After dinner, Tengiz told Nora that he had come for half a year or a year, depending on how things worked out. He had gotten an interesting offer from Mosfilm, and in a few days, after the details were decided, he would be moving to a rented apartment that the studios had promised to provide him with. Then he went quiet, mumbled something, and went quiet again. Nora didn’t say anything, either; but both of them were thinking about the same thing.
“There have been some changes in my life, you see. Nino got married, and her husband has a house outside Tbilisi. Natella decided to move in with our daughter—they’re living there now. Natella left me, right? I’m a lone wolf now.”
“I see,” Nora said, nodding. He did have a trace of the wolf’s gauntness about him—his eyes glittered with fierceness, or perhaps hidden fear. And he wants to stay here, with me!
Tengiz’s hands had always been stronger than his head. He even said this about himself: “especially when my hands are you,” he told Nora. But that wasn’t quite what he meant. What he wanted to say was that Nora could put into words what he was unable to express. Russian was not his first language, of course, but even in Georgian he didn’t know how to articulate his thoughts with precision. He relied on circumlocutions, gesticulations, howls and groans, and other forms of body language to get things across, but he ultimately succeeded in making the actors submit completely to his will. And not just the actors. It was a gift. He knew how to motivate people, and they did what he wanted them to. It was probably some ancient power of suggestion. There was possibly only one person on earth who didn’t succumb to his power—his wife, Natella. He was in thrall to the primordial but insurmountable female power she wielded. For almost thirty years they had been locked in constant battle. Both of them felt doomed to continue this struggle, which neither of them could win.
“You’re a witch, Natella, a witch,” he would say in despair when he couldn’t bear the sight of her any longer. “Just kill me outright. Why do you suck my blood, like a bird?”
Why a bird, he couldn’t explain in ordinary, daytime language. He had a recurring dream, a nightmare: He was lying naked on the warm ground, in a pale-grayish-brown light, and someone seemed to be poking needles into his veins. And then he saw that they were actually filthy birds, covered in dirt, sucking his blood through their thin beaks—one on his neck, another on his stomach, and a third in his groin …
Nora gave him what Natella took away from him; this was the secret of their enduring relationship. Nora was the ideal receiver and retransmitter of his will, and working with her on a play was a pleasure for Tengiz. She was adept at translating his intentions, his mumbling and bellowing, into material language—a dark-red wall imitating brickwork, sepia-colored dresses, a white backdrop that had been spattered by a hail of artillery fire … And she kissed his hands, and licked every one of his fingers, like a puppy that nuzzles its mother’s belly, looking for a nourishing teat.
“My clever girl,” he whispered to her, surrendering his hands to her moist lips, her hard tongue.
What precisely she was licking off cannot be captured in words, but after each new episode, after each new performance, Nora became stronger and more sure of herself. Later, when Nora herself proved her mettle, transforming herself gradually from an artist and a set designer into a director, even an author, and staged her first plays in provincial theaters, she told him, “Tengiz, my directorial skills were sexually transmitted.”
That first night, Tengiz slept on the floor, on a quilted cotton comforter spread out in the living room. The next day, they moved the furniture around again: Grandmother’s boat bed sailed into the living room, the divan was passed on to Taisia, and the former population of the apartment (Nora and her son) was doubled, much to Yurik’s delight.
Several days after Tengiz moved in, Yurik whispered in Nora’s ear, “It’s even better this way than with a German shepherd.” It wasn’t about the dog, of course, but about the guitar. He took it in his hands and began to like himself more. When no one else was home, he went out into the hallway, where there was a full-length mirror, and played, watching his reflection out of the corner of his eye. The happiness he experienced at this moment wasn’t completely unprecedented. He suddenly remembered feeling the same thing when he was five years old, beating out rhythms on the African drum, and then on the xylophone. But he was also learning to read at just that time, and he had traded the xylophone for Kipling: first there was a cat who walked by himself; then Mowgli, who for many years was his favorite character from a book; and after that, four other books, which Nora thrust under his nose in short order, one after another. Now all that he had forgotten came rushing back to him. The guitar seemed to contain the rhythm of the drum, and the xylophone, and sounds, sounds from which phrases emerged in some mysterious fashion—though the phrases were different from those in books.
Tengiz shared his rudimentary theoretical knowledge of music with Yurik, and no new information inspired him like the ideas of modes, major and minor keys, intervals, and chord changes. He listened attentively now to the sounds of the world around him, evaluated them in the light of his newfound knowledge, and discovered every day anew that all the sounds of the world could be described with these new rules, and that there was music playing everywhere, at every moment, even in your sleep, getting louder or dying down. Now he heard a complex rhythm in the patter of the first raindrops, the dangerous pauses in the rumbling of the iron sheeting on the roofs of sheds; in the trill of the doorbell he caught the sound of a minor third … Tengiz had no idea what a powerful mechanism for perceiving the soundscapes and aural structures of the world he had unlocked. He was just happy about the boy’s rapt attention, and the eagerness with which he absorbed this new information. Not that everything he discovered in this new aural universe was radiant and blissfuclass="underline" sometimes his new capacity for hearing filled him with anxiety, even torment.
Yurik now came straight home from school, not dawdling, and not getting distracted by the ways and habits of cats, which he used to follow for hours on end in their meanderings through the courtyards, over the roofs of sheds, and into basements. Nora was now teaching a children’s drawing class—her only source of regular income during that year—so twice a week she was unable to pick Yurik up from school. Taisia wasn’t always able to catch the boy at the school door. Sometimes Nora rushed home after her classes and found no sign of either Yurik or his book satchel. Then she would wander around the neighborhood for hours, looking for him. But after acquiring the guitar, Yurik no longer roamed the streets and courtyards, and when Nora got home she could already hear him strumming from the stairwell.
Tengiz met the screenwriter every day to discuss the grandiose project Mosfilm had offered him—the film version of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin. They were trying to collaborate on the first draft. Nora read The Knight and tried to find something in it that spoke to her, to untangle the endlessly complicated story of the relationships between the sovereign, his knights, and their beloveds; it all seemed to her to be extremely ornate and fussy, mannered, and convoluted. When she tried to convey this to Tengiz, he brushed it off, saying it was only the preliminary material. The script they were writing would be very different from the original source. It would be about something different altogether.
“Just read it, and then we’ll talk about it. When the script is finished, we’ll do our own thing with it.”