The Eighth Life

by Nino Haratischwili

‘You’re a thread, I’m a thread; together we make a little ornamentation, and together with lots of other threads we make a pattern. The threads are all different, differently thick or thin, dyed different colours. The patterns are hard to make out if you look at just one individual thread, but if you look at them together you start to see all sorts of amazing things.

But something in the mixture and the preparation made this chocolate special, unique, irresistible, startling. The very scent of it was so enticing and so intense that one couldn’t help hurrying towards its source. The chocolate was thick, syrupy, and black as the night before a heavy storm. It was consumed in small portions, hot, but not too hot, in small cups, and — ideally — with silver spoons. The taste was incomparable: savouring it was like a spiritual ecstasy, a supernatural experience. You melted into the sweet mass, you became one with this delicious discovery, you forgot the world around you, and felt a unique sense of bliss.

But what they don’t consider is that a farmer has no interest in selling his produce at a loss. He’d rather harvest nothing: either way, he’s headed for poverty, and he’d prefer to be poor without having to toil for it.

Just six years later, Roman Rudenko, the deputy public prosecutor from Ukraine who had been summoned to Kharkov to observe the execution of the operation and ensure everything went according to plan, was one of the Soviet Union’s chief prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials. Throughout those trials he accused the fascists of being responsible for this indiscriminate orgy of killing.

As was customary with traitors, deserters, and dangerous criminals, her family was sent the bill for the bullet they used to shoot her in the back of the head.