72 years — on the road to nowhere!

DEMONSTRATION PLACARD

The military took control of the whole city centre.

The search for Christine took a long time; it was only at the end of the following day that her body was identified in one of the city hospitals. The official cause of death was cardiac arrest. Engulfed by the crowd, she had fallen to the ground. Hadn’t got up again. Unofficially, though, it was the return of the past and her inability to halt it.

The military’s attack on the demonstration, which had seemed like an eternity to me, had apparently lasted just thirty minutes. Thirty minutes that had cost twenty-one people their lives, among them my great-great-aunt Christine. Thirty minutes, twenty-one dead, and hundreds injured. My family assumed that Christine had lost her veil in the mêlée, and I didn’t disillusion them.

We were sitting in the cold hallway of the hospital basement, outside the pathology department. The waiting room was full. People sat there, some crying, others letting out a laugh of relief when the body was not that of the person they were looking for. Stasia went first; she went in alone. She didn’t want any of us there. Kostya was sitting apart from us, at the other end of the room. When Stasia came back and nodded to us all, letting us know that it really was Christine, he just shook his head. Stasia’s face gave nothing away: no horror, no pain, just a heavy emptiness. One hand was pressed to her side — she seemed to have an ache there.

*

Unfortunately, Kostya was right: nothing much changed after 9 April. There was a general sense of helplessness, and the population was split by the realisation of how powerless it was. One half felt spurred on to more radical action by the military’s brutal attack; the other half felt resigned. Even the anticipated protests from the West against Gorbachev’s bloodthirsty politics proved to be a false hope: everyone soon realised that the West wanted to go on seeing Gorbachev as a reformer and liberator. Even Le Monde described the events of 9 April as ‘a Georgian coup, and an act of provocation’.

The First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party was hastily voted out of office and Moscow’s candidate, Shevardnadze, was placed at its head. When a Moscow news team asked him whether there was a general anti-Russian feeling in Georgia at the time, he replied: ‘We have no evidence to support this conclusion.’ Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister and, at that moment, the most powerful Georgian in the Kremlin, flew to Tbilisi and spoke of a wound that should be healed as quickly as possible. The Red intelligentsia tried not to burn any more bridges with Moscow and started openly criticising the nationalists, calling them fanatics.

Kostya was to meddle in his beloved granddaughter’s life one last time. He accosted the lovely Lasha on the street and issued him with an ultimatum: either he swiftly separate from his wife and marry Daria, if he couldn’t leave her alone; or else he should see to it that within forty-eight hours he had not only vanished from her life, but preferably from the city as well. It was only when I discovered that the lovely Lasha came from a respected Tbilisi family of doctors, and that his grandfather had been a Party functionary, that I understood why Kostya had done it. He would never have looked favourably on the match otherwise.

And the unexpected actually happened: the following week, the lovely Lasha filed for divorce. The paperwork was rushed through, and everything was arranged for his civil wedding to Daria.

Now that nothing stood in the way of her marrying the man she had chosen, her happiness seemed complete. Daria was already talking about the challenge of juggling her career and married life, while Miro and I stumbled through those months with no orientation, searching for a foothold. We got into the works of Machiavelli, which were enjoying a resurgence in popularity at the time; we anaesthetised ourselves with kissing and sex and cheap schnapps; we accepted the constant clashes with Lana and Elene, who had now formed a close alliance based on the conviction that we were no good for each other; we hung around the now practically deserted go-kart track and tried to keep the dismal present at bay.

Miro had suddenly started dreaming of a career as a filmmaker (he wanted to finish what his father had started — though he had never used the word ‘father’ before in all the time I’d known him).

‘You’ll write, I’ll direct. Isn’t it a brilliant idea?’

‘But I don’t write.’

‘No, but you will.’

‘I don’t know, Miro. I don’t think I’m good enough.’

‘Don’t talk nonsense. You just have to do it. Just make a start.’

When I sat beside him, lay, laughed, or talked with him, I wasn’t afraid of the aggressive voices on the radio or television. I had the confidence, the illusion, that no one could hurt us if we just stuck together. We were always able to comfort each other by making love. We perfected the art of banishing the images from our heads while clinging to one another like two wild little animals. We wanted to intoxicate each other, hold back tomorrow, and outwit the present. We made love in dark stairwells, at night, behind the go-kart track, on the back seats and bonnets of various cars, in his childhood bed when Lana was out, and once even in the attic of the Green House. When I slept with him, I was thoughtless, I was free. Freed from the crippling expectations I placed on myself; freed of my own inadequacies.

But as the end of May approached and Miro still hadn’t submitted his application to the Film Institute, I pressed him to tell me why. For my part, I had finally started making a few sketches and notes to start work on my first novel. Irritated, he replied that he couldn’t get the necessary documents together this year, and, for that reason, largely at his mother’s behest, he had applied for the Polytechnic Institute, where he would sit the entrance exam for the engineering course.

What followed was our first argument, during which it became clear to me that Miro was a dreamer, someone for whom having dreams was more important than realising them, and that, by contrast, I was a person for whom the dreams stopped at the precise moment when you decided they were just dreams and entrusted them to a distant, uncertain future or the vagaries of fate. Unexpectedly, this insight gave me the strength to put my own doubts aside and start writing. I overcame my inhibitions, retreated to the Green House, and wrote like a woman possessed for a whole week. I wanted to tell my — our — story. But I didn’t yet have a beginning or an end. I let myself be guided by disordered sentences and unfinished characters. I tried to sharpen my memory, to bring scenes and faces back to life. I wanted to prove to myself, but, above all, to Miro, that it could be done, that we could become what we wanted to become, slowly, one step at a time.

I sat in the attic and wrote until my fingers couldn’t take any more. I used a thick leather-bound notebook that had been a present from David, and which I had saved for a special occasion.

*

Finally, Kostya got the wedding he had once wanted for his daughter. Finally, everything was going according to his plan; it was just his country that wasn’t playing along any more.

Countless people were invited and came to the grand hall in Ortachala. Daria glittered and sparkled in her white dress. The managing director of the wine factory, the chief consultant in cardiac surgery, the singer (and recipient of the Order of Lenin), the former colleagues from the ministry, the trade union heads and the Komsomol leaders, along with numerous directors, actors, and musicians, all lent their lustre to the celebration. All the people to whom Kostya wanted to show what a pearl, what a rising star in the firmament of beauties he had raised. And even if his pearl had selected a very dubious line of work, even if the bridegroom was a few years older than her, they were still the model couple.

The celebratory mood also meant people could quickly and easily forget what was happening on the streets, the shaky footing on which this country stood, the country most of those present had served with unwavering loyalty all their lives. With a few glasses of the best Kakheti wine they could forget the fear in their bones. The fear of the day when the system would chew them up and spit them out. You could forget a lot on such an evening.

The images of Daria’s wedding are so clear in my mind, Brilka, even now; it’s as if I have a photo album in my head that I can leaf through at will. My sister’s happy face, her shining eyes, the little bunch of white roses in her hand, the newlyweds’ tentative kiss, her euphoria, the knowledge that she was indestructible, beautiful — and the arrogance inherent in such beauty.

And I often think, when I see these images in my mind’s eye, of the moment I found Daria in the toilets, where she was reapplying her lipstick, and looked at her in the mirror. How she turned to me then and wrapped her arms around me. How she whispered in my ear that she loved me (‘I love you so much, you little weirdo’) and how she planted a red kiss on my cheek, which was sweaty from dancing with Miro. And how she then flew off like the wind and left me standing there, bewildered and overwhelmed; how I put my hand to my cheek to hold on to her kiss, in the hope its impression would stay there forever.