David's Revenge Read online

  In the case of injury to a husband’s honour by a third party’s attack on his wife’s virtue, it was the duty of a husband in ancient civilizations (civilizations, this work calls them!) to punish not just his wife but also her lover. King Ibert of Sicily, catching the enchanter Klingsor in the act with his queen, castrated his rival in love on the spot. This may be a legend, but there is evidence at least of the legal custom of cutting out the kidneys of such adulterers, those organs being considered the seat of sexual desire.

  In the city of Reval the law allowed an adulterer to be dragged through the streets by his penis. In Poland his testicles, or as we would say, his balls, were nailed to a board. In Spain he wasn’t even granted any chance to recover from such halfway measures and perhaps repeat his offence: his entire genitals, penis, scrotum and all, were simply chopped off.

  So I feel positively relieved to read that, at quite an early date, the Georgians came to the civilized conclusion of satisfying their claim to an offender’s blood by taking a cash payment instead. When King David the Builder erected the main church of Gelati, he climbed the scaffolding one day, missed his footing and fell into the depths. His injuries took a long time to heal. He recovered only when a nobleman called Avshandadze recommended him to bathe in the milk of dogs, and provided a tub of that fluid, presumably by calling on contributions from all the suckling bitches in the country.

  King David showed his gratitude to the nobleman by renewing a guarantee that one of his forebears had already give the Avshandadzes: anyone who killed a member of the family could, if he wanted to save his skin, get out of trouble by paying 400,000 botinauris, and anyone who seduced one of their women would have to pay half that sum. Monetary atonement could also be paid in kind, the documentary guarantee stipulating twelve white mules and twelve hounds, along with a dozen serfs. The Avshandadzes could legally cut the throat of anyone who tried to wriggle out of paying these damages.

  It’s interesting that not only did I gather such information, but as I studied the relevant literature horror seized upon me now and then—as if I didn’t already know that murderous events had occurred throughout the history of the world. After all, I had spent years studying the subject at university. But then, so far as I remember, it left me cold. At the outside, I worried over whether some bean-counter marking my exams would want to know how many dead there were in, for instance, the Battle of Verdun (360,000 French and 335,000 German; I’ve just looked it up again).

  My far more empathetic reaction in my venture into the study of blood vengeance could indicate an alarming imbalance in my emotions. Am I sensitive only when I’m afraid that my own skin is in danger, do I feel nothing at all so long as others alone are affected? To cap it all, when I embarked on that study I lost sight of the ridiculously banal facts. Instead of using my brain, I’ve been seeing ghosts.

  And even my discoveries in the field of legal history show me no cause for that. I am not a case for blood vengeance. I didn’t kill Matassi. I didn’t commit adultery with her either, because presumably even in Georgia immissio penis in vaginam, full consummation of the sexual act, is necessary for that. I just put my hand under her skirt, and very likely Ninoshvili never even heard about it.

  Yes, well, I can’t rule out the possibility that Dautzenbacher, who was standing around with Ninoshvili for a while at the time of our fight to Yerevan before he went to stand in line for passport control, dropped some remark about Matassi’s visit to my hotel room; in fact it would have been rather surprising if he’d failed to make use of this opportunity for an insinuating joke. But neither then, when my Georgian friend waved to me, smiling, nor later, via the New Year cards he’s sent me since, did Ninoshvili show that he knew anything. Instead, he regularly sent me warm good wishes from Matassi, who added “A Happy New Year!” in her own hand, in English, with her signature.

  If the couple had been involved in a plot against me in Tbilisi, then if the sin was nipped in the bud it might at the most rankle with Ninoshvili. But if they were not agents, just a perfectly ordinary couple, then I’m as good as sure that Matassi said nothing to her husband about our little flirtation. And then she won’t have admitted it to him even if, prompted by Dautzenbacher, he had asked about it.

  It may be that Georgian society, as the historian Suny wrote in 1989, is still ruled entirely by men; it’s not so very different even in our own enlightened culture. But I have well-founded doubts of Professor Suny’s sweeping statement about Georgian women. I don’t think they observe their traditional rules of behaviour just as they always did—according to Suny they are still subservient to men, devoted to domesticity and sexually demure.

  Perhaps Matassi was an exception. She wasn’t demure, anyway. If I didn’t still have her beautiful, immaculate face before my mind’s eye, I’d even call her a hussy. She didn’t reject my advances, she even offered provocation.

  Well, here I close my studies of blood vengeance and put them away in the files. They have been a ridiculous waste of my time.

  Chapter 13

  Perhaps it was because of being under strain for so long, but anyway, I misinterpreted my strange experience on Viktor’s sovkhoz. That sense of losing the ground underfoot, of unexpectedly finding ourselves in another world, doesn’t just happen when we’re travelling abroad. It sometimes comes over us even in familiar surroundings, as I would probably have remembered if my hysterical fears hadn’t blocked the idea.

  I had an experience of that kind yesterday afternoon when I’d gone to the university to get hold of some material on the legal situation in cultures where blood-vengeance killings are common. I joined the young people standing in a queue slowly moving closer, at a snail’s pace, to the lending desk in the library; other young people followed me. Rain had been falling from a sky of ragged clouds that let the sun shine through now and then. The students’ anoraks hemming me in smelled damp and a little musty, and so did their sweaters and jeans. Straggling hair, a few beards that could have done with a comb.

  Suddenly I was filled with melancholy. A memory had surfaced in me, vague, yet perceptible by all my senses. The bleak, desolate mood of an afternoon many years ago, in a German or History class when I had spread out half a dozen books around my workplace. I had to study them, but I couldn’t. The strong smell of the old papers. Muted voices in a corner behind the shelves, the faint rustle of a page being turned, no other sign of life. The autumn sun came out, tinged the edge of the roof of the lecture hall opposite with colour, and then went behind the clouds again. I wanted to get out of there, but where could I go?

  And it’s not just melancholy that overwhelms us at such moments, irresistibly transporting us into another world. Again, when I saw Mount Ararat for the first time I lost all awareness of my present existence, of the moment in space and time where I now was, something to hold to, but at the same time my heart expanded. I felt blessed.

  It was an experience like Pushkin’s when he pitched his tent in the dark on his journey to Erzerum, came out into the fresh air next morning, and was overwhelmed by the view of the Biblical mountain. He thought he saw, with his own eyes, Noah’s ark coming to rest on the peak of Ararat on the seventeenth day of the seventh month of the Deluge; he saw the raven and the dove flying, the symbols of punishment and atonement sent out by Noah to discover whether the water had gone down.

  And these moments are enough, as at the library borrowing desk and indeed on far lesser occasions, to remove us from space and time. The church bells on a Sunday morning bring to mind the aroma of the Sunday roast and my father’s cigars, they show me freshly swept streets with windows flashing in the summer sunlight, or sometimes the snowstorms when I looked out of our warm living room. Admittedly, the happiness we feel at such times is only borrowed. We have lost the real thing, and what goes to our hearts is more like our longing for it.

  I am almost sorry that Ninoshvili probably won’t be coming after all. Three weeks have passed since his letter arrived, twenty-one days during which ther
e have been some considerable upheavals in the Republic of Georgia. I’m assuming that he must have given up his plans to travel, and I feel that like a loss, quite apart for my fear that something may have happened to him or Matassi or even both of them. I would have liked to discuss the matters on my mind with him.

  I would have liked to ask him what he felt about my own native land, the foreign land he would have been seeing for the first time. And I would also have wished to hear more from him about his own country, which unexpectedly has come closer to me in the last few days. I have been continuing my reading of more recent Georgian literature, since such books were still lying around on my desk, and I find them—presumably because the tension upsetting my perception has finally worn off—interesting and stimulating in a way that I hadn’t been able to feel earlier.

  I found in a novelist called Otar Chiladze, born in 1933, an almost alarming echo of my occasional loss of my hold on reality. In a novel set at the turn of the century, Chiladze describes Batumi, the Black Sea port captured by the Russians from the Turks in 1878, as vividly as if he had been living there. Dimitri, a young lawyer who has studied for several years in Odessa, where he married a shy girl called Daria, returns with her to his native city of Batumi. But the wild parties that his parents once held in their house behind the green garden gate are over now. His parents themselves, buried long ago, look down on the young couple in silence from their black picture frames.

  Silence develops between husband and wife, and when they lie side by side at night, mute and still in the marital bed, they are both overcome again and again by images from their past, which is stronger than the present. Daria feels that she has suddenly turned back into the little girl whose grandfather used to bring her a bunch of grapes from the vineyard, with spider’s webs clinging to it, or a downy-skinned peach. Dimitri sees himself sitting as he did in his childhood, on an officer’s lap amidst his parents’ merrymaking guests, and hearing the crack of a pistol shot. Yet again someone has fired a gun purely for fun, but this time the bullet misses the ceiling and grazes the officer’s hand; no great harm done, no, and Dimitri watches as the ladies, laughing and crowing, bind up the officer’s bleeding hand with his mother’s veil.

  One day a stranger erupts into Daria and Dimitri’s moribund relationship, an actor from Tbilisi whom Dimitri, never guessing what complications he is bringing down on himself, invites to the house. “Come in, come in, guests are sent by God.” And the Georgian author’s novel begins to brim over with images, characters, aromas and sounds. It doesn’t stop at the melancholy whistling of the locomotives pulling carriages along the Transcaucasian Railway from Tbilisi to Batumi, or the distant wailing sirens of the soot-encrusted pilot steamboats escorting gigantic ships into harbour to take on board the ever-richer flow of oil in the form of naphtha.

  The local whores turn choosy; as soon as a British ship comes into harbour they despise the Turkish lira and sell themselves only for sterling. The coffeehouses of the city begin to swarm with Turks wearing the fez, Germans in leather gaiters, Scotsmen in tartan kilts. Night after night the actor knocks on Dimitri’s door, hammers away on the piano, quotes Hamlet and holds forth, spouting revolutionary monologues. Dimitri is afraid that the police are listening and will deport them all to Siberia. The workers go on strike and storm the prison. Cossacks gallop along Marine Prospect, leaving the street smelling of weapons, leather, sweating horses. Thirteen workers are shot.

  Yes, I’d have liked to know more about the country. But that’s all over now. I shan’t be invited to Georgia again in a hurry. Perhaps I could book a voyage from Odessa to Batumi with Inturist, if the agency still exists in the new republic. I imagine approaching the land of Colchis in the light of dawn, like Jason, seeing the snow-crowned peaks rise halfway between the sea and the sky. Yes, if the land of Colchis still existed.

  Chapter 14

  David Ninoshvili has arrived. I found him in the kitchen with Julia late in the afternoon when I got back from a rehearsal with my drama group. He had tied one of Julia’s aprons round his waist and was chopping parsley. He put the knife down,flung his arms around me and kissed me on both cheeks. Julia poured me a glass of the Kakheti wine brought by Ninoshvili as a present to the household. They had already opened it to taste it.

  Ninoshvili is a little stouter than I remember him, but he’s still a youthful-looking, well-built man, a handsome specimen of the race that even Herr von Bodenstedt thought one of the best-looking peoples on earth. I was reminded of Grigol Robakidze’s description of typical pure-bred Georgians: tall and strong, broad-shouldered with a slender waist, a shapely aquiline nose, chestnut hair and a pale gold complexion.

  The only difference is that his eyes are not honey-coloured but very dark.

  They were shining as he drank a toast: “To the renewal of our friendship!” He didn’t leave Julia out either, but turned to her: “And to Dr Kestner, hoping she’ll be part of it! Or may I say Julia?”

  Chapter 15

  It took me a good fifty minutes to pacify my drama group at midday today. Yesterday afternoon I had thrown Micky Rautenstrauch out because, yet again, he hadn’t learned his lines and was brazenly trying to carry it off by improvising. The stupid oaf really seemed to think he could fool me that way.

  But as soon as I had sent him packing there was vigorous protest: Jürgen Dahlmann, playing Romeo, even claimed that the whole production would fall apart without Micky, and Günsel Özcan, our Juliet, who doesn’t appear in the scene we were rehearsing and until then had been sitting chattering and giggling in a corner of the hall, started protesting more and more vigorously. When I asked what useful arguments she could contribute, she actually said well, after all, Brecht had called the play a practice piece for actors, so it was fair enough to ask for Micky to be allowed to practise.

  I put an end to the argument by sending Günsel and Valerie Müller up on stage to rehearse the scene between Juliet and her nurse. But the whole thing had gone fat, the two of them just reeled off their lines, and were obviously keen to prove that with my expulsion of Micky Rautenstrauch the heart had gone out of the drama group. I had also realized that I was going to have trouble finding a replacement for Micky; although he was only seventeen the boy had caught exactly the air of ponderous desperation necessary for the part of Romeo’s tenant Gobbo, as presented by Brecht in an additional scene to go into Shakespeare’s play, which we were including. But I wasn’t giving in so quickly.

  At noon today, when the last lesson was over, I asked Christian Berkhan whether I could have a word with him. Romeo and Juliet were instantly suspicious, exchanged glances, and Günsel put up her hand. If it was something to do with the drama group, she said, she and Jürgen would like to be in on it. That dream couple, self-confident as they are, know exactly what liberties they can take, so I shrugged my shoulders and agreed.

  Poor Christian, who had tried in vain to get a speaking part a couple of times, was obviously much alarmed. As the classroom emptied, he stayed sitting as if nailed to his chair, and looked at me as though he expected me to tell him to jump off the roof just to see what it was like. He cast just one quick glance behind him, to where Romeo and Juliet were sitting side by side at a table, Jürgen leaning back with his arms crossed, Günsel propping her chin on one hand, the fingers of the other drumming on the table top in a way that boded no good.

  I explained the part of Gobbo to the offender and asked if he thought he would be able to take it on. He began to stammer, yes, of course, he’d be happy to, he was sure he could do it, but the rehearsals were quite well advanced, the cast were used to the play now, and so on and so forth. The little coward was afraid to cross any bridge I built for him. When words looked like failing him entirely, Jürgen suddenly cleared his throat: maybe Günsel and he could make a better suggestion, he said. Oh yes? I couldn’t wait to hear it, I told him.

  Günsel stopped drumming her fingers and took over: we probably needed an understudy for Mercutio anyway, in case Max Blüm
el had to move to Hamburg with his father. And she could really see Christian as Mercutio. So could he, agreed Jürgen, and if we restored the passages of text that I had cut only because Max couldn’t get them into his head, then Mercutio would be a great part for Christian.

  I wonder when those two thought up that manoeuvre to outflank me. Anyway, they performed it at a moment that not even the Prussian general staff could have picked better. As I was pointing out to them, in some annoyance, that we were not discussing an understudy for Mercutio but the part of Gobbo, there was a knock on the door, and Micky Rautenstrauch looked in, smiling and nodding. He said he didn’t want to disturb us, but it was important to him to settle something urgent for what might be called personal reasons; he wanted to explain… It wouldn’t take long, he said.

  He was undeterred by the look I gave him… He came in, closed the door behind him, and said he wanted to apologize. Of course it was bad that he hadn’t known his lines, but there’d been stand-up rows going on at his home, not a moment’s peace for days. He’d spare me the details, he added, he just wanted to say that he’d gone right through his part last night and knew it perfectly now. But he was only telling me, he said, so that I’d know he really was sorry.

  Günsel played a lively rhythm with her knuckles on the table, and Jürgen joined in. Poor Christian crumpled entirely. He said he’d be happy to understudy Mercutio, that part was probably more his kind of thing. I beat a retreat in good order by stressing the merits of good teamwork, and finally said, raising my voice, that this was definitely Micky’s very last chance, and if he didn’t toe the line he was out of the drama group for good. Micky nodded. “Yes, sure, that’s fine.” Günsel batted her eyelashes at me in her most fetching way, and I set off cheerfully for home.