Who included me among the ranks of the human race?

JOSEPH BRODSKY

‘I’ve got precisely twenty minutes. Then I have to go to some excruciating event, national children’s dances or something. I wanted to have you to myself for a moment — you didn’t come to the concert yesterday, and I thought …’

Kitty was exhausted. She was sitting at the round table in Christine’s living room, and her eyes had dark rings under them for lack of sleep.

Christine put her arms around her from behind and stood like that for a while. They listened to the old cuckoo clock ticking on the wall. Kitty closed her eyes. Leaned back against Christine’s chest. Her body felt so weightless, like a bird you could hold in the palm of your hand.

‘I don’t know what’s happened between you, but it seems unthinkable to me that you and Deda hardly see each other any more,’ Kitty said wearily.

Christine moved away to fetch a carafe of cherry liqueur and two glasses. Then she sat down opposite her niece. Her gaze was full of warmth and comfort, as if she were laying a warm blanket round Kitty’s shoulders.

‘There are three men on the stairs outside my door. I assume they’re here because of you.’

Christine poured the red liquid into the glasses.

‘Yes, they follow me everywhere I go. Every second, every minute, they’re there. Only when I’m with Kostya — then they leave us alone. Kostya’s trustworthy enough for them. But I wanted to see you — all of you. Not this masquerade, Christine. I don’t get to see you, Deda and Kostya are trying to turn my life into one long party, Andro isn’t even conscious any more, and the rest, the rest is … unbearable.’

Christine leaned across the table and pressed a kiss to Kitty’s forehead. What Kitty really wanted to do was lie down on this table, right here and now, and ask her aunt to watch over her, to stroke her head as she had back then, during the worst time of her life; until her strength returned and she was healthy, raring to go and bursting with new songs. But at any minute they would knock on the door and remind her that this masquerade, in which, like it or not, she was playing the lead role, had to go on. She would go out to them, give them a friendly smile. They would warn her once again not to visit the dying deserter and traitor in hospital.

She got up and went to the bathroom. Since returning to her homeland she always seemed to be taking refuge in toilets and bathrooms, both public and private. They seemed to be the only places where she could assume she wouldn’t be followed. It felt as if someone were squeezing her temples with forceps.

There was a knock on the apartment door. Kitty heard Christine open up. It was Alania. She recognised his footsteps. She heard him say something, and Christine invited him in. No — she couldn’t go out yet. She let the water run.

*

‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but they’re waiting: I have to take Comrade Jashi away from you.’ Alania was embarrassed. He felt inhibited and ugly before the once-beautiful Christine; he wanted to get out of this apartment again as quickly as possible. He thought of how Kostya had idolised this woman. This was the woman for whom he had delivered the parcel, an impotent attempt to comfort her after her tragedy. And it was the parcel he had to thank for his encounter with Kitty Jashi: it was because of Christine that he’d made that detour all those years ago. The detour that had lasted a lifetime.

She had opened the door to him, but now she stepped back in shock. Her lips parted as if she were going to cry out; then she closed them again and slowly backed away. She groped along the wall with one hand, feeling for something, found the switch and snapped on the overhead light. She stared at him as if she had seen something that scared her to death.

‘Is everything all right?’

Alania raised his head and looked straight at her. Although it made him rather uneasy, he wanted to look at her properly, to impress her image on his mind. To seek the beauty behind the passage of time.

Christine had dyed her hair black and wore it swept into a stern, symmetrical bun at the nape of her neck. She wore a knee-length black dress and nylon stockings. One half of her face was veiled by a piece of dark-blue lace pinned to her hair. How many rumours had circulated about her, about the husband who had killed himself, about her lover? What strength must she have summoned, back then, to sacrifice her face for her honour, to preserve her dignity, to refrain from pumping her mind full of contempt.

Now she stepped a little closer to him. She slowly raised her right hand, as if she were about to touch him. Then lowered it again, and froze in that unnatural stance. He took a step towards her, afraid that she might fall, but she immediately folded both arms across her chest as if to protect herself from him.

‘Who the hell are you? What are you doing in my apartment?’ she asked quietly, almost hissing.

‘Giorgi Alania — you must know my name, I’m an old friend of your nephew’s. I trained with Kostya at the Frunze Higher Naval School in Leningrad, do you remember?’

He tried to speak in as calm and friendly a voice as possible.

‘Giorgi Alania. Alania.’ Christine repeated his name quizzically, as if it were very unusual, as if she were practising the correct pronunciation. Suddenly she shook her head, as if to dispel some fanciful thought; she seemed annoyed by her own irrational behaviour. ‘I’m sorry; how silly of me. For a moment you reminded me of someone I used to know … How stupid of me, that’s just not possible, forgive me.’

Christine invited Alania into the living room.

‘Kitty’s in the bathroom. She’ll be back in a minute.’

They sat down at the table, and Christine, clearly still agitated, reached for the glass of liqueur. She knocked it back and started scrutinising him again, studying his face. She kept shaking her head in disbelief, as if she were having an internal dialogue with herself. Then she laughed and slapped her forehead.

‘Is there something the matter with my face?’

‘No, no. It’s just …’ she said, as if waking from a dream. ‘It’s just. I don’t know how to say it.’

‘Tell me what it is that’s troubling you. I’d be more than happy to help.’

‘You really do seem very familiar to me.’

Something about the way she said this made Alania prick up his ears.

‘I think it’s highly unlikely that we’ve met before. I would never have forgotten your face, never.’

‘You are from Georgia, aren’t you? Who are your parents?’ she asked disarmingly, still absorbed in her examination of his features.

What was taking Kitty so long? Alania suddenly felt an urgent need to escape, not to be forced to continue this peculiar conversation.

‘Yes, but you definitely won’t know the village where my mother spent her whole life, I’m quite sure of that.’ Alania continued to maintain an amiable and courteous tone.

‘And your father?’

She wouldn’t let it go. A question that was like a judgement. Alania cleared his throat. Lowered his head. Should he lie? Make up a father? A hardworking kolkhoz farmer, a patient teacher, a busy geologist, perhaps?

‘There is no father.’

He gave the honest answer. Suddenly Christine stood up, walked over and stopped right in front of him; he smelled her slightly sweet, alcoholic breath as she bent down and touched his face. Goosebumps crept up his arm.

‘Everyone has a father,’ she said, almost inaudibly.

‘I never had the chance to meet him. My mother died without explaining to me the precise circumstances of my … um, well, conception. I don’t even know his name, and so I have no father.’

‘It’s quite remarkable … You’re the spitting image of him. The same skin. Your voice is a little deeper, but it has the same timbre.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

Alania was finding the situation increasingly uncomfortable. He tried to tell himself that she had, of course, mistaken him for someone else; but something about her manner refuted this. He wasn’t prepared for it. Hoped that Kitty would come and save him.

‘He was addicted to beautiful women. Preferably blonde, pale, tall, blue- or green-eyed. Was your mother blonde?’

She had listed these characteristics as if talking about a product that only rarely came onto the shelves at the grocer’s. The alarm in her face had been replaced by a triumphant certainty.

‘Yes, she was — and tall, too, but …’

‘Or perhaps I’m entirely mistaken.’

She was about to go back to her chair, but he reflexively grabbed her hand and asked her to stop.

‘Who are you talking about? Please, tell me.’

His voice wavered. He looked at her, appealing to her for help.

And then she spoke the name of the Little Big Man out loud. And as terrible and unlikely as this name seemed to him in the context of his own existence, at the same time it was like a key to the eternal puzzle of his origins. If he traced back the thread running through his life with this in mind, everything fitted together, completely logically. As if there could never have been any question of his having any other father. As if it were obvious that the Little Big Man had fathered him.

He had let go of her wrist. She, however, continued to look down at him. His hands were trembling. He didn’t have ultimate confirmation of this atrocity, but already the realisation was dripping into his consciousness like poison, paralysing his body.

Of course it had happened in Baku. The Little Big Man had studied there, he had lived there, had begun his stellar career there. And Gulo, little naive Gulo — what could she have said against him? The scales fell from his eyes. Of course his mother had had to remain silent. How could she have protected her offspring from his own progenitor?

Suddenly, he was paralysed by an appalling realisation. At some point he must have found out about his, Giorgi’s, existence. Of course — he owed it all to the recommendation of his anonymous father: his admission to the naval academy that was open only to the best families in the country, the transfer to the Sea of Japan, his recruitment, and the move to Moscow! Beads of sweat broke out on Giorgi Alania’s brow. He felt as if he were about to fall off his chair. The Amur shipyard, and the visit from the senior official just before the end of the war! Of course. His whole life had gone according to his invincible father’s plan!

Yes, this woman was right. Everyone had a father.

He lost his composure: tears rolled down his cheeks. Christine didn’t move. Nor was she looking at him any more. She had found what she had been searching for. Now she would be patient. She would wait. She had all the time in the world. She was the messenger. The black angel.

*

Even the security men had been invited to Kostya’s table. They were all there: the madmen and the hypocrites, the parasites and the opportunists, the sympathisers, the servants and the commanders, the wives and the lovers, all sat there eating a celebratory dinner in Kitty’s honour. Only Alania had not come. He had excused himself right at the beginning of the feast and disappeared. Kitty had waited for him in vain; she had hoped he would return and brush his knee against hers under the table, the assurance that everything was fine. But nothing was fine. She knew that, and so did he.

She found him on the hill, standing there in the dark. The terrifying abyss of the gorge fell away into infinite blackness. Crickets could be heard exchanging their secrets. The distant conviviality of the company around the table and the loud, long-winded toasts drifted up to where they stood, on the edge of the property, as snatches of echoes.

‘What’s going on? Why did you leave?’ She saw that his eyes were red, swollen. He was shivering as if he were delirious. Without knowing why, she knelt before him.

‘Giorgi? What’s happened to you?’

‘It can’t be true, not now, not like this …’ he kept repeating.

For the first time, she saw terrible fear in his face. Now it was her turn to catch him, to offer him refuge, to spread her wings over him. He clasped her so tightly she could barely keep her balance. She took his hand and guided it to her neck. She nestled her head in his hand, she let his hand stroke her neck. She kissed him.

He ran his forefinger over his lips in disbelief, as if checking to see whether she had left her taste on them.

Sometimes it was lips that were the wings, sometimes just words, and sometimes treasured photos.

*

Andro died three days after Kitty’s departure. He didn’t regain consciousness, but my mother says the last time Kitty was there with him he clutched her hand. I don’t know whether this was just the reflex of a dying man, or whether it could perhaps be construed as a gesture of reconciliation — which was my mother’s interpretation.