How my soul yearned to catch butterflies!

May it now find peace somewhere …

KONSTANTIN SLUCHEVSKY

There were ladybirds, the ones that had such pretty spots on their backs, and there were the smells of all the different family members to be noted and distinguished; there was the sun and the moon, and there was sleep, and the dreams Daria didn’t usually remember after waking; there were stray dogs and cats, and there were comically patterned lizards; there were thousands of types of plant; there was the unfathomableness of all the different shades of light and earth, the nature of water, her mother’s choice of blouse; there was Goya, claiming his new home.

Yes, there was plenty to sniff and touch, plenty to smell and taste; and she had things to learn — crawling, for instance, or the word ‘Deda’. Then there was the hilarity of being tickled by her grandfather’s moustache when, with uncommon devotion, she threw her arms about him. The rural idyll around her, the horsewhispering from the stud farm, and the remoteness from the rest of the world protected her from all sorrow.

The only thing that could darken Daria’s perfect horizon was her mother’s sadness and lack of interest in her. For Elene had not been healed by her child, as she had hoped. It was too exhausting: the crying at night, the keeping to set feeding times, the post-natal hormonal swings. Her melancholy was too great, the pressure of being obliged to completely immerse herself in the joys of motherhood too stressful. And so, after enduring the first three months, Elene increasingly sidestepped her responsibilities and left her child more and more often with her own mother and grandmother, who seemed to have no problems whatsoever with the baby; on the contrary, they mastered every task very easily and with little effort, and even found it all delightful and exciting.

Initially, Elene was just as enthusiastic about the Green House as the rest of the family. But it wasn’t long before she realised that she was lonely out there, cut off from everything. That neither her daughter nor her parents were capable of filling her inner emptiness. She had too much time to think. Too much time to mull things over. She imagined what it would have been like if Vasili had stayed with her, if she hadn’t helped him to abandon her. Or if she had a place at university now and were living in Tbilisi, in a boarding house with others her own age; if she had made new friends, allies, kindred spirits. As it was, she felt permanently guilty, dirty, disorientated, and so full of anger: it was so stressful having to be Elene, Elene Jashi, having to carry this inheritance around with her, always having to be something special!

She prowled about, slept badly, was bad-tempered, bored. She found it hard to concentrate on anything for longer than an hour; nothing, it seemed, could rouse her interest, her curiosity. Sometimes she felt old, lethargic, and so alone that she asked herself whether she would ever be able to live like other people her age again. She didn’t know what to do with herself. She crept out of her room at night, wandered about the garden, secretly smoking one of Stasia’s cigarettes, biting her fingernails, staring at the night with restless eyes and searching for a way to be someone — anyone — other than herself. At what point had she failed to find herself? Where had she taken the wrong turning? When had she lost her way, and what way was it?

Her solitary walks took her further and further away from the Green House, away from Stasia and the child, away from her father and mother, who were both picked up early in the morning and brought back in the evening by Kostya’s driver.

When she thought about her classmates in Moscow and Tbilisi, her old friends, she was filled with rage towards Daria. She was certain her friends didn’t have swollen, aching breasts, or stretchmarks, didn’t have to get up three times a night, and could go out, drink, party, study, travel, fall in and out of love, and live as their age and desires dictated.

Her walks grew longer. She got to know the surrounding villages and settlements. Visited the stud farm. She studied the lithe thoroughbred animals as they grazed. She watched the Arabs, Javakhians, and Kabardins. Imagined what it would be like to mount one and ride off into the unknown.

On one of these walks she met Miqail. I think it was his name that decided it. If he’d been called David, Seraphim, or Giorgi, perhaps she wouldn’t have gone about things with such zeal and such readiness for self-sacrifice. He was a middle-aged man with a full beard and peculiar clothes. A simple cross hung around his neck. He was working at the stables for the summer.

Once she had overcome her initial mistrust, she grew more talkative; this dour man seemed friendly, open, and interested in her troubles. Also, his speech betrayed his city origins: he was from Tbilisi.

Elene’s walks became her main occupation. At around three o’clock, Miqail would take a break, and she would already be waiting outside the stable. She would bring a little picnic basket with her — Stasia’s delicacies wrapped in aluminium foil, plus a little fruit and some vegetables — and if the opportunity presented itself she would pilfer a bottle of wine from Kostya’s cellar. She liked Miqail’s calmness, his self-control, and above all she liked the feeling that as a woman she didn’t seem to interest him in the slightest. At first, she was almost offended, ascribing his lack of interest to her diminished attractiveness since the birth of Daria, but soon she found it liberating. This, she had to admit, was better and simpler.

He didn’t ask stupid questions; he didn’t seem the least bit surprised that she never once mentioned the father of her child; he wasn’t interested in why such a young woman was living in such isolation and not pursuing an occupation, in line with socialist values, according to which no one in the Soviet Union was without work. He once asked her whether she believed in God. For some reason, Elene wasn’t surprised by the question; it was as if she had been waiting for it. She didn’t know, she answered; she would like to. Two years earlier she had even entered a convent, but it hadn’t really done anything for her.

After this, Miqail began to supply Elene with Christian texts. He told her, later on, that his parents had fallen victim to state repression, so he had grown up with relatives and in children’s homes. That his sister had killed herself after discovering that her own husband was spying on her. That, at the age of nineteen, he had ended up in Navtlukhi prison, and subsequently spent seven years in prison in Rostov. He had gone astray, as he put it. In prison he had found God, and now he propagated his own religion, a motley combination of Greek Orthodox ideology and Tolstoy’s A Confession and My Religion.

After Rostov, he said, he had started roaming across the country, and was repeatedly arrested for refusing to work. He despised all forms of possession and lived by doing casual summer jobs in the countryside, because in Tbilisi a man like him would quickly become too conspicuous and wouldn’t find any disciples for his ideology. And indeed, in the years of his peregrinations he did make a name for himself as a miracle healer (such things have always found fertile ground in the Caucasus), and away from the kolkhozes and tea plantations he found plenty of people to listen to the teachings he had cobbled together. It wasn’t long before Elene, too, was counted among his followers.

He preached a life without possessions, a stateless system; he quoted the Bible and Tolstoy, and kept supplying her with the right books.

Everything he said sounded so simple and so clever. As if all you had to do was follow his commandments and life would just be an endless orgy of happiness. But his commandments seemed impossible to put into practice. However hard Elene tried to forgive her parents, to not get annoyed with Daria, to never get worked up about her annoying family members, to be loving and forgiving, she would always come up against her own limits, run to Miqail, confess her ‘sins’ to him, and vent her frustration over the enforced harmony of daily life in the Green House.

‘I can’t stand it any more! And when I’m sitting on the terrace in the evening, I hear my father saying to my mother: “Look at the way she just wanders about, why doesn’t she make something of herself, she’s completely letting herself go, she has no interest in anything, it’s just not normal, and then that stupid music, that music all the time, it’s not healthy, what has she done to her hair, why doesn’t she socialise with people her own age, why doesn’t she come to Tbilisi with us, why’s she always down in the village, where does she go there?” And so on. And Mother tries to calm him down, feeds him some lie or other, but she’s just as disappointed in me. Sure, it’d be great for her if I were one of her students, then she could show off, she could say: “Look, this is my child, she may have been jilted by a deserter but she’s got back on her feet, got her energy back, and now she’s studying, and soon she’ll find a strong Georgian guy who can be relied on not to walk out on her and will look after her properly. She’ll be a good housewife to him, a sociable girl dancing through life, accompanying him on lovely summer holidays to Borjomi and skiing in Bakuriani in winter!” Honestly, it makes me want to throw up. What on earth should I do, Miqail? At night, when they’re all asleep and Daria doesn’t need feeding any more, I sneak up to the attic. It’s the only place in the house where I can have my peace and quiet, where no one can find me. The extension isn’t finished’ — (it never would be, Brilka!) — ‘and there’s a balcony up there with no railing. I sit there, reading, smoking, thinking, and I can’t come to a conclusion. No solution. Isn’t that awful?’

But she didn’t have the courage to speak of what she really wanted to confess. How she would have liked to confess to Miqail about that terrible afternoon; to admit that, ever since, all her actions, memories, and thoughts ended in this vague sense of deficiency, failure, and hopelessness. How much she would have liked to have told him about her squeaking bed, Miqa’s confused, fearful expression, the terrible panic and destructive fury she had felt, which had so overwhelmed her, filling her with such fear, and which at times she still sensed in herself today. That although she felt remorse, there had also been a certain gratification, something deeply satisfying, because she had succeeded in driving him out and reconquering her rightful place, the throne she craved; except that this throne had turned out to be nothing like as desirable and comfortable as she had imagined.

She would have liked to ask Miqail what it was, this ball of emotions that time had failed to unravel, that still moved in her veins, in her blood vessels. Would so have liked to have known whether, beyond her anger, her jealousy of Miqa, there had been some other thing back then that had pierced her so deeply, so sharply, some thing capable of unleashing such destructive fury in her, a feeling that made everything else appear secondary. Why it was that, to this day, she became frantic with rage whenever she thought of how he hadn’t defended himself, hadn’t held her back.

*

Meanwhile, Brilka, your mother was learning to crawl, then walk. John Lennon released Imagine; Stasia gave up her trips to the city and any attempts to overcome the distance and contempt between herself and her sister; Kitty Jashi released her best and most popular album yet, Replacement, with the now-famous photo from Prague emblazoned on the cover. Bored by the New Testament, Elene read Madame Bovary, Swann’s Way, Scarlet and Black, Albert Savarus, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (this last, of course, covertly); and some western journalist compiled a statistic according to which the average Soviet citizen spent around five-hundred and fifty-two hours a year queuing for food. He also claimed that one-third of the goods manufactured in the Soviet Union existed only on paper.

*

Withdrawal took precisely thirty-four days. Kitty left the flat only to buy necessities. The delirium and hallucinations, the outbursts of aggression, the vile insults, the pathetic begging and whimpering were followed by two fainting fits, during which Kitty had to call an ambulance, and utter hysteria that forced her to tie Fred’s emaciated body to the bed. After many, many sleepless nights — and after Kitty had written five new songs — Fred Lieblich got out of bed at three o’clock one morning, showered, put on a clean shirt, came into Kitty’s study, and looked at her friend, smiling as if nothing had happened.

When she saw Fred standing in front of her, wet-haired, smelling fresh, the feverish light of those recent days gone from her catlike eyes, Kitty’s guitar slid to the floor; she put her hands over her mouth and started crying silently. Fred stood and smiled at her; neither woman trusted herself to go to the other. As if there were an invisible wall between them: impossible to transition straight from the role of nurse, or patient, to lover.

‘Keep playing. Don’t stop.’

Fred sat at Kitty’s feet. Kitty took her guitar, played, and began to sing along with the chords.

As dawn was breaking, with Fred trailing her forefinger across Kitty’s thigh, Kitty made her a proposition.

‘I want to move to Vienna with you. I want you to go back there. I want us to make a home there for ourselves. There was a time when I wanted to go there with someone else. We never made it, and now he never will. But you and I could go. And I’d really like to. I’d really like to go back, too, but I can’t. You can, and you should try. All of this here, all these people, they’re not good for you. They don’t see you, they don’t know you, they don’t understand you. Let’s try it, you and I.’