Our magazines are practically vying as to who
can spit at the Soviet Union the best.

VIKTOR CHEBRIKOV

She participated in fundraising galas and performed at various benefit concerts along with other rock and pop stars. She made a huge number of television appearances and gave countless interviews. She took up offers of various guest spots alongside famous colleagues. The Herald Tribune called her the British Patti Smith.

Kitty transformed herself, rejected her age. Gave interviews, spoke about her past, criticised the Soviet Union, criticised her homeland, criticised the USA, criticised politics, made herself vulnerable. Her album sales soared; Amy rejoiced. Young people were rediscovering her old albums. But as much as she refused to acknowledge her age, her body was increasingly showing signs of it: tiredness and indifference had taken hold. She could blank them out as long as she surrounded herself with loud music, fun, crowds of people, and alcohol. With gratitude, she accepted all those things that had previously been distasteful to her. With ease, she opened up to everything that had been so foreign to her nature all these years. She could be joyful, euphoric, she could let herself go, leave herself behind, outsmart herself. A little more each time. Shifting a little further away from herself each time.

Like a phoenix, she could rise from the ashes every evening and transform herself beneath the hot stage lights. She could be what she was not. For an hour, or two, or three, sometimes even seven hours, or the whole night, she could pretend to be a woman who had the world at her feet and knew how to deal with it. But she wasn’t writing any more. She hadn’t written a single new song. There was nothing more she wanted to say.

And afterwards, at night, if she was left on her own, if she came home to her bed, she tried not to think about the man who had a drawn her a map for survival, and what he was doing now, or about the woman who had wanted so desperately to obliterate this map. She wished the man well, even though he was living in a world that had become foreign to him. Wished for the woman to survive, and for galleries to welcome her in.

But Andro was coming more often; she saw him in the audience. When she looked down from the stage into the dark crowd, she would see him standing in the front row, with his shining curls. She saw him when she looked out onto the street in the morning, standing under her window, looking up at her. She saw him when she was hurrying across the road to Amy’s house, from where they would drive to the studio or to an interview. Or in one of the noisy, smoke-filled clubs she went to with friends and acquaintances, where she would sit and listen to people tell her again how ‘great’ or ‘cool’ or ‘epoch-making’ she was. She saw him smiling at her in the mirror when she retreated to the toilets and put her face under the running water. He stayed. He was there. He would never leave. He was waiting for her. Of that, she was certain. He didn’t press her; he had all the time in the world.

Once, during a party at the luxurious house of a patron of the arts overlooking Waterlow Park, she took her glass of champagne out into the garden to get some fresh air and have a moment alone. She saw him standing there under a sycamore tree. She froze, thinking he would quickly vanish again, but when he showed no signs of going, she strode confidently over and stood shoulder to shoulder with him, making no attempt to touch him.

‘I just wanted to live, to survive — is that really so terrible? Is that why you’re here? Why does everything keep starting over, Andro, like a merry-go-round, again and again? Perhaps that’s just how the world works. But when you stand there in silence, it makes me think you’re trying to tell me something — that I should have done things differently, perhaps. He would have been a grown man now. I think about him every day. I promised him I would keep him: here, here, everywhere in me.

‘But I’m talking nonsense. I know, I can’t believe I’m really asking you all this. I just want to sing, water my hydrangeas, and have a glass of good whisky now and then. Is that too much to ask? Please, do something; help me, Andro!’

Suddenly, she collapsed; the glass fell onto the wet ground, she caught herself on the rough bark of the tree, scratched her hand to pieces, dirtied her black trousers, knelt on the slimy earth of the garden, then sat down, legs bent, her back against the tree. Andro had vanished. There was nobody there now. Only the distant lights from the house and a buzz of animated voices — but they had nothing more to say to her, nor she to them.

She got up. Brushed the soil from her trousers, leaned against the tree. Life was flaking away from her, and she was what was left. She had never yet managed to come to terms with that, not since she had run away. Which was exactly thirty-five years ago.

*

Starting on 25 February 1986, the 27th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, under the leadership of their new General Secretary Gorbachev, passed radical reforms to stimulate the economy and extend freedom of speech and of the press, and called for glasnost.

Later that year, Gorbachev allowed the nuclear physicist Sakharov to return from exile, which many people saw as the first step towards real reform. The new General Secretary pushed for an ‘acceleration of social and economic development’, even if those plans threatened to founder when they encountered reality. Within a mere six months of taking office, he had replaced seventy per cent of the Politburo.

However, the economy had long been stagnating, and nepotism and corruption had reached unprecedented levels. The wave of privatisation, and the withdrawal of state control over companies, met with great resistance. And this resistance came in part from my grandfather, Konstantin Jashi, who was of the opinion that the country needed stricter controls, not another revolution: everything had been left to decay for long enough, and was now threatening to fall apart.

In sunny Georgia, people were caught between euphoria over the upcoming reforms, and worry at the indecision of the reformer. Freedom of the press and publishers meant that many previously banned manuscripts, translations, essays, and articles finally saw the light of day. Increasingly, groups of people gathered in university and school buildings to debate the future, though they were still very cautious. You could read more and more criticism between the lines of poems and songs.

‘If you want changes, you can’t make them dependent on everyone being in favour of them,’ Kostya grumbled as he sat in front of the television in the evening, watching the news. ‘Otherwise they’re doomed to failure from the outset. But this would-be reformer wants everyone to love him. The communists and the capitalists. He’ll kill himself trying.’

At the time, I paid no attention to his words or his concerns. I had no interest in watching Vremya, either. After our great falling-out, I had lost all interest in my grandfather, or at least I hoped I had. I didn’t want anything more to do with his problems.

Instead, I enjoyed the sweet fruits my little revenge plot was bearing: Daria’s undivided attention and blind trust. She no longer avoided me in the playground — quite the opposite: she invited me into her clique and introduced me to all her friends, which filled me with pride. I had done more than just outsmart Kostya. I had also managed to prove to my sister that my love for her was more steadfast than that of the grandfather she so admired. I had proved to her that it was worth sticking with me. It was entirely gratifying.

Even Latsabidze shook my hand when I accompanied Daria to the studio on her last day for some pick-up shots, and thanked me for my support. The film was called The Way, he told me, and would be released soon. I wanted to share my triumph with someone, so one afternoon I took the trolleybus to Vake and rang Christine’s doorbell. I followed her into the shady sitting room, which smelled of freshly made jam. She didn’t ask what I was doing there; she just served me a delicious dumpling soup. After I’d eaten, she asked me if I was there to see Miro.

‘Yes, I am,’ I said.

‘He told me about the lovely time you had in Bakuriani.’ She eyed me approvingly. ‘And Stasia says you’re a very clever girl.’

She poured a small measure of liqueur from a carafe into a glass. I had already moved on to a piece of cake and was trying to eat it without dropping crumbs.

‘You used to live with us, didn’t you?’ Once again, I was having trouble reining in my curiosity.

‘No, that’s not strictly true. They all used to live with me. I had a big house then, a beautiful house. Your grandfather and your great-aunt grew up there. We had a lovely garden, with a fountain, and … well. Times have changed.’

Then she told me that Miro had gone to a go-kart race at Mziuri Park with some friends. But she would let him know I had dropped by.

‘Come again, whenever you like,’ she said, as she saw me to the door. I was overjoyed at the offer.

The atmosphere in Elene’s apartment had been sepulchral for some time. My mother was always complaining of headaches, so Aleko had moved his drinking sessions out of the house — which only ended up causing more arguments when he came home late and drunk. So I decided to go to Mziuri Park, which wasn’t far from Christine’s flat, and look for Miro.

Down at the far end of the park, where it bordered on Tbilisi Zoo, I eventually found a small track and a crowd of adolescent boys in leather jackets and lumberjack shirts, standing around smoking cigarettes and cheering on the drivers. I sensed their eyes appraising me as I marched through the group, asking for Miro. Eventually I spotted him sitting on a folding chair, sorting out some slips of paper with another boy. When I appeared in front of him, he leaped up from the chair in surprise and alarm.

‘What are you doing here?’ he cried.

‘I was at Christine’s, and she told me I’d find you here. I thought I’d stop by.’

‘Yes, great, that’s really good of you. But you can’t tell anyone about this, okay? You have to be sixteen to drive. They make an exception for me,’ he said, grinning from ear to ear.

‘Can you drive, then?’

‘Yup. But right now I’m taking the bets.’

‘Bets?’

He took me to one side, laid an arm meaningfully around my shoulders, and whispered in my ear that this was technically an illegal activity, but the boys were just making a bit of pocket money, and it was no big deal. To be on the safe side, he added that I mustn’t tell anyone.

‘But if I just caught you here with these bits of paper, how easy do you think it’s going to be for the militsiya to cotton on to you and your bets?’ I pressed him.

He scratched his ear, giving the question some thought. This didn’t seem to have crossed his mind before.

‘You need to organise this whole thing better, be smarter about it. That’s what I think, anyway,’ I explained.

‘You think? How?’ He bent his head down to me; a curl dropped over his forehead and tickled my cheek.

‘Well, I could always do it for you.’

I didn’t know the first thing about go-kart racing, and I was intimidated by all the boys. But the idea came to me as I was thinking how nice it would be to see Miro more often.

‘You? But you don’t have a clue what you’re doing.’

‘I’ve got lots of free time after school. My mother doesn’t really check up on me, and I’m a fast learner.’

He thought for a minute, then hurried over to the others and conferred with them. He came back to me looking very pleased.

‘They think it’s a clever idea. We’ll explain everything to you; nobody’ll suspect a girl. You need to be here at two tomorrow, The Shark’ll be here then, he’s the boss.’

‘The Shark?’

‘Yeah, The Shark. He’s nineteen,’ he said reverentially, as if there were some great merit in being nineteen.

I would have to skip the last period of geography the following day to get to the park on time, but that was doable.

*

It was simple: just after sunset, when everyone had left the park, the little go-kart track opened for the teenagers and their adult leader. They bribed the attendants to turn a blind eye. Officially, these were training sessions; unofficially, a pastime for cool kids and a way of making some fast pocket money. The races took place in the dark. Before the race, you could write the name of your favourite on a slip of paper and drop it into a bucket, like a tombola. You had to give your money to The Shark beforehand — there was a different rate for each race — and afterwards it was shared out among the winners. From now on, I was to manage the finances.

The Shark — a skinny chain-smoker with bad skin and greasy hair, who wore genuine Levis that seemed permanently moulded to his body — was sceptical at first, but I convinced him. I calculated quickly, refused to enter into discussions, and kept the money in my tights — a very safe hiding-place. The only challenge consisted in telling my mother that I was taking a course in ‘Literary Appreciation’ at the Youth Palace and so would be late home three nights a week. But she soon acquiesced, and sometimes I even managed to avoid trekking all the way home first by going to Christine’s and eating there, before walking to the track with Miro. Christine had discussed it with Elene; it made no difference to her whether she was feeding one mouth or two, and most of the time Lana wasn’t there — she was always working, or away at architecture conventions in various Soviet cities.

Despite my initial shyness, I soon found it easy to spend time in the company of the go-karting boys; I actually felt more comfortable around them than with the girls at school. I didn’t have to be pretty, I didn’t have to think about my clothes, I just had to sip from a beer bottle from time to time, then belch, or take a drag on a cigarette — that was enough for them to accept me as part of their community.

During the races, in which I took little interest, I read my books. The boys sometimes made idiotic jokes about my love stories, but I hit back by saying that it was a good job at least one of us could read and write. These kinds of remarks gradually earned me respect. The Shark’s initial fear that I was too much of a girl for the job proved unfounded. I quickly learned to laugh at dirty jokes, and not to immediately class lewd comments as a sign of intellectual backwardness. I learned to spit a long way, and to run as fast as I could when someone told us the ‘pigs’ were about.

At that time, Miro was precisely at the interface between Wuthering Heights and ‘Fuck your mum’, and it was still unclear which side he would eventually come down on. His need for everyone to like him, and to make everyone laugh, sometimes got on my nerves, but he always managed to overcome my annoyance by taking things one step further, carrying on until I was forced to laugh. But when he no longer needed to clown around, in those quiet moments when he would sit down beside me and I would read aloud to him, I felt needed and right, in this place with this permanently grinning boy at my side.

*

I knew it was getting late. I was already thinking up excuses for Elene. There had been an argument between The Shark and the other boys over the outcome of a race, which had remained unresolved, so I’d had to hang on to the money. I was tired, and it was already after ten, and I would probably have had to wait ages for the trolleybus, so Miro and I trudged back to Christine’s on foot, and Christine called my mother. Then she gave me the phone.

‘I’m sorry, Deda. I was chatting to Miro and I lost track of time.’

‘I can’t come and collect you now; Aleko’s taken the car. You can stay at Christine’s tonight. And tomorrow you need to come straight home after school. Kostya’s going to pick you both up after Daria’s gymnastics class, is that clear?’

We played cards and giggled over what had happened that day. Miro did impressions of the boys from the track. Lana was at a week-long conference in Rostov, and we had his room to ourselves. There was a camp bed set up for me beside his bed. After the light had been turned out, he switched on a torch, hopped in beside me, and pressed a book into my hands.

‘What’s that?’ I whispered.

‘Amphibian Man by Belyaev. I’m on page one-hundred and nineteen already. Would you go on reading?’

I refrained from making any comment and started reading the science fiction novel to him.

‘Can you smell that?’ I asked him after a while. The digital alarm clock Miro was so proud of, a gift his mother had brought back from Dresden, read 02:45. The smell was so intense that for a moment I felt quite peculiar. Miro sat up and sniffed as well, picking up the scent like a hungry animal.

‘What is it?’ I asked. I had never smelled anything so delicious in my life.

‘It smells like chocolate. Christine must be baking a chocolate cake. Right?’

‘Yes, let’s go and look …’

We both leapt up at the same time, I shoved my feet into his slippers, which were at least four sizes too big, and we ran into the next room.

Christine was sitting in front of the television — there was no picture, just the coloured stripes signalling that programmes had finished — spooning a black liquid out of a teacup. She didn’t notice us at first, and went on eating in slow motion.

Puzzled, we stared first at her, then the television, then her again. Miro crept over and hugged her from behind. She gave a start, as if someone had jolted her out of a dream, then planted a kiss on his forehead.

‘What are you two doing out here? Why aren’t you asleep?’

‘What is that crazy stuff you’re eating?’

He stared at her cup. She put a hand over it.

‘Nothing. I mean: it’s not for children.’

‘But we’re not children any more,’ Miro retorted cheekily.

‘Oh yes you are. Go away. You’ve got school tomorrow, had you forgotten?’

‘But Christy’ — he called her Christy, affectionately — ‘we want to try it too. It smells so delicious. What is it?’

‘No!’

She almost shouted the word, and leapt up from her chair. For a moment, we stood facing each other, like big cats circling their territory. Then Miro ran into the kitchen and came back carrying a little metal jug, which looked like a Turkish coffee pot. He was already dipping his forefinger into the jug and licking it. He closed his eyes appreciatively and made a strange movement with his head.

‘No!’ Christine cried out again, before falling back into her armchair in front of the television.

But now Miro was putting his forefinger, covered in thick, gooey chocolate, into my mouth. I felt goosebumps on my arms, and something tightened inside me. It was a little piece of paradise on earth. It was the most wonderful flavour I had ever tasted. We scraped out what little remained, our fingers reaching into the pot, into our mouths, and back again. Christine sat rigid in her chair, neither looking at us nor making any further attempt to stop us.

‘Oh my God, Christy!’ Miro lowered himself onto the arm of her chair and put an arm round her shoulders. ‘Why have you never made that for us? It’s so delicious.’

‘My sister was right. She was always right,’ she whispered.

With the heavenly flavour of the chocolate still in my mouth, I sensed an aftertaste of sadness. Something about this flavour had made me fearful. It left so many questions on my tongue.

*

The next morning at school, we heard that there had been an explosion in a Ukrainian nuclear power plant called Chernobyl, and we were probably all now going to mutate and ultimately die a painful death.

‘But the Ukraine is miles away,’ a boy in the eighth class said in the playground.

‘Not far enough, though. Anyway, it doesn’t matter how far away you are. We won’t be able to eat or drink anything: everything’s contaminated, and we’ll all get hydrocephaly,’ a particularly bright boy in the top form retorted.

‘And will the trees turn pink, and the earth go blue? I read that’s what happened in Hiroshima.’

‘This is much worse than Hiroshima. The whole world will be contaminated now. Even America,’ insisted the older boy, who seemed to be a follower of conspiracy theories.

‘Maybe the Yanks provoked it? On purpose, so that —’

‘They must have. People here would never allow such a thing to happen, they’re more careful than that,’ said a shocked girl in John Lennon glasses.

‘We’re all going to turn into zombies,’ another girl was wailing as I hurried out of the playground.

That evening, on the way home with Daria in Kostya’s car, I asked what it would really mean. Kostya asked the driver to pull over. He got into the back with us and put his arms around Daria and me. I flinched, not having touched him since our afternoon on his bed.

‘Everything will be all right. Nothing’s going to happen to you. Not to you.’

*

Kostya hardly left his bedroom any more. When he sat down in front of the television, unshaven, in his dressing gown, he did nothing but rant about ‘weaklings’, ‘thieves’, and ‘enemies of the state’, and insist that this country needed an iron hand to get it back on its feet. Some days, he drank wine straight after breakfast.

Now and again, gloomy-eyed men from the ministry pulled up at the Green House in their Volgas, Kostya would take them into his study, and we would hear indignant exclamations through the wall. The gentlemen often hurried out looking shocked and left the house. At the end of May, he finally went back to work. When he came home that evening, the first thing he did was smash every last piece of Nana’s Czech tea set against the wall. In a rage, he shouted that he was going to show those swine: he was the one responsible for getting them those posts in the first place, for them having any work at all; he would show them who it was they were dealing with.

‘Are you out of your mind?’ Nana shouted. Kostya had smashed one of her special editions to smithereens.

Daria and I sat, petrified, on the swing seat, which was on the point of falling apart. Daria had met Latsabidze a few days previously. The film had been edited, but the premiere had been postponed for the time being because of Chernobyl. First, there would be a private screening in the House of Film, to which he had invited her. And Daria, flushed and excited, had asked me if I wanted to go with her. Since then, all she could think about was what she was going to wear. I realised with some discomfort that she had started mentioning one particular name a lot, and every time she did, she had this stupid, dreamy look on her face.

‘Who is this Lasha you keep talking about?’

‘Our head cameraman.’

‘What’s going on with him?’

‘What do you mean, going on?’

‘You’re always talking about him.’

‘He’s picked me up from school twice now.’

Kostya’s loud, distorted voice could still be heard from inside the house.

‘What do you mean, picked you up? Did you arrange to meet him?’

‘He asked me out to the cinema, on Friday.’

‘But what kind of guy is he?’ I asked.

‘He’s lovely. And so handsome. He always wears such great clothes, and he’s been to America: he’s seen New York, and he’s even met some of the stars.’

‘And how old is he?’

‘Thirty-three.’

‘That’s seriously old.’

‘Rubbish. Anyway, I prefer mature men.’

I was astonished: up to now, Daria hadn’t preferred any kind of men, or she simply hadn’t had the time to think about them, being too preoccupied with herself. But now she seemed to have come out of hibernation.

‘The devil take your old tea set — they’re trying to throw me out of the ministry, they want me to take up some crummy post in the MVD. They even had the cheek to tell me to my face that there were irregularities in the accounts — under my leadership! Brainless idiots!’

As background music to Kostya’s tirade, we could hear Mozart’s Magic Flute wafting from the barn. Stasia had been in there all day.

‘They’re trying to throw Grandfather out?’ Daria was suddenly all ears. I started listening as well.

‘These namby-pambies — I’ll show them. I’ll sack the lot of them, get them all out. You can’t trust anyone any more — anyone, do you hear me? No one has a single spark of humanity in them in this day and age, let alone decency or morality. They should open up their own accounts, then we’ll see who’s got a clean record!

‘But Kostya … Tell me that’s not true. Is it? Are there really irregularities in your accounts?’ Nana asked anxiously.

‘Irregularities? Irregularities? The whole country is one big irregularity. What do you think you live on, hmm? The summer health spas and your little tea parties with your friends. How do you think I paid for your best friend’s operation, with the best doctor in the country? What or who do you think gave us all this? Your salary, and mine? Do you honestly believe that?’

Daria’s bottom lip began to quiver. She grasped my hand.

‘They all steal and lie, they all want backhanders, no one lifts a finger otherwise. That’s what this rotten country is. But you wanted me to come back. To come back to this rat-hole. This would never have happened in the navy. Being a man means something there. Do you know what sort of lowlifes I’ve had to waste my time on all these years? Do you think I enjoyed it? I didn’t invent the system. I just ended up in this rat-hole, because of you and your oh-so-clever daughter. Who’s now settled for an alcoholic. The accounts — don’t make me laugh. The accounts. I’d like to see anyone in any state institution open up his accounts!’

‘Kostya!’ Nana sounded frightened, unnerved. ‘I’m asking you, are there any irregularities in your accounting?’

‘There is no accounting — you still don’t get it, do you? There’s nothing that’s still sacred to these people, and you want to know why? Because they let this weakling take power, this would-be revolutionary who’s afraid to stand up in front of his people. And how long has this been going on? And what about where you are? What’s it like in your sacred university? How much would I have to pay them to let me study law? How much would I have to shell out to become a doctor? How do things work there? Or is syntax so exciting that you’ve stopped paying attention to the world around you? You wanted to live like this. You all wanted to live like this.’

‘Kostya, for pity’s sake, what are you talking about?’

‘You wanted the health spas and the driver and you wanted crêpe de chine from Italy and Opium from France; you wanted to be the envy of your friends, to show them how good you had it, that you’d hit the jackpot, as it were. I had to play along, Nana, or I’d have been thrown out long ago,’ he shouted, then abruptly fell silent.

Daria had stood up and was looking at me wide-eyed. I didn’t know what to say; I didn’t dare move. Mozart, too, abruptly fell silent.