Whoever wants to help the waverers must first stop wavering himself.

VLADIMIR LENIN

In July, Miqa was arrested and charged. Just three days earlier, in a dark brown suit that was decidedly too warm, he had paid a visit to the Tbilisi registry office with Lana — wearing a smart, cream-coloured two-piece suit and a white rose in her hair — and two film school friends who still dared to act as witnesses, and had married the mother of his child.

The charge against him was ‘misappropriation of state property’, and he was also accused of ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’. He was initially taken into custody in Ortachala. The trial date was set for the late autumn, and a special commission was set up to track down the film reels. Both Christine’s apartment and Andro’s house were searched. As the footage seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth, the lawyer gave neither Christine nor Lana any hope that Miqa would be released any time soon, because as long as the film reels were just a dangerous rumour, the state prosecutor could assume they did indeed contain something truly outrageous. He was also able to imply that the accused had shown an unwillingness to cooperate, which made his situation even worse.

When handing over a peredacha — the name given to packages smuggled to inmates by bribing the prison staff — the intermediary Christine had engaged was struck by the alarming state Miqa was in. The boy looked terrible, he said. Apparently he was having difficulty coping with life in jail; the other prisoners, most of them the worst sort of criminals, were giving him a very hard time; he was suffering from the unspeakable conditions: in short, the boy was not someone who could handle prison, and they had to get him out of there as fast as possible; he was at risk of both mental and physical breakdown.

*

‘I think I made a mistake.’ Lana didn’t dare raise her eyes, didn’t dare look at him directly. In the visitors’ room the guard stood leaning against the wall, wheezing and trying to look as absent as possible. She leaned towards him across the scratched table.

‘What are you trying to say?’

Even his voice had changed. As if it had renounced all interest in the outside world.

‘You’ve got to get out of here! It’s imperative, Miqa. Christine’s right. You’re not someone who can cope with a place like this.’

But before her lips could form another sentence, Miqa sat upright on his chair, shifted a little closer to her, and whispered: ‘No way. Whatever happens, you will do nothing. Do you understand me? We’re going to see this through to the end.’

‘To the end? We’re about to have a baby!’

‘You knew that back then!’

‘I don’t want to take the blame for this.’

‘Do as I tell you. That’s all I want from you. I’d rather you told me what they think of me. Have you talked to the others? What are the lecturers saying?’

His face lit up for a moment. As if that was what mattered. As if none of this counted — his current state, his misery, his fear — only the opinion others had of him.

‘They … they think you’re a hero. They’ve even started a petition. The whole institute is up in arms. They’ve plastered your photo all over the building. They’re planning to send an open letter to the public prosecutor’s office. Even some of the lecturers are standing with the students and saying it’s absurd to arrest you over a film that doesn’t exist.’

She didn’t know herself why she told him this. Perhaps because he wanted to hear it; it gave him the strength to endure it all. Because she was exaggerating: there were no photos of him, the petition had come to nothing, and the few lecturers who had initially supported him had been keeping their mouths shut since he’d been taken into custody. She had to keep this hope alive for him; but the more her belly swelled beneath her clothes, the more she despaired, the more senseless the whole undertaking seemed to her. The less she understood herself.

She’d tried to make contact with the film collective to get some moral support, but no one wanted to talk to her. People kept their distance, hung up when she called yet again. How could she ever have believed that his absence would be easier for her to bear than his lack of courage, his giving up? That she would rather have a director at her side than a father for her child?

*

Stasia had already laid the table and was waiting for her guests with great excitement.

‘I’ve persuaded him. He’s going to sit down with us. He’ll hear you,’ she whispered to her sister and Andro as they passed. He’ll hear you! It took all of Christine’s self-restraint to bite back a caustic remark. He’ll hear you! As if he were the lord of the manor and they his serfs.

The table they sat at was laid as if for a feast. Nana had taken the children to Vake Park, and Elene was wandering around somewhere down in the village.

After about half an hour, Kostya appeared in his dressing gown with a thick scarf wound about his neck. He nodded absently to them both. No handshake, no embrace. Better that way, thought Christine. She patted Andro’s hand under the table. Andro had come to town from the village at Christine’s behest especially for this meeting. The sight of him filled Christine with alarm. He had gone bald, only his magnificent beard glowed white, and you couldn’t miss the schnapps blotches on his cheeks. The hard skin on his hands was covered in boils — the price for his loyal devotion, for all the many heads of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

‘Apologies for my appearance. I can’t seem to shake this flu; it’s very annoying.’ Kostya took a seat at the table. As if what he was wearing was the most important thing about this meeting.

The silence weighed heavily on them. Stasia’s attempts at family small talk got nowhere. Andro pushed the food around his plate, and Christine seemed to have lost her appetite as well; she, too, held back while Stasia blathered something about the four village girls who had recently started coming to her for ballet lessons. Kostya sat stiffly at the end of the table, leaning back in his chair, like an observer of the scene who had been forbidden to contribute or intervene in any way. It was Christine who finally spoke up and began to voice her thoughts and suspicions about what had happened to Miqa.

The thin crust of civilised behaviour was soon scratched away and primitive energies released: an unimagined delight in destruction and relish for self-sabotage. They battered each other with words, fired sentences, wounded with revelations. And soon the forbidden name could no longer be avoided: the ghost of Kitty was invoked, and a bonfire of memories lit in her honour. They vied for her love; they threw the scraps of all their memories into a magician’s hat and mixed them together. And this feast of terrible memories would have been allowed to rage much longer if Kostya had not abandoned the path of conjecture and yelled out, in a threatening voice, one fact that massacred all others and turned Andro’s grief for one son into a tragedy of two.

‘You talk about her as if it were a logical consequence that my sister had to go away, that she couldn’t go on living here! As if she made a free decision to leave us and her country! Have you ever thought about the life she would have had if you hadn’t betrayed your homeland and she hadn’t been carrying your son in her belly?’

Andro didn’t understand. He had reached the limits of his physical capacity some time earlier, as no alcoholic drinks were on offer; he waggled his head like a Vanka Vstanka roly-poly toy, scratched his beard, and looked to Stasia for help. He searched for words, stammered. His ignorance was painful to behold. Kostya, coughing, also looked around him in surprise. Christine wondered whether he really was unaware that, after all these years, Andro still didn’t know, was still groping in the dark, or whether he had planned this revenge. Would he pull the emergency brake and bring the train to a halt before it hurtled into the abyss? Seconds later, though, Kostya had shaken off his momentary puzzlement, and continued, undeterred.

‘Andro — you must have wondered, didn’t you?’ He seemed to be making a huge effort to restrain himself, as words like ‘parasite’, ‘traitor’, ‘bastard’, and ‘deserter’ did not fall from his lips once that afternoon. He had opted for a crueller weapon: incontrovertible facts.

‘You were irresponsible enough to believe the Nazis were our future. And that’s why they abducted your beloved, and her child —’

‘Kostya, please!’

Christine’s voice was tentative, as if she weren’t sure whether to stop her nephew or let him go on speaking. But while she was still grappling with her indecision, Kostya had already decided. He wanted finally to break his feeble yet tenacious enemy.

‘They aborted the child — the child you planted in her womb with no thought of what it means to be a man, to bear responsibility for your wife and child, to protect them — even, if necessary, to protect them from yourself. Instead, you threw yourself so pitifully into the role of abused victim that others had no option but to bear that burden in your place!’

How skilfully Kostya placed every emphasis, every pause. As if he had been practising for this conversation all his life. An eerie silence fell, broken only by the ticking of the clock. You could practically hear the grass outside breathing.

*

Andro had followed Christine up to the Green House in the hope that Kostya would get his son out of the place he had sent him to. His life would surely have continued as imperceptibly as it had for years, indifferent, quiet, and brooding, leaving tracks he carefully obliterated behind him in the sure and certain belief that nothing in his life was worthy of preservation.

Perhaps he could not have prevented anything; could not, with his scabbed palms, have protected anything; perhaps he would not even have managed to convince his son that his life, at least, was worth preserving. But he would have tried — with what strength he had left he would have tried, if this atrocity, buried in a schoolyard long ago, had not robbed him of his last remaining shreds of empathy and the ability to battle through each day simply by continuing to exist.

Gradually, though, the ground split open. Time was combed the wrong way, the sequence of events shifted; misfortune was like a black bird’s beating wing that momentarily brushed them all as it descended.

Christine knelt before him, pleaded with him, clasped his hands in hers, but he didn’t want to stay, he didn’t want to have to save or preserve anything any more. He went home, to his strong schnapps and the busts of Lenin. It was so good to be able to replace the present with the past.

Why hadn’t she told him? Why hadn’t she written to him? Why hadn’t he known anything about her pregnancy?

He drank, and punched holes in the wall with his aching fists.

The nights carved bloody images on his chest.

He couldn’t breathe.

He reached for a hammer and smashed it down on the big head of Lenin that the administration building had rejected three years earlier on the grounds that Lenin’s nose was insufficiently distinguished.

He went on drinking.

The neighbours came running, knocked, and called out to him. He bolted the doors. He entrenched himself, and put his life on rewind.