The Lack of Light, page 6
Her hopes turned to dust. First, she received a letter from Astrakhan saying that the prisoner had been conscripted to work on a construction project, and had died in an accident. Then the Great Patriotic War was declared, and both her brother, Guram, and her new husband were posted to the front. The following year, her beloved brother, who wrote poems in German and sang Puccini arias “like no other,” was killed in action on the Kerch Peninsula. “He wasn’t made for war; he had the soul of a swan,” Eter would say at this juncture, and I would try to imagine a Guram who wasn’t my father of the same name, a Guram who wrote poems in German and had a swan’s soul, but with the best will in the world I couldn’t do it.
She barely knew her husband: only from the letters he wrote her from the front, in which she desperately tried to see a war hero, since he was unsuited to being a romantic one. He left just one significant trace in her life, and that only because, as Fate would have it, he was wounded in the last year of the war and transferred to a hospital in Tbilisi to recover. It must have been while he was there that my father was conceived. Guram was already a half-orphan when he came into the world: his father had scarcely recovered before he was sent back into battle, and did not survive the war’s final days.
Eter’s status as a young war widow made her life a little more bearable; she swallowed her anger and disappointments like bitter but necessary medicine, rolled up her sleeves, and began to reinvent her life. She gave her son the name of her beloved brother, Guram, and remembered things that had made her happy. She thought of the light-filled afternoons in which she and her brother had vied with each other in reciting poetry, competing for praise from their German governess, Martha. Now, she returned again and again to this magical place, salvaging what was left. And although many were surprised—the war was only just over, and German the language of the enemy—she decided to study German, because for her there was another Germany, too: Martha’s Germany, the Germany of her father, where he had often traveled on business, the Germany of the Brothers Grimm and Heine and Kleist and Novalis and Hölderlin—and, of course, her beloved Goethe.
She studied German, and even got a scholarship, which just about enabled her to get by. The number of times my brother and I had to listen to her saying that the German language and culture had saved her life . . . She remained loyal to the language until the end; she found comfort and warmth in it, goodness, and nobility—everything life had denied her after her father’s arrest and abduction. My brother used to tease her in a way that never failed: she would get terribly upset and indignant every time he said that German sounded “like a jackhammer” and that he refused to learn it.
I actually regret that I didn’t somehow document the hours of squabbling and argument between her and Babuda Two about the advantages of the German versus the French language. These were gladiatorial battles, true master classes in the art of the verbal duel. The absurd arguments that were sometimes put forward, all the things they cited in their defense: The Nibelungen Saga versus The Song of Roland, Goethe versus Racine, Voltaire versus Kant, Musil versus Proust. These constant quarrels, the never-ending arguments, the comparison of French and German virtues, were the ongoing accompaniment to my childhood. And we all knew that there could be no winner in this battle, that the unsatisfactory stalemate would endure.
“German is the most wonderful language in the world, if for no other reason than that ‘life’ and ‘love’ are only separated by one little ‘I,’” said Babuda One at the breakfast table one sunny morning. My father was buried in his newspaper, my brother and I were squabbling about something, Oliko had the radio on in the background, playing kitschy folk songs: everything as it always was. Already we could sense the epic discussion looming up on the horizon.
“Deda, please, not again, and especially not now!” my father groaned.
“What? It needs to be said.” Satisfied, Eter glanced in Oliko’s direction. She was acting as if she hadn’t heard, but you could see that she respected her rival and thought this a very skillful opening.
“Would you pass me the butter, please, my little sunbeam?” said Oliko, turning to my brother.
Eter did not expect praise, but you could tell that she felt the banality of this sentence constituted a small victory. She went on eating contentedly. The counterattack came just as we were all about to rise from the table.
“And do you know why French is the most beautiful language in the world?” Oliko’s flashing eyes rested on each of us for a moment. (We were accustomed to the fact that we were always drawn into these eternal arguments; we were their arena, we spurred them on; without us the game would be pointless and boring.) “Because it’s only in French that orgasm is described as a ‘little death.’ La petite mort,” she added, with relish, in her elegant French.
My father choked on his tea.
“Have you completely lost your mind? The children are at the table!” Eter interjected immediately. But the rebuke was half-hearted; you could sense her admiration for her opponent.
“What’s an orgasm?” asked my brother, beaming at the two elderly women and feigning innocence.
ETER KIPIANI WAS regarded as a great authority by the German faculty of the state university where she worked, first as a professor, and later as head of department. Her son, my father Guram, was old beyond his years; he tried to meet his mother’s high intellectual standards, and, even when he was just a schoolboy, to keep pace with his mother’s favorite students, whom she talked about constantly. She confided in her son, telling him all her worries and problems, but she underestimated the emotional burden this placed on him. Over the course of his life, my father developed a strategy for dealing with his dominant mother, to which he adhered until she died: he gave her what she wanted to hear and see, and kept to himself all that really worried him or weighed on his mind. To this day, I am convinced that this was precisely where the two Babudas’ perpetual rivalry began: in my father’s heart.
From a very young age, Father displayed tremendous enthusiasm for the natural sciences. Listening to his class teacher, his mother nodded silently, then observed, with a touch of regret in her voice, “I wish I could have sparked his interest in the important things in life . . .”
The teacher stared at Eter in bewilderment. “I was planning to enter him for the National Student Mathematics Olympiad!” she said. Eter just shrugged.
He won the Olympiad, and the following year he was sent to a school for gifted children, where he learned alongside other bespectacled math geniuses. It was there, however, that he discovered his great passion: physics. And, after graduating top of his class—with the “Red Diploma” he mentioned so often, especially to my brother—he decided that physics was what he would study. With recommendations from some of his teachers, he managed to get accepted by the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, one of the most elite institutes in the Soviet Union.
MY MOTHER’S MOTHER, Babuda Two—officially Olga, but generally known as Oliko—had a story no less tragic than that of her perpetual adversary. She too came into the world in the confusion of the Sovietization of Georgia, and as a child of the bourgeoisie she, like Eter, would have had all she needed to lead a carefree, light-footed life. A beautiful one, above all. Because, unlike my father’s mother, she was an aesthete to the core; every part of her was thoroughly addicted to beauty. She judged everything in the world by its beauty, and once she decided a thing was beautiful—a flower, a person, a house, a cat, or a book—it was the object of her absolute delight, at least until her next discovery. She had to be continuously in love: with the world, with people, with herself. She had to be enraptured, besotted, drunk on all that surrounded her, in order to feel alive. This characteristic, I’m sure of it, was what saved her life so often, and prevented her, despite all her grievous losses—including, ultimately, the loss of her own child—from becoming bitter or forfeiting her greatest gift: the ability to look for miracles in the most commonplace things. Yes, Babuda One was certainly right when she said Oliko was like a butterfly: fluttering, beautiful, but utterly inconstant. Sometimes her interest would fade as quickly as it had flared up, and of course most of her plans and projects were never realized, which Eter, who was a very conscientious woman, found deeply suspect. But for Oliko, that wasn’t what really mattered.
Now, in retrospect, I can scarcely think of anyone else who possessed such an unlimited capacity for happiness. And the fact that life was so miserly in granting happiness to her seems to me as unfair as it is stupid. Because life should make concessions to a person who is prepared to celebrate it every day; it should dance with them, their whole life long. But as is so often the case, life didn’t care what expectations we had of it. With Oliko, it was above all the Bolsheviks who didn’t care.
Oliko’s father was a surgeon, and a Francophile social democrat right from the start, an ardent supporter of the republic that only managed to survive in his sunny homeland for three years. Although his brother, who had managed to emigrate to France before the Russian Revolution, suggested he come and join him, he decided to stay in his homeland. Things wouldn’t get that bad: that was what he kept repeating, until the day he was humiliated and dispossessed, picked up by black-clad Chekists and thrown into Metekhi Prison. (Oliko always called them “Chekists,” and it was some time before I realized that the Chekists and the Bolsheviks were one and the same.) Apparently he always insisted that they would think twice before putting the head physician of the Mikhailovsky Hospital behind bars. And then, when he was arrested, according to Oliko he didn’t say a word; he just pulled out a suitcase, already packed, from beneath his bed.
Over the years, this battered brown suitcase became, for me too, a symbol of all the colossal, eruptive forces that can smash into our lives overnight, laying waste to everything we have built through years of hard work.
Long, agonizing months of uncertainty began. For nights on end, Oliko’s mother stood outside Metekhi Prison, which was packed full of people who couldn’t bring themselves to worship false idols.
“Deportation would have been worse. At least he had hope that he would stay in his hometown and be near his family,” Eter would regularly interrupt at this point, as if she needed to compete with her dearly beloved rival even over degrees of suffering. By the time Oliko started to tell the story of the only meeting between her mother and father—how her mother had managed to bribe the guards, and had smuggled the package of food and a few clean clothes, put together with the utmost difficulty, inside the thick prison walls; how her father, sick and weak with diphtheria, had dropped the package because his hands were shaking too badly—Eter would have had enough, and would interrupt Oliko with some pointed remark. At least her mother had managed to get something to her father . . . Oliko would lose her temper and snap at Babuda One in her characteristic high-pitched voice: “How dare you presume to say such a thing! You have no idea what it was like for my mother, or how we felt! At least they left you your mother—mine was snatched away from me as well . . .”
And so the whole drama would start over from the beginning, with, in the main roles, Eter, the stern, disciplined, harsh mother of our father, and Oliko, the dreamy, eternally romantic, childishly enthusiastic mother of our dead mother.
Scenes like these usually ended with one of the two taking offense and storming out of the room, ceding the field to her rival. Either way, we remained in the clutches of their stories. There didn’t seem to us to be much difference between them: they were equally sad, equally horrifying, and equally distant. My brother and I were condemned to be eternal listeners; even my brother, who turned his back so decisively on his family later on with his uncompromising rebellion, understood back then that they needed us, even more than we needed them. That their tragedies and comedies had always played out behind closed doors, and that this in itself may have been the biggest drama of their lives.
Oliko’s father was spared the gulag. The ignoble conditions in the prison, the non-existent hygiene, and above all the dehumanization of his fellow inmates by the guards, which the once-cheerful doctor was forced to witness, were soon the death of him. And just when the family thought the worst was over, their mother too was taken away and deported, to Pechora, in the autonomous republic of Komi. Packed together like cattle on a small boat with cramped, windowless cabins, they cut through the high waves of the White Sea, voyaging to the end of the world, to where survival was only possible if you set aside your humanity, like a gorgeous silken cloak that proves useless in the depths of winter.
Then came the part that brought tears to my brother’s eyes and mine, no matter how often we heard it, or how well we knew each word Oliko used to describe what she only found out from a survivor many years later: how her mother, in the Arctic wilderness, in the unimaginable cold, had taught the other women in the camp Georgian polyphony, and how they had sung “Tsitsinatela” together while chopping wood. At this point, Oliko’s voice would crack, and there followed an unbearable silence that none of us could bring ourselves to fill.
Oliko’s sister, who, according to Oliko, had never in her life so much as scrambled an egg, but would read in three different languages for days on end, felt duty bound to find a way of ensuring that she and Oliko would be more secure. And so, like my Babuda One, she married an apparatchik (another word that seemed strange and threatening to me, like a dangerous magical creature from a fairy tale): a member of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. She said “I do” to a man she profoundly despised. All her life Oliko was unable to shake her guilt about the sacrifice her sister had made for her. They both survived. And they survived the war that made the whole world tremble and turned back the clock to year zero.
When Oliko’s ambitious apparatchik brother-in-law was offered a position on the Supreme Board of the National Economy in Moscow, Oliko stayed behind on her own. Her brother-in-law did at least leave her his spacious apartment near the university, where she enrolled to study French language and literature, seeing it as a way of paying her father the respect he was due. In her first year, she promptly fell in love with a young professor whom she called “my troubadour,” and flung herself headlong into the adventure of love. She had grown up to be a very attractive young woman. (I can still see all the black-and-white photos with the serrated edges that immortalized her as such.) She was dainty, and exuded an aura of timelessness, entirely at odds with the dismal, ominous, postwar reality. People had experienced too much horror; now they thirsted for beauty, of which Oliko was happy to give a great deal. At first, the two of them had to keep their love secret; she was his student, after all, although only slightly younger than him. And so they had clandestine meetings in covered passageways, and in the shadowy, cobbled alleys of the Old Town. It was probably in this period, when she had to spread her love across the whole of the city and its hiding places, that Oliko absorbed Tbilisi as if it were a poem.
“Ninoshvili Street is good for eating plums and telling jokes.” She would often come out with peculiar remarks like this. “Behind the caravanserai is a wonderful place for kissing; there’s a gorgeous rose garden there.”
It seems her love was only suited to hiding places, covert whispers and surreptitious glances, because as soon as it was dragged into the light it wilted, like a shade-loving plant that scorches in the sun. Oliko could already sense on the way to the registry office that the magic was fading, but she couldn’t bring herself to scupper the event she had yearned for for so long. Her marriage lasted precisely one year. Oliko made a great effort to be a model housewife, even giving up her post as a teacher of French language and literature. But her troubadour had long since metamorphosed into a typical Caucasian man who expected to find his shirts ironed and laid out on the chair every morning, and a hot meal when he got home. Oliko was dying of boredom, and took to going on long walks, humming French songs to herself along the way. It was with one of these songs that she captivated a well-dressed gentleman in a smart hat who was looking around for a new apartment following a painful divorce.
The well-dressed gentleman was a chivalrous engineer and enthusiastic mountaineer, which is how Oliko discovered her love for the Caucasian Mountains. Her love of mountains outlasted this second short, and similarly childless, marriage. It was after her second separation that Oliko finally found her vocation, to which she remained true all her life. She began to translate French literature. At this point in the story, she liked to add, giggling like a little girl, that she lost her translator’s virginity to Anatole France. Husbands came and went, but France, La Rochefoucauld, Rolland, Balzac, Sand, Flaubert, Verne, Montaigne all remained, as did the “love of her life,” Baudelaire, some of which she translated illegally for samizdat publication.
At the Union of Soviet Writers, she got to know an editor on the poetry committee, who became her third and last husband, and our unknown grandfather. This respectable editor with the heroic literary name of Tariel loved poetry, good wine, and beautiful women, and was preceded by a valiant reputation: he had been present at the storming of the Reichstag in Berlin, and a cluster of medals adorned his breast. Oliko’s third marriage ultimately left her with something far more meaningful than the mountains or the secret alleyways of the city: a daughter, whom she christened Esma, after a woman she had met on a hike up Mount Kazbek. The woman had given her goats’ milk to drink, so Oliko’s beauty would bring her and her goats good luck. And although Oliko detested goats’ milk, the story goes that she drank the pitcher dry.
Tariel was a good father, but he was not a good husband. His hunger for wine and women was insatiable, and after five years, the marriage ended in divorce. Shortly before Rati was born, Tariel died of a heart attack en route to a tryst with his new flame.
Esma grew up to be an adventurous young woman, and she met my father in the city her mother-in-law so despised. She became our mother, and lived her life without speed limits, until one dull, damp February morning, at a dizzying tempo . . . But that’s another story, and I’m telling you about our courtyard.
