Among the Russians(67)
We walked through the last hall into a pseudo-mortuary. It was decorated by vases holding dead, twisted branches, and seemed to reproduce Lenin’s tomb-chamber in Red Square. Our feet were silenced by a scarlet carpet as we circled its arc of columns. At its centre a gold death-mask shone. The face looked old, small and exhausted. One of the girls tripped up in her high heels and burst into nervous giggles.
The next moment we were released into a gallery of the post-war years, as into paradise after the Passion—beaming miners, booming industry, clapping delegates. But in the hall there was a mingled smell of incense and latrines.
I sat in the gardens outside, drugged by nausea. A trickle of tourists was moving among the grandiose fountains now, and some cars had appeared. Two of them showed photographs of Stalin. When Russians praised him, I realized, it was of power that they spoke. He was more graspable than Lenin. Lenin preached an international workers’ brotherhood—but Stalin preached Russia. He was the demiurge of her greatness, the nation transcendent. And her people were his children. He answered their yearning for a god’s or parent’s rule, the power which would protect them from the terror of their own disorder and that of the world, the power of Ivan the Terrible whose hand you kissed as it executed you. Beside that timeless despotism, law and the individual had no history.
The two girls emerged from the museum and passed near me. I asked them what they thought of it. ‘Quite nice,’ they said. And as they did so I realized that Stalin’s time was as remote to them as that of Peter the Great. They were about twenty years old. They wandered chattering away, discussing where to buy tights in Tbilisi. And I felt thankful for them, and for tights and for all trivia.
Even my hotel had been built to accommodate the pilgrim hordes of Stalin’s day. Its coffered ceilings and rude glut of pillars topped by fat capitals—classicism in its last perversion—resembled one of the stations of the Moscow metro. A repressed-looking girl sat at the reception desk. Under the painted vaults of the dining-room the tables were crammed only with men, and when I left at eight-thirty the next morning a forty-strong delegation was already downing a full-scale meal with two bottles of champagne each.
As I passed the last suburbs of Gori, I wound down my car window and let in the air. A warm wind blew from the Black Sea a hundred miles away. From the vineyards and apple orchards of the Kura valley the road twisted into hills dotted with beehives, and all the lorries seemed to be carrying animals: horses whose chestnut flanks quivered with every jolt of the road, pigs gruntingly astir, crates of gawping chickens.
Towards noon I wriggled a few miles off my prescribed route to where the huge, floating spur of Gelati monastery overhangs its valley. All about it the Caucasian mountains billow in on forest-dappled waves, then drop into the plains at its feet. Surrounded by a shambling wall black with ivy and jostled by apple trees, its churches are lifted naked to the sky and mountains.
The Church of the Nativity was the Saint-Denis of Georgia, where her kings were buried. It was built with the high walls and turret dome of all this land, solitary and confident in the beauty of its stone. I had arrived on a Sunday, and while the Russians plodded here and there in educational groups, the Georgians were enjoying themselves. All round the monastery they were drinking, picnicking and playing football, with a robust sense of what was theirs.
‘Look!’ boomed one, as I went inside the church. ‘Our kings still live here!’ Around us the nave rose in frescoed glory—a painted incantation to the hierarchies of earth and heaven. And there, sure enough, the royalty of Georgia was banked in phalanxes of canny kings and tight-lipped queens. They looked like crowned and anointed bandits. Inside their obligatory haloes the kings showed black, flinty eyes and horizontal moustaches; and even the mosaic archangels in the apse were dressed in the pearl-encrusted robes of secular princes, whose gush of wings was merely a hereditary leftover.
‘There’s our Bagrat! Our Giorgi! Tamara!’ My self-appointed guide poured out a hoarse torrent of ownership. ‘And there’s David—the big one! What about him then?’
David and his great-granddaughter Tamara compass the apogee of Georgia’s power in the twelfth century. It was they who stretched the Christian kingdom from the Black Sea to the Caspian, ravaged northern Persia and endowed at Gelati a famous philosophic academy, whose ruins were still crumbling on the valley’s lip, their stone benches feathered in grass. David the Builder, prodigious soldier and statesman, at once gracious and formidable, is the quintessential Georgian folk-hero. By the end of his reign the Turks, who had contemptuously dubbed him ‘a woodland king’, had relinquished Tbilisi after four hundred years of Moslem rule. His life, say contemporary annals, was stained only by some youthful escapades ‘which God Himself has forgotten’, and he lies buried now with ostentatious humility across the deep, powerful entranceway to the monastery, where an iron gate, captured from Persia by his son, swings thin as a leaf in the wind. It is the gravestone of a titan—cracked and enormous. It spans the whole way, where every passer-by could tread it underfoot. ‘This is my home for all eternity,’ runs the inscription. ‘Here shall I dwell, for I have willed it.’
‘See what a size the man was!’ My guide spread his arms as if to embrace an oak. ‘There’s a six-hundred-kilogram stone in one corner of the church, and this man lifted it up! Just as if it was a child!’ He tossed an imaginary infant into the air. ‘No problem!’