We were first in line,

but those behind us are eating already!

VLADIMIR VYSOTSKY

With her patience, tenacity, and single-mindedness, Lana too had succeeded in translating Miqa’s ethereal, intellectualised yearning and fervour into the language of the body. She accepted what he offered her without a hint of reproach, hoping that beneath his unhappy reticence, his mute fatalism, there was much more to be found, much more to be had. After months of waiting and methodical preparation, Lana achieved her ultimate victory. The last of his defences fell. And even though his hands still didn’t know quite what to do with her body, even though she was still slightly disappointed by his lack of passion, Lana was happy. She was also well aware that he was rewarding her: thanks to her ingenuity and the cleverly packaged half-truths in the second script, written for the commission, the screenplay had been approved. Miqa could make his film!

She knew, then, that for him this act of love was a sign of gratitude. But that didn’t mean anything; soon this gratitude would become inevitability, then necessity, and he would find her body as indispensable as her survival strategies, her cleverness and support.

*

It was one of those dimly lit roadside restaurants in Mtskheta — wooden bungalows and booths with provisional-looking décor, and tired, drunken musicians always tootling the same tunes — that, contrary to expectations, serve the best Georgian food. Miqail and his Plekhanov Street friends, along with Beqa and Elene, had just enjoyed an excellent meal and were sitting outside, a little drunk now, making sentimental toasts, constantly hugging each other, and not thinking about politics for once.

The sixth-term film directing students from the State Institute for Film and Theatre were celebrating in the same restaurant. Naturally, Lana was also at this table. And the two parties would probably never have noticed each other, and the evening would have passed off without incident, if some of the students hadn’t started singing.

The singing attracted the attention of Miqail’s boys, and they sent the waiter over to the ‘singing table’ with a bottle of sparkling wine and a plate piled high with fruit. Whereupon a tipsy student came over, thanked them, and invited the group to join them. Tables were pushed together and they began switching seats. It was only when she had reached the other end of the terrace that Elene noticed Miqa. Concealing her agitation, she attempted a friendly smile, even venturing to greet him with a tentative kiss on the cheek. Everyone introduced themselves, shook hands, and clapped each other euphorically on the back or shoulder. Fresh jugs of wine were ordered; epic toasts were made.

The tension in Miqa’s body, and Elene’s frequent glances in his direction, did not escape Lana’s notice, and she kept asking questions, wanting to know who this girl was. Christine’s great-niece, he informed her, under duress. He excused himself, rose from the table, and marched over to the men’s toilets. A few seconds later, Elene followed him. The door was half open and she peered in. Miqa was standing in front of the mirror, washing his hands.

‘I’m happy to see you, even though it’s strange … Oh God, I don’t know what I’m saying. How are you? Studying?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Yes, I do. And what are you doing now?’

He soaped his hands again, despite having just washed them, as if he were afraid of turning round, of having to look at Elene. She stared at his reflection.

‘I feel so bad about the business with my father. I didn’t mean —’

‘Just forget it, okay?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Let’s go back. I expect they’re waiting.’

‘Why didn’t you stop me? Why?’

She walked up to him. He left the water running and it dripped off his hands. He shook his wrists like an epileptic. Then, slowly, he turned round, avoiding her eyes, perhaps hoping to get past her. But she blocked his path, summoned all her courage, and stepped right up to him so that he had to look at her. And what she saw made her shudder. His eyes were filled with incandescent poison. Never had she seen a look of such corrosive, devastating hatred. She felt utterly disarmed. Utterly ignoble and worthless.

‘What do you want from me? Huh?’ he barked at her. ‘Just get out of my life, will you. Stay out of it! Do you understand?’

His eyes had contracted to two small, dark dots, his mouth was twisted in an ugly, contemptuous line, the veins on his neck protruded in scarlet indignation.

‘Why did you sleep with me?’ There was a knot of iron stuck in her throat. Another second and she would start sobbing at the top of her voice, and she would never be able to stop, she would be stuck here, in this toilet that stank of urine, an appropriate location for the whole of her miserable existence.

‘Sleep? I didn’t sleep with you! I screwed, banged, fucked you!’ He spat the words in her face. They burned. They were little blades slicing open her skin.

‘Why would you say something like that?’

‘You were the horny one. Totally driven by your urge to procreate! You had a real itch between your legs! That’s how it was, wasn’t it? The little whore who found her true vocation!’

Where were these words coming from? They sounded like a foreign language in his mouth. He’d never raised his voice, never contradicted anyone. Where was he finding such venom now, such blind, destructive fury? Had she turned him into this person who glared at her now with such malice in his eyes? Did he know the price she was paying? Did it show?

‘What do you want from me? Shall I crawl to you on my knees? Can’t you see I haven’t forgiven myself? Is that what you need? Is it? Is that what you want, Miqa?’

She pressed her hand over her mouth to stop herself howling like a wolf.

‘Yes, that’s exactly what I want!’ he retorted, and stepped to one side. He was going to leave; he was going to run away right then and leave her there in her misery. Yes, that was what would happen. No — she couldn’t let it happen. She grabbed his wrist; he looked down, as if he couldn’t believe she was daring to touch him, but he didn’t wrench himself free, not yet. His eyes were unreadable. They frightened her. She didn’t know whether it was pain or remorse, anger or disgust that gathered there. She hadn’t known how to interpret his expression before, either.

She moved closer and flung her arms around him, clung to him, tried to capture his breath; perhaps his smell would make him seem familiar to her again.

‘You enjoyed it. I know you enjoyed it, I looked into your eyes, I watched you the whole time; it gave you pleasure to see me lying underneath you. It gave you pleasure to see me suffer. Please tell me; say it and I’ll kneel in front of you for all I care, I’ll do whatever you tell me. Please, just admit it. I’ll take all the blame, I’ll beg my father to ask for your forgiveness, but do it, please!’

‘You want me to do you a favour? Why? So you can feel less dirty, less bad? When it was you who couldn’t keep your legs together!’

‘Why won’t you just admit it? Why can’t we be honest with each other? Do you think I forgot it just like that, drew a line under it, that I simply moved on? Please!’

‘Elene, that’s not how it works. You can’t expect me to absolve you so you can go on playing Miss Cheerful. You forced me into it, and no matter how you try to twist the facts, that’s the way it’ll always be!’

‘Why don’t you just say it? Why don’t you say that you hate me?’

‘Hate’s far too big a word. That’s another emotion you have to earn. What I feel for you is indifference, and how you deal with your pangs of conscience is your own affair. You should have thought about that before pulling up your dress.’

‘You did it because you thought it was a way of denouncing me, exposing me in Christine’s eyes. You slept with me so you could be alone with her. You hoped everything would be decided in your favour; you bet everything on that. It’s true, isn’t it? Are you surprised that I can see it?’

He didn’t answer; instead, he tried to get away from her. Incapable of saying anything else, trapped inside her fear that he might escape her, abandon her to herself again, to the emptiness that held her so tightly in its arms, she stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to his.

He wanted to grab her by the shoulders and push her away, but someone else got there first. Someone grabbed his shoulders and flung him to the damp floor of the toilet; already he could feel something connecting with his coccyx. Beqa had come looking for his girlfriend and found her kissing a strange man in the gents’. According to the male codex, when Georgian honour is violated, the only possible course of action is to punch one’s rival to the ground.

Elene’s screams brought everyone running from table to toilet, and the Plekhanov boys and the film students fell on each other in a savage brawl. Within seconds, a great scrum of male bodies had formed. They held their opponents’ heads under their armpits, pressed them against the cold tiles, or slammed their fists into backs and knees, stomachs and faces.

Elene stood looking dumbly on, as if paralysed. She saw Lana throw herself between the men, in an attempt to shield Miqa, and get punched. Perhaps it was Elene’s instinct that protected her, prevented her from joining in this orgy of flailing arms and legs; for although she didn’t know it, at this point my mother was already pregnant with me, and perhaps I would not be here today if she had intervened in that fight.

Eventually the waiters, three other customers, and the burly restaurant owner pulled the men off each other and ended the punch-up. Elene was sitting on the pavement crying, her face in her hands, sobbing like her two-year-old daughter when she jerked awake in the night and cried out for her mother. Lana appeared beside her out of nowhere, with a torn blouse and a bloody scratch on her cheek, and glared down at her with loathing.

‘Leave him alone.’

‘It’s not my fault. This time it’s not my fault; I didn’t want —’

‘Just stay away from him, okay?’

Elene was surprised by the velvety voice of this woman who, just moments ago, had been defending Miqa without a thought for herself. Despite the harshness of her words, she sounded as if she sucked caramels every day to give her voice its soft and unctuous timbre.

‘He didn’t defend himself, again,’ Elene murmured absently.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He didn’t defend himself!’ Elene screamed.

*

Two weeks later, my mother found out about me, and accepted the news with calmness and equanimity, matter-of-factly, as if there were an inevitability to her getting pregnant, as if she existed only to offer up her body as a portal to all unborn children with an insatiable desire to enter the world.

Beqa, her rebellious boyfriend, received the news with less composure. He stared at her, stunned, scratched behind his ears, massaged his neck, cleared his throat, and tried to smile. Then he started doing everything in his power to persuade her. It was really difficult right now, he had no work, and not much prospect of any, either; he was living with his parents and certainly didn’t want to sponge off them. And with her parents — no, there was absolutely no question of that, quite apart from the fact that Elene’s father would never accept him as his new son-in-law; besides which, he was, as she knew, against the institution of marriage per se; of course he was happy that she was carrying the fruit of their love in her womb, it just wasn’t the right time to be starting a family. So, hmm, er, perhaps this time, this one time, it would be possible to, er, well, hmm, ‘get around’ the problem.

My mother stood up without a word, tucked her handbag under her arm, and left Beqa.

*

When Kostya heard that he was to be a grandfather again, he hurled the pretty cup from which he was drinking his evening black tea, and its scalding contents, at the wall. It had been one of his wife’s acquisitions; she was very keen on valuable household objects and was always asking someone with a travel permit to bring her back a Czech, German, or English tea set, of which she now had a sizeable collection. She screamed, shocked by his fury, as well as by the loss of the pretty cup, because what value was there in an incomplete tea set?

‘Do you know what you are? Do you? A whore, a cheap, worthless whore, that’s all,’ he yelled at Elene. Coming from him, this vulgar word was like a dagger to her heart, because there was nothing Kostya hated more than people who screeched like fishwives, or vulgarity of any kind. His weapons were argument, contempt, coldness, rejection; never words like this.

Elene sank into a chair.

‘Who said you could sit down? Huh? Who? That’s my chair. And you will sit in it when I say you can. Because everything in this house was put here by me and my work — everything you can touch and see. The people who live here have worked. But you? You’re a good-for-nothing — a freeloader and leech, on top of everything. The only thing you know how to do is trample on our nerves and our good name. That’s your sole vocation in life!’

‘Kostya, please,’ Nana interjected, the shards of her Czech, German, or English teacup in her hand.

‘What is it? What? Am I wrong? Enlighten me, then! She could have had it all, we gave her everything on a silver platter, and instead she trampled it all to bits with her slut’s legs. She spits in our face, then laughs at us behind our backs with her criminal friends. Because that’s what they are, my dear. That priest — don’t make me laugh. He wants to prepare a path to God for me, does he? Are you familiar with his history? Did he tell you about his spell behind bars? Or did your John the Baptist neglect to mention that?’

‘He’s got nothing to do with it,’ mumbled Elene.

‘Oh, right, so it was an immaculate conception, was it?’

‘He’s not the father.’

‘So much the better. Why don’t you reveal to us the father of your child? Why don’t you introduce him to us? Your honourable consort? It wasn’t enough for you to get involved with a gigolo, a traitor, a deserter; no, something was still missing, you had to surpass yourself. Well, I can’t wait to hear who it is this time. I’ll never be able to wash the shame away now. This is the path you’ve chosen. So you will do as I tell you. Because as far as I can see you’ve got no one else who’s in a position to help you. Apparently you can’t even hang on to your criminal boyfriend. On Monday we will go to a doctor and he will carry out an abortion. Is that clear?’

Nana looked away from her daughter at the shards in her hand. Elene’s chin began to tremble. Kostya stared defiantly out of the window at the sunlit landscape, into the free, clear day. And before another word could be uttered, Stasia entered the room, holding little Daria in one hand and her roll-up in the other. Daria laughed and ran to her mother.

‘Something happened?’ asked Stasia, and sat down at the table. Daria clambered onto Elene’s lap as Elene struggled to control her chin.

‘Leave Mama alone, Dariko. It’s not your fault that she’s a tart, my angel. Come to me,’ said Kostya calmly, holding out his hand to Daria.

‘I hate you!’ screamed Elene, jumping up and setting Daria down on the floor.

‘I’ll just have to live with that. All I want to know is, are we agreed?’

‘I’m going to keep the baby,’ said Elene.

‘Are you pregnant?’ asked Stasia. She broke out in rasping laughter. Nana and Kostya shot her furious looks.

‘Tart! Tart!’ Daria shouted merrily, clearly delighted by the addition to her vocabulary.

*

I’m sure I would have been a wanted child, conceived in love, if Thekla had survived the era that was no longer hers, if Stasia had been allowed to follow Peter Vasilyev, if Ramas Iosebidze had prevented his wife from removing her mask at the New Year’s ball, if Ida had conquered hope, if my grandfather had found the door between sea and horizon and opened it, if operating tables had not been used in schoolrooms, if Andro Eristavi had learned that, as a consequence of his mistaken beliefs, a child was ripped from Kitty’s womb, if Kitty had kept Death at bay, if she had stayed, if the world had castrated the Little Big Men before they could sow their seed, if the ghosts had been allowed to finish singing their songs, and if hunger had not been stronger than love. Yes, everything would have been better then, the way we want it to be when we come into the world: loving parents, a free country with no Brezhnev, and Lou Reed for everyone.