David's Revenge E-Book

Hans Werner Kettenbach

• Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Beschreibung

A taut psychological thriller about a visitor from war-torn Georgia who brings paranoia to a peaceful family.

Das E-Book David's Revenge wird angeboten von Bitter Lemon Press und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

 

Title Page

 

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

 

BACK TO THE COAST

THE VAMPIRE OF ROPRAZ

A NOT SO PERFECT CRIME

DOG EATS DOG

Copyright Page

Hans Werner Kettenbach was born near Cologne. He is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including David’s Revenge and Black Ice, also published by Bitter Lemon Press. He came to writing late in life, publishing his first book at the age of fifty. Previous jobs he has held include construction worker, court stenographer, football journalist, foreign correspondent in New York and, most recently, newspaper editor. His thrillers have won the Jerry-Cotton Prize and the Deutscher-Krimi Prize; five of them have been made into successful films.

Also available from Bitter Lemon Press by Hans Werner Kettenbach:

Black Ice

1

Ninoshvili’s letter has made me curiously uneasy. It’s ridiculous, but I felt something like a presentiment of disaster at the mere sight of the dingy grey envelope when I came home today after teaching five tedious lessons and found it lying on the hall table. I stared at the stamp, with its colourful picture of King David the Builder swinging his sword against the Mussulmen. I deciphered the postmark as Tbilisi, removed an imaginary speck of dust from my coat sleeve, and began to feel afraid.

Ninoshvili writes to say he is very happy to tell me that, after persistent efforts, he can travel to my country at last. The Cultural Ministry of the Republic of Georgia has officially commissioned him to visit the Federal Republic of Germany, where he is to get in touch with publishing houses interested in bringing out Georgian literature in German translation. Unfortunately, he adds, Matassi can’t come with him, but he looks forward to picking up our friendship again, seven years after we first met.

The letter has taken a good four weeks to get here from Tbilisi, and since Ninoshvili says that “all being well” he will be “making my final preparations in about a month’s time”, he could turn up on my doorstep at any moment.

I actually rose immediately from the desk where, with a stifled groan, I had just sat down, lifted the net curtain and looked out. The street lay deserted in the midday sun. No taxi in sight.

Or perhaps he’s coming from the bus stop on foot to save money, bringing only a small, well-worn case with him? Perhaps he’s already walked past the house, sizing it up. Perhaps he’s on his way now, stepping quietly, coming through the garden, looking around with those inscrutable dark eyes.

Oh, that’s enough of such absurdities! I have no real reason to be afraid of this visitor. He’ll mean a certain amount of inconvenience for me, of course, I can see that in advance. The postscript to his letter, in which he hopes that I can help him “to find inexpensive accommodation”, is clear enough. He probably thinks it will be only natural for me to ask him to stay here. Every other toast we drank in Tbilisi was to the hospitality of the Georgian people, and now, seven years later, I have to suffer the consequences of that admirable quality.

But what’s our spare room for, after all? It can’t be permanently reserved for Julia’s old school friend, Erika, who likes her pleasures and uses it as a base for her excursions to the West every six months, leaving it impregnated with her aggressive perfume. Or for Ralf’s friends, a couple of whom have already slept off their hangovers in the bed under the sloping roof, after having too many beers to ride their mopeds home. They probably didn’t even remove their trainers. David Ninoshvili will appreciate being asked to stay in our spare room. Let him have it.

2

I’m only trying to fool myself. It remains to be seen whether this visitor from Georgia is really as harmless as he seems.

Matassi. That evening in the bar of the Hotel Iveria. The next afternoon, when Ninoshvili invited me to his apartment. And last but not least, the middle of the following day, when Matassi knocked at the door of my hotel room, bringing me the article she’d photocopied for me in the library.

Matassi wore pale blouses and skirts in plain colours, and once I saw her in a bright summer dress with a white collar. No tall circular cap, no laced bodice, no strings of beads dangling from her temples. No long, plaited braids lying on her breast; she wore her black hair cut short. Yet she had the same exotic charm as the women in Georgian national costume smiling at visitors from the posters at the Tbilisi branch of the state-run Inturist travel agency. Round cheeks, dark thick eyebrows and lashes, shadows around her eyes. Full lips.

On the evening when Ninoshvili brought her to the hotel bar with him and introduced her as his wife, Dautzenbacher and the bearded Slavonic lecturer from Heidelberg – I forget his name – immediately sat up and took notice. Dr Bender, the only woman in our party, went to her room in a fit of pique on finding herself increasingly left out of the conversation. She pleaded a headache, but didn’t bother to make it sound plausible. I had stayed in the background, and found myself rewarded by the intriguing impression that Matassi was casting me glances of much greater interest than those she gave the other two, who went on tirelessly posturing. I even received a dazzling smile now and then.

Next day, Ninoshvili didn’t tell me that she’d be expecting both of us at his apartment. Instead he asked casually, after our group had all lunched together, whether I would like to visit a Georgian home, and I instantly decided to skip the afternoon’s study programme. I followed our interpreter through the winding streets of the Old Town, immersing myself in a flood of strange smells and sounds. I thought, with growing alarm, that if I were to lose sight of my guide I’d never find my way back through this teeming labyrinth.

When Ninoshvili, with an inviting gesture, opened a small gate in a high wall, I found myself in a quiet courtyard surrounded on three sides by balconies. I saw wooden balustrades, elaborately carved and painted sky blue. Washing lines crossed the courtyard up to the second floor. On the wall of the house there was a large stone tank with a tap above it. Two children, sitting in the shade on the trodden mud of the courtyard floor, inspected me with dark eyes.

The round table in Ninoshvili’s living room was laid with three cups and three plates, and the aroma of fresh coffee hung in the air. As I looked around me, Matassi appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen. She was wearing the summer dress with the white collar. She smiled at me and said, in English, “Good afternoon, Mr Kestner. How are you?”

Ninoshvili said he would just go out to the confectioner’s for something to nibble with our coffee, and when I protested that I couldn’t possibly eat anything else after our lavish lunch, he waved the objection away with both hands, smiling, and went off. Matassi brought the coffee. I asked her if she didn’t have to go to work. No, she said, not today. And how, I asked, had she known that I’d be coming? She hadn’t known, she replied, but she had hoped I would. Hoped I would? Why? A silent glance and a smile were her only response to that.

Perhaps it was the wine and vodka freely dispensed by our hosts at lunch, when toast after toast was drunk, and anyone who didn’t empty his glass every time was offending the sacrosanct table manners of the Georgians. But be that as it may, as soon as Ninoshvili had set off for the confectioner’s I embarked on a determined flirtation with his wife, threw my ideas of a guest’s proper conduct overboard, and began to feel I was hovering under the blue sky, in the summer wind wafting in through the balcony door.

When Matassi showed me a little book written by Ninoshvili, and leaned over my shoulder to translate the Georgian print of its title for me, moving her pale brown forefinger along the line, I turned my face to her. The tip of my nose touched her cheek, and I breathed in a perfume that I had never smelled before. The Orient and myrrh sprang to mind and remained lodged in my memory, although to this day I don’t know what myrrh really smells like. I kissed Matassi’s cheek. She did not draw back. I took her in my arms and kissed her on the mouth. She returned the kiss before, smiling, she freed herself.

I felt no scruples about deceiving my host. If I did feel a little sorry for anything afterwards, it was only that when Matassi showed me first the kitchen and then the small, shady bedroom, I didn’t pull her straight down on the bed, which was covered with a woven spread and provided with plump pillows. I was afraid that Ninoshvili, swinging a bag of pastries, might surprise us in a situation that couldn’t be satisfactorily explained in a hurry, my trousers around my feet, her summer dress pushed up to her armpits. At that point I imagined him dropping the bag and reaching for a knife, washing away the shame with blood, Matassi’s blood, but also, and fatally, mine.

As I thought later, with annoyance, I need not have feared the Georgian’s revenge, or at least not that he would catch us in the act. Ninoshvili didn’t come back for a full hour. He said he had been held up.

3

Only later, when we had left Georgia and were travelling on through the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, did I begin to wonder about the division of labour between Ninoshvili and Matassi when they entertained a guest. We were sitting in a bus on our way from Yerevan to Ejmiadzin, where we were to have the honour of an audience with the Catholicos, when Dautzenbacher, for whom no joke was too tasteless, grabbed the woman interpreter’s microphone and bellowed into it, in his beery bass voice, “Attention, everyone, please, here is an important announcement!”

He cleared his throat, making the diaphragm of the microphone crackle, and went on. “Don’t forget the bugs! We may be on our way to a monastery, but don’t you go thinking the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church despises those dear little creatures, not him. So no hostile questions, please, and most important of all no negative criticism of Soviet power! It’ll all be recorded, and then you’ll be sorry. Thank you for your kind attention.” And with that he handed the microphone back to the interpreter, some Irina or Natasha from Inturist, who took it with a rather forced smile. Dautzenbacher dropped back into his seat, very pleased with his performance – his broad shoulders were shaking.

I suddenly thought of the memo that had been handed out at home along with the programme for the trip. I’d just shaken my head and thrown it into the waste-paper basket. Our study group, this memo told us, could expect a friendly reception, but nonetheless we must not forget that the Soviet Union had a highly developed intelligence system which took a particular interest in foreign visitors.

I don’t remember the details, but this document warned participants in the study tour against bugging devices in not only our own rooms but also those of the people we’d be meeting, all of them “top professionals from the educational institutions”, although that did not, unfortunately, mean that some of them might not also work “for the intelligence services”. There followed several categorical imperatives for unsuspecting participants in study trips, which as far as I remember ran: Do not go out alone! Beware of incriminating situations! And the crowning injunction, with three exclamation marks, was: Do not give your hosts the chance to put you under pressure in any way whatsoever!!!

I had thought this list of banalities was mere pomposity on the part of the Federal German authorities financing our study tour, who were obviously not too happy with its stated aim, i.e. to foster cultural exchange between Germany and the Soviet Union. But at the same moment as I remembered these infantile rules of conduct, I thought I saw the writing on the wall in them, an awful warning of something I’d only just escaped. I felt hot, I began to shift restlessly in my seat as my memories of Tbilisi inexorably turned into an embarrassing and alarming nightmare. Why hadn’t I put two and two together?

Matassi, who worked at the university library, and Ninoshvili, the writer, translator and interpreter, now appeared to me in a new and ominous light. Two pleasant people, forthcoming, frank and open? What a wicked deception! Behind that hospitable façade, the couple were really a pair of agents in the Soviet secret service. And now I had a plausible explanation for Ninoshvili’s hour-long absence at the confectioner’s.

The trap had been set when he invited me to his apartment. A bug in the bedroom, not a permanent installation, of course, but specially fitted by Ninoshvili for my visit, perhaps with help from some kind of KGB technician. Ninoshvili leaves the house after handing me over to Matassi, tells the children in the courtyard to go and buy him some pastries in the shop next door, immediately takes himself off to a windowless room near his apartment and switches on the listening apparatus. He waits there for Matassi to call for help, removing his headphones only once, when the children knock on the door and deliver the bag of pastries.

After an hour, when nothing useful for his purposes has happened, he calls the whole thing off, comes back to have coffee, carrying his purchases, and explains that he was held up. But they are already planning the next attempt. Matassi, her white teeth biting into a crisp croissant, brings the conversation round to a French ethnologist’s account of his visit to Tbilisi at the turn of the century, and when I show interest says she’ll photocopy his article from the journals archive in the library and leave it at my hotel tomorrow.

And shouldn’t I have smelled a rat, at the very latest, when the next day came?

Matassi wasn’t content just to leave the photocopy at the hotel reception desk. Instead, she appeared on the twelfth floor, unannounced, and knocked at the door of my room when I’d gone up there after yet another tiring lunch, meaning to take a nap before the next excursion on the study programme.

When she explained this delightful surprise – unfortunately, she said, the hotel service wasn’t very reliable, even letters from abroad were lost now and then – I didn’t stop to think of anything that might have aroused my suspicions. I went to the bathroom, brushed my hair, rinsed out my mouth, did up my shirt buttons. When I came out she was sitting on the bed, leafing through my bedtime reading, a Simenon crime story.

I offered her some of the duty-free bourbon I’d bought at the airport, stocking up for the journey, and she didn’t hesitate for a second. “Oh, wonderful, thank you! Just a little bit, please,” she said, again in English. I sat down beside her with both glasses, drank to her, and as her dark brown eyes gazed at me over the rim of the glass I jettisoned the prelude I’d been contemplating, some idle chatter about Georges Simenon and the erotic component of his work. Waste of time. Throw it out, unnecessary.

I took her glass from her, drew closer, putting one arm on the bed on the other side of her thighs, said I really had to breathe in the scent of her skin again, just once more. She laughed. I ran my nose gently over her cheek, her eyebrows, then down over her nose, her mouth, her throat. I kissed her throat and then her lips. She responded to the kiss, so I never got around to asking her whether she used myrrh as a perfume. We sank on the bed; I put a hand between her thighs. The skin there was smooth and cool. Matassi didn’t object. She closed her eyes.

There were three sharp knocks at the door, a short pause, and then they were repeated. David Ninoshvili with the knife in his hand! Matassi opened her eyes, but she lay where she was. I fear my reaction made her doubt my virility. I snatched my hand out from under her skirt as if a vicious insect had stung me, jumped up and stared at the door.

It wasn’t David the Avenger, it was Karl-Heinz Dautzenbacher. “Open up in there, Kestner!” he called. “Or are you going to sleep the whole afternoon away?”

Matassi rose, put the Simenon that had fallen to the floor back on the bedside table, picked up her glass and sat down in an armchair. When I didn’t move from the spot, she smiled and asked, “Why don’t you open it?” I opened the door. Dautzenbacher raised his eyebrows when he saw Matassi, grinned, said, “Why, hello, Mrs Ninoshvili!” and apologized for disturbing me, still grinning. He’d only come, he said, to tell me that the bus for the sightseeing trip to Narikala Fortress was leaving half an hour earlier than originally planned.

I could have murdered that smirking troublemaker, I could have rammed King David the Builder’s hunting spear through his thick skin – to think of that great elephant trampling all over my little oriental garden! On the way to Ejmiadzin later, when I thought I saw the facts of the matter, I reluctantly began to do him justice: Karl-Heinz Dautzenbacher, an uncouth fool of a guardian angel who, unwittingly but reliably following the dictates of Fate, had saved me from the honeytrap.

Once again I picture David Ninoshvili sitting next door, in a hotel room booked by the KGB, headphones on his ears. Waiting beside him stands a militiaman: calf-length boots, round peaked cap with a red band and a gold star. Ninoshvili is listening in, raises his head as he hears me mention the scent of Matassi’s skin. Then, unexpectedly, he hears the knock on the door, recognizes Dautzenbacher’s voice. Cursing, he takes off his headphones and slams them down on the desk.

If Dautzenbacher hadn’t barged his way in, the scene as staged could have come to quite a different end. A nasty end. Ninoshvili, listening intently, raises one finger. The militiaman parts his hands, which he’s been holding clasped together behind his back, and juts his chin. A shrill scream comes from the room next door, my room. It is Matassi’s cry for help. Ninoshvili kicks back his chair, races out of the room, hammers at the door of my room. It opens; Matassi appears in the doorway.

Her blouse and bra are torn, she clutches the rags together, pressing them to her bare breasts as she sinks back against the wall. Her other half asks her a question in Russian or Georgian, she replies in a faint voice. I don’t understand a word of it.

Ninoshvili slowly approaches, stops in front of me. Balancing on one leg, I struggle with my trousers: one foot is tangled up in them. The Georgian looks at me, asks tonelessly, as if he can’t believe something so outrageous, “Is this true, my friend? You tried to rape her?” I cry, “No! If she says that, she’s lying!”

The burly figure of the militiaman appears in the doorway; the door is still open. After a glance at Matassi he scrutinizes me, adjusts his belt and says something in a sharp tone, more of an accusation than a question. Ninoshvili turns back, speaks to the militiaman, pushes him out into the corridor and closes the door. Then, his footsteps dragging, he goes over to the armchair, drops heavily into it, looks at me almost without interest as I do up my trousers. “This is a bad business, my friend. Very bad. You can think yourself lucky I arrived in time.” He shakes his head. “But I don’t know what will come of it now.”

He looks at Matassi, who is still leaning against the wall, her eyes cast down. Before I can work out what to say without digging myself even deeper into the hole I’m in, Ninoshvili stands up. He wraps his jacket round Matassi and leads her out.

He comes back in the evening, on his own. He accepts a glass of my bourbon, walks up and down the room with it, stops by the window now and then and peers down at the street, while I sit on the bed, feeling numb.

He’s been out and about all afternoon, says my Georgian friend, he’s done his level best to avert a scandal. But the militiaman – who by some unfortunate chance happened to be coming along the hotel corridor – has reported the incident, there’ll be police inquiries, and they could take a long time. The authorities won’t let me leave the country. They have made it very clear to him that they are, after all, ready to let me go only on one condition.

He sips his bourbon, turns away from me, and continues with some hesitation, peering out through the net curtain. It would be a two-way deal, he says, a deal of a kind that, very sad to say, is not unusual in the Soviet Union. And this shameful practice is also now the standard in Georgia, once a free republic fit for human beings to live in. To tell me the bitter truth plainly: the authorities will waive prosecution and allow me to leave if – and here he takes a deep breath – if I declare myself ready to supply them with information now and then, once I am back in the Federal Republic of Germany. Nothing world-shaking, nothing that could really be called espionage. But the authorities, he says, are pathologically obsessed with gathering information of every kind.

When I try to protest, my voice shakes pitifully. I manage to say that I didn’t offer Matassi any violence. I was caressing her, yes, I can’t and won’t deny that, and I’m extremely sorry to have forgotten myself so thoughtlessly. But there was no question of rape, not even an attempt at such a crime. I can explain the state of Matassi’s clothing only by supposing that she herself – perhaps overreacting in panic – had torn her own blouse and bra before she opened the door.

Ninoshvili shakes his head, as if in sorrowful regret. “I believe you, my friend. And Matassi wouldn’t want to get you into trouble either. But the militiaman has given a different account. And the authorities won’t believe either me or you, they’ll believe that overzealous police officer.”

He has brought with him a written statement, prepared by the authorities, of my willingness to work for the promotion of world peace. He takes it out of his breast pocket and hands it to me with a regretful expression. I have only to sign this paper, he says, and then I’m at liberty to travel on.

4

Julia and Ralf take it even worse than I’d feared when I tell them, at supper, about Ninoshvili’s forthcoming visit. My lout of a son throws his fork down on his plate, frowns and leans forwards. “Where did you say this guy comes from? Georgia? Hey, look, they’re cutting each other’s throats there at this very moment, right? Is he going to apply for political asylum here or something?”

I ask him, raising my voice, kindly to spare me his idées fixes. When, I say, is he finally going to get it into his head that foreigners usually have far better things to do than to exploit our German fatherland? David Ninoshvili is an educated man, highly regarded in his own country, and he’s coming on behalf of the Georgian Ministry of Culture.

While my wife eats in silence and looks at her plate, that oaf Ralf stuffs his mouth with food, chews and grins. He breathes heavily out through his nose. “Ministry of Culture, ho ho, what a hoot! What sort of culture do those Georgians have? All of them running around with knives between their teeth. Or anyway with Kalashnikovs.” He clenches his right fist, aims his outstretched forefinger at me. “Bang, bang, bang!”

I lose my temper. I throw my napkin down on the table. “Are you actually proud of your ignorance? Your total lack of historical knowledge? People were living in towns in the Caucasus when your ancient Germanic ancestors were still squatting behind bushes gnawing bear bones!”

“Yes, teacher, sir!” He puts his fork down, wipes his mouth, pushes his chair back and gets up. “Just could be I know more about the Caucasus than you, though.” He leans over the table. “So can you tell me what happened on Mount Elbrus fifty-one years ago?”

I stare at him. He grins. “Twenty-one mountaineering infantrymen planted the German flag there, that’s what. And it would still be flying on the mountain peak if Army Group A hadn’t run out of petrol.”

“Oh, get out of here!” I shout.

“Okay, I was going anyway.” He slouches casually towards the door on his air-cushioned rubber soles. “I’m off to get some fresh air before that Georgian wop turns up.”

I’ve put up with the way Ralf carries on for too long. The hopeful idea that he might turn out better than the recalcitrant little bastards who do their best to pollute my lessons every day was an illusion. I expected to see him develop into an enlightened human being of his own accord, but I was wrong. I ought to have revised my educational principles ahead of time. Corporal punishment for good reasons, a few sound slaps now and then – that might have worked wonders. But it’s too late for that now, never mind the fact that by this time he’s probably physically stronger than me, and wouldn’t hesitate to dislocate his own father’s arm if I raised it to chastise him.

And I ought to have turned my attention to young Herr Schumann earlier: Gero Schumann, in whose summer house my son and his friends hang out, leading their own lives and pouring beer down their throats. Unfortunately I was depending on Julia. Herr Schumann did his probationary period as a qualified trainee in the legal practice where she works, and ended up with glowing reports: an affable, highly intelligent man who’d make his way in the world as a lawyer. Nice manners, well-to-do family – the summer house belongs to his grandmother, who owns a number of properties.

Herr Schumann has now successfully stood as a candidate for the city council, on which he sits representing a party of the far right. And my son and his friends put up his election posters and distributed unspeakably idiotic leaflets. Against xenophobia – but against foreign domination too! Foreigners yes, freeloaders no! For a confident, independent Germany!

I have always assumed that my wife finds this inflated babble as abhorrent as I do, despite her constant attempts to calm my anger: now don’t get worked up, it will all work out, he’s at the awkward age, just suppose he’d taken to drugs, to be honest I’d rather have him spouting this silly stuff, he’ll get tired of it some time… and so on and so forth. Ah, the maternal instinct: come what may, the mother will love her black sheep.

After this evening, however, I doubt this explanation of her attempts to mediate. Once our son has stormed out uttering deplorable invective of some kind, I look at her, breathing heavily. Julia does not return my glance. In silence, she finishes eating her supper. I ask her, “Did you have no contribution to make to that conversation?”

She shrugs her shoulders, shakes her head. “Oh, you know how he reacts to these subjects. Arguments make him even angrier. He’ll calm down.”

I don’t believe I’m hearing this. Who will calm down? I suppose we’re talking about that lout’s state of mind, not by any chance mine? My tone becomes a little sharp. “The subject was not the question of political asylum, but a visit from a man who’s a friend of mine.” (A friend of mine – oh, God.)

“You’re right, his behaviour really is impossible.” She folds her napkin. A few seconds pass, then she comes out with the question her son would already have asked if he hadn’t preferred to make a dramatic and ill-mannered exit. “How long is this man going to stay?”

I don’t know, damn it. There’s no indication in his letter. And I can understand that. He’s not to know how long it will take him to get people over here interested in publishing Georgian literature. (I hope at least he knows where to go to find such people.)

She looks up from her napkin. “You haven’t forgotten that Erika wanted to visit us at the end of this month, have you?”

Erika?

“That’s right, Erika. I told you some time ago.” She didn’t, but never mind; I could have guessed that her school friend from Halle was feeling tired of her dreary home town yet again. When did she last visit us? In spring, that’s not even six months ago. Sometimes I still feel bothered by the way that heavy perfume of hers hangs around, but of course that’s not Erika’s problem. No doubt she’s already shifting about restlessly on her curvaceous behind, longing for all the distractions the West can offer.

I try to control my tone of voice. Well, I say, it’s perfectly possible that Herr Ninoshvili will be on his way home before the end of the month. If he does want to stay any longer, or if he has to stay any longer, which I don’t anticipate, then just for once maybe it wouldn’t be too much to expect Erika to go to a hotel.

The answer comes promptly and baldly, nothing to soften it. “That’s not how I see it. Why can’t Herr Ninoshvili be expected to get a hotel room?”

“Because he’s sure to be short of cash.”

“So is Erika.”

“You’re overlooking one considerable difference.” I pause for a moment while she looks at me, her eyes flashing. “Erika is travelling for her own pleasure. Herr Ninoshvili, on the other hand, is making this journey on behalf of a cultural project of some considerable importance. And also, not least, to earn his living.”

She nods, smiles wryly as if my comparison had shown me up in some way and was also an insult to her old school friend. “I’m afraid you have overlooked another considerable difference.”

“Which is?”

She hesitates, but not for long. “Ralf did have a point. This man comes from a country engaged in bloodthirsty civil war. Do you know which party he belongs to, and what he may have done in this war? You can’t be sure he’s not getting out of the country to escape retribution. And you say yourself that he doesn’t have any money. So how do you know he won’t want to take refuge with us? And then, once we’ve taken him in, he might hang around for months and months.”

I say, “You’re describing the situation of a political refugee. The classic case of a human being with a right to claim asylum.”

She shrugs. “Call it what you like. As you know, I’ve often enough supported the principle that such people should have their rights. But does it really have to be at your own family’s expense?” She leaves the dining table and goes to her study.

I clear away the dishes and take them to the kitchen. A cup slips out of my hand and breaks on the stone floor. I tread on the broken pieces, and they fly all over the place.

I’ll show those two what a guest means and how civilized people treat their guests! Yes, yes, perhaps Ninoshvili is in fact coming because he can’t stay in his own country and hopes to begin another life here, build up a new future. Then let him stay in our house, damn it, until he’s found his footing. If necessary I’ll celebrate Christmas and see the New Year in with him.

I don’t suppose he’ll be planning to stay until Easter.

5

I should add here that seven years ago Julia’s legal practice was defending a qualified engineer from the Federal Office of Defence Technology and Procurement who was an alcoholic, and had let himself be recruited by the KGB. The case for the defence was rejected, and the provincial Supreme Court sentenced the man to three years behind bars, as far as I remember, for giving away a few ridiculous state secrets for an equally ridiculous sum that didn’t even cover the delinquent’s bills for spirits.

I hadn’t known anything about this client of my wife’s when I set out on my trip to the Soviet Union. It was only after my return that Julia happened to mention casually what a lot of work the case was making for her. It was a mild autumn evening, and we were sitting on the terrace watching twilight fall slowly over the garden. Julia had said she must go back to her desk, but she obviously didn’t want to, and was trying to postpone the moment by telling me about all the trouble she was having with the unfortunate procurement technician.

When she had finally gone in I mopped the sweat from my brow. Luckily she didn’t seem to have noticed my uneasiness. I’d almost forgotten my nightmares about Ninoshvili and Matassi – with some difficulty, but successfully in the end – by calling on sound human reason. After all, if the couple were really working to entrap people, why would they want to lure an ordinary secondary-school teacher of German and history into their clutches? Any information I could have given the KGB about Germany would have centred on my experiences with pupils who liked to waste time behaving like pigs, and teachers who suffered from having to be their swineherds, and that would hardly have been of any material interest.

But now my fantasies began running wild again, preying on my mind: suppose the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Besopasnosti, the Soviet secret service, had been trying to gain access to the Federal Office of Defence Technology and Procurement through schoolteacher Christian Kestner and his lawyer wife Dr Julia Kestner? Maybe they hoped, by those means, to get an insight into top-secret documents from which they could discover how many screws held the Leopard tank together, or which of the civil servants employed by the Defence Office was as notorious a drunk as the qualified engineer Julia was defending, or how many bucketfuls of jam a division of the Federal Armed Forces consumed on average per month.

Enough of this foolishness. I will also add that over the last few years Julia and her firm have defended several clients working in those fields that are absurdly described as “sensitive”, (as if making your living by dealing with armaments and their accessories calls for profound sensitivity). But this participation by my wife in the affairs of state of the Federal German Republic doesn’t really constitute reasonable grounds for me to feel as if I ought to anticipate Ninoshvili’s visit with misgivings.

Even if the Georgian and his wife were trying to get me into the clutches of the Soviet secret service, the Soviet Union as such no longer exists. And the Republic of Georgia certainly has weightier matters on its mind than blackmailing Christian Kestner, senior schoolteacher, by holding over him a crime that he would have liked to commit but, thanks to Karl-Heinz Dautzenbacher, never did.

6

In the morning twilight they looked to the east, and halfway between the sea and the sky they saw snow-crowned peaks rising above the clouds, bright and glittering. And they knew that they had reached the Caucasus, at the ends of the inhabited earth. The Caucasus, the highest of all mountain ranges, father of the rivers of the east. Prometheus was once chained to its summit, for the eagle to gnaw his liver day after day, and at the foot of its slopes whispered the dark forests around the magical land of Colchis.

 

That is vividly written, although sad to say by an Englishman, not a Georgian. I’m acquainting myself with Georgian literature a little in order to do my guest justice, but I’m not getting on very well with it. Hardly any modern texts exist in German translation, and the older works I’ve found in libraries have a musty odour of the past about them that sometimes puts me off. Or makes me yawn, to confess the truth (and I do want to stick to the truth here).

The Georgians must be strange people if it’s true that every other man and woman among them can quote from Shota Rustaveli’s The Man in the Panther’s Skin, and quote from it with feeling. Yet this “book of books of an entire nation”, of which I knew nothing before, is almost eight hundred years old, and its venerable metaphors would never trip off anyone’s tongue in this country today. What does a Georgian feel when he declaims lines claiming that Queen Tamar had “the countenance of a rose”, “crimson lips” and “teeth like polished crystal” set between rubies?

I also have to ask myself why I feel considerably greater interest in Rustaveli’s account of the lovelorn Patman, who falls for the wrong man and afterwards complains, “Unlucky that I am, I was no more than the female goat to his buck.” And the book’s antiquated illustrations, where knights sit with their ladies behind portières and on cushions, remind me, I am ashamed to say, of the pornographic interiors depicted by Chinese and Japanese artists, although Rustaveli’s ladies wear high-necked gowns and the knights’ private parts are not on display.

Do I lack moral seriousness because I can’t understand this cult of courtly love? Have I been, unknowingly, a guest in a country where women are still put on a pedestal just as they were eight hundred years ago, to be defended against all attacks – defended, perhaps, with the murderous tools so famously manufactured by the Georgians over the ages?

I found a macabre tale illustrating the efficacy of this renowned Georgian craft in Pushkin’s travel journal. He writes that weapons from Tbilisi “are highly prized all over the Orient”, and continues, “Count Samoilov and W., who were known here for their physical strength, generally tried out their new swords by chopping a ram in half or beheading an ox with a single stroke.” Heaven help us. Disgusting!

Why am I doing this? Well, my study of Georgian literature does offer more than just sensations of tedium and horror. In a novel published in 1937, I have come upon an idea which helps to explain the uneasiness that Ninoshvili’s letter aroused in me without the need for any outlandish fantasies.

Grigol Robakidze, the author of this novel, describes a banquet to which writers, actors and painters from Tbilisi are invited. It is held in a castle not far from the city. The guests sit down at a long table on the veranda, and the leaves of an old walnut tree with many branches allow dappled sunlight to fall on the table. As they are drinking their first glasses of Maglari, a wine made from a grape variety that grows wild on date palms, they choose the Tamada, the master of ceremonies, who will now be in charge of the banquet and whose orders are to be obeyed to the letter, whether he tells the guests to drain their glasses or commands one of his companions at table to sing a song or perform a folk dance.

Robakidze was well advised to let his readers know first that a banquet was essentially a religious celebration in ancient times, and remains so in Georgia to this day. Without supernatural assistance, the guests at that 1937 banquet could hardly have consumed the full menu served to them under the walnut tree.

First they eat young green beans mixed with ground paprika leaves and walnuts, accompanied by two kinds of cheese and hot maize cakes. After the Tamada has struck up a hymn in praise of the Upper Imerians, an ancient Georgian tribe, this first course is followed by boiled chicken and baked trout. When the fish bones and chicken bones have been taken away, the Tamada calls for the recitation of a poem. One of the literary men composes, extempore, a sonnet in honour of a beautiful woman. His companions applaud him and the lady, and they all rise to dance.

After they have given their digestions a little help in this way, they are served roast mutton on twelve long spits, sprinkled with barberries and with a pomegranate-juice sauce poured over it. They get to work on the mutton until the spits are bare, and then pause once more to recruit their forces by listening, much moved, to a discourse on the incomparable virtues of the Georgian language. Then another course is brought in: a whole boiled shoulder of beef in a sauce of wild plum juice, highly seasoned with pepper and other spices.

Finally the guests applaud the Tamada in approximately the tenth or maybe even the twentieth toast of the day, once again draining their glasses. “With that the banquet came to an end, but only the ritual part of it. Thereafter everyone could eat (sic!) and drink, sing and dance just as he liked.”

I would have thought this account of gluttony with musical accompaniment a mere amusing exaggeration on the author’s part, like Queen Tamar’s crystal teeth or the flawless skin of Princess Vis, which glowed at her birth so that it illuminated the night like moonlight, if I hadn’t been to a similar banquet myself seven years ago. It was not, to be sure, held in a castle, but on a sovkhoz, a state-owned property not far from Tbilisi.

We sat at a long table in the manager’s office. Choice specimens of the fine apples and bunches of grapes supplied by the sovkhoz to the capital stood on the table; on the wall hung pictures of Lenin and Stalin, the former Josef W. Dzhugashvili, who at this time had been anathematized by the Communist Party for three decades, although obviously that hadn’t ruined his reputation in his native land as Georgia’s greatest son.

Our Tamada, the manager of the sovkhoz, was called Viktor. He gave us permission to ask him questions, and for a long time he didn’t fail to give answers, but then, all of a sudden, the feasting which was to leave us unfit for our study programme for the rest of the day began. When asked a question about the ratio of wages to expenses on the state-owned property, he rose to his feet, leaned his hands on the table, let his eyes, under their thick brows, wander, and explained, “The only answer to that is one hundred grams.”

The interpreter translated, explaining that by order of the Tamada everyone had to knock back a shot of the amber spirit distilled from the grapes of the sovkhoz before he could answer the question. And so it went merrily on. Viktor kept finding new reasons to demand the consumption of another shot.

At one point he got us to drink to Dautzenbacher, who, on being commanded by the master of ceremonies to perform a German folk song, had immediately complied with a rendering of ‘At the Well in Front of the Gate’ during which tears actually came to his eyes. Another shot was necessary to atone for the offence committed by the librarian Heinrich Weinzierl from Passau, who had gone looking for the men’s room without asking the Tamada’s permission. When he returned, relieved but visibly swaying already, Viktor wagged a forefinger at him and delivered judgement. “Cheinrich! Forfeit!”

My female colleague Dr Bender was not present when the Tamada proposed a toast to friendly German-Soviet relations that would teach President Ronald Reagan some manners. Later, when I had asked and received Viktor’s permission to leave the table for a pressing reason, I found her in the back yard. She was sitting on an upturned wooden cask, her head in her hands, and shook her head mutely when I asked if there was anything I could do for her.

I walked a little way further, took a deep breath, and looked at the plain, pale-yellow prefabricated buildings in which the sovkhoz workers and their families lived, and the green hills behind them. I saw the bright-blue sky resting on the distant, glittering mountain ridge to the north. I looked for the pass over which the Russians had once entered the country, a winding, icy path skirting steep ravines.