David's Revenge

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  I cleared a chair and sat down. Julia came over to me and whispered that the war in Georgia had taken a dramatic turn for the worse; David had been trying to reach Matassi for the last hour.

  The Abkhazian separatists have taken the harbour town of Sukhumi on the Black Sea. President Shevardnadze, who directed the defence of the city himself for twelve days, has fed. He has said, speaking from an unidentified place, that “Russian, Chechen and Abkhazian soldiers armed to the teeth” killed hundreds of people in Sukhumi.

  It was being said in Tbilisi that Sukhumi fell only because the Georgian reserve troops, who had been stationed in the town of Otshamshira ready to hurry to the president’s aid, turned traitor and refused to leave their quarters. These double dealers were supporters of former President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, now overthrown, who was planning to seize back power with the help of the Abkhazians.

  It’s said that a hundred thousand of the Georgian inhabitants of Abkhazia are on the run. The TV news showed pictures from the region at the centre of the fighting this afternoon: women and children, frail old people going down a road with their bundles while jets of mud shot up in the air behind them as shells landed. In an interview, Shevardnadze has called the Abkhazians “murderers and Fascists”.

  While Julia tiptoed back to her chair Ninoshvili, listening intently to the receiver, raised his head. “Hello?” he called, and then suddenly began to speak Georgian. He talked fast, pausing again and again to nod, his brows drawn together. Julia stood up, took the tea glass standing in front of Ninoshvili, went out to the kitchen with it and came back with the glass refilled.

  I stayed where I was. This phone conversation did not sound to me like a man conversing with his beloved. I hadn’t heard Matassi’s name at the beginning of the phone call either. I was going to wait and see if I could catch it later. But I didn’t understand a word.

  The conversation lasted almost ten minutes. When Ninoshvili had put the receiver down he rubbed his forehead with both hands and stared absently at the desk for a while. Then he looked up and saw first Julia, then me. He nodded. “Matassi sends her regards. She says she’s all right, nothing has happened to her. But a bad situation. Very bad situation.”

  I tried to find out details of the very bad situation. I asked whether there was fighting in Tbilisi as well. Julia said, “Give him a little while to calm himself. Would you like a glass of wine now, David?” He nodded, his mind obviously elsewhere.

  We moved to the TV set. Julia brought in a bottle of wine and poured a glass first for our guest, then for me. She sat down with us until the next news programme was over. Georgia had already dropped to number three in the bulletins; there were no new developments. Julia rose and went into the kitchen. She was obviously trying to move with care. Ninoshvili picked up the TV magazine and studied the programmes in silence. I assume he was looking for the time of the next news bulletin.

  I heard clattering from the kitchen. Julia was evidently making supper. I stood up and went to join her. “Can I do anything?”

  “No, thanks. I’m just going to put something cold together. Or are you very hungry?”

  “No.” I watched her for a while.

  “Won’t you keep him company for a bit?” she asked.

  I said no, I wouldn’t, and she looked at me in surprise. I asked, “Did you know he let Herr Schumann hire him to give a lecture? In that summer house, to Schumann’s followers.”

  She put down the fork she was using to arrange slices of cold meat on a platter, passed her hand over her forehead, lowered her head and sighed. “Well, did you know?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “It was the evening when he said he went to the cinema with Ralf. And then to a bar. Remember that?”

  “Yes, I remember. How do you know about this?”

  I ignored the question. ” I can’t believe he’s playing around with us like this. And in cahoots with our own son at that. Well, can you think of any explanation for such behaviour?”

  “What do you mean, explanation?” She looked at me, shaking her head. “You don’t have to look far to find one.”

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t think of anything in the least acceptable.”

  She turned back to the platter of cold meat. “He needs money. The pathetic amount of currency they gave him to bring must be running out by this time. And I expect Herr Schumann paid him a good fee. I’m afraid it’s as simple as that.”

  “Simple? You call it simple?”

  She shook her head. “No, of course it’s not at all simple. It’s all rather hole and corner, you’re right.” She looked at me. “But I hope you’re not going to tell him so this evening.”

  “You expect me to let him go on believing he can fool us like that?”

  “But you can’t, Christian!” She was obviously upset. “Not this evening. The poor man’s devastated.”

  I did not let Julia’s glances during supper deter me from trying at least to get a little more out of Ninoshvili on how he saw the situation in Georgia. He gave only monosyllabic answers, ate little, and soon, after asking Julia’s permission, moved to the TV set with his glass and sat there, switching from one news bulletin to the next, and staring absently at the screen in between times.

  He doesn’t seem to support Gamsakhurdia the nationalist. But maybe it only goes against the grain with him that the former president has made common cause with the recalcitrant Abkhazians. On the other hand, in his own way of course Shevardnadze is also a Georgian nationalist, despite his celebrated past as Moscow’s Foreign Minister, and he heads the government on behalf of which Ninoshvili says he came here. However, before that Shevardnadze held office as head of the Georgian Communist Party, and in that capacity, as nationalists like Gamsakhurdia see it, was no less than a slave-owner appointed by Moscow. But then again, that could mean that a former KGB agent felt very much safer on Eduard Shevardnadze’s side, and must now fear for himself. Unless Zviad Gamsakhurdia too is actually in league with the KGB.

  Once I realized that my thoughts were going around in this back-and-forth kind of way, I gave up. I cleared the supper dishes and sat down with our guest and Julia in front of the box. Ninoshvili was drinking a good deal. After the ten-thirty news, which had nothing very recent to report, he rose to his feet and said, “Please forgive me. I’d like to get some rest.” As he went out, walking rather unsteadily, his shoulder collided with the door frame.

  We listened. Once the spare room door had closed behind him, Julia said, “Thank you.”

  “What for?”

  “I know how hard it was for you not to ask him to explain himself at once.” She smiled. “You’re a good person.” Then she stroked my hair and kissed me on the nose. “Don’t worry. I’ll speak to him about this whole silly story as soon as he’s feeling a bit better.”

  Chapter 28

  I don’t want to speak too soon, but it could be said that the first lesson in my four-part series was a success. Of course there was the usual silliness and some troublemakers, even before I asked what they would think if we spent four lessons studying a topical subject. When asked, “What subject?” I replied, “Georgia.” Oliver Zacher instantly bleated, “Never heard of it. Where’s that supposed to be?”

  Manni Wallmeroth, who as far as I know takes no interest in either football or any other kind of physical exercise, cried, “Dinamo Tbilisi! Everyone knows Dinamo Tbilisi!” And Charlotte Keusch, who is bosom friends with Wenka Jovanovic, objected that Georgia wasn’t so very important these days, and she thought it would be better if we studied Bosnia.

  But what most of them made of the texts I handed out for them to read before the first lesson was very encouraging. I had not just duplicated a passage each from the absurdly similar speeches of those mortal enemies Gamsakhurdia and Shevardnadze, I had also chosen an extract from Naira Gelashvili’s reports on the explosive complex of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations in Tbilisi before Zviad Gamsakhurdia was overthrown. I thought this text particularly sui
table for them because of the gentle irony that the reporter preserves in spite of all the bitterness, for instance in the account of clashes in the Square of Heroes, so-called in popular parlance because it has traffic flowing in from five different directions, and those drivers who manage to cross it intact are considered heroic.

  Particularly effective was Gelashvili’s account of the distress of the animals in the zoo on the same square, and the panic into which the constant noise of gunfire, shells and detonating mines cast them. The cries of the owls, drowning out even the chanted slogans of the demonstrators; the plaintive roar of the tigers forced to go hungry because their keepers were taking home the meat supposed to feed them; the night when the wolves broke out of their enclosure and unexpectedly appeared among the demonstrators; and the pitiless hunt as the guards pursued the terrified animals down the streets and shot them.

  A good half-dozen of the girls, together with Hasan Ileri and Christian Berkhan, began with the animals in the essays I set them to write: this, they said, was an example of the lack of restraint with which humanity abuses and destroys its environment; it is a familiar observation that in ideological struggles animals fall by the wayside, and those who don’t feel for animals cannot be expected to respect other human beings.

  But such reactions were not all. Only a few students failed to notice or mention the give-away similarity of the arguments proposed by Shevardnadze and Gamsakhurdia. Those few included Oliver Zacher, but I assumed that he had in fact understood what I wanted and acted stupid for that very reason. Also Helmut Freese—well, I’d expected nothing else of him. Helmut the recalcitrant dimwit said that in a case like that there was no solution but to let weapons decide the outcome, and then everyone could see who was right. I reprimanded Hasan Ileri because after this contribution he looked at the writer of the essay and tapped his forehead, muttering, “Talk about a silly sod!”

  In the extract from Gelashvili’s reports I had also included its quotation from John Steinbeck’s Russian diary:

  Wherever we had been in Russia, in Moscow, in the Ukraine or in Stalingrad, the magical name of Georgia came up constantly. People who had never been there, and who possibly could never go there, spoke of Georgia with a kind of longing and a great admiration. They spoke of the country […] as a kind of second heaven. Indeed, we began to believe that most Russians hope that if they live very good and virtuous lives, they will go not to heaven, but to Georgia when they die.

  Then I told them the Georgian version of the Creation story, which I have found again and again in both the belles-lettres and the historical writings on Georgia: the Lord God, when he made the world and gave every nation its place there, forgot the Georgians. But they bore him no grudge, and instead invited him to visit them, served him wine and sang him their songs. The Lord God had such a good time that he decided to give these cheerful, dauntless people the place on earth that he had planned to keep for himself: the hills and valleys in the south of the great Caucasian mountain range.

  I asked them whether they thought that was a special kind of national pride, or more like arrogant nationalism, or if they could see any points of comparison with other nations. One boy called out at once, “God’s own country, the Yanks have the same idea.” It wasn’t long before Günsel Özcan said, “And la grande nation is pretty arrogant as well.” Manni Wallmeroth, who had been intent on biting his nails until now, took his finger out of his mouth and said, “The Brits are just as crazy—‘my country right or wrong’!” The quotation I had been hoping for was provided by Christian Berkhan: “How about the saying that German virtues will put everything in the world right?”

  I said perhaps that sounded a little more moderate in the words of Emanuel Geibel, who coined the phrase, and quoted the last verse of the original poem on The German Vocation:

  Upright, free, strong in the fight, Clear in mind and eye alike,

  Let us banish from our sight,

  All but lawful grounds to strike.

  Then those German virtues may

  Cure the whole world’s ills some day.

  There was laughter. Someone called out, “So what? Where’s the difference?”

  I was very pleased with them. I just wondered whether it hadn’t been a mistake to send Ralf to a different school to avoid clashes between the two of us.

  I wonder how he would have turned out in this class of mine, which often enough infuriates me, but also makes me hope for a certain amount of progress in humanity.

  Chapter 29

  If it wasn’t Matassi on the other end of Ninoshvili’s phone call, then who was it? Maybe some KGB comrade in the Abkhazian region, and Ninoshvili was phoning the KGB man to find out for certain about the situation at the front.

  The House of the Republic on Rustaveli Square in Otshamshira; night has already fallen, the square is deserted. From a side street comes a bus, tilting over and creaking, rattling as it spews diesel fumes, rounds the Stalin memorial and disappears down another side street. A dull rumbling is audible in the distance. Of the windows in the House of the Republic, only a few in the upper storeys show any light. Half the ground floor is burnt out, and the empty, smoke-blackened frames yawn in the pale light of the arc lamps.

  Behind one of the lighted windows, a telephone rings. The comrade steps through the open doorway of the next room, glass in hand, a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He lifts the receiver, pulls up a chair, when David Ninoshvili greets him.

  “We’ll have to wait, David. If I were you I’d stay put for the time being. Yes, that’s right, the two regiments are going to join Zviad. I don’t know where Eduard is. He’s not in Otshamshira, anyway. Maybe he’s gone to Tbilisi already to save what he still can. And it looks as if things are about to get uncomfortable here pretty soon. No, I don’t think so. Zviad holds better cards, that’s as good as certain. Me? I don’t know yet. But yesterday I had a word with Merab Zereteli, you must know him. Yes, he’s already carried out a mission for Zviad.”

  Another explosion, not far away, shakes the House of the Republic. The light flickers. The comrade says: “Good luck, David. And stay right where you are. The wall in here is beginning to wobble, I must get my arse out of the firing line.” He hangs the receiver up, puts out the light, goes to the window and peers out. Two militiamen are running along the other side of the square, beyond the circle of light cast by the arc lamps. The comrade drains his glass and leaves the room.

  If Ninoshvili was talking to some such comrade rather than his wife, and she would have been the first person to spring to any normal man’s mind, why did he give me Matassi’s regards? What could be behind such a ploy? Was it just to hide the fact that his life is in danger, and he can’t go back to Georgia in a hurry?

  And I can’t shake off another idea. Maybe Matassi is dead, dead of an illness, in an accident. Or as a victim of the civil war. Or maybe she died even earlier, during the demonstrations when the Georgians who wanted a revolution were trying to wrest their independence from Moscow by force. On the night of 9 April 1989, Russian special troops violently broke up the crowds who had gathered outside Tbilisi University. They beat the demonstrators with sharp-edged spades and fired poison gas at them. Nineteen women and one man were killed on the spot. Thousands are said to have died of the consequences of gas poisoning.

  Matassi struck down by an army spade—oh, come on, that’s just my imagination. I obviously feel tempted to turn the woman in Ninoshvili’s life, whom I once took for a KGB agent, into a freedom fighter. Let’s just drop that. Perhaps she’s still alive, never had anything to do with the KGB, but instead she and Ninoshvili have separated, a perfectly ordinary rift. For instance, maybe when we were leaving Tbilisi Dautzenbacher really did make some insinuation about Matassi’s visit to my hotel room, and it brought Ninoshvili’s blood to boiling point.

  So then he goes straight home, flings the little gate in the high wall open, strides across the yard, pushes the children aside and climbs the creaking steps. Matassi is sittin
g on the bed in the little bedroom, folding laundry. She looks up when Ninoshvili stops in the doorway, preserving an ominous silence, a dark shadow in front of the shafts of sunlight that fall from the balcony into the living room. “What is it?” she asks.

  He wants to know what she was doing in my hotel room. She tells him he knows; she was bringing me the copy of that article. No, he says, that’s exactly what he doesn’t know, and she is well aware of it; he naturally assumed that she’d hand the copy, as agreed, in at the hotel reception desk. Or should he have entertained the possibility that she would evade the receptionist, like a tart, go straight up in the lift and knock at a foreigner’s door in an unobserved corridor?

  Matassi loses her temper. She says if he dares to call her a tart again she’ll scratch his eyes out. She has nothing to hide, but she doesn’t owe him any explanations either. And whatever she was doing in my hotel room, she tells him, it’s nothing at all to do with him. David the Avenger takes a step into the room. He doesn’t bring out his flick knife, but his sweeping gesture tells Matassi to leave. She sweeps the laundry off the woven bedspread, flings a suitcase down on the bed and starts to pack, while Ninoshvili goes into the kitchen and gulps down a glass of Armenian cognac.

  The break was a lasting one, and they haven’t had any kind of contact since.

  So then how to explain the greetings sent by Matassi over the years, written on Ninoshvili’s New Year cards, the present he brought me from her, and the card “in remembrance” that came with it? And always, from the first, in the same handwriting?

  It wasn’t Matassi’s handwriting. I only thought it was. I never saw anything written by Matassi in Tbilisi. Ninoshvili has persuaded her successor, the woman who’s been sharing that bed with him since Matassi moved out, to write messages on the cards in her name. He has told the woman—let’s call her Nana or Nona—who I am, and that it might come in useful some time if he keeps me believing that he’s still living with Matassi. Nona was slightly hurt, but then she laughed, and wrote the good wishes he dictated to her on the cards.