© Mariam Bekauri 2012
This story comes from a new collection of fiction from Georgia, published by Dalkey Archive. Mariam Bekauri is part of an emerging wave of young Georgian authors re-energising a long-established literary scene. Still only 22, Bekauri has already won several literary awards, and “Debi” was selected for Georgia’s annual “Best Short Stories” anthology in 2010. “Through her description of a series of seemingly minor losses, of experiences and interactions which characterise ‘normal’ childhood, Bekauri expresses a far greater loss, of childhood itself, of innocence and of normality,” says the story’s translator, Elizabeth Heighway. “It was this expression of weighty psychological themes through a child’s everyday experiences that appealed to me; linguistically this was mirrored in Bekauri’s ability to combine emotional power with such concision and simplicity of expression.”
We are playing with pebbles. Debi is so thin I worry sometimes that she might break in half. We don’t speak. We throw pebbles into each other’s “territory” and count them up to see who has the most. Mom’s warned me that Debi is sick and I should always let her win. We mingled our blood and swore to keep it a secret that we don’t believe in God. Debi says if God existed she wouldn’t be so thin. At night, when Mom perches on Debi’s bed and quietly says her prayers, we pull the blanket up over our heads and laugh. Then Mom bends down and kisses us: me twice, Debi four times. She turns out the light and leaves the room. Soon after I feel something touching me. Debi holds my hand tight and whispers a warning in my ear: “Go to sleep or the bogeyman will get you!” We cling to each other in fright. I press my lips against my sister’s eyelids and am surprised by how salty her eyes are.
“I’m a statue,” Debi insists. She stands motionless in the middle of the room and won’t look at me. I make lots of noise. I want her to react. But she won’t look at me, just gets paler and paler. I hold two fingers right in front of her eyes and wait. She doesn’t move. I get angry. “Look at me!” I yell at her, but she gives no reaction. “Look at me!” She says nothing. I grab hold of her shoulders and shake her. She’s so pale I start thinking there’s no blood left in her. Mom runs in when she hears the shouting. She goes as white as a sheet.
“Leave her alone!” She comes over to me.
“Make her look at me then!”
“What was it I told you?” Mom slaps me across the face.
I let go of my sister and try with all my might to hold back the tears. I mustn’t cry now, I know it. My mother and I stand in silence. Debi slowly raises her hands and starts to clap.
“Did it hurt?” she says in a strange voice.
Now it’s me who stays silent.
“Did it hurt?” she shouts and starts to laugh. “It hurt, didn’t it?”
“Are you not a statue any more, then?” I can’t hide my anger.
“Now you get it, don’t you? You won’t hurt me any more!” Her laughter falls away and she starts to cough.
Mom kisses me quietly on the head. She does it so Debi doesn’t see, and I notice that Mom’s crying.
Debi sits on my back. I go from room to room on all fours. She’s happy. “I’ve got a horse,” she shouts. I don’t like this game. I stop and wait for her to get off my back. I’ve got dirty knees and dirty palms. Debi brings a jug of water. She pours it over my hands and rubs my palms as hard as she can.
“Now I’ll be your horse,” she offers, laughing, not realising we can’t do it that way around.
I cut her off. “I don’t want to.”
“But I want to,” she sulks.
“We can’t, Debi.”
“Because I’m thin, is that why?”
“Yes.”
Her face brightens. “Then lick my stomach.”
“We can’t do that either.”
“Why?” She’s gone pale again.
“We’ll get told off.”
“They won’t find out. Please?”
“No, Debi.” I turn around. I can’t look at her paleness any more and I’m tired of following her stupid wishes, too. She runs over, comes up to me with a frightened look in her eyes and asks me, “Don’t you love me anymore?”
“Of course I do.”
“Then why won’t you play with me?”
“I’m tired.”
She thinks for a moment, then tilts her head to one side for a second as if she’s just worked something out and says, haltingly, “No, you don’t love me anymore. I know it.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“It’s true.”
She’s sitting on the floor. She puts her hands behind her head and stares at me so hard I almost yell at her to stop.
“You must love me more than anyone else, do you understand?” Her voice is frantic.
“I do love you, Debi.”
“No! That’s not what I’m saying. You must love me, and nobody else.”
“So what if I love somebody else?”
“You mustn’t. Other people don’t know our secrets. Promise me!”
“Debi, don’t be stupid!”
“No! Promise me!” She’s very pale.
I sit down next to her, try to calm her down.
“Listen...”
“I don’t want to. You can’t love anyone but me! Promise!”
Right then I really wish I believed in God, but I don’t anymore. If God existed Debi wouldn’t be so thin.
“Promise!”
Debi presses her face against mine.
“This is mine. Both are mine. And mine is yours. Don’t you get it?”
Her lips are pressed against my lips and it’s almost as if both of us are speaking.
And then I feel that familiar saltiness spill once more from Debi’s eyes into mine. We smell of the sea.
Debi stands in front of the mirror, a smile on her face. Her shirt’s pulled up under her chin and she’s prodding her slight, budding breasts.
“Can you see them?” She turns around toward me.
“Pull your shirt down.” Instinctively, I turn my head away. I somehow know it’s not right.
“No. They’re pretty.”
“It’s not right, Debi.”
She ignores me. Then it’s as if she’s forgotten I’m there. She sings something very quietly. I’ve never heard the song before. She’s probably made it up. Suddenly she turns white as a sheet. She walks over to me with rapid little steps and pulls my T-shirt right up. I try to stop her, gently. I’m scared I might hurt her. She doesn’t give up. She stares at my chest curiously and asks me in amazement, “Why haven’t you got any?”
“Only girls get them.”
Suddenly she gets it. “Aaaah,” she says, drawing the sound out thoughtfully.
Then she presses her hands around my neck.
“Does that hurt?”
“No.”
“It must hurt.”
“In that case it hurts.”
“There is no God, do you understand?” She’s paler than death.
“I know.”
She moves away from me. She rubs her hands together and, smiling, says to me, “I nearly broke my fingers.”
Mom lets us go down to the yard. She only does so when I promise not to leave Debi’s side. Debi takes long steps. She jumps down two steps at a time. She’s not usually this excited. “Lord, have mercy on your child Debi,” she repeats senselessly. She heard it last night when Mom was praying. She doesn’t know that “Lord” is the same as “God,” otherwise she wouldn’t say it. I sit her on a bench under the tall poplar tree and warn her not to go anywhere, to behave herself, and wait for me. And I go out onto the square, right by where she’s sitting, where the boys play soccer. I’m so happy. It’s as if I’ve broken free. I run fast, chase after the ball, use my sleeve to wipe away the sweat pouring from my temples. Suddenly everyone stops. They’re looking at something and laughing. I turn around and I see her: Debi is holding a small puppy, her T-shirt’s pulled up around her neck again and she’s telling it to suck. The puppy is howling pitifully and trying to get away. But Debi’s holding it tight. Then she starts howling just like it, she seems unaware of what’s going on around her. I leave the ball and run over to my sister. Behind me I hear voices saying, “Debi, you’re mad!” and, “Debi, you dog!” Those voices tear me apart inside and I finally understand what pain is. “Don’t you dare!” I scream, and shake my fists. All I know is that they are all my enemies and I must beat them all so that they too feel pain and know that God does not exist...
I grab Debi and start dragging her home. “No, I don’t want to go! He hasn’t fed yet!” she wails and tries to break free. Silent, I pull her along and think that I may never speak again. Debi lies down on the bed. She pulls her T-shirt up again and, laughing, points at her chest.
“Do you want to touch them?” she asks with interest.
I sit down on her bed. I lay my head beneath her chest and once again force myself not to cry. Debi’s naked skin has a particular scent to it. The saltiness has dried up. I start to feel sure that my sister is right. I can love nobody but her. It comes to me as a sort of childlike intuition and I run my rough tongue over her stomach. “Again, again!” she cries at the top of her voice. I wet her bony flesh again. I want her to understand that it hurts me. That she got what she wanted and that now it hurts me more than it hurts her. And so I lick Debi again and again until her paleness fades away...
“What are you doing?” I hear my mother’s quivering voice. I turn around. I look at my mother and I know that this time I am allowed to cry. But I do not cry.
Silence spreads through the room like fire. Nobody in the room speaks but Debi. It’s as if there’s a law against it. Mom stares at me strangely, tears in her eyes. I feel guilty because it’s Debi who is ill and not me. But I already know the most important thing, the thing I should have known before. We all know that something is going to change, and the change frightens us. Debi isn’t pale because she doesn’t believe in God. It’s because of her illness.
I lurk by the window, watching unobserved as they take Debi to live somewhere else, somewhere where they’re all like her. Debi cries and calls out my name, again and again. I can almost taste the saltiness of her eyes. “Oh God, have mercy on your child Debi!” I intone. For the first time I cry, and know that I smell of the sea.
