23

When Salome arrived and started frantically ringing the doorbell, I had been sitting on the floor for nearly four hours and the bottle of vodka was almost empty.

I was sober. Despite the vast quantity of alcohol I had consumed, my mind was completely clear. So clear it almost hurt.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Salome sat down at the table and looked around.

‘Where’s Buba?’

‘He’s staying at his friend’s. What’s happened? You’ve been drinking.’

‘My mind has seldom been so clear.’

‘They’ll be back the day after tomorrow. Please calm down. I was really worried about you when you rang.’

‘Yes, yes: they’ll be back soon, everything’s okay, please don’t worry.’

Did Salome really think I was drunk and overreacting, or had she simply not wanted to hear what I could tell her? I no longer had the strength to decide, and lay down on the bed. She came and lay beside me, probably because she felt duty-bound to take my mind off things. I fell asleep within minutes.

*

‘I know you can’t answer right now, but I want to tell you that I’m sorry I told you to tell your father, back then. Please, forgive me. There’s something else I want to tell you, too. I want to tell you that it wasn’t that one afternoon that first bound us together. Because it was only possible for that afternoon to happen as it did because I stayed with you, and you with me. Of our own accord. Because it was what I wanted, and it was what you wanted. Which means it wasn’t that bloody afternoon, Ivo, that shaped everything. No: that afternoon made me realise that I want to be with you, to stay with you. I would give you the choice: if only I could turn back time, I would have run off, I would have jumped down from the tree and left with my father. And in doing so I would have spared you everything that followed. If I could do it, I would. I chose you, without knowing that this choice would destroy everything. But you did the same. And yes, Ivo, we were children, we feared for our dreams, we feared being torn apart, we feared for each other. But — yes, but. That’s all I have to say.’

*

I left a voicemail message and hung up. Salome was sleeping on Ivo’s side of the bed. The clock hands read eight. I went to the bathroom and washed. I looked pitiful: the dark circles around my eyes had become black holes. I brushed my hair and made myself a coffee. Despite my monumental drunkenness of the previous night, I was clear-headed and full of energy again after the short sleep.

I spent the day at the market with Salome and Buba. We did some shopping, then later we cooked at Lado’s house and played cards. Buba had some friends over, and Salome and I waited on the boys like a pair of chaste old maiden aunts, laughing at ourselves.

Lado had called, and had said only that they would be setting off for home that night. Salome seemed relaxed, and I also managed to hide my unease. I fell asleep on the living-room sofa, befuddled by good food, house wine, and the sound of the television in Buba’s room.

*

They were due back late in the evening. By then I had tidied up, done the laundry, distracted myself with inconsequential activities, sat on the veranda, and eaten vanilla ice cream straight from the tub. The heat no longer felt as oppressive, and something inside me seemed infinitely light, infinitely free and calm. As if something had been overcome. I looked down at the city and really felt I could imagine making a completely fresh start. A fresh start for Theo, for myself, and perhaps for Ivo, too. I could imagine turning my back on Europe for a few years and moving here. Visiting Mama, and starting to write again — real writing, unvarnished, unorthodox. I could imagine being free, a free agent, a freelancer. I could totally imagine living in this apartment and growing flowers on this balcony. Theo and Buba would become friends, I would learn the strange language and its songs, I would find myself again. Here, liberated from all constraints, free of my responsibilities, ready to move on.

*

This is what I was thinking when my phone rang and Salome told me they were dead.

*

Alexei had known, back then, that his Georgian lover was married to the enemy, to an enemy leader, in fact, and had given birth to his, Alexei’s, child. She had confirmed this on the day that she was going to leave, to go back to her husband, and had implored Alexei to let her go. That night, Nana had begged him, and he too had begged her: not to go away, to show him his child at least once, to consider starting a completely new life with him. She pictured the poetry evenings and ceremonial halls, saw herself wearing her Desdemona costume again, thought of the Russian’s gentle, benign, young love, and for a brief moment she thought this could be her future. Only for a moment: just long enough to go to his apartment and stay with him till dawn, to comfort his broken heart with a little closeness.

But he wanted to keep her with him, and promised her family would have unimpeachable protection if she stayed. He promised he would drive her to Batumi himself, in his car, in a few days’ time. He promised absolute protection for her children, for her friend; he even guaranteed it for her husband. They would all reach Tbilisi unscathed. And he kept his promise. He even managed to make sure that Lado survived. Lado, who lost his entire brigade and survived, not knowing he owed his life to his wife’s lover, the biological father of his only son.

Ivo had found all this out. He had been corresponding with Alexei Nevsky for weeks.

Back then, the Russian had promised Nana he would let her and their son go if she stayed with him just a few more hours. Nana stayed. She stayed, and by staying she secured her family’s survival. She stayed, under bombardment, knowing that total occupation was imminent.

Then Salome left Sokhumi. A few days later, Nana and Lado’s house was set on fire. It was the day Nana had gone back. Alone, unaccompanied by the Russian, without his protection, because he hadn’t thought of her, he had forgotten that she was the one who needed it most. He never found out exactly what happened to her. For three days he searched for her, and at the end of those three days he could barely identify her burnt body. It was only weeks later that forensics established for certain that it was Nana.

She had simply left his house and gone back to hers. And that was where her body was found, three days later.

It was war.

It was a wrong time.

The Russian had kept his promise. He had given up his biological son. He had left the husband his son, in exchange for his dead wife.

Ivo wanted to bring peace: this was what he had promised to himself, the Georgian, and the Russian. Ivo wanted to make amends.

He wanted to ask strangers for forgiveness. For me and for himself. He was asking his dead mother for forgiveness by giving another dead woman the truth. He wanted to bring Lado to the man he so hated, whom he blamed for the death of his wife, but to whom he owed the son who had given Lado a second lease of life. This was what Ivo had wanted, just as he would have wanted my father to stop his father, to tell him the truth, to perhaps prevent the unthinkable. He wanted to give Salome the freedom to leave, to return to her family, because she wouldn’t need to stand in for Lado’s memories anymore. And he wanted to give me the freedom to decide: to go or to stay, of my own free will, unconstrained by the memory of a single afternoon.

He had wanted to give Buba the possibility of a future without guilt, the kind he would have wanted for himself, more than anything in the world.

He had persuaded unfamiliar people in an unfamiliar country to break their silence. He had asked them questions, he had searched and found, he had wanted to connect their past and present, because he wasn’t able to do it for himself and his family.

And perhaps he wanted to tell the story of a little girl who ran for her life in a time of war, because she believed she had summoned death. To tell the story of another girl who ran to try to prevent something she couldn’t prevent anymore.

Perhaps he had tried to force me to realise this: that when Emma drove back that night to the house by the port, my mother could have called her husband to account. That my father, after fleeing his lover’s husband, could have driven home and waited for Emma and me. That he could have gone to Ivo’s father and told him he desired his wife; that he should have taken me with him that afternoon, against my will, even if it meant forcing me, even if it meant dragging me down from the tree and carrying me off in his arms. Through the basement. Into the street. Outside.

Perhaps the reason Ivo wanted to uncover this other story, to tell it, was simply to make me see that those factors were just as responsible for our guilt, our failure, as the war in Salome and Lado’s story, in Maya and Buba’s, in Nana and Alexei’s. That we both made the mistake of assigning the guilt to ourselves alone; that this was a mistake, and that all our attempts to punish ourselves, to make the adults accuse us, had come to grief because they were always met with silence. That our anguish may have had its origins in, and been triggered by, that afternoon, but not our closeness, not our longing for each other, not us. That we couldn’t be made to bear the guilt of having chosen each other.

Perhaps.

*

The Russian had grown old with the years. He was still an administrator, in a crisis zone; he too had no real home. This was what Ivo had written in the folder labelled Nevsky, where I found the remaining pieces of the puzzle. He had married a Georgian woman, who lived alongside him, silent, hurt, in the shadow of a dead woman.

We, too, had lived in the shadow of a dead woman.

The Russian told Ivo his story. Ivo had corresponded with him for months; he had saved everything in the folder, and the Russian had written a lot, everything Ivo needed to know, as if he had been waiting for a stranger to come one day and deliver him from his silence.

And Ivo heard another story, the story behind the story — his story.

I assume that, at their meeting, Alexei Nevsky told Lado the truth: about Nana, his wife, and the day she didn’t get into the car. All that Ivo had learned from him the Russian also told Lado. Then, sometime later, they got into their cars. I know that Alexei Nevsky got into his car as well. I know that they were not far from the beach promenade, the endless quay that was the first thing to be rebuilt and repainted after the war, the many bullet holes superficially plastered over.

I know that Lado took the wheel, and I believe Ivo only let him do so because he believed the truth Lado had just heard would bring him, if not happiness, then peace. Why had Ivo forgotten, why had he forgotten that the truth doesn’t always heal — that it can also kill?

I know that Lado calmly switched on the engine, calmly turned the steering wheel, slowly drove off, let the Russian go ahead, and then, after positioning himself in the left-hand lane, abruptly spun the wheel and cut in behind Alexei Nevsky’s green Lada Niva. I know that he kept his foot on the accelerator and sped straight at the green car, that the Russian lost control of his vehicle, skidded, and that the car slammed into the stone wall of the promenade before smashing through and hitting the sand six metres below. Ivo’s Land Rover didn’t go through the barrier, but rolled several times before coming to a halt in the middle of the road. I know that a white Mercedes crashed into the right-hand side of the Land Rover without braking, and that this cost Ivo his life.

Alexei Nevsky lived for another three hours before dying of his internal injuries. Lado lived only a few more minutes. Ivo died instantly; his heart stopped beating on the spot.

The driver of the Mercedes was a Frenchman. He survived the accident. He was in the country as an international observer for the UN.

*

I had to identify them both in the morgue in Sokhumi. Salome couldn’t get a permit to travel to the city where she was born. The bodies were transferred by plane to Tbilisi.

Lado was embalmed so people could mourn him and say their farewells in a three-day ceremony, according to Orthodox tradition. I had Ivo cremated. It was only after I had collected his ashes from the crematorium that I called Germany. For some strange reason, the first person I called was my father. For a long time he said nothing; I couldn’t even hear him breathing until he finally let out a sound like the cry of an animal. I heard him weeping, and tried to remember if I had ever heard him weep like that. He wept so uninhibitedly, so loudly, so entirely without restraint, that for a fraction of a second I forgot that this was my father, the man who had first deprived this boy of his mother, then made him live another life, a life with him and me. I said nothing. I did not try to comfort him. Before I hung up, I said that I would be coming to Hamburg in four days’ time with Ivo’s ashes in my suitcase, and that he needed to organise everything by then and tell everyone, including Mama in Newark.

As I said it, I meant those words as punishment for all that he had done. But when I hung up, I knew that Ivo had not wanted any more apportioning of guilt, and I knew that when I saw Papa I would tell him the truth, even though the truth could kill.

*

Hundreds of people gathered for Lado’s funeral in the house with the tree stump in the garden. His coffin was laid out in the middle of the room where I had eaten, drunk, and laughed so often. Black-clad women — professional mourners — sat in front of it on chairs. Salome, in the middle, rocked back and forth, her face rigid, chewing her bleeding lips. Men stood in the entrance; Buba, in black, leaned against the wall and stared at the open coffin where his father lay. Father. As if nothing had happened: peaceful, restored, so others could mourn him. So the horror of the moment when his car rolled over was no longer apparent. So people didn’t have to see what he saw in his final seconds.

I observed how the people in the room formed a circle around the coffin, sobbing, whispering, groaning, hugging relatives. I noticed the photo that someone had put up beside the coffin. A picture of Ivo. A picture I had never seen before.

Ivo in Tbilisi. In one of the winter months before he came to Hamburg to fetch me, to make me remember. It made me smile. I smiled because he was so beautiful, because in the photo he looked so happy, promising so many things, uncovering so many secrets, making so many people happy. And I was one of them. I looked at him.

*

In that time I didn’t shed a single tear. I was mute. I was present. I tried to support Salome, who didn’t sleep a wink and kept vigil by Lado’s coffin like a faithful guard. I tried to hug Buba, to keep his rebellion, his anger, his despair in check when he started yelling or banging his head against the wall. I tried to be there.

I don’t know where it came from, my inert staying power. My superhuman fortitude. My competence and vigilance. I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat, I didn’t drink, and yet I didn’t keel over.

I made it through. I faced the days as they came, with such emotionless clarity that I sometimes wondered if I was actually still alive, or what miraculous strength one develops in such close proximity to death.

I arranged the buffet for the funeral reception, I organised Lado’s gravestone, I took Ivo’s smashed laptop to a repair shop and got them to save the data that could still be saved. I booked my flight. I phoned Papa and gave him instructions for the scattering of Ivo’s ashes. I dealt with Ivo’s belongings.

Four days after Lado’s funeral, I flew back.