Only the gods are not afraid of gifts.

Try to meet a god.

MARINA TSVETAEVA

They said a civil war had broken out in Tbilisi. The city lay in darkness. Everyone was against everyone: the opposition — though by that time nobody knew who was actually in it — was against Gamsakhurdia; the Communist Party was for itself; the private army was for more power; the partisans for anarchy; criminals for justice; the intelligentsia for Shevardnadze; and the rest of the people somewhere in between. Shots were fired with increasing frequency; a curfew was imposed. Barricades were erected everywhere they could be, and voices amplified by megaphones became part of the everyday background noise.

Despite all this, Severin didn’t want to leave. I was annoyed by his excitement and interest in these tragic developments. I suggested that the only reason he saw any good in the destructive potential of what was happening here was that the world he came from was still in one piece. Lectures were cancelled. Demonstrations weren’t. We were always hearing about people who had been physically attacked or held up and robbed.

I wrote, and froze. The poker games were temporarily put on hold. The boys had more important things to do. Everywhere stank of petrol. Everywhere was cold. Everywhere people looked about them fearfully and flinched if something was dropped on the floor.

We wanted to spend New Year’s Eve 1991 all together at the Green House because shots kept being fired in Tbilisi and bullets had shattered our neighbours’ windows. There was a worried phone call from Daria every week, but she had stopped sending money to Kostya and Nana. I suspected something was wrong, but I put the thought to the back of my mind. I had enough worries of my own.

With the civil war, something else entered the country: heroin. The staircases of apartment blocks were increasingly littered with needles. There were more and more glassy eyes on the metro, more and more absent expressions.

We sold and sold. My mother even pawned her wedding ring. When there was nothing left to sell, and the money I had saved from the poker games was gone as well, Stasia announced that there was only one way for us to survive. That night, a delicious aroma spread through the house. We wandered sleepily into the kitchen in nightshirts and pyjamas, and discovered our ninety-one-year-old Stasia at the kitchen table — with a chocolate torte in front of her.

‘What on earth is that?’ I cried out. I wanted to stick a finger into the wonderful cake then and there, but Nana stopped me, and Stasia explained that she had made it using her father’s old recipe. She wanted us to take it into town and sell it to one of the small, newly-opened kiosks that offered cakes and pancakes.

At first everyone thought it was a crazy idea, but then Elene told us excitedly that she knew someone in Tbilisi who sold confectionary in his shop, and she would try taking the cake to this man in the morning.

I drove her into the city the next day, and together we took the cake to the little basement shop Elene had mentioned. The corpulent and excessively hairy owner took the cake with some reluctance, and of course for much less money than we had originally asked, saying he would see how it sold. He thought individual slices would do better; at the moment the Mkhedrioni were probably the only ones who could afford a whole cake.

But by the next day the cake had sold, and he ordered three more from Elene. In two weeks, we sold a total of ten cakes. Stasia refused to accept help from other members of the family, and insisted on keeping the family recipe a secret. I was the only one she would countenance as an assistant in this difficult task.

‘Only Niza. No one else. She’s the only one in this house who can withstand the curse!’

My mother and Nana exchanged meaningful looks. Initially, I was far from delighted at having the honour of assisting her. I hated any kind of kitchen job, and baking in particular had never been one of my strengths. But Stasia was adamant and wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise. I told myself that at least this was a good opportunity to spend more time with the increasingly frail Stasia and finish collecting my stories.

The first night, as I watched her make the chocolate, I remembered the delicious aroma in Christine’s apartment that had enticed Miro and me out of our beds and into the kitchen. And as she stirred the dark mass, I heard, for the first time, the story of the chocolate-maker’s hot chocolate, and the curse that, according to Stasia, went with it.

‘You should never have been allowed to taste it, and now you have. My sister, may she rest in peace, never believed me. She used it to put the Little Big Man in his grave, and even after that she still doubted. But you — you must promise me faithfully: two dessert spoons of the mixture are all you need for a cake. You must never make it in its pure form for someone you love. Swear it to me.’

The scent melted me along with the chocolate as I watched her mixing the ingredients with hands that were old but still nimble, cautiously, carefully tasting, and measuring everything several times as if it were a medicine, a poison, and not this heavenly chocolate. And of course I didn’t believe a word she said. Chocolate was there to be eaten, after all, and I just wanted to dive into this dark mass and lick it all up. But she watched over me, sternly ensuring that not one of my fingers found its way into the pan; tasting to check the flavour was all that was allowed. Stasia’s cakes got us through the winter, and spring, too, and when Boris Yeltsin was elected as Russia’s first president in June 1991 our cake business really took off. Our world was sinking, and people wanted to stuff themselves with cake until they felt sick.

‘When times are bad, business is good for confectioners — that’s what my father always said.’

Stasia repeated these words like a mantra as I stood beside her in the kitchen, stirring the black mass by candlelight.

*

She was thinner now; her cheeks seemed sunken and her eyes gleamed. Her dress no longer clung sleekly to her hips, but hung loose on her body. Her hair was tied back in a hurried ponytail and her make-up had been carelessly applied. Nonetheless, she was recognised at the airport, and although people didn’t ask for her autograph — which in any case wouldn’t have been practical in the semi-darkness of the complete electricity blackout in the arrivals hall— they stared as she passed and whispered to one another.

We hugged for a long time.

‘So where’s your husband?’ I asked my sister.

‘He stayed in Moscow.’

‘That’s nice for us: we’ll all have a bit more of you. The Green House is expecting you. We’ve cooked your favourite things.’

‘I’m so glad to be home,’ said Daria, before falling asleep in the back seat of the car.

Kostya had put on some decent clothes for once, in honour of Daria’s visit, and was wearing a white shirt and pressed suit trousers. We had a late supper, and Daria told us about Moscow, about the chaos there, the extreme food shortages. The one good thing was that she had been able to get a part in a play, and had work. When Elene asked her about Lasha’s business, she prevaricated and changed the subject. Three days later, she went to their empty apartment to ‘take care of a few things’ and disappeared for days. The telephone was cut off, so I drove to her building and rang the bell for a long time. Even on the stairs I could hear loud music and a hubbub of voices coming from her apartment. I was surprised that she had visitors and hadn’t thought it necessary to tell me. The whole apartment was full of people I didn’t know. I could only see a few of her old friends. People were standing around drinking vodka by the light of kerosene lamps, which stank to high heaven, playing guitar and singing. The flat was untidy, as if she hadn’t made any attempt to clean it since she’d got back. When someone pressed a vodka glass into my hand, I knocked back the bitter liquid in one go and listened with irritation to these people’s drunken nonsense, all the while keeping my eyes on my sister. I had never seen her like this: she was hysterical, loud, forward, almost vulgar; her skirt was hitched up and her make-up had run. She danced around, told Russian jokes, kept throwing her arms around her friends’ necks, and eventually ended up on the lap of one of these strangers, who in his drunken state instantly started feeling her up — but not even this seemed to bother her.

When she went to the toilet, I followed her and locked the door behind us.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Spare me your moralising. I’ve been away for a long time — I missed them all so much, and my friends —’

‘Your friends? I’m pretty sure you’ve never met most of these people before. Come on, please. There’s something wrong. Please, Daria — I don’t want to stop you doing anything, I just want to know you’re all right, and I haven’t seen you for so long — I really missed you, and I thought —’

Suddenly, she threw her arms around me and started to cry.

‘It’s all going wrong. I don’t know what to do. He … he … Lasha’s in real trouble.’

In short order she told me that his business hadn’t gone well from the start; he was dependent on help from his parents, but wanted to maintain his standard of living, and was increasingly losing himself in the whirlwind of Moscow life. She told me he had been injecting heroin for quite a while, and sometimes he would disappear without trace for days on end. She kept saying how much she loved him, though, as if she were afraid I would tell her to leave him. But before I could say anything, she wiped her face, put on a smile, and, beaming once more, hurried back into the living room where she was loudly welcomed.

Daria had always known what place in the world was her due, what she could expect from life; she hadn’t doubted things, she hadn’t questioned herself or the world around her. She had just chosen the wrong person to love, and she herself had granted him permission to knock her world off kilter. She had practically laughed in his face and said, ‘You love me — you may do it; take everything you need, take everything, as long as it makes you happy.’

And he had.

She stood before me, with those sunken cheeks and dark shadows under her eyes. Her blue eye was glassy; her brown eye was dull. She had lost her equilibrium.

And as I watched her, as she danced in the arms of some idiot, I had a frightening realisation: Lasha had managed to turn her into his nightmare version of her. He had projected all his fears, complexes, and manias onto her. And she had let it happen. He had managed to transform her love into a dull, dirty, swampy mass, so that he could finally accept it. I watched her dancing and felt nauseous.

Where was my wonderful, unbroken, self-sufficient Daria, the beautiful queen of Kostya’s realm? And where was Kostya’s realm now, anyway? Where were we all living?

*

Three days later, I met Aleko. He was distraught. He told me that David had been stopped in the street by some men who’d tried to mug him. When they discovered there was nothing in his purse, they wanted his gold chain, but he defended himself. (I tried to remember a chain around his neck. Had I ever noticed? No.)

‘Is he dead?’ I asked Aleko, marvelling at my own composure.

‘Yes. Nine stab wounds. Probably some kind of criminal gang or friends of the Mkhedrioni.’

‘For a chain?’

‘For a chain.’

I shut myself in the bathroom and stayed there for hours. I held the world tightly in my fist but still it ran through my fingers as if it were made of sand.

I lay down in the empty bathtub. The water had been cut off again.

Time seemed to shatter against the backs of my knees. I was eight, I was ten, and I was in David’s apartment. I saw the drawings and pictures on his walls, I tasted the scalding tea on my tongue, I heard his voice. Would he play cards with the other ghosts now, too? He didn’t like cards. If he played anything, it would have to be backgammon.

I tried to cry. I had never been good at it. I had no tears. I hated this country, I hated these people, I hated this bathtub, I hated myself and my powerlessness. Why had he done it? Refusing to give up a chain, for God’s sake? Why had he done that to me? I thought about the blood in the bathroom, at the seaside that time; about beautiful Rusa and how she had pretended to be carefree in the snow, so many months later.

I laid my face against the cold edge of the bath.

I went under. Even though there was no water.

Christine’s halved face, the screeching human mass of 9 April, the cold of the last two winters, the darkness on the streets, David’s words, our last meeting, the strong tea, my desperate sister’s glassy eyes, Miro’s laugh, the pervasive hopelessness of these days, the pages I had filled (with what, exactly?), my mother’s despondent expression, the smell of the hot chocolate … At that moment, everything merged together in my mind.

How long would I be able to lie there? And what would it change? This useless grief.

I gave myself a slap. I wanted to feel something. I wanted it to hurt. I wanted to be closer to David. I wanted to hold on to him: in my unspoken words to him, in my vision of the afternoons and evenings I could have spent with him. In the next room, my mother put on Kitty Jashi’s album Home, and perhaps that was the first time I consciously listened to her music. And perhaps it was Kitty’s music that enticed me out of the bath, out of the house again after those endless, empty hours, Brilka.

*

‘Do you know why everyone, even his former allies, wants to get rid of Gamsakhurdia now? Do you know why they’re all railing against him?’ Kostya was getting worked up over supper again, as we sat around the kitchen table by candlelight during a blackout, listening to the battery-operated radio. ‘Because people are starting to realise that in return for the sovereignty they so desperately wanted, they’ll have to change their lifestyle. No more quick flights to Moscow, with its restaurants and its Russian women; no more Caucasian swagger, no more privileges, no more sunny Georgia. And now they realise that’s not what they wanted at all.’

Uprisings were still happening all over the country. If you wanted bread, you had to start queuing in the middle of the night. The National Guard and the Mkhedrioni refused to enter into cooperation with the Ministry for the Interior. They had long since abandoned the rule of law — if anyone was actually still abiding by it — and were making laws of their own. No authority was going to tell them what they should and shouldn’t do any more. At the end of the year, when Gamsakhurdia had all Russian television channels blocked in an effort to keep negative Russian propaganda away from Georgia, general dissatisfaction was aroused once more. Those average citizens who, a few months previously, had fervently shouted ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’ at the demonstrations were now upset at being denied Russian ‘culture’.

‘Yes, I suppose it’s true: we are a nation that looks at itself through others’ eyes. I’m afraid I can’t remember who said that,’ Stasia commented that evening, agreeing with her son for once.

*

We made chocolate cakes to the recipe of a long-dead confectioner who was trained in Budapest and Vienna, using flour and powdered milk with USAID printed on the packets, and cocoa powder adorned with a red star. Meanwhile, the National Guard, working with the Mkhedrioni, occupied all the city’s central buildings and set up posts outside them. Once again, people thronged Rustaveli Boulevard. And once again, shots were fired; once again, people were killed and wounded. What surprised me most of all was the general indifference of the city’s population to these warlike acts. Flame-throwers kept causing fires, the sound of Kalashnikovs was constant, yet most people still went calmly about their daily business.

The metro was running; cinemas were open; passers-by stopped in the street and watched with cold expressions, their faces motionless as the soldiers loaded their guns.

After Severin got caught up in it, too (he was attacked and robbed), he handed all his books over to me and left, promising to come back as soon as he’d taken care of some stuff in Berlin. The day before his departure I invited him up to the Green House, and we ate polenta and cheese in silence. I’d got very used to him; I had learned to love our intimacy, and the German words that I promised to go on memorising in his absence. I could see that the thought of returning to order after all this chaos troubled him, too.

‘You should go to Europe, Niza,’ he told me, this time in German.

‘Europe, yes, Europe. Remember when you said you wanted to be at the epicentre of history?’

‘Yes, well, maybe I’ve changed, or maybe I just got tired. Tired of this fear. I was never afraid before — I wasn’t afraid when I came here. It’s different now.’

Before I drove him back into town, we went up to the attic, took a candle out onto the unfinished roof terrace, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the clear, starry sky. Piles of old books and my notes lay in the corner. This had been my kingdom, my retreat for so many years. Despite the chaos of those days, I vowed to try to leave enough space within me that I wouldn’t forget him. At that time, I didn’t think I would ever see him again.