That impressively capable trio with their victim, a kindhearted dimwit who was past helping, had put David Ninoshvili right out of my mind.
When I got home the house was empty. I called, “Hello?” but there was no answer. On my desk I found two pieces of paper with numbers and a few words in Georgian written on them. Apparently he’d been telephoning and making notes. I took the pieces of paper into the kitchen and studied them while I ate a pot of curd cheese.
In his handwriting, in Georgian, Ninoshvili uses the international transcription alphabet, Roman letters complemented only here and there by unusual signs. But I thought that in what he’d written here I also detected the look of the original Georgian characters, like hieroglyphs that are drawn rather than written. Curves breaking midway and ending in pointed wedges. Crossways lines and pendants. The Hebrews wrote something like that, or no, it was the Persians. It’s the handwriting of the Orient, anyway, not of Europe.
I put the scraps of paper down on a corner of my desk, and unpacked the essays that I was going to read and mark. After the first three I got to my feet, slowly climbed the stairs, opened the spare-room door and looked in. He hadn’t brought the small, shabby case I’d imagined in my fantasies. A large brown leather suitcase in good condition, with heavy metal clasps, stood on the chest under the sloping ceiling.
It had begun to rain, and drops were pattering against the window. I hesitated for a moment, then went up to the case and tried to lift the lid. The case was locked.
A car started out in the street, and the sound of the engine moved away. I listened. There was still nothing to be heard but the pattering of the raindrops. I cast a glance around the room, struggled with the temptation to look inside the wardrobe, which had its key in it, and inside the drawer of the bedside table. Finally I overcame myself and went back to my desk.
After looking through another three essays, I reached for one of the scribbled notes, picked up the phone and dialled one of the sequences of numbers written on it. The call went through, but I heard only the ringing tone for an endlessly long time. Suddenly a man’s voice answered. “Hello?” I hung up.
Ninoshvili had seemed slightly annoyed yesterday evening when we told him about the two mysterious calls before he arrived. No, he said, it hadn’t been him, and he didn’t imagine that Matassi already wanted to call and ask how he was. Were we sure it was someone calling from Georgia?
He has brought me a present from Matassi. He disappeared into the spare room before supper, and returned with a fat, round package that he handed to me in front of Julia. When I asked what was in it he said he didn’t know, Matassi had put the little package in his case at the last moment. I unpacked the present. It’s a small glazed earthenware plate, obviously a replica of an old work of art. The rim is brightly patterned, the plate itself shows a man and a woman in colourful Caucasian costume. They are turning to each other, and the man is smoking a long pipe. Matassi has added a pink card on which she has written, in English, “In remembrance and with my best wishes! M.”
Julia said oh, what an exquisitely pretty thing, and Ninoshvili nodded with a silent smile. I stood the plate on my desk and put the card in the drawer. One or two hours ago, in the middle of my work, I touched the plate, smelled it, and then, because the glaze was giving nothing away, I smelled the card too. The Orient. Myrrh, what else, or at least what I think is the fragrance of myrrh. Perhaps she let a drop of her perfume fall on the card.
I found it hard to concentrate on the essays again, and not just on account of Matassi. I couldn’t decide whether it was a good sign or a bad sign that Ninoshvili was staying out so long. Absurdly, I thought of his expedition to the confectioner’s, and I was all but on the point of getting to my feet to go and make sure he hadn’t concealed himself somewhere about the house.
After all, so far as I was aware, he didn’t know anyone but us in this city. And I couldn’t think that among the publishers he was planning to visit here he had instantly found someone interested in bringing out Georgian literature in German translation, and they had already entered into negotiations that were going on until evening. Was he using his commission from the Georgian Ministry of Culture and his travel expenses to loaf around town somewhere?
My speculations were resolved in a surprising way. At about six thirty the front door was opened and I heard the voices of Julia and our guest. They were engaged in lively conversation. It turned out that this morning, when I had already left the house, Ninoshvili had asked Julia where he could find a copy shop. For the sake of simplicity she offered to get her secretary to photocopy his manuscripts. So he visited her in her office in the afternoon, and when she had finished work the two of them went to several shops where Ninoshvili found ingredients for a Georgian supper.
I don’t know whether he also paid for them. Anyway, this evening we’re starting with pkhali, which as our Georgian friend explained to me is chopped cabbage with walnuts, pomegranates and red peppers, and as the main dish we’re having chanakhi, apparently a delicious dish made of mutton, aubergines, tomatoes and potatoes cooked and served in an earthenware casserole.
For some minutes now there’s been a spicy aroma in the house. I can hear the two of them talking in the kitchen, and laughing now and then. When I passed the kitchen door on my way to fetch today’s paper from the magazine rack in the living room, I heard Julia talking broken Russian. Or anyway, it sounded like Russian. Evidently she’s trying out her linguistic knowledge on David Ninoshvili, a skill gleaned from when she was at Halle Polytechnic High School in the Democratic German Republic.
Chapter 16
I‘ve looked up a couple of sentences that I noted down rather absently, shaking my head over them, when I was reading Robakidze, but which have appeared to me in a rather dubious light since yesterday evening. That twentieth-century Georgian man of letters, an upright democrat and an enemy of the tyrannical Bolshevist rule of his native land, described Alexander Pushkin’s visit to Tbilisi in a historical excursus in one of his novels, and wrote this rather offensive passage: “The Slavonic steppes could not satisfy his Negro blood. Only in Tbilisi did Pushkin feel at ease…”
Well, Robakidze would have been referring to the fact that on his mother’s side Pushkin was descended from Peter the Great’s Moorish godson Ibrahim, whom the Tsar generously sent to a military academy in Paris, where he did Peter great credit. The Moor left the academy with a commission as a captain in the artillery. And in the 1920s it may not yet have seemed incorrect to anyone to call a Moor a Negro, or assume that his blood made him particularly excitable.
But it was not just Negroes on whom Robakidze the Georgian looked down with obvious distaste. He has his hero fee from the streets of Tbilisi, where the Kurds’ smell of sweat takes his breath away, to Kashveti Cathedral, at the sight of which he receives an insight into the Iberian, meaning Georgian, nature. “Every stone of the temple is a virgin… the temple itself is a virgin, a pagan virgin offering herself as a sacrifice…” Here again, the forecourt of the cathedral is crowded with evil-smelling, degenerate figures, but “suddenly eyes are shining, eyes that one would recognize among thousands, the eyes of the virgin Iberia. A pure, unmixed race. Pride and modesty in one.”
I remembered this hymn of praise when at Julia’s request Ninoshvili tried, over our Georgian meal yesterday evening, to explain the reasons for the constant bloodshed in his native land. Ralf, who had avoided spending much time with our guest on the first evening, had come home hungry, was obviously unable to resist the smell of supper, even though the wop had cooked it, and sat down at the table with us. As he consumed large quantities of pkhali and chanakhi, he listened, clearly with growing interest, to what Ninoshvili told us.
The civil war, our guest explained, would not have broken out but for the attempt of a couple of recalcitrant tribes to break up the unity of the Georgian Republic. They were the Abkhazians in western Georgia, and the Ossetians, a mountain-dwelling people descended from nomads who had set their faces
firmly against civilization. The cultural and political level of these tribes, who had settled on Georgian soil over the course of time, was pathetic compared to the Georgian people themselves, but they refused to recognize the fact and instead had always been inclined to bloodshed, all the more so now that Georgia was a sovereign state again.
For instance, said Ninoshvili, masked Ossetians had hauled thirty-two of their own countrymen out of a bus and massacred them, laid the blame on the Georgians, and then tried to show that Georgia was intending genocide, a kind of Holocaust of the Ossetians. As for the Abkhazians, they had planned, he said, to increase their influence in Georgia by turning to their fellow tribesmen who emigrated to Turkey centuries ago, appealing to them to return, as genuine Turks, or at least citizens of a state that had been hostile to the Georgians over a very long period.
Ralf asked whether you could say that Georgia was threatened by foreign domination. Ninoshvili smiled. “Not yet. And we shall oppose any such thing.” In this connection, he explained the concept of the Caucasian race, a term which had been taken as meaning white people in general in the nineteenth century. The half-savage tribes who had made their way into the Caucasus as newcomers, or more precisely as an occupying force, could not of course have been regarded as the prototype of that race, only purebred Georgians. In Germany of all countries, we should understand that those Georgians were unwilling to dispute their claim to leadership with other inhabitants of the country originating outside it.
At this point, to my own satisfaction, the argument obviously became more than Julia could stand. She ended the conversation by starting to clear away the dishes. Ninoshvili rose from the table at once to help her, and would not be dissuaded. Ralf said good night and went to his room. I switched on the TV and watched the screen without really seeing what the programme was about.
Chapter 17
It was not the kind of relief you might hope for in an unpleasant situation, but it did boost my ego, and that, I won’t deny, did me good.
Elke Lampert, who had been wandering around the corridors for days looking lost, told me her troubles. When I came into the staff room this morning to kill time, having an empty period in my timetable just then, she was sitting alone in a corner by the window with an open book in front of her, staring out of the window at the chestnut trees. Their golden leaves were gradually falling and drifting to the ground.
I poured myself a coffee and picked up a newspaper that someone had left lying around. Heavy fighting in Abkhazia. The headline was enough to make me go on leafing through the paper. When I had reached the arts section I unexpectedly heard a slight sound. I glanced at Elke. She had turned her back to me, but I could tell that she was mopping her eyes with a handkerchief.
I tried to concentrate on what I was reading. After a while I heard another sound, this time clearly a suppressed sob. Elke’s shoulders were bowed, she seemed to be doubling up. Alarmed, I went over to her and asked if there was anything wrong. She turned away from me, the handkerchief to her mouth, and shook her head in silence. I sat down beside her and touched her arm with my fingertips. She looked at me with brimming eyes. Next moment she could no longer control her sobs, and her tears began to flow.
I had expected various reasons for her distress, but not what I now heard. Her husband, small, unprepossessing Kurt Lampert, had found himself a girlfriend twenty years his junior. I know the man, I have even—reluctantly—been on first-name terms with him since Elke brought him with her to the skittles evenings so tirelessly organized by Brauckmann to encourage friendly social relationships among the staff. On these occasions I had noticed Kurt Lampert, if at all, only because in spite of the amount of beer he poured down his throat, his unerring aim could always knock down both the left- and the right-hand corner pins.
His intelligence is nothing out of the ordinary. He works as a manager or head of a department in a pharmaceuticals firm, maybe he supervises the pill-rolling machines. What clever, sensitive Elke sees in her husband I don’t know. It’s my impression that he isn’t even very easy to get on with, or so I conclude from the unpleasant way he crows when he himself or his team win at skittles.
He is also, obviously, an unscrupulous liar. When Elke found out that he was sleeping with this girl from the office, he swore blind that he’d already broken it off with her. Last week she caught him in the act with the girl, on the back seat of his car.
I didn’t ask Elke how she’d found the car. I tried to cheer her up. These things, unfortunately, were happening all the time, I said. Maybe he’d had good intentions but had weakened once again. She shouldn’t let jealousy consume her, I told her; that would only make it all seem worse. And so on and so forth. As I talked Elke stared straight ahead of her. I was suffering from an awkward feeling that I had put forward more convincing arguments on other occasions. In the end I ran out of words and just patted her arm.
After a while she looked at me. “Has anything like that ever happened to you?”
“What, on the back seat? No, I probably wouldn’t feel very comfortable.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean, has your wife ever cheated on you?” Then she immediately apologized; it was none of her business, she said, but she really was so upset.
I shook my head, said there was no need to apologize. And it wasn’t difficult for me to answer her question, I added: no, Julia had never cheated on me. At least, I’d never had the slightest cause to suspect such a thing. Elke nodded.
As we both sat there in silence again, I realized that my marriage is very enviable compared to other people’s. In nearly twenty years, of course, there’s been a cloud in the sky now and then, even a quarrel, for instance over pushy Erika and the trouble that brash female from Halle makes in our household every six months. But when that happens I’ve always taken back anything hasty I said, because I am also impressed, even pleased, by the way Julia stands so firmly by her school friend.
And of course from time to time some impertinent goat has come along thinking Julia might fancy him and has tried to ruffle her feathers. I remember a lawyers’ ball where a provincial presiding judge with pepper-and-salt hair and a deep-black moustache, a former hockey player said to have been almost picked for the national team once, attached himself to Julia—not so much a cockerel as a polyp, a bloodsucking jellyfish. He put both his arms around her when they danced, rubbed his moustache against her ear. Julia kept still and smiled; I don’t know, but perhaps she had to appear before the man in a court case, and wanted to lay the foundations for a verdict in her client’s favour.
When she had gone out for a moment, I managed to clink glasses with the judge when I was holding a glass of red wine, which spilled over his dress shirt and dyed it red down to his cummerbund. I apologized, although I did tell the judge he hadn’t been entirely in control of his movements. For a second I was afraid he was going to throw a punch at me. But then, still scrubbing vigorously at his dress shirt with his handkerchief, he left the hall and wasn’t seen again.
When Julia came back with fresh make-up on, I told her that unfortunately the judge had had to go, and why. She laughed and kissed me.
And in the long years of our marriage her physical desire for me hasn’t worn off, any more than mine has for her. My occasional lapses—all things considered really very rare—haven’t been because of sexual frustration at home; if anything they have not diminished but intensified my feelings for Julia. And they have done our relationship no harm because, of course, I successfully concealed them. I shrank from the complications that might ensue after a confession. Julia is jealous. But then again, if that can sometimes be a nuisance, it’s just one more reason for me to think myself lucky in my wife.
When we had gone to bed on the night of Ninoshvili’s arrival, and were lying side by side, each with a book, she suddenly asked me what Matassi looks like and what kind of woman she is.
I’d never shown her—probably because of my guilty conscience—the New Year cards with Matassi’s warm gr
eetings, but I had purposely let her see the letter in which Ninoshvili announced his forthcoming visit and wrote that, unfortunately, Matassi couldn’t come with him. After all, I must assume that my Georgian friend would mention his wife in front of Julia at some point. As soon as she had read the letter she asked who Matassi was. I shrugged and said it must be the name of Ninoshvili’s girlfriend or wife, I’d met her once or twice in Tbilisi, although I had forgotten her name.
She was satisfied with that, for one thing probably because at this point she didn’t feel like bothering more than absolutely necessary with our unwanted visitor, who threatened to divide our family. But now Matassi’s present to me had aroused her suspicions.
“Is she pretty?” asked Julia. I muttered something, put my book down, switched off my reading light, turned on my back, shook my duvet into shape and looked up at the bedroom ceiling in the dim light, as if I had to search my memory. “Well, what exactly does pretty mean? So far as I remember she was quite… quite tall. Almost Ninoshvili’s height. Sorry, I can’t tell you any more about what she looked like. I think I hardly noticed her.”
“Just what I’d have advised.” Julia put her own book down, switched out the light, snuggled close to me and started petting.
If all that ought to have made me feel guilty, poor Elke Lampert did a great deal to ease my conscience. She went on sitting quietly there for a while after I’d answered her question about Julia’s fidelity. Finally she looked at me, nodded again and smiled. “Yes. Why on earth would your wife cheat on you?” I looked enquiringly at her. She said, “You’re such a nice man. A good person.” And she kissed me on the cheek.
Chapter 18
Julia did not mention Ninoshvili’s remarks about the Caucasian race and the barbaric tribes sabotaging peace in Georgia again. Presumably his account of it had embarrassed her as much as it did me. At the most, I did feel an urgent need to make it clear to our guest that civility, which had required us not to start arguing with him over our Georgian meal, has its limits. I spent a little time preparing what I had to say, and then spoke to him about his remarkable discourse on Georgia.
David's Revenge Page 6
