Woman Longing to Love Book One — Awakening
In the spring of 2000, Elizaveta (Lisa) Galich is once again in Greece, the country she first loved more than a decade earlier. Six months ago, she married Dimitris (Mimis) Zagkos – a much older man she has known for years and hates with all her heart. Now he is dead. His sons are waiting for the fortune they expect to inherit, including money Mimis once stole from Lisa and her family. Lisa wants none of his property. What she wanted from Mimis was not wealth but revenge, and she has achieved it.
Returning from his funeral to the apartment where they spent eight months together, Lisa prepares to leave. She does not consider herself guilty of his death, yet she knows it was not entirely accidental. Alone with her fear, sleeping pills, and a stack of Mimis’s letters waiting to be burned, she looks back across the decades that brought her to this room.
Lisa was born in Izmail, on the Danube, in a house that had once belonged to a Turkish envoy. Behind its high walls and magnificent garden, she spent her first eight years almost untouched by Soviet ideology, poverty, or fear. She was surrounded by four adults who loved her: her parents, her grandmother Anna, and her adored grandfather Nikita Yartsev.
The women of Lisa’s family carry a history of beauty, pride, endurance, and rebellion. Her great-grandmother, Elizaveta Khomenko, was a noblewoman from the Kharkiv region. Her grandmother Anna survived orphanhood, revolution, war, and the death of her first husband. Nikita came from a prosperous peasant family destroyed during collectivization; he escaped the massacre, fought his way to Berlin without a wound, became a decorated war hero, and later headed the Danube shipping administration. He taught Lisa dignity, curiosity, and the pleasures of a life lived without servility.
Lisa attends school in a mansion built by a wealthy Greek merchant who settled in Izmail early in the twentieth century. On the mosaic floor of its great hall is the name of his disabled son. Lisa runs across those letters every day without knowing that, decades later, she will marry the merchant’s grandson.
When Nikita dies, Lisa’s enchanted childhood ends. Her mother, Alexandra, is intelligent and refined but physically fragile and trapped in passivity. Her father, Vasily Tropinin, is a gifted painter suffocated by military service and an unhappy marriage. After the divorce, he disappears from Lisa’s life. The girl who was raised inside unconditional love begins a lifelong search to recover it.
In 1974, Lisa enters Kyiv University to study Romance and Germanic languages. She becomes an interpreter for Intourist and marries Alexei Galich, the son of a powerful Soviet official. She hopes marriage will restore the security her family lost, but Alexei’s father refuses to support them. Alexei becomes ill, resentful, and dependent on his wife. Lisa carries the household and gives birth to a son, Ignat, who will become the closest person in her life.
Through Intourist, Lisa attracts the attention of the KGB. Restless, adventurous, and initially intrigued by danger, she accepts an officer’s commission. The work she was promised bears little resemblance to the work she is ordered to perform. She refuses to inform on colleagues, refuses to join the Communist Party, and discovers that an intelligent, beautiful woman with an independent mind is treated not as an officer but as usable material.
During firearms training, a senior officer attempts to rape her. Lisa saves herself by firing over his head, but her superiors blame her and turn the assault into compromising evidence against her. From that moment, she is determined to leave the organization, though an officer who knows its secrets cannot simply resign.
Colonel Pesnevsky sends her on a mission from which he hopes she will not return. Hidden in the attic of a village house in western Ukraine, Lisa is ordered to record a clandestine meeting between Ukrainian nationalists and an emissary from Canada. Listening from above, she understands that she no longer accepts the state’s definition of an enemy. Her homeland has no enemies, she concludes; the system has enemies because it is defending a communist utopia built on the bones of its own people. She deliberately reveals her presence. The operation collapses into violence, and Lisa survives only because the owner of the house and Captain Sergei Belov intervene. After months of evasion and medical leave, she is finally released from the KGB following Brezhnev’s death in 1982.
In March 1989, Intourist sends Lisa abroad for the first time. In Egypt, travelling with a Soviet tour group, she meets Fakhri al-Fahmi, an educated man from a distinguished family. Her feeling for him awakens more than desire. For the first time, Lisa sees love, money, freedom, dignity, and personal choice as parts of the same possible life. Even Egypt, poorer than the West, reveals how completely Soviet ideology has penetrated and constricted the lives of her compatriots.
Fakhri proposes marriage and plans to take her to Paris, where his family lives. Lisa accepts, ready even to adopt his faith. He leaves to prepare his family, then vanishes into silence. Months later, a letter written by another hand explains that he was badly injured in a car accident. He has not betrayed her, but by then Lisa has already survived the loss. The love that awakened her has also taught her how unsafe it is to depend upon love.
As the Soviet world begins to collapse, shortages, unemployment, and political chaos convince her that she must leave if she is to protect Alexandra, Anna, and Ignat. She divorces Alexei and begins looking not for romance but for the security she now believes only money can provide.
Dimitris Zagkos, a retired Greek general and widower, offers her work at an English-language school in Athens. In letters and telephone calls, Mimis presents himself as a cultivated family friend. In Greece he becomes another man: possessive, miserly, jealous, and sexually coercive. Lisa falls passionately in love with Greece but discovers that the man who brought her there sees a woman from the former socialist bloc as inferior and available.
When Mimis once again demands her body, Lisa undresses and stands before him in complete stillness. Her nakedness does not make her vulnerable; it makes her untouchable. She resembles a queen carved from cold white marble, while he becomes the supplicant who cannot approach her. Mimis understands that he has lost. From this confrontation begins a ten-year struggle between them – desire against pride, possession against freedom, money against self-respect.
Lisa nevertheless tries to use the connection to build a future for her family. When she and Ignat later stay at Mimis’s house on the island of Aegina, his promises again become imprisonment. He controls their movements, torments the boy, and attempts to force Lisa into becoming his mistress. Ignat attacks him with a baseball bat to protect his mother. Without enough money even for return tickets, mother and son are trapped.
Their chance of escape appears in the harbour as a magnificent yacht. Lisa swims out to it and persuades the men aboard to listen. Among them is George Aliagas, a powerful, self-possessed man with the eyes of a predator. The moment Lisa sees him, she recognizes the man she has always imagined loving. George gives her enough money to take Ignat safely back to Kyiv. She assumes they will never meet again.
Back home, Lisa collapses into clinical depression. A perceptive psychoanalyst, Svetlana Sukhova, helps her confront guilt, fear, and her hunger for a home. Lisa begins to believe in God while rejecting the institution of the Church. Around her, the old Soviet order is disintegrating. Her close friend Margot loses the privileges that came from her powerful father, discovers that her life has never truly belonged to her, and kills herself. Lisa chooses to fight her way back.
She gives private lessons, resumes contact with Mimis, and eventually proposes a business partnership rather than marriage. Together they profit from the opportunities and lawlessness of the post-Soviet transition. Mimis persuades her to keep her earnings in a joint Greek bank account, quietly ensuring that her independence remains in his hands.
Then George Aliagas reappears as one of Mimis’s business associates. Lisa and George recognize each other at once. Their attraction enrages Mimis, who considers Lisa his possession. He threatens to report her to the tax police and seize the money in their joint account unless she abandons George. Lisa refuses. Mimis carries out both threats and leaves her nearly penniless, predicting that when her life collapses she will crawl back to him.
Lisa and George become lovers and business partners, but he never finds the courage to leave his wife. After four years of waiting and repeated professional disappointments, Lisa chooses independence over uncertainty. She establishes her own travel agency, builds it into a successful company, writes about distant countries, appears in magazines, and finally becomes publicly visible in her own right.
On a business trip through Athens, she meets Adam Eratinos, a charming young heir to an old Greek title. His grandfather was the merchant who built Lisa’s school in Izmail; his father’s name was the one written in mosaic beneath her childhood footsteps. To Lisa, the coincidence feels like destiny completing a circle. She marries Adam, becomes a countess, and allows him into her business and her life.
The dream collapses. Adam makes disastrous decisions, accumulates debts behind her back, and after eighteen months disappears without warning, taking only his father’s diamond ring. Lisa is left with creditors, a revived tax investigation, and the threat that Ignat will be conscripted into the war in Chechnya. Adam’s former partner, Yevgeny Iezuitov, exploits her vulnerability and blackmails her. Ignat abandons his studies in France to stand beside his mother.
Two weeks before Adam vanished, Mimis unexpectedly returned to Lisa’s life. Now, with no money and no safe way to protect her son, she calls the man who predicted her defeat. He helps her recover her passports and valuables from creditors. Lisa decides to make him pay for the years of manipulation: she secures a rapid divorce from the absent Adam and persuades Mimis to marry her, promising a devotion she has no intention of giving.
As Mimis’s wife, she cares for the aging, sick man but refuses him sexual possession. He retaliates by withholding money, paying her as though she were a servant, and charging her for heat and telephone calls. Lisa resumes her friendship with George, yet their meetings are built more on conversation and unfinished feeling than on a future either can promise. She has also begun to paint, uncertain whether her work can become the foundation of a new life.
Finally, exhausted by Mimis’s demands, Lisa tells him she will come to his bedroom. She stands at the foot of his bed and begins to dance. The dance becomes an act of liberation from every man who has lied to her, used her, or mistaken longing for surrender. As Mimis reaches for her, he suffers a stroke. He dies that night in a military hospital.
Lisa feels no remorse. She did not plan his death, but neither does she regard it as meaningless. Mimis is released from the obsession that ruled him, and Lisa is released from being its object. Their ten-year curse has ended.
At dawn after the funeral, she will leave the apartment with her paintings and the little money she has. But her unfinished reckoning remains. She must discover why Adam disappeared and what part others played in his betrayal. She is not yet ready to let George go. Mimis was only the first of the men whose claims upon her life must finally be settled.
Spanning the final decades of the Soviet Union and the violent birth of the post-Soviet world, Awakening follows a woman whose hunger for love repeatedly collides with systems – political, economic, and intimate – that demand submission. Lisa’s awakening is not a single moment but a series of recognitions: love without freedom becomes possession; security bought with the self is another form of captivity; and survival is not enough unless a woman can remain the author of her own life.