Among the Russians(64)
A frightened Russian lorry-driver flagged me down. ‘Is this the way to Tbilisi?’ He’d never been in the mountains before. He was more alien than I. ‘What’s the road like farther on? Have you found any petrol? These Georgians….’
For hours I had driven among ranges beheaded by cloud, and had envisaged their summits thundering and looming out of sight. But now, for an instant, the whiteness peeled away from the 16,500-foot Kazbek, ’the Mountain of Christ’. It was like a religious unveiling. One moment it was obscured. The next, the shroud had slid away and the mysterious peak revealed itself, glimmering with snow and higher than anything I had imagined. It towered over the whole valley. The local tribespeople call it the seat of God, and believe it harbours Abraham’s tent and the holy manger—but they say the only climber to have searched there descended stark mad. For a minute it filled the sky. Then the mists closed in again, and it was gone.
A cold wind started to blow. The afternoon was thinning away in eerie washes of light—pinks and yellows which seemed to emanate from the mountains themselves. The road ascended again, but frost and avalanche had hacked its surface to bits, and chunks were dropping off into the ravines. Even in September the gulleys were lined with snow. The overhanging scarps flared russet against their whiteness, and other slopes were flaking away as if diseased, so that the chasms beneath them were mounded with brittle scales. I was nearing the highest pass. Long, concrete tunnels, some disused, covered the road against landslide. The clatter of the car inside them sounded hoarse and old. But I had an ignorant faith in it.
By dusk I was over the watershed, descending out of volcanic ranges into wooded hills. A huge, dim perspective opened up. The road twisted and plunged above gorges where rock-flung waterfalls dangled, and streams showed in icy filaments far away. Then I was sinking to a gentler country of apple and peach orchards. It was almost night.
Even in the morning the dining-room of the hotel at Pasanauri was bursting with carousal, its tables ringed by circles of guzzling revellers and stacked with two bottles of wine apiece. They shouted at me to join them.
But I was making south for the Kura valley, which divides the northern, Greater Caucasus from the Lesser, and nurtures the veteran capitals of Mtskheta and Tbilisi. As the last hills dropped behind me, I escaped the noon sun in a huge, bare corpse of a church, enclosed by a castle in the foothills. It was empty and desanctified. A single brazier guttered before its frescoed Christ, and the muralled saints seemed to occupy their pillars apologetically, like denizens of a forgotten felicity.
A fierce-eyed Georgian youth burst in on me as I studied them. He tugged my elbow and talked in rapid, urgent tones. But I knew no Georgian. As this dawned on him, he grew frantic with frustration. His eyes bulged and threatened, his hands flew in a furious sign-language. He started to shout. But I could only stare back at him in doltish helplessness.
He could contain himself no longer. ‘Leeverepul-too-Tbilisi-tree!’ he screamed. He plucked out a knife, sank on his haunches and feverishly inscribed something in the stone floor. It was a cup.
I stared at it. A chalice. Was he a member of some mystical sect? I became as maddened as him. I tried Russian, English, French, schoolboy German. But nothing worked.
For a minute he went on shouting and gesturing in despair. Then he enclosed his head in his hands for a mammoth feat of recall, and suddenly yelled: ‘World Cup!’ He positively danced in front of me. ‘Liverpool—two! Tbilisi—three!’ Then he pummelled the floor to indicate the return match in Georgia. ’Tbilisi—three! Liverpool—nought! Nought!’
I showed polite rejoicing at this news—all Georgia must have raged with it for months. Instantly his manner turned secretive, and his shoulders coalesced into the furtive hunch which precedes illicit trade. This time his English came smooth as butter: ‘Have you anything’—his voice scaled down to a susurration—‘anything to sell? Trousers? Magazines? Discs?’ The word came in a stage whisper: ‘Jeans?’
I shook my head. His eyes pinned me like javelins. ‘Nothing?’
We were crouched under a fresco of the Last Judgement, where the damned were roasting or freezing in the rather bureaucratic departments of the mediaeval Hell. He edged away from it. ‘Radio? Shoes? You have nothing?’
But I had nothing. To Georgians, and later to Armenians, I was pure heartbreak. My commercial uselessness left them dumbfounded. Why, they seemed to ask (but were too polite) had I come all the way to the Soviet Union if not to effect some deal? They begged to buy my Morris for three times its worth in Britain. For one man the knob of its gear-handle exercised a terrible fascination. He was determined to buy it, but couldn’t screw it clear. Every day I steadfastly refused to sell car parts: neither its tyres, its mirrors nor its cushioned seats. As the bids mounted, I realized a stubborn affection for it.
By the time I reached Mtskheta, Georgia’s early capital, I felt as if I were back in Syria or Sicily, in the colour and caprice of the south. Brown-limbed children cavorted in the streets. Driving became an act of bravado and opportunism. Everywhere the dedicated plodding of northern crowds was replaced by a languid stalk or a crutch-tight swagger. Photographs of the half-disgraced Georgian, Stalin, stared defiantly from shops and restaurants.
Mtskheta is a small town now. The high places of its pagan idols—moon-god and fertility goddess—were exorcised by Christian churches on the encircling hills, and the foundation of its great cathedral is suffused with fables. Clenched in battlemented walls, the building is typically Georgian. Its short transepts and long aisles meet beneath a turret like a giant candle-snuffer. It is strong, handsome. It belongs to a tradition grown from the far marches of the ancient Christian world, like the churches of Armenia. Its people show a peasant attachment to it and circumambulate its walls piously in the drenching sun, fondling its blond masonry and leaving flowers at its doors. For the Georgians the Church is the expression of the nation. The Russians have tampered little with it. Stalin himself refrained from persecution because (it is said) he was frightened of his pious mother, who lived to be almost a hundred, still regretting that her son had not become a priest. Inside, the cathedral shines with the same fair stone. It is the Rheims of Georgia, where her kings were crowned and sometimes buried. Under my feet the marble grave-slabs were dimpled with crests and inscriptions.