Mortal Happiness: Chapter Eleven

There was still light enough to see the path and the outline of rock when Enna approached her destination. Just a little further up the track and there it was, crouched in a clearing.

For a few moments she was disorientated; surely there used to be more space? Or maybe the closeness of the trees was what gave the place its air of being squeezed inwards? The house and outbuildings were merging with what surrounded them; even at this distance she could see moss on rotten window-ledges and ivy blunting the sharp gables. Sheds and barns were crumbling, their roofs opening to the rain and mist. The day she’d left the place wasn’t beautiful or even clean, but the extent of dilapidation took her by surprise. She’d thought of the farm only rarely and always imagined everything paused by her own absence.

She drew a deep breath and another and thought of what she’d said to Iveri about the puppet-master Karabas. Safe with Tomaso and her work she’d sometimes wondered how much of her feeling about her father was real and how much her own distorted imagination. Now, looking at the wooden two-storey building before her she knew she could have chosen from almost any dark fairy story to truthfully describe her father and her life with him. Even this building was something from a tale told to frighten children; like the house of Baba Yaga which ran on the legs of chickens. Here the author of spells was more complex, more subtle than a mere witch. And his house never moved.

She’d lived half a lifetime in this place and now wondered at her own sense of separateness from it. All this was part of her but she had no sense of belonging, though the bark of the trees and the fir needles littering the ground used to be always under her fingernails and in her hair. Even her memory of these things was worn thin, shed like her own skin.

In the years immediately after leaving home she’d occasionally tried to picture the good times of her childhood; but although she knew they must be many and real, she’d not been able to remember a single moment of unadulterated happiness before the age of sixteen; except one. So she’d stopped thinking about home at all.

From some long buried habit she approached the building obliquely, entering the yard in a silence as dense as the needle-thick ground springing underfoot. Clouds of gnats rose as she passed the large water tank that filled a rear corner of the yard. Then she was standing in front of the door that led directly into the kitchen.

Reaching for the big iron handle, Enna pictured the room beyond and had a sudden vivid memory of being six years old and standing beside the kitchen’s tiled stove, her eyes level with the scrubbed pine table. Firelight danced on the long blade in Zuria’s hand as she dismembered a carcass, slicing flesh then tying it with deft, bloody fingers into joints that would bleed a rich, dark gravy. Outside the wind howled like wolves and she had imagined the pack running, whipping snow from the branches of pines with their thick tails, running through drifts deeper than a man, even a tall man like her father. She remembered staring at the yellow patterned tiles on the big winter stove, as she listened to her mother’s high, girlish voice.

Zuria and Tamar were where Enna expected them to be. She could tell from their way of sitting that they were alone in the house. The yellow patterned stove tiles were the same as in her memories, but cold now. Her mother shelled peas into a red plastic bowl on her aproned lap. Her sister, much broader and heavier than Enna remembered, chopped potatoes with a meat cleaver. They looked up, hesitant even after recognition, as if expecting some other Enna to be standing there.

‘Hello’, she said and moving towards her mother bent and kissed her on the cheek. She turned to her sister and said ‘Tamar’ before kissing her too. Both women stared at her, immobilised by surprise and something else.

‘I have come a long way,’ she said, ‘is there any tea?’

Neither woman moved.

‘Shall I make some?’ Moving to the samovar she found it cold and unpolished. It was always going to be hard, but this was not what she had imagined. She said, ‘How do you make tea now?’

‘Why are you here?’ Tamar Serpukhova laid down the cleaver and stepped to her mother’s side.

Facing these two, Enna experienced a self-consciousness she’d forgotten existed. Without moving she stretched like an athlete before a long race. ‘I think you know why I am here Tamar … Mother. It is because you are here, though everyone else has left.’

The older woman made an impatient clicking sound with her tongue. ‘But we do not want to leave that is why we are still here. You made your choice a long time ago.’

‘My mother is right. You left, you have no place here – and no right to speak about anything in this house.’

Enna bent her head, gathering strength. ‘Maybe I have no right, as you say, but maybe I do because you are in danger and I have a duty to help you. The world knows war is coming here again and this time it will not be Georgians against Abkhaz but maybe Russians against Chechens too. I met Iveri down below and he confirmed that this is true: a bigger war is coming to this valley. The villages west of here are already burning and Russians are on their way through our passes. They may be here very soon.’

‘Do you think we are ignorant, that we do not know what happens around us? Why should we fear Russians?’ Tamar’s voice rose, ‘Have you been away so long you have forgotten your own blood? Are we not Russian? Is our father not Russian as Mother is Svan?’

Enna sighed and started almost to relax. It was exactly as she’d imagined it would be.

‘Tamar, listen to me. Do you imagine soldiers will stop and ask for your birth certificate when they come here, or ask Father for his? Do you think they care?’ She shook her head, ‘If you knew the things I have seen …’

‘We do not want to know what you have seen.’ Tension cracked Tamar’s voice like a snapping branch. ‘We do not want you here, go and leave us to our ways.’

Enna knelt beside Zuria’s chair within the aura of unwashed clothes and aging flesh. ‘Mother, the road from here to Dzhvari is full of Svans, people you know. Mara, your own sister, spoke to me on the road. She knows what is happening and she has left. Will you not leave too?’ She looked up at her sister, ‘I understand if you do not want to leave with me - but with or without me, leave. Please.’ She took her mother’s hand; it lay unmoving in her own. ‘Please. It may be too late tomorrow.’

The hand was withdrawn. ‘You do not remember how things are. You have been gone too long. Tamar has told you. There is no need for us to leave. Even if the Abkhaz come into Svaneti – if they come - why should they hurt us? And if Russians come, Leonid Petrovich will tell them he is Russian too. We have nothing to fear.’

Enna stood up. ‘Leonid Petrovich will look after himself, it is his nature. Do not rely on him to protect you, Mother.’

Tamar screeched and moved towards Enna, fingers outstretched as if to claw her.

Zuria held up a pale hand. ‘You think I will not leave because of Leonid Petrovich? This is so. He is my husband and he is a good husband, who has never beaten me. But he is not the only reason I stay Enna Leonidova. I stay for my family who are in the ground. My ancestors and yours lie in this village and though all the others have left, I will not desert them and risk their curses.’

‘To stay is to be cursed,’ Enna said, ready now to play her last card. ‘I have seen things. You remember, Mother, how I saw things that came true?’

Tamar drew near her mother again and both women grew quiet, uncomfortable with the introduction of this new element.

Enna said, ‘I saw you both dead, outside in the yard. There were Russian soldiers.’

Tamar was pale, freckles standing out against her white skin. ‘Why do you frighten my Mother with these stories?’

‘Tamar, please …’ Enna reached out to her sister and was thrust away.

‘Go from here,’ Tamar whispered, her thin voice shaking, ‘we do not want you or your words!’

Enna said, ‘I came here because I saw what I saw. I know what will happen if you stay.’ She heard the pleading in her own voice. ‘How could I do nothing, say nothing, knowing that?’

Through the kitchen window she noticed how the world was divided into black and grey, below and above the tree line. She looked at her mother and sister in silence then left the room by a different door and followed the long, dusty corridor that led to the front of the house.

She had done what she came to do and now, though it felt nothing like freedom, she was free. At the foot of the staircase she hesitated before walking up, setting her feet silently on the smooth, wooden steps.