Soviet Union — Staggering Success!

PRAVDA

‘Hey, it’s me. I think you’ve overdone it a bit …? What do you mean, it’s no longer under your control? You’re with the militsiya, of course you have control. What do you mean, unconscious? You should have taken care who you locked him up with. What I wanted? Did I ask you to beat him like a piece of meat? You disappoint me, my friend. It seems I’ll have to deal with this personally. No, thank you. No, you’ve straightened out quite enough already. Why do I have to do all the thinking for everyone? What sort of rabble are you that you can’t even add two and two together? Of course he can’t defend himself; I mean, he didn’t come from the delinquents’ camp! You’ve got his file there in front of you. Fine; so tell your colleagues I don’t want any further proceedings. Tell them to forget the whole thing. I don’t want him to croak in there. When’s the trial? Fine, so we’ll wait out these three weeks and then … they’ll let him go.’

Elene, leaning against her father’s study door, overheard scraps of this phone conversation, but she couldn’t even cry any more, although the tears were choking her.

*

He went up to the guards, showed his pass, and entered the grey hospital building with its barred windows. The big guard stared indifferently into space; two others were playing cards and smoking cheap Astras. When Kostya finally came out again, the darkness masked his face and it was hard to read his expression. He stopped in front of Christine.

‘He’s in a coma,’ he said bluntly. ‘There was a fight.’

‘He was beaten into a coma?’ Her mind refused to process this information.

‘They … tried to strangle him.’

She hid her face in her hands.

‘The doctors say they don’t know how long his oxygen supply was cut off.’

‘I want to go to him.’

‘I don’t think that’s —’

‘You’re going to take me in there right now.’

‘It’ll take some time. I’ll have to make a few calls first. He is a prisoner, after all.’

‘A prisoner who was strangled without a single guard coming to his aid!’

*

Miqa spent five days in a coma before his ventilator was switched off. He looked as if he were asleep. The cuts and bruises had faded. Andro collapsed in the hospital corridor; Stasia rocked him back and forth as she had when he was little, as his mother had when she was still alive. Christine lay motionless, stretched over the dead body; she was admonished several times by the hospital staff, but no one dared forcibly drag her away from Miqa’s corpse.

Only Lana screamed and kept slapping her hands against her thighs.

And when Stasia looked up, Sopio Eristavi was standing in the blue light in the middle of the hospital corridor. She stood there as if she had just dropped by to say hello, for no particular reason. A brief, casual visit. Stasia began to walk, on frail, unsteady legs, towards her eternally young friend.

‘Now don’t act as if you didn’t expect to see me here,’ said Sopio.

‘I’ve made a mess of everything. Ever since you’ve been gone everything’s just gone down the drain.’ Stasia’s lips were moving silently. ‘He was only twenty-two, my God, just twenty-two. I haven’t been able to hold on to anything, everything’s trickled away, vanished, as if it fell through too coarse a sieve.’

‘Oh, Tasiko, you incorrigible fatalist.’

‘What should I have done? What?’

‘Dance, Taso. You should have danced.’

‘Who are you talking to, Deda?’

Kostya’s voice echoed down the corridor, interrupting the ghostly dialogue. Stasia looked around. The corridor was empty. But her son had called her Mother again.