Peace, land, and bread!

POSTER SLOGAN

Kitty had spotted Christine from the other end of the corridor. She had looked so old, and at the same time so childlike. The once-striking beauty had become an impoverished, eccentric, introverted figure. She held her aunt in her arms for a long time. Inhaled her scent, and remembered how, when she had returned from that village, from Hell, without her big belly and with burning stitches in her abdomen, she had run her fingers over Christine’s wounds to draw her own map of survival.

The window of the hospital room looked out onto narrow-limbed, black-green cypresses, with tops that seemed to stab the clouds. Elene led Kitty into the room and explained to her that he came round intermittently, that when he did he even took a little food, but that he had not spoken since his arrival and Kitty shouldn’t hope for too much. Then she offered her a chair, as if she, Elene, were the hostess at some happy event.

Another patient lay in the other corner of the room; he was conscious, and reading Pravda.

Cautiously, Kitty approached Andro’s bed. He was lying slightly on his side, head turned towards the sunny window, one arm resting on top of the blanket. It took some time for her to see the old features in his face, which the intervening years had disfigured beyond all recognition. It wasn’t easy to find the blond, curly-haired Andro, carver of angels, in this man with the matted beard.

How had he lived since she’d been gone? Who was the woman who had borne him a son? And what had his son been like? Did he resemble the son who had been denied the right to be born?

Elene told her that the doctors said he only had a few more weeks. Kitty stretched out her hand. She was shivering, although it was warm outside. Elene had gone over to the window and was looking down into the hospital garden with the tall cypresses and the white benches.

Neither of them saw the woman in a man’s suit, with eyes like Andro’s, who stood down there under the tallest cypress, looking up at them. Smiling patiently.

Dark veins were visible through his skin; skin rough and lined from the hard work to which he was so unsuited. From the busts of Lenin and the Generalissimus.

Kitty struggled for words.

‘Andro, can you hear me?’ she whispered, bringing her lips close to his ear. ‘It’s me, Kitty. I’m back. Here — my hand, can you feel it? I’ve come. To you, Andro.’

Only now did Kitty sit on the chair Elene had pulled up for her. Then she beckoned to Elene, who hurried over and sat on the edge of it, where Kitty had made space.

‘Tell me about him. And about his son,’ she said quietly, not taking her eyes off Andro’s stony face.

As if she had waited centuries for this request, Elene began to talk. Cheerful and over-eager, the words and sentences gushed out of her such that even the Pravda-reading patient put down his paper for a moment and squinted over at them. She talked wildly, indiscriminately. About her childhood. About her time in Moscow. About Vasily and the Black Sea coast. Then the business with Miqa’s film that no one had ever seen. Then about the night she and Lana had driven to the village in the mountains to fetch Andro. But mostly she talked about Miqa. She tried to tell the truth. She tried not to gloss over her own failure. But she couldn’t do it: no matter what she said, no matter how long she went on talking, her words didn’t create a unified picture, didn’t make anything clear. There was no logic to her story, nothing made sense; the thread that could have led to Miqa’s death was missing.

Elene kept glancing hopefully at Kitty, but gleaned no comfort from her features, no understanding, not even a reproach; it was as if Kitty’s face were a mirror in which she saw only herself.

Suddenly, Kitty stood up and left the hospital room. Elene stared after her in dismay, incapable of connecting Kitty’s exit to her report. Kitty walked past Christine into the orange-tiled hospital toilet, which stank of urine. The door swung shut behind her; immediately she leaned against it and stood there, motionless, for several minutes, trying to control her breathing. Then she walked over to the basin, which was yellowed with age, and turned on the tap. A brownish liquid flowed from it; recalling her mother’s saying, ‘Let the water run long enough and eventually it’ll run clear,’ she waited. Sure enough, the brown disappeared and the clear water came. She held her hands under it. She looked at herself in the scratched mirror. And screamed.

She sank to the wet floor, fell on her knees, still clinging to the basin with one hand. Her body was failing her. Her breath was failing her. People, too: all of them had failed her.

He would die. She would have to mourn him. He, too, would go.

There was so much she still wanted to say to him. She would have had to tell him the story of half her life. No — all of it. But differently: retold. The story he didn’t know. Didn’t understand. She wanted to puke up her silence, her impotence, into this miserable basin. To vomit with all she had and disgorge her fear, the fear of what was still to come. Yes: she was no longer interested in what might lie ahead. How could you live if you were constantly looking back?

*

She saw him again at the state banquet. Four days had passed since her arrival. Four days in the Green House, where a non-existent happiness was invoked and celebrated. There he stood, in the entrance to this stylish restaurant above the city, near the television tower. Between the white-clothed tables, under painfully garish lights, surrounded by frantic waiters and the suit-wearers who all dissolved into a grey mass in Kitty’s eyes.

Kostya was originally supposed to accompany her to this reception, where she was to shake countless hands, give prepared answers to questions, and eat with people who inspected her with suspicion and, at the same time, were filled with envy; where she was to meet the musicians, painters, and writers who had been recognised and approved by the state and speak with them about the advantages of socialism. Where her every gesture and every word would be carefully weighed and she would be examined and judged on the degree of her capitalist depravity. Kostya, however, had caught the flu and stayed at home.

Instead, Kitty had brought her niece, who was wearing a bright yellow dress and was very excited. It seemed there was something she had to live with that she couldn’t live with, and she was seeking in Kitty another life that Kitty — she was sure of it — would not be able to give her. Elene would end up being disappointed. This young woman looked so like her, yet was so unlike her in her passivity, her torpor, her inability to lead an autonomous life, while always longing for precisely that.

He greeted her, played the role of official chaperone so masterfully. He hadn’t needed to rehearse this. Nor had she. He shook her hand. Not too firm, not too feeble.

Seated between Elene and a pianist, she kept glancing at him as she let the obligatory stilted speeches about friendship between peoples, art, homeland, socialism, the Georgian Communist Party and its impeccable leadership wash over her. And every time she looked at Alania she saw Andro’s closed eyelids. The cracked lips, the feeble, cold hand, the ragged fingernails, the matted beard. And when she thought of him, she thought of the classroom and Mariam; she saw the blonde woman hidden behind the dark corner of a house, pulling her brother towards her. And then she saw the blood on the knife in the room on the Holy Mountain, and asked herself whether she had ever really left that room. And when she asked herself this, the next question was inevitable: after all that, how could she have bound anyone to her again, and how could she ever have believed a red-haired woman who, unlike her, was smart enough to know that concentration camp barracks and rooms with corpses are not places you ever leave?

*

Her rehearsals at the Philharmonia began the following day. They tried out the acoustics and the engineers did a sound check, under the eyes of Alania and two other men from the Georgian KGB. She hadn’t performed for a very long time, particularly not in front of such a large audience. After her American tour, and then the split with Fred, she hadn’t played any more big concerts.

She was to be accompanied on four songs from the album Replacement by a string quartet, and by a pianist for three more. They rehearsed together, and once they started playing she was actually able to forget Andro’s face. Soon they were creating harmonies that drove the battle between socialism and capitalism out of her mind.

After rehearsals, Kitty would stroll around the streets of Tbilisi, accompanied by the three silent men. There was little she could do about the fact that she saw the city through the eyes of two people: the eyes of the red-haired junkie, Fred, and the eyes of the dying Andro.

The day of the concert was the only day Kitty didn’t go to the hospital. Despite Alania’s protests and the warnings of the security men, who refused to be shaken off, she had visited Andro in hospital every day, had stroked his hands and watched them artificially keep him alive; and once, unable to stop herself, she had lain on his chest and kissed his face over and over again. Elene had been outside, the Pravda patient asleep.

Now she was sitting alone in her dressing room at the Philharmonia, thinking of a particular hotel room in Baltimore. It had had heavy gold curtains, presumably from the Gilded Age. Fred had taken one of the curtains and wrapped the material round her body, draping it like a Victorian dress; she had put on Kitty’s lipstick and posed as if singing an opera aria. Kitty had picked up Fred’s newly purchased camera and taken a photo. A photo she’d never had developed, as the camera had disappeared along with the film and its owner.

Kitty hid her face in her hands for a moment, took a deep breath, rose to her feet, and stepped out on stage with her guitar. She would sing of her life of two halves. Here, on this stage, she could finally be who she was, and afterwards it would surely be harder for her to go back to the bad play in which she couldn’t be who she wanted to be, couldn’t say what she thought, couldn’t mourn those she wanted to mourn. She was afraid the sentences she had learned by heart would run out, that she would lose control of her face, that her voice would crack. But she was buoyed up by the applause that broke out the moment she was caught in the spotlight, and the fear instantly vanished when she played the first chord on her guitar.