What you hide away is lost;

What you give away is yours.

SHOTA RUSTAVELI

Severin occupied a pre-war apartment in Wedding, Berlin, with a tiled stove and high, stuccoed ceilings. He still worked at his father’s shop, whose customers were now almost all of the seriously wealthy kind and no longer so eager for the rare finds from the East that Severin had once obtained. The trend was moving towards Asia, as he explained to me not long after my arrival.

He wore white trainers, summer and winter. Every other day he would cook spaghetti in a mushy tomato sauce, and he had recently fallen in love with a boy called Gerrit, though Gerrit didn’t want a serious relationship. He had an impressive video collection, which proved very helpful for my integration. He lived for the weekends, when he could go out, drink, and dance without feeling guilty. (The idea that you could only let go on a Friday or a Saturday had a logic that was completely impenetrable to me.)

His friends looked on me as one of the curiosities he brought back from his numerous trips. Every one of them was a left-wing liberal, and they were all active in some organisation or other, everything from animal protection to asylum-seekers’ rights. Severin said I should tell them if their curiosity and their questions were getting on my nerves, but I didn’t dare: I always felt compelled to dispense information about my country and my life with all the drama and emotion I could muster. Afterwards, I usually felt terrible and locked myself in the bathroom. Severin was understanding about my moods, for a completely illogical reason that just sent me into a greater fury. He called my condition the ‘Eastern Blues’, and claimed to be very familiar with it.

He refused to countenance living in separate apartments; he kept saying the two of us were going to be great flatmates. He didn’t even want to let me get a job for the first few months, thinking it might overtax me, which wouldn’t be good for my state of mind. I did as I was told: he signed me up for a language course, and I parked myself in a classroom with people of every possible nationality, from countries I had only encountered in my old children’s book of World Folk Tales. I put on a friendly smile and said, in German, ‘Hello, my name is Niza and I come from Georgia. Georgia is a small country in the Caucasus, and …’ One of my fellow pupils then asked if Georgia wasn’t part of Russia, which forced me into a digression on the brief history of the Soviet Union, still making an effort to maintain the friendly smile, and this tired me out so much that I spent the rest of the lesson in a semi-conscious daze, wondering what I was doing here and what on earth was to become of my life.

Severin showed me the city. He enjoyed playing host. He was finally able to put his historical knowledge to good use, and gave me detailed lectures about some building or other, some street or other, some former or current resident.

In March, just before my tourist visa ran out, we trooped down to the registry office and applied for a marriage licence. After jumping through numerous bureaucratic hoops and obtaining all kinds of documents, we were able to marry.

I bought a dress in a second-hand shop — until then I hadn’t owned any dresses — and he borrowed a suit. And when the registrar called upon us to do so, we kissed very passionately by our standards, then spent the whole evening laughing about it. He didn’t invite his parents to our wedding.

‘They’d only put the kibosh on the whole thing. I wouldn’t even put it past my father to tell the registrar it was a sham marriage. I don’t want to put you in danger,’ he explained to me.

Later, we went to a fast food stand, stood under a red and white umbrella with dancing pandas on it, and ate currywurst until we felt sick.

*

For the first few months, I suffered from broken sleep and panic attacks; nightmarish images would wake me with a start. I spent whole nights sitting on the window seat, staring out into the darkness, smoking and wondering what to do with all the time that lay ahead of me. I had no motivation. No will. No joy. But there was something liberating about this state. For the first time in what felt like an eternity I sensed an almost masochistic pleasure in this inner emptiness. I suppressed all thoughts of home, limited myself to brief phone calls in which I summarised and prettified things, and told them about non-existent plans.

I wrote more honest letters to Miro, but never sent them. And every time he called — which was regularly, to begin with, then less and less frequently — I felt a fat lump in my throat, which left a rusty taste behind on my tongue.

Slowly, I felt my way back into the language and began timidly exploring Severin’s bookshelves, taking out one book after another and negotiating them with the help of a dictionary. Starved and hollow as I was, every line, even the most hackneyed sentence, had the capacity to send me into a genuine paroxysm of joy.

I took great delight in our summertime visits to the little arthouse cinema, the walks along the Spree, the delicious ice cream in the Italian gelateria, and the Turkish kebabs. When I had no idea what to do with my day, I accompanied Severin’s friends to their university lectures and sat there doing my best to be invisible.

The idea of studying, of working towards something, scared me at first. But I was much more afraid of doing nothing. I took casual jobs, working as a kitchen porter in a Russian restaurant, walking dogs, doing the night shift in a twenty-four-hour off-licence, even working in an upmarket shoe shop, although I knew absolutely nothing about shoes. I never lasted more than four weeks in any of them. My boredom was becoming increasingly unbearable, and the panic attacks had finally subsided, so I pulled myself together and enrolled on a degree course in modern history and politics at the Humboldt University. Severin strengthened my resolve, saying I could chuck it in at any time if it got too much for me.

I slipped into my new and truly monotonous student life very quickly. And I kept working: I had discovered a garage in the Neukölln district calling itself ‘The Shed’, which was run by a lesbian couple who only employed women. They were looking for someone to work the till. After a trial day, they hired me, and I sensed I would stay there longer than the usual four weeks.

Caro and Maggie, the couple who owned the garage, seemed to like me, too. After a while they even started letting me into the workshop, where I was allowed to lend a hand.

For the first time since I had come to Berlin, I felt something like joy in this place. I loved being able to distract myself from my thoughts with physical activity — even if Severin shook his head when I came home with dirty hair, covered in streaks of oil.

Now, I remember very little about my first two years in Berlin. All I have are a few images, and a recollection of the strange, semi-conscious state in which I was trapped. When I think back to this time, it’s this ‘not’ state I always think of. All I remember is not wanting, not being able, not feeling. As if I were attached to an invisible device, my only life source, which made me get up every morning, do the things I had to do, put my time to some sort of meaningful use.

But I also remember the feeling of being constantly short of time. My fear of free time that I might have to spend alone with myself — time when I would have to think, feel something, remember something — made me create an almost impossible schedule, stuffing the day so full that in the evening I had no choice but to collapse into bed half-dead and fall asleep in seconds.

I ran. I cycled. I walked. I fled. I had no time to miss anyone or anything; I had no time to grieve, no time to laugh, no time for regret, remorse, reflection. No time to be lovesick, no time to live. I functioned, and I did that splendidly.

And when, in those few moments when I could no longer hide from myself, the images and memories flooded over me, I would press my face into a cushion, a book, even a shoe or a plate so hard that my eyes could see nothing but a pattern of colours, and then I would hurry back to my tasks.

I needed two mute, introverted years to replace my own words with foreign ones. I needed new faces in order to forget the old. I needed new shoes and jackets, new poets and philosophers; I needed time to catch up on time, to become young again, to cement the walls around me.

To my great relief, Severin, who initially made a huge effort to integrate me into his circle of friends, began to leave me in peace. He asked less and less often how I was doing, and managed to stay out of my way for days at a time. He organised our life together with little notes on the fridge, which were never about anything more than the need to buy milk or toilet paper. When it was his birthday or New Year, when I was forced to join in and dance, to share in the general happiness, I fulfilled this duty without objection, along with the countless other duties in my life that had to be fulfilled.

During one of the few arguments we had —I didn’t usually have the energy for an argument — he called me a robot and accused me of having forfeited all my likeable qualities. But when I then suggested that I find my own place to live, he refused, saying he didn’t want to give up on our ‘marriage’ just like that. And in fact I sometimes wished I could have gone to his room, sat on his bed, and howled out everything that had been building up inside me: how catastrophically I had failed myself and the world, how suddenly I had given up my family, my homeland, the world I had thought was mine. I wanted to hold someone responsible for my paralysis, implicate him in my state of not-being. But I knew it was pointless, that my situation would only become even more unbearable after such a desperate confession. I didn’t want sympathy. I didn’t want to hear: ‘But you couldn’t have changed anything’ — and I didn’t want to be convinced of the opposite. Without my self-hatred, what would I have had left? What could I then have used to keep hold of the past? With what emotions could I then have faced the world, and, above all, what motivation would I have had to go on living?

One day, Severin brought home a cat and informed me that she was our new housemate. I had a fit of rage. I myself didn’t understand what made me overreact like that, screaming that I couldn’t do it, that I didn’t want to feel responsible. For anyone. Not even for an animal. He looked at me sadly, not knowing what to do. It wasn’t just his annoyance that I had lost my spontaneity, my easy-going manner, my sense of humour — everything that had bound the two of us together in those dark, cold days in Tbilisi. There was a deeper sadness in his eyes, too, and that might have been something new: a degree of understanding. Understanding for the effort it took me not to think about the stories, my stories and those of others that I had borrowed and assimilated over the years, in the hope that I would be able to go on writing them one day.

The cat was returned.

*

After one of my rare phone calls with Miro, which was peppered with sarcastic comments from him and ended in an argument, I left the house in a rage, went to a club, and spent so long smiling at some lanky guy that he couldn’t help but notice and take a seat at the bar with me. After just three sentences I had my tongue in his mouth. He took me back to his apartment in Kreuzberg, which he shared with his girlfriend, who was away, and I lay down in their bed. For the first time my body tried to love someone who wasn’t Miro. For the first time I feigned desire for a complete stranger.

When he had fallen asleep, I crept out of the apartment, hailed a taxi, and went out drinking. Severin found me the next morning, asleep on the living-room floor. He sat down beside me, lifted my head into his lap, ran his fingers through my hair, and talked to me as if he were saying a prayer: ‘Niza, you have to talk. You have to talk to someone. Otherwise you’ll eat yourself up inside. I can see it, you know. And if you don’t want to talk to me, then go to a therapist, get some help.’

But I didn’t want to know; I just kept pinching my arms and thighs, my cheeks and belly until he was forced to take hold of my hands and rock me to sleep like a baby.

I’d just wanted to feel something again.

*

My history professor kept me behind after a seminar, wanting to talk about an essay I had just submitted. She fixed her eyes on me from behind her large glasses.

‘I would venture to say that you have a great gift, Miss Jashi.’

I held my breath. This word belonged in my old life, it mustn’t turn up again here, not here, not now and never again, anywhere.

‘Not that I know of.’ I tried to sidestep.

‘You are, perhaps, aware that there is support available for nurturing special gifts?’

‘Listen, I’m not gifted!’

‘Well, let’s see. You write better German now than your native-speaker classmates. You absorb information at an incredible speed, but on the other hand you are surprisingly bad at making use of it in a purposeful way. You have problems with attribution. Then again, you have a store of knowledge that is, how shall I put it, remarkable. You are highly focused when something interests you, but incredibly lax when you already know something. The fact that you rarely associate with people your own age also suggests that you’re not being stretched enough. You are uncommunicative, awkward, and stubborn. And you aren’t always scrupulous with the truth …’

‘So? Are those all signs of being gifted, then? Don’t you think that’s a little — well, clichéd?’

‘It would be a cliché to assume that what you have is a deficiency, not a gift. The cliché is your fear of confessing to your own talents and making proper use of them. I don’t know who taught you not to use these talents. It was most certainly a mistake.’

‘I like it here. I don’t want anything to change. Please.’

‘I’m your professor, not your mother. As your professor, I would advise you to apply for a research grant. I further recommend that you apply for a post as an assistant at one of our research centres. If you make a little effort, you can finish your degree ahead of time. You could do so much more, Miss Jashi. And if I were your mother, I would advise you to start facing up to your talents at once, and dealing with your absurd reluctance to use them.’

It was the first time since coming to Berlin that I had cried in front of anyone.

*

Caro was a trained car mechanic with strikingly long legs, tattoos on her arms, and one of a lizard around her ear. She idolised her girlfriend, a DJ who played many of the city’s clubs and belonged to a feminist performance-art group. She loved fast cars, but above all she loved to play cards.

The first time she asked me whether I played, I said no. When she pressed me again, saying that she didn’t believe me, given how curious I had always been whenever she talked about her poker games, I replied that I had given up. And when she finally persuaded me and took me to a game with her, I had to go to the bathroom after the first hand and throw up. Caro declared that I had professional qualities, and took me to a game in the backstreets of Pankow, where we played a very serious-looking group for money in a strange building that was more like a warehouse than anything else. I won some cash that evening, and deliberately left it on the seat in the U-Bahn. I handed my next win over to Caro. It was only on the third occasion that, as I raked in the cash, I managed not to immediately think of that hundred-dollar note that had made me stay at the print works and eventually, with trousers round my ankles and aching limbs, ram the neck of a broken bottle into a man’s skin.

By that winter, I had so much money that at Christmas I was able to send home a considerable sum, get myself an old Volvo 760, and buy Severin some special edition trainers he had been drooling over for months.

‘Where did you get the cash?’ he asked suspiciously.

‘I play cards,’ I confessed in a neutral tone.

‘You do what? You play cards? Where?’

‘Private games.’

‘You know you could get yourself in trouble doing that?’

‘Oh, don’t start, okay? I love capitalism — just let me love it! I lived under socialism for long enough! Come on, Severin!’

That made us both laugh.

*

In the Christmas holidays I got into my dark blue Volvo, took what remained of my winnings, and set off. I didn’t know where I was going; I just drove through snowy landscapes and along icy roads. On the move, on my way somewhere, the feeble sun at my back, I felt something homely, something familiar, something that allowed me to breathe easy. I stopped at service stations, slept in cheap motels, ate bad food, and felt good. I crossed the whole of Germany. I drove to Paris. The borders had disappeared, and I wondered where they had gone. In Paris, I took a seat in a café and ate a slice of almond gateau. I watched the passers-by; I watched snowflakes falling onto the Seine. I drifted. I tried to take in the scent of the city. I was happy that no one knew me there, that I knew no one. I thought about my childhood and tried to reconstruct the pictures that had been in my mind as I’d read Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Colette and Miller, Voltaire and Diderot, Genet, Duras.

I thought about the French films I had so enjoyed watching with Aleko, Daria, and later Miro. The discussions afterwards.

I sat on a bench, looking out at the passing tourist boats, and wondered whether the city would have disappointed Stasia, whether it would have held its own against her idea of it, whether it would have welcomed her and, most importantly, let her dance. I saw Stasia behind my closed eyelids, and watched her dance for me.

I drove on from Paris to Lyon, then to Geneva and Turin. I crossed Switzerland, I crossed Italy and sang along to an old song on the radio and thought about my sister’s different-coloured eyes. I exchanged my language for the songs on the car radio. I exchanged my native language for all the languages I borrowed for a few days, like the pretty hair slides I had once borrowed from Daria.

I crossed Europe, which had once been so far away and which now melted together beneath my tyres. I visited Rome and held back my tears at the thought that my sister would never be able to set her different-coloured eyes on all this beauty.