The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

I was living in a foreign country; I had cut myself off from most of the people I’d once loved, those who used to mean something to me, and had accepted a visiting professorship that, though it guaranteed me a livelihood, had absolutely nothing to do with who I really was.

A country that is still mourning its Golden Age, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, and hopes one day to recover its former glory (yes, in our country progress is always simultaneously retrogression).

Never be unfaithful to your man, and if your man is unfaithful to you, forgive him, for he is a man. Live first and foremost for others. Because, in any case, others always know better than you what’s good for you.

she taught me to live, to dance on a tightrope when everything around me was going up in flames, on a tightrope stretched taut, higher than any tower, poised and fearless — because, when you fall, all you do is stretch out your arms and you’re flying.

But one notable characteristic may have recommended him to the chocolate-maker as a good match for his daughter: Simon was a sentimental man, and a great devotee of the past. He loved Pushkin’s Russia; he dreamed of the great Napoleonic balls, grew downright maudlin at Swan Lake.

Stasia had realised very early on that she had to assert herself in this family. Otherwise, she would probably remain unnoticed, in the shadow of a toddler with whom she just happened to share a father.

‘Men always want to be in charge of you. What kind of life is that? I may as well have been born a dog; even as a dog I would have more freedom,’

They were an unusual couple. He: huge, powerful, a colossus with a balding head, a wide mouth, and sincere, permanently moist, eyes. And she: a delicate, dainty creature, a work of art, carved from ivory.

He wasn’t yet interested in knowing how very alike the score of life and the score of death can be.

Sometimes, Brilka, stories repeat themselves, and overlap. Even life lacks imagination occasionally, and you can’t blame it for that, don’t you agree?

Ida asked no questions: she let him grieve, because she knew about grief; for many years it had been her most dependable companion. Ida knew that the world — both her own and, above all, the fragile world of all-encompassing intimacy she shared with Kostya — was doomed, but she faced this doom with her eyes wide open, awaited it, stoic, erect, standing to attention, like a steadfast tin soldier.

children became adults overnight and polished grenades. Tears became rare, expensive things. Only grimaces were free.

In Germany you cannot have a revolution because you would have to step on the lawns. VLADIMIR LENIN

‘I’ll give you mine. You have to come with me, now.’

Combat rootless cosmopolitanism! POSTER SLOGAN

She started to recite the names of all the victims she could think of. First, prominent victims from the fields of art and science, from the intelligentsia. Then she remembered the parents of classmates who were no longer allowed to mention them; the grandparents of fellow students; she remembered doctors who had suddenly stopped coming to work; she remembered the lecturers and teachers who had abruptly disappeared; she remembered friends of her mother and aunt, all of whom were missing a husband, son, wife, mother, father. The list of names was endless. The whole of Arlington Road was not enough; she had to walk down side streets as well in order to say out loud, at least once, all the names that occurred to her.

He felt profound humility before the rites of these people, who lived so free of doubt, so far removed from any kind of modernity, as if operating by a different calendar; but at the same time he loathed their tradition-steeped intransigence, their superstition, their unwillingness to place anything above the laws of their ancestors.

Communists should set an example in study; at all times they should be pupils of the masses as well as their teachers. CHAIRMAN MAO

We were first in line, but those behind us are eating already! VLADIMIR VYSOTSKY

Elene must drive home and talk to her father. Everything was at stake.

The right to a failed life is inalienable. AMÉLIE

Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn soul to stone, I must learn to live again ANNA AKHMATOVA

There was so much she still wanted to say to him. She would have had to tell him the story of half her life. No — all of it. But differently: retold. The story he didn’t know. Didn’t understand. She wanted to puke up her silence, her impotence, into this miserable basin. To vomit with all she had and disgorge her fear, the fear of what was still to come. Yes: she was no longer interested in what might lie ahead. How could you live if you were constantly looking back?

We’re not the ones who invented this world, I’m not the one who invented this world. A world where you can do anything, But you’ll never change a single thing. ALLA PUGACHEVA

He painted the world for me. And the world aroused a pathological interest in me. It wasn’t the limited world of school, or Kostya’s clearly structured world, or my mother and Aleko’s world, plagued by day-to-day worries, or Daria’s rose-tinted world, or the raw and ethereal world of Stasia. It was a world I felt at home in. It was a large, unfathomable world, in which not every question had an answer. And, above all, a world in which nothing was normal.

A man, a people — without an ideal — is born blind. MAXIM GORKY

it became clear to me that, more than anything else in life, I wanted to do what this woman, blind and yet so far-sighted, was doing right then: I wanted to bring together the things that had fallen apart. Assemble other people’s memories, which only reveal their connections when a whole is created from a host of individual parts. All of us, whether we know it or not, perform our own dance within this overall picture, following a mysterious choreography.

I spoke with him as I had seldom spoken with anyone, apart from David, and as I did so, I was not the wilful little girl, not the secretive girl with the gloomy expression and the pathological curiosity, the one everyone was always worrying about. I was just me. And it was such a relief not to have to make an effort; and he simply sat there, sipping at his milk bottle and listening to me, smiling now and then or shaking his head as if in agreement, frowning, smacking his lips

swap the government for a kilo of macaroni! PLACARD AT A DEMONSTRATION

Within Russia, take as much sovereignty as you can swallow. BORIS YELTSIN

You could do so much more, Miss Jashi. And if I were your mother, I would advise you to start facing up to your talents at once, and dealing with your absurd reluctance to use them.’ It was the first time since coming to Berlin that I had cried in front of anyone.

I dug myself into the wet sand. I hadn’t come to the sea for it to remind me of all the things that hadn’t happened in my life. No; I wanted to know what was still possible. And here, looking out at its grey expanse, I understood that too many stories were already gathered within me, blocking the view ahead, and the temptation just to keep looking back, like Orpheus, at what lay behind me was too great. I