The Lack of Light, page 56
One day, as I sat enjoying the splendor of my garden in full bloom, I found myself thinking that it was essentially the same story, approached from different ends. Ever since, I’ve always said both names, because, for me, it’s only the combination of the two perspectives that completes the story. Our story, too, can only be told from its various ends. When Nene accuses Ira of destroying her life, she’s both right and wrong at the same time. When Ira says she wanted to set her friend free, it’s true, but also very presumptuous. I see my brother’s happy face, and think of Dina’s horrified expression as she walked toward me in that bare hospital corridor. When I look at the picture of the two of them, their brazen happiness, all I can think of is Guga, that innocent giant, phoning in the middle of the night and dragging me out of bed. I’ve never again seen such shock in anyone’s eyes. And his younger brother was just as responsible for that shock as my own brother was. All of us contributed to it; we were all different ends of the same story, both betrayers and betrayed.
I WAS WOKEN by Eter’s voice, thick with sleep; she sounded annoyed. I forced myself out of bed and trailed down to the loggia, where she was leaning against the wall in her floor-length nightdress. She held out the receiver.
“Who is it? What’s the time?”
“It’s Nene’s brother. He wants to speak to you. It’s late—very late!” she said, and went back to her room. She wasn’t well: Oliko’s death had orphaned her, there was no other word for it. Looking at her, I could sense the hole that Oliko had left behind. She hadn’t said which brother it was. Alarmed by the lateness of the call, which meant it was sure to be bad news, I yelped a frightened “Yes?” into the receiver. I was sure something had happened to Nene, that she had fallen out with her rich Moscow husband and done something alarming.
It was Guga.
“What’s happened? How’s Nene, where is she?”
“It’s not Nene. Please can you come?”
“Now?”
“I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious.”
He sounded desperate, beside himself. I tried to extract some sort of useful information from him, but when I realized it was hopeless, I promised to come as soon as possible.
I dressed quickly, in the dark: I’d gotten used to finding my clothes in the closet just by feel, so as not to have to rely on a source of light. I tied back my hair, and left a note for Eter and Father on the table. The kitchen clock told me it was half past one in the morning.
Not long afterward, I ran breathlessly up the marble stairs and knocked softly on the big metal door. Guga opened in seconds. His eyes were red, and the color seemed to have completely drained from his face. All the lights were on, so I assumed Manana wasn’t there and I could move and speak freely. In the living room, I found a pair of high-heeled shoes spattered with mud. Puzzled, I looked around. I heard someone taking a shower at the back of the apartment, which perplexed me; it took me a while to realize that these shoes belonged to Anna Tatishvili. I’d never been able to picture these two as a couple. I mistrusted Anna’s sudden change of heart; after all, the whole neighborhood knew she’d been in love with the other Koridze brother for years. But I was pleased for Guga, whose tender devotion and loyalty I knew only too well.
“Is that Anna in the shower?” I asked cautiously. He nodded, and motioned for us to sit. We settled on the capacious three-piece suite; beside us was one of those vases with an imposing bouquet of Jesus’s tears. Guga put his face in his hands, and shook his head violently.
“I don’t know what to do. There’s something wrong with her. I told her to take a shower for now. I didn’t want to contact Zotne, he’s in Zugdidi at the moment. And I really don’t want Tapora and Manana to find her here when they get back—they’re in the countryside, at a relative’s funeral. I just didn’t know who else to call.”
“It’s not a problem, Guga, forget it. Just please tell me what’s going on. Did something happen to Anna?”
Even as the thought began to take shape in my head, I already knew the worst had happened.
“She’s confused, and she won’t talk to me. She called me at midnight from a telephone booth near that abandoned factory on the way out of town . . .” For some reason it seemed important to him to describe exactly where he had found Anna, so I nodded sympathetically. “I picked her up there. She was filthy, like she’d been wallowing in mud, she looked terrible, and her dress, her dress . . . She ignored all my questions, she was just babbling incoherently, like a crazy person.”
He seemed completely at a loss, as if he really had no idea what might have happened to a woman around midnight in an abandoned factory on the outskirts of town. Frantically, I tried to think what to do. I had to talk to Anna, even if we weren’t exactly friends. But I needed to know exactly what had been done to her, and above all by whom, to be sure neither my brother nor Levan had anything to do with it.
Just then Anna appeared in the living room. She was stark naked, and even in this utterly bizarre situation there was no overlooking her beauty: the thick, dripping hair writhing down her back like artful snakes, her marble-white body with the full thighs and delicate ankles, her heavy breasts, and her long, immaculate neck all reminded me of Botticelli’s Venus. But when she stepped into the light I could see the many bruises, the purple patches on her thighs and belly. I jumped up and quickly fetched a towel from the bathroom, which I wrapped around her shoulders. She didn’t seem unduly surprised to see me. She greeted me with exaggerated friendliness, even gave me a kiss on the cheek. She must have been in pain, and suppressing it; I knew what that was like. Whatever had happened on the outskirts of town, she had survived it, and now all she wanted to do was forget.
“Do you have anything to eat? I’m dying of hunger,” she said, rubbing her hands. The towel fell to the ground, and she made no attempt to cover herself. She was clearly in shock. I had to do something.
“Guga, go and see what you’ve got.”
I wanted to speak to her without a male witness; I wanted to wake her from her nightmare, to be a sister to her, and find the perpetrators. Suddenly it felt like an existential necessity, as if my own fate depended on it. If this maltreated beauty could manage not to fall apart, then so would I.
“I think it would be a good idea if you put something on.” I made an effort to sound cheery. She followed me into Nene’s bedroom. Ignoring the wave of melancholy that engulfed me on entering my friend’s old room, I quickly opened one of her closets. Anna was much taller than Nene, but I found a loose cotton sweater and a skirt that had lost its elastic. I sat down on Nene’s bed, hoping she would sit beside me, but she stopped beside the little dressing table, and eventually took a seat on the stool in front of it.
“Guga really is such a sweet man . . .” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. She picked up a lipstick from the table.
“Yes, he is. And he seems happy with you.”
I couldn’t think what else to say. I wasn’t cut out for this; I had little acting ability, and the urge to go to the bathroom and look for a sharp object was strong.
“I’m happy too; very happy, in fact . . .”
The lie sent a shiver down my spine. I looked at her in the mirror and watched as she applied red lipstick in an increasingly wide arc. I watched her smear on her clownish war paint, and felt completely helpless. I couldn’t save her from herself, just as I couldn’t protect myself from myself, or from life, which spared us nothing, perhaps because it thought we were its bravest soldiers, its toughest brigade. Her nightmare sucked me in; the prospect of obliteration exerted a powerful fascination. Perhaps painting ourselves the face of a clown was the only, ridiculous refuge we had left.
Then Guga came crashing into the room. He begged her to tell him what had happened. It was terrible to watch him grope for a logical explanation, not permitting himself to think the obvious, as if even in his wildest dreams he couldn’t imagine that someone had violated her to try and discover her brother’s whereabouts.
As he spoke to her, she sat in front of the mirror with a soft smile, gazing steadily at herself. I sent him out, telling him it would be better if he made himself useful, and he obeyed without protest. A moment later we heard him busying himself in the kitchen, and the smell of butter and onions wafted through the house.
I went to the window and yanked it open; the room was stuffy, Nene’s absence hung in the air. I turned to Anna.
“Who was it, Anna? You have to tell me. They can’t be allowed to get away with this.”
“They caught me on the street and dragged me into the car, then they blindfolded me . . .”
“Was this about Otto?”
“It was a fun outing. Really, such fun,” she said suddenly, and laughed.
I shuddered. “How many were there?” I wanted to get some sort of clue, some sort of useful information from her.
“Two, or maybe five. It was fun, and Whitney Houston was playing in the car the whole time. Do you know Whitney Houston? I love her. I think she’s got an incredible voice.”
“Anna, should we get a doctor to examine you?”
“A doctor? Why?” She turned abruptly and stared at me in astonishment. “I’m not sick. We just went on an outing.”
I thought of Ophelia; I thought of Ophelia, dead, lying on a bed of flowers in the stream. Years later, standing in front of the Millais painting in the Tate Gallery, I suddenly felt acutely nauseous as Anna’s beautiful features superimposed themselves on the face in the painting; she gazed out at me, smeared in red lipstick, and I hastily left the room.
“That wasn’t an outing, Anna. We have to get you examined, you really don’t look well. Do you remember their faces? Was it anyone you knew? Was it about your brother?”
It made me sick to ask the question. What an irony that I, of all people, girlfriend to Saba’s brother, sister to Rati, should be the one to ask. I was seized with numbing shame. And all the while I was hoping that neither Levan nor Rati had anything to do with this.
“Did you know Guga’s asked me to marry him? You and I haven’t seen each other for quite a while, have we? I can’t think how long it’s been! Do you like Whitney Houston? I love her, I think she’s amazing! I have to retake two exams, I wasn’t very well in the spring, I’m finding it hard to concentrate at the moment. Are you still going out with the Iashvili boy? I thought you made a cute couple . . .”
She was talking to her reflection again. I shrank back, helpless.
“I really don’t know why I didn’t like you in school. I think it was because of your friend. Are you still so close, you and Dina? Inseparable . . . Like me and my girls. I hardly see them anymore, though, since the business with my brother . . . I often think of Tarik, too. What a senseless death . . .”
I didn’t want to interrupt her stream of consciousness: perhaps she would say something of her own accord about what had happened that night.
“. . . just like Saba.”
Suddenly she turned her pale eyes on me, and her mouth twisted in a grimace of pain. I thought of all her sunny prospects, the promises life had made to her when she was young, and now here she sat, in my absent friend’s clothes: a red-painted clown, her body covered in bruises. What wanton gods were playing this wicked game with us?
“Why! Why!”
The words burst from my throat, completely unbidden, an accusation. Anna stared at me in surprise, then nodded sympathetically. She stood up, came over to me, gave me a maternal pat on the cheek, and before she left the room, she whispered in my ear:
“Because we women can take it.”
I WOKE HIM with a scream. I hurled myself at his bed and seized him by the shoulders. I was haunted by the events of the previous night; Anna’s madness gave me no peace. I wanted to smash through the shield of supercilious aloofness he had put up around himself in recent months, to shatter his entire degenerate world, a world where women were turned into Ophelias. I spat in the face of my own inadequacy, and the desolation that, in this country, they called the future; I threw my whole weight against hopelessness. I didn’t want to have to take anything anymore. I didn’t want to wait any longer, I didn’t want to tolerate anything else. That morning I was prepared to take on the world, regardless of the consequences. Dina was right: the war was already here, it was being fought in our streets, in our courtyard, in our kitchens, in our beds. It was ridiculous to try to protect yourself from it; there were no more hiding places, anything that appeared undamaged was just another trap. I should ask Dina to take me with her, commit every single battlefield to memory, never close my eyes to anything again, never run away from anything. We should all show ourselves, we should all reveal our scars, he should look at me, my brother should look at me.
“What the hell?” He sat up, bare-chested, rubbed his eyes, and glared at me. “Have you lost your mind?”
“What did you do to her?” I was screaming like a banshee.
“To who? Who are you talking about? What’s going on?” He grabbed my wrists and threw me onto the bed. “Calm down, you’re completely hysterical!”
“I don’t want to calm down, I want to know whether you’ve got anything to do with this disgusting business! Did you send someone?”
He was still holding me fast; my wrists began to hurt. But I resisted, fought back, did not relent, until he had to use even greater force.
“What are you talking about? Are you high?”
“Anna Tatishvili! What did you do to her?”
“Anna? What about Anna? What’s happened?”
“She . . . last night, she . . . they . . .” It felt as if I was suffocating. But Rati seemed to have understood.
“Do you think I’m the kind of man who would do something like that to a woman?”
“You threatened Dina with a knife.”
He stared at me, appalled. Then he leaped out of bed and hastily started pulling on his clothes.
“Swear to me that you had nothing to do with it!”
He stood there with his back to me. Then, slowly, he turned to face me, and I saw in him the little boy he had once been, that openhearted, needy little boy, always teasing and annoying me, always wanting to be reassured of my love, the boy who worshipped our dead mother and gave the Babudas smacking kisses on their hands when he was especially happy, who told my father dirty jokes just to see his scandalized expression: this restless, unreliable boy, with the most beautiful smile in the world—I recognized him again. And I promised myself that I would never again let him slip away.
“I swear to you by Deda,” he said, simply.
And I believed him.
“Levan . . . ?” I murmured.
“What do you want?”
“Levan. Fetch him. You have to question him.”
“There is no way, no way he would ever do something so . . . Not in a million years!”
“He’s obsessed with getting revenge on Otto. Maybe he just snapped. Fetch him!”
It felt vitally important, as if my whole existence depended on assuring myself that neither of these men were to blame. Anna’s misfortune was also mine; her survival or collapse would be mine, as well.
“Levan would never do something like that. Not behind my back.”
“You are so blind . . . This isn’t about you, you’re not always the center of the universe. He’s battling his own demons, and you’ve been giving him the cold shoulder the past few weeks, ever since he and I—”
“With good reason. That’s the price he pays for bedding my sister!” Rati was dressed now, about to storm out of the apartment. I seized my last chance, and clung to him. He tried to shake me off, but ended up dragging me out with him onto the walkway, where I hit my head on one of Nadya Alexandrovna’s heavy flowerpots. I cried out, fell, lay still. Immediately he bent over me, alarmed, then sat down on the dusty floor and put my head in his lap. I curled up into a little ball; I wanted him to hold me tight, and I wanted to hold on to him, the brother of my childhood.
“Keto . . . does it hurt?”
“Fetch him.”
BEFORE LONG, Levan was at the door of our apartment. Since he had made our relationship official, his relationship with Rati had cooled. He didn’t hide his resentment that Rati had demoted him, assigning him tasks he felt were beneath him, when for years now Levan had been his right-hand man. I hadn’t seen him either, not since our excursion to Bakuriani that had spiraled so out of control. I was secretly hoping he would apologize, while also knowing that this would never happen. The moment he entered the apartment I could feel the spark of attraction between us, but that was irrelevant now. The three of us sat down at the dining table.
“What’s so urgent?” asked Levan eventually.
“Anna Tatishvili.”
Levan’s face remained expressionless. He stared back at my brother, eyebrows raised, and drew on his cigarette.
“It seems something’s happened to Anna, but Keto hasn’t told me what exactly.” Rati sipped his coffee indifferently, and for a moment I wished they had seen what I had seen that night: Anna’s red-painted face, her frightening laughter, her dance on the edge of the abyss. “I’ve already assured her that we had nothing to do with it. And now she wants to hear it from you.”
I stared at Levan from the side, and thought I saw a disquieting flash of something I couldn’t quite put into words. My head started spinning again, and I hastily opened the window.
“What happened to Anna?” Again, that brief flash of unease appeared between his eyebrows.
I looked Levan dead in the eye. “Did you have something to do with it?”
