Among the Russians(68)
‘And Queen Tamara?’
‘Oh yes, she was OK too. But…well….’—his fingers twirled in reservation—‘…just a woman.’
There are other shrines tucked along these ridges—tiny, huge-stoned churches, built for eternity, their gravestones half drowned in the earth. But I had little time to explore them. The afternoon was fading and soon I was circling back across those western lowlands which the Georgians call Imier, ‘that side’, to distinguish them from the harsher ‘this side’ to the east. The change, beyond the Kikhi passes, is sudden. The mountains relax into peace, and watered valleys fatten in the hills. The Rioni river, the Phasis of the ancients—and the eponymous home (they thought) of the pheasant—swells and meanders through the lush plains of Colchis, flax-rich kingdom of Roman geographers, where each verandaed house stood in a plot of sweetcorn or a bier of vines. The Mediterranean was breathing close now. Poplars and olive trees appeared. The verges cackled and bellowed with geese and cattle, and grunting pigs in makeshift halters. This was the land of a people already flourishing when the black ships of the Greeks first hove onto their horizon—Jason and his Argonauts, early traders or pirates. The natives, it is said, laid fleeces on the beds of the alluvial streams to pan for gold. But the Golden Fleece may simply have symbolized alchemy or trade, or have grown from a memory of the golden light which bathes this ample land, and which was even now dropping out of the evening sky. With every mile the fields grew denser in tea and fruit, the plains more sodden with their streams. The village gardens slopped and blazed. Cattle slumbered in the road. Palm trees and water buffalo emerged out of the dusk. And as night fell, the verge-grazing cows and pigs gathered by ones and twos at their owners’ garden gates, awaiting admission like domestic pets. I had time only to glimpse a black clamber of mountains descending to the sea, before darkness came down and I was on the shore under a sky barely paler than the water.
All this brought on a voluptuous nostalgia. The shores of the Mediterranean!—or nearly. I was no longer quite alone. The history-laden sea accompanied me. I felt vaguely homesick. I settled by my car in a half-deserted campsite near Sukhumi, and began to cook a supper of scrawny chicken. It was my last night in Georgia. But I had no sooner lit my stove than a pair of trendily-jeaned legs intruded into the gaslight, followed by a saturnine face which lowered itself conspiratorially to mine. It wore a look of hard, Georgian ebullience.
‘You’re British aren’t you? If you have any….’
But the familiar litany fell into a gaping absence of jeans, and the man’s hunger for the West—for all novelty and stimulus—turned into a fierce conviviality. ‘The moment I saw you I thought “Ah, there’s a foreigner I could like.’ Something about your face!’—I at once felt fraudulent—‘Let’s have a party! My name’s Zahari. I know a place….’
Five minutes later we were racing into Sukhumi with a frightened Czechoslovak girl who needed to catch a train and who said she was being followed. The lights of another car glared and wavered behind us, and as we reached the station and she ran through the ticket barrier, a car-load of youths spilled out behind us.
‘You’ve let her get away!’ The driver gaped at me. ‘What did you do that for? We only wanted to fuck her.’
Even Zahari looked uncertain, split between friendship and machismo. I said the girl was afraid. But the youths stared at me nonplussed, wrinkling their shallow moustaches and fingering their belts. I began to feel stupid. And now the girl was gazing back from the platform with what might have been regret.
Zahari and I passed the evening in a conflagration of talk and music around a dance-floor packed by fifty-odd whirling couples. We sat with a bottle of wine each, and plates heaped with kebab. Every time a woman passed, Zahari would hitch his jeans ruttishly about his thighs and evaluate her figure to me in fiery, glottal Russian.
‘But this is a deadly dull town, I can tell you. The mountains are beautiful, of course, but there’s nothing else.’
‘You’d prefer Moscow?’
‘No, oh God, no.’ He shuddered and hissed. I couldn’t imagine him there. ‘Moscow!’—he exorcized the thought with a swig of wine—‘I had to live there once. Politics! The place reeks of them. It freezes you. And business is hopeless there. ’But in Sukhumi his talent for banditry had found its outlet in a profitable trade from backstreet clothes factories. ‘We Georgians are basically selfish. I suppose the Russians are more idealistic.’ He grinned and shrugged. This idealism qualified them only for his distaste.
I asked him if he’d visited Lenin’s mausoleum?
‘Lenin? I’ve never heard of him!’ He flicked a piece of gristle off his plate. ‘That’s for Lenin!’
He drank again, more heavily. At the thought of Moscow, Sukhumi became bearable to him. ‘In summer we even get a few foreign women. I had an English girl from Hull once. God…I wonder if all the girls there are like that?’ He jabbed at his lamb with phallic repetition. ‘Women! I was married at twenty, but my wife left me because I got at other girls. Tell me, how much does a first class prostitute cost in London?’—he speared the kebab again—‘I mean an absolutely first class one?’
I made an uneducated guess.
‘Christ, I’d rather spend it on drink…. All the same, can you get me a work permit?’