78

On the hills of Georgia lies the blanket of night …

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

‘Have you completely lost your mind?’

Lana was agitated. She had taken off her glasses and was cleaning them nervously on a corner of her skirt, blinking continually as she did so in an effort to see her companion better. My mother was standing at the gas stove, making soup for us. Daria was asleep, and I was sitting in the corner, sorting nuts.

‘Nana turned up at Christine’s door yesterday. And Christine genuinely has no idea what’s going on. Nana thinks she’s covering for you. She’s worried about where the children are. Surely you can’t be that naive — you can’t just kidnap the children from their beds like that!’

‘Did you tell them anything?’ my mother asked, calmly stirring the soup.

‘I told them I would find you and take you back to your parents. I mean, your father’s already started patrolling outside the university.’

‘I’ll get in touch with them.’

‘But Elene, look around you. At this flat. Good Lord! You don’t even have proper furniture.’

‘Why does everyone keep going on about furniture? As if the meaning of life were to own as much furniture as possible!’

‘I’m just trying to do you a favour, okay? Your children have been here for two weeks. You haven’t shown your face at the institute. You’ve taken up with some guy old enough to be your father and —’

‘My God! He’s not some guy, and he’s only thirty-seven!’

‘To be perfectly honest, I think you’re being silly. And egotistical. You’ve started a degree. You’re getting the kind of support other mothers can only dream of, and what do you do? Force your children into some dirty hole and cook them vegetable soup and pretend you’re a perfect family. Get off your backside and sort all this out with your father. As you might be aware, I’m no great friend of Kostya Jashi, but in your position —’

‘And I thought you were my friend,’ Elene interrupted her, offended.

‘You think your friends are going to applaud you for this nonsense? I mean, what were you thinking? That your father would call and congratulate you on your new-found marital bliss?’

‘Why are you being such a bitch? I thought you at least would understand. I’m going to start attending lectures again on Monday. I just needed some time for the girls. They have to get used to being here. Aleko and I are going to the registry office next month anyway — then my father will have to stop going on about his rights!’

‘Just how crazy are you? Have you forgotten what your father’s capable of? Surely you know him well enough by now. Please re-engage your brain.’ Lana put her glasses back on and stopped blinking.

‘I’m happy again, for the first time in ages. Aleko and I will get this right — this time, I’ll get it right. And for God’s sake, I am these children’s mother.’

‘A mother who won’t be able to provide for these children. Who’s taken up with a wannabe writer, who’s going to spend the rest of her life in this dump and —’

‘You don’t even know him. Stop putting him down like that!’ Elene raised her voice.

‘Forgive me, but you haven’t exactly hit the jackpot with your choice of men so far. My advice is: go home, and, most importantly, take your children back. I’m not going to keep covering for you.’

Three days later, there was a row at the Green House. Sparks flew, a glass door was broken, and Aleko stood in a corner like a New Year spruce that had been taken down and forgotten about. Kostya was beside himself. Elene screamed. Daria and I cried. Nana and Stasia tried to reconcile what was now irreconcilable.

Elene had informed her father that she was going to marry her new boyfriend. The thirty-seven-year-old sound technician (a sound technician who was still working as an assistant in the sound department at the state television station, although he was nearly forty!) and nascent writer (who was light years away from a writing career, who hadn’t yet read at the Writers’ Association, hadn’t been approved or even joined). At this point, Aleko’s only published work was a collection of short stories printed by one of the semi-legal private publishing houses, which he had distributed to friends and people he trusted. He also had two sons with his ex-wife, though his meagre salary didn’t really stretch to the maintenance payments; rather than plough his energy into his detested job, he preferred to spend his nights discussing ‘the system’ with his friends, watching pirated copies of banned films at closed private screenings, smoking weed, and drinking beer with vodka chasers.

Kostya swore, called Aleko a ‘pansy’, a ‘failure’, a ‘scrounger’, and a ‘gigolo’, and accused him of only wanting to marry his daughter in the hope that her father would guarantee them a secure income and a comfortable, prosperous life. But that was where he was wrong! Kostya yelled, his voice reverberating through the house. That was never going to happen: if his ‘harlot’ of a daughter dared to take such a shameful step and marry this ‘parasite’ without his consent, she would have to live with the consequences, one of which would most certainly be losing even weekly visiting rights with the children.

That August, Elene married Aleko, and Kostya’s will was done: Daria and I stayed at the Green House. Elene took up her studies again and was at least allowed to come up and see us on Saturdays. But from that moment on, she was no longer permitted to stay overnight at the Green House. When I think back to this time, I remember all the jams, fruit baskets, bottles of liqueur, cakes, and biscuits wrapped in tinfoil that Nana and Stasia would smuggle into Elene’s car before she set off back to Tbilisi in the evening.

I learned to read at four, and to write at five. I learned the Cyrillic and the Georgian alphabets, and when I presented Kostya with this fact by writing his name in both languages, he told me that Daria’s calligraphy was better. When I drew a round Nana, a bent Stasia, a yellow Daria, a large Kostya, a red Elene, a black Aleko, and a tiny me, entitled the picture ‘Our Family’, and stuck it to the fridge door, Kostya disliked it so much that he tore it down and threw it in the bin.

I carried on dancing, in order to make Stasia’s memories my own, and Daria rode the stud farm’s beautiful bronze-coloured ponies. I liked vanilla ice cream; Daria liked chocolate ice cream. I liked the stray dogs in the village; Daria was afraid of them. I wore cut-off trousers as shorts and Daria wore brightly coloured skirts. I wore my hair short, while Daria’s reached her waist. I didn’t like fairy tales, which for all their horror always had a happy ending (I mistrusted happy endings even as a child); Daria loved them.

We were both shielded by our ignorance, not just about our family, but the wider world, too. We didn’t know that our grandfather was plagued by nightmares, all of which took place on a submarine, and featured an inferno, a tall woman with rings on her fingers, a man whittling wooden angels and his curly-haired son, who forced his love upon Kostya’s daughter.

We didn’t know that Stasia watched with fascination as Thekla and Sopio played Patience in our garden. We didn’t know that, in far-off Moscow, Giorgi Alania was sliding into a deep depression. We didn’t know that Elvis Aaron Presley had died at Graceland, bloated and estranged from the world. That our mother suffered two miscarriages before finally giving up on her desire to start a proper family, then began writing her degree dissertation (on Lady Macbeth, of all things). That Christine was doing everything in her power to confer on Miqa’s son the happiness Miqa himself had lost. No one told us that Stasia’s second-eldest sister, Meri, had died in Kutaisi, or that Lida had died a short while later, in the town where she was born — probably without fear, overjoyed to be entering the kingdom of heaven at last as a bride of Christ.

But perhaps we were already starting to suspect that the world resembled a tangle of threads, and that this was incredibly important in some complex, inexplicable way.

‘Did you know that we’ve got different papas?’ Daria said, out of the blue, without lifting her focused gaze from the artwork she was painting.

The summer was on its way; the world smelled lush, vital, as if life had begun to sweat. The noon light lent Daria’s long ponytail a golden sheen. She was now eight years old, and attended the First Classical Gymnasium, the most elite school in Tbilisi, right on Rustaveli Boulevard, where her favourite subjects were Russian and Physical Culture. This was the term for PE at that time, as she would inform each of our guests, a little conceitedly, before accepting the adults’ obligatory praise as if it was her due. And now she was telling me, casually, indifferently, that there was far more dividing than uniting us.

No, I hadn’t known that. Hadn’t even suspected. No one had told me. The word ‘father’ was as absent from Daria’s lexicon as it was from mine. I shrank away from her and started shaking my head vigorously. No one spoke to us about it in the playground; it seemed that, given our grandfather’s power, the parents had been coaching their children and had drummed into them the fact that this topic was not agreeable to the Jashis. It was the same in the Green House: the subject of fathers was never addressed. We thought of Father as someone who was far, far away, but who loved us and missed us and thought about us a lot. We were sure of it.

‘Yes. So, your papa is in prison. And my papa is dead. He was a hero and he drowned trying to cross the big sea.’

Daria said it as if she were just telling me the time, in an off-hand tone and with an expression of extreme concentration on her face as she focused on finishing her picture.

‘Why is my papa in prison?’ I felt a bottomless well of disappointment open up inside me. My father, too, should be a hero who had tried to vanquish the sea.

‘Because he’s a criminal,’ Daria replied nonchalantly.

‘And why did your papa try and cross the sea? He must have known you can’t do that; was he stupid or something?’

‘You’re stupid. Most people can’t do it, but heroes can. That’s why they’re heroes,’ she explained with disarming self-assurance.

I couldn’t come up with any argument against that, and I had to confess that someone setting out to cross the big sea was a pretty impressive thing.

‘Well, we’ve still got the same mother,’ I said, to comfort myself.

I suddenly felt small, ugly, stupid, and powerless; I wanted to leave the room and find Stasia, demand that she explain why my father was a criminal and Daria’s a hero, but I could feel something gathering inside me, an incredible rage that I couldn’t put into words, couldn’t articulate. I pounced on my sister from behind, grabbed her immensely long ponytail, which slid so gratefully into my hand, and pulled her to the floor, ignoring her cries and yelling in her face: ‘At least my father’s coming back one day — yours never will. Never!’

That same day, Aleko’s short story was rejected by the Literaturnaya Gazeta again. Elene had submitted her final dissertation exactly one week earlier and wasn’t sure whether she would pass. There was too much talk of power in it. The vodka bottle held the dregs from the previous evening, when Aleko and his friends had talked themselves hoarse about Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers. She poured what was left into a teacup and knocked back the fiery liquid. Elene felt tired, empty. Money was tight. Their prospects not that alluring. Her longing for her children gnawed at her, made her scratch her forearms raw, press her hands to her temples, blink; it parched her mouth.

The previous month, Beqa had been released from prison, and although this fact had given her no particular pleasure (after all, he hadn’t written a single letter to her or his child in all those years), she still hoped he might want to meet me. Which meant that she had to apprise me of the less than romantic circumstances of my conception as quickly and gently as possible.