Mortal Happiness: Chapter Nine

The road to the village was rougher and narrower than Enna remembered. The sun already touched the tops of the highest peaks, but there were still a few hours before true dusk. A few hours to reach the farm and do what she came to do.

Three kilometres from Rulini she rounded a bend and saw the roadblock. Relaxed-looking soldiers were standing and smoking beside a red and white barrier. She closed her eyes. On her right was the cliff-face this road was hacked from centuries ago. Left, the road slid down into a crevasse filled with broken boulders from some long ago landslide. She wondered who the soldiers were; from this distance was impossible to see any insignia.

When she was fifty metres from the barrier one of the men walked forward gun in hand and waved her to a standstill.

She rolled down the window and in Georgian said, ‘I’m a doctor and I need to reach a patient,’ then remembered she had no medical equipment in the car to prove her claim.

‘Sorry Doctor, no one’s allowed through here now, it’s not safe.’

The man had a strong southern accent, his cap badge was Georgian Army.

‘What about my patient? I can’t just leave without finding out how she is.’

‘The village is empty, your patient will not be there. You should turn around and go back.’

Noticing that the barrier had been placed in front of the widest section of the road, Enna looked helplessly up at the soldier and said, ‘I can’t turn here, it’s much too narrow. Could you please let me through the barrier, then I can turn and not have to reverse along this terrible road.’

The man looked at her for a moment then nodded, gesturing ahead. He shouted to the men on the barrier and made a vertical, circular motion with an index finger.

‘Thank you, thank you so much.’ Enna moved slowly forward, rolling up her window. As the barrier was raised she passed through it, smiling and waving her thanks to the soldiers. Lifting their hands from their weapons, they waved back. She drove slowly at first, as if fearful of the drop just beyond her left wheel. Then, just at the point where she should turn, she put her right foot to the floor. The engine screamed protest at the sudden demand. The soldiers near the barrier shouted what sounded like abuse at the man who’d let her through. Then they were all running after the car. One man, faster than the others, was very close behind; she could see his flushed, straining face quite clearly in the rearview mirror and imagined she could hear his boots thumping into the dirt. In second gear the vehicle picked up speed.

She started to draw away from her pursuers. Realising he had had no hope of catching the fugitive the nearest man raised his rifle and let off a few shots. Most went wide, but two bullets hit the car. Head down, Enna drove, hoping her memory of the road was more accurate than the soldiers’ aim. Pebbles trickled down from the cliff above, then larger stones. As she rounded the first bend a strong petrol smell filled the car.

Out of the air, her father’s voice sounded in her head: hide, hide, hide yourself. Shock made her swerve towards the edge of the drop. For one long moment she thought her father was in the car with her. Then she drove harder and faster up the increasingly steep track, willing the bullet to have hit the top of the petrol tank, not the bottom. The gauge was no help; the needle has been fixed on half full since she left the airport.

On the final bend before the village, the engine spluttered, recovered, choked out a dry whine and stopped. Getting out of the car, Enna listened for the sounds of pursuit, but heard only the fluttering and rustling of wind in the pines that lined both sides of the road.

There was nowhere to hide the car but she took the keys and left it where it stood. Any pursuer would be entering her territory now. She walked forward until the road opened out to reveal a high rolling land that quivered and shone in the late afternoon light. And all around - higher than the gold-green hills, higher than the dark, pine-covered slopes - stood the snowy spires, the vast, eye-shattering peaks, of her childhood.

Rulini. Everything was familiar except the silence and deserted streets. When she left this place she’d been nowhere else and thought all the world was green streams, high flowering meadows and dense, dark forest. Above her, piercing the darkening blue of the sky, stone towers rose like ancient skyscrapers. She’d visited similar structures in Siena as a tourist, with Tomaso; but those spires were urbane and polite compared with these rugged, thousand year old shapes that grew like vast, petrified mushrooms from streets and fields. The medieval Svans had built their towers everywhere and forever and she’d scarcely glanced at them as a child. Now she stared in wonder.

Beyond the village a small track led to the very furthest north-west corner of Georgia. She knew the way with a clear memory that coexisted with the disbelief she’d ever lived here, ever inhabited this tuck in the landscape, this mountainous fold of earth. Less than fifteen kilometres from Abkhazia and the Kodori Gorge she was in the heart of Svan territory. Her mother’s people had lived here for thousands of years, since long before there were such things as borders. Until the Soviet Union imploded and the territorial conflict began, cousins of her mother lived in the Upper Kodori.

She stood for a moment, looking in the direction of the track that led to her mother’s house. She looked at her watch then toward a tower that seemed to grow out of the rock a little higher up the single, twisting street that was the heart of Rulini. Making a decision, she walked towards the tower.

She thought she could still find the little loose stone, roughly ten centimetres above the ground and just to the left of the massive wooden doors. If she remembered correctly the stone would slide smoothly out of the base of the wall, revealing the hiding place of a key that was almost as long as her forearm. Squatting in the grass at the base of the tower she looked for the tell-tale absence of mortar and felt along the cracks with her fingertips. She heard the footsteps before the voice.

‘Stop what you are doing and get up. Raise your hands.’

She obeyed and turning towards the speaker saw a shadowy, insubstantial shape, only the gun, a solid black line.

‘It is me, Enna.’ The Svan rolled out again, dense and surprising as the tower beside her.

‘Enna?’ The gun lowered but the shadow remained still. ‘Move away from the building. Stand where there is more light.’

She took several steps forward. ‘Do you not remember my voice Iveri?’ She said quietly. ‘I am not surprised. Today I have spoken our language for the first time since that day you walked with me to the Dzvhari road.’

‘It is you! I do not believe it.’ Iveri Samushia stepped out of the shadow of his family home, weapon slung over his shoulder. He came closer and for a moment Enna imagined he was scenting the air. Then he moved quickly. Holding out his arms he seized her, kissing her on the forehead.

‘I have missed you so much. If I had known how it would be without you, I would have never let you go! Never! I would have gone with you! I should have. I should have followed you.’

He drew breath and Enna said, ‘You have grown tall but not changed Iveri and I am glad. Your mother gave me a message for you.’

‘I can guess what she said.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘Where did you meet her? ’

‘On the road. It was lucky for me. She told me you would be here and that I could stay if I needed to.’ She gestured to the door of the tower overshadowing them.

‘My mother would say there is no such thing as luck. You met her and now you meet me.’ He made a gesture with his fingers similar to the one his mother had made earlier in the day.

She said. ‘Mara is worried about you.’

‘I know, it is her privilege to worry. Until five minutes ago I would have said she was foolish. Now I see you here, I am worried myself. Let us go inside, it is safer.’

She shook her head. ‘If I go in there with you the evening will pass and I will not want to finish the journey.’

He nodded and walked back under the shadow of the tower indicating that she should follow him.

‘You have come for them, for Tamar and my aunt?’

‘Mara tried to change my mind.’ She put one arm through his, feeling his bones under the thin fatigues and loose fitting jacket. ‘I had to leave my car back down the road.’

‘That was you? They were shooting at you?’

She smiled at him and squeezed his arm very slightly. ‘Just the Georgian Army trying to change my mind too.’

‘They are just city fools. They have been there nearly a week. They stop everyone, except now there is no one to stop and they are left standing like rabbits surrounded by the dogs. But you got through.’ He sounded proud of her skill. ‘You have not changed either.’ He laughed softly. ‘Remember those lessons your father gave us? ‘Survival skills’ he called them? Maybe they had some use after all.’

He felt her arm stiffen against his, before she drew it away.

‘I must go.’ She stepped away from him. ‘I must, having come this far.’

Not understanding her sudden change of mood, he said, ‘Then I will walk with you.’

She nodded and they walked together towards the track that led out of the village and towards the Serpukhov home.

As the emotions raised by her cousin’s ingenuous words subsided, Enna realised she felt oddly comfortable with this almost-stranger who was her boy cousin. She said, ‘Tell me about your life here, Iveri.’

‘I am with the Forest Brothers, Enna. That is the main thing for me now. We are a militia, a good one. We are training to fighting the Abkhaz and anyone else who enters our land uninvited.’

Enna said, ‘But I thought the Forest Brothers were bandits.’

He snorted. ‘That is what everyone says, because we have some power but we do not use it to support the central government. This is our land Enna, your mother’s, my mother’s. We are Svan. Those politicians who decide things down in Tbilisi, they just appease Moscow as they have always done. What do they care about us and the terrible things we suffer because of the Abkhaz? But now,’ he paused excitedly, ‘now the Chechens are with us and with their help, real help, maybe we can be free of everyone!’

For a moment his naïve zeal disturbed her memory of him and a real stranger was speaking from the deepening shadow. She shivered and said, ‘Are you not afraid to exchange one oppressor for another? What if your new allies bring greater danger with them?’

‘You mean Russians?’ He turned to face her. ‘The Chechen leader – Gelayev – he is a great soldier and we have learned much already. If the Russians come here they should remember that this is our land and that we will defend it.’

She opened her mouth to say one thing and instead said, ‘They are coming Iveri, I have seen it.’ As the words left her mouth she knew that this was the truth of what she’d seen when she fell to the floor in the hospital corridor. The clarity with which this realisation struck her was disabling and she took her cousin’s arm again for support.

‘Peacekeepers you mean? They have been moving this way all day. We have watched them. They will move through the high passes. We do not know why they come over the mountains this time instead of directly to Gali by airplane.’ He grimaced. ‘Who knows why Russians do any of the things they do?’

‘I do not know what they are, but I know they will come here.’ She turned to him urgently, ‘I saw them, Iveri, mother and Tamar dead and soldiers everywhere. That is why I am here, to help them leave.’

‘But my mother has already tried Enna, they laughed at her. They will not go. You know they will never leave him.’

‘Then he must leave too.’

He turned to her, surprised. ‘You must have forgotten how things are. He is glued to that place, stuck hard and fast. He said he will only leave in a box and I believe him.’

She laughed harshly. ‘I can find a box if I have to.’

Iveri took her arm and held it fast. ‘You can still sound just like him - I know you always hated for me to say so.’ She tried to pull her arm away, but he held on. ‘I hear it and then … and then I worry for you.’

‘I hated you saying it because it was untrue.’

He released her arm from his grip and in a different voice asked, ‘I do not understand why you care for my aunt and cousin. They have never cared for you.’

She was silent a moment, staring into the trees. ‘I know. Sometimes I thought they hated me. But it was all about him. They thought he gave me something they never got.’

For a moment Enna watched herself standing in the veiling shadow of the great tower, talking to this man she no longer knows, about things she thought she had put away for ever. She shuddered.

‘And did he?’ Samushia asked quietly, ‘did he … give you something he should not have?’

She laughed, sounding genuinely amused. ‘Is that what people thought? Is that what you thought?’

‘I thought many things. That was just one possibility.’

‘Yes, it was a possibility. My mother and sister thought it was more than that and blamed me.’ She looked at him directly, her smile no longer humorous. ‘People always imagine sex as the worst they can think of – perhaps their minds are limited. There are many things worse than sex, especially for a child. My father had no interest in my body, Iveri. I doubt he even saw it.’

She sensed her cousin shiver as she finished speaking. She had never said these things before, not even to herself.

‘So what was it?’ he whispered.

She shrugged almost casually. ‘Who knows? Maybe Leonid Petrovich himself did not know.’ She looked deeper into the shadow of the tower and said. ‘Do you remember when we were children and I read ‘Buratino’ to you.’

‘Yes’.

‘And Karabas-Barabas the puppet-master in the story, remember him?’

Again he nodded. ‘You are meaning that Leonid Petrovich was like this Karabas?’

‘Yes.’

Abruptly Samushia said, ‘Let me go with you. Maybe together we can convince them. Tamar is fond of me and may be more easily persuaded than your mother.’

She shook her head and smiled. ‘Thank you, Iveri, but no. I have been away sixteen years. I never thought to return to my family holding my little cousin’s hand for comfort.’

‘Then let me at least protect you from strangers. Tell me exactly what you saw.’

‘Nothing clearly until I spoke of it just now. I saw men in uniforms, then my mother and Tamar on the ground, injured. Now I know that the men were Russian. I saw their badges, their faces.’

Energy started to prickle around him as he unslung his automatic rifle. ‘The rest of my unit are not far from here and they will be glad to come with me looking for Russians. Wait for me here and when we are in position I will let you know so you can go in safety.’

He was already moving towards the trees. She said, ‘Do you remember the day we found the old hermitage, Iveri?’

He didn’t stop but turned to face her and continued walking, backwards. ‘Of course I do. Sometimes I go there and remember that day. I remember you looking at all those things we found, how excited you were.’ He turned back and over his shoulder said, ‘It is still our place.’

Enna waited until the trees swallowed him and then a few moments more. Satisfied that he was gone, she turned and started walking quickly towards the Serpukhov house.

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