THE ONE WHO INVENTED THE GLOBE , OR THE NIGHT SERENADE SUNG BY A VOICELESS LOVER
is my wife. One could say we have an unequal marriage. I am 79, Toma is 39. We live in Moscow, on 3rd Samotechniy Lane, on the seventh floor. Our windows face the old Schemilovsky Park. The three-century-old oaks’ foliage whispers to us. The floor of our bedroom is covered by a huge Uzbek rug, three by three metres. It features Generalissimus Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in full height. The Uzbek female rugmakers personally presented this rug in the Kremlin to the man whose image is woven on it. Stalin kissed all the four women, one of them fainted, so happy was she. When I was a little boy, back in 1949, thirty years before Toma Stenko was born, I watched a documentary depicting this scene at Spartak, our local cinema in Tbilisi. How the rug had found its way to our bedroom is another story. It’s irrelevant here. Once, four or five years ago, when we lived in Malta, my beloved wife ran after me holding a big kitchen knife. She shouted, “Will ya write this novel or not? AST Publisher is waiting for it, Lena Shubina is waiting for it, I am waiting for it...” I ran from her yelling, “I am not Faulkner! Not Marquez! Not Scott Fitzgerald! I can’t write novels!” And indeed, I can’t. At this moment, while Toma Stenko is preparing for her art exhibition, the catalogue is printed for the event. In it, besides her paintings, watercolours, graphics, photographs, book illustrations and posters, should be my story about the artist Toma Stenko — I can’t even write this piece... What can I write? That she has
Irakli Kvirikadze Screenwriter, film director, author
“The dress she wore was translucent. A plain dress, slightly tightened by a thin cord at the waist. The rest was Toma Stenko herself, twenty-two years of age. ‘Her breasts are like pomegranates’, or however it was said, but in fact it’s just a young woman’s breasts”. This way Kurt Vonnegut described his heroine Mona in Cat’s Cradle, and I’ve just replaced Mona for Toma. Let me describe our first encounter in Sochi, back in 2002. It was June. On that night, the guests and participants of the Centaur Film Festival danced in the Zhemchuzhina hotel’s 50-metre-long pool that was drained. Dry especially for the closing ceremony. (Oh, I am sorry, the festival was called not Centaur, but Kinotaur, and the pool was not drained dry, but merely the water was let out of it.) So, the dancing crowd in sandals, sneakers, and patent-leather shoes moved amid the puddles scattered across the pool’s concrete bottom. All of them were merry, they were brothers and sisters, beautiful and handsome, loved and loving ones... Now, I will interrupt myself, but will return again soon to my description of my first encounter with Toma Stenko.
I am Irakli Kvirikadze, my métier is filmmaking, Toma Stenko
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