Mortal Happiness: Chapter Seven

A plastic statue of the Virgin bounced on the dashboard beside a sticker of the Gelati Monastery as Enna Serpukhova drove out of Kutaisi’s small, dusty airport. Worry beads swung from the rearview mirror which reflected the distant Racha Mountains. The ancient Lada had cost two weeks salary for three days hire. Handing over the money she’d known the owner had no expectation of seeing his battered old car again.

After an hour or so the road dropped, smoothing itself through a gently rolling landscape. This was a region Enna knew briefly after leaving home. She’d been a sixteen year old on her way to the capital and a new life. How different everything had seemed to her back then: the vineyards and lush fields of central Georgia a world away from the rocky, forest landscape of her childhood.

She’d kept herself at school with carefully constructed lies about distant relatives and long nights of work in one of the great factories of the capital sticking labels on wine bottles, before graduating to control of the corking machine. When she’d left for Moscow two years later and the exams that finally led to the University of Toronto Medical School, the women at the factory had presented her with a cork, a single rouble stuck into it for luck. She’d left knowing how to lie to authority and how to survive in a very different environment to the one she’d survived before.

At least there had been work here then. She thought now how slow and dusty everything looked in the morning light, remembering that when she first saw these roads fifteen years ago they’d seemed vast and endlessly busy. Those days were gone; even a cursory look said that Georgia was no longer the playground of a vast, socialist empire, but had become what she’d thought it always was - a small, backward country somewhere between Europe and Asia.

The small fan on the dashboard whined then fluttered to a stop. She rested a sweating arm on the door, feeling the air on her skin as she drove. Trailers piled with hay and trucks loaded with crates of sugar beet and apples passed every few minutes. There was little traffic; occasional cars, lone businessmen at the wheel. An ancient bus filled with school children belched black smoke into the clear air.

As the road wound gradually north-west then north it became narrower and more potholed. As if to compensate the land opened before her, stretching itself. Sunlight flashed off the glossy leaves of orange trees and the air through the open car window was heavy with the scent of fruit and sulphur. Her mind returned to the infertile plain she’d left less than 48 hours earlier, but she pushed that thought away and focused on the road ahead.

To distract herself Enna thought of the past, the distant, safe past. Jason and his Argonauts should be safe enough. Three thousand years ago this road had marked the eastern edge of Bronze Age Colchis, home of the Golden Fleece and destination of the Argo. As a child she’d read that story over and over again: how thieving, deceiving Greeks had come to her country and stolen its greatest treasure, kidnapped its princess and murdered her children. As an adult she’d read the Greek version of the story and been delighted by the differences. On reflection, she thought that what had really struck her about the story when she first read it was the idea of leaving home in search of something wonderful, something almost beyond price.

She’d seen quite a few golden fleeces by the time she was ten years old. The fast flowing rivers of north-west Georgia still ran with gold then - probably still do she thought, if you knew where to look. She swerved, avoiding a pothole deeper than the front wheel of the car. Did anyone set traps for gold in Svaneti’s rivers any more? She smiled briefly, remembering how she had found the secret places where the gold-hunters hung their sheepskin traps to dry. Centuries of yellow powder coated the floor of the caves where old men beat the dried fleeces until they surrendered their sparkling treasure. From her hiding place she’d seen how the gold dust danced in the air, swirled in the lamplight, before settling and turning dross to precious metal. One time, she had waited until the men left then searched through the dirt, rubbing the left-over gold dust into her skin and her hair. Walking back into the village feeling like a queen she couldn’t understand why the other children had screamed and fled from her.

She shook her head. Even ancient stories brought her back to her own past and her destination, which was getting closer every moment. She drove steadily trying to think of nothing at all; particularly not what lay behind her. Heart-thoughts were an unaffordable luxury on this trip.

By mid-afternoon the road was busier, oncoming traffic gradually building to a stream of vehicles loaded with household goods. She recognised it all with a distant shock. The faces through the glass were anxious, fearful. Sounds of argument and weeping reached her over the Lada’s rattle. An aircraft flew low overhead, military insignia on its underside.

Ahead, black smoke rose over what the Abkhaz and the UN call the Zone of Conflict and Georgians the Gali District. The conflict in this region was not religious, whatever extremists on both sides might say. Having no religious belief herself, and having seen horrors beyond count committed in the name of faith, her tolerance of such things was always limited. Catching her own thought she considered, wryly, how easy it was to be intolerant.

Not long before she left her mother’s home, Chechen mercenaries had begun moving through Svaneti on their way to help the Abkhaz in their fight for independence. Svan village headmen had welcomed their brothers of the mountains not knowing, or maybe not caring, that they were on their way to join Svaneti’s enemies, the Abkhaz, their activities funded by the Kremlin which officially hated them. Sheep had been slaughtered for feasting, the meat shared. Weapons were exchanged and blood oaths taken.

Driving through the late summer heat, Enna recalled those Chechens in her village: dark, wiry men in fur hats and long, waisted coats that looked romantic and concealed grey-green fatigues. They had rarely smiled, but sometimes, watching her watch them, their serious faces would lighten momentarily and they would say things to each other in a language she didn’t understand.

She shrugged and shifted her hands on the steering wheel, relaxing her shoulders. Why was it surprising that nations fought each other when neighbours rarely agreed? When she was about nine years old she’d started listening to adult conversation, listening and learning. The old village men would argue, endlessly it had seemed to her, about the differences between Svans and Georgians who could never, they said, agree on anything. Svans were Svans, just because they lived in a place called Georgia didn’t mean they had to agree with the lowlanders who controlled the world. All a real Svan, a good Svan, wanted – she smiled without humour, recalling the old men’s words - was to ignore anyone not related to them, and be ignored in return. She considered the relation between the words ‘ignore’ and ‘ignorant’, then realised she was thinking in English, the language of her work. The language of her marriage; and of love. Not for the first time she considered the strangeness of expressing the most intimate of feelings in a learnt tongue.

Shit! She really didn’t want Tomaso there, in her head, right now. Irritated by her own thoughts, Enna focussed once again on the road.

Soon the vehicles coming towards her became a stream that took up much of the road on both sides. These huddled men and women were not Svans but lowlanders probably trying to scrape a living in the Zone of Conflict. Enna wondered how many times they had loaded everything they owned into the truck or car and fled. How many times would she be prepared to do that? Without hesitation she decided once would be too often. Glancing into an overloaded sedan moving only a metre from her own vehicle Enna noticed an elderly woman with dozens of tiny portraits pinned like medals across her heavy, black-clad breast: portraits of the dead carried to and fro with the living. As if the proximity to a beating heart gave the dead a second existence.

Suddenly nauseous she pulled over and stumbling quickly from the car, vomited onto dusty grass. The weight of moving vehicles shook the ground, she felt it under her feet and for a moment it felt as if she were back in the camp, surrounded by dancing women and pounding drums. After a moment she took a bottle of water from the passenger seat and rinsed her face and mouth. The air moved slightly, unsticking her shirt from her body. She stretched, got into the car, and drove on.

She entered the Administrative Region of Svaneti in the mid-afternoon. Home, only it was not. Driving through the narrow streets of a small, grey town she wondered how it ever could have been.

The town was crowded. Men drove cars full of children and refrigerators and stared, anxious and angry, through dirty windscreens. She recognised the patterned headscarves of mountain villages on women with swollen eyes and sobbing infants.

Looking for somewhere to eat among the grey brieze-block streets she parked the car right outside a café and sat where she could watch it.

‘No one believed it,’ the café owner said as he poured tea grown, he said, on his brother’s nearby plantation. ‘At first we thought it was just rumours … round here we’re used to rumours of trouble. But when our family who live over there …’ he waved towards the Zone of Conflict, ‘when they said they’d heard much more shooting than usual and were planning to leave, then we knew it must be true.’ He shrugged and wiped his hands on a grubby towel. ‘But we still don’t understand it.’

The bitter tea flooded her tongue ‘What is it you don’t understand?’

‘Why strangers come here to fight. Don’t we have enough anger of our own that outsiders must come and make it worse?’ He shook his head and for a moment Enna thought he was going to cry. ‘Everything has changed. Nothing makes sense any more.’

He remembered the Soviet days of stability and plenty when his brother’s tea was sold from Vladivostok to Tallin. Now he was lucky to sell a few cups a day, here in the café. Like many men his age he wanted the old days back but she knew they were gone. For good. Nothing ever went backwards.

She nodded, as if in sympathy, then pointed to the refugee-filled street outside. ‘Those people, are they from the conflict zone – from Gali? They look like mountain people to me.’

‘Those villagers? Maybe they left because they heard Chechens were coming and didn’t want to wait to find out whose side they are on.’ He paused, his face creasing with what looked like helplessness. ‘Or maybe the Abkhaz are attacking all along the border again?’

Back in the car, Enna placed the water and neat packages of food she’d bought from the café owner on the passenger seat and wondered how accurate the man’s speculations were. Having lived in the capitals of Georgia and Moscow she knew disinformation was just a way of life. Did rumour and exaggeration lie behind what was happening here? The possibility that whole regions might flee their homes on a falsehood appalled but did not surprise her.

Reluctantly she thought back to what she’d seen two nights ago. The sense of menace was still there, hovering just beyond her vision. She gripped the steering wheel more tightly using logic to push the fear away. Who was in her mother’s yard? There were groups of men, none immediately recognisable and they wore different kinds of clothing; at least, she thought so. It was too hazy and the emotion she’d felt on seeing her mother and sister threatened to cloud what little she did remember. Recognition might not even matter. What mattered was that she should prevent it happening at all.

By five o’clock the heat was fading and she was exhausted from driving against the long line of oncoming humanity, exhausted by a constant search for two particular faces among the hundreds passing her. Two pink-cheeked women in flowered headscarves. Near a junction with the Mestia road the traffic ground to a halt. One side of the road was crumbling escarpment, the other fell away into a ravine so deep its floor was invisible under a dense, gold-leafed canopy of trees. Two carts and a tractor blocked the away ahead while behind them old trucks and cars lined up and shattered the air with blaring horns. The vehicles were bowed under the weight of bedding, televisions and generations of villagers, most staring at the wider world with confused eyes. Many people were on foot, walking beside vehicles too full to carry them.

With each kilometre Enna felt a growing sense of discomfort. Refugees were her job; columns of exhausted, sick people had been her life since leaving medical school. But these men and women in drab shirts and flowered headscarves were Svan, her mother’s people and witnessing their journey she felt a surprisingly personal sense of pain and shame.

She was moving so slowly now it was easy to scan every passer-by and there, in the great swell of shifting faces, she saw one she recognised. A plump woman, maybe a dozen years older than herself, stood, hands on hips at the side of the road staring at her intently through the open car window.

Enna smiled and the woman smiled back and walked forward, open armed.

‘Is it you?’ She got out of the car.

The woman put her arms around Enna and said, ‘I always thought you needed more flesh, my girl, but look at you, you are grown beautiful!’

‘And you, Aunt, you look well. I am very glad to see you.’ As the words left her mouth she remembered that she last spoke Svan more than half a lifetime ago. ‘How are you and my uncle? How is Iveri?’

‘Your uncle is dead Enna,’ she shrugged. ‘Not much loss there. He drank too much chacha one night when there was deep snow. He fell down, into the snow. It covered him. He never got up again. I do not miss him, but your cousin I think still does, though he would not say so to me.’

‘And how is Iveri?’

The woman shook her head. ‘Your cousin was well enough when I left him this morning. I begged him to come with me, but he laughed - you remember how he laughs when he’s afraid? All that talk about the Brotherhood and strengthening the Svan identity! Nonsense, all of it nonsense, but men can never hear the rubbish they talk. God has made their ears deaf to their own voices.’ She made a clicking sound with her tongue and teeth and hearing it Enna felt a sharp shock of remembrance. ‘My son says he has seen Russians in the high passes with his own eyes, just a few of them at a time. They are reconnoitring so he says.’

‘Russians? I thought you would say Chechens, I thought it was Chechens everyone was afraid of.’

‘No girl, Iveri is with the Chechens! He says they are helping to train our men against the Abkhaz, against the Russians, against anyone else who comes into our land. They are hiding over in the Kodori Gorge with guns and bigger guns, hiding from the ones who call themselves peacekeepers.’

Confused, Enna said, ‘Who is hiding?’

‘The Chechens of course.’

Enna shook her head. She forgot how easy confusion could be here.

Her aunt said, ‘You have come for them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing has changed. My sister is as stubborn as ever and your sister is as stupid. God forgive me for unkindness but I speak the truth.’ She laid a hand on Enna’s arm, ‘They will not leave. Some of the women from the village tried talking to your mother. I tried. You can guess what she said.’

‘And my father?’

‘Leonid Petrovich!’ The older woman spits briefly.

‘I know how it will be, Mara, but I must try.’ Feeling a wave of sickness she put a hand on the car for support.

‘You are ill?’ Her aunt looked at her closely.

She shook her head. ‘No, it is the driving, the fumes from the other vehicles, that is all.’

Mara Samushia continued to stare at her niece. Her son Iveri grew up playing and fighting with this older cousin and little Tamar, her sister. He’d written poems for Enna when he was twelve and had eczema that bled in long gashes. She had never laughed at him.

‘You are pregnant.’

It was not a question and Enna could not hide her surprise at the other woman’s insight. She had only known herself for a week and told no one. Afraid the results might be wrong, or that the foetus could be unstable, she’d planned to do a second test a week later. Her immediate impulse, to tell Tomaso, she’d supressed. It couldn’t be more than five weeks since conception and so much could go wrong at this early stage. To raise his hopes only to destroy them again ... no, she wouldn’t do that.

She nodded and the other woman smiled. ‘Why surprised? You are a doctor - yes, Iveri heard it - but doctors are not the only ones to see things.’ She laid a roughened hand on Enna’s wrist. ‘Go home sister’s-daughter, wherever home is. If you have a good man, go home to him. Do not waste your strength on them. Keep it for yourself and your baby.’

Enna shook her head, but the hand was powerful and closed on her even more tightly.

‘You know I am right. You know how they are up there. She will never leave your father behind. He has them both possessed … I have always said so. Only you were strong, strong enough to fight and leave him.’

Enna looked away her jaw tight. But her aunt was relentless.

‘I wish he had never come to Rulini, except that then you would not be here and I should be sorry for that.’ She smiled, wryly. ‘It is a pity Tamar is too stupid for anything or Iveri would have married her long ago just because she is your sister.’

‘I am very glad for his sake that he did not. Iveri deserves much better.’ She straightened and her aunt released the grip on her arm. ‘The trucks are moving now and I have to go. I must get there before dark. You are right, nothing will change. Who can know that better than I?’ For a moment she sounded bitter, even to herself. ‘But I must try, for myself,’ she touched her belly with both hands, ‘and so that later, I will not feel ashamed.’

Mara Samushia nodded. ‘You saw something didn’t you?’

Once again Enna was surprised. On leaving home she had thrown her village and almost everything in it into a mental box and locked it with a key labelled ‘Past’. Now, looking at the other woman’s clever, concerned face she felt a pang of guilt. Taking her aunt’s hand she said. ‘I did. You know how it is … what will surely happen if I do nothing.’

Mara Samushia did not ask what her niece saw. She simply nodded and Enna felt an unexpectedly powerful sense of kinship with the woman.

‘The village is empty,’ Mara said, ‘we have all left. We agreed we would leave just for a while, until we know what is happening. No-one wants to be in the middle if the Russians and the Chechens begin fighting in our district.’ She shrugged. ‘Most likely nothing will happen and we will all turn around and go home.’ She paused, looking at Enna. ‘Iveri told me he will take care of our home, but I said “This tower has stood against a thousand years of avalanches, it will not fall over a few foolish men”.’ She smiled. ‘Go there, sister’s daughter. Find him. You know he will always help you if you need it. And tell him,’ she added sharply, ‘tell him not to be a fool.’

‘Iveri is sensible, he always was.’ Enna smiled. ‘You are very lucky in your son.’

‘May you be lucky in yours.’

Mara Samushia made a sign with her fingers, which Enna imitated unthinkingly as they embraced.

For a moment Enna watched the other woman moving away, then she got into the car and driving north, begun climbing steeply into mountains that already folded around her. Moving always against the wave of humans, vehicles and pack animals that flowed sullenly in the opposite direction.

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