Solo (27 page)

‘I saw you taking pictures of that girl on the sofa.’

‘Oh.’ He laughed sheepishly. ‘We don’t have girls like that where I come from.’

‘I thought you had everything in America.’

‘Well. Yes. In a different sense. How come you speak such good English?’

‘I speak four languages,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing. Do you know I designed Kakha’s house? He came to me and said,
Make me a futuristic
Georgian castle that will last a thousand years
.’

She felt she could tell this man anything and he would believe it. If she wanted she could make him fall in love with her
like that
.

‘Really?’ he said. He looked at it with renewed interest. ‘It seems like a high-tech stronghold. Looks like it has every kind of security system on the planet.’

She said solemnly,

‘The only way to survive is to be afraid.’

He nodded earnestly. She was entertained.

They had left the rest of the party behind, and could see the lights spread out. Her blue dress brushed his legs, and he was slowing the pace.

‘What’s your name?’ he asked softly.

‘Khatuna.’

‘I’m Charles.’

‘Like the prince?’

‘I guess so.’

‘But he’s not as good looking as you.’

He smiled, and stopped walking. He turned to look at her. He put a hand on her breast and leant to kiss her. She avoided his lips, and for
a moment they stood looking at each other, nose to nose. His hand loosened, and he stepped back, uncertain.

‘You’re lucky no one saw you,’ she said. ‘You could have been out in the street with a broken nose by now. Or worse.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean—’

‘Of course you meant.’

‘I’m very sorry.’

‘You’re funny.’

For a moment they looked with parallel gazes back to the house, and the shrieks of the party flickered over their silence.

‘Shall we go back?’ she proposed.

They started to walk. He said,

‘If you ever come to New York, please give me a call. If you want to talk about architecture. I have lots of contacts. This is my card.’

She took it.

Struction Enterprises, Inc.
Building the twenty-first
century

‘Still a couple of hours before it starts,’ she said. ‘The twenty-first century.’

‘No. It’s nearly midnight.’

Inside, Natalia Sabadze had taken the stage and was performing some of the songs from her new album,
Nata 2000
. Her voice was breathy, as if she were whispering in your ear, and she kept her eyes half closed as she sang. When her performance was over, Kakha led the applause, and the crowd kept clapping for a full five minutes while Nata walked slowly down the steps of the stage and kissed her father ceremonially on the cheek. Then a prominent businessman grabbed the microphone and gave a long speech in praise of Kakha. He proposed toasts to Kakha and his family. He listed Kakha’s achievements and the many qualities of his character. He flattered for a long time. He said,

‘We would like to present Kakha Sabadze with a special millennium prize for his contribution to Georgian industry!’

A young woman presented a velvet case to Kakha, who took out a gold medallion on a chain. He nodded graciously, and the guests applauded. The businessman said into the microphone,

‘If you look at it very carefully, Mr Sabadze, you’ll see your own portrait engraved into the gold. You’ll see we’ve given you something very special.’

There were cheers, and then the DJ pushed the volume towards the mythic. Fat, breathless men in suits left behind political debate to sing old socialist anthems and dance with the end-time. Models in G-strings performed mannered lesbian acts on platforms around the room. The room was hot, and there was hardly place to stand amid the swaying people. On the sofa, Vakhtang leered ecstatically over the exposed breasts of the woman he had singled out hours before, on whose satin surfaces he had just arranged stripes of coke. In the doorways, impassive security guards stood watching the writhing gathering, glancing coldly at each other across the room.

Khatuna was dancing gently on her own when Kakha appeared by her side.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

She put her arms around him. He said,

‘I saw you with that American. Was he disturbing you?’

‘No.’ She laughed.

‘You realise there’s only ten minutes left?’

Khatuna was laughing long and hard. She said,

‘Nothing can ever harm me now.’

‘Come and see the fireworks.’

They walked out together, and he put his jacket round her shoulders in the fresh air. Natalia Sabadze staggered out of the house, her arm around a friend, the two of them shouting,
Millennium!
The first rockets went off, a few minutes premature. Charles was there, watching, and two men were pushed into the pool, coming up shining and
breaking into a fistfight. A countdown gathered in the crowd, starting from sixty and soon losing all relationship to actual seconds – and before it was over there was an enormous explosion of coloured light. For a moment,
2000
was written in fire above them. Kakha held Khatuna tightly against him, and guards let off machine guns into the air to show appreciation. The sky boiled with red and green, and from this high point they could see chemical bursts glinting over the rest of the city.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Khatuna. ‘It’s so lovely.’

Tears started flooding over her cheeks, but she did not know why. She wondered where all the festive bullets would land, and if the century would begin with incomprehensible deaths across the city. She had not expected the new time to be so urgent, and wished she was not apart from her brother. She whispered his name to the gunpowder galaxies, and even the word
Mother
. She said to Kakha,

‘Make love to me.’

They slipped away, Khatuna whispering,

‘When you understand me it is like the best wine.’

They lay next to each other, and Khatuna undid the top buttons of his shirt. His chest was covered in tattoos.

They made love. The incessant thud from downstairs filled her reeling brain with the dark pleasure of ducts, the moist embrace of membranes.

Afterwards, she did not move, so she could rock in the continuation. Her thoughts drifted on thermals to the ceiling.

He got up, and put on his shirt. She had been asleep. She asked him,

‘Where are you going?’

‘Back to the party,’ he said. ‘You stay here. I like to think of you in my bed.’

He tucked a blanket around her and she smiled drowsily. He opened the door.

‘Kakha.’

He turned back.

‘Yes?’

Her make-up was smudged across her face.

‘I have a favour to ask you.’

Khatuna did not go home for four days. When finally she turned the key in the lock and opened the door, she found Irakli roasting aubergines. The room seemed newly bright and clean, and her mother was dressed and sitting at the table. Khatuna kissed her silently on the cheek.

‘Long time, sister,’ said Irakli, sprinkling pepper.

Khatuna’s mother inspected her stonily.

Irakli laid out three plates and served the food. He sat down and looked appreciatively at his cooking.

‘This aubergine is from the twentieth century,’ he said, holding a piece up on a fork. ‘It was kept in a fridge from that century to this. Cryogenic.’

‘It tastes good,’ said Khatuna. ‘Even now.’

‘I feel weightless in this new time,’ declared Irakli. ‘I love this emptiness. We have no idea what twenty-first-century music sounds like, because we have never heard it.’

He ate with gusto.

‘When the year ended, I realised: this is the century I’ll die in. I feel protective about it. The last century was fucked up by other people. But this one is ours. This is the century when I’ll write all my books.’

Khatuna could hardly eat. Her stomach was tense and twisted. She said,

‘What the hell are you going on about?’

Irakli smiled indulgently.

‘Khatuna. How are you? How did you celebrate the dawning of the new millennium?’

She glared at him. Her mother burst from her silence:

‘Where have you been, for God’s sake? It’s been four days!’

Khatuna concentrated on placing her knife and fork parallel on her plate.

‘I’ve had some merry conversations with the police,’ said Irakli. ‘They told me you were probably sold by now, and far away.’

‘You couldn’t call? What has happened to you? Is this how you treat your old mother?’

Khatuna retorted,

‘You’re not old. I hate it when you say that. You’re not even fifty.’

Her mother began to cry. Khatuna kept on:

‘What do you do for this household? Everything comes from me. If you want me to earn all the money, you let me live my way.’

Her mother was shaking, and Khatuna watched her with contempt. It was a feeling, she found, that made a lot of life’s troubles easier. She left the table and picked up her bag. Irakli said,

‘You’re tied up with bad people. It’s not unreasonable for us to get worried.’

‘Shut your mouth, Irakli.’

‘Will you just stay for one moment?’ wailed her mother. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Goodbye,’ she said tersely, and slammed the door.

‘Where are you going?’ her mother cried again.

Khatuna moved into Kakha’s house, and Kakha made good on his favour. He asked his best men to take care of it for him.

It was only days later when a black car pulled up quietly near an antique shop in old Tbilisi. Khatuna sat in the front seat of the car. With her were four men with guns. One of them was Vakhtang.

The lights were on in the shop, and she peered in from the other side of the road.

‘That’s him,’ she said. ‘The young one on the stool. The man behind the counter is his father.’

The men got out of the car and ran across the street. In the shop, Khatuna saw the younger man leap towards the door, trying to lock it against them, but he was too late. She checked her hair in the car mirror, and lit a cigarette. The smoke’s twist was slow and feline against the windscreen.

She was aware of how she walked, careful across the street. A bell rang with the door’s opening, and what she was most conscious of
was how the shop was completely bare, with just a couple of painted icons, modern reproductions, propped up on cheap shelving, and a few glass vases, and a telephone, and the two men held down on the floor.

‘The shop is empty,’ she said to Vakhtang.

‘Money laundering,’ he said. ‘That’s all they do.’

She lifted the chin of the younger man.

‘Do you remember me?’ she said.

‘No,’ he said.

She nodded to Vakhtang who smashed his rifle butt against the side of his head.

‘Do you remember me now?’ asked Khatuna while the father stammered entreaties.

The man groaned. Khatuna said,

‘Put a bullet in his leg.’

Vakhtang aimed his gun and the man writhed and cried out.

‘I remember! I remember.’

‘What do you remember?’ asked Khatuna.

‘A few years back. I remember coming to your mother’s house.’

‘Yes?’

‘We stole some stuff. Paintings, I think.’

Khatuna was still smoking her cigarette.

‘Hit him again.’

Vakhtang hit him. The impact of wood on skull was deep and sublime. Khatuna said,

‘My mother came here to sell her antiques. She was miserable and ruined, and all she could do was turn to you. Every few days she came to hand over part of our family’s history. Did you know she is a princess?’

There was no one on the road outside, no traffic, no evening sounds, just Khatuna standing over the man in her long black coat.

‘You threatened to kill my brother. I told you that day I would come for you, and I have come.’

The father could not breathe properly with the muzzle of a gun in the
back of his neck, and was dribbling saliva on the floor. The young man was dazed from the blows. He said,

‘I’ll repay you. In full. I’ll get everything back.’

‘I’m not here to bargain,’ said Khatuna.

‘There must be something I can do,’ whimpered the man.

‘No,’ replied Khatuna.

She nodded to Vakhtang. The gun had a silencer, and the only sound was a brief sucking of air. The man slumped as if death had come from within. The father screamed hoarsely.

‘As for you,’ Khatuna said coldly, ‘I have nothing to say because you are old and ugly. You can have one last moment to think of everything you did to my family.’

Crows were cawing with the end of the day, and the old man choked. Everyone watched Khatuna, who gave the signal, and he fell forward too.

She wandered round the shop. Her heartbeat was out of control. She was shaking and unslaked. She wished she had pulled the trigger. Her voice wavered.

‘There’s nothing here to break.’

‘Break the window,’ suggested Vakhtang simply.

She took his gun, went out of the shop, the bell tinkling again, and swung at the plate glass with all her strength.

The glitter-crash went on an age. She watched it all: the subdivision of crystal, and the shards’ rebound. It was a drastic cascade, and it did not touch her in the least.

She had waited years for this moment. She had expected, when it came, she would feel everything shift back into its rightful place. She had expected to feel reborn: she had expected that the spider-clutch of memory would be released, and the treasure of her tenderness exhumed again. But she could detect none of these things. Her chemistry had not altered, and the sky looked exactly the same.

The noise had brought people into the street, and she was aware of them grouped behind her, watching.

‘Burn it,’ she ordered, through the hole.

She turned round to get back in the car, while the men emptied
petrol canisters over the bodies, over the walls and shelves, over the telephone – and even as they drove away she watched the cloud of oil smoke until it was hidden by the buildings, and she could see it no more.