk a little too much Crimean champagne, was immediately fully alert and promised to take care of it.

‘We shouldn’t have taken the risk in the first place,’ Alania sighed.

Kitty contrived to shake off the officious woman from the Ministry of Culture and slip out of the hotel. She wandered the streets of this city that had been the bridge to her new life, thinking back on the lonely months she had spent here. How long ago had it been? How many years was it since she had seen her mother? How many words, songs, meals, kisses, memories, how many disappointments, how many people, places, thoughts, encounters, borders, nights, and days separated the Kitty of today from the Kitty of then?

She walked along the cobbled streets of the Old Town, looking neither right nor left; she felt a tightness in her chest, and avoided people’s eyes; after London, they seemed to her so serious and downcast, so lost in thought. She had no destination, no idea where her feet were taking her. She just kept walking straight on, and realised that she didn’t know the city at all; that she had managed, back then, to remain invisible here. Her thoughts ran into each other, creating a colourful mosaic in her head. The city was restless. Her nameless friend had been right, as always. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were marching against the desire for a different life. Battalions against a people. A whole army against her reunion with her mother.

She found herself thinking of Fred. Fred’s eyes. Glassy eyes. Eyes that flirted with death. Yes — that was exactly what it was: the way she stared into space, this mental absence. Had she ever truly recovered from Mödling? What was she taking? What kind of drug?

At seven o’clock, the delegation met in the lobby. Kitty acted as if she had just come down from her room. They were taken to a restaurant with a pseudo-folkloric atmosphere and state-approved background music. There was plenty to eat, lots of beer, and exhausting conversation about nothing whatsoever from the curious, excited Komsomol employees and the tedious woman from the ministry. Kitty did her best not to let her panic show. Panic at the thought of having to leave the city without seeing her mother’s face again. She smiled absently and asked no questions, but readily answered theirs about her songs. Everyone spoke Russian. Asked whether this was her first time in the city, she responded with a friendly ‘yes’.

At one point she went to the toilet and splashed her face with cold water. She had to maintain it, this face; it could not be allowed to slip. Upon her return to the hotel she would probably find a message from her personal guardian angel. And just this once she would defy him. For her, there was no going back without meeting Stasia.

As she cut the knedliky into little pieces and dunked them in the wild mushroom sauce, Amy’s shrill laughter echoed in her mind, the terribly artificial way she had laughed so as not to forfeit the last vestiges of her dignity when she found Fred half-naked in Kitty’s living room.

The call came long after midnight.

‘You must pretend you’ve got flu. You must leave the city as soon as possible. Cancel your performance before they come to you. You must do it, because I can’t guarantee anything in the current situation.’

Kitty feigned acquiescence, and agreed. Yes, she would cancel her performance, pretend to have a bad case of flu, and would fly straight back to London the day after tomorrow. But there was no way she was going to sleep now. She couldn’t leave. Her mother was here, all her old life was here. It was like a treasure chest, and all she had to do was open it. She couldn’t just leave again. She had to open this chest. She had to find Stasia. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers notwithstanding.

*

The invasion began that night. Half a million foreign soldiers occupied the country. These fateful events took the decision out of Kitty’s hands. Around nine o’clock in the morning, there was a knock at the door of her hotel room and, gesticulating wildly and bowing his head ever lower, the young komsomolets who had stared at her the previous evening with hostile admiration babbled something about politics, about Czechoslovakians and Russians, about the shadow now being cast over that great friendship between peoples, about her security, which, in the circumstances, the Komosomol Club could no longer guarantee, about her performance which now, unfortunately, had to be cancelled. All the leading party functionaries, including Dubček, had been arrested and sent to Moscow; all reforms were to be reversed immediately.

She stared at him, bleary-eyed, through the crack in the door. He told her he had been charged with taking her to the airport at once. The next flight left that evening, at nine o’clock.

‘You mean, they’re here already? Here, downstairs, on the street?’

Kitty was suddenly wide awake. She opened the door a little further and beckoned him inside, so he would have a chance to give her his own assessment of the situation instead of the stuff he had learned by rote.

‘Yes, Comrade Jashi,’ he continued in his faltering Russian, and entered her room with an awestruck expression. It was probably the most luxurious room he had ever set foot in. This huge, soft bed, the thick carpet, and the ornate, gilded mirror on the wall. She could already see his very own personal West light up in his eyes. This was how he imagined the West to be: beds like these, carpets and mirrors like these — for everyone.

‘The streets are full of people. The president has called on the populace to show prudence and obedience. But …’

He was clearly hesitating: he didn’t know how freely he could speak with her.

‘Tell me — it’s all right, go on!’ Kitty offered him a chair.

‘The students have set up a pirate radio station. Almost everyone from the university and the institutes is out on the street. I had to fight my way through to get here. People are marching between lines of soldiers, carrying home-made banners. Street signs have been reversed so that the …’ He faltered again. Which word did he want to use? The Russians, the enemy, the invaders?

‘The occupiers?’ she suggested. He seemed relieved.

‘Yes — so that it’s harder for them to find their way around the city. My brother told me people are being arrested every minute. And the Soviet news agency claims that the Czechoslovakian Republic turned to the Soviet Union with an urgent appeal for help. A complete lie! They’re actually claiming that we asked them to provide help through military force. Can you imagine?’

He had forgotten the Komsomol oath more quickly than expected; bit by bit, he revealed to her his anger and disappointment. Finally, he even confessed that he desperately wanted to stand by his friends and fellow students outside, but had promised his father that he would stay well away from the streets; one saboteur in the family was enough, his brother was very active in the protest movement and it looked as if he was about to be thrown out of university; besides, he had to get her safely to the airport, because he still hoped she would be able to give her concert one day after all; he was such a big fan of hers, such a big fan.

She fetched one of the ten copies of Summer of Broken Tears from her suitcase — she hadn’t been allowed to bring any more into the country — and signed it for him. She promised she would be in the hotel lobby at seven o’clock precisely.

The boy would keep his mouth shut, regardless of how this worked out. He wouldn’t denounce her. He would only give people the part of the truth they expected from him: I was there, she didn’t come, I looked for her, I didn’t find her, I did my duty, I couldn’t do more than that. He wouldn’t say: she seemed excited, curious, cross-examined me, asked me to report on the situation, gave me the feeling that she had anti-Soviet sympathies. Et cetera.

Yes, she had made him her accomplice, and the bed, the carpet, the mirror, and the album had been a great help to her in this.

In the collective memory of the West, Brilka, the ‘Prague Spring’ is celebrated as one of the biggest and most courageous revolts against Soviet tyranny. For the East, it was a threnody, a moment of sadness, because the curtain that had just been pushed ever so slightly aside would soon be drawn even more firmly closed.

*

Much has been said and written about the legendary tale of how Kitty, surrounded by tanks, took out her guitar amid the tumultuous crowd in Wenceslas Square and started singing an old folk song from her homeland. Some have claimed it was one of the Russian romances and not a Georgian folk song at all. Oh yes, there’s a great deal of speculation and discussion over what that song might have been.

Later, of course, in the West, people idealised her actions, glorifying them as a great advertisement for peace and freedom. The West, with its prejudiced viewpoint, was always misinterpreting the East; in this case, it saw a deliberate protest by a courageous artist, oblivious to what was going on around her, who sympathised with the people and was trying to soften the hearts of the brutal mercenaries. In reality, when she walked into the square and started singing, it was an act of desperation, and her motivation was purely selfish, not remotely intellectual or political. Her behaviour had nothing to do with courage or political convictions.

She went to the square as a woman uprooted, filled with rage, driven by the thought that her journey here, to this city, the journey into her past, might turn out to have been in vain. That she would have to leave the city without having had the chance to reconcile with the part of herself she had left behind. There was the profound pain of having to leave without seeing her mother and asking her why she hadn’t fought for her back then as, years earlier, she had fought for her son.

After the komsomolets left her room, Kitty started throwing her things into her suitcase, but stopped again a few moments later because she didn’t know what to do with it. Instead, she took her guitar, slung it over her shoulder, and hurried out into the street. For more than an hour, she wandered aimlessly, until she got close enough to the epicentre of events and was swept along by the crowd. Of course, she was afraid; of course, the guns, the tanks, the uniforms awakened her ghosts; of course, she would have liked nothing better than to flee, to return to the safety of London; for a moment, she cursed herself for having come here — and, of course, the West was deaf, later on, to her real motivation.

But that’s just the way it is, Brilka — we do things with a specific aim in mind and sometimes we achieve something completely different, just as you could never have dreamed, when you boarded the train to Vienna, that you would have to travel backwards, backwards to me, into the story you were so eager to leave behind.

And when an exhausted Kitty Jashi was swept into Wenceslas Square, took her guitar out of its case, and began to sing in an attempt to counter her own impotence, she too could not have imagined that a Magnum photographer would be standing nearby, would take a photo of her, would turn a woman who had seldom felt so discouraged, frightened, and lost into a figurehead of the resistance.

But Stasia didn’t come to Wenceslas Square. Stasia didn’t see her daughter singing. Stasia’s son had called the previous evening and ordered her to keep quiet, to stay in her hotel, and to set off for home with the Intourist agent as soon as she was able. Stasia began to fear for both her daughter and her son.

Three women from Leningrad who had come for the congress were sitting in the hotel lobby, distressed and worried about the journey home. The men from Kharkov were talking to their ‘tour guide’ — who was really a KGB man — about the possibility of catching a train to Ukraine.

By evening, as the situation continued to escalate and became increasingly ugly, the tour guide managed to find a bus that would take the congress guests to the airport. He ordered them to quickly grab their suitcases and board the bus.

Stasia stood in the lobby, her hands shaking, her lips pressed together, her little suitcase at her feet. She was the first to see the uniformed man enter the hotel and walk up to the tour guide. He showed him a document, which the tour guide studied intently for a long time before nodding, impressed, and shaking the uniformed man’s hand. Then he pointed his finger at Stasia and gave her a surly look. Stasia stared at the tour guide in amazement: she could hardly believe that anyone might want anything of her, and as the uniformed man approached her, she instinctively looked round, as if she expected there to be someone behind her who was the real object of the tour guide’s finger. Then sheer panic overwhelmed her, and she felt paralysed. If she took a step to the right, towards the centre of town, she was endangering her son; if she stepped to the left, towards the airport, she was abandoning her daughter.

For hours she had been in a state of fear, incapable of doing anything, of making a decision. Where could she even look for Kitty? Who could she ask? Had they already got her daughter out of the city? Had her hopes been in vain? And who was responsible for creating this brutal, macabre scenario? Surely it couldn’t be that every time she went anywhere, her journey culminated in a war! Was this her curse?

‘I must ask you to follow me, Comrade.’

The uniformed man spoke Russian with a Caucasian accent. A whole map of medals adorned his chest.

‘What’s happened?’

‘We have a few questions about your documents, and unfortunately we have to take you to the commissariat. Nothing serious — I’m sure we’ll soon be able to resolve these problems, and then naturally we’ll drive you to the airport as well.’

‘But — what problems?’

‘Follow me, Comrade, and we’ll explain everything on the way.’

Strangely, Stasia’s panic dissipated. She didn’t feel afraid of this man. Something in the way he spoke to her, the way he bent down towards her; something in his posture, which had a youthful, relaxed aspect in spite of all the medals, made Stasia trust him.

He took her bag and headed for the exit; she followed him, accompanied by the patronising looks of the other congress participants. Typical Soviet citizens: suspecting everyone they met of being spies and enemies, capable of switching in seconds from kind, friendly librarians to informers. Already she could hear them talking on the bus: I could tell from the start that something wasn’t right about her, she was so quiet and withdrawn; she didn’t want to go to the department store with us, either, and gave me and Martha such a snide look when we asked about the knickers and bras. I’d have so liked to buy those knickers, you know, you won’t find a pair like that in ten years back home, and even if you do they’ve all already been sold under the counter, with a horrendous mark-up, you know what they’re like … And so on. Ah well, what can you expect of the population of a country where you can’t buy proper underwear, thought Stasia, and got in the back of the car.

They started weaving their way through the crowd. Screaming, running, aggressive, desperate, hopeful people. How awful, thought Stasia, that this scenario seems so familiar to me. How much older do I have to get before images like these vanish from my head?

The uniformed man was driving the car himself, although a man like him would normally have a driver. All of a sudden, she was suffused with relief. Her limbs relaxed, the back of her neck stopped hurting, her hands warmed up. She leaned her head against the window. As if the congress guests and the Intourist moles and the cut-throat tour guide had been the real threat; not this man, who was taking her with him into the unknown.

*

The photo was taken, and the film — miraculously — was slipped past the soldiers who arrested and searched the photographer on the spot, along with hundreds of others in Wenceslas Square. Kitty escaped before they could handcuff her, too; swept up by a mob of students, she ended up in a side street where she was carried along by the next wave of people, like a paper boat in the gutter, floating aimlessly, helplessly, from one street to the next, from one danger to the next; a throng of students swept her onto a bridge, where she walked straight into the arms of a Kyrgyz soldier who ordered her to show her papers. When she produced her British passport — exhausted, hungry, with an expression of dazed indifference — the Kyrgyz called on his colleagues for help. After some deliberation they decided to take her along to the nearest police station where there would be a more senior official who could deal with her case.

In the military vehicle, she explained to the soldiers — in accent-free Russian that nonetheless sat like lead on her tongue and would no longer flow light and sparkling from her lips — her reason for being in the city. She feigned ignorance about the events on the streets, claimed she had only got mixed up in this chaos out of curiosity, and kept repeating that she had to be back at the hotel on time because the komsomolets was supposed to take her to the airport.

This conversation took place at five forty-five. At five fifty-five, the Kyrgyz radioed the local militsiya with the news that a foreign woman had been arrested. At six fifteen, Stasia was fetched from her hotel. Almost simultaneously, Kitty arrived at the police station near the Charles Bridge, where Stasia, too, was brought shortly afterwards.

The Kyrgyz soldier’s confusion upon picking up a British citizen in the tumult — even though she was clearly from the Soviet zone — had enabled Kitty’s dream to come true.

Giorgi Alania had been on the phone all day; he had even taken the risk of using the telephone box right outside his London flat for the phone calls to his middlemen in Prague. When he had hung up the previous night, he had already suspected that Kitty would not stick to the arrangement, that the temptation would be too great, that with her British passport she would feel too safe not to give in to her hope of finding her mother in that sea of people. It was, of course, a daredevil recklessness that flared up in her so quickly, a recklessness bordering on naivety. He knew her well enough to know that she wouldn’t be able to resist this temptation. He should have refused Kostya’s request. This was a more than hazardous undertaking; he had allowed himself to be persuaded into something that was far too risky, and he had done it because, for the first time since he had been recruited by the NKVD, his emotions had clouded his judgement. He had put her, his best friend, and, above all, himself in tremendous danger.

From London, he placed calls to his accomplices and alerted them. No one could tell him where she was. But Fate proved merciful, and he was given a chance to rectify the only mistake he had ever made in all the long years he had spent on the Kitty Jashi file; for he was never wrong in his choice of accomplices. He received a call from the militsiya officer, whom for years he had secretly been supplying with little envelopes of banknotes (real British pounds, to be precise), informing him that Kitty Jashi had been arrested. And although he knew he was acting rashly and was taking an even greater risk, he told his confidant to bring Stasia to her daughter.

*

I often asked Stasia about this moment. Back then, though, the words she used to describe their meeting seemed to me disappointing, small, almost insulting. They weren’t worthy of this moment, which could have been a scene from a classical drama, except that it wasn’t the gods sitting in judgement over the destiny of mankind but the KGB. Back then, as a young girl nosing around my family’s secrets, I wanted something truly dramatic, something that had the scent of Destiny; instead, Stasia talked about a small, dirty, foul-smelling interrogation room where she was brought by her Caucasian protector, and which her daughter walked into shortly afterwards. (At this point she always stressed that, at first, she had thought she was hallucinating.) She told me that the uniformed man with all the medals quietly informed them that they had exactly one hour before Stasia had to be driven to the airport and Kitty, who would now miss the flight she was booked on, was expected back at her hotel.

Stasia described the reunion with the usual unsentimental, almost banal words that were so typical of her, and that seemed even simpler and more commonplace the greater or more painful the event they described.

No tears. (‘No, no, we didn’t cry! What good would tears have done us then? Brought relief? Tears just fill gaps, act as substitutes. If the person you want to shed tears for is standing in front of you, you don’t cry, you make use of the time you have. Tears can wait, after all; they can be wept later, at any time.’)

I imagine the scene. The stark ceiling light in the empty room. At first, silence. Tentatively, they move closer. A few steps on either side; the echo of those steps. Kitty, walking up to Stasia and feeling her face like a blind woman. As if trying to trace the marks of the time that lay between them, the new wrinkles, the grey hairs: to identify the past.

‘I’ve never yet made a journey that didn’t end in a war.’ Stasia was the first to speak.

‘Oh, that’s not true, Deda.’ They both had to reaccustom themselves to the word; it was like a lump in Kitty’s throat. ‘You just have a knack for bad timing.’

‘Timing; what’s that?’

‘Oh — never mind.’

‘You’ve got an accent.’

‘I don’t get much chance to speak Georgian.’

‘You’ve grown.’

‘Grown-ups don’t grow any more.’

‘Yes they do; you’ve got taller. Do you really live in Great Britain? And … you make music?’

‘Yes. I sing. And I write songs. Deda, oh God, Deda …’

Kitty covered her face with her hands. And Stasia put her arms around her daughter. Her body must have felt as light as a bird to Kitty; so delicate, after all those years, as if it were made of sand running through her fingers. At least, that’s how it always felt to me when I hugged Stasia as a child.

Stasia told her about Tbilisi, and Kitty told her about London. Then Stasia told her about Christine and Elene and Nana and Miqa, and about Andro, too. Only the good things, the cheering things, the most optimistic things. And Kitty spoke about Amy, and kept quiet about Fred. Stasia told her about Kostya, about the library and her imminent retirement, and Kitty told her about her music.

They talked about many things — but not their fears and their hate and their impotence, and certainly not about the ghosts. But one question, the question that had pulsated under her skin like a deep wound for all the years since her flight, the question that had seared itself onto her retinas and through which she saw everything in the world — this question Kitty did ask.

‘Why didn’t you stop him? You knew it wasn’t right, putting everything in a false light, deporting me like that, condemning me to blame myself all my life for sending someone to their death. Why?’

Kitty was clinging to her mother like a little child now: she wouldn’t let her go, hugging her shoulders, burying her head in her neck, inhaling her smell, because these impressions would have to last, to endure in her memory for God only knew how long.

‘I’m your mother. I gave birth to you. It’s not in my power to send you to your death. I’m responsible for your life. Yes — I’m there to make sure you live. I stake my own life for that. No matter what the reason, no one can demand of a mother that she be responsible for the death of her child. It would be inhuman of you to expect such a thing of me. I kept you alive. I had no choice.’

As if he had been waiting outside the door with an hourglass, the uniformed man returned. Their time was up. Kitty didn’t want to let Stasia go; she cursed and screamed, begged that they be granted a little more time. But Stasia kept stroking her face, and whispered in her ear:

‘I will not die without having seen you again. No matter how long it takes, I will not die until you come home. So pull yourself together now, Kitty, do it for me; go, go, because you will come back to me again; the times are changing, Thekla says so, Sopio says so, yes, that’s what they tell me, they’re changing and you will come home and I will stay alive until then. Until you come.’

*

It took the armies of the Warsaw Pact just three days to put an end to the Prague Spring. The Czechoslovakian reformers, including the imprisoned Dubček, were summoned to Moscow and made to stand in the corner like schoolboy truants. Upon his return to Prague, Dubček, humiliated, had to tell his people that Moscow had rescinded all the reforms. In the course of the Prague Spring, tens of thousands of people fled the country. At Moscow’s behest, the Czechoslovakian Communist Party was restructured and some members were expelled. In protest against the state’s capitulation, two students immolated themselves on Wenceslas Square, near the spot where Kitty had stood and sung her songs.