Imagine me; I shall not exist if you do not imagine me.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

In April 1998, Miro called. He would be travelling to Amsterdam in the next few days and wanted to see me again. He seemed to have been drinking, and was very tearful on the phone. He murmured something about a ferocious longing for me. I agreed.

After hanging up, I spent a while looking silently at my reflection in the window. I saw a very small woman whose age and sex seemed somehow of secondary importance. I saw the short, untidy hair, which could never be tamed, saw the flat chest, the sloping shoulders, the sharp cheekbones, and the long, hooked nose. Saw the tired circles under my eyes, the duck lips, the dark eyes that looked so cagey, so inexpressive, and wondered what he might say about it all, whether he would recognise me, what we would have to say to each other after all this time. I wondered whether we would be able to smell, taste, feel on each other everything that had happened in between, the other people there had been in the last few years. And whether that would mean anything.

I got off the train in Amsterdam and went straight to the hotel where he was staying. I had forbidden him from meeting me on the platform. In my unsettled state I couldn’t handle any sentimental scenes.

I knocked, and he immediately flung open the door. We looked at each other. I put my little overnight bag down on the floor. He was more grown-up, more imposing, more self-assured. The playfulness had gone from his face. He was wearing suit trousers, which for some reason made me feel completely overwhelmed.

He took my hand and pulled me into the room. He threw me onto the bed, and before I knew what was happening we were both undressed and wresting the memories from each other, the memories of what we once had been and what we had believed we would remain forever.

We didn’t say a word. We struggled in silence, each of us trying to expand our ribcages to let the other one in, trying to scratch off the layers of time that stuck to our skins like a crust. It seemed so easy to be an us again. Our intimacy was so effortlessly restored. I could love him so effortlessly, like no one else in the world.

It was dark in the room; we hadn’t turned a light on. We listened to each other breathing.

‘Let’s try again,’ I said to him. ‘Let’s do it. We’ll make it work, if you want it to. I have so little to keep me here, yet there’s so little calling me back. But if I had you again, if I could bring you back into my life, then …’

He hesitated, laid his head on my chest, stretched, sighed, said I was right, that he didn’t want to forget me, that he was sure we would make it work. That he had to think about coming to Europe. That we had a future, a future together. That we should go to Berlin, the very next day.

And I believed him, unquestioningly.

Holding hands, we marched to the station the next morning. Holding hands, we bought our tickets. Holding hands, we got on the train. Our carriage was very full, so I asked him to wait while I found an emptier one. He stayed in his seat. When I came back, he wasn’t in his seat any more. The train was still stationary. I thought he had gone to the toilet, but then I saw that his little suitcase was gone as well. I didn’t want to think the worst. Maybe he was scared of thieves, or wanted to have a quick shave in the train toilet, I told myself. He hadn’t had time for a shave that morning, and had complained about it. I forced myself to sit down. The train was about to leave. I stared at my watch; I stared at the empty seat in front of me. I didn’t dare ask the other passengers about him: I already knew the answer and didn’t want to believe it.

As the train began to move, I leaped up from my seat and ran to the door. I wanted to get off, but it was too late, and I had no choice but to take my leave of him from the window as the train pulled away and I saw him, the collar of his coat turned up, his gaze fixed on the ground, hurrying along the platform as if he were escaping from something. Wordlessly, with a deep horror and a sense of devastating finality lying heavy on my limbs, I watched as he vanished into the crowd.

*

Ignoring what my professor had said, I took the usual amount of time to complete my degree. I didn’t intend to hurry; I had nothing to hurry towards. Even when, over the months that followed, she kept talking to me about the research post, I declined the offer and avoided the subject. I did, however, play regular games of poker, and sent the money to Georgia. When my mother asked where I was getting so much money from as a student, I told her something about a generous grant. I don’t know whether she believed me. Or whether it even mattered to her. Mostly, when we spoke on the phone, she talked about God, Jesus, and the Church, and when she wasn’t talking about this trio, it was about Anastasia, whom everyone now called Brilka, and who was apparently not as keen on becoming a pious, God-fearing child as Elene wished.

I kept working at the garage, and when everything got too much for me, when I was sick of the city and day-to-day life, I got in my car and drove all over Europe. Sometimes with Severin; sometimes without him. Vienna was the only place I gave a wide berth. I associated the city with other people’s dreams.

My professor, who had a real bee in her bonnet about me, insisted that after my finals I should write a thesis. She introduced me to a colleague of hers, an expert on Eastern Europe, who had just got funding for a project researching the Cold War and was looking for a capable assistant, as she informed me with a satisfied grin. The Eastern Europe expert turned out to be a thoroughly charming, eloquent, and quick-witted man, who assailed me with countless questions and had already read my final dissertation. In the past few years I had done my best to steer clear of Eastern Europe. My reaction to being forced to consider it again was one of extreme aversion. However, as I had no real alternative, and no idea what to make of my life, I said I was prepared to do it. And so I became a research assistant, writing my thesis as part of a project which was to culminate in the publication of a wide-ranging book.

I kept running. I didn’t stop. I didn’t pause for breath.

*

Four years after my arrival in Berlin, Elene called me and told me Stasia had died. I pulled out my old suitcase, which was gathering dust under my bed, and found the recipe book Stasia had bequeathed me. I read through the recipes, but most importantly I tried to memorise the mixture of ingredients for the hot chocolate. In the morning I bought everything I needed and made my great-great-grandfather’s hot chocolate.

Mechanically spooning up the dark liquid, I wept for my great storyteller, the spirit-seeing great-grandmother who was woven into my dreams. And along with her, I wept for the fact that I had not yet learned how so many of the stories ended, had not yet understood the connections between so many events, and that she would never again be able to help me understand.

*

I remember this dream as well as if it had all really happened. I remember his face so well, imperceptibly different from the photo I had found as a child among the old pictures in the living room cabinet. I dreamed of this man, Kostya’s friend, who had helped Kitty Jashi across the border. In the dream I didn’t remember his name, but I knew that at the Green House I had seen an old photo of him in which he was wearing a naval uniform and standing beside my grandfather, smiling into the lens. In my dream, he visited me in Berlin and brought me a bunch of violets, beautiful dark-blue violets, like the ones from the garden of my childhood. And he smiled at me. In my dream, he was young, just as he was in the photo from St Petersburg. I invited him into my apartment, we drank tea, and he showed me a suitcase — but I woke up before I could find out what was in it.

Three days later, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and phoned home. I had trouble getting my mother to remember who I was talking about: after all, I didn’t know his name. I just knew that he had travelled with Kitty when she returned to Tbilisi, and that he was the one who had brought my grandfather the news of his sister’s death.

‘You mean Giorgi Alania. What made you think of him?’

‘I don’t know. He just came to mind for some reason. Do you know where he is — whether he’s still alive? And if so, where I might find him?’

‘What do you want with him?’

‘It’s to do with my thesis. I’m researching Soviet prisoners, and I thought —’

For the first time since I left home, I wasn’t telling my mother a pack of lies.

‘I’ve no idea what became of him. But yes, he was Kostya’s best friend.’

‘Can you think who I could ask about him?’

‘Some of Kostya’s old colleagues are still around; they must remember him.’

In fact, just a few days later my mother got me the phone number of one of Kostya’s old colleagues. And when I heard his name, and then his voice, I knew who it was. It was Rusa’s father, who had been such a good host to us in Batumi, never guessing that his friend was having an affair with his daughter.

‘Oh, so you research depressing things like that these days, do you? I’m sure your grandfather would be proud of you,’ he said, after hearing me out. ‘Guess who’s on the phone!’ he suddenly called out to someone. ‘Kostya Jashi’s granddaughter, who’s living in Germany. The wunderkind, do you remember?’

Then I heard footsteps in the background, and suddenly there was a female voice on the line.

‘Niza?’

I recognised her at once. The velvet-soft voice hadn’t changed.

‘Rusa?’

I tried to picture her face. The delicate face from before I found her in the bathroom. The face from before I met her in the snow. The face of a carefree woman in love, who simply wanted too much, and who was so good at backgammon. She was very affectionate, wanted to know all about me, and told me she was working as a lawyer now; she was married and had two sons. I was a little taken aback by so much openness and warmth. She seemed to have nothing in common with the woman in the red snow suit from Bakuriani. Before she handed the receiver back to her father, she murmured softly into the mouthpiece, ‘I’m so sorry about Kostya. I was too afraid to come to his funeral; I just couldn’t. I wanted to keep him alive in my memory.’

‘I understand.’

‘Niza?’

‘Yes?’

‘Thank you.’

I didn’t say anything else.

Of course you could save a person. I just hadn’t managed to save my sister. With the people I loved, I hadn’t managed it. Or with myself. At least there’s her, I thought. At least I managed to save her.

Rusa’s father told me that Alania had been living in London for more than ten years. He had asked to be transferred there at the start of perestroika, and since then Rusa’s father had heard nothing more from him, which meant he had no contact details, either. I thanked him and hung up, thinking I would just drop this naive idea and go back to my books. But the next day Rusa called me: she had so wanted to do me a good turn that she’d pestered her father until he called someone in Moscow, who knew someone, who … and so on and so on, until she had finally tracked down an English postal address. I noted down the address and thanked her. A place near the very lyrically named Seven Sisters.

I flew to London and took the train down to Sussex. I had a taxi take me to the address I’d been given. It was a pretty, rather out-of-the-way cottage with a lovely rose garden, ringed with elder trees. Nobody answered the door. Until that point I hadn’t doubted that my plan would work. Unsure what to do next, I sat down on a small wooden bench, lit a cigarette, and let the distant sound of the sea envelop me. I considered taking a room for the night somewhere nearby and getting the train back to London the following morning. I was annoyed at my own naivety: how could I have hoped that this stranger would be here to welcome me, sitting in his rocking chair wrapped in a woollen blanket, smoking a pipe, ready to tell me stories about his past? What had I come here for in the first place? Did my visit really have anything to do with my research, or was I actually looking for answers for myself, which I pretended not to need? After I had smoked my third cigarette and cursed myself for now having to trudge back through this no man’s land in the windswept darkness, I heard footsteps.

On the narrow dirt path that led up to the cottage, I made out the silhouette of a man carrying a stick and a torch. I leaped up and approached him cautiously. I called out that I was part of a research project on the history of the Soviet Union and needed information. It was only when I had spoken the words that I realised I’d said them in Georgian.

He shone his torch in my direction. Stopped, but then carried on moving towards me. When he shone the torch in my face I had to narrow my eyes, but despite the bright light I knew that I had found him. An unexpected wave of euphoria rolled over me.

He walked with a stoop, and evidently with some difficulty, always leaning on his stick. He simply passed me by without a word, unlocked the door, and disappeared, slamming the door in my face. Shocked, I stayed where I was, then started to knock tentatively, explaining my request again in as friendly a tone as possible. But there was no response to my knocking. I was angry, and about to turn and leave, but then I stopped and shouted through the door: ‘I’m Kostya’s granddaughter. I’m here because of Kostya. Because of him and Kitty. And I’m here because of you. I’m here because of my great-grandmother and my grandmother, and I’m here because of my sister, and I …’

I could hear my heart hammering. I was afraid. I was afraid of rejection and of what he would have to say to me, in equal measure. It was only when he tentatively opened the door and switched on the light that I realised my whole body was trembling. As I stood before him, he raised his liver-spotted hands to my cheeks, took hold of my face, and stared at me, wide-eyed, for a long time.

‘You’re Kostya’s little girl?’ he asked in Georgian.

‘I think you’re mistaking me for my sister. I’m the younger one. My sister … she’s dead.’

He let go of my face and took a little step back.

‘The beautiful girl?’

‘Yes, the beautiful girl.’

‘Good God. How? What happened?’

He invited me in.

*

I stayed in the Seven Sisters house for four whole days. Since I had left Tbilisi, this frail old man was the first person with whom I could speak about my past. He convinced me to stay with him; when I learned that the house had once belonged to my great-aunt, I accepted his offer. And he willingly answered my questions. For every one of my stories, he gave me one of his. Stories about the many photos that adorned most of the walls in the house. The photos of a woman I didn’t know, who had been my great-aunt.

Every day, a red-haired carer came to help him with everyday tasks, and to lay out his medication for him.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ I asked him.

‘A better question would be what isn’t wrong with me,’ he replied.

We ate potato soup. He showed me the bay where Kitty Jashi had taken her own life. He stayed up on the cliff: his legs hurt. I climbed down the steep path to the beach alone, looking for the last traces of her, but found only the sea.

He told me things about people I’d assumed I had known, and after hearing these stories, I could no longer assume that I did. He opened himself to me like a book and let me read him. He made me a pudding with shaking hands and veiled eyes.

‘You said you came here because of your grandfather and because of Kitty. Because of your great-grandmother and grandmother. And to ask me questions. But you didn’t say: I’m here for my own sake. Why?’

His question surprised me. I didn’t know what to say, but he gave me a smile that was like an embrace. Perhaps finally the meaning of it all would be revealed here; perhaps I was close to making a connection. But my fear didn’t vanish; it grew with every story. All the ghosts gathered in my head as he went on weaving the carpet before my eyes. I watched him do it, never able to recognise my own thread amid all the confusing patterns.

I went down to the rough, stony beach. I sat down on the wet sand. I let the wind whip my face. I stretched out towards the sea. I let myself go.

Of course Stasia had been right: of course they were still there. And they stayed. I screamed. I didn’t want to keep listening out for them across time. I didn’t want to chase after them any more. I didn’t want card-playing ghosts in my garden, and yet here I was, sitting with Alania, filled to bursting with all these words, all these things that had happened, all these stories which, clearer in his words than they had been in Stasia’s, showered down upon me with incredible force, burying me under their weight.

For me, there had always been something magical about Stasia’s stories; they were fables and fairy-tales from another world. The things Alania told me were facts, real and brutal.

I had wanted to lead a life. My life. I had wanted a history I could use, a history that could have provided anecdotes in sentimental sepia for evenings with my Berlin friends, for instance, or at least for a few solution-orientated therapy sessions. Yes, that was the life I should have been leading. Wasn’t that why I had crossed the border from East to West, the border from Then to Now?

I dug myself into the wet sand. I hadn’t come to the sea for it to remind me of all the things that hadn’t happened in my life. No; I wanted to know what was still possible. And here, looking out at its grey expanse, I understood that too many stories were already gathered within me, blocking the view ahead, and the temptation just to keep looking back, like Orpheus, at what lay behind me was too great.

I climbed the steep path up the cliff. I asked him to go on talking. I asked him to answer only the questions that were important for my research project. Nothing else of a personal nature. Not a single familiar name, nothing about my own flesh and blood — please.

He looked at me quizzically, poured us some elderflower lemonade. He put a record on the old record player. He closed his eyes.

‘This voice — her voice. That remains. Always,’ he said. ‘Yes, ask me. Go ahead and ask me what you want to know. But go to London. Do it soon. Find Amy. She spent years trying to track down someone from your family. Only, back then, when she had the strength for it, the Iron Curtain was still in place and nobody got through. And I stayed out of it; after I moved, I didn’t want to take a single step backwards … Go and visit her.’

‘I don’t know how relevant that would be.’

‘You know, it’s really fascinating,’ he went on, as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘I knew that one day someone would come; that someone would come looking for all that.’

‘I really just want to write my thesis. That’s all.’

‘You shouldn’t separate your history from history in general; you shouldn’t try to amputate yourself from it. No matter what you do with it all, this isn’t the way to do it.’

‘It’s for a piece of academic research, not a romantic novel.’

‘Go to London. Or to Vienna. Fred Lieblich, talk to Fred Lieblich, I can give you her address. Who knows how much longer these traces of the past will still be visible.’

I didn’t reply.

*

I didn’t go to London, or to Vienna.

And I didn’t go back, either.

I didn’t write.

Not a single line.

I forbade myself from thinking about words that might have a meaning, a meaning that went beyond the banalities of everyday life. Words that described more than I was ready to remember. I forbade myself from using more words than were strictly necessary to deal with day-to-day life. I forbade myself from creating my own sentences, finding an independent form for my thoughts. Yes; in fact, I forbade myself from thinking anything at all.

I didn’t finish my thesis. I refused. I didn’t want to possess any abilities beyond those necessary for everyday tasks. For the monotonous research work, for other people’s lives, for the hours I spent in the workshop, and for playing cards. I went through the motions of doing research and assisted the project leader, who was constantly urging me to get on and do something with my material. In our work together I proved stubborn and uninsightful, but he didn’t drop me from the project.

The promised publication came out in 2002 and caused some controversy. Although I was a contributor, I stayed out of it, and brusquely declined when the Eastern Europe expert offered to take me along to his conferences. The project was over, and I hoped that this was one duty I had now escaped — but then I was recommended to the Otto Suhr Institute for Political Science, which offered me a guest lectureship. I accepted on the spur of the moment, because we had just been caught playing poker in the back room of a restaurant and were only able to avoid prosecution by paying a horrendous amount in compensation to the landlord.

I wanted to carry on sending money to Georgia, and there was my divorce from Severin to pay for, and Severin and Gerrit were going to live together, which meant I had to find an apartment of my own. I agreed to lecture on the Cold War. I learned others’ sentences off by heart, others’ theses and experiences, and reeled them off day after day in the lecture hall. Every day I expected complaints from the students to reach the dean’s office about my inability to teach them anything, or at least my lack of enthusiasm. But they didn’t complain; they accepted me, just as I accepted everything, as my life turned into a dull progression. A path that led nowhere.

I found a recently-renovated apartment in an old building in Motzstraße, and, after a boozy farewell party in our old place, I moved out and cleared the way for Severin’s long-desired happiness. Once in a while, I would go out with men who usually had a wife or a girlfriend and didn’t want that to change. I went on driving across Europe in the hope of eventually arriving somewhere. I didn’t read newspapers, didn’t watch television, only used the internet to write emails and stay in touch with the university. I lost interest in the world, both the eastern and the western parts of it.

I called Mother and Aleko, and heard Brilka growing up in the background. Brilka was too strong-willed, too taciturn to speak to me on the phone. She fobbed me off and quickly passed the receiver back to the adults.

I received postcards from England written in a barely legible hand. If I responded at all, my replies were very polite and distant; I didn’t react to his pleas and insistence, which I found intrusive.

I had found peace, the golden centre of my existence, more rust-red than golden, but that didn’t matter to me, and I kept looking straight ahead: as time went on, it no longer took as much effort.

Twice, Elene and Aleko came to visit me in Berlin, and I played the uncomplicated daughter. They didn’t bring Brilka; they said she was staying with Lasha’s parents. They told me she was growing up to be a keen dancer, and I thought of Stasia. Stasia — wherever she was — was watching contentedly, while at the same time keeping a strict eye on her steps.

*

Once, Severin, Gerrit, and I were sitting in a pub, our eyes fixed on the television positioned above the bar, when we saw Shevardnadze being carried away from his lectern by security personnel. A tall man rushed forward carrying a rose, followed by a jeering throng, and we witnessed the overthrow that was to herald a new revolution and a new era in Georgia. I recognised the parliament building, saw my old school and Rustaveli Boulevard. But these places seemed so distant, so far removed, that I had trouble connecting them with me. Meanwhile, Severin was almost frantic in his jubilation over the new, young revolutionary and probable future president. Like the whole of the West, he seemed to be rejoicing along with the Georgian people, who were hoping for a better life, an end to corruption, a more open attitude to the West, a putative democracy.

Severin looked at me curiously, wanting to see my joy as well, but I had already turned my eyes away and was just muttering to myself that this was the third Georgian Messiah since 1989 and neither of the previous ones had managed to carry out his mission. I, at least, had no interest in another saviour.

‘Get us another beer. In four years, at most, we’ll know which of us was right,’ was all I said.

Gerrit, too, was fired up by the images of the peaceful revolution and the symbolic rose, and called me a fatalist. ‘Here, nobody comes out and complains about anything. Nobody bothers to get off their backside. So everyone’s doing okay here, are they? At least there is still a sense of possibility in Georgia: be glad that people there aren’t indifferent to their country and their future! At least they’ve got that!’

There was a strange longing in his eyes as he went on staring at the television. And once again I marvelled at the western yearning for chaos.