But she laughed. “No, I mean, what I said about him needing to be in hiding, it wasn’t a question. I was just saying—I know that much at least…”
What was I supposed to do?
It was pure fantasy. Unfortunately, I had to disillusion her.
I spoke to her as a parent would a child. Tactfully. Warmly, even. “Listen, my dear. Bakar Tukhareli doesn’t exist. I made him up. He never lived with the wolves and he never stole for the Baron. I made the Baron up too; he doesn’t really exist either.”
Silence.
“I’m sorry.”
Do you know what made me say sorry? Her face. Her already ashen face had become even paler. She pulled back, as if I smelled bad. Strange as it may seem, she was looking at me with fear, irony, and compassion in her eyes, as if I was crazy—in other words, the same way I’d looked at her just a moment before, when I realized she was crazy.
And that’s how we left it. Neither of us said another word. In fact, I just walked off. She never moved from the spot.
And I thought to myself that if there were two kinds of crazy people in this world—those who were wise with it and those who were just stupid—then she was probably the second kind.
I was sure I would never see her again, but I was wrong; I saw her again the very next day and in the very same place, right outside the entrance to my building.
“You think there’s something not quite right about me, don’t you,” she said, “following you around like a spy? But I swear on everyone I know, living or dead, I really need to see him… What you said to me before—about him not existing—I’ve realized now why you said it. I’m not stupid. I’m not the first person to come to you asking for his number, am I? I bet they drive him mad… but I’m not like that… He just doesn’t know me… How can I make you understand?”
(Well, do you understand?)
What was I supposed to do now? All I could think of was:
“Have you read The Three Musketeers?”
“What’s that got to do with it?” Once again she looked offended.
“Answer me. Have you read it, yes or no?”
“Yes, I think so. I don’t know.”
“What about Otar’s Widow?”
“What?”
“Didn’t you go to school?”
“Why are you making fun of me?”
“I’m not making fun of you, honestly.”
“Well, what’s that got to do with anything, then?”
“Look, did you go to school?”
“So what if I did? Is there something wrong with that?”
“No, precisely the opposite.”
“Okay, yes, I went to school. What’s your point?”
“Well, did you do Otar’s Widow? Or—I don’t know—Othello?” Silence.
“Do you think they’re real, those people? You think Giorgi actually existed?”
“Which Giorgi?”
“Giorgi, the son.”
“Whose son?”
“Otar’s.”
“What?”
“The son of Otar’s widow…”
She looked at me with a smile on her face. She seemed to be more and more convinced I was mad.
And you know what? That made me angry again. But somehow I managed to just laugh.
“How old are you?” I asked her.
“Twenty.”
(Well, that was a lie; she looked younger.)
“And do you know what it is that writers do?”
“What?”
“They make things up, don’t they? You’ve read The Sins of the Wolf, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I made it up. From start to finish. There’s not a single character in it who really exists.”
“Well then why did you write ‘This is a true story’ at the beginning?”
“It’s just what writers do, isn’t it…?”
(How could I explain?)
She smiled again. A sympathetic smile. A pitying smile.
But eventually my patience ran out. I was old enough to be her father, at the very least, and so with as much authority as I could muster I said to her in a low voice, “I swear on my own life that Bakar Tukhareli is not a real person, and may I be struck down if I’m telling a lie.”
She actually jumped. She was dumbstruck… but only for a moment. Then she squinted at me again, suddenly, suspiciously. “He should’ve played his ace. Then he wouldn’t have needed to go into hiding.”
(Even swearing on my own life hadn’t done it!)
And then I realized she was referring to chapter seventeen, “The Casino Affair,” where Bakar trumps Neron Pilpon’s Jack of Hearts with his joker, and the Baron beats his ace with a second joker.
And now she’d made me angry with myself; I should have just laughed in her face! There’s nothing worse than a reader with blind faith. She really would have believed anything I’d written.
Fine. If she wasn’t going to believe me, what could I do?
There was no reasoning with her, but I still had to get away somehow. There was nothing else for it—I was going to have to pretend my character did exist after all.
I needed to draw a line here. Calmly, with no fuss, no irony…
Like this:
“Okay. There’s nothing else for it. I’ll tell you everything…” I paused. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t heard from him in over a month.”
She actually sighed. Oh my God, I’ll never forget how she sighed, with such relief.
“Has he sold the car, the Opel Vectra?” she asked me, seriously, like some weary co-conspirator.
I nodded.
“Did Maggie call him?”
And then I saw it: she loved him, my Bakar Tukhareli, my thief. She was scared to ask that question more than any other, but she asked it nonetheless.
How her heart must have pounded in her chest, the poor thing!
I don’t even know how to describe what I was witnessing; she was like some terrible enigma, this teenager, full of life, standing right in front of me, jealous of the lover of a man who existed only in my novel.
It was the stuff of fiction.
I felt sorry for her. I wanted to protect her.
“No, she never called. Edishera went to western Georgia instead.”
She wasn’t exactly pleased to hear this. Edishera was no less of a threat than Maggie (in The Pig Skin, he had shot Bakar three times, because while he was alive Edishera couldn’t become a thief), but it seemed to calm her down anyway.
All she asked me was this: “So why did you swear a minute ago that he doesn’t exist?”
She was right, that had confused things: neither she nor Bakar the Thief would ever have sworn such an oath unless they were certain it was the truth. What had I done? I had committed an unforgivable sin—the Gypsy Baron would have given me a beating for that—and cheapened the very act of swearing an oath, casting doubt upon its worth…
I suspect she just couldn’t understand how Bakar had ever trusted me—such a faltering, inconsistent, and deceitful man. How could he have let someone like me write him, how could he have told me his story?
I don’t know whether it was this or something else that made her look at me with that air of disgust again, as if I smelled bad. I was starting to rattle her, and her nerves were going to pieces.
But I wasn’t about to push this child too far, was I?
I said nothing. I just smiled at her like an idiot and went on my way. Once again I was sure I would never see her again.
Some time afterward I was appearing as a guest on a radio show, talking about literature, and I recounted the story of the girl who’d believed the hero of my novel was real.
“I don’t think she was really that naïve,” speculated the presenter, who wrote novels himself. “She must have been a bit strange… a bit crazy.”