The Eighth Life
Page 1
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Prologue
Book I
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Book II
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
Book III
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Book IV
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
Book V
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
Book VI
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
Book VII
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
Book VIII
THE EIGHTH LIFE
NINO HARATISCHVILI was born in Georgia in 1983, and is an award-winning novelist, playwright, and theatre director. At home in two different worlds, each with their own language, she has been writing in both German and Georgian since the age of twelve. In 2010, her debut novel Juja was nominated for the German Book Prize, as was her most recent Die Katze und der General in 2018. In its German edition, The Eighth Life was a bestseller, and won the Anna Seghers Prize, the Lessing Prize Stipend, and the Bertolt Brecht Prize 2018. It is being translated into many languages, and has already been a major bestseller on publication in Holland, Poland, and Georgia.
CHARLOTTE COLLINS studied English Literature at Cambridge University, and worked as an actor and radio journalist before becoming a literary translator. She received the Goethe-Institut’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2017 for Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life, which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. Her other translations include Seethaler’s The Tobacconist and The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells.
RUTH MARTIN has a PhD in German literature and philosophy from the University of London. Her recent translations include Volker Weidermann’s Dreamers, Michael Köhlmeier’s novels Two Gentlemen on the Beach and Yiza, short fiction by Joseph Roth, and essays by Hannah Arendt. She has taught translation to undergraduates at Birkbeck and the University of Kent, and is currently co-chair of the Society of Authors’ Translators Association.
Scribe Publications
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First published in English by Scribe in 2019
Originally published as Das achte Leben (Für Brilka) in German by Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt GmbH in 2014
Text copyright © Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt GmbH, Frankfurt am Main 2014
Translation copyright © Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin 2019
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.
The moral rights of the author and translators have been asserted.
Excerpt from ‘In a Shattered Mirror’ by Anna Akhmatova from The Poetry of Anna Akhmatova: Living in Different Mirrors by Alexandra Harrington quoted by kind permission of Anthem Press.
Excerpts from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova by Anna Akhmatova translated by Judith Hemschemeyer reprinted by kind permission of Canongate Books.
Excerpt from untitled poem by Anna Akhmatova translated by Graham Harrison reprinted by kind permission of the translator.
Excerpt from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © 1955, Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Excerpt(s) from A RUSSIAN JOURNAL by John Steinbeck, photographs by Robert Capa, copyright © 1948 by John Steinbeck, copyright renewed © 1976 by Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck, and John Steinbeck IV. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Every effort has been made to acknowledge and contact the copyright holders for permission to reproduce material contained in this book. Any copyright holders who have been inadvertently omitted from the acknowledgements and credits should contact the publisher so that omissions may be rectified in subsequent editions.
This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s PEN Translates programme, supported by Arts Council England. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas.
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The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
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For my grandmother,
who gifted me 1,000 stories and a poem.
For my father,
who left me with a bag full of questions.
And for my mother,
who told me where to seek the answers.
Prologue
or
The Score of Forgetting
2006
This story actually has many beginnings. It’s hard for me to choose
one, because all of them constitute the beginning.
You could start this story in an old, high-ceilinged flat in Berlin, quite undramatically, with two naked bodies in bed. With a twenty-eight-year-old man, a fiercely talented musician in the process of squandering his gift on impulse, alcohol, and an insatiable longing for intimacy. But you could also start this story with a twelve-year-old girl who decides to say NO! to the world in which she lives and set off in search of another beginning for herself, for her story.
Or you start the story with all the beginnings at once.
*
At the moment when Aman Baron, whom most people knew as ‘the Baron’, was confessing that he loved me — with heartbreaking intensity and unbearable lightness, but a love that was unhealthy, enfeebled, disillusioned — my twelve-year-old niece Brilka was leaving her hotel in Amsterdam on her way to the train station. She had with her a small bag, hardly any money, and a tuna sandwich. She was heading for Vienna, and bought herself a cheap weekend ticket, valid only on local trains. A handwritten note left at reception said she did not intend to return to her homeland with the dance troupe and that there was no point in looking for her.
At this precise moment, I was lighting a cigarette and succumbing to a coughing fit, partly because I was overwhelmed by what I was hearing, and partly because the smoke went down the wrong way. Aman (whom I personally never called ‘the Baron’) immediately came over, slapped me on the back so hard I couldn’t breathe, and stared at me in bewilderment. He was only four years younger than me, but I felt decades older; besides, at this point I was well on my way to becoming a tragic figure — without anyone really noticing, because by now I was a master of deception.
I read the disappointment in his face. My reaction to his confession was not what he’d anticipated. Especially after he’d invited me to accompany him on tour in two weeks’ time.
Outside, a light rain began to fall. It was June, a warm evening with weightless clouds that decorated the sky like little balls of cotton wool.
When I had recovered from my coughing fit, and Brilka had boarded the first train of her odyssey, I flung open the balcony door and collapsed on the sofa. I felt as if I were suffocating.
I was living in a foreign country; I had cut myself off from most of the people I’d once loved, those who used to mean something to me, and had accepted a visiting professorship that, though it guaranteed me a livelihood, had absolutely nothing to do with who I really was.
The evening Aman told me he wanted to grow normal with me, Brilka, my dead sister’s daughter and my only niece, set off for Vienna, a place she had conceived of as her home, her personal utopia, all because of the solidarity she felt with a dead woman. In her imagination, this dead woman — my great-aunt, Brilka’s great-great-aunt — had become her heroine. Her plan was to go to Vienna and obtain the rights to her great-great-aunt’s songs.
And, in tracing the path of this ghost, she hoped to find redemption, and the definitive answer to the yawning emptiness inside her.
But I suspected none of this then.
After sitting on the sofa and putting my face in my hands, after rubbing my eyes and avoiding Aman’s gaze for as long as possible, I knew I would have to weep again, but not now, not at this moment, while Brilka was watching old, new Europe slipping past her outside the train window and smiling for the first time since her arrival on this continent of indifference. I don’t know what she saw that made her smile as she left the city of miniature bridges, but that doesn’t matter any more. The main thing is, she was smiling.
At that moment, I was thinking that I would have to weep. In order not to, I turned, went into the bedroom, and lay down. I didn’t have to wait long for Aman. Grief like his is very quickly healed if you offer to heal it with your body, especially when the patient is twenty-eight years old.
I kissed myself out of my enchanted sleep.
As Aman laid his head on my belly, my twelve-year-old niece was leaving the Netherlands, crossing the German border in her compartment that stank of beer and loneliness, while several hundred kilometres away her unsuspecting aunt feigned love with a twenty-eight-year-old shadow. All the way across Germany she travelled, in the hope it would get her somewhere.
After Aman fell asleep, I got up, went to the bathroom, sat on the edge of the bath, and started to cry. I wept a century’s worth of tears over the feigning of love, the longing to believe in words that once defined my life. I went into the kitchen, smoked a cigarette, stared out of the window. It had stopped raining, and somehow I knew that it was happening, something had been set in motion, something beyond this apartment with the high ceilings and the orphaned books; with the many lamps I had collected so eagerly, a substitute for the sky, an illusion of true light.
Perhaps it should be mentioned that Brilka was a very tall girl, almost two heads taller than me (which, at my height, isn’t that difficult); that she had buzz-cut hair and John Lennon glasses, was wearing old jeans and a lumberjack shirt, had perfectly round cocoa-bean eyes that were constantly searching for stars, and an immensely high forehead that concealed a great deal of sorrow. She had just run away from her dance troupe, which was performing in Amsterdam; she danced the male roles, because she was too extravagant, too tall, too melancholy for the gentle, folkloristic women’s dances of our homeland. After much pleading, she was finally allowed to perform dressed as a man and dance the wild dances; her long plait had fallen victim to this concession the previous year.
She was allowed to do leaps and to fence, and was always better at these than at the female dancers’ wavelike, dreamy movements. She danced and danced with a passion, and after being given a solo for the Dutch audience — because she was so good, so much better than the young men who had sneered at her in the beginning — she left the troupe in search of answers that dancing, too, was unable to give her.
*
The following evening, I received a call from my mother, who was always threatening to die if I didn’t return soon to the homeland I had fled all those years ago. Her voice trembled as she informed me that ‘the child’ had disappeared. It took me a while to work out which child she was talking about, and what it all had to do with me.
‘So tell me again: where exactly was she?’
‘In Amsterdam, for goodness’ sake, what’s the matter with you? Aren’t you listening to me? She ran away yesterday and left a message. I got a call from the group leader. They’ve looked everywhere for her, and —’
‘Wait, wait, wait. How can an eleven-year-old girl disappear from a hotel, especially if she —’
‘She’s twelve. She turned twelve in November. You forgot, of course. But that was only to be expected.’
I took a deep drag on my cigarette and prepared myself for the impending disaster. Because if my mother’s voice was anything to go by, it would be no easy matter just to wash my hands of this and disappear: my favourite pastime in recent years. I armed myself for the obligatory reproaches, all of them intended to make clear to me what a bad daughter and failed human being I was. Things I was only too well aware of without my mother’s intervention.
‘Okay, she turned twelve, and I forgot, but that won’t get us anywhere right now. Have they informed the police?’
‘Yes, what do you think? They’re looking for her.’
‘Then they’ll find her. She’s a spoilt little girl with a tourist visa, I presume, and she —’
‘Do you have even a spark of humanity left in you?’
‘Sorry. I’m just trying to think aloud.’
‘So much the worse, if those are your thoughts.’
‘Mama!’
‘They’re going to call me. In an hour at most, they said, and I’m praying that they find her, and find her fast. And then I want you to go to wherever she is — she won’t have got all that far — and I want you to fetch her.’
‘I —’
‘She’s your sister’s daughter. And you will fetch her. Promise me!’
‘But —’
‘Do it!’
‘Oh God. All right, fine.’
‘And don’t take the Lord’s name in vain.’
‘Aren’t I even allowed to say “Oh God” now?’
‘You’re going to fetch her and bring her back with you. And then you’ll put her on the plane.’
They found her that same night, in a small town just outside Vienna, waiting for a connecting train. She was picked up by the Austrian police and taken to the police station. My mother woke me and told me I had to go to Mödling.
‘Where?’
‘Mödling, the town’s called. Write it down.’
‘Fine.’
‘You don’t even know what day it is today.’
‘I’m writing it down! Where the hell is that?’
‘Near Vienna.’
‘What on earth was she doing there?’
‘She wanted to go to Vienna.’
‘Vienna?’
‘Yes, Vienna. You must have heard of it.’
‘All right! I’ve got it.’
‘And take your passport with you. They know the child’s aunt is picking her up. They made a note of your name.’
‘Can’t they just put her on a plane?’
‘Niza!’
‘Okay, I’m getting dressed. It’s all right.’
‘And call me as soon as you’ve got her.’
She slammed down the phone.
That’s how this story begins.
Why Vienna? Why this, after the night of fleeing from my tears? There were reasons for it all, but for that I’d have to start the story somewhere else entirely.
*
My name is Niza. It contains a word: a word that, in our mother tongue, signifies ‘heaven’. Za. Perhaps my life up till now has been a search for this particular heaven, given to me as a promise that has accompanied me since birth. My sister’s name was Daria. Her name contains the word ‘chaos’. Aria. Churning up, stirring up; the messing up and the not putting right. I am duty bound to her. I am duty bound to her chaos. I have always been duty bound to seek my heaven in her chaos. But perhaps it’s just about Brilka. Brilka, whose name has no meaning in the language of my childhood. Whose name bears no label and no stigma. Brilka, who gave herself this name, and kept on insisting she be called this until others forgot what her real name was.