The Lack of Light, page 40
“You shouldn’t be . . .” I said, automatically. In fact, I had no real idea of what she should or shouldn’t be doing—what any of us should or shouldn’t be doing.
“And Saba shouldn’t be dead, and his murderer shouldn’t be alive. The baby should have a father, and God should have struck my family down with a thunderbolt—the day Otto Tatishvili put a ring on my finger, if not before.” She was speaking in a calm monotone. I glimpsed the little girl she had once been shimmering through her defiance: in a flash, the prudent, protective mother had disappeared and the willful, self-absorbed, immoderate girl was standing before me again, the girl who was never allowed to be herself.
“How long will she be gone?” Nene seemed to be shaking something off; she started walking, and changed the subject.
“I think it’s two semesters. And her English is incredibly good, I mean . . .”
“Yes, I know. There’s nothing she can’t do, except . . .”
“Except?”
She didn’t answer. She turned her attention to the ancient, enchanted trees we were passing. I was thinking something I didn’t want to say out loud, though I hadn’t been able to put it out of my mind since Ira’s visit to Kakheti: in addition to the professional opportunities, I sensed that America might represent a kind of personal liberation for her. I hoped the distance from Nene would stop Ira needing her so much. I wanted her to find people who thought like she did and loved like she did; I wanted her to have a chance to be herself.
“I’ll talk to her,” said Nene, breaking our long silence.
“I know it’s hard; it’s hard for us all to let her go, especially now, but . . .”
“Have you let him go?” she asked, turning her azure-blue eyes on me.
I lowered my head. I knew who she was talking about, and I didn’t have an answer to her question. I hadn’t seen him since I’d been back; apparently he had gone to the countryside with his parents. His mother wasn’t well. And every time I turned into the courtyard, I would look up at his apartment to see if the shutters were open, and give a sigh of disappointment when I realized there was still no one there.
“He hasn’t been in touch for weeks, Nene.”
“He’ll never be whole again. You must know that, Keto.” I wondered at these crystal-clear and profoundly sad words coming from Nene’s lips, the lips of the greatest optimist I had ever met. She wasn’t expecting a response; she turned on her heel, and signaled that she wanted to go back, go home, back into battle.
AS THE MILD, bewitching fall arrived, the house of cards that was our country began to collapse. Despite the ceasefire agreed at the start of September, in the weeks that followed the sea washed up one corpse after another. People who had once lived side by side were now enemies. Defenseless against the arbitrariness of the Russian guns, refugees began arriving in the interior of the country. The so-called Georgian armed forces were a motley bunch: clueless fathers and underage boys taken off the street and put on trucks; a few patriots with romantic notions, desperate to prove their heroism; artists who used to preach pacifism and now, gripped by some strange fever, felt called upon to defend their country; and members of the Mkhedrioni, who continued their looting. But it was also heroin, the wonder-drug that had appeared out of nowhere, that was luring men to the war. We were not yet familiar with this colorless, odorless poison, and had no idea of the powerful spell it cast, robbing people of their souls; it flowed through our streets, crueler even than the war and the Russian Kalashnikovs. Maya and her indestructible enthusiasm brought me back to the Academy, and I clung to the irregular regularities of my degree. Now and then I thought of Reso, and several times I fished his phone number out of the drawer, but I always stopped short of calling. What was I meant to say to him?
IT MUST HAVE been early September: our doorbell rang, and I remember my knees starting to tremble and my mouth going instantly dry. I was incapable of uttering a single word. Levan simply took me in his arms, and whispered in my ear, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry for everything. Please forgive me, I never want to hurt you again—I love you, Keto!”
And even if I hadn’t believed him, I needed these words; I had thirsted for them, and at that moment it felt as though someone had freed me from a dark, windowless room where I’d been held for months against my will. Everything collapsed inwards, and the sensation of falling was beautiful. I wrapped my arms around him, and for a second I really thought the worst was over, that from now on we would harvest only happiness, as recompense for all that we had been through.
I remember going out without telling anyone; I just slipped on my sneakers and followed him into the warm September sun. We wandered aimlessly. We got lost; we lost the city; the world fell away like a scab from a healed wound, and in those hours we felt healed, too. We had healed ourselves.
He talked about Saba, ceaselessly, recalling only the best, most beautiful things about his brother. I listened, soaking up every word as if I already knew these moments would be rare from now on. I saw it as what I wanted it to be: a profession of faith for me, for us. I hooked my arm through his, and it felt so natural to be together, so obviously right. He was tender and attentive, offering me his denim jacket when the sun went down, putting his arm around my shoulders for all to see. I was so grateful to him for that. Then eventually—it must have been somewhere near Pikris Gora—he pulled me to him and kissed me, unselfconsciously. The kiss, too, seemed easy, as if we’d been doing nothing else since childhood.
With him at my side, I suddenly felt something like love for our city once more. Maltreated, suffering, plunged into chaos, it seemed to have known nothing but occupation, liberation, blood, tears, and war, over and over again, ever since it was founded a millennium and a half ago. And all the life it had seen in between: all the people who had struggled, century after century, to obtain their tiny portion of happiness, and whose fate had so often been decided in some other place. We, too, were now a part of the city: the blood of all those who had built this place, and who had fallen here, the blood of those who had been betrayed, who had loved and celebrated here, who had been arrested and deported, who had vanished leaving no grave behind, only tracks leading into oblivion—their blood flowed in our veins. We too were children of time; we too were her promised brides. She held us tightly in her clutches, and yet that day we wanted to escape her, to trick and outwit her; we felt invincible because we were in love, and people in love can claim the right to remain untouched by the world.
A friend had given him the key to his apartment. We could go there, he said, if I wanted to. A moment of hesitation made me pause before answering. Our last encounter was branded on my memory. But the fear quickly dissipated when I looked into his bright face. “Alright, let’s go,” I said, taking his hand. I marveled at my own decisiveness. Outside the university, I stopped at a phone booth and called home. I didn’t want Father or the Babudas to send my brother out looking for us. I invented a plausible excuse for staying out late, and hung up.
The apartment was stuffy and cramped, its windowsills populated with little cacti. Levan seemed to know these rooms, navigating them easily and lighting an oil lamp. Then he peeled a couple of persimmons, as carefully as if he were performing an operation, and offered them to me. The dim light gave his face a saintly aspect; he looked like a martyr, with his thick hair and prominent cheekbones. A strange, feverish excitement had taken hold of him since we’d entered the dingy apartment.
“Have you spoken to Rati?” The question was a crucial one for me.
“I will, I promise.”
“I’m not a secret you have to keep. I don’t want any more ridiculous hiding, all this secrecy. I can’t do it . . .” I touched his chin, wanting him to look at me. “We can speak to him together, if you like. I’m not afraid of my brother.” I wondered, as I said it, whether that was true: whether Rati’s anger—and this would make him angry, that much was certain—would really leave me cold.
“Out of the question. I have to take care of this myself.” Without waiting for a response, he stood up and kissed me fiercely. I relented, not wanting to delay any longer. He unbuttoned my shirt, but when I went to pull up his shirt, he gripped my hand.
“Stay there—just keep standing there,” he said, and his hands began to crawl over me like lizards. He undressed me slowly, and I had to summon all my courage to withstand his gaze. At the last moment, I stopped him from taking off my pants. The final pieces of clothing could only fall once the lamp had been extinguished, when the darkness would ensure he didn’t see my scars. He was so practiced and self-assured that a wave of jealousy washed over me; I wondered where and with whom he could have learned all this. These fluid movements, the expert kisses he scattered all over my skin. His eyes were shameless and direct, the eyes of an experienced man, not a boy tricking life into believing he was grown up. He was careful, wanting to give me pleasure. The Levan from the car in the woods seemed to have disappeared. I hoped—no, I tried to convince myself—that he was gone forever.
I approached his body with childish curiosity, wanting to map him like a cartographer, to capture him with all his scratches and unevenness, his warmth and restlessness. He let me do it, he let himself fall; yet when I reached his loins, he jerked me upright and threw me onto the bed.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. I said nothing, not grasping why my desire to love him unreservedly should meet with such distaste. I swallowed my confusion, and my reawakened unease.
And on that lukewarm September night, when I loved so hungrily (in my imagination it was that same night, though I know there was no way it could have been—days, if not weeks, must have passed between these events), my friends were also altering the course of time, partly with intent, and partly with no notion of the consequences. In my memory, these events have fused inseparably together. They shape each other; they seem intertwined, different strands of the same story, because I cannot tell my own story without them. Without Dina, Nene, and Ira, I would be a mere fragment.
Nene was packing the suitcase she would take to the Black Sea coast—to a part of that coast where no corpses would wash up. And she had summoned her most faithful follower to her kingdom, locking the door behind them, as if wanting to protect her unborn child from any harmful influence, any critical word, any unkind look from her family. It was late evening. Her mother was asleep, Zotne was out, and Guga had started spending all his time at a sports club. Saba’s death had left its mark on him, too, although they had never been close. Guga was slowly withdrawing from the life lived by his uncle and brother, and rediscovering his earlier passions. He had always been into sport, but more as a keen observer, and now, for the first time, he was daring to pursue his own sporting ambitions. It had been obvious very early on that Guga wasn’t cut out for his family’s twilight world; he moved in it as if across a frozen lake, always expecting the ice to break. He’d never had the strength to rebel against his brother or his uncle, but the devastating tragedy his beloved sister had been drawn into seemed to have sparked a radical change in him; it had unleashed something. Nene told us about his love of freestyle wrestling, once a popular sport in Georgia, which none of us knew anything about. When I saw him walking down the street one day, outside the former Central Committee building, I barely recognized him. I had to look several times to convince myself that it really was Guga, so great was the alteration in his posture, and above all in what had been a slightly flabby, awkward body, now transformed into that of a steely athlete.
Ira stretched out on Nene’s bed and watched her stuffing everything into her case, listlessly, haphazardly, until suddenly she paused, as if all the strength had gone out of her, and flopped onto the big bed beside her friend. Nene nestled against her, laid her head on Ira’s flat chest, inhaled her scent.
“You’re not coming with me. You’ll go to America. You’ll do it for me,” she said firmly, brushing an unruly strand of hair off Ira’s face. Ira gave a start. Nene’s breath smelled of ripe cherries and bliss, but instead of offering her a refuge, her friend’s words were chasing her away.
“Who told you?”
“That doesn’t matter. You’re going to the States, or I won’t ever speak another word to you.” Nene was not going to tolerate any objection. Her face was just a few centimeters from Ira’s, and she looked deep into her eyes.
“I won’t abandon you again.”
“I will have the baby. Whatever happens. You don’t need to worry about me. But you have to go your own way. For my sake, too,” she said, stroking Ira’s cheek.
Ira felt everything slipping away from her. If Nene had known what mission she was sending her friend on, and how differently Ira would interpret her request, would she still have sent her away? Would she still have forced Ira to seek freedom?
“But I’ve already turned the scholarship down.”
“Then you’ll reverse the decision. You can do it.”
“I can’t believe they told you,” Ira muttered, feeling herself turn red with anger.
“I would have found out anyway. I want you to go.”
“But I want to stay with you,” said Ira, a tear rolling down her cheek. “Oh, Nene—I’m so sorry.”
“I know. I know you are, Irinka.”
“I could always try again later. I mean, there’ll be another program next year—”
“Don’t be silly! No one can say what will happen next year. And that’s why you and I are going to go to the university tomorrow morning, and you’re going to reverse your decision.”
“But I’d have to be there by the end of the month. I won’t see you when you get home.” She wept. She wept without restraint, without hiding her tears.
“You’ll come back. And I’ll be here waiting for you—we all will. Where else would we be?” Nene grinned, her blue eyes wide, and Ira searched for the usual uncertainty in them, but found only an unfamiliar, leaden determination.
“It’s a long time—a whole year. Anything can happen in that time. For you, for all of us in this fucking country. And I’d be far away, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have the money to come home straight away if anything happened. Maybe you could come . . .”
“You can see that I can’t leave. What would I do anywhere else? I can’t do anything. I don’t speak English or French or any other cool language. God, I’m chained to this place like Amiran to the Caucasus.”
Before turning back to her suitcase, Nene took Ira’s chin in her hand and pressed a damp, warm kiss onto her lips. It meant everything and promised nothing, and they stayed like that for a few moments. Ira couldn’t help but follow her instincts; she wrapped her arms around her friend, daring to put her lips to her throat and whisper, “Nene, I want to stay with you.”
“I know, Irinka. I know you do,” Nene replied calmly. She freed herself from the clinch with a gentle tug, and turned back to the mountain of clothes. Perhaps that was the moment when Ira finally realized that she had to leave.
WHENEVER I THINK of this fateful goodbye, I see Dina, elsewhere, putting a finger to my brother’s lips. In my imagination, it happened just as Ira was recognizing that Nene could never give her what her nameless love sought so desperately, and as Levan was forcing me to wrap my desire in a mantle of respectability.
That night, Rati was in a strangely unselfconscious mood. He had sent his friends away and picked Dina up from the newspaper office without his ever-present retinue. Together they had walked through the fall streets, watched the whirling leaves, held hands, kissed beneath a broken streetlight, then eaten lobio and drunk beer in a deserted bar on the right bank of the river. They had embraced and whispered declarations of love to one another, and walked home along the riverbank in the shade of the plane trees. Dina was about to go down the basement steps when Rati held her back and asked her to come upstairs with him. The family would be asleep already, and no one would disturb them.
In his room, he put a record on, and they danced in a close embrace. He kept brushing her wild hair out of her face, and looking at her as if he couldn’t believe his luck. It’s strange: I have never wanted to picture my brother’s lovemaking, and I had no reason to go into his room, but this scene, which Dina recounted to me in detail, is one I can see as if it is playing out in a movie, with Rati in the lead role. At this point on the time axis, when, in my imagination, our biographies so clearly intersect—the point we had been inexorably steering toward ever since our escape from the zoo—I can’t help but think of my brother. I see his face before me, as if there’s something specific I need to discover there, something that might have escaped me, that could have been crucial for everything that followed.
In my movie, Rati unbuttoned Dina’s blouse, and tugged at the zip of her favorite gray jeans; she made a move to stop him, to signal that this wasn’t the place to give themselves to one another fully. But his urge had to be satisfied, the emotion drunk down to the very last drops. In my movie, she let herself be swept away by it, as she always did with uncompromising passion, which exerted a magical pull on her. And so she let herself be guided by his desire, waited for the right moment—yes, even in her abandon she stayed entirely true to herself—then snatched the rudder from his hand. Obedience was foreign to her, and so it must have been she who undressed him, placing a forefinger on his lips to remind him to be quiet and not wake the Babudas. Many people mistook Dina’s lack of shame for shamelessness. She was free in her thought and her emotion, so why should she tame her body? In this sense, she was completely childlike: nonjudgmental, and extremely curious. In my movie, they made love breathlessly, and she closed his mouth with her kisses. They were reckless, extracting wordless promises from each other, their hands brushing away the dark premonitions; their shadows, scarcely able to keep pace with what was happening, froze on the walls and ceiling, and looked on in astonishment. Rati and Dina were so unashamedly young and insatiable, so intoxicated with each other, so arrogant in their togetherness, little bolts of lightning striking their bellies, their ribs, the insides of their mouths. They lost all interest in the outside world; they simply forgot it. Everything they needed, they found in one another. She sat astride him and moved as if this were some sort of pagan ritual, and she was trying to placate angry gods, while his desire clouded the windows. They were united, and nothing seemed able to part them: not the century wheezing toward its end, not the war, and not the great uncertainty we called the future. Together, they were invulnerable. They held hands, dancing a rhythmical and perfectly learned dance, choreographed just for the two of them. Tenderness dripped from her forehead, and he caught it in his mouth. He admired her, the Amazon, above him, the only one he allowed to defeat him. He admired her breasts, which shone in the dim light, the elegant curve of her throat, her protruding ribs, the unfathomable place between her thighs, her slightly rounded, childish belly, her tiny belly button, her wiry arms, her powerful hips, her wild hair—tousled, sweaty—the glow in her eyes, and wanted never to return from her endless labyrinth of secrets.
