The Pear Field Page 4

  ‘So, what do you think? I’ll take you for a spin and then bring you back. And I’ll pay. I’m not expecting you to do it for free. I’m not like that.’

  ‘No?’ says Lela. ‘What are you like?’

  Koba looks slightly confused. He shifts on the spot and smiles stiffly.

  ‘Think about it at least,’ he says, and leaves.

  Lela closes the door, takes a deep drag on her cigarette and exhales, watching as the smoke spreads and fades with the echoes of Koba’s footsteps.

  A week goes by and a few days more and there’s still no sign of Irakli’s mother.

  Lela takes Irakli round to the flats next door. They see Goderdzi lying under his car doing some repairs while a group of young men stand around watching. Koba’s there too. Rolling around on the ground, Goderdzi looks like some kind of hairy beast: his T-shirt has ridden up to his chest, revealing a stomach covered in coils of thick wavy hair growing out in all directions. Koba doesn’t say hello to Lela. In fact, he pretends not to notice her at all.

  Mzia opens the door. She’s still smiling. A pleasant spring breeze rushes through the open windows and makes the curtain on the back of the door flutter wildly.

  They sit as before: Irakli on the stool and Lela on the sideboard.

  Irakli dials. The phone on the other end rings, but nobody picks up, so Irakli calls a neighbour instead. A man answers.

  ‘Can I speak to Inga, please?’ asks Irakli.

  There’s a long silence, then a woman comes on the line. It doesn’t sound like Irakli’s mother.

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Irakli, Inga’s son…’

  ‘Oh, hello, Irakli. How are you, love? It’s Nana Ivlita – remember me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Your mum’s not here, Irakli. She’s in Greece. She said to tell you she’ll be back, though. She’s going to take you to live with her over there.’

  The woman is shouting so loud Lela thinks she must have forgotten she’s got the phone there at all and is trying to make herself heard without it.

  For a moment Irakli says nothing.

  ‘When’s she coming back?’

  ‘She said she doesn’t know yet. She needs to find a job first, you see. Anyway, how are you, dear?’

  ‘Fine.’

  Irakli sits there, hunched over, one hand holding the receiver, the other braced against his knee. Lela looks at his downcast eyes and – for the millionth time – is struck by the way his long eyelashes curve up at the end.

  ‘What shall I tell Inga when she calls, love? Do you want me to give her a message?’

  Irakli thinks for a moment.

  ‘Ask her when she’s coming back.’

  ‘OK. I’ll do that.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Take care, Irakli, and try not to worry. Bye-bye.’

  Irakli puts the phone down.

  ‘Ready?’ says Lela.

  ‘Ready.’

  As they are leaving, Mzia smiles at them and slips a couple of barberry sweets into their pockets.

  They walk along in silence until Irakli suddenly asks, ‘Do you think she’s actually gone?’

  Lela unwraps one of her barberry sweets.

  ‘Probably,’ she says, pulling the sticky sweet out of the wrapper with her teeth. She offers the other one to Irakli. ‘Try one. They’re really nice.’

  ‘I’ve got my own,’ he says.

  They carry on walking. Irakli stares down at the ground. His pale ears look like diaphanous red-ribbed leaves against the glow of the setting sun.

  3

  There are no ‘Heroes of Kerch Street’. At least not yet. It took thirty-one years for the city of Kerch to receive its title. Maybe one day a child from this foul-smelling, crumbling school will be given the title as well. If that day ever comes, there’s no doubt who the school’s first heroes will be: Kirile and Ira.

  They left a few years back – Kirile first, Ira five years later – and the more time passes, the harder it is to believe that such gifted, successful people ever lived there. Lela and the others have heard all about them from the teachers.

  Kirile didn’t break his ties with the school straight away. Lela was still young when he left but she remembers him visiting. He was tall and slim, a slouching, fair-haired Russian boy with a calm voice and an unhurried gait. He wore flared trousers and from a distance he reminded Lela of one of the Bremen Town Musicians from the old Soviet cartoon. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind: Kirile walking down the road, hunched over, arms swinging, holding a bag in one hand. He looked like a tired old man coming home from work. The children would run out to meet him whether they knew him or not. Kirile would smile, say hello, pull sweets out of his bag and hand them round. Dali would look on with tears in her eyes, brimming with pride to see what a fine, upstanding man he had become. What set Kirile apart was that he graduated from school with distinction, went on to university and then found a job. Although he lived at the school, he was such a capable student that they sent him to a ‘normal’ school, where his exam results earned him a gold medal. When Kirile visited, he never stayed for more than an hour. He had the weary, sad expression of a man carrying a heavy weight on his shoulders. It was clear that his life was filled with worry and woe.

  Then, like so many others, Kirile disappeared without a trace. Some said he’d gone to Russia, others that he’d been killed. Nobody knew for sure. Slowly but surely the myth of Kirile was forgotten; soon even Dali stopped mentioning him.

  The second hero would no doubt be Ira, a blonde girl with a Georgian father and a Russian mother. Her father left her mother and her mother left her children in turn. Ira could tell you off the top of her head which residential school or children’s home each of her many brothers and sisters was in. She was charming and elegant, the kind of girl who could wander into the yard next door without anyone suspecting she was connected with the School for Idiots. Like Kirile, she graduated from school with distinction and later went on to university to study law. Ira’s heroism went one step further, though. She took her own mother to court to strip her of her parental rights and, miraculously, she won. She took custody of her youngest sibling, who for some reason the mother had chosen to keep, and raised him herself. Dali loved Ira’s story. Whenever she thought about it her eyes filled with tears.

  Lela remembers Ira well. Eventually Ira got married and cut her hair short, but she still came back for the occasional visit. She was as happy and charming as ever. She would run straight over to the playground to play football with the children, making deft tackles and then racing off towards the goal in her short leather skirt and crop top, laughing loudly, without a care in the world.

  So far, Kirile and Ira are the only future heroes the school has produced. The children always found their stories fascinating. If Kirile and Ira were backward like them, they asked, how had they managed to finish school? How had they managed to learn? The teachers told them that some of the children at the school – like Kolya and Stella – were not actually backward at all but were living here because the children’s homes were full or because of the school’s superior facilities, like its big yard and playground, and the quality of its teaching staff.

  There are others, though, who might never be considered heroes but who nonetheless stand out in the history of the school.

  Lela remembers Marcel, a fifteen-year-old black boy from Batumi, a wild, unbroken colt with a fiery temper. Nobody seemed to know how he ended up in Tbilisi. To the locals, who had never seen a black person before except on TV, Marcel was like a museum exhibit. They would come from all over Gldani to stare at him through the school fence, shouting, ‘Hey, darkie, come over here!’ Marcel would bend down, pick up gravel by the handful and throw it at them, or press himself against the fence like a caged animal, clawing, howling and spitting.

  Marcel intrigued Lela. He paid no attention to the teachers and did whatever he wanted. He spoke to Lela on just three occasions, but each time he was calm and
articulate.

  The first time, Marcel came up to her in the dinner hall and asked whether the cooks put dead flies in the food. The second time, they were in the yard and he asked about bus routes. The third time was at night. Lela couldn’t sleep so she went down to the yard for a cigarette. She didn’t notice him at first in the darkness. Then he whistled and she spotted him sitting on the bench under the spruces. He waved at her to come over, then asked for a cigarette.

  She sat down on the bench next to him. They smoked in silence. Marcel took long, deep drags. When he had finished, Lela offered him another cigarette. He took it, stood up and walked away, then turned to call back to Lela: ‘Is the sea near here?’

  She replied, ‘No.’

  He turned again and left, and that was the end of that.

  A few days later they took Marcel away. Lela never knew where he was taken or why.

  There was Aksana, a pretty, smiling girl with blonde hair and blue eyes who, unlike the other girls at the school, refused to dress like a tomboy. Instead, she wore tight skirts and light dresses. She was constantly disappearing with young men from the neighbourhood and coming back with pockets full of sweets and trinkets. If Aksana’s name was mentioned by anyone outside the school, it was usually because she had ‘fucked half of Gldani’ or gone at someone’s dick ‘like it was a Chupa Chups lollipop’. She was always smiling, though. Lela only once saw her cry. Lela was riding Marika’s bike up and down when she saw Aksana coming out of the yard behind the College of Light Industry down the road from the school. She was crying. When Lela asked who’d upset her, Aksana just started sobbing more violently and repeating, ‘The bastard, the bastard.’ Lela gave her a ride back to the school on Marika’s bike and by the time she got off and blended back into the crowd of schoolchildren the smile had returned to her face.

  Then one day Aksana left, with no warning, not even a goodbye, joining the ranks of so many others before her who vanished as if they had never existed.

  Then there was Ilona, a wilful, free-spirited Lom gypsy girl who answered to no one. When a journalist visited the school, Ilona told her that Vano had fucked her. Tiniko ignored her but the journalist spent some time going around the school trying to investigate what had happened and, as Tiniko had no objections, filming the children. Lela remembers Tiniko telling the journalist about Aksana, who wasn’t the only girl from the school to have gone down that path. They just couldn’t stop her, Tiniko explained: once she’d gone out they had no idea what she was up to; they weren’t children any more, they were adults; it was just in their nature; they wanted it too, especially if there were sweets and presents on offer. The journalist listened carefully. She spoke to the children, asked them questions, wrote down their answers and made pages of notes. Then, for some reason, she too just disappeared, taking what Tiniko and Ilona had said with her.

  Ilona left and started begging and selling herself at the station, or so the children were told. They heard she’d moved back to her parents’ on Lotkin Street. They heard that one day her parents got into a fight, that Ilona’s mother and little brother hid in the wardrobe and her father fetched his gun and emptied the entire clip through the wardrobe door, into his son. After the incident Ilona’s father took her to Russia and that was the last that was heard of her.

  There was another girl, called Yana. Lela remembers her well; they were the same age. Yana was proud and self-assured. She talked non-stop about her parents and her grandmother, all of whom were dead, but most of all about her uncle, her only living relative, who, she was certain, would take care of her once she left school. According to Yana, her parents’ flat was waiting for her, all sealed up and held as part of their estate until she turned eighteen. She was one of those people who came out of any situation looking good. She didn’t fight, she didn’t swear and she never complained or took offence, although she never looked particularly happy either.

  One day Yana asked Lela to come to the flats next door. It was New Year’s Day and bitterly cold outside; the children were all huddled indoors. The streets were empty apart from a few hungry dogs. Yana took Lela into the yard, then rolled up her sleeves and started digging around in the bins. Lela did the same. At that moment a woman opened a window on the third floor and beckoned to them. Yana and Lela went over to the foot of the building. The woman disappeared inside and two little girls stuck their heads out and shouted down to Yana and Lela to wait. The woman reappeared, balanced a basket on the window ledge and tied a rope to the handle. Then she began to lower it carefully out of the window. Lela and Yana stood there, hearts pounding, waiting for it to reach them. The closer it came, the more they could see: the basket had been filled to the brim with sweets, cakes, dried fruit, walnut churchkhela and mandarin oranges.

  ‘Take it! It’s for you!’ shouted one of the girls.

  Yana took the basket and untied the rope, and the two of them raced back to the school as fast as they could.

  When Lela and Yana ran in carrying the basket the other children could hardly believe their eyes. In no time at all there was nothing left but the mandarin skins. Lela can still recall how good the cake tasted. Years later, when chocolate imported from Turkey started appearing in the kiosks, she would sometimes buy a Mars or a Snickers but always found herself thinking that nothing would ever taste better than that cake.

  Less than an hour later, Yana told Lela they were going back to return the basket.

  Yana emerged from the TV room with a few of the other children. Lela couldn’t work out how Yana had chosen them; most of them had trouble either walking or speaking. Yana led Lela and the other five children round to the block next door.

  The little girl who opened the door looked quite startled when she saw such a large group of children. Then the woman came to the door and invited the children inside.

  It was the first time in Lela’s life that she had been invited to a supra. The table was out in the loggia. The woman laid it with crockery, cutlery and even serviettes, then brought out more food than Lela had ever seen: fried chicken, walnut sauce, cheese-filled khachapuri, stuffed vine leaves, cake, caramelized walnut gozinaqi, bread, dried fruit, fizzy drinks and stewed quinces.

  The children sat down to eat. The television in the corner was showing a New Year’s concert and while the children tucked in the woman asked them questions about how they had seen in the New Year. She wanted to know whether the school had welcomed its first visitor of the year yet and then told them that Yana herself had been the first person to come to their door. So full she could hardly breathe, Yana laughed to think of her honoured role. The woman’s daughters asked whether there was a New Year tree at the school. The girls had an artificial tree in the corner of the loggia and had covered the floor and branches with cotton wool as imitation snow. The youngest girl pressed a button at the base of the tree, which began to rotate slowly. The children clapped and stared, mesmerized, at the toys and ornaments hanging from the branches, finding their reflections in the succession of shiny baubles that passed in front of them as the tree turned.

  When they had finished, the woman packed the leftovers into the empty basket and sent it home with the children.

  That was Yana, the girl who could go out to look through bins and come back with a basket of goodies – twice.

  Some time later Yana became ill. Nobody knew what was wrong with her. One day an ambulance came and took her away, pale, weak and unable to eat or speak. Then they got word that Yana had moved in with her uncle and would not be coming back.

  Like Lela, Yana would be eighteen now. Lela wonders whether Yana is living in her parents’ flat now, and whether she still buttons her shirt right up to the neck. Or whether she is even alive.

  One by one, all of the pupils that Lela remembers have left the school. Times have changed. The children who used to live there seemed more rebellious, readier to fight and run away. Nowadays things are much calmer. New children hardly ever join the school and Lela is the only former pupil still living there.<
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  As such, she occupies the most powerful position in the school. Nobody tells her what to do and nobody messes her around. When Lela was a little girl hiding in the teachers’ skirts, she could never have imagined a time would come when she was scared of nobody. Yet because there is nobody left to be frightened of, life seems to have lost its edge and time itself seems sluggish.

  The departure of certain children saw the end of a brutal tradition, a ‘game’ Lela was never made to play. Merely witnessing it had terrified her. Lela saw it first-hand in Marcel’s time. The older children would grab a new girl or a girl in her early teens, drag her off to the pear field and deliver her to some libidinous boy, who would push her onto the ground and then rape her, while the others, both boys and girls, held her down by the arms and legs. The sound of the girl’s cries made Lela’s heart beat out of her chest. The children would clamp their hands over the girl’s mouth to silence the screams. The sight of the girl lying there filled Lela with horror: the splayed legs, the scratches on her face, the blood… When the boy had finished he would get up and the children would drift back to the playground to carry on with their games, leaving the girl lying there on the ground. Then she would stand up too, straighten her clothes and spend a few minutes by herself before rejoining the others and carrying on as normal. The victims of this game were usually girls who wore skirts and dresses and grew their hair long.

  After the collapse of the Soviet Union everything in the school began to break down, starting with the taps and ending with the balcony. The school started receiving humanitarian aid and second-hand clothes, which had never happened before, but only rarely did any of it reach the children. Tiniko ‘redirected’ most of the items to line her own pockets, if the official in charge of dividing the goods between the schools had not already done so.