It was morning. I was on my knees, begging, “Oh Lord! I’m ready now! I want to die right now!” Even though it was morning…and the day was just beginning…

Such a powerful desire…to die! So I went down to the sea. Sat down on the sand. Tried to talk myself into believing that there was no need to fear death. Death is freedom…the waves kept crashing and crashing against the shore. Then night came, and then it was morning again. The first time, I couldn’t decide. I wandered along the shore, listening to the sound of my voice: “God, I love you! Oh Lord…” “Sara bara bzia bzoi…” That’s Abkhazian. So many colors all around me, so many sounds, but there I was, ready to die.

I’m Russian. I was born in Abkhazia and lived there for a long time. In Sukhumi. Until I was twenty-two. Until 1992, when the war broke out. If the water catches fire, how do you put it out? That’s what Abkhazians say about war…Everyone took the bus together, went to the same schools, read the same books, lived in the same country, and all learned the same language, Russian. Then suddenly they were all killing each other: Neighbor killing neighbor, classmate killing classmate. Brother killing sister! And they were warring right there, right in front of their own homes…How long ago had it been? Only a year before that, two…We’d been living like brothers, everyone was in the Komsomol and a communist. In my papers for school, I’d write, “Brothers forever…” “Unbreakable union…” Killing someone! It’s not heroic, it’s more than a crime…It’s too awful! I saw it—it’s impossible to comprehend—I still can’t make sense of it. I’ll tell you about Abkhazia, I truly loved it there…[She stops.] And I still do, no matter what…I love it. In every Abkhazian home, there’s a dagger hanging on the wall. When a boy is born, relatives give him a dagger and some gold. Next to their daggers, they hang their drinking horns. Abkhazians drink wine out of horns like they’re glasses. You can’t put your horn down until you’ve drunk everything in it, down to the last drop. According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn’t count toward your lifespan because you’re drinking wine and enjoying yourself. So how does the time you spend murdering count? Shooting people…Well, how? I spend a lot of time thinking about death now.

[She lowers her voice to a whisper.] The second time…there was no stopping me. I locked myself in the bathroom…I practically scratched my fingernails off, down to bloody nubs. I kept scratching, digging my nails into the wall, into the clay, into the chalk, but at the last moment, I suddenly wanted to live again. And the cord snapped…In the end, I’m alive, I can pinch myself. The only thing is, I can’t stop thinking about it…about death.

When I was sixteen, my father died. Ever since, I’ve hated funerals…that music…I don’t understand, why do people put on such a show? I sat next to the coffin and even then, I knew that this wasn’t my father, that my father wasn’t there. It was just a cold body. A shell. The first nine days, I kept having the same dream…Someone was calling to me…calling me to come…but I didn’t understand: Where was I supposed to go? To whom? I started thinking about my relatives…I’d never even met a lot of them, never knew them, most of them had died before I was even born. But suddenly I saw my grandmother. My grandmother died a long, long time ago, we don’t even have any pictures of her left, but I recognized her in my dream. Everything is different where they are…They exist but they don’t exist, they’re not covered by anything like we are by our bodies. They have nothing to protect them. I saw my father. He was still cheerful, earthly, completely familiar. All of the other people were kind of…kind of…Like I had known them but forgotten. Death is a beginning…the beginning of something…We just don’t know what. I keep thinking about it. I want to break out of this captivity, I want to hide. And it wasn’t even that long ago when I would dance in the morning in front of the mirror, thinking “I’m young and beautiful! I’m going to have fun! I’m going to love!”

The first one…He was this really good-looking Russian guy…really very handsome! As the Abkhazians would say, “A man for his seeds.” He had a little dirt sprinkled on him, he was wearing sneakers and an army uniform. The next day, someone had taken his sneakers. He was lying there dead…and then, and then what? What happens underground? Under our feet, beneath our soles…down there or up in the sky…What happens up there in the sky? It was summer all around, and the waves were crashing. The cicadas were singing. My mother had sent me out to the store. And there he lay, killed. Trucks full of weapons rolled through the streets, people handing out machine guns like they were loaves of bread. I saw refugees, someone pointed them out to me and told me that these were refugees, which made me remember that long-forgotten word. I’d only ever read it in books. There were a lot of refugees: Some came in cars, others on tractors, some on foot. [Silence.] Can we talk about something else? Like about movies…I love movies, but I prefer ones from the West. Why? Because nothing in them resembles our lives, not in the least. Which means I can make up whatever I want…dream up an entire world, put on another face when I’m sick of my own. My body, even my hands…My body’s not enough for me, I’m too restricted by all this. I keep having the same body, always the same one, while inside, I’m constantly changing; I keep being different…I’m listening to my words and thinking that I can’t be saying these things because I don’t know these words and I’m dumb and only like buttered rolls…Because I haven’t loved yet. Haven’t had kids. And yet I’m saying these things…I don’t know why I’m saying all this. Where did it come from? The next one was a young Georgian…He was lying in the park. There was a spot with a little sandy area, and he was lying on the sand. He just lay there looking up…and no one moved him, he stayed there for a long time. When I saw him, I knew that I had to run…I had to get out of there. But where could I run to? I made a run for the church…There was nobody there. I got down on my knees and prayed for everyone. Back then, I didn’t know how to pray, I hadn’t learned how to talk to Him yet…[She digs around in her purse.] Where are my pills…I can’t! I’m not supposed to get upset…After all that, I got sick. They took me to the psychiatrist. I’d be walking down the street…and suddenly I’d want to scream…

Where would I like to live? Inside my childhood…Back then, it was just me and my mother in our little nest. Save us…Lord, save the trusting and blind! In school, I loved books about war. And movies about it. I imagined that it was a beautiful thing. That it made everything vivid…That life during a wartime was something brilliant. I was even sad that I was a girl and not a boy: If there was ever a war, they wouldn’t let me fight. I don’t read books about war anymore. Even the best ones…Books about war are all full of lies. War is filthy and terrifying. I’m not sure anymore, is it even possible to write about it? I’m not talking about trying to capture the whole truth, I mean writing anything about it at all? Talking about it…How can you ever be happy afterward? I don’t know, I’m lost. My mother would put her arms around me: “What are you reading, daughter?” “They Fought for the Motherland, by Sholokhov. It’s about war…” “Why do you read those books? They’re not about life, daughter. Life is something else…” Mama loved books about love…My mother! I don’t even know if she’s alive. [Silence.] At first, I thought that I couldn’t live there anymore…in Sukhumi…But it turns out that I can’t live anymore at all. And books about love won’t save me. Although love does exist, I know it does. I know…[For the first time, she smiles.]

It was the spring of 1992…Our neighbors Vakhtang and Gunala—he’s Georgian and she’s Abkhazian—sold their home and their furniture and got ready to leave. They came to say goodbye. “There’s going to be a war. Go to Russia if you have anyone there.” We didn’t believe them. The Georgians were always making fun of the Abkhazians, and the Abkhazians didn’t like the Georgians, either. Oh…the jokes! [She laughs.] “Can a Georgian go into space?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because all the Georgians would die of pride, and the Abkhazians would die of envy.” “Why are Georgians so short?” “It’s not that the Georgians are short, it’s that the Abkhazians’ mountains are too tall.” They laughed at each other, but they lived side by side. They tended their vineyards. Made wine…For Abkhazians, winemaking is like a religion. Every winemaker has his own secret. May went by, then June…the beach season began…the first berries…What war? My mother and I didn’t think about the war, we were busy pickling, making jam. Every Saturday, we went to the bazaar. The Abkhazian bazaar! Those smells, the sounds…It smells like wine barrels and cornbread, sheep’s cheese, and roasted chestnuts. The subtle scent of cherry plums and tobacco—pressed tobacco leaves. Cheeses hanging…matsoni, my favorite yogurt…Vendors beckon customers in Abkhazian, Georgian, and Russian—in every language, it’s “Vai-vai, sweetie. You don’t want it, don’t buy it, but come here and try it.” There hadn’t been bread anywhere in the city since June. That Saturday, my mother decided to stock up on flour…We were on the bus, a friend of ours sat down next to us with her son. At first, he was playing, but then he burst into tears and started crying so loudly, it was as though someone had frightened him. Suddenly, the woman turned to us: “Were those gunshots? Can you hear that? Are those gunshots?” What a crazy question! When we got to the bazaar, we saw a mob of people running toward us, all panicked. Chicken feathers flying, rabbits underfoot, ducks…No one ever remembers the animals…how they suffer…but I remember a wounded cat. A cockerel squawking in pain, he had a shard of something sticking out from under his wing…I really am crazy, huh? I think about death too much, it’s all I ever do these days…And suddenly, the screaming! That screaming…Not just one person screaming, but a whole mob of people, and all of them screaming. Armed men, in civilian clothes but holding machine guns, chasing down women, snatching their handbags, taking whatever they had: “Give me that…Take those off…” “Are those convicts?” my mother whispered to me. We got off the bus and saw Russian soldiers. “What’s going on?” my mother asked them. “Don’t you understand?” a lieutenant answered. “This is war.” My mother is a big coward, she fainted. I dragged her into the inner courtyard of the nearest building. Someone from one of the apartments brought down a pitcher of water. They were bombing somewhere nearby…The sound of explosions…“Women! Women! Do you need any flour?” This young guy appeared out of nowhere holding a sack of flour, wearing a blue smock like freight loaders wore, only he was all white, covered in flour. I burst out laughing, but my mother said, “Let’s get some. Maybe this really is a war.” So we bought some flour from him. Gave him our money. Afterward, it dawned on us that we’d just bought stolen goods. From a looter.

I lived among those people…I knew their habits, their language…I loved them. But where had these other ones come from? So fast! So inhumanly fast! Where had all of this been lying dormant? Where…who will answer these questions? I took off my gold cross and hid it in the flour, where I also hid the wallet with the money. Like an old woman…I knew exactly what to do. How? I carried the ten kilograms of flour all the way home, like five kilometers. I walked calmly…If someone had killed me right then, I wouldn’t have had time to get scared. But the people I saw…many of them were running from the direction of the beach…Tourists…Panicked and in tears. While I was calm…Probably I was in shock? It would have been better if I had been screaming…screaming like everyone else…That’s what I think now. We stopped to take a break by some railway tracks. There were these young men sitting on the rails: Some of them had black ribbons tied around their heads, others had white ones. All of them had guns. They even teased me, cracked jokes. Not far from them, smoke was rising up from the hood of a truck…The driver was behind the wheel, murdered. In a white shirt…When we caught sight of him, we took off running through a mandarin grove. I was all covered in flour…“Put that down! Leave it!” my mother begged me. “No, Mama, I can’t. War has broken out and there’s nothing to eat at home.” All of these images…A Zhiguli came toward us. We tried flagging it down. The car went past us so slowly, it was like it was part of a funeral procession. There was a guy and a girl in the front seat and a woman’s corpse in the back. Terrifying…but for some reason, not as terrifying as I had imagined it would be…[She is silent.] I want to think about this all the time. Think and think. Right by the sea, there was another Zhiguli, its windshield shattered…a puddle of blood and women’s shoes on the ground next to it…[She is quiet.] I’m sick, of course…sick…Why can’t I forget anything? [A silence.] I wanted to hurry! Hurry up and get home, get to some familiar place. Run somewhere…flee. And suddenly, this booming…war from above! Green military helicopters—and on the ground, tanks. They weren’t moving in a column—they came one by one, with soldiers holding machine guns sitting on top of them. Georgian flags unfurled in the wind. The column advanced chaotically: Some tanks moved quickly, while others were stopping at kiosks. The soldiers would hop down and break the locks off with their gun butts. They took champagne, candy, soda, cigarettes. Behind the tanks, there was an Ikarus bus full of chairs and mattresses. What were the chairs for?

At home, we rushed to the TV…They were broadcasting a symphony concert. Where’s the war? The war was not being televised…Before going to the market, I’d prepared cucumbers and tomatoes for pickling. I’d sterilized the jars. And when we got home, I started filling them. I needed something to do to keep myself busy. In the evening, we watched the Mexican soap opera The Rich Cry, Too. It’s about love.

Morning. We woke up extremely early from the rumbling. Military machines were moving down our street. People had come out to watch. One of the vehicles came to a halt in front of our house. The crew was Russian. I understood what they were: mercenaries. They called out to my mother: “Give us water, Mama.” My mother brought them water and some apples. They drank the water but wouldn’t touch the apples. They said, “Somebody poisoned one of our men with apples yesterday.” I ran into a girl I knew on the street: “How are you? Where’s your family?” She walked right past me as though she didn’t know me. I ran after her and grabbed her by the shoulders: “What’s wrong with you?” “Don’t you understand? It’s dangerous to speak to me because of my husband—my husband is a Georgian.” But I…I had never thought about whether her husband was an Abkhazian or a Georgian! What did I care? He was an excellent friend. I hugged her as hard as I could! That night, her brother had showed up at her house in order to kill her husband. “Then you can kill me, too,” she’d told him. Her brother and I had gone to the same school. We were friends. I wondered what I would do if I saw him. What would we say to one another?

A few days later, our whole street buried Akhrik…Akhrik was an Abkhazian boy I knew. He was nineteen. He’d gone to see his girlfriend one evening and gotten stabbed in the back. His mother walked behind his coffin. One moment she’d be weeping, the next, she was laughing. She’d lost her mind. Only a month ago, we’d all been Soviet, now we were a Georgian, an Abkhazian…an Abkhazian, a Georgian…a Russian…

Another guy I knew lived on the next street over…I knew him by sight; I didn’t know his name, just his face. We’d say hi to each other. By all appearances, a normal guy. Tall, good-looking. He killed his old teacher, a Georgian. Killed him for teaching him Georgian in school. He’d given him bad grades. How could he do that? Can you understand it? In Soviet school, everyone was taught that all men are friends…friends, comrades, and brothers. When my mother heard about it, her eyes got very small, and then they got huge…Dear Lord, protect the trusting and blind! I spend hours on my knees in church, praying. It’s quiet there…although it’s always full of people now, all praying for the same thing…[Silence.] Do you think you’ll be able to? Are you hoping that it’s possible to write about this? You are, aren’t you? Well, go ahead and hope…I don’t have any hope.

I would wake up in the middle of the night, call out to my mother…My mother would be lying there with her eyes open, too. “I was never as happy as I was in my old age. And then, all of a sudden, we’re in the middle of a war.” Men are always talking about war, they like weapons—young and old alike…while women like to remember love stories. Old women tell stories of how they were young and beautiful. Women never talk about war…They just pray for their men. My mother would go see the neighbors and every time, she’d come home petrified. “They burned a stadium full of Georgians in Gagra.” “Mama!” “I also heard that the Georgians have been castrating Abkhazians.” “Mama!” “They bombed the monkey house…Then, one night, the Georgians were chasing someone thinking it was an Abkhazian. They wounded him and heard him scream. Then the Abkhazians stumbled upon him and thought it was a Georgian. So they started chasing him and shot at him. Finally, when it started getting light out, they realized that all along, it had been a wounded monkey. So then all of them—the Georgians and the Abkhazians—declared a ceasefire and rushed over to save it. If it had been a human, they would have killed him…” There was nothing I could say to her. I prayed for everyone. I turned to God: “They walk around like zombies, convinced that they’re doing good. But is it possible to do good with a machine gun and a knife? They go into people’s homes and if they don’t find anyone, they’ll shoot the livestock or the furniture. You’ll go into town and see a cow lying in the middle of the street with her udders full of bullet holes…shot-up jars of jam…They can’t stop shooting. Make them see reason!” [She is silent.] The TV broke, we only got sound, no picture…Moscow was somewhere very far away.

I would go to church and talk there…I’d talk and talk…Whenever I saw anyone in the street, I’d stop them and talk to them. Eventually, I started talking to myself. My mother would be sitting next to me, listening, and suddenly I’d realize she was asleep. She’d get so tired, she’d fall asleep on her feet. She’d be washing the apricots and fall asleep. While I was all wound up, talking and talking, about what I heard from other people and what I’d seen myself…How a Georgian, a young Georgian, threw down his machine gun and started screaming, “What have we come to? I came here to die for my Motherland! Not to steal other people’s refrigerators! Why are you going into strangers’ homes and stealing their refrigerators? I came here to die for Georgia…” They led him away, stroking his head. Another Georgian stood up straight and walked toward the people shooting at him: “Abkhazian brothers! I don’t want to kill you, don’t shoot me.” He was shot from behind by his own comrades. And then…I don’t know whether it was a Russian or a Georgian, but he jumped under a military vehicle with a hand grenade. Shouting something. No one could make out what he was trying to say. The vehicle was full of burning Abkhazians…They were screaming, too. [She is silent.] Mama, Mama…My mother covered every windowsill in our house with flowers. She did everything in her power to try to save me. She’d tell me, “Look at the flowers, darling! Look at the sea!” My mother is very special, she has an exceptional heart…She’d confess to me, “I wake up so early, the sun is just coming through the leaves, and I think to myself, ‘If I go look in the mirror right now, how old will I be?’ ” She suffered from insomnia, her feet hurt, she’d worked at a cement plant for thirty years, but in the morning, she wouldn’t remember how old she was. She’d get up, brush her teeth, look at herself in the mirror and see an old woman staring back…Then she’d make breakfast and forget. I would always hear her singing…[She smiles.] My mother…my sweet friend…The other day, I had a dream about leaving my body…I rose way up into the sky…it felt so good.

I can’t remember what came earlier and what happened later. I don’t remember…at first, the looters wore masks. They’d pull black stockings over their faces. But pretty soon, they stopped bothering. You’d see one walking by, holding a crystal vase in one hand, a machine gun in the other, and a rug draped over his back. They took TVs, washing machines…women’s furs, dishware…Nothing was sacred, they’d pick through children’s toys in bombed-out houses…[She lowers her voice to a whisper.] Now, when I see a regular knife at the store, a normal kitchen knife, it makes my skin crawl…I never used to think about death. I went to school, then medical college. I’d study and get crushes. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and lie in bed dreaming. When was that? It seems so long ago…I don’t remember anything from that life anymore. I remember other things…how they cut off a boy’s ears so that he wouldn’t listen to Abkhazian songs. They cut off this other guy’s you know what…so that his wife wouldn’t have his kids. There are nuclear missiles out there, airplanes and tanks, but people still get stabbed with knives. They run pitchforks through them, chop them up with axes…It would have been better if I had lost my mind…at least I wouldn’t remember anything. A girl on our street hanged herself…She was in love with this guy, and he’d married somebody else. They buried her in a white dress. No one could believe it: How could she die for love at a time like this? Maybe if she had been raped…I remember my mother’s friend Sonya. One night, they butchered her neighbors…a Georgian family she’d been close to. And their two little kids. Sonya would spend all day in bed with her eyes closed, refusing to go outside. “My girl, why go on living?” she’d ask me. I spoon-fed her soup; she couldn’t swallow anything.

In school, they had taught us to love armed men…Defenders of the Motherland! But these, they weren’t like that…and it wasn’t that kind of war. They were all just boys, boys with machine guns. When they’re alive they’re terrifying, and when they’re lying there dead, they’re helpless—you feel sorry for them. How did I survive? I…I…I like thinking about my mother. How in the evenings, she would spend a long time brushing her hair…“One day,” she promised, “I’ll tell you about love. But I’ll tell you the story as though it happened to another woman and not me.” She and my father had really loved one another. It was true love. My mother had been married to another man before him. Then, one day, while she was ironing his shirts and he was eating dinner—and this could have only happened to my mother—she suddenly declared, “I’m not going to have your children.” So she got her things and left. Some time later on, my father appeared…He’d tag along behind her, waiting for hours for her outside her house, getting frostbite on his ears in the winter. He’d just walk beside her, admiring her. And then, one day, he kissed her…

My father died on the eve of the war…it was heart failure. One evening, he sat down in front of the television and died. As if he just stepped out…“So, little girl, when you grow up,” my father had big plans for me. And—and—and…[She bursts into tears.] Then it was just me and my mother. My mother, who is afraid of a mouse, who can’t sleep if she’s home alone. She would cover her head with a pillow to block out the war…We sold all of our valuables: the TV, my father’s gold cigarette case—a sacred item, we held onto it for a long time—my gold cross. We’d decided to leave, but in order to leave Sukhumi, you had to bribe the officials. The military and the police both needed to be paid off, which meant you needed a lot of cash! The trains had stopped running. The last ships had left long ago, with refugees packed onto their holds and decks like sardines. We ended up only having enough money for one ticket…one one-way ticket to Moscow. I didn’t want to leave without my mother. For a month, she begged, “Go, my little girl. Go!” But I wanted to go to the hospital, take care of the wounded…[Silence.] They didn’t let me take anything on the plane except for my purse with my papers in it. No clothes, not even the pies my mother had baked. “You have to understand, we’re operating under wartime conditions.” The man going through customs next to me was dressed in civilian clothes, but the soldiers all addressed him as “Comrade Major” and loaded his suitcases for him, these big cardboard boxes. They loaded his cases of wine and mandarins onto the airplane themselves. I cried…In fact, I cried the whole way there. A woman with two little boys comforted me—one was her son, and the other one was her neighbor’s. Both of the boys were bloated from hunger. I didn’t want to go…I didn’t want to leave, not for anything…My mother tore me away from her, pushed me onto the plane. “Mama, where am I going?” “You’re going home. To Russia.”

Moscow! Moscow…I spent my first two weeks in Russia living at the railway station. People like me…there were thousands of us at all of the train stations in Moscow—Belorussky station, Savelovsky, Kievsky. Whole families, with children and old people. From Armenia, Tajikistan, Baku…living on the benches and on the floor. Cooking their food there. Washing their clothes. There are outlets in the bathrooms, and next to the escalators…You pour some water into a basin, stick in an electric heating wand, throw in some noodles, a little meat—soup’s ready! Porridge for the kids! I think that all of the railways stations in Moscow must have reeked of canned food and kharcho soup. Pilaf. Children’s urine and dirty diapers. People would dry them on the radiators, on the windows. “Mama, where am I going?” “You’re going home. To Russia.” So there I was, at home. No one had been expecting us. No one came to meet us. Nobody paid any attention to us at all, nobody asked any questions. Today, all of Moscow is nothing but one great big railway station. A caravanserai. My money ran out very fast. Twice, men tried to rape me: The first time it was a soldier and the second time, a policeman. The policeman pulled me up off the floor in the middle of the night. “Where are your documents?” He started dragging me to the police room. His eyes were crazed…I screamed my head off! Apparently, that scared him…he ran off shouting, “You little idiot!” During the day, I would wander the city…I stood on Red Square…In the evenings, I’d roam the grocery stores. I was always hungry; one time, a woman bought me a meat pie. I didn’t ask her to…She had been eating and she saw me watching her eat. She took pity on me. Just that one time…but I will remember that “one time” for the rest of my life. She was an old, old woman. Poor. I was willing to go anywhere, do anything rather than sit at the station…sit there thinking about food and my mother. Two weeks went by like that. [She cries.] At the train station, you could occasionally find a piece of bread in the trash, a gnawed chicken bone…That’s how I lived until one day my father’s sister showed up. We hadn’t had any contact with her for a long time—was she dead or alive? She’s eighty. All I had was her phone number. I called every day, and no one ever answered. It turned out that she’d been in the hospital. I’d been positive that she was dead.

It was a miracle! I had been waiting for it and then it happened. My aunt came to get me: “Olga! Your aunt from Voronezh is waiting for you in the police room.” Everything suddenly went into motion, everyone was abuzz…The whole station wanted to know: Who had come? Who was getting picked up? What last name? Two of us ran over to see: There was another girl with the same last name but a different first name. She’d come from Dushanbe. She cried so hard when she found out it wasn’t her aunt…That she wasn’t the one being taken home…

Now I live in Voronezh…I work odd jobs, wherever they’ll hire me—I’ve been a dishwasher at a restaurant, a security guard at a construction site, I sold fruit for this Azerbaijani until he started hitting on me. Right now, I’m a surveyor. It’s a temporary position, of course, which is too bad—it’s interesting work. My diploma from the medical college was stolen at the railway station in Moscow. Along with all of my mother’s photos. My aunt and I go to church together. I kneel and beg: “Oh Lord! I’m ready now—please take me! I want to die right now!” Every time I go, I ask Him: Is my mother dead or alive?

Thank you…Thank you for not being afraid of me. For not turning away like the others. For listening. I don’t have any girlfriends here, no boys pursuing me. I talk and talk…About how they lay there, so young and handsome…[She has a crazy smile.] Their eyes open…with their eyes wide open…

—

Six months later, I got a letter from her: “I’m joining a monastery. I want to live. I will pray for everyone.”