I GOT IT INTO MY HEAD ONCE TO FIGURE OUT WHAT HAD STARTED THE Abkhazian war. It was 1999 and I was living in Tbilisi, the capital of the post-Soviet Republic of Georgia in the southern Caucasus. It was five years since the Abkhas (with some meddling help from the Russians) had defeated the Georgian army and pushed a quarter of a million ethnic Georgians out of their homes along the pebbly Black Sea coast. The displaced families still filled every grand hotel in Tbilisi, strung up their washing on the mini-balconies, punched holes in the walls for tin-can chimney pipes. The refugees were making do with patched-up remnants, but all of Georgia was essentially camping in a shell of its former self during those limbo years. The country was in stasis: flatline economy, electricity down to four hours a day. The streets chugged with generators, a fug of kerosene hugged my apartment. Luckily I had a stove fueled by a gas canister, but I cooked by candlelight, peering into obscure saucepans and dripping wax on the potatoes.
Half British, half American, I had grown up safe in the assumption of historical progress. I had absorbed the Whig theory of liberal democratic determinism and the American belief in economic growth and the deliverance of technology. But I was living in Georgia, in the husk of the Soviet Empire, where time had run backward and now hung about listlessly. The tropes of civilization, the normal about-your-business quotidian of life—police, courts, state salaries and pensions, municipal heat—had all but stopped. The long corridors of power were dark, their parquet warped and the offices on either side only intermittently occupied by officials who found it convenient to conduct their business from a government phone line. I began to grimace at the palliative idioms I had formerly parroted and which now stuck in my throat, trite and false: “darkest before the dawn,” “tomorrow’s another day,” “things can only get better.”
“It’s all a bullshit! Pah!” Zaliko would shake his head and pour another glass of homemade wine from a plastic five-liter jerican. In Georgia this comment was universally applicable. I would stick my feet in the fire to warm them and listen to his funny, scurrilous stories of self-serving parliamentarians and businessmen-bandit-thugs and dinosaur apparatchiks who still loomed in the shadows. Zaliko was an archaeologist by training, a mountaineer by passion, and a humanitarian by default; he believed in no ideology or institution except that of human kindness, and he was the best man I ever knew.
Zaliko was in his fifties when I first met him and he invited me to tea in the railroad apartment, housed under the sloping tin roof of a collapsing pre-Revolutionary house on a hidden lane off a cobbled street in the center of Tbilisi, that his family had occupied for a couple of generations. His two children were young adults, grown and married, and he lived with his widowed father; his wife, the beautiful and long-suffering (for anything Zaliko had, he immediately gave away) Marina, who worked for the Soros Foundation; and his younger, soft-spoken brother Zura, a puppeteer, who had never married but whom all children instinctively loved. The family had survived the civil war years that coincided with the ethnic wars in Abkhazia and South Ossetia (another ethnic oblast engineered by a Stalinist pen stroke across a map) by making cheese from the milk of two cows they kept at their ramshackle dacha up a picturesque ravine a little way out of the city.
“Don’t laugh at cheese!” Sometimes Zaliko’s long nose and long gray beard appeared to give him an admonishing clerical expression, but then his deep-set currant eyes would twinkle with an impish sense of the ridiculous and any notion of reprimand was dispelled. “Two years we lived in cheese!” He laughed with great seriousness. Zura staged a full-length puppet satire spectacular about a group of Georgian cows who longed for lush Swiss pastures. One of my favorite scenes was a re-creation of a grandiloquent communist May Day Parade, complete with banging drums and triumphant trumpets, when all the cows proudly marched under banners proclaiming, “Cheese Is Freedom!”
Zaliko and I sat several winters by his fire, tracing histories and stories on the old faded and worn map of Georgia that covered an entire wall. Often there were visitors: an old friend, now broken down and wearing a threadbare overcoat; a visiting American professor of ethnography who had brought him a fresh supply of National Geographic magazines; a pair of young climbers embarking on an expedition to Everest; Chechen refugees from the Pankisi Gorge hoping to set up a computer center. One Chechen I remember, nervous and scratchy, hollowed out with heroin and begging more money when the computers were all, inevitably, stolen. We would sit around the table covered in papers and books and Zaliko would buzz in and out of the kitchen, making tea, pouring wine, bringing out a bowlful of jonjolia, a tangle of pickled white flowers, or a hunk of aged salty ammoniac cheese. Sometimes he fried up kupati, chicken-guts sausage, thick and black, coiled and oil-rich like the innards of a disassembled engine. In the summer he would take me up to the dacha and build a fire with dried vine cuttings, which he said made the best heat, and roast skewers of pork for mtsvadi, tossing the crackling meat with ruby pomegranate seeds.
We sat by the fire and I learned my Georgian history. It was a litany of defeat: Romans, Greeks, Tamerlane, Persians, Ottomans, Russians. . . .
“But the Georgians are even better at fighting among themselves!” Zaliko snorted half in derision, half with a certain rueful, stubborn pride. He told me stories that crisscrossed the waves of invasion with countercurrents of long-lost feudal alliances, traitor princes, highlander defiance, fortress monasteries, kidnappings, massacres, hostage sons. All along the roads we drove in his secondhand Soviet army jeep, among the stripped-for-scrap abandoned ruins of Soviet factories, he pointed out the tumulus remains of razed villages and the fragments of crenellated walls that still clung to steep promontories.
Once during the civil war—it must have been about 1991, when there was fighting around the Parliament building—Zaliko was on duty with the Red Cross. Sheltering in a doorway in a side street he had caught sight of his father, head up, stride unchecked by zinging bullets, a small shopping bag looped around one wrist, on his way to buy some eggs and cigarettes.
“Go home, old man!” Zaliko shouted across the street between scattershot fusillades. “It’s dangerous! There’s fighting here!”
“Pah!” shouted back his father, who had been to Berlin with the Red Army. “This is not fighting. This is just boys!”
When the war in Abkhazia began, Zaliko’s son, Archil, was seventeen and got himself fired up with all the pride-of-small-nations bravado and nationalist flag-waving. He wanted to go off and fight for his country. Zaliko had to forcibly stop him.
“Pah!” he told him, “do you think you will be a man if you play with these boys?”
Empires had come and conquered, but somehow the Georgians remained. They had kept their polyphonic harmonies and their hexagonal churches and their language with its macaroni curlicued alphabet. I began to suspect that the Georgians knew they could never win on the battlefield and had learned a subtler tactic for survival, lulling the invader into leniency with excess hospitality. The Roman legionnaire, the Persian satrap, the Ottoman general, the Russian engineer would find himself in front of a table overladen with dozens of dishes: pounded spinach with walnuts and marigold spice, lamb stew with sour green plums and tarragon, cold roast suckling pig with purple plum sauce, hot, crumbly rounds of khachapuri cheese bread, a stew of tomatoes and aubergines, stuffed mushrooms, pickled garlic, minced pork kebabs, crispy fried corn bread, milky sulguni cheese. The tamada, or toastmaster, would raise his wine horn and drink to mothers and to the motherland, to old friends we have lost, and new friends we have just made, to the sacred grape (Georgia is the oldest center of viticulture in the world), king and emperor, to ancestors and grandchildren yet to come—and foreigners would find themselves charmed and beguiled, quite drunk and the object of such lavish affection that they could not stop grinning. The supra became Georgia’s most enduring national pastime. Any excuse: arrival, departure, birthday, funeral. In the nineteenth century, sixty-seven separate religious feast days were identified.
“No wonder Georgia never got around to industrializing,” I teased Zaliko. Georgians shrugged at their lackadaisical obstinacy; they had no need for modern invention and intervention. During Soviet times, visiting delegations from Siberian industrial combines were invariably treated—subjected to the ploy of the generous supra-fest. It was an effective strategy, even in the land of the production committee. Georgian businessmen managed to insert themselves into every nook and cranny amid the cogs of the great inefficient mechanism of the command economy. Georgia sent its wine and famous salty Borjomi mineral water, its mandarins and hazelnuts north, and in return received cars and fridges. In 1989, when everything went to hell, Georgians had the highest savings per capita of any republic in the Soviet Union.
Despite the cushy arrangement, the thwarted pride of a nationalist heart beat in every Georgian chest. Perhaps the Abkhazian war was the result of the Georgians becoming momentarily overexcited, finding themselves in the unusual position of the biggest kid on the playground instead of the littlest. Perhaps the Russians fanned the flames of mistrust between Georgians and Abkhas because a war allowed their machinating intervention. Perhaps it was easy enough just to say, “it’s the Caucasus”—tribe, honor, feud—and shrug.
“You want to know what started the Abkhaz war?” Zaliko asked, spooning out a little honey from a giant amber jar he had been given by an old friend with a hive near Zugdidi (“Did you know they preserve bodies in honey in Mingrelia?”). “Ask Jaba!”
Jaba had been the most prominent of the warlords during the years of civil and ethnic war. In 1999 he had recently been released from prison, and he was still vain enough to agree to talk. In the yard of his apartment block I came across his eight-year-old grandson, also called Jaba, playing ambush in the courtyard with a plastic Kalashnikov. Little Jaba nodded at me gravely, as if vetting my entry. The door was opened by Jaba’s wife and I was ushered into the parlor, where a table was set for tea: a pink-and-roses tea set with gold trim, a saucer of lemon slices, a small bowl of peaches in syrup, and a plate of sliced cake: a dense coffee sponge soaked in brandy and covered in swirls of chocolate whipped cream with a cherry on top. This faux-opulent cake tasted like mealy wet cardboard with chemical cream; it reminded me of the rococo gilded-veneer pastiches of French eighteenth-century furniture that the Soviets had copied from Romanov palaces and were to be found, invariably, in the grande-luxe corners of former apparatchiks’ apartments.
Jaba, tall, unbowed, with short-cut steel-colored hair, smiled sharkishly at my questions. I asked him about August 14, 1992, the day hostilities had begun, when a group of Georgian soldiers had opened fire in a small seaside town on the Abkhazian coast. On whom exactly was unclear. Why? and On whose orders? were other unanswered questions. I had begun to think of this incident as the fulcrum moment, a volley of violence that tipped everything suddenly into war. With hindsight it looked inevitable—tensions between Georgians and Abkhas had been seething for months—but inevitable is a word that can be used only in hindsight.
Jaba told me that he had been in Kutaisi on the day in question and nowhere near the events in Abkhazia. He refused to specify further. It was a complicated time—he waved his hands in circles—Shevardnadze had just come back but was not yet elected, there were no phone lines, no one knew what was going on, the Georgian National Guard was all split up under different commands, Gamsakhurdia’s supporters had kidnapped ministers. . . .
“You should ask Kitovani these things,” he said, referring me to the second most powerful warlord of that era, and then smiled as he held up a delicate filigreed china plate. “Some more cake?”
The Georgian defense of Sokhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, collapsed in October 1994. The Georgians who fled from their homes along the subtropical littoral were still wearing their summer clothes, but in the mountains there was already snow on the ground. Zaliko went with his old mountain rescue friends to help the refugees through the high passes. He carried an old sick man on his back for several hours. Mothers juggled toddlers; grandmothers pushed handcarts; soldiers stumbled, wounded, exhausted, carrying their comrades on stretchers. The forest verges and clearings were full of the detritus of flight: abandoned heavy vinyl suitcases, scraps of muddy clothing, a loose goat, the dazed, the dying.
Zaliko and others tried to get the old and sick onto helicopters, but there were not many helicopters, the ground was jagged and high, the weather froze and rolled mist, and it was hard to land. One pilot couldn’t bear to turn desperate people away, and a huge crowd crammed into his hold. Zaliko watched as the helicopter lifted off the ground and swayed toward the ridge ahead, then rolled inexorably like a great hippo, crashing into the mountainside. He and his colleagues climbed up to the burning mass of metal and people to try to help any survivors. Zaliko spent the night with a woman dying of her injuries.
Kitovani had been released from prison two years earlier. I talked to him in the back of his black Mercedes, with a bodyguard in the front seat. He was squat and fleshy like a toad, kept his sunglasses on throughout the interview, and said nothing of any interest that did not serve his own.
Zaliko often visited some families he knew among the refugees from Abkhazia, brought them lengths of pink sausage or a plastic Coke bottle or two filled with his homemade firewater, chacha. He seemed to be a one-man NGO, a freelance humanitarian. He was one of the very few Georgians at that time who used to go up to South Ossetia, and he maintained a rare point of informal contact with moderate Ossetians, despite plenty of his acquaintances muttering “traitor” under their breath. He drove me up to Tskhinvali, the capital (scarcely an hour and a half from Tbilisi), on a raw wintry day, through the black market that sold cheap Russian goods—almost exclusively lurid yellow soda and gasoline of the same color—on the unrecognized border. We were met by two young men, earnest enough and friendly and glad to have some help with some project or another, but I remember them looking over their shoulders in case someone saw them fraternizing with the enemy.
My efforts—I talked to historians, ex-soldiers, politicians, journalists—to identify the moment, the order, the misunderstanding, the spark that had caused those Georgian soldiers to open fire on August 14, came to naught. Nobody knew or especially, it seemed, wanted to. I harbored a dreadful suspicion that there was no particular reason or order for the shooting at all. It need not have happened, it had been a random mistake, a spur-of-the-moment reaction.
The following summer my brother came to visit me in Georgia, and Zaliko took us up into the mountains, rattling up the stone road to the northern slopes of the Caucasus, to the vertiginous meadow sweeps of Khevsureti. We walked up high over piebald snow slopes, through freezing snowmelt rivers in bare feet to keep our shoes dry, past slate shrines surmounted with goat skulls, and into the valley of Arkhoti for a ceremonial horse race.
In the mountains Zaliko was half goat, wiry, strong, and lithe, half mischievous Pan, striding up a near-vertical track with a cheap Viceroy cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth and a hundred pounds of clinking bottles (chacha and plum sauce accounted for the bulk of his baggage) on his back. When we stopped to rest I would bend over my knees to steady the lightheaded space of veering height against my jelly knees, and Zaliko would reach inside his shirt pocket and produce a magical plastic bag of lemon slices and sugar that had been macerated into a bright delicious sludge by the action of his stride.
“Very good for energy!”
Khevsurs, rosy-cheeked highlanders, came from surrounding valleys and villages, tied their horses to a fence, and stacked their Kalashnikovs by the doors of the few houses. On the day of the race we feasted on boiled ox and tiny fried river fish and salads of finely diced radish, potato, and dill. The village elders drank ceremonial beer made from precious barley, and everyone else drank chacha till there was singing and fistfights, and the children ran around in loops catching skittish horses. That night Zaliko slept with his body across the entrance to my tent to protect me from kidnappers.
In other trips to the northern side of the Caucasus, Zaliko would tell me about village feuds and plague huts and describe the ingenious irrigation systems for abandoned slate villages or the asymmetrical plow that the uplanders used to cultivate such steep slopes. He often took supplies for the few poor families who stayed in Upper Khevsureti through the winter, cut off when the first snows blocked the passes. He passed out sixty-pound sacks of flour, quantities of macaroni and sugar, bags of peaches we had brought from the lowland farmers along the road, and, for the kids to share, a giant red watermelon or two.
We were camping in a meadow a few miles from the Chechen border one night when a lone man with a scraggly beard, wearing a camouflage jacket and a Kalashnikov across his back, emerged from the gloaming. I felt a sense of foreboding but Zaliko welcomed him warmly, tore off a chunk of bread and offered it to him, shared our supper, and poured our guest glass after glass of chacha. I sat watchful and quiet as Zaliko enthusiastically toasted the mountains, family, friendship, brotherhood, honor. The lone man drank tumbler after tumbler, and his suspicious stony expression softened in the firelight glow as the stars came out, livid above. When we packed up the next morning our visitor was still lying where he had collapsed, dead to the world, with his head on a rock for a pillow. Zaliko, strangely, was as sprightly as ever.
“Aha!” he tapped the side of his nose, “after the first two toasts, I am filling my glass with water!”
We drove out of the mountains, filthy, unslept, tired, and aching from the jolting stone flint roads. We stopped at Zaliko’s favorite shack for khinkali—great fat dumplings of dough pleated into a topknot and filled with a nugget of ground pork surrounded by broth. You had to eat khinkali very carefully, balancing the scalding-hot rim of the dumpling against the forked topknot and biting gently to suck without losing any of the precious juice. I could manage only four or five, but Zaliko always ordered twenty because somehow it was a shame to order a paltry plate.
“Do you know the story of the man who ordered ninety-nine khinkali?” Zaliko’s moustache twitched merrily. I shook my head. “The waitress asked him, ‘Why not just order 100?’ ‘Oh, no!’ said the man, patting his big round stomach proudly, ‘I know my limits!’ ”
“He would give everything to everyone else!” Zaliko’s wife, Marina, smiled, rueful, remembering his stubbornness. I had left Georgia in 2001 and had returned only intermittently, following the Rose Revolution from afar and keeping in touch with my friends. I marveled with them at the novelty of uncorrupt police, the new buildings going up, ATM machines, and home loans; everyone seemed a little more prosperous, Saakashvili’s presidency had brought a buzz. Now it was the end of August 2008 as Marina and I reminisced. The Russians had pulled their tanks back to the South Ossetian border a few days before. I had spent the day in hospital wards, interviewing wounded soldiers and trying to piece together the events of another sudden war in the Caucasus, and Marina had just come back from delivering food to refugee families.
We shared accounts. Marina made me a cup of tea and poured a little wine Zura had made from the vines at the dacha. She put out a plate of hazelnuts, and as she talked she cracked them with a little hammer and placed the naked kernels in a row for me to eat. I told her that the soldiers’ wounds—shrapnel, blasts, amputated limbs—were all from aerial bombardment.
“No small arms. Not a single bullet hole. They were smashed up by Russian air superiority. Aviatsia.” I used the Russian word. “They were brave, I think—hiding, scattering, trying to regroup under the bombs—but their orders were contradictory, no helicopters, radios were down—”
“Many of the refugees from the Georgian villages in South Ossetia are in ZAKVO,” Marina told me. I nodded; I had been to talk to families there too. She said she had been making lobio, bean stew, and taking it to them in the evenings. “What can we do? We can do something, but it is very small.” She shrugged wearily and smiled, beautiful as always, undimmed, almost beatific.
ZAKVO was a giant hulk of 1970s architecture that had housed, in former times, the headquarters for the southern Military Strategic Planning Authority of the Soviet Union. This was where Soviet generals had putatively planned an invasion of NATO-allied Turkey. The Russians had only actually vacated the building a few months before; in recent years it was rumored to have been a leftover listening post. Marina and I rolled our eyes at the doomed-to-repeat looping irony of the situation: Georgian refugees from a war promulgated, encouraged, and egged on by Russia were now camping in the deserted offices once populated by Russian military officials planning wars.
Our conversation halted at some point, in deference to the sadness and the weight of it.
“I’m so sorry I did not come for the funeral,” I said, tears beginning to well along with chagrin at the too-many years that had passed before my return to Georgia. Marina shook her head.
“No, no. It was very far for you. And there were many, many people—all of Tbilisi it seemed came—”
Zaliko had died in 2005. He was killed in a climbing accident on Ushba, the treacherous mountain that rises, sheer, icy, and double-peaked, above Svaneti, the highest region in Georgia. Zaliko and two other Georgian mountaineers were guiding two Dutchmen to the summit when there was an accident of some kind. Mamuka, Zaliko’s friend, was injured, equipment was lost, and the weather closed in. The third Georgian and the two Dutchmen continued up and climbed above the clouds, calling from mobile phones for a rescue party, but for several days Zaliko and Mamuka were missing. When the rescue party found Zaliko’s frozen body, they said there was still a smile on his face. He had died in the mountains that he loved; he had died because he would not leave his dying friend.
“Everything he gave away,” repeated Marina. I allowed a wan, inward smile; after all, she had just returned from feeding the hungry. “Especially his time. All his time and energy went on other people. And the last time we spoke I was angry with him and shouting down the telephone, because he did not even tell me he was in Svaneti. And when I heard where he was I was angry, because I had some premonition that he would try to climb Ushba.”
A couple of days after I met Marina for coffee that afternoon, I got a commission to write a profile of President Saakashvili for an American magazine. I reported for more than a month, trying to disentangle the Georgian official version of the summer’s events. I interviewed Saakashvili and his security team several times. Who shot first? Whose rockets were fired from which position? The tale was clogged with intercepted radio transmissions, public pronouncements, and Russian propaganda. The Georgians distorted sections of the timeline and tried to overwrite events with an official narrative. They clung to nationalist outrage and pointed north shouting, “The Russians! The Russians!” at the top of their lungs.
At 7:00 P.M. on August 7, as tensions and gunfire between South Ossetian militias and Georgian army and police posts was intensifying, Saakashvili had gone on television to declare a unilateral ceasefire. By midnight he was shelling the South Ossetian capital and had ordered a full-scale attack. What happened—or what he thought or guessed or hoped was happening—between those two decisions, I never discovered. The Georgian attack foundered, the Russians sent in armored columns. And in the middle of the worst of it, when the Russian tanks were rolling down the highway toward Tbilisi and the Americans continued to dither, Saakashvili was caught on a BBC satellite feed, as he waited to make another impassioned, desperate plea for Georgian democracy, munching the end of his tie like a demented man.
Another scrappy, brutal, stupid Caucasian war, meaningless and tragic. I missed Zaliko. I missed him telling me it was all “a bullshit.”