We hear the command! In this brave time the people shall burn the past!

With the proud flag we greet our eternal people, Georgia!

PABLO IASHVILI

Daria, the sun child, came into this world in the stifling, sultry night of 4 June 1970, in a pastel-coloured room in a hospital reserved exclusively for Lubyanka personnel. People had started to call the Lubyanka building in Moscow ‘Grown-Ups’ World’, after the big department store ‘Children’s World’ was erected opposite it in 1957.

Kostya himself had driven his daughter to the hospital when she went into labour. He had rejected outright his wife’s suggestion that she come to Moscow to support her daughter. He had paced up and down in the waiting room all night, and was the first person, after the midwife and Elene, to look into Daria’s angelic face. He was also the one who registered his own surname on Daria’s birth certificate. Naturally there was no question of giving his granddaughter the name of a deserter.

She was born during President Nixon’s first term in office, one year after Neil Armstrong’s landing on the moon, two years after Gagarin was killed in a mysterious plane crash, one year before Bernd Sievert was shot forty-three times and seriously wounded by East German border guards while attempting to escape over the Berlin Wall. The same year the Beatles announced they were splitting up, unleashing a flood of tears all around the world. Shortly before the Easy Rider wave washed over the eastern half of the globe and had every twenty-year-old praying that some blessed person would smuggle Harleys across every border. Shortly before Idi Amin seized power in Uganda; during the protest by the dissident Sakharov against sending members of the opposition to Soviet mental hospitals; and some months after the Nobel Prize was awarded to a certain Mr Beckett, who was still unknown in the East and, of course, nonetheless — or perhaps for that very reason — banned. Two years after the revolution that started in Paris — people still didn’t know whether the history books would record it as failed or successful, or whether it could even be described as a revolution. Shortly after the publication of an article in LIFE magazine about the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which the American Task Force Barker unit raped, murdered, and wiped out an entire village. And exactly one month after the Green House was completed.

*

The Green House was, and still is, one of the most beautiful houses I’ve ever seen. Bordered by a thick forest of pine trees to the north, to the west encircled by a breathtaking gorge (the first thing Stasia did was erect a three-metre high fence in front of it), to the east, a narrow dirt path leading to the nearby village, and overlooking the barns of the stud farm to the south.

Construction was completed in what was, for Georgian workmen, a utopian timescale. Stasia had shown real talent as a building contractor: she had driven the workers the way an experienced shepherd drives his flock, had cooked them princely meals every evening, kept their schnapps bottles full, and had nonetheless managed to ensure that work began at seven each morning. This despite the fact that Soviet workmen were a breed apart, one that needed a vast amount of alcohol, food, and rest before they could so much as put one brick on top of another.

At the age of seventy she had not only achieved the impossible, but had also demonstrated good architectural taste. She had had the old wooden balconies restored, the curlicued ornaments and old banisters refurbished. Had the wooden floorboards typical of the region varnished dark red; had stone floors laid in the spacious kitchen and in all the bathrooms, as well as in the cellar; and even managed to resurrect the ruined fireplace in the guest bedroom.

There were eight rooms over two floors, and a huge terrace at the front of the house that was to become the main living space for the whole family, except in the winter months. And then there was the phenomenal piece of land the house was built upon, which, according to Stasia’s plans, she and Christine were going to transform into an enchanting garden.

On the wide meadow that sloped up to the forest, she had a barn built, which — God knows why — she had the men paint lettuce-green. She claimed this barn for herself, and no one thought to ask what she intended to do in there, given that there was now plenty of room for everyone to have their own space in the magnificent house. They probably thought she wanted to use it for her gardening tools.

The Green House was an ideal place; it promised the world as it was meant to be. And the whole family was excited about moving in, looking forward to this new beginning and the arrival of a new family member. All except Christine.

She felt the loss of Miqa keenly: she was like a different person. She was seldom at home; no one knew where she went after work; they hardly ever heard her opera arias any more; her former passion — spending hours in the garden sowing seeds, weeding, trimming bushes, watering flowers — was extinguished. Added to the difficulty she had in coming to terms with her advancing age, and her perpetual resistance to retirement, was the disappointment of losing Miqa, whom she had raised with besotted love. The result was that Christine constantly gave the other women the feeling that they had done something wrong, that it was all their fault, because whenever she spoke to them now it was in a tone of condescension.

Any conversation about Miqa was stifled by Christine with icy vehemence. But what else could they have done, given the problems Miqa had caused? Stasia, newly returned from Prague, had been in no state to think about anything but her daughter. And ultimately they had had to make sure Miqa was safe from Kostya’s anger; even Andro had been forced to acknowledge that. Stasia would not accept any reproach on this score. Sopio had whispered to her in a dream, all those years ago, that she should tell the boy stories of a good world, and this she had conscientiously done. Now the boy was almost a man, and he would have to learn to fend for himself. Stasia was too old to put rose-tinted spectacles on anyone’s nose. She was too old to tell fairy tales. Besides, the boy — presumably it was in his nature — had made a terrible mistake, the consequences of which he, as well as her own biological grandchild, must bear. That was that — over and done with! She had done her duty; it was her right to take her well-earned, and above all peaceful, retirement and make the most of the opportunity the Green House offered them all.

But the more often Christine drove out to the house with her sister, to support her during its construction, the more her resistance to the plan intensified. It wasn’t a new beginning for her, not here, not under these circumstances. She had allowed her beloved boy to be sent back like a parcel delivered to the wrong address. Neither her opportunistic sister nor her weak-willed daughter-in-law had tried to establish the truth; they had just stoked the girl’s destructive fury and humiliated the boy in his defencelessness. And, although Christine respected her sister’s great achievement and could see how meticulously she had worked, with such attention to detail, she nonetheless became increasingly convinced that this paradise on earth could never be her home. Miqa was not allowed to be here, the truth had no place here, and she would never find peace, not without the boy.

And when the next scandal surrounding Elene came along, and then the news reached Tbilisi that the Russian bastard Vasili had jilted his pregnant fiancée and sneakily, dishonourably, run off with the wedding money, Christine could not restrain herself. She remarked triumphantly that it was only logical that he had bolted before it was too late: sensible men didn’t marry women who coerced them into things. Her schadenfreude was hard to comprehend; Nana responded with scorching fury, Stasia with bewilderment.

One month before the planned move to the Green House, Christine announced to her sister as they were washing up in the kitchen that she would not be going with them.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ cried Stasia in astonishment, putting a plate back in the sink.

‘What I just said: I’m staying here. This is my home.’

‘Don’t you see you’re being childish? Of course this is your home. You don’t have to move in straight away with all your worldly goods. As far as I’m concerned you can just come up for the weekends, while you’re still working at the hospital —’

‘I’m staying here. I’ve got nothing more to say on the subject. Besides, Miqa will apply to study in Tbilisi, and when he does I want him to live with me in my house.’

‘All this time I didn’t realise that this was your house, not ours! Elene will be here in two weeks. We’ll help her with the baby, and we’ll —’

‘You and Nana will manage that without me.’

‘He got my granddaughter pregnant, for goodness’ sake, and we were considerate and didn’t say anything to Kostya.’

‘We brought Andro up, and when it mattered we failed to see what was going on. We let him make that terrible mistake; and why? Because back then our own children and their worries seemed more important, didn’t they? I’m not going to make the same mistake with Miqa.’

Stasia had stepped aside and was lighting her filterless cigarette with one damp hand. ‘Now you just listen to me. I’ve paid dearly enough for what he did — that’s wicked, accusing me, saying I didn’t do enough to —’

Goya came flapping into the kitchen. They could hear Nana shifting furniture upstairs; she was in a real moving frenzy.

‘He didn’t do it. You know he didn’t. He gave in, he just gave in to your granddaughter. That was the full extent of his crime: he was just a boy, and he couldn’t control himself with a half-naked girl.’

‘Who had to pay the greater price? My poor girl, who had her womb scraped out at the age of fifteen, or Miqa, who had his fun and was sent back to his parents?’ Stasia was screaming now; her eyes had narrowed to slits. ‘It’s a miracle she got pregnant again. Doesn’t that count either, Christine?’

‘I tried to prevent it.’

‘And you didn’t! And do you know why? Because we’re not all-powerful, and we can’t save anyone! When are you going to understand?’