There is more than a hint of sadism in the curiosity that stalks the chatter; there are those present who in the excitement of the evening have surrendered themselves to an inconceivable temptation, who have edged beyond the landmass of political prudence in order to prod the fantasy – incredible as it seems – of seeing the leader squirm. They ask about the implications of the bad harvest, the second in a row, and surely a challenge for the entire bloc? There is talk of the cutbacks in oil exports and the resulting disaffection in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia … A toast to Comrade Chernenko … They discuss the hijacking in Bulgaria, the French election, the Afghan war. Willi Brandt and Ronni Reagan. They move on to the troubling issue of Romanian debt.
Everything is observed with a combination of disdain and reluctant excitement by a woman with onyx hair who smokes her cigarettes through a holder. She is the wife of a prominent young party member who is currently exchanging glances with her every time Comrade Brezhnev opens his mouth. She claims descent from one of Georgia’s ancient royal families and has been known to sign ‘Princess’ before her name; she admires spirit and excess, and harbours only contempt for the cheap suits, the sycophantism and the cult of impersonality around her. But this is not like other party gatherings: tonight she senses something unfamiliar which arouses her interest. There is Brezhnev, of course: pathetic absence of a man whose astonishing position in the world is somehow (she has drunk not a little) beautiful and tragic – how can one not be moved by the discrepancy between this wilted figure and his epic office? There is his grey-eyed apprentice, whose razor youth eclipses every other man in the room with body and poise. But there is something else as well. She drinks more, the better to sense it. There is the romance of chaos. The delight of seeing petty men panic over the crisis of their system. The tremulous voices that understate cataclysmic things in the name of decorum. But there is still something more, something she has never realised before tonight, something new in the eyes of the party men who now hang on Brezhnev’s words with a heady mixture of public fear and private ambition. For the first time, she has seen bloodlust in these bloodless men. It is a revelation. Her spirit rises and she is glad; and there are bloodwings beating in her own organs. While they talk with concerned faces about the spread of the Polish counter-revolutionary contagion, while they drink with unusual gusto out of respect for their Russian guests, she smokes greedily and allows her mind to conjure scenes of stubbled heads banging on the glass wall of the future, giant fronds waving against the sky, and underground seas of lava heaving with grandiose slowness on a fantastic vortex.
Brezhnev announces his departure. It is still early, but the old man needs his rest. The woman is only vaguely aware of the Russians’ exit, and yet it is now that the night spills forth. They drink toasts to their guests in absentia, and review the highlights of the evening’s conversation. There are sweaty moustaches still constrained by neckties, and there are the beautiful necks of women. One man sings and another seeks to recruit the gathering to his chant of Dinamo Tbilisi and then there is a joke not for the ladies: the men gather, crouch headed and wheezy, with the voices low and the sniggers premature, and the story proceeds in starts till he gets to the punch; he stands up broad-faced, shouting, If I were a gentleman I would marry her!, laughing laughing crying with cheeks upon the table and even her husband is doubled up, his vodka glass the only vertical thing about him. She watches him as time sweeps them into oblong orbits and the senior party members begin to depart. She can drink no more and wants to escape these insignificant men; she demands her coat and wrestles her husband from his stupidity, Let’s go! Let’s go!, and though he is reluctant he hurries after her, grabbing some last ham from the table, down the corridor to the elevator whose attendant smiles, closing the grille, and in the mirror they are green night creatures with shining pitted faces and her folded arms find her own skin above her skirt. They land weightlessly and the grille crashes open again and the evening breeze is in the lobby the smell of the river and the city and they flow liquid into the limousine. The night is shut out with the car door and there is only her jealous tussle. She does not even like to make love to this man who is so unromantic in his soul but now, now! she pulls it from him and he is drunk, lost to it, holding the back of the seat fucking on cobbled streets and they are turning corners driver grabbing mirror glances she deep in herself, his tie swinging pestilence in her eyes headlights in his face laughing red in the night city thrusting into the corner and things turn breathing matter circumference diving axis she sees houses shapes depth out of the window they are reaching home now, now! the car stops and stills with engine silent and night seeping into the car and the driver sits endless immobile looking straight ahead as if the loud fucking is not behind his very head and she shouts out,
‘Keep driving, you imbecile!’
Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a baby girl, and named her Khatuna.
4
AS A YOUNG GIRL, Khatuna loved secret things. She had a secret name for herself that no one else knew. Her mother called her my treasure, and she smiled at the notion of a hidden wealth whose value is only to itself. For special occasions she donned outfits that had once belonged to great characters from literature, but she did not reveal their provenance. She liked the secret her mother had told her, that deep down she was a princess.
There was in the house an old box with a lock, which she took for herself. Accessible only with her key, her personal relics could breathe there safely and in silence. The box was of her, yet outside her, and so it offered the prospect of solemn reunions.
When she turned the lock and lifted the lid, the spirits of this box flowed into her. She fingered the objects entombed there: two glass marbles given to her by an important man; an ivory crucifix she had stolen from her mother’s bedroom; a picture of a beautiful woman, cut from a magazine; a lock of her own hair, tied up with silk; an instruction booklet for a radio which looked impressively official, like a passport; and a dead beetle of stunning iridescent green, mounted on a glass slide, which she had once asked her father to buy for her in an antique shop.
When she was four years old she gained a baby brother named Irakli. She loved him immediately, and, far from jeopardising her realm of secrets, his arrival promised to double its size and appeal. As he grew old enough to understand, she drew him in under the mantle of her world, revealing to him her secret name and showing off her box of relics. He responded fervently, full of admiration for everything she had worked out during her short head start on earth. He fancied she was another half of himself, carelessly separated before birth, and he plotted how they would be joined again.
She had a blue cloak she sometimes used to put on. It made her walk very upright, with her lips pursed to look like a princess. She also had a blue teddy bear that she endlessly stroked and cuddled. And there was another thing: the pen around which she clenched her early, gawky writing hand was blue.
Observing all this, the young Irakli one day took a paintbrush and painted blue over his penis, in the hope it would become another of her playthings. He emerged into her bedroom naked, glistening blue paint daubed even on his stomach and thighs, his blue infant penis wagging with expectation.
Khatuna burst out laughing at the sight; she summoned her mother and the two of them cried with mirth at what he had done, sitting and pointing and saying it again and again. He was ashamed, and hoped they had not uncovered his motives. He relegated it to his own realm of secrets, which in his case was not shared with anyone.
Things were changing in the country, and even their solid family home could not keep it out for ever. There were phone calls late at night, and guns in the house, and groups of men who arrived at strange hours to talk business. On certain days there was nothing to eat. Khatuna’s school was destroyed in the civil war, and the city became overrun with beggars and refugees. Until then, she had only read about poor people in books.
Her father took her to a factory. They drove out of Tbilis
i with several other carloads of men and guns. Her father was the one in charge of these other men: they all looked to him. Guards waved their convoy through the gates, and the five cars drew to a halt, loud and exhibitionist. The factory was motionless and silent – and disappointingly small, Khatuna thought, for a factory. Her father stood in the middle of the semicircle and made a speech. He had bought himself a Red Army uniform to wear for the occasion. Some men leant on machine guns for the style of it. The speech was about milk. The applause was thin in this desolate air. They opened champagne and passed around plastic cups for a toast. They went on a tour, Khatuna’s father in his suit and overcoat pointing out condensers and explaining freeze-drying.
They drove back to Tbilisi. Khatuna said to her father,
‘I thought you worked in politics.’
He said,
‘Now I make milk. Powdered milk for people to buy. And that’s only the beginning.’
Khatuna was impressed. She knew how undependable the world had become, and she admired her father for knowing what to do.
He began to think only about foodstuffs. He read the ingredients on packets and talked about how different things were made, and where, and by whom. He was going to buy more factories: a vegetable canning facility and a plant for bottling water.
There were armed guards at the house, and everywhere they went. The stories Khatuna heard took on a wild edge. Communism had collapsed, and people were selling off the government’s chemical weapons on the street. There was a wave of suicides and murders. The electricity started to go off for days at a time, and there was no water.
Her father unveiled his new company, which was named after himself. It was a diversified foods conglomerate. He carried business cards with his own logo. He invited astonishing men to the house, who seemed no better than thugs, and whose speech he was forced to censor, Not in front of my family. He looked at maps and reports like an anxious general.
But he did not live to see the fulfilment of his plans. Unwittingly, he carried a congenital tissue disease, and he died one afternoon while climbing up to the roof of a building he hoped to acquire; his wasting heart burst from the exertions. His death certificate explained: Aortic rupture arising from Marfan’s Syndrome.
Khatuna’s box of secrets began to look bankrupt. Though she had always kept it locked, the essential had slipped out, and she no longer understood why she saved these things. Why this doubling up? – she had hair on her head, and had no need to hoard it in a box. The beautiful woman from the magazine now looked like a prostitute. The marbles reminded her of dead fish eyes.
She threw everything out – except the crucifix, which belonged to her mother.
She began to keep a diary. Whenever she felt something out of the ordinary, she wrote it down: an account of her eyes in the mirror, a description of a mad old woman shitting proudly in the street, a poem about an uncle she found particularly handsome.
Her periods came, one morning. Her mother inspected the situation and marched out of her room proclaiming balefully, Welcome to the world of women! Khatuna lay in bed, sticky between her legs, helplessly indignant that her mother might understand her in ways she did not yet herself.
In his own room, Irakli was also lying in bed. He was awakened by his mother’s epochal chant, and, though he did not know what it meant, he felt an icy pain in his throat, and the foreboding that his sister would never again belong to him as she had before.
Khatuna’s mother tried to keep control of the freeze-drying plant and all her husband’s other ventures, but she was outmanoeuvred by his rivals, who sent a band of nineteen-year-olds with AK-47s to surround the plant.
Her savings vanished rapidly in the inflation. She began to sell things. She had a house full of heirlooms, and though the prices she obtained were derisory, this store of wealth saw her a reasonable way. An antique dealer with international connections had set up in town especially to provide for people like her. She came every week with a ruby necklace, or an ancient icon, and he paid her in the new currency.
Then one night, five men broke into the house and stole everything she had left. They did not even bother to cover their faces, so she knew who they were. They had come from that same antique shop, whose owner had no doubt grown impatient with buying up her treasure one item at a time.
They herded the family into the corner of the room; they began to remove paintings and ornaments and stack them in a van outside. Khatuna’s mother was delirious with rage and impotence: she shrieked at them, and spat and flailed.
‘Where’s the jewellery?’ the guard said to Khatuna, ignoring her mother.
‘Find it yourself.’
He looked at her, sitting there on the sofa.
‘You’re not so young, you know. I can do you right now in front of your mother and brother. So just tell me what I need to know.’
‘You don’t frighten me.’
He punched her in the face, and her mother screamed.
‘Shall I show your little brother how he came into the world? Then I’ll send him out of it again with a bullet in his head.’
She glared at him.
‘The chest under my mother’s bed.’
Her mother let out an infernal howl while they brought out the chest. The house was violated. The men prepared to leave.
Khatuna said,
‘One day you’ll regret you ever came here.’
The man looked at her.
‘And what? And what?’ He put his hand up her nightshirt. ‘Shall I take this too?’
She looked defiantly into his eyes, his hand still between her legs, and he took it away.
The men left the house and started the van, offensively loud in the silent night.
After the losses of that night, Khatuna’s mother had to sell the house, and they moved into a single room.
‘How do people survive?’ cried Khatuna’s mother. ‘How are they surviving? They should all be dead!’
She began to rely on drink.
Girls followed Khatuna at school, and admired her. She dressed outlandishly, with no respect for fashion, and she led bands of youths to late-night bars where they ordered one mint water between them. She drank anaemic toasts to her own memories, and described the extravagant scenes of her future, and cackled, and mocked them for their meekness, and told them that everything was illusion.
They listened.
One time she looked at them all in dismay. She said to them,
‘You are all so fucking boring.’
Late one winter night, Khatuna walked home through the darkness of another night without power. Shapes clenched and tossed under street-side blankets, too cold for sleep, and occasional cars juddered over the cobbles, cutting brief swathes of rickety light. She pissed in a gutter before entering the building, for inside the toilets were frozen.
In their room a single candle was burning.
Her mother had passed out with vodka, and snored in her stupor. Her brother’s bed shook with agitation. She brought the candle close, and he was shiny with sweaty sleep; his lips looked blue. She shook him desperately awake and wrapped a blanket round him, she broke ice from the bucket and warmed it on the stove. He drank fitfully, and she wiped his face and neck. She gave him some bread. She wept.
‘Please get well. I’m sorry for leaving you. Please get well.’
He smiled at her wanly, and lay back under the blanket. She stroked his wet hair, and sobbed. Her mother was roused by the commotion.
‘What’s going on?’ she murmured.
‘What’s going on? What’s going on?’
Khatuna leapt up, beside herself.
‘Your son is delirious from fever! And look at you, knocked out with drink. He could die and you wouldn’t even know it!’
Khatuna took a swig from the vodka bottle and emptied the rest in the fireplace.
‘You’re a worthless woman,’ she said. ‘You should die.’
Her mother began to cry.
‘What can I do? Ther
e’s no money. I’ve sold everything. I’m miserable, Khatuna: be nice to me.’
Khatuna seized her box from the corner and unlocked it with the key she still kept around her neck. She took out the ivory crucifix and threw it at her mother.
‘Why don’t you sell this?’
Her mother fingered it, blankly.
‘I thought I had lost it.’
‘No. I took it from you. That’s why it isn’t sold yet.’
Her mother began moaning into the pillows.
‘Stop it!’ cried Khatuna. ‘This self-pity. Find yourself a man like everyone else. Someone to pay for your vodka and your son’s medicine.’
She looked at her deliberately.
‘Don’t worry yourself about us any more. I’ll take responsibility for Irakli and me. You just look after yourself. See if you can.’
After that, Khatuna burned all her diaries. She had written regularly, and had filled a large stack of notebooks. She put them listlessly on the fire, one by one, her mind becoming strangely void.
She got a promotional job with a foreign tobacco company. They gave her an outfit in the colours of a cigarette brand, and she stood by Philharmonia in the evenings offering free cigarettes to passers-by. She was attractive and flirtatious, and people liked to take her cigarettes: she promised ‘Best Brand in the World!’ as she exhaled gaily.
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