Within Russia, take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.

BORIS YELTSIN

On 7 January, the battles were declared to be over, and the Mkhedrioni uncorked the champagne outside the Parliament Building. Gamsakhurdia had been forced to flee, and after being denied residency in Armenia, he ended up in Chechnya. The demonstrations continued; Gamsakhurdia’s followers tried again to set up shop all over Tbilisi, but the Mkhedrionists and the National Guard opened fire on them. Southern Georgia, especially Samegrelo, the region with the most presidential supporters, was up in arms.

People demanded Shevardnadze’s return to Georgian politics. It had started to dawn on everyone that dissidents and criminals would not be able to bring this chaos to an end. And there were increasing signs of a power struggle between the Mkhedrioni and the National Guard.

Shortly after Shevardnadze’s return in March 1992, my sister also came to Tbilisi for a few weeks. She withdrew to our childhood bedroom, announcing that she and the lovely Lasha had had ‘a falling out’; he had even greater ‘financial problems’, and she wasn’t sure how long she would be staying with us. She firmly blocked all of Kostya’s attempts to get any more out of her; however, she had more colour in her cheeks than the previous year, when she had spent two weeks doing nothing but partying. But her gaze was absent, her demeanour restless and jumpy, and even her normally soothing smile had something artificial and contrived about it. The happiness she had always radiated so majestically, the satisfaction at being at the centre of everything, the confidence that she could reach out and grasp anything she wanted — all the things she used to display so openly — seemed to have been snuffed out, as if her main impetus, the sole engine for all these characteristics, had been switched off.

It made me sad to sense her emptiness, and I decided to spend more time with her, support her, tease out her secrets, and show her at long last that it was time to tell her lovely Lasha to go to hell. But she was slippery as a fish, eluding anything that might come too close for comfort; she was an expert at manipulating every conversation. I found it difficult to figure her out, something I used to be able to do so well. But between then and now lay her love, her marriage, Moscow, and the countless moments and emotions I had not shared with her, the experiences she’d had without me.

Just two weeks later, Lasha suddenly turned up at the front door. He had grown thin, and his face had an unhealthy, yellowish hue. His appearance at once brought Daria back to life. She turned her attention to him, patting his cheeks all the time, preparing his favourite food. She stopped complaining about the blackouts and how cold the house was; she snuggled up to him, showered him with tender gestures, and seemed to completely ignore his snubs and his lack of interest in her. As if she didn’t even notice that he wasn’t returning her kisses and shunned her tenderness. I couldn’t watch. I turned my eyes away from her. Couldn’t get the images out of my head. This man had done something terrible to my sister; he had taken something precious from her, something important had changed in her, and I wouldn’t and couldn’t come to terms with it. Once again, I decided to interfere in someone else’s life. This time, though, I wouldn’t be able to win the fight alone. Perhaps Kostya — as difficult as this was for me — would become my ally. Perhaps he would summon his dwindling energy, pour his pent-up frustration and rage over Lasha’s head and make him stay away from Daria. For that reason, I was more than grateful to Kostya for persuading the two of them to stay in the Green House rather than going to their apartment. It was more difficult to get provisions in the city, he told them, and, above all, it was more dangerous there. I had given over our old bedroom to them, and was sleeping in Stasia’s room. We had all started huddling together: it was cold, and there wasn’t enough petrol and wood to heat all the rooms.

Over the days we spent living together, Daria’s arguments with Lasha began to escalate. He had done all this for a ‘little two-bit whore’, I heard him shouting, from the other side of the door. He was an ‘ungrateful pig, a rotten bastard, a nothing’, Daria retorted. And my suspicion from the last party was increasingly confirmed: she was doing all she could to prove to herself that he was right, that she really did correspond to his image of her, that she deserved to be mistreated. And if Daria finally succumbed to this image her husband had created of her, her life would be ruined — of that I was also certain. ‘All or nothing at all’ had always been her motto. Once her appetite was piqued, she couldn’t stop eating. If she was beautiful, she had to be the most beautiful. If she was an actress, she would play only leading roles. If her interest in someone or something was aroused, she couldn’t stop until she possessed the object of her desire. If she fell in love, she had to get married. Once she was in love, it had to be forever. If they had a fight, she would let herself be beaten and insulted in the most despicable way. I was certain that if ever she were to start hating herself, it would end in complete self-destruction.

One night, I was lying in bed and heard Daria’s footsteps in the corridor. She passed my door and started climbing the stairs to the attic. I quickly threw on a jumper and hurried after her. She had lit a small candle and was sitting beside my pile of dust-covered books with her knees drawn up to her chest. When she heard my footsteps, she looked round in alarm.

‘Oh, it’s you …’ she said, with a note of disappointment in her voice, as if she’d been hoping someone else had followed her.

‘Yes, it’s only me.’

‘Do you want to have a cigarette with me?’

‘Sure.’

‘Funny that in all these years we still haven’t managed to put up a railing,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘I like it the way it is.’

‘It’s pretty high, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, it is. Do you remember how much we loved coming up here as children?’

‘I was always afraid of heights — I only did it because of you, so you wouldn’t think I was a coward.’

‘A fear of heights doesn’t exactly go with being a trapeze artist, does it?’

‘I’ve always done things that scared me.’

‘Uh-huh … And are you scared of your husband, too, Daria?’

‘I don’t want to talk about him. Just drop it, please.’

‘He’s a filthy swine. All those things he says are just his warped imagination.’

She looked at me in shock.

‘Have you been eavesdropping?’

‘Even without hearing his wonderful words, you can tell how much he loves you just by looking at him.’

‘That’s not true. He does, even if you can’t see it.’

‘When? When he hits you, you mean, or when he can’t get it up to have his way with you?’

‘You’re going too far. It’s got nothing to do with you!’

‘You’re my sister, for God’s sake, and I won’t let this bastard break you.’

‘He’s ill. Try to understand that. You have to be lenient with him. He has so many problems, and there’s so little I can do to help him … You live in your world. You don’t know what it’s like to love a person so desperately.’

Our cigarette ends burned in the dark like two amorous glow-worms.

‘All you’re doing is living up to his twisted ideas, Daria.’

At these words, she looked at me thoughtfully. As if this one sentence had really got through to her.

‘I just can’t do it,’ she said in a weak voice, and buried her head between her knees.

I couldn’t hold back any longer: I wrapped my arms around her with all my strength. She tried to shake me off and get up, but I clung on tightly. I wanted to hold her, I wanted to save her.

I wanted her to be mean to me again, and so beautiful that you would forgive her anything; I wanted her to drive me into a white-hot rage, to be catty and capricious — anything but this, this hunched back, this sluggishness and submissiveness, this guilt, this disappointment. I let out a laugh.

‘You’re crazy,’ she cried. She freed herself from my embrace and fell back, exhausted. I crawled over to her and laid my head on her belly. Hesitantly, she brushed a strand of hair from my forehead.

‘You had my husband beaten up by your criminal friends, Niza. That doesn’t help.’

‘But he —’

‘That doesn’t help!’

‘I won’t do it again. I promise. I’ll do anything you want. But don’t go back. You have to start acting again.’

‘Who’s interested in films or theatre these days?’

‘It won’t be like this forever.’

‘Oh, Niza.’

She hugged me to her and rubbed my back. Then she got up and brushed the dust from her nightshirt.

‘I have to go back down. He can’t sleep without me.’

*

The fighting continued in southern Georgia between Gamsakhurdia’s followers and the new government, but Shevardnadze’s return did seem to have brought a glimmer of hope to the conflict with the Abkhazians. His desire ‘to forget all the quarrels of the past’ gave the Abkhazians hope that their demands for sovereignty would be met with a more open mind. But when words did not lead to deeds, and the Georgian State Council made an attempt to convert the port of Ochamchira in Abkhazia into a base for Georgian naval forces, this hope was quickly extinguished. In Tbilisi, too, people began to speculate as to whether Shevardnadze would really manage to avoid more bloodshed. At the centre of these disagreements was Abkhazia’s future status within or outside Georgia’s borders. And when, in July 1992, the Abkhazian parliament suspended the 1978 constitution of the Abkhazian ASSR and reintroduced the constitution of 1925, the Georgian defence minister and head of the National Guard ordered Georgian troops to march into Abkhazia. He justified this as a ‘measure necessary to defend territorial integrity against the separatist efforts of the Abkhazian parliament’.

That was how the war started.

Daria went back to Moscow with Lasha. A few months after her departure, she called the Green House and screamed down the phone. It was only after Nana had made several attempts to calm her down that Daria was able to get a clear sentence out: her husband had been shot by debt collectors of some kind, and was now in intensive care. The bullet had grazed his spine.

Only at the end of the phone call did she mention, almost in passing and completely unable to cope, that she was expecting a baby.