The Lack of Light, page 18
“What do you think? She wishes she’d been kissed as well. But she’s so moody and uptight, she’s never going to get a guy!” Nene retorted; then, as she often did, she began to play the fool in an attempt to take the edge off her words. She danced around Ira, blocking her path, and started to tickle her. Ira fended her off angrily, repeatedly pushing her away.
“Leave me alone!” She sounded alarmingly desperate.
“Nene, just let her go.” I could see that Ira was serious.
“No, no, our Irina wants to be kissed, right? Right? Right? . . . Should I show you how? I can teach you, I’m a really good kisser!” And without waiting for a reply, Nene went right up to Ira, stood on tiptoe, just as she’d described a few minutes before, and kissed her best friend. She kissed her with passion, with abandon; she kissed like someone much older than she was. I stared at the two of them like a voyeur, not knowing what fascinated me more—Nene’s skill, or the fact that she was demonstrating it on our friend. I stood there, wide-eyed and frozen to the spot, unable to look away. Two completely different people were giving each other something, and at the same time snatching it away: one was giving the other a fleeting joy, and at the same time infecting her with a calamity that instantly began to spread.
THE COUNTRY, the people, and their words were changing along with us. Things that in our childhood had been unsaid, secret, kept hidden from the eyes of the state, were revealed, as if a curtain had been pulled aside. Every day it was getting more difficult to ignore the tanks and military vehicles on our streets, the curfew, and the tense mood that hung over the city like a leaden hood. There were endless demonstrations, demands shouted through megaphones, crowds outside the university and the Central Committee building.
Nene was the only one who really seemed to blossom in this somber atmosphere: the gloomier others were, the more exuberant she became; the quieter and more muted the people around her, the louder her laughter, the more extravagant her makeup. From that day on, her entire focus was Saba Iashvili. Nene developed a disconcerting obsession, as if she had been saving up all her suppressed desire for this boy, and had now decided to rebel against her golden cage in the name of this first love.
Ira, meanwhile, increasingly withdrew into a cocoon. She seemed to be kicking with all her might against the changes happening around her. She observed Nene’s euphoria with an expression of blatant revulsion. At school, during the long recess, she sought out a far corner of the playground to consume her beloved kadas, which she brought from home, wrapped in paper napkins. If learning had come easily to her before, in her final year of school she transformed herself into a creature of pathological ambition and drive, banishing all joy from her life for the sake of good grades and teachers’ praise. And when she did spend time with us, she argued with us constantly and accused us of having no interest in politics or society. We were irresponsible people, she said, who cared nothing for the future of our country. She was always preaching moral courage and civic duty, and as a result Nene, Dina, and I increasingly arranged to meet separately, without telling her, and suppressed our guilty consciences in order fully to satisfy our non-political needs. I felt terrible about this, because I couldn’t ignore the fact that her stoic refusal to keep pace with our hard-won levity was condemning her to loneliness—a loneliness from which we had painstakingly released her once before, offering her a community for the first time. I was always having to choose between Ira’s steadfast seriousness and Nene’s carefree openness. I stuck it out, as if holding my breath in anticipation of something colossal and fateful. Ira was mistaken when she accused me of taking no interest in the world around me; in fact, ever since I can remember, my greatest weakness has been giving far too much thought to others. I was also worried about the distance that was increasingly opening up between Dina and me, as she retreated into the imaginary world that she only wanted to imagine with my brother. I watched Nene’s daring escape from her family corset with growing apprehension; she was invoking a calamity, like a high priestess plotting an uprising in her own temple.
I registered the irritable mood that prevailed in our school and our courtyard, a trembling tension that lay over everything and everyone like a layer of sand after a storm on the edge of the desert. I kept thinking about Levan and his duduk, Levan and his Makarov—I couldn’t help it. There was no way to change what was happening around me, and the only distraction that helped me to endure it was my drawing. I drew obsessively, everywhere I went: on the bus, in the playground, in class. I drew because I found it calming, as though simply capturing things could hold off the approaching threat.
No one had told me how to grow up; no one had told me how to pursue people you love through all the uncertainty that life forces upon you. No one had explained to me that it is possible to like a boy and really want to please him, to give him fleeting and adoring glances, even though you’re afraid of him, of his desires and the secrets he keeps under his bed. No one had taught me to ignore the outraged, angry voices from the next room; the adults probably thought grammar and math were adequate preparation for life. But I hadn’t learned to keep pace with the dizzying changes in a country that had hidden its true face behind a mask for seventy years.
“SO, WHAT KIND of stuff does he talk to you about?” I asked Dina casually one afternoon, in her shadowy apartment. We were helping Anano prepare for her part in a school performance, where she was supposed to recite “Nestan’s Letter” from The Knight in the Panther’s Skin.
“What do you mean, stuff?”
I hated her habit of pretending to be clueless when she was trying to dodge a question.
“These days, Rati only comes home to sleep. Father is pretty close to losing it. And then Levan mentioned something about him and his friends wanting to compete with the Koridzes. I’m just worried . . .”
“Can we carry on, please?” said Anano, impatiently. She was standing in the middle of the room, ready to perform for us.
I SEE HER in my mind, standing there in her long dress—where did she get that floor-length dress?—and I glance around, looking out for the kind, elegant woman she has become, with her large creole earrings. I spot her in the distance, a flash of that unmistakable profile in the throng; she looks more like her sister with every passing year. She’s listening attentively to someone, and has no idea that, at the same time, she is also standing before me and Dina as a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old, reciting Nestan’s heartbreaking plea to her true love.
“In a minute,” said Dina, trying to mollify her sister. And to me: “I just don’t get what you want me to tell you.”
“God, Dina!” I couldn’t contain my annoyance any longer. “You’re the person he’s closest to.”
“Do you have some kind of problem with us?” Her voice tipped over into sticky aggression, and her eyebrows knitted together in a line; she was poised to attack. What was she afraid of? We’d never kept secrets from one another. We’d always shared everything, and been proud of the generosity with which we revealed our hidden desires, dreams, and worries to each other. When had she begun to see me as a threat?
“Now can we . . .” Anano whined.
“Hey, just go away for a minute, will you? We’ll call you when you can come back. Can’t you see we’ve got something important to discuss here?” Dina scolded her sister. Anano, who needed harmony in her life, left the kitchen looking offended, throwing some remark over her shoulder that we both ignored. For a moment, I was sorry I’d started this discussion.
“Leave her. If she doesn’t understand when she needs to go away, she’ll just have to sulk.” As long as she lived, I would never get used to how hard, how merciless Dina could be—and the fact that she treated herself that way, too, not just others. These unachievable standards, which no one else could even hope to reach. The sheer cliffs of her mind.
“Listen, you’re my best friend and he’s my brother—for God’s sake, isn’t it obvious that I’d be worried . . .”
“Worried? Why? Because we’re together?”
“Well, yes, that too. It’s kind of brutal, the way you shut me out.” I was defending myself, and at the same moment I began to doubt myself, with her questioning my intentions so forcefully. Could it be that I was jealous? Did I begrudge her my daredevil brother, or did I not want to share my best friend with anyone?
“Look, I think he’s great just the way he is. And I’m not going to stop him,” she said firmly, as if that were her final answer. She took an apple from a bowl on the table.
“What do you mean, stop him? From doing what?”
“You just want me to talk him into doing what your father wants. But I’m not going to. I think he’s great because he is the way he is. I’m not with him so he’ll become what you all want him to be.”
“You all?” She was deliberately hurting me. “I didn’t know I was suddenly part of a ‘you all,’” I said, feeling crushed.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it like that; but I’m not going to try and force him to do something he doesn’t want to do. I’m not a spy, giving you information on what he’s planning and with whom,” she said, rather dramatically, sinking into a chair. Now she was the one sulking. She bit into the apple and rolled her eyes pointedly. Music was coming from the next room. Lika was restoring an old bureau that two burly men had jostled through the narrow basement door earlier that day. When she was working, there was usually a record on, and she could often be heard humming along.
“I need you to understand, though: he could get into trouble. Do you honestly think the Koridzes will just accept it if he and his wannabe gangsters start competing with them for business? Plus, you can’t seriously approve of him making nothing of his life, can you?”
“You’re talking like a real bourgeois!”
“Like a what?”
“A bourgeois.”
“Come on, that’s just silly . . .” Were those my brother’s words? Who was actually under whose influence here?
“It might not be the path most people choose.” Suddenly, something flared up in her, she was incensed, and began to defend Rati with all her usual zeal. “Your father says he should go to university and study something. But there’s no value in that, Keto. Let’s be honest, any idiot can just march into a university and buy themselves a place, or even a diploma. Tell me I’m wrong! Rati doesn’t want to do anything by halves, and nor do I. Most of all, he doesn’t want to support this sanctimonious hypocrisy anymore. Everyone around here knows perfectly well”—here she waved a hand dramatically—“that our life, and this whole country, is one big lie. We want to be free at last, to be our own masters, we don’t want to have the wool pulled over our eyes any longer. Not by the Koridzes, and not by the state. Anyway: I’m not going to university, either!”
“Good grief, Dina, you’re talking just like him! I thought you had a mind of your own,” I said, being deliberately hurtful. “But that’s all just talk. What can he do against the Koridzes? I mean, don’t you know who Tapora is, how much power he has? He owns half the city.”
“That’s exactly it. Either you pay the militsiya, or you pay some criminal. Why? Because you’re scared! That’s what our society runs on: fear. But Rati isn’t scared. Of anyone. And that’s why he’s not like anyone else,” she added, with an almost maternal pride.
“Everyone’s afraid of something,” I said, more to myself than to her. “And even if he wasn’t, what cards is he holding? How exactly is he planning to put the Koridzes in their place?”
“He wants to offer people protection. Him and his boys. Protection from all the Taporas and the rest of those lowlifes. He’s going to protect them from the racketeers. And he’ll charge much less than those greedy, corrupt bastards.”
I couldn’t believe it. Rati had infected her with his wayward ideas. How could she be so blind? Or was I the one who was mistaken? Was I too unimaginative, too fixed in my views, too cowardly and conservative, as she’d accused me of being?
“And Tapora and his people are just going to stand by and watch, are they?”
“Times are changing,” she said, as if that settled the matter. I couldn’t bear that she was shutting me out, now that I represented an obstacle on the path she believed she had to forge with Rati, and she was doing it so radically, so effortlessly, with such determination, that it took my breath away.
“How can you . . .” My eyes filled with tears. “I thought the two of us, we . . .” For a moment, I saw a slight hesitation in her dark eyes. She felt uncomfortable in this corner I had driven her into; she wanted to sidestep, to escape the situation, but something was holding her back. Suddenly she leaped up, flung her arms around me, and pressed a kiss onto my neck.
“Don’t be silly. Of course we belong together!”
“I just want everything to be like it was before,” I whimpered, annoyed at my own inability to stay mad at Dina for longer than a single breath. Even now, it was pointless to try. I gave in, hugged her, and we stayed like that, my face against her throat.
“We’re going to get married in September,” she said, letting go of me.
“What?!” I cried out.
“Ha ha, got you! Yeah, right—I’ll never get married, you know me better than that. But now I need to go and find the child and practice with her. You can stay here, we’ll be right back.”
And she left the room.
I lingered for a while in the spacious dining room with its handsome old sink, listening to the ticking of the clock on the wall, before deciding to leave. I already had my schoolbag in my hand—and then the music from the back room, the nicest room in the apartment, with windows that faced the street (though hardly any light came through them), put me under its spell, drew me in, and I knocked on the wooden door.
“Keto, it’s you! Come on in, my darling.” Lika beamed at me, and once again I was completely captivated by her openness. She had stuck a pencil in her hair in an attempt to tame the unruly strands, and was wearing overalls that flattered her figure almost as much as an elegant evening dress. She was barefoot, as she usually was at home, and her shapely toenails were painted a shimmering red.
“Where are the girls?” she asked.
“They’re practicing for Anano’s performance at school.”
“Oh, of course. Wait, I’ll turn the music down, you can’t hear yourself think in here.”
I wanted to stop her and ask her to take no notice of me, to simply carry on with her work as usual; I just wanted to watch, to witness her sorcery. But she turned her music down and offered me the little stool opposite her.
It was a room in which time stood still, like a portal to a parallel world. Here, perpetual security reigned. Here, everything smelled unchanged. Her tools, the names of which I didn’t yet know, always lay spread out on the floor, a teacup was always perched on something, and occasionally there was a cigarette in the ashtray. The outside world didn’t penetrate this far; this room didn’t give a damn where the world out there was marching off to. And for the first time I understood why I had always felt so comfortable and safe here, so at home: here, the world and its growing demands couldn’t hurt me. You couldn’t hear the megaphones in here, or the agitated television commentaries. The things that Lika held in her hands had already lived and defied time, and now this sorceress with the wild mane was plucking them from the clutches of decay and condemning them to be preserved. I was filled to the brim with this sudden realization. The desire to take root in that room, to become a part of this world and stay there forever, became almost physically painful. I have such a vivid memory of Lika working on the Biedermeier roll-top bureau that day. I remember the disorder around it, which in my eyes became a beautiful still life—sandpaper, an assortment of brushes, glue, screwdrivers, a hammer, sticks of wax, hinges. I remember it all: the artificial light from the industrial lamps, the magnifying glass she sometimes used, the imprint of her red lipstick on the teacup.
I still can’t explain why that afternoon came back me years later, as I stood in front of a fresco dating from between 20 and 40 B.C. in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome—that afternoon when I first stepped through the secret portal and lost my innocence. The pine tree in the fresco moved me to tears, and I wanted nothing more desperately than to be able to share the moment with Lika. The incredible intensity of the colors, the centuries layered over them, the countless human lives that had come into contact with that tree—the knowledge of all this collapsed in on me, catapulting me out of the here and now to somewhere beyond time and space.
“You seem much more interested in all this,” said Lika, her eyes sweeping the room, “than either of my daughters are.” She sipped her tea.
“I like this room a lot . . . I like that you’re rescuing something that would otherwise be thrown away,” I said, uncertainly.
“That’s a nice way of putting it,” she replied, enveloping me in her smile. I yearned for the down-to-earth peace this woman radiated so majestically; and now I understood that all that calm and security had little to do with the smell of wood glue or the still life with tools: it came from deep within her.
“You know, when I was your age, I wanted to be a singer. Can you imagine that?” she said softly, starting to clean a brush. I knew almost nothing about Lika; she seemed to live in a world of her own. When Dina and I took over the dining table, or horsed around on the bed, she moved around us on quiet feet, seemingly weightless. The only thing she couldn’t bear was rudeness. She wouldn’t stand for Dina being brusque, upsetting her sister, or answering back. Over time, I became Lika’s advocate, and dealt harshly with anyone who was critical of her. The Babudas, for instance; they were of the opinion that Dina and Anano had too much freedom, and that Dina in particular could do with a firmer hand from time to time. At school, too, all kinds of stories circulated about Lika’s free-spiritedness. I would stand up for her, not infrequently accusing her critics of jealousy, because—and this is something I am still convinced of—all those who felt the need to pass judgment on her secretly envied her freedom.
