The Lack of Light, page 29
“Don’t take the metro, though; I hear there are going to be cancellations and closures because of this wretched demonstration,” she called after me.
THE STATE OF emergency had not been lifted, and the city’s wounds were still open. The brutal civil war had cut off the Old Town, which was now surrounded by battlefields; most of the fighting had taken place in the heart of the city. Passing Rustaveli Avenue was a challenge: many of the well-known buildings, places that, for all of us, were associated with our childhood, had been reduced to rubble. Skeletons of apartment blocks, façades blown up or burned down like charred hopes—the old no longer existed, and the new had died in the womb.
In the midst of all this, my happiness at the money in the inside pocket of my coat lent me wings. I rode the trolleybus a little way, before it halted at a road closure. Everywhere, I could see the uniformed men of the Guard, and the Mkhedrioni men in their camouflage jackets and silly sweatbands, with their Ray-Bans and their guns. I tried to ignore them, and focus on where I was going. I just had to remain inconspicuous and avoid attracting attention; that was all that mattered. I saw a crowd pressing forward from Elbakidze Rise toward the Vere Bridge, which has gone by another name for many years now, as if trying to wash off the disgrace it bore witness to that day. People were shouting the name of the president and calling for his return. They moved toward the bridge in an orderly, almost choreographed fashion, radiating a gloomy obedience, and instinctively my eyes searched for my grandmother. Part of me wanted to spot her, but I was afraid of seeing her there, too. And something else was mixed with the fear: shame. Without knowing why, I was ashamed to think that she was part of this crowd. Something in me resisted it. As Heroes Square grew closer, I realized that I would have to fight my way through the crowd in order to reach Dina. Our meeting point lay on the far side of the river.
I saw two tanks rolling toward Heroes Square at a snail’s pace. I kept feeling for the money in my coat pocket as I strode resolutely on. At the Vere Bridge, the noise swelled, and I was swept up by a sea of people, which lapped over me and carried me along. The mostly dark-clad women reminded me of a chorus of mourners in an ancient play. “Zviadi, Zviadi,” they cried, in unison. Nothing and no one seemed able to intimidate them; this sea of a thousand heads and arms pressed on rhythmically, steady and unwavering. There was no holding back the tide. I was sweating with fear, but wouldn’t admit it to myself; I had to complete my mission, possibly the most meaningful task of my life so far: to get my brother out of hell and give him back his future, the future to which he was entitled, despite his refusal to lead a normal life. I pictured myself as a salmon swimming upstream, as I swam through this sea of humanity without disrupting its flow.
Not long after I had crossed the bridge, and was heading toward the Marjanishvili Theater, where I was to meet Dina, I heard the first shots being fired somewhere in the distance. I flinched, but in recent months I had learned to judge the danger by how loud the sound was. It was far enough away, and so I walked on, undeterred. I soon spotted Dina, and quickened my pace. She came rushing out of the newspaper office, her camera in its scuffed leather case dangling from her shoulder. Despite the tension in her face, she was a beacon amid this dreary gray. She was wearing a blue jacket, a daringly short plaid skirt, and battered dark-brown boots. Her wild mane of hair stood out from her head like a knight’s helmet. She looked so free, and so out of place in this minefield that had once been our country.
I gave her a fierce hug, immensely glad that, for once, she was on time.
“You had to go through the middle of the demo, right? It’s fine, we’ll get to Saburtalo safely, there won’t be a single one of these lunatics there, I promise you,” she said, eyes twinkling. “And the Mkhedrioni bastards will be concentrating on this side of the river—in the office, they were saying the biggest demonstration was in Didube, so we can get to Saburtalo no problem.” She took my hand, as if I were a child and she my mother, and I surrendered myself willingly to her confidence and determination, pushing aside my doubt—because, after all, the state television building, where another gathering was scheduled to take place, still lay between us and the lawyer.
The entrance to the metro on Marjanishvili Square was closed. We took a minibus that happened to be passing, and made it past Plekhanov Avenue without any problem. It was only the gloomy faces of the other passengers that boded ill. When we turned left past the film studios and the minibus didn’t take the exit to the riverside but began to chug back toward Heroes Square, I realized it would have been smarter to walk. The bus came to an abrupt halt, and the driver wound down his window with a shrug and looked helplessly at his passengers, as if he considered it a personal insult that he hadn’t taken them to their destination.
“What now? Turn back?” I asked, hesitantly.
“No way—we’re not going to let these criminals turn us around!” Dina resolved, taking my hand again and pulling me after her. This time I followed more reluctantly; I could already see a few camouflage jackets and headbands in the distance, on men with AK-47s and swamp-green military vehicles, none of which inspired much confidence. Again, I felt for the money in my coat pocket. An unsettling silence surrounded us.
“Let’s scoot through this corridor, and then we’ll just keep walking, all we have to do is get past this damn square.” Her voice was cracking, and slightly higher than usual, a telltale sign that she was nervous. Then we watched as a military parade slowly started moving toward us from the other side, machine-gun barrels sticking out of the open car windows like warning signs.
What was going on here? Were we about to be kettled in this large square? Were we supposed to wait it out until every last person had abandoned the president? Were we supposed to swear that we would never again slake our democratic thirst, would be obedient, loyal, subservient to authority? Would they do what the Russian army had done just under three years earlier, lashing out at schoolchildren and students with shovels? Would they mix diphenylchlorarsine into the tear gas to put us out of action?
All at once, I was gripped by a debilitating hopelessness, which rooted me to the spot. How were we to overcome these hurdles? I started trying to convince Dina that we should turn back immediately and head down the steps to the circus building, where we had both gone so often as children, where we had eaten cotton candy and bought the homemade balls of brightly colored rubber bands from the old women who sold them. A shot rang out very close by. It had been fired by a boy scarcely older than us, with ridiculous adolescent fluff on his upper lip—I can still picture his face. He was aiming his gun above the crowd, to demonstrate his minuscule amount of power.
“Go home, you bastards, get out of here!” he yelled, and the crowd began to roar, their ecstatic cries for the president growing louder. Dina remained surprisingly composed, and I wondered how she stayed so calm and coolheaded in extreme situations, whether it was a fistfight at school or Nene vanishing into the night after the prom, as if the extreme were her natural state. Now, too, she remained in control, grabbing me by the shoulder and yelling in my ear that she had a plan and I needed to follow her. She pushed aside someone carrying a flag, and we plunged back into the sea of banners, people, presidential portraits, Kalashnikovs, cold sweat, and frothing, surging violence.
It was easy to swim through the crowd; the left flank set the rhythm, and the rest fell into step with it. As I swam, it occurred to me that I had suddenly become part of “the people” Babuda Two spoke about so often and so enthusiastically. We heard more gunfire, but this time it was hard to tell how close it was: several shots in quick succession, which must have come from an assault rifle. The sea rose up at once; the regular beat faltered, someone gave an angry cry, and then, as if these people had just been waiting for the shots, we heard shouts of “Zviad, Zviad, Zviad” on all sides, and “Long live a free Georgia!” And then the wave surged forward, swelling all the time—in a moment it would flood the whole square, and everything would be submerged.
My grip on Dina’s hand tightened as she pulled me briskly along behind her. She knew what she was doing, and all at once her plan seemed like the smartest gambit in the world: I realized that she was steering us toward the nearby zoo. The crowd was thinner outside its main entrance, where no more than a few exhausted, anxious people were sitting. But we paid them no attention—and now I was the one pulling Dina along as we ran toward the entrance, with its stone lions and rusty metal turnstile.
The zoo backed onto Mziuri Park; the two were separated by an overgrown gully along which the Vere flowed. It was always called the “little river,” as if people wanted to downplay its strength. The zoo had been a popular place for outings on the days when we skipped school, and to save paying the entrance fee we would usually creep in the back way, balancing over to the animal enclosures along a thick, rusty pipe laid across the gully at a dizzying height.
“We can go down to the gully, then across the pipe to the park. And then we’re safe!” This time I was the one deciding our survival strategy. She agreed wordlessly, and followed me with heavy, hasty footsteps, clutching the camera bag to her side to make sure nothing happened to this precious article. We scrambled over the low turnstile, passed the shuttered ticket windows, then the lions and tigers, and the camels. We could hear more shots in the distance. The screams and panic reached us through the railings; they were affecting the animals, too, who began to pace nervously in their enclosures. Then the gunfire grew more distant, and the cries were also transformed into a strange, indefinable echo, overlaid with the sounds of the animals. The world of rage and threats, the world of hate, receded. We reached the slope, and would soon be in the wilderness. Difficult as it was to cross, the “little river” promised to be our salvation.
And then we heard it. Somewhere near the monkey enclosure with the cheeky chimpanzees and the wise orangutans, the perpetual background music to our teenage years was playing: vulgar insults and threatening gestures, the unmistakable, universal language of violence.
“I’m going to smear your guts across the bars, you son of a bitch, you’re going to die like a dog right here, just like your buddy—you just couldn’t keep your word, could you? You gambled our money away. Isn’t that right, you pedo?” There followed a dull thud, like the butt of a rifle hitting bone. Then a yowl and a kick from a boot, another threat, a curse, an awful imperative.
We were rooted to the spot, incapable of taking another step in any direction. We stood beneath the only streetlamp that was still functioning and stared at the two men in camouflage jackets, with the big obrez guns, who were beating up another young man in torn, blood-soaked jeans. Beside him lay a figure in a sheepskin coat, face down in the mud, motionless.
The realization hit me like a bolt of lightning. We weren’t going to escape. We were caught between the shooting and the growling, beneath the only cone of light in the city, in a country that didn’t exist, not anymore, or not yet, because there was no better version of us, because we were the people we were—with our guns, with the saved-up money in a coat pocket, with our messiah on our breast, with our will to survive, and our fear of admitting that we had unlearned our desperately longed-for and hard-won freedom, like a foreign language you’ve had no opportunity to speak for decades. We were caught in an endless cycle of repetition.
The shaven-headed ringleader, who had just slammed his rifle butt into the redhead with the bleeding leg, turned to look in our direction. The other man, who looked somewhat more uncertain and was clutching his enormous gun with both hands, immediately followed suit. Only the figure on the ground, with—as I now noticed—a patch of glistening red on the back of his head, saw nothing.
“What are you doing here?” the bald man asked, squaring up to us.
“We . . . we just want to get home, we got caught up in the demo and we . . .” I stammered, feeling a rising wave of nausea at the sight of the still-motionless figure in the sheepskin coat.
“Just want to get home. I see.” The thug scratched his ear. “What d’you reckon, Ika, should we let them go?” He turned to his partner, who also scratched his head, then shrugged. “Or are you going to tell them at home what you think you saw here, hmm?”
I shook my head vigorously. Dina just stood there, not moving. I was surprised at how silent she was.
“Oh, we didn’t see anything . . .” I was about to throw up: what we had seen, were still seeing, was becoming ever clearer to me. “We really just want to get across the river and . . .” I faltered, glancing sideways at Dina, who was still standing in a trance, staring straight ahead, as if she could see through everything.
And then, suddenly, as if someone had given him a slap, the blood-covered man with the red hair started screaming: “What have you done to him, what have you done to him, you bastards?” He had crawled over to his motionless friend while his tormentor was distracted, and had tried to turn him over. I looked to Dina; she opened her mouth, but no sound came out, she just kept gasping, like a hungry chick.
And then I saw it, too. I can see it now: the bloody mass welling out of the prone man’s skull and mingling with the muddy ground. And I hold my breath, because the certainty comes like a blow, numbing and horrific—the certainty that he is dead.
“Shut up!” The bald guy kicks the redhead in the stomach. “Hey, Ika, what now, should we let these girls go?”
I CAN HEAR THEM. I close my eyes: I am no longer there, I’m here, I’m safe, nothing can happen to me, everything that could has already happened, and now I am in a beautiful room, safe, light years from that orgy of blood. I can breathe—but no, the scene is still there; it never ended, I never escaped that grisly place. I feel sick; I shouldn’t drink so much wine, and when was the last time I ate a proper meal, besides the stodgy sandwich on the plane? I look around for my old friends: the sight of them will reassure me. Ira is not far away, lost in a picture, at the mercy of her own memories. I take a deep breath; I am still standing in front of myself, with the monkey in the enclosure behind me, pitying me for being human.
WAS I RIGHT in thinking that the nervous Ika was much less at ease with the situation than his disgustingly self-assured boss, who already seemed to have some experience of slaughter? He knew that this was his time, that for him and his kind everything was there for the taking, with no authorities to stop them anymore. They were the king’s army, guards, judges and executioners in one. Their power was limitless, and so he didn’t really give a damn that Dina and I might recognize his face, denounce him, bring charges against him; he knew we didn’t stand a chance against him and the thousands of others who had his back. In his eyes, we were just two scared, ignorant girls for him to play with, to intimidate and provoke a little.
“OR WOULD YOU rather stay? Your friend there seems quite fascinated. Are you into guns, into strong guys with guns, eh, kiddo?” he asked, and let out a bark of laughter. Then he turned back to his victim, kicked him once more in the flank and yelled so violently that spittle flew from his mouth:
“I need the money, today! I told you that, I told you, didn’t I, pedo? I need it today, not tomorrow, not the day after. Did I say that to your retarded buddy or not? Well, your freak of a friend is gone now, and that’s on you—and if you don’t tell me right now where that money’s coming from, the same thing’s going to happen to you, you fag, do you understand?” He leaned over and pushed the barrel of his gun into his cheek. The red-haired man didn’t move.
“You’ve killed him, you just killed him, you rat, you . . .” he murmured, struggling painfully to sit up.
“Okay, that’s it, my patience has run out. Tell me where my money is, or your guts are going to join your friend’s here.”
“I don’t have the money. I haven’t seen any of it. I don’t even play. You killed him—what more do you want? And let the girls go, let them go. They’ve got nothing to do with this.”
At these words, the blood froze in my veins. I grasped Dina’s hand and took a hesitant step forward.
The bang exploded in my ears, and a shrill whistle drowned out all other sounds. This shot was different from the ones that had come before, and I knew instinctively that it had not been fired into the air, but at a clear target: a human life. It took me a moment to register that Dina was screaming like a stuck pig, and her screams merged with another, deeper voice, from the red-haired man who had been shot in the leg and was now doubled over in agony.
“I’m giving you exactly fifteen minutes to tell me where I’m getting that money from, you cocksucker, and then I’m going to blow your brains out!”
EVERYTHING IS NOW; everything dissolves; all that was, all that will be, is erased. I hear my heartbeat, and a single thought is throbbing in my head: we have to escape death. And I make a decision from which there is no return. I take a step away from myself, from what I believed I was. I choose Dina’s life and mine, and my brother’s future, which I am carrying in my coat pocket. I choose us over the red-haired man.
THE DARKNESS WOULD swallow us any minute, making an escape across the pipe high above the gully impossible. I took Dina’s hand and pulled her after me, wondering at my sudden clarity, and my ability not to think about the dead boy on the ground; instead, I thought of Rati and his release. I expected to hear a shout at any second, expected the men to stop us, to drag us back, but nothing like that happened. And so my pace quickened, my grip tightened. I could hear Dina panting behind me, but no other sound came from her mouth, and I was grateful to her for this silent compliance.
I ran through the lurking, lengthening shadows like a predator, toward the gully that was to be our salvation, drawn on by the reassuring, monotonous churn of the river. I ran faster and faster; I was on the run, believing I had to flee from death—but today I think I was mainly on the run from having to bear witness to something I wasn’t strong enough to deal with.
