Kursha

The dog was called Kursha. He slept by the well with one ear up, in case the bucket needed him, and in August he smelled of hay and of the river he was not allowed in.

“Slower,” said Ani. “I’m writing.”

On Monday evening she was at my kitchen table with her exercise book and her green felt pen. The homework was called “When Grown-ups Were Little”. You had to interview one grown-up. She had come to me because, she said, the others were already done.

So I went slower. My grandmother’s house was in Racha, I told her, at the top of a road that gave up halfway. A walnut tree dropped walnuts on the roof all night, like someone small knocking. Every summer I fell off the neighbour’s donkey. Every summer my grandmother painted my knee with brilliant green, which stays for a week, and said, “Again?” The well was so deep that if you shouted your name into it, it took a while to decide whether to answer.

Ani stopped writing.

“That’s Valiko’s donkey,” she said.

“It’s a common donkey.”

“It’s grey, it bites and it’s called Pavle.” She turned back two pages. “Valiko. Tuesday.” She turned back further. “And the well is Eter’s. She shouted into it too. Her grandmother hit her with a towel.”

“Mine didn’t,” I said. “Mine was gentler.”

“And the walnuts on the roof are Gia’s.” She looked at me over the exercise book, exactly the way Eter looks at a bill. “Is any of it yours?”

I thought about it. Under the table Muria had come in to sleep on my feet, the way he does when the radiator is off.

“Kursha,” I said.

“Whose was Kursha?”

“Everybody’s. Every village in Georgia had a Kursha. Ask anyone.”

She wrote it down. Then she read out the last question on the worksheet, the one the teacher had underlined. “What happened to your grandmother?”

“Which one?”

“How many did you have?”

I counted, roughly. The one with the brilliant green. The one with the towel. The one who made plum sauce in a pot the size of a bath. The one who hid sweets in the wardrobe and forgot where. And many thousands more behind them, on the same long porch, all calling somebody in for dinner.

“Quite a lot,” I said. “They all made jam. And in the end they all died. It’s the one part where every version agrees.”

Ani put her pen down. For a moment I thought I had gone too far. Then she nodded, the way you nod at a sum that comes out right.

“Mine too,” she said. “Both.”

She wrote for a long time after that. I didn’t read over her shoulder. When she had finished she put the cap on the pen.

“Miss Nana will give me a nine,” she said. “She takes one off when it isn’t true.”

“Which part isn’t true?”

“I don’t know yet.” She bent down and patted Muria. “But Kursha was a good dog.”

This morning she knocked before school with the exercise book open. A nine, and in the margin, in red: “Very lively. Whose grandmother?”

Underneath, in green, Ani had already answered: “Ours.”