Woman Longing to Love
Book Two — Merciless Forgiveness
Elizaveta “Lisa” Galich has just buried Dimitris Zagkos. He was much older than she was, and for more than ten years his obsessive passion turned their relationship into a struggle between his desire to possess her and her determination to remain free. He deceived her, stole the money she had earned, and repeatedly drove her to the edge of despair. During the last months of his life, when circumstances forced Lisa to seek refuge in his Athens apartment and become his wife, the revenge she had imagined for years was finally accomplished. She did not set out to kill him, but she knowingly hastened his end – and she feels no remorse.
Lisa leaves his apartment immediately after the funeral. She takes only the paintings she once brought him as gifts. The furniture, antiques, car, and everything else remain for Mimis’s sons. On the small widow’s pension due to her, she rents a modest but comfortable apartment and begins again. She paints, resumes seeing George Aliagas – the man she has loved for years – and tries to imagine a future no longer governed by Mimis.
Yet freedom has not brought security. Lisa needs money to continue paying the lawyer searching for Adam Eratinos, her second husband, who vanished eighteen months earlier after ruining her company and leaving her exposed to creditors and criminals. She cannot believe that his disappearance was merely an act of cowardice. Adam’s dealings in Kyiv brought Yevgeny Iezuitov into their business, and partnership soon became extortion. Lisa suspects that Iezuitov knows what happened to Adam and that, having failed to control him, he will eventually come for her.
Money also seems to offer a path toward the life Lisa still hopes to build with George. He has never left his wife, despite years of promises, and Lisa wants enough independence and social standing to meet him as an equal. She wants her paintings to be seen and bought. She has talent, but no gallery, reputation, or access to the society in which patrons are created. She wants to become known not merely as a beautiful woman attached to a man, but as an artist in her own right.
Lisa turns to John, a wealthy shipowner and an old friend of Mimis, hoping he will lend her the money to launch an exhibition. John admires her paintings, but his jealous wife, Beba, dismisses the idea: nobody knows Lisa, and turning an unknown artist into a fashionable name would require money, influence, and time. Lisa leaves the villa believing she has exhausted her last possibility. The next day, however, John offers to introduce her to a man whose influence can open every door closed to her.
Edmund von Narwitz is immensely rich. His ships cross the world’s oceans; his properties rise in capital after capital. Paralyzed from the waist down, he lives without a family in a vast house, attended by servants and, above all, by his devoted German butler, Rupert. His physical world has narrowed, but his mind has not. He reads, thinks, analyzes, and directs a financial empire from his wheelchair.
From their first meeting, Edmund recognizes in Lisa far more than beauty or artistic promise. He sees her intelligence, courage, and the pain she conceals behind her enormous grey-green eyes. Their acquaintance becomes a friendship, then the relationship Lisa has long wanted without knowing its name: that of teacher and pupil, mentor and equal. Edmund answers questions no one else has understood, challenges her mind, and offers guidance without demanding obedience. He is drawn to her deeply, but he will not turn gratitude into another prison. He knows that her heart still belongs to George, whom he considers shallow and unworthy of her, and he refuses to place Lisa in a gilded cage merely because he has the wealth to build one.
Edmund devises her first exhibition as an elaborate act of theatre. Lisa will appear before Athens high society wearing a velvet mask. The unknown artist’s hidden past will become a mystery whispered about by shipowners, bankers, industrialists, politicians, and their privileged circles. Lisa has no illusions: the guests will buy her work because Edmund von Narwitz has chosen to patronize her, even if the canvases showed nothing but the tail of a cat. For that reason, anonymity suits her. She needs the money, and she is willing to let society purchase its own fascination while her paintings speak for themselves.
On the day of the exhibition, the mask leads Lisa to think about another member of her family who changed his identity and betrayed his own beliefs in order to survive.
Her grandfather Yakov, Anna’s first husband, was born into a Jewish family in Uman. Orphaned young and raised by his grandparents, he left for Kyiv at eighteen, hoping that his gift for drawing would gain him admission to the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. He arrived in 1918, when the city was passing violently from one power to another: Bolsheviks, socialists, German forces and the Hetmanate, Ukrainian nationalists, the White Army, and then the Bolsheviks again. Kyiv filled with refugees from the collapsing Russian Empire – officers, bankers, actors, journalists, aristocrats, and criminals – while armies were raised, abandoned, betrayed, and destroyed.
Yakov studied art, drew newspaper caricatures, painted in Kyiv’s gardens, and paid his rent by producing counterfeit banknotes at a time when false currency had become almost commonplace. When White Guard forces prepared to leave the city, they unleashed a pogrom. Jewish men were murdered, women were raped, and homes were looted. Yakov’s landlord tried to save himself by pointing to his tenant and telling an armed pogromist that Yakov was a Jew. Yakov killed the man who had come to kill him, took a dead officer’s uniform, gathered his drawings, and fled his home in Podil forever.
The Academy closed, the newspapers disappeared, and Ukraine was surrendered to Bolshevik violence. Yakov contracted typhus and was carried to a morgue after doctors mistakenly declared him dead. He awoke among corpses. Homeless and without any means of survival, he abandoned his faith, changed his surname, and entered the Red Army. He was trained as a political officer and served for nearly twenty years in aviation units across the Soviet Union. He met Anna, and their daughter Alexandra – Lisa’s mother – was born.
During Stalin’s purges in 1939, Yakov was arrested and then held under house arrest for more than a year. Every night the family expected the secret police to take him away to be shot. In an act of defiance, he wore the White Guard uniform he had taken from the officer he killed. Anna begged him to remove it: discovery would endanger not only him but his wife and child. Yet to Yakov, the man who had hated Jews and tried to murder him had become less monstrous than a Soviet regime that devoured entire peoples without distinction.
When war began, Yakov went to the front and was reported killed beside the commanderof his aviation regiment by a shell that supposedly left no bodies. The authorities nevertheless returned his personal belongings, including a silver teaspoon still bearing traces of jam. Anna spoke of him rarely, but that impossible detail told Lisa what the official account concealed: Yakov had almost certainly been killed by his own side. His life becomes one of the historical mirrors within Lisa’s story – a life shaped by identities assumed for survival, principles betrayed under coercion, and a final refusal to submit inwardly to the system he outwardly served.
As Lisa waits for Rupert to collect her for the exhibition, history abruptly gives way to present danger. From her window she sees a jeep stop outside the building and recognizes the two men who emerge. She has seen them in Iezuitov’s office; he kept them for jobs that required someone to be frightened or removed. While they climb the stairs, Lisa escapes from her second-floor balcony by clinging to the thick trunk of a wisteria vine. She takes the battered Fiat belonging to her landlady’s son and drives through Athens with the jeep in pursuit.
Instead of allowing the men to force her onto an open road, Lisa heads directly for police headquarters. She abandons the Fiat across the narrow street, blocking the pursuers’ escape, and runs to officers who know her from repeatedly renewing her visa. The men are arrested and later deported from Greece. Lisa has escaped Iezuitov once, but she knows the danger has not disappeared.
Ignat arrives from Kyiv in time for the exhibition, giving his mother the support she urgently needs. He also tells her that he is in love and intends to marry a woman several years older than he is. Lisa’s first impulse is to object. Before leaving Ukraine she transferred her apartment to her son and found him good employment; she hoped he would first establish an independent life. She fears that after losing the daily presence of his strong mother, he has simply found another woman on whom to depend. Yet Lisa remembers the errors through which she herself had to learn. She chooses not to confiscate her son’s right to make his own mistakes. His life and its consequences must belong to him.
The exhibition is a triumph. Red dots appear beside almost every painting. Edmund rejoices for Lisa; George rejoices for himself. At last he is willing to appear with her openly. He sees the famous guests, the money her work will bring, and the envy their magnificent appearance will provoke. Lisa understands the difference. Edmund used his influence to make her visible; George waited until visibility made her useful.
For years Lisa believed that George was the great love of her life. She first saw him on a yacht off Aegina, when she and Ignat were trapped in Mimis’s house without enough money to escape. George, a man with the eyes of a predator, helped them return safely to Kyiv. Later Mimis himself reintroduced them, and between 1992 and 1997 Lisa represented George’s commercial interests in Ukraine.
Those years were the violent birth of the post-Soviet order. As Ukraine attempted to free itself from Moscow, former Party officials and their descendants used money, political connections, and criminal force to seize industries that had belonged to the state. Privatization vouchers became instruments of deception; factories fell into the hands of a few families; businessmen and politicians acquired private armies; Parliament became a marketplace for competing oligarchs. A country with the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal surrendered it in exchange for promises of security, while its leaders rented Sevastopol to the Russian fleet, weakened national institutions, and left Russian influence embedded in the military and security services. The conditions for a future invasion were already being created.
In that world, business contracts could lead to meetings with gang leaders outside the city or generals in bathhouses, and a failed delivery could end with an execution in a forest. George had charmed Lisa, but she gradually discovered that his confidence concealed a lack of money, connections, reliable suppliers, and sound judgment. When he signed a timber contract without having a buyer, unpaid railway cars were left standing at the station and Lisa’s life was threatened. She protected him by quietly closing his projects, built her own company, and eventually married Adam, whose kindness and spontaneity seemed to promise something George never gave her.
Now, at the exhibition, George believes their time has finally come. Lisa sees more clearly. The glamorous life he desires has never been her dream. She would rather live in a quiet house with a garden, painting beside the person she loves. She is wearing the mask for money, not because she wishes to belong to the people gathered around her.
By the end of the evening almost every work has been sold. One of the two unsold paintings is The Gardener with a Knife, a disturbing image of a crime about to occur. The gardener bears Adam’s face.
The next day, Lisa returns to the empty gallery as rain falls outside. While she stands before The Gardener, wondering whether Adam will ever reappear, she turns and sees him on the other side of the window, his face pressed to the glass as he stares at the painting. Lisa runs into the street, grips his coat, and falls to her knees on the wet pavement. “Why?” is all she can cry. Adam weeps but says nothing. She reaches toward him, certain that he will lift her up, embrace her, and explain. Instead, he turns and runs away.
More than a year later, Lisa and George are living together in a rented house with an old garden in one of Athens’s most prestigious districts. They attend parties and dinners; society gossips about Lisa, men pursue her, and women invent stories about her. Her paintings continue to sell, while George’s business improves through the connections that now surround them. After a decade of waiting, they possess comfort, status, and each other – but a note of discord grows steadily louder. Lisa longs for a daughter. George, who already has children, wants no more.
When Lisa discovers she is pregnant, she believes the child will complete the life she has waited so long to share with the man she loves. George reacts with irritation and calls the pregnancy a betrayal. Lisa finally understands that he has never regarded her most intimate hopes as equal to his own. He was willing to claim her once she had become successful, displaying her like a prize whose value enhanced his. He does not want the future she wants.
The next day, while George is away, Lisa leaves without giving him an address.
She returns alone to Aegina and rents a small house. She walks beside the sea, paints, and prepares to give birth with the help of an elderly Greek midwife who has delivered generations of fishermen’s children. Edmund repeatedly asks her to move into his home, promising to care for both mother and child, but Lisa refuses. Sheneeds solitude before deciding how the next part of her life will be lived.
From Kyiv, Anna writes about another family journey into exile. Fearing revolution, Lisa’s great-grandfather once moved his wife and thirteen children from Kharkiv to Samarkand, believing he was saving them. The foreign land destroyed the family instead. His wife, Elizaveta, died of typhus; he began drinking; their property disappeared; the children scattered, hungry and dependent upon strangers. Only five survived. Anna does not condemn Lisa for leaving home in search of Adam, but she warns that separation has lasted too long. A family must remain together, and old age cannot postpone death indefinitely.
Lisa gives birth to Stefania, the daughter she had almost ceased to believe she would ever have. Four years after Mimis’s death, the men who defined the previous decade are falling away. Mimis is dead. George has proved incapable of giving the love Lisa preserved for him. Adam remains the final rider on what Lisa has come to think of as a carousel of deception and betrayal. Yet she has also gained what none of them gave her: confidence in her own talent, public success, and a new source of absolute love in her child.
Four years after Stefania’s birth, Lisa receives a letter from Adam. He is gravely ill and asks to see her. Leaving her daughter in Edmund’s care, Lisa travels to Sofia and finds Adam in an infectious-disease hospital, close to death. Believing he has little time, he finally tells her why he married her, why money vanished from her company, and why he abandoned her in Kyiv. He introduces her to the man he loves, with whom his relationship began years earlier. Adam asks Lisa to forgive him.
She remains at his bedside for more than a month and nurses him back from the edge of death. The truth resolves the mystery but cannot erase its consequences. Lisa can understand that Adam loved another person; she cannot understand how he could finance that love by destroying her life, or how he could escape while leaving her, Ignat, Anna, and Alexandra exposed to Iezuitov’s threats and killers. How can devotion to one human being excuse utter indifference to another? How can love built upon someone else’s fear and ruin be called innocent?
When Adam recovers, Lisa returns to Athens. Before leaving, she tells him never to write to her again. He receives the forgiveness he asked for, and she receives the truth she needed – but forgiveness does not restore intimacy, cancel responsibility, or grant him a place in her life. She saves him and releases him, then closes the door forever. This is her merciless forgiveness.
At the end of 2009, Lisa and little Stefania prepare to celebrate Christmas at Edmund’s home. The decade of deception is over. Mimis, George, and Adam have stepped down from the painted horses of the carousel, and its music has stopped. Lisa is free of their lies and of the attachments that once gave those lies power over her. She has survived the labyrinth with a son, a daughter, a beloved friend, and her paintings.
The great house at Christmas seems to return her to childhood. Edmund sits where her grandfather Nikita might once have sat. Stefania hangs ornaments on the lowest branches of the tree, solemnly passing them to him and laughing as he pretends to reach higher from his wheelchair. Later, Lisa and Rupert will finish decorating it. For the first time, Lisa believes she has found a peaceful harbor where no one will deceive or betray her again.
Spanning the lawless transformation of post-Soviet Ukraine and the buried history of revolution, pogrom, Stalinist terror, and war, Merciless Forgiveness is the story of a woman learning that forgiveness is not surrender. Lisa does not free the men who betrayed her from the consequences of their choices. She frees herself from the need to remain bound to them. Love, she discovers, may offer compassion without reunion, truth without absolution, and mercy without the sacrifice of one’s own life.