Michael no longer knew who he was. He’d managed to surprise himself. He used to think he was different, yet now here he was in a world where he no longer recognized himself. So he drank heavily, but didn’t hold his liquor well. During his hangovers he explained that he lacked a certain enzyme, probably having to do with his Taiwanese genes. Nevertheless he drank, and often wept. Their relationship was beautiful in a certain melodramatic way, however, because, when he wasn’t thinking about everything, he was lovingly tender and would stare into her eyes as if into the abyss into which the world was disappearing. She hadn’t known that making love could be so beautiful. It was as if they were in this totally alone, outside of the world, on the edge of the vast space between the past and the future, just the two of them, holding each other tight. And she gave in to it as if every moment they spent together would be their last.
She comforted him and never demanded that he get a divorce; she didn’t ask for anything—that was how sorry she felt for him—even though Alma told her she shouldn’t trust him, she’d heard lies like this only too often.
Then one day he told her he’d called his wife and admitted he was in love with another woman.
He said it softly. He also said she’d been shocked and yelled at him through her tears, and then—after he’d wanted to say more but couldn’t think what—she hung up.
It was strange to hear all this, because deep down it made Šeila happy, but she knew the situation involved another person’s grief. Michael was shaken, trembling like a person who’d just run over someone on the road. She saw he was suffering because of the woman he’d betrayed, and this was why—even though there was something in this which might bother her—she loved him even more deeply. Ten days later, one evening while they were lying naked, watching Frances, starring Jessica Lange (a movie she would finish watching only much later in life), the phone rang next to the bed. Michael answered and then cupped the receiver with his hand and asked Šeila, with a look of unease, if she could leave the room.
Michael’s apartment was spacious. She was there all the time and had almost forgotten what it was like to live in a dorm. Now she was sitting in the other room, in a bathrobe—what’s more, she’d forgotten to grab her cigarettes—and this was the first time she’d felt that this other woman really did exist. Suddenly, she felt as if she were nobody. A stupid little kid who’d been sent to her room while the two of them talked, sitting there, smelling of sex with another woman’s husband. I deserve this, she thought. This woman does exist. What was I thinking—that she was only a name?
She looked out the window at the city. It was wounded, real, poor. They were still receiving donations from abroad, which were helping them survive.
Almost an hour later Michael opened the bedroom door, holding her cigarettes. She was lying on the couch, staring at the window.
“Sorry,” he said, sounding drained as he brought two bottles of beer from the kitchen.
She lit a cigarette. The flame shook.
“What did your wife say?”
“She wants me to go back to the States to work things out.”
“And?”
“I’m going. To work it out.”
“What’s your wife like?”
“She’s . . . okay. I haven’t a bad thing to say about her.”
“Is she pretty?”
“Well . . . I was in love with her.”
“Does she still love you?”
“Unfortunately, she probably does.”
“Tell me more about her.”
She’d been careful not to say “about the two of you.”
He sighed with a look as if apologizing to someone far away, and started talking about his wife, about her journey from a bad neighborhood in a lousy city, about the struggle of an African American girl to attend college, and then (smiling sadly) about how they’d met, how great things were at the beginning, how he’d sneak into the women-only dorm on campus and stay the night, how with her he started feeling as if he had someone he could rely on, how they started living together, how for years they helped each other become more successful, and how, somehow, without him even noticing, it all started to fade—which he could see now—even though they didn’t admit this to themselves and believed everything was fine. They truly loved each other, maybe just at a lower intensity. But when he was given an offer to work abroad, he felt he wanted it. He married her to convince her he was not running away, because he honestly didn’t believe that things . . . could end like this. He finished his beer and looked at her, his eyes brimming with tears.
“So, what are you going to do now?”
“I’ll have to divorce her.”
“Are you going to change your mind when you get there?”
He sucked on his empty bottle before saying, “No, I won’t.”
“I . . . I should go . . . Could you please call me a cab?”
As she said the words he saw her lost look, so he hugged her and whispered, “Don’t, please. Stay here while I’m gone. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“You told her the same thing, Michael.”
“Yes,” he said, and sighed. “There’s really no need to bring that up.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll be back.”
They made love again. Tenderness mingled with sadness and then the body, filled with wild desire, turned that all to dust.
Michael left. He was supposed to come back after two weeks, but he called to say he’d stay another week.
She stayed at his place the whole time he was gone. She couldn’t go back to her dorm room, which she shared with a first-year student from a small town; she felt centuries older than the girl, the two were worlds apart. If she were to lie there on the bed, just steps from the quiet girl’s bed, she believed she’d slip away into a crack somewhere in between, a world that didn’t exist.
She could barely make herself eat. She couldn’t think straight. There were times when she was certain Michael was coming back because he sounded so convincing over the phone. The next instant she was sure he’d never come back because he hadn’t sounded so convincing over the phone. Staying at his apartment felt like floating on an iceberg that was nearing the Titanic through the mists. But the people on board, would they be saved?
If they were saved—she might go mad.
Michael did come back. When she saw him at the airport she screamed with joy. Now she was able to bounce back from a fear she’d felt for the first time: the fear of losing everything. He’d done what he promised and they were free. Now they had all the time in the world. Their story was no longer shimmering on the verge of the real. The fear took its toll on me, she thought later. At one point, she became aware of something: a blurry and ominous presence in the distance—a distance that quickly shrank.
Five months later, Michael told her he’d be transferred to Georgia and, seeing her shudder, asked her immediately if she wanted to go with him. Despite her parents’ wishes, she moved with him to Tbilisi. It was a big city in a state of ruin, yet beautiful. And the Georgians were pleasant, unaware of a racism that was complicated by their love for Americans, which they felt as strongly as their lack of love for Russians. With Michael she perfected her English, and with time, she noticed that people treated her as if she were an American, a white woman. Indeed, she walked around like an American there, liberal enough to be dating an African American, and only at fancy dinner parties was she asked where she was from exactly. When she said she was from N., in the country they saw on the news, all of a sudden there would be an unexpected sorrowful silence, because all the things that had happened there, when considered together, or even separately, were inexplicable.
Sometimes, the wives of other foreigners would ask her, “But why?”
They were referring to the war and all the horrible things.
They believed there ought to be a handy answ
er, an answer Šeila should provide them to satisfy their wish for the world to be explained and accountable.
She tried, but the nice ladies were never satisfied.
“Yes, but why?”
It was then that she realized she’d stepped out of her language and that everything about where she’d come from and her life were inscrutable in the English language, which she had perfected.
She began to realize that so far she’d lived in a world that was drawn into itself and her life was maybe a little odder than normal, as she’d been used to thinking of it. She also noticed that when they talked about life under communism, the Georgians talked about something different from what she remembered and what her parents had told her. “Yes, it was much harder for you,” she often had to say. She began to realize she’d been born in an unusual, enigmatic place, because not only was she unable to explain—to the Georgians or the Westerners—what had happened during the war, but also how things had been earlier.
She had no one in Tbilisi but Michael, and she didn’t know what to do except with him. She was forever waiting for him, and she started fearing she was being a bore. She told herself they had all the time in the world. So maybe that was why he was no longer running toward her. Maybe he started frowning when she told him she was eager for him to come home because that sounded as if she were complaining about being lonely, and he came home tired and sometimes couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. She understood him. She knew very well that she had almost nothing interesting to say, seeing as nothing special was happening to her, so she spent her time thinking about how to reignite the spark. She struggled through preparing dinners with candles and wine, and asked him gently how his day had gone. It was only then that she started to be more interested in what he did, realizing they mustn’t lose contact. She didn’t really understand, though, the promotion of the free market or what his agency was up to, but she hoped to learn something or maybe even—she thought optimistically—become involved somehow. It would be great to do something, to contribute. Talking to him she learned that his work was about the promotion of privatization; Michael supervised marketing campaigns, organized expert symposiums, brought in lecturers who explained the procedures to local people, and provided advice to government agencies. At the time, for example, he advised them on amendments to the privatization law, which (he explained to her) meant introducing auctions without minimum bids, a concept which she barely knew how to translate into her own language.
“So there’s such a thing as an auction with no minimum for the starting bid?”
“Yes, this makes things significantly easier.”
He told her that the government finally decided to privatize the energy sector, and this was the main thing he was monitoring.
“Michael, does this mean, for example, that the water utility should be privatized?” she asked during one of their dinners. She had made them a few French dishes and was surprised by how delicious they’d turned out.
“It’s not part of the plans yet . . . But why not?”
She found this odd, probably because her mother worked for the water utility and she wasn’t able to picture the building where her mother worked as a private company. Her mother hoped Šeila could get a job there and replace the old microbiologist who was in charge of monitoring water quality—as far as she knew her mother kept track of such things—and no one else from their town, except Alma, had studied microbiology. Šeila’s mother was counting on Alma not to earn her degree, and Šeila was embarrassed that her mother was thrilled to hear how Alma flunked out of first year. Now in Tbilisi, she remembered all this and thought how funny it was, so she retold the story to Michael. He, too, found it funny, and she was pleased to find she could make him laugh.
She sighed when these things came back to her. They seemed so far away.
“But, say, for example,” she asked Michael, “I get a job as a microbiologist at the water utility and I’m supposed to monitor water quality. It would be a little different if the utility were privatized. I might be scared to say the water’s bad if it ruins my boss’s chance for profit. I mean, I’m not stupid. I know what he wants from me.”
By asking this question, she actually wanted to show Michael how smart she was and how easily she could analyze a problem. She wanted them to talk to each other like adults, sipping fine Georgian wine, enjoying their romantic candlelit dinner and the view of the city lights.
“Sure, but there is a system of controls.”
“I know. And I would be that system.”
She wanted to compete with him because sometimes she thought of herself as stupid when she was just saying “uh-huh.”
“You’d be protected. There are rules.”
“You mean there would be rules.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. Say the boss at the water utility decided I was the type to dig in my heels and might cause trouble. Maybe he wouldn’t even hire me. Maybe he’d hire someone else, a person he knew was more flexible.”
She felt she’d cornered him, and she relished this like she’d relish a passionate courtship. She could feel herself becoming aroused and wanted to make love.
“I don’t think you should worry so much about whether they’ll hire you as a microbiologist. As far as I know, unfortunately you dropped out of school.”
Not only did his words sting, but suddenly the whole evening took an entirely different tack. The flickering candles reflected on their faces. Darkness all around. She knew this was a mistake. The whole conversation was a mistake. Yet, still . . . Unfortunately.
“Unfortunately?” she repeated. “I did come here with you.”
He touched her hand, which was on the table. “Sorry. Slip of the tongue.”
“It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have started—”
“No, everything’s fine. It’s just, you . . . you’re holding on to the vestiges of a socialist mind-set. Like these people here,” he told her, looking at her as if he understood and held no grudges.
“You think so? I don’t know . . .”
She’d tried so hard, yet everything came out wrong. She puzzled over what kind of socialist mind-set she’d been holding on to. I spend my time only with foreigners, she thought. Socialism collapsed when I was a teenager. Did he want to say I was still acting like a teenager? That I pointlessly protest and rebel? These thoughts crossed her mind, but there was no use, no conclusion, so this reminded her of Alma. What’s going on with her, anyway? Šeila wondered.
And what about me?
He saw her mood shift to gloom, and he felt sorry for her. But he was also very tired. He had worked the whole day, unlike her. “Okay. Sorry. Just please don’t get depressed,” he said.
They went to bed, and he quickly fell asleep. She, however, didn’t fall asleep till dawn.
She tried to forget that night, the moment at the table when the darkness around them seemed to gain a dimension of depth. She remembered this only much later, when she read somewhere that the Italians were opposing the privatization of the water utility and how—the same article said—there had been opposition in England to the privatization of the energy sector. She asked herself: Why would he tell me I was holding on to vestiges of a socialist mind-set? Do the people there cling to socialist mind-sets as well? But they never mentioned the conversation again.
She tried to forget his use of the word unfortunately. She must have really annoyed him, and what they talked about must have mattered a lot to him. She wanted to forget about it, and she did.
She tried hard with those dinners and all sorts of other things, struggling to keep everything together, because the way they were in love with each other in the beginning was worth something. That was why she was still in love with him, in a different way, though, as if she were constantly recalling those moments, the Michael from before, the sad and melodramatic Michael, drinking and weeping (he no long
er drank or wept), the beautiful misery of his when she consoled him, not thinking of herself or what was going to happen to her when he left the city where she was a black man’s mistress. She didn’t worry about it in the least, and she loved this version of herself much more than who she was in Tbilisi, where he no longer looked deeply into her eyes as if this were their last moment together, where everything could be on hold, where he worked while she sat in their beautiful apartment with nothing to think about, where he was an older, grown-up man and she an immature and spoiled pretty young woman, turning into a Stepford wife and whining about being lonely, as if that were the world’s biggest problem.
She felt as if all their differences had become more glaring than they used to be. In her country, they’d been nearly invisible—he being the foreigner and she always knowing where she was, and always having something to explain to him. But now he seemed irritated with her, so she was becoming irritated, too. “We used to function as lovers, but this, this is not working for us,” he told her at one point, staring at the ceiling. She knew he was right, but she no longer knew how to picture her life without him in it or where to go back to. If only he’d married her, if only she’d gotten their papers so she could travel without a visa, she thought, knowing how horrible this would sound if she actually said it.
Tbilisi turned into torture, because he knew—and she could see it—how much she would lose if they separated and he felt sorry for her. If he hadn’t, maybe they would have already parted ways, she thought. But she could see he was angry both at himself and at her. Even though he said nothing, he was bitter because he’d divorced naively and abruptly due to their relationship. Although she wasn’t quite sure why, she felt she’d ruined everything. She felt like a burden, like a poor woman clinging to a spent love she kept hoping to revive. The ordeal even made her ugly. She gained weight, and the walks she took around Tbilisi did not help. She felt she was supposed to walk, so she went shopping and visited stores in order to look like a woman with a purpose. Luckily, there were few things she liked in the stores so he never had to complain about her spending too much. But, boy, did Georgians know how to make baklava. With a guilty conscience she would visit the pastry shops with the plain windows on Rustaveli Avenue. She couldn’t stop herself. Those were the most exquisite moments of her days. One day he asked her, “Have you ever been to Istanbul? It is quite close.”
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